The limits of poetics

摘要

It is a little known historical fact that some 30 years ago a group of talented students gathered around two inspirational architectural tutors at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK, for a Master's course on the History and Theory of Architecture. Among the students were several now eminent professors and practitioners, including Daniel Libeskind, Mohsen Mostafavi, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Perez-Gomez. The two tutors were Joseph Rykwert and Dalibor Vesely. This remarkable group of people has gone on to be highly influential within the world of architecture. Some have published a considerable number of books, including Rykwert, who is now one of the most prolific architectural historians in the world. Some of the students even went on to write books based on the thesis that was being espoused by Vesely, notably Perez-Gomez, who published his seminal work, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983). Here, Perez-Gomez eloquently articulates the central thesis behind Vesely's outlook. It was as though Perez-Gomez was Plato to Vesely as Socrates, faithfully recording the thoughts of the great master. Vesely himself went on to teach at the University of Cambridge. But, despite a long and distinguished career in academia in an age when research productivity was becoming increasingly important, Vesely published relatively little - until now, that is. At last, after years of waiting, Vesely's long-awaited magnum opus, the result of more than 30 years of teaching and research, has been published.