CFP: Rivista di Estetica: Architecture

November 2014: Architecture

Advisory editors: Elisa Di Stefano, Francesco Vitale (mail to: [email protected],[email protected]‎ and [email protected])

Deadline for submission: November, 30, 2013

Since the beginning architecture is a two-headed art as it is anchored on the field of the functional (see the functionalist drifts supported by the theorists of the Modernism in various forms) as well as on the field of the beautiful (which, in extreme cases, takes it to those forms of sculpture/architecture where the use destination annuls itself in the aesthetic experience). This issue of the “Rivista di Estetica” aims to account for the status of the contemporary debate, in the analytic and continental area, by focusing on the questions which nowadays society poses to architecture. Therefore, what is the meaning of the dialectics between the functional and the beautiful in the contemporary architectural culture? To what extent can the aesthetic investigation contribute to the critical debate where the artistic and aesthetic dimension of architecture is pointed at from different perspectives as the legitimacy of a self-referential architecture, which is oriented to purely commercial values and is reduced to a media instrument, to means of cultural colonization? New issues related to globalization, ecology, landscape and environmental protection require an interdisciplinary approach and, above all, the retrieval of an ethics of responsibility. If the contemporary technocratic society too often sets the reasons of the profit above those of ethics, aesthetics, culture and even life, it is perhaps possible, through a new dialogue with classics, with the great masters of the past, to rebuild paradigms which can refer architecture back to its thousand-year task: the material and symbolical elaboration of the vital space of man. In this perspective, the issue of the “Rivista di Estetica” is open to the contribution of scholars of aesthetics as well as of scholars of other philosophical disciplines, humanities and architecture, and of architects directly involved in the design practice.