Corners
Introduction: A bad idea When I started research for this essay, I came across an essay by the architect Peter Eisenman entitled "There are No corners after Derrida". Eisenman's a pretty smart guy; alas, I read his essay with more enthusiasm than comprehension. The Derrida that he invokes is Jacques Derrida, a famous French philosopher who was among the first to talk about “post-modernism” and lived between 1930 and 2004. But then I remembered what my college philosophy professor once said: A bad idea is not improved by attaching a famous name to it . So I decided to read Eisenman's essay with some caution: maybe its idea wasn’t all that good. Derrida wrote about architecture, as have other philosophers, such as Plato, Augustine, and Kant. The idea that humans not only are shaped by the world, but shape a part of their world, is very rich in philosophical implications. Architecture may provide an challenging class of objects fo...