On Architecture with Graham Harman

Thales’ Well

On this episode Professor Graham Harman returns to talk about architecture and philosophy. We had a fascinating conversation discussing architecture in relation to the history of philosophy. Graham has tackled just this topic in new book Architecture and Objects (2022), which has recently come out with University of Minnesota Press. We discuss a whole host of topics including the role of the ‘big three’ philosophers – Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze –how their thought informs architecture, and the ways Graham draws on, develops, and applies his own distinctive object-oriented-ontology (Triple O) position to architecture. Graham also talked about teaching architecture as a philosopher, materialism, the dangers of ‘literalism,’ ecology, the ideological dimension of architecture, and of course we spoke about buildings such as Imperial War Museum North, Sydney Opera House, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Newgrange, and the Tate Gallery London.

Graham Harman is a world-leading philosopher. He works at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles. He has authored several books, articles and journals and you can find more information about him on his institutional webpage. In the discussion Graham mentioned these books specifically Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (2016, Polity), Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018, Pelican) and Speculative Realism: An Introduction (2018, Polity).

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