Since the time of Immanuel Kant, "formalism" has been a pivotal topic for both the arts and architecture. In the simplest sense, formalism refers to the idea that a work of art or architecture is cut off from its surroundings. Anti-formalism would mean, by contrast, that a work simply cannot be cut off from its social, political, or biographical context. In Art and Objects (2020) I tried to show that while a certain degree of formalism is inevitable in the arts, this cannot take the form of separating art from its beholders, as both Kant and Michael Fried attempt to do; art is innately theatrical, though still cut off from its environs nonetheless. In the freshly published Architecture and Objects (2022), I claim that both form and function in architecture have been interpreted in too relational a sense, and thus in too non-formal a sense. The way forward for architecture is to move in the direction of what I call zero-form and zero-function.
Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at SCI-Arc. His most recent books are Object-Oriented Ontology (2018), Speculative Realism (2018), Art and Objects (2020), and Is There an Object-Oriented Architecture? (2020, ed. Joseph Bedford). He is Editor in Chief of the journal Open Philosophy, Editor of the Speculative Realism series at Edinburgh University Press, and Co-Editor (with Bruno Latour) of the New Metaphysics series at Open Humanities Press. Forthcoming books within the next year include Skirmishes (punctum books), Architecture and Objects (Univ. of Minnesota Press), and Waves and Stones (Penguin). His writings have been translated into twenty-four languages. Prof. Harman has also taught at the American University in Cairo, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Turin, and Yale University. www.doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com
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