“Spinoza, Affective Architecture, and Proportionate Power” - Spinoza and Proportion Conference
Spinoza’s philosophy embodies a generative framework full of prolific concepts recurrently expressing architectural and spatial connotations, which, however, have been largely overlooked by the field of architecture. This paper is an experiment to ensemble an assemblage between Spinoza’s philosophy and politics, and architectural theory and practice through the conception of an affective architecture and proportionate power of potentiated spatial actors.This conception necessitates the transvaluation of the statically perceived relationship between the built environment and its social actors following Spinoza’s concepts of affect, body, power, and proportion among others. Every actual body, according to Spinoza, is defined by its simultaneous capability to affect a matrix of other bodies and be affected by them. From a Spinozist perspective, there is no dichotomy, as is prevalent in the architectural discourse, between architectural constructs as passive objects and their spatial actors as active subjects. Architecture is not a passive background or a neutral enclosure, but rather an affective bodily composition with an active agency to engender affective relations, decreasing the power of certain bodies, while increasing others in a great many ways.
The larger implications of this theoretical exercise signal a critical discussion of the affective relationship between human and non-human spatial actors, a new conception of cultural and ecological assemblages, as well as the agentive relationship among architects, users, and state, and capitalist apparatuses that help shape the built environment.
Conference: Spinoza and Proportion Conference
Venue: University of Aberdeen, King’s College
Program: lecture, research
Date: May 2015
Location: Aberdeen, Scotland
Speaker: Gökhan Kodalak
Status: Realized
Link: https://vimeo.com/134283068
