"A strange catalogue of things"
pp. 367-376
in: Robert Kirkbride (ed), Geometries of rhetoric, Berlin, Springer, 2010Abstract
The universe has evolved humans who in their turn act as natural-cultural agents to intensify the acceleration of evolutionary processes. The human sciences, whose growth severely trailed that of the physical sciences, failed to theorize the objects that we invent and make. Professions such as architecture that exist in both the realm of naturally occurring substances and human activities have suffered without the intellectual resources for adequate reflection on the world we have made, and about whose consequences we remain all too unaware. Naturally occurring substances and humans must be framed together within a single idea. Further, "the strange catalogue" of contemporary production and billions of individual consumer products must be understood as having relationships within human society. As an integrating discipline that composes with physical materials and cultural life, architecture benefits from a theoretical unification too long neglected by the human sciences.