The Flute and the House

The title of the 2006 AHRA conference, The Politics of Making: Theory, Practice, Product, seems to adopt the established Aristotelian categories and, moreover, the correspondence of the conference's three strands (divided into Theory, Practice and Product) with the three basic types of Aristotelian knowledge, ¹ makes this standpoint explicit. In terms of these categorical distinctions, according to David Ross, ² the science of Politics, for Aristotle, is divided into two folds: ethics and politics. Ethics refer to the appropriate way of life of the individual, while politics refer to the social interaction between individuals. Nevertheless, Ross also suggests that the two folds in Aristotle are intertwined: ethics are social and politics are ethical. ³ Nikolaus Lobckowicz argues further that Aristotle's philosophical analysis of political life is also responsible for the contemporary understanding of the term practice as doing and subsequently to the understanding of theory as an opposing pole. ⁴ Under this light, the title of the conference makes an implicit identification of architecture as a form of 'making.'