Feld.
Modelle, Begriffe und architektonische Raumkonzepte
Daidalia. Studien und Materialien zur Geschichte und Theorie der Kulturtechniken

Daniel Gethmann
Zurich: diaphanes, 2020
German, 336 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-3-0358-0213-9
EUR 38,00

Conveyed through models and diagrams that present, in spatial fields, processes of relational connectedness, in an architectural context spatial concepts arise which expand an object-related understanding of design to embrace immaterial relations and interactions. Present-day transformations of action related to design and architecture, which are associated with the term and concept of the field, link a history of architectural knowledge with early electricity research from the eighteenth century. It links to the nineteenth-century scientific concept of “field” coined by Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, but also to the field as conceptualized by twentieth-century cultural scientists like Ernst Cassirer, Kurt Lewin, or Pierre Bourdieu. A historical exploration of the transformations that the figure of thought “field” passed through from the natural and cultural sciences to architecture more closely examines the models, image techniques, and spatial concepts of the field in order to recognize their contribution to the history of architectural knowledge.

Daniel Gethmann is an associate professor in the Institute of Architectural Theory, History of Art and Cultural Studies at Graz University of Technology.