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63 FIFTH AVENUE,
NY NY 10003

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought at the New School incubates advanced transdisciplinary research and practice at the intersection of social theory and design and fosters dialogue on related themes across the university.

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Philip Schauss

Philip Schauss is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research writing on the concept of order in relation to architecture’s role in articulating the fabric of social existence.

 

PHILIP SCHAUSS is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. He comes to philosophy with a background in law and an interest in architecture. His project looks at the philosophical implications of people’s relationship to architecture.

Sparked by the mesmeric experience of the modular, seemingly endless repetitions of Madrid Barajas Airport’s Terminal 4, Philip’s project considers how the ideal of architectural order has undergone various permutations over time, from the ancients on to the Renaissance and modernity. Abstract notions of architectural order are always shaped by conceptions of nature, the human body and geometry, all of which tie in to a higher-order philosophical worldview. This project examines the role of architecture in articulating the fabric of social existence alongside other ordering institutions and practices such as law and politics. What does it mean that human beings live in a world that, to a great extent, they shape? The theme of “order” is an umbrella term for a variety of essential phenomena that constitute the rhythm of human life—phenomena such as measure, symmetry, harmony, and balance—as well as their opposites: the immeasurable, the asymmetrical, the disharmonious, and the unbalanced.