Edward Robert de Zurko: Origins of Functionalist Theory (1957)

“The main purpose of this book is to study the idea of functionalism from a historical point of view. The research media are the literary sources of functionalism. Early functionalist trends in writings on architecture shall be analyzed and compared with each other and with modern interpretations of the concept. By means of this es­sentially semantic study I hope to demonstrate (1) the antiquity of functionalist ideas, especially the tendency to connect ideas of use with ideas of beauty; (2) the variety of guises assumed by this type of theory; and (3) the recurrent ideas which have generally charac­terized functionalist theory.” (from the Introduction)

Publisher Columbia University Press, 1957
265 pages
via Charles

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The Edge of Reason, catalogue (2011)

The exhibition The Edge of Reason, curated by Norwegian and London-based artists Sidsel Christensen and Ben Judd in 2011 in the KinoKino centre in Sandnes, Norway, explored notions of authenticity and belief, inviting viewer to have a first-hand experience of a world beyond the senses.

Christensen and Judd invited artists whose work helps to trace a historical overlapping in the development of the empirical and scientific with the irrational and mystical. The artists in the exhibition presented a duality of experience, by moving in-between a sceptical enquiry and a more internalised visionary engagement to explore the unknown.

Artists: Sidsel Christensen, Marcus Coates, Maya Deren, George Gurdjieff, Susan Hiller, Ben Judd, Hilma af Klint, Susan MacWilliam, Oscar Muñoz, Karen Russo (with Jeremy Millar, Shezad Dawood, Mark Titchner), Jane and Louise Wilson.

The catalogue contains transcript of a 2011 séance contacting the Swedish pioneer of abstract art and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862—1944; pages 16-23).

Publisher KinoKino Centre for Art and Film, Sandnes, Norway, 2011
56 pages

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Stephen Toulmin: Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (1990/1992)

In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts that agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world.

Originally published by Free Press, New York, a division of Macmillan, 1990
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1992
ISBN 0226808386, 9780226808383
240 pages

review (Quentin Skinner, The New York Review of Books)

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