Summer Reading List

Did you know that Lufthansa charges €20/kg for excess baggage weight?

Half of my suitcase is filled with gifts; For example two Wii Wheels and several games for my cousin. Then factor in my laptop, clothes and books and I am in for trouble.

I thought I would outline my summer reading list since nothing else in my suitcase is of any interest. The four books I chose were taken from a reservoir of un-read material that has been trailing me since last fall.

1. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; Deleuze & Guattari
2. Critique of Judgment; Kant
3. Cradle to Cradle; McDonough & Braungart
4. Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees; Weschler

1. Ever heard of the 'rhizome'? What Deleuze & Guattari have philosophized about has been transformed to the benefit of two contemporary discourses of architecture; Parametric Design/Digital Fabrication and Landscape Urbanism. More so in the case of Parametric Design/Digital Fabrication after Tom Wiscombe directly quoted "One or Several Wolves?" in his book Emergence. Architects have an amazing way of taking extremely dense philosophical texts and perform a sort of professional alchemy in order to apply these concepts to architecture. Deleuze & Guattari never intended for this, I imagine quite similarly to how Gustave Courbet never intended to start Modernism. This book is 514 "pages', or perhaps plateaus is a better term, of knowledge in the form of several seemingly irrelevant stories. I have a friend in Dusseldorf, Daniel Helbig, who will be my reading buddy.

2. Ever heard someone talk about subjectivity versus objectivity? This archaic dialectic begins at Immanuel Kant. The critique of judgment is really one of three critiques of pure reason. And according to Kant, judgment lies between understanding and reason, go figure. This book is a monster. I keep a going summary of every sentence I read in a notebook, otherwise you can go three paragraphs and not understand a word. I want to impress as many Germans as possible with my terse knowledge of Germanic literature. As an American, having even heard of Kant or Goethe will surely get you a PROST!

3. In 2005, McDonough came to Woodbury University to lecture about his book. Simultaneously the USGBC was pioneering LEED certification. Now LEEP AP has taken over but have the concepts of Cradle to Cradle remained?

This book is dense... no literally, it weighs a lot. It must be the plastic resins and inorganic fillers. It is the heaviest book I am bringing but it is worth it because it is waterproof. How cool is that?! I can't wait to read it in the Mediterranean Sea (photos to come)!

4. Lawrence Weschler is a name that keeps popping up. But mainly based on a recommendation from Hadley Arnold, I purchased it. Thumbing through the pages quickly reveals it is a reader on Robert Irwin's life. Interesting.