Bibliography:

The Color of Light covers almost all of Tadao Ando's projects, presenting both Ando's architectural drawings and Richard Pare's photographs that capture the subtlety of experience. Ando is incontestably a master of architecture who infuses his work with a subtlety and sensitivity that escapes imitatation.  He creates an architecture concerned with the enrichment of the human spirit, "understood as much by the body as by the eye" (p 17), an architecture that both serves and inspires.  It is this intangible quality that Richard Pare tries to portray in his photographs.  He attempts to communicate the way Ando's buildings can be sensed or experienced rather than as they are seen, a subjective rather than an objective representation.  As Ando has written "If you cannot sense the "depth" or philosophy of the designer when you experience a building, the architecture is merely an economic activity ... [and] in that case, the architecture has little meaning for me."(p.24)  Pare allows us to understand that depth.

Barthes, Roland. A lover's discourse: fragments. Hill and Wang, New York ,1978.v

Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Semiotext(e), New York, 1988. 

We have embarked on the age of information.  Jean Baudrillard proposes that the immediacy and availability of information and images creates a culture of obsenity that "resides in the confusion of desire and its equivalent materialized in the image" (p. 35).  He writes, "Obsenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication.  We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstacy of communication" (p. 22). If obsenity is that which is immediately accessible, seduction is that which defies understanding and possession, it is a mastering of the reign of appearances. Baudrillard writes,  "The power of metamorphosis is at the root of all seduction" (p. 46). 
In our obsession for information, our quest to discover the "truth" of any and every mystery, we have reduced objects and events to a series of quantifiable and categorical drudgery.  We have removed all possibilities of subjective understanding and blurred the psychological dimension.  "We no longer invest our objects with the same emotions, the same dreams of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy"(p. 12), seduction is lost in the search for meaning.
 

Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. New World Perspectives, Montreal, 1990. 

Carson, Anne. Eros the bittersweet: an essay. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1986.

Anne Carson's book traces the theory of love in literature from ancient times, and begins with the observation that "It was Sappho who first called love "bittersweet"."(p. 3)  To this she is not referring to a chronological sequence of events, but rather, the moment of desire itself.  Eros is at once an experience of pleasure and pain.  Carson adds that "that which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire" (p. 65), thus pleasure lies in the excitement of the unknown.  For desire to exist, however, "a space must be maintained or desire ends."(p. 26), and it from this that pain is derived.  Desire is associated with absence, it is a quest for the unattainable.  This quest "whether in the future as hop or in the past as memory," is done "by means of an act of imagination. ... Passion is a thoroughly mental event"(p. 63).  Thus she stresses that erotic experience is bound to a heightened sensibility "tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it"(p. 41). Desire leads to an awareness of oneself.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colors. M.I.T., Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970.

Kierkegaard, Sren. A Seducer's Diary. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1997. 

We are introduced to Kierkegaard's theory of aesthetics through the actions of a seducer, Johannes, whose whole being is engaged in the seduction of a young girl.  For Johannes, seduction lies in the realm of the imagination, and he gains sensuous delight more from the possibility of seduction then from the seduction itself. It is not the girl's submission that he desires, but it is rather, her resistance that drives him. He employs artifice and irony to awaken the desire in his beloved and it is from this awakening that he derives voyeuristic pleasure. His advances towards her are never direct, his actions shrouded in an air of mystery and secrecy. According to Johannes "eros gesticulates, does not speak; or if it does, it is an enigmatic imtimation, symbolic music." (p.163)  Thus he attempts to "transform the engagement from an act to an event," (p. 100) to weave poetry from daily life.

Leach, Neil. The Anaesthetics of Architecture. M.I.T Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts1999.

Neil Leach essentially draws the discourse of seduction into the realm of architecture.  His contribution to the dialogue is based on the notion of aesthetics and anaesthetics.  He notes, "the ancient greek term, aesthesis, refers not to abstract theories of beauty but to sensory perceptions.  It involves a heightening of feelings and emotions and an awakening of the senses, the very opposite of "anaesthetics."" His theories are thus in line with Baudrillard and Kierkegaard, for whom seduction is a means for engaging the imagination rather than a tool for anaesthetizing "into a condition of mindless consumption" (p. 88) (This is the distinction  Beaudrillard makes between seduction and fascination)  Leach is concerned that modern theories of architecture with their "privileging of sight as the primary mode of perception, and the dominance of a Cartesian rationality," (p. 88) create an architecture of spectacle, an architecture devoid of context and meaning.

Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Polyphilo, or The Dark Forest Revisited: an Erotic Epiphany of Architecture. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992. 

Sennett, Richard. The Sense of Touch. From Tracing Architecture, Maggie Toy ed. Academy Editions, London, 1998..

“The sense of touch,” Sennett argues, “is all about the dialectics of resistance.” As we move towards an ideal of user-friendly, fixed-function objects, our role becomes secondary to that of the object. The object is no longer a tool to be used at our disposal, we are asked for submission rather than engagement.  This diminishing resistance in our daily environment results in a weaker connection to reality and suffocates any possibility of arousal or stimulation.  The physical world ceases to exist, and an idea  or an image becomes as valid as its manifestation.  It is evident, however, that between an idea and its expression, there is a process and there is a craft.  Craft is the tangible expression of an idea, a translation of an inner conciousness into physical reality, a process inseparably linked with both the body and the mind.  The omission of this process is the result of the confusion between image and object, and has erected a “forbidden barrier between the eye and the hand.”

Thomsen, Christian. Sensuous Architecture: The Art of Erotic Building. Prestel-Verlag, Munich, 1998.
 
 

Cybersources:

www.tschumi.com - a link to Bernard Tschumi's work.