ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how reading literature together with philosophy offers an approach to teaching architectural theory by which crucial cultural questions can be apprehended as architectural concerns, as well as in narrative terms of inhabitation analogous to architectural experience. This approach is examined in the context of a graduate seminar taught recently at the McGill University School of Architecture that explored architecture and the city as the paradigmatic sites in which the human has been realized through an ambivalent engagement with animality. To negotiate the political and philosophical complexity of the human-animal relation, Haruki Murakami’s novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was read alongside philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal. In the novel, the city appears as inhabitable parallel worlds in which the human self is grasped through a metaphorical relation to animals. The significance of animality to the human in the novel was illuminated by Agamben’s theory of the “anthropological machine,” which describes how the human is established through the exclusion of animality only to find it radically inscribed within the human itself, and therefore inherent in the condition of the city as the sphere of human self-realization. The chapter considers how in reading literature with philosophy, architecture students were able to explore how the human-animal relation could be discerned as an architectural and urban concern through their own research into architectural projects, artifacts, theories, and practices as well as technologies, art, literature, and other cultural forms.
