Review: Lars Spuybroek, 'Grace and Gravity. Architectures of the Figure'

Abstract

Lars Spuybroek's new book continues to develop the interest in a "digital gothic" from his last book The Sympathy of Things, but it shifts gears into a hypermode: his interest here is not one that would aim at an ontology of hyperobjects, and yet he is spelling out the object-oriented turn in recent philosophy more meticulously perhaps than the key protagonists have done so far. For it is the movement of turning itself that Spuybroek seeks to erect as the generative world-principle of the new gothic. Instead of objects, this world is one of figures that embody generic and troped activities, "likenesses" come and go through a play of mimesis that works radiantly and absorptively. These figures are not properly statues, for they don't indexically bridge the caesura between life and death, animate and inanimate. Rather, their bodies are of a spectral kind of quickness; they organise the materiality of light. With this approach, Spuybroek paths a fascinating and highly inventive way-by re-animating a rich stock of classical concepts that have been capital for every architecture theory in the past-for architecture and philosophy to begin coming to terms with the unsettling material and intellectual reality of quantum physical light.