Radical love: architecture and the efficacy of the new

I would like to offer a brief introduction to this thesis document. The work that follows takes as its staring point the universal theme of love as it could (or should) relate to architecture, historically and presently. Central to the study is how love contributes an energy toward the formation of human relationships and how these relationships activate wider political and economoic agencies in western society which shape the built environment. These agencies become recognizable social structures: businesses, families, political parties, marriages, interest groups, sports teams etc. These social connections produce the neccessary spatial organization that defines our idea of collective inhabitation. Included in this work is a number of appendices that supplement the main thesis. A glossary of terms encountered from research that I have structured into a personal dictionary, a report on a visit to a Steiner Kindergarten to observe children playing and a micro-essay analyzing a set of models made in conjunction with my research into play, love and construction. These texts are structured into a contrived ‘archive’, here imagined as an open-ended dossier of research, essays, reports, photographs and other information pertaining to the central theme of love and architecture. The structuring of this work however, is a personal interpretive re-imagining of what the archive is or could possibly become. As such the texts and documents are somewhat asynchronous so that they may be read, interpreted and structured in a variety of orders to encourage the process of cross-referencing between the texts. Further, I suggest that the reader in opening this archive is a participant in giving these ideas a form and becomes an active part of the archive while they engage it.