Sometimes, the sum is larger than the whole. The quotations that follow – in no particular order – have been selected by Claes Caldenby, not only as samples of the literature employed in the course, but also to provide an idea of the overarching perspective that it offered the students. To begin with, a passage from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the flesh:

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. These are three major findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again.

Next, two quotes from Torsten Hägerstrand’s Tillvaroväven:

Fundamentally, the material world within human reach is changed not by words but rather though manipulation. It may be the case that the wordsmiths are in power, but for that which has been decided to become something more than vibrations in the air, somebody or everybody have to engage with the material [det tingliga].

In speaking of sustainable development, we bring together two different processes of evolution, the natural and the cultural, in a single expression. The idea is to achieve a ‘harmonization’ of the two processes. In terms of knowledge, the initial conditions are not favorable, for one thing because of the way in which the search for useful knowledge has been organized. ‘Science’ has come to be separated from that older and wider concept which we call science [vetenskap] in Swedish.

Then, a slightly longer passage from Jonas Frykman’s Berörd:

What new can actually be derived from a phenomenological point of view on things? Ethnology is already known for its exploration of objects; is there really something more to add? For most of the discipline’s existence, material culture has constituted its core field of investigation. Knowledgeable about things [a play on sakkunnig, the Swedish word for an expert adviser, which literally means ‘thing-knowing’] – that’s what ethnologists were. […] Heidegger’s analytical distinction between things as tools and things as symbols became a recurrent figure of thought. Here, the study of things actually took a qualitative step forward, since what came into focus was no longer the tool in itself but rather that which became visible or available with its help. In Heidegger’s terms, the tool is zu handen [‘ready-to-hand’]. ‘To the one who has a hammer, the world is full of nails’ is the typical way to sum up that function.

Next, a vivid description from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust. A history of walking:

Walking returns the body to its original limits again, to something supple, sensitive, and vulnerable, but walking itself extends into the world as do those tools that augment the body. The path is an extension of walking, the places set aside for walking are monuments to that pursuit, and walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it. Thus the walking body can be traced in the places it has made; paths, parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire; walking sticks, shoes, maps, canteens, and backpacks are further material results of that desire. Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

And, in counterpoint, a more sober account from Francesco Careri’s Walkscapes. Walking as an aesthetic practice:

The first Dada urban readymade marks the passage from the representation of motion to the construction of an aesthetic action to be effected in the reality of everyday life. In the first years of the century the theme of motion had become one of the main areas of research of the avant-gardes. Movement and speed had had emerged as a new urban presence capable of imprinting itself on the canvases of the painters and the pages of the poets. At first, attempts were made to capture movement with traditional means of representation. Later, after the Dada experience, there was a passage from the representation of motion to the practice of movement in real space. With the Dada visits and the subsequent deambulations of the Surrealists the action of passing through space was utilized as an aesthetic form capable of taking the place of representation, and therefore of the art system in general.

Next, a succinct statement by Italian author Claudio Magris, who the students met in person during their trip to Trieste:

Il viaggio è innanzitutto un ritorno, ed insegna ad abitare più liberamente, più poeticamente la propria casa.

Travel is above all a return, and teaches one to inhabit one’s own home more freely, more poetically.

Then two quotes from Robin Evans’ landmark essay “Translations from drawing to building”:

To translate is to convey. It is to move something without altering it. This is its original meaning and this is what happens in translatory motion. Such too, by analogy with translatory motion, the translation of languages. Yet the substratum across which the sense of words is translated from language to language does not appear to have the requisite evenness and continuity; things can get bent, broken or lost on the way.

If one way of altering the definition of architecture is to insist on the architect’s direct involvement, either calling a drawing ’art’ or pushing it aside in favour of unmediated construction, the other would be to use the transitive, commutative properties of the drawing to better effect. The latter option – which I call the unpopular option – I wish to discuss in this article.

And finally a passage from Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva’s article “‘Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move.’ An ANT’s view of architecture”:

Our building problem is just the opposite of Etienne Jules Marey’s famous inquiry into the physiology of movement. Through the invention of his ‘photographic gun’, he wanted to arrest the flight of a gull so as to be able to see in a fixed format every single successive freeze-frame of a continuous flow of flight, the mechanism of which had eluded all observers until his invention. What we need is the reverse: the problem with buildings is that they look desperately static. It seems almost impossible to grasp them as movement, as flight, as a series of transformations. Everybody knows – and especially architects, of course – that a building is not a static object but a moving project, and that even once it has been built, it ages, it is transformed by its users, modified by all of what happens inside and outside, and that it will pass or be renovated, adulterated and transformed beyond recognition.

Does it all add up to something? Many of the individual titles also appear in Claes’ retrospective of the course. For a complete inventory of references, see the reading list.