Daniel Jütte: "Living Stones and the Anatomy of Architecture"

This lecture held at the 2016 Holberg Symposium: "Art in Life / Life in Art" in honour of Holberg Laureate Stephen Greenblatt. Among the arts, architecture is often considered a particularly rational manifestation of human creativity. The desire for the perfect form runs deep in modern architecture, culminating, perhaps, in Le Corbusier’s notion of the “house as machine for living in.” Historically, however, there have also been other, very different ways of conceptualizing architecture. Following Greenblatt’s call to “explore the ways in which pieces of life pass into the formal structure of art works,” Jütte will focus on one particular idea: the house as a living being. Biography: Daniel Jütte is a historian of early modern and modern Europe. He is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin. Select works: The Strait Gate: Thresholds and Power in Western History (2015), The Age of Secrecy: Jews, Christians, and the Economy of Secrets, 1400-1800 (2015).