Throughout the book, this literary base is repeated, splashing the book with quotes from Kafka himself, as well as Moby Dick by Herman Melville or The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo among others.
It is on this philosophical basis that the author embarks on a complex critique of contemporary architecture and the future of cities.
Description of book by Bartlebooth
Architecture can no longer be limited to the art of making buildings, it must also invent the policy of undoing them. Along these pages, Jill Stoner addresses the construction of a minor architecture, a way of operating (in) the space that surrounds us. Facing the ruins of a landscape full of disused buildings and shopping centers, modeled by heroic architects, she offers us the sharp look of a hacker, journalist or handyman. That is, to become minor architectures.
The minor architectures, mobilized from underworld of power structures, will sometimes arise inside other architectures -current or obsolete-. They will sometimes become uncapturable and elusive before prying eyes. They will celebrate their fragility and contingency without reservations. They will emerge, in any case, from the resistance and collective desire to transform the reality that surrounds them.
On the basis of literature, film and thinking of the twentieth century, Stoner traces the vectors, structures and elements of a new spatial grammar. Starting from the overthrowing of the four great myths that underlie the hegemonic thinking of architecture - the interior-exterior dichotomy, the autonomy of the object, the heroism of the architect and the binomial culture-nature - she proposes new possibilities for the construction and destruction of space. These pages build an intense and comprehensive manual from which to address the "detritus" of facts built from an urban landscape full of opportunities and a complex language from which to respond to the major forms of architecture.