RESEARCH WORKSHOP
Manchester, April 24-27, 2023
The thought of Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Bruno Latour has greatly contributed to the advance of research and scholarship in the field of architecture. As part of a hugely influential strand of French intellectual history that spans Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Phenomenology and contemporary Actor-Network Theory, the links between these three thinkers are many and vital, and yet they have rarely been discussed together, ‘in dialogue’, or across case-studies drawn from architectural and urban research. This workshop provides an opportunity for such a dialogue, convened by the authors of three volumes in the Thinkers for Architects book series published by Routledge/Taylor&Francis: Foucault for Architects (Gordana Fontana-Giusti); Merleau-Ponty for Architects (Jonathan Hale); and Latour for Architects (Albena Yaneva). It offers a unique opportunity for young researchers to ‘think with’ these leading theorists of the last 100 years and to harvest applied knowledge for their ongoing research projects.
“It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.”
Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, 1991, pxxiii)
“Our actions and our given surroundings are the starting point of our self-knowledge, each of us being for himself a stranger to which things hold up a mirror.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Sense and Non-Sense, 1964, p73)
“It might be time to put Marx’s famous quote back on its feet: ‘Social scientists have transformed the world in various ways; the point, however, is to interpret it’. But to interpret, we need to abandon the strange idea that all languages are translatable in the already established idiom of the social.”
Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, 2005, p42)
Thinkers for Architecture 