Values and Surfaces: Art, Economy, Architecture brings together fourteen essays by art and architectural historian Philip Ursprung, tracing the entangled relationships between art, economy, and architecture through a deliberately subjective and speculative lens.
About This Book
Ursprung moves through these essays not by well-worn critical paths but by unconventional intellectual routes that produce what he calls “spaces of thought” — configurations in which art, economy, and architecture become mutually dependent rather than discrete disciplines. The collection advocates for speculative historiography, a mode of writing history that is willing to revise its own theoretical premises. For architects, designers, and historians working at the intersection of cultural theory and built form, this is a book that resists easy synthesis and rewards sustained attention. Each essay functions as a provocation, reorienting familiar phenomena into newly legible, sometimes unsettling constellations.
Key Features
- 240 pages of critical essays examining art, economy, and architecture through speculative historiography
- Author: Philip Ursprung, art and architectural historian
- Published by Gta Verlag
What You'll Discover
- How art, economy, and architecture function as mutually dependent systems rather than separate fields of inquiry
- A model of speculative historiography that foregrounds subjectivity as a critical tool rather than a liability
- The value of unconventional intellectual paths in generating genuinely new frameworks for understanding cultural phenomena
- A sustained argument for revising the theoretical premises that underpin architectural and art history
About the Author
Philip Ursprung is an art and architectural historian whose work interrogates the cultural, economic, and spatial dimensions of modern and contemporary practice. His essays in this collection draw on a deliberately subjective critical stance, using it as a generative rather than disqualifying position.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 240
- Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783856764609
- Publisher: Gta Verlag
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects, architectural historians, and cultural theorists with an interest in the political economy of art and space, and readers drawn to speculative, essay-form criticism.