Society and space

Gastón Gordillo reviews Henri Lefebvre’s newly published book Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). An interview with Lukasz Stanek, the editor of the book, is available here.

Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) was one of the most incisive, original, and prolific philosophers of the twentieth century, and his wide-ranging books profoundly redefined our understanding of space as something material, produced, embodied, and disrupted by conflict and violence. Yet, it is only in 2014 that we finally have access to his masterfulToward an Architecture of Enjoyment, his most forceful meditation on the spatial utopia he aspired to. Written in 1973 and subsequently forgotten for four decades, the book is an extraordinary exploration of the affective dimensions of space, a topic that was uncharted territory in the 1970s. Lefebvre tackled it with the creative heterodoxy that always characterized him, blending his acute spatial gaze, the critical spirit of Marxist theory, phenomenology’s bodily sensibility, and a Dionysian, Nietzschean thrust. Continue reading Gordillo’s review here.

Gastón is the author of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (Duke University Press, 2014) and was interviewed for the Open Site earlier this year.