Architecture from the Outside

Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Writing Architecture Series

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by Elizabeth Grosz,

Foreword by Peter Eisenman

MIT Press

Due/Published June 2001, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 0262571498

Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each other--architecture and philosophy--can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discoiurse but who indabit its space--the destitute, the homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities.

Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argures that time, change and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture's historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of Bergson, Caillois, Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray and Lacan, Grosz raises abstsract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic.