When pragmatism is invited into architecture: a meeting placed under the sign of the obvious
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Abstract
Taking the theme of the dossier literally, this article tells the story of a particular encounter between architecture and philosophy. The scene is set in New York in 2000, when Joan Ockman took the initiative of introducing the American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism into the field of architecture. She put in place a series of ambitious arrangements to bring about this unprecedented and risky encounter: a Reader bringing together articles by architects and pragmatist philosophers on supposedly common themes, a transdisciplinary assembly meeting in panels or in dialogue on the occasion of a workshop at Columbia University and a conference at MoMA, and, finally, the publication of some of these contributions. The relative failure of this series of events invites us to question the conditions for the success of such an encounter. To do this, the article first sets out to unfold the mechanisms that were put in place, before looking at the arguments that they made possible. The narrative itself borrows from pragmatist methods and criteria: on the one hand, the artificiality of the encounter is seen as an opportunity; on the other, its success must be measured in the light of its consequences. Finally, pragmatist criteria for judging a good encounter between architecture and philosophy are sketched out: this scene and the discussions that take place on it lead us to consider the adoption of philosophical thought by architecture as necessarily a matter of 'creative betrayal'.
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