1st Edition
Designing Social Equality Architecture, Aesthetics, and the Perception of Democracy
In Designing Social Equality, Mark Foster Gage proposes a dramatic realignment between aesthetic thought, politics, social equality, and the design of our physical world. By reconsidering historic concepts from aesthetic philosophy and weaving them with emerging intellectual positions from a variety of disciplines, he sets out to design a more encompassing social theory for how humanity perceives its very reality, and how it might begin to more justly define that reality through new ways of reconsidering the built environment.
Introduction 1. The Aesthetic Turn 2. The Politics of the Unknown 3. Aesthetic Distances Defined 4. From the Critical to the Speculative 5. Axiomatic Equality 6. Hierarchy and the Problem of the Privleged Observer 7. Race, Gender and the Politics of Omission 8. Philosophy and the Aesthetics of Social Engagement 9. The Equity of Equidistance 10. Strangely Equal 11. The Invitation of Curiosity 12. From Sustainability to Dark Ecology 13. Revising Practice and Pedagogy 14. The Death of Disciplinarity 15. Beyond Prattle Acknowledgements
Biography
Mark Foster Gage is an internationally recognized architect and theorist. He has written extensively on the relationship between aesthetic philosophy and design in both academic and popular publications and edited defining books on the subject, including: Essential Texts: Aesthetic Theory for Architecture and Design (2008) and Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture and Philosophy (2019). Gage is the Principal of Mark Foster Gage Architects in New York City and Assistant Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, USA.
"From the opening paragraph on, sparks fly off the pages, in a cascade of small and large surprises, whether Mark Gage is contemplating the molecular weight of a piece of punctuation or complaining that an over-the-counter remedy for a headache has undergone more testing and data analysis than a free-standing piece of architecture. Even if his arguments aren’t yet equally persuasive for all readers, his passionate aspiration to find the route to greater equality in our built environment certainly will be."
—Elaine Scarry, PhD, author of Thermonuclear Monarchy
"Engaging, smart, easy to read and trenchant, Mark Foster Gage’s timely book puts object-oriented ontology to work in imagining an architectural practice that is passionately engaged with the pressing global and local issues of our troubled times: global warming, race, extinction, gender, relations between humans and others, class… How? By revaluing the aesthetic dimension, not as mere response to superficial details, but as the substance of political causality."
Timothy Morton, author of Dark Ecology
"This important book speaks to our failure in architecture to deliver on promissory notes we issue routinely about our power to better the world. Gage peels back embedded aesthetic habits to explore the 'aesthetic social' and persuasively reveals how the discipline and practice of architecture often harbor static epistemic hierarchies. The book calls for, and fleshes out, a turning point in architectural thinking that should hit a central nerve in the discipline."
—Catherine Ingraham, PhD, author of Architecture, Animal, Human
"Mark Foster Gage has one of the most fertile architectural imaginations of the present day. In this book he deftly weaves together aesthetics, ethics, and politics and in doing so proves the decades-long relationship between architecture and philosophy is alive and well!"
—Graham Harman, author of Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything
