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Spatial Infrastructure is a collection of essays crafting a self-consistent project that recasts architectural thinking as a form of knowledge by addressing a number of fundamental questions relevant to the reading of works across styles, time-periods, and geographic boundaries.Building upon one another to engender a coherent and distinct outlook on twentieth-century and contemporary architecture, the essays comprising Spatial Infrastructure investigate some of the most intractable issues pertaining to the history of the field while examining any appropriate scientific, critical, and cultural dimension wherever sufficiently germane to them. Some of those issues include a building’s discursive building, engineering patents and spatial disposition in architecture, typological invention and sponge surfaces, “the organic” at the intersection of architecture and philosophy, imageability in the context of an evolving market economy, language vis-à-vis self-determinacy in creative practices, a building’s spatial kernel, and the possibility of architectural metacriticality. There is here a strong argument for architectural thinking that emerges from intimate knowledge of its capacities and an evident desire to work through disciplinary frameworks to expand our horizons of understanding while maintaining epistemological clarity and integrity, especially when undertaking interdisciplinary projects.

José Aragüez is an architect, write and educator. He is principal architect at José Aragüez Architects, a Paris based practice for architecture and urbanism. Aragüez is actively engaged in research in the realm of architectural discourse. He led graduate studios at Columbia GSAPP and held the H. Deane Pearce Endowed Chair at Texas Tech in 2020-21. Aragüez holds a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton; a M.S. AAD degree (Honor Prize for Excellence in Design) and a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Architectural Research from Columbia GSAPP; and a Master of Architecture and Urbanism from University of Granada, Spain.

José Aragüez