ABSTRACT
The author insists on how Immanuel Kant's ideas about critique oblige thinkers to think beyond a prefabricated world into which they just have to fit. Kant's work on the aesthetic judgement of the beautiful and sublime indicated to them the role architecture could play in creating 'playspace', wherein alternative ways of relating to others become possible. The author emphasises that Kant's work was constantly informed by a concern for the world as an evolving and interconnected whole and how thinkers acts, as particular instances of decision-making, have repercussions within this wider framework. Kant's hope was that such 'cosmopolitical' behaviour would gradually form the 'great political body of the future'. Buckminster Fuller, like Kant, was critical of his age: he thought that the world's problems – such as the shortage of natural resources in many parts of the world – could be solved if only a 'philosophy of fixedness' were to be abandoned and replaced by 'an increasingly dynamic world picture'.
