Skyline: The Narcissistic City

by Hubert Damisch, John Goodman (Translation)

One of today’s foremost art historians and critics presents a strikingly original view of architecture and the city through the twin lenses of cultural theory and psychoanalysis. Hubert Damisch―whose work on the history of perspective, the notion of imitation, and the question of representation has emerged as the most important body of critical thought on painting since, perhaps, Meyer Shapiro’s collected essays―here engages a subject that has been of continuing interest to him over the last thirty years. In the field of architecture, this book has been awaited for a long time; in the fields of art history and cultural studies, it will be welcomed as a powerful argument for utilizing in an urban context interpretive approaches developed for the analysis of spatial and visual phenomena. Though architecture has served since Descartes as a structural analogy for philosophical discourse and has played a similar role in literature, contemporary studies on architecture have tended to be very specialized, with little regard for their accessibility to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This book, however, with its solid grounding in architecture and urban theory and its profoundly humanistic approach, will prove deeply rewarding to specialist and generalist alike. The book engages a wide range of subjects, including reconstructions of the Egyptian labyrinth, architectural museums, European visions of New World cities, the great spaces and national parks of the American West, and landscape gardening in the United States. These subjects work together to develop a unique way of looking at the city and its architecture, the landscape and its spaces.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Hubert Damisch (born 1928), is a French philosopher specialised in aesthetics and art history, and professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris from 1975 until 1996.

Damisch studied at the Sorbonne with Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, later, with Pierre Francastel. In 1967 he founded the Cercle d’histoire/théorie de l’art that would later become the CEHTA (Centre d'histoire et théorie des arts)[1] at the EHESS.[2]

Damisch has written extensively on the history and theory of painting, architecture, photography, cinema, theatre, and the museum. His works are landmark references for a theory of visual representations.

Reviews

[Sean Billy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The ideas might have been a little interesting but i stopped reading after the first couple chapters and skipped to his reference to Rem Koolhaas that the book was recommended to me for.