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ATMOSPHERE 9

BEAUTY MEMORY ENTROPY

HISTORY AND THEORY

 

Beauty, Fragility and the Perpetually Unfulfilled in Poliphilo’s Dream

Jesse Rafeiro, Carleton University

 

ABSTRACT

The meaning of beauty in Timothy Morton’s contemporary ecological thought is sympathetic to the role of beautiful art and architecture found in the Fifteenth century Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Though separated by over five hundred years, several parallels can be drawn between these two visions of beauty. In both, the beauty experience acts as an attunement towards the other and as that which takes possession over our faculties. By cross examining the role of beauty with the other conference themes: memory and entropy, the presentation will consider aspects of an ecological thought in architecture apart from the dominant discourses of sciences and technology.

In Morton’s philosophy, beauty is the recognition of fragility and death. In the experience of the beautiful object, the subject fuses with the inexplicable other in a nonviolent near death experience that warns us of our intimacy with other beings. Memory is that which is inscribed over time on objects and is equally evoked by the presence of objects. For Morton, entropy is the very condition of our non-mechanical, unpredictable universe governed by a mysterious causal dimension: aesthetics. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili presents an erotic architectural narrative describing the main protagonist Poliphilo’s quest for his lover Polia in a dream. In this narrative, the experience of beauty in ancient architectural ruins is always inexplicable, calling for an excessive but always inadequate articulation linked to the unquenched thirst for love. The ancient ruin entices memory and likewise invokes the Renaissance architectural imagination. The cosmos is an unstable place for Fifteenth century Europe and nature is still a mysterious realm not yet subject to human domination. In both of these world-views, reality is mysterious and the human species is fundamentally limited. The challenge for humanity is to recover a lost unity with the other that remains perpetually unfulfilled.

 

BIO

Jesse Rafeiro is a first year PhD in Architecture student at Carleton University. He is currently looking broadly at the topic of architecture and death in the Anthropocene and is currently in the early stages of proposal writing. Jesse has an interest in alternative ecological discourses and in investigating the roles of historic modes of representation in architecture. He has recently completed his master’s degree in Architecture at McGill in 2016 and has continued the interests he developed there into his PhD at Carleton. Jesse has a five year research background in digital tools and architectural representation between the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) at Carleton and the Facility of Architecture Research in Media and Mediation (FARMM) at McGill. Jesse is currently a project leader for an ongoing collaborative research project at CIMS involving the heritage documentation of the East Block and Topography model of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. He is also currently instructing a first year studio course at Carleton University.