ABSTRACT
Poetic forms in architecture are sensitive to the figurative, associative, and anthropomorphic attitudes of a culture. This chapter begins by citing two texts, one by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a famous philosopher and sometime architect of the twentieth century, and another by Michael Graves, a famous architect. It is concerned with what hinges these two texts and what they say about 'habitable space', and hence about 'habitability' and 'spatiality'. Architectonics provides the condition for the possibility of the emergence of absolutely necessary, apodictic knowledge—'science'. While failure concerning rational architectonics seems to be confined to the realm of pure theory in the Kantian text, a close reading exhibits its effect in the realm of the aesthetic as well. The failure of the modern involved a certain failure of the science of architecture, a certain failure concerning the rationality of artistic canons, it was also the failure of forgetting what Graves calls the anthropomorphic dimension of architectonics.
