Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface
1. The Digital Nature of Gothic
2. The Matter of Ornament
3. Abstraction and Sympathy
4. The Radical Picturesque
5. The Ecology of Design
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

A new edition of Lars Spuybroek’s ground-breaking exploration of Ruskin, aesthetics, ornament, and digital design.

About the Author

Lars Spuybroek is Professor of Architectural Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He is the author of NOX: Machining Architecture (2004), The Architecture of Continuity (2008), Research & Design: The Architecture of Variation (2009) and Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011). He is an award-winning architect with his practice NOX.

Reviews

... exhilarating to watch elements of Ruskin's thought being taken on ... The Sympathy of Things is energetic, well written and full of examples.
*Times Literary Supplement*

This is a dazzling, provocative, baffling, and sometimes vexing manifesto. The Sympathy of Things is an unforgettable book.
*Carlyle Studies Annual*

The term 'brilliant' is often misused in reviews, but the opening chapter on 'the digital nature of gothic' is truly scintillating.
*Architectural Research Quarterly*

Hundreds of threads that make an astonishingly rich tapestry ... Ruskin has at last found an interpreter with the breadth of learning and a poetic imagination to make his perceptions relevant to our own day.
*Architectural Review*

The author envisions a radical future for design and technology ... This book is undoubtedly a rich and original source of ideas for anyone across the many disciplines that increasingly care about materiality in the past, present or future.
*Theory, Culture & Society*

In this remarkable study, Spuybroek treats us to an astonishingly fresh upgrade of John Ruskin, who ends up no longer inhabiting an antique past but talks to us directly. Spuybroeck shows how Ruskin's aesthetic actually works, cutting through clouds of vagueness to get at a wonderfully algorithmic, procedural tactics with limpid clarity. But there's much more: something like a distinctive ontology emerges when we study Ruskin this way. This ontology radically decenters the human from its meaning-making position in the cosmos, allowing all kinds of other entities to show up without the usual visas and interrogations. What results is truly an ecology of things, making Ruskin sharply relevant for our age.
*Professor Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Chair in English, Rice University, USA*

The Sympathy of Things is a stirring call to action; an amazing reconstruction of the ideas of the Victorian sage John Ruskin; and, above all, a visionary look at the inner life of things. Lars Spuybroek makes the case that aesthetics is first philosophy, and proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital age.
*Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, USA*

If Spuybroek, like Ruskin, does not shake your design and aesthetic concepts, you haven’t understood him.
*Charles Jencks*

The Sympathy of Things is an astonishing and visionary work. I have never before come across a book so brimming with insight, written with such feeling, and so keenly in touch with life. Ostensibly a meditation on the oeuvre of John Ruskin, what Lars Spuybroek offers us is an intoxicating meditation on art, architecture and design that soars above the ponderous deadweight of thing-theory to luxuriate in the unruly and exuberant proliferation of the things themselves.
*Professor Tim Ingold, Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen*