Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture

"Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture concerns the dissolution of the classical paradigm of architecture as imitative form in the context of the French Enlightenment and the emergence of a new logic of architecture based on a biopolitical process of subject formation. Following the publication of the English translation of Michel Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics, Sven-Olov Wallenstein's book is the first to relate the biopolitical concept specifically to architecture. It concludes witha pictorial essay on the development of a building type that epitomizes this new architectural logic - the modern hospital."--BOOK JACKET.

Sven-Olov Wallenstein teaches philosophy at the University College of Sodertorn and architectural theory at the Royal Institute of Technology, both in Stockholm. He is the editor-in-chief of SITE (www.sitemagazine.net), the author of several books and essays on contemporary art, philosophy, and aesthetics, and the translator of works by Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze. A brilliant and eloquent younger intellectual whose recent books include Bildstrider: Forelasningar om estetisk teori (Image Wars: Lectures on Aesthetic Theory, 2001), Den sista bilden: det moderna maleriets kriser och forvandlingar (The Last Image: Crises and Transformations of Modern Painting, 2002), and Den moderna arkitekturens filosofier (The Philosophies of Modern Architecture, 2004), as well as Swedish translations of Immanuel Kant's, Critique of Judgment (2003) and Gilles Deleuze's, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (2004), Wallenstein deserves to be known by an American architectural readership.