Androgynos: The Male-female in Art and Architecture - Hardcover

Feuerstein, Gunther

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3930698749 ISBN 13: 9783930698745

Publisher: Edition Axel Menges, 1994

Synopsis

This book deals with elemental basic architectural questions: the age-old subject of antithesis and thesis, unity and duality, contrast and harmony.

About this title

Synopsis:

After the angry gods had split the originally perfect, androgynous human being into man and woman, for the Greeks the only possible way of re-uniting the two sexes was in the form of a bisexual being created by fusing the nymph Salmacis with Hermaphroditos, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite. It is not only Greek and Roman antiquity that was concerned with this subject: in many early cultures, in the religions of India, in theosophy and in alchemy perfection is seen in a happy union of man and woman. A number of pictorial records make this abstract idea visible. Latent longing for a new unity is also to be found in more recent art, especially in literature, film and painting. If we grant architecture the ability to form metaphors, to make statements about human existence, to go beyond fulfilling everyday needs, then here too the question of sexuality must become visible. We know the theory that something upright is phallic-male and that rooms, caves and domes represent the uterine-female. But this book goes a - doubtlessly speculative - step further.

It makes a mental leap to recognize something specifically androgynous in architecture: the "tower on the dome" as a symbol of union, of penetration, of conjunction (which is love and aggression at the same time), the "house within the house" as a symbol of a being within a being etc. If we abstain from sexuality then we come to elemental basic architectural questions: to the age-old subject of antithesis and synthesis, unity and duality, contrast and harmony.

About the Author:

Gunther Feurstein who was a professor at Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Linz and also a lecturer at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste and at the Technische Universitat in Vienna until his retirement, must be considered the catalyst in the Viennese post-war architectural scene as almost all architectural avant-garde groups of the town have comer from his circle.

About this edition

• Publisher: Edition Axel Menges
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 3930698749
• ISBN 13: 9783930698745
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240