His gleaming and translucent futuristic structures, often supported by a minimal, girded, metal frame, definitely qualify as reason’s second residence. German-born, Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn is a modernist of the Cartesian variety. With respect to the historical development of modernity, the space of the secular imagination is second in importance only to the pace of the secular imagination. Descartes’ understanding of the imagination as a space devoted to the interrogation and reconfiguration of reason has remained a constant throughout the four hundred year saga of Modernity. This made him a seminal precursor to the Enlightenment, and by default the emergence of a modern secular subject whose faith in reason rivaled if not superseded any religious bearings. He directed his contemplation towards experiences in this world as opposed to a theological reasoning aimed at the next. Descartes’ explorations in logic, Euclidean geometry, particularly his use of the grid, not to mention his famous dictum, Cogito Ergo Sum (I think, therefor I am) were an unprecedented celebration of human reason. In other words, as his house of reason underwent inspection and reconstruction, reason itself would need to take refuge in its second residence, the imagination. Before proceeding with demolition, however, Descartes needed another metaphorical dwelling, a mental structure that while consisting of only a few maxims would be sound enough to support the weight of empirical thinking. In order to facilitate a more rigorous scrutiny of mind, body, soul, and their relation to a supreme being, Descartes needed to tear down his existing belief system. Although he was not an architect, the mathematician and philosopher Renee Descartes’ began an introductory section of his famous treatise, Meditations (1637), with an architectural metaphor. There is architecture as a profession, a practice, a field of activity architecture as object, as form, as space and finally, the most transparent of these, architecture as metaphor, as a way of thinking, as thinking, as thought.
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