This book orchestrates a convergence of two discourses from the 1960s—Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic theory on one side and critiques of modern architecture articulated by figures like Peter Blake, Charles Jencks, and Robert Venturi/Denise Scott Brown on the other. Grounded in Goodman’s aesthetic theory, the book explores his conceptual framework within the context of modern architecture. At the heart of the investigation lies Goodman’s concept of exemplification. While his notion of denotation pertains to representational elements, often ornaments, in architecture, exemplification accentuates specific formal properties at the expense of others, including color, spatial orientation, transparency, seriality, and the like. Supplemented by findings from phenomenology, the book traces these effects in buildings, notably those by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright—all key figures in the critiques of modern architecture. Employing Goodman’s framework, the book aims to address accusations of emptiness and alienation directed at modern architecture in the postwar era. It illustrates that modern architecture symbolizes aesthetically in a fundamentally different way than architecture from earlier periods. This book will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers, and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy, and aesthetics.

American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1998) was one of the foremost analytical thinkers of the twentieth century, with groundbreaking contributions in the fields of logic, philosophy of science, epistemology, and aesthetics. This book is an introduction to the aspects of Goodman’s philosophy which have been the most influential among architects and architectural theorists. Goodman specifically discussed architecture in his major work on aesthetics, The Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1968), and in two essays "How Buildings Mean" (1985), and "On Capturing Cities" (1991). His main philosophical notions in Ways of Worldmaking (1978) also apply well to architecture. Goodman’s thought is particularly attractive because of its constructive aspect: there is not a given and immutable world, but both knowledge and reality are constantly built and rebuilt. Whereas other theories, such as deconstruction, implicitly entail an undoing of modern precepts, Goodman’s conception of world-making offers a positive, constructive way to understand how a plural reality is made and remade. Goodman’s approach to architecture is not only relevant thinking in providing new insights to understanding the built environment, but serves also as an illustration of analytical thinking in architecture. This book shows that the methods, concepts, and ways of arguing characteristic of analytical philosophy are helpful tools to examine buildings in a novel and fruitful way and they will certainly enhance the architect’s critical skills when designing and thinking about architecture.

Nelson Goodman (1906-1998) was one of the outstanding thinkers of the 20th century. In a memorial note, Hilary Putnam considers him to be "one of the two or three greatest analytic philosophers of the post-World War II period". Goodman has left his mark in many fields of philosophical investigation: Epistemology, Philosophy of Science, Logic, Metaphysics, the General Theory of Symbols, Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of Art, all have been challenged and enriched by the problems he has shown up, the projects he developed from them and the solutions he has suggested. In August 2006 a couple of Goodman aficionados met in Munich to celebrate the Centennial. The proceedings of the ensuing international conference are documented in this volume. The contributions attest the fact that Goodman's thinking still holds many treasures.

This book displays both the remarkable diversity of Goodman's concerns and the essential unity of his thought. As a whole the volume will serve as a concise introduction to Goodman's thought for general readers, and will develop its more recent unfoldings for those philosophers and others who have grown wiser with his books over the years.

Taking as its point of departure Nelson Goodman's theory of symbol systems as delineated in his seminal book «Ways of Worldmaking», this volume gauges the possibilities and perspectives offered by the worldmaking approach as a model for the study of culture. The volume serves to demonstrate how specific media and narratives affect the worlds that are created, and shows how these worlds are established as socially relevant. It also illustrates the extent to which ways of worldmaking are imbued with cultural values, and thus inevitably implicated in power relations.

This dissertation examines the evolution of Western and Modern architecture in Siam and Thailand. It illustrates how various architectural ideas have contributed to the physical design and spatial configuration of places associated with negotiation and allocation of political power, which are throne halls, parliaments, and government and civic structures since the 1850s.

Evaluates for the first time one of the foundational works in architecture criticism. Immediately on its publication in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, was hailed as a transformative work in the history and theory of architecture, liberating those in architecture who were trying to find a way out of the straitjacket of architectural orthodoxies. Resonating far beyond the professional and institutional boundaries of the field, the book contributed to a thorough rethinking of modernism and was subsequently taken up as an early manifestation and progenitor of postmodernism.