Issam S Chemaly

Spacing Forth the Architecture Selfscape: A Phenomenological Reading of War Ruins in a Lebanese Urban Context Issam S Chemaly

This book approaches the problematic question of reading the architectural desensualization of space-as a result of current architectural movements and cultural trends (modernism, postmodernism, post-postmodernism)-through an interpretation of architecture as a rather dynamic entity enhancing sympathy with the self/subject. Therefore, architecture is analyzed as objectively (relating simultaneously to objects and objectivity) acting in space and time upon the subject and thus favoring them with sympathy. In a discipline boasting a multitude of discourses that could be employed in support of this argument (such as neuroscience and Husserlian phenomenology), this book favors the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), a theoretical framework that is able to propose a method where time and space can be emitted from architecture as object-oriented. In other words, architectural time and space are examined as possessing the agency to shape the subject, and consequently their perception, cognition and sympathy. Through a case study of war ruins from the Lebanese civil war and neighboring countries, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the interplay between space and time through object-oriented wartime architecture, on the one hand, and the self/subject on the other hand. The study aims to provide architects with a potential discourse through which design can be reconsidered. This discourse is formulated around an evaluation of three dimensions-architectural time, architectural space and architectural matter-in addition to a review of architectural strategies and the relationship between subject and object. In so doing, space is presented as that which acts upon the subject, space that is no longer desensualized, space that instead becomes a verb.