Master Dissertation Studio 24-25
Tutor: Steven Schenk
Campus Sint-Lucas Gent
- Ibn al-Haytham. „On the Configuration of the World,“ translated by Saliba, In Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences in Honour of David Pingree, edited by Ragep, F. Jamil, 389-414. Brill, 2005.
- Uexküll, von. (2010). A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning. University of Minnesota Press.
- Einstein, „Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie.“ Annalen der Physik 49, no. 7 (1916): 769-822.
- The Eternal Recurrence of the Sevenfold Division of the Universe as a River of Space and Ink on paper, A manuscript from Rajasthan, 19th century.
- Swedenborg, Opera philosophia et mineralia. 1734.
- Hansell, „Enlargement of the Nest of Chartergus chartarius“ Animal Architecture. Oxford University Press, USA, 2005, 139.
- Sterling, et 1985, „Optimum Relative Humidity Range for Good Health,“ 621.
- Govindjee and John Photosynthesis: Third Edition. Bios Scientific Publishers Ltd., 2001.
- Retrograde motion described by Ptolemy. Almagest. Translated by G. J. Toomer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
That long roads disappear into seemingly one point is quite perplexing. Similarly, the spherical object we call Earth eventually appears flat to us. A forest, while expansive, also possesses a precise interior and is somehow defined by a limit. In this sense, nature exhibits an approximate quality, and our perceptual abilities play a crucial role in understanding and making sense of a place. When we drink a cup of tea, our eyes perceive the cup as smaller when it‘s further away, while our hand maintains a constant size. Is this not bizarre?
The way things appear to us is undoubtedly influenced by a mysterious factor. If we see in front of us a tree, as I move away from the tree, it diminishes in size. If I were to continue moving away while keeping it in view—perhaps to the top of a mountain—the tree would lose detail until it merges into another object: the forest. The phrase „you can’t see the forest for the trees“ illustrates how the entity „forest“ is a larger phenomenon not perceptible from the same position that one sees „trees.“
What does this type of observation mean in front of aspects of epistemology that overly prioritize an architectural discourse that is influenced by visual senses and metaphors (such as pictures, perspectives, and representation) as well as their integration in our current apparatus? A discourse that might still be largely influenced by a 17th-century human embarkment on greater journeys, where we humans carried a certain kind of subjective space with us, leading to a peculiar shift in our perception of the world. A world in which it seemed as though the same space extended universally, encompassing all imaginable objects simultaneously. A world in which such understanding only got expanded in all directions, solidifying it as a fixed and unchanging entity within which we as the center freely maneuvered. A world that since the agricultural revolution even got more detached from nature and more treated as a commodity. Even though Kant recognized that our human perception was inherently structured by space, he struggled to completely relinquish this concept of an infinite and immutable space detached from nature.
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