During the early 1920s, the German artist and poet, Kurt Schwitters, developed a method of creating models of architecture using found objects based upon his Merz approach to art. While many leading architects joined the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and Bruno Taut's Gläserne Kette at the end of World War I to speculate upon what to build for the new post-war German architecture, Schwitters challenged the predominant views by probing how it could be designed through models. Compared to the normative practice of molding clay and casting plaster into scale models after completed designs, Schwitters assembled found objects into two models, Haus Merz during 1920 and Schloss und Kathedrale mit Hoffbrunnen in 1922, to imagine new combinations and transformations of material, form and space in building designs. Schwitters' Merz interpretation of found objects as models of architecture held that all materials have an ineffable transitory content that contributes to their identities as natural or man-made utilitarian things. In the Christian medieval exegesis of religious objects, the interpretation of materials as a dichotomy of visible form and invisible content was described as "anagogy." However, unlike this Christian conception of the invisible that was transcendental and a priori, the anagogical Merz interpretation seeks to find the invisible within the visible through the active imagination of found materials assembled as a model of architecture. This dissertation examines Schwitters' proposed use of found objects to construct architectural models as an anagogical approach to the material imagination of architecture. / Ph. D.

À partir du constat de l'importance de l'argumentation scripturaire dans le discours du mépris du savoir mondain au Moyen âge et de la récurrence des versets employés, compte tenu de la dynamique intertextuelle ouvrant la citation sur sa tradition interprétative, notre thèse a pour but d'éclairer la signification de ce discours à travers le prisme exégétique. L'étude des commentaires bibliques médiévaux d'un corpus significatif, mettant en lumière pour chaque verset les perspectives de lecture retenues et les développements sémantiques opérés, permet alors une exploitation thématique transversale, caractérisant l’objet et la justification du mépris en question, dont la compréhension des différentes manifestations s'appuie ainsi sur l’apport du savoir sacré. Le recours à l’exégèse, inscrivant dans une continuité l’effort d’élucidation de l’expression biblique de la limitation de l'entendement humain, de la vanité de la science, de la réprobation des sages et de l’éviction de la sagesse de la parole dans la folie de la croix, permet d’appréhender de manière privilégiée, au cœur d’une confiance paradoxale dans le langage, les ressorts de la critique médiévale du dévoiement du savoir dans sa réception de l’héritage patristique et dans son orientation vers la connaissance salvifique. / Aknowledging as a key feature the recurrence of biblical verses within the argumentation conveyed by the medieval contempt of secular learning, given that the use of Scripture in the Middle Ages implies intertextual developments through exegesis, we offer to the understanding of this contempt the light of the medieval biblical commentaries upon a selection of preponderant verses. From the examination of the hermeneutical choices and semantic associations regarding each verse, we are then allowed to extend its contribution to an overview of this medieval approach towards knowledge and of its explanatory topics. The issues of secular versus sacred erudition are therefore received in a meaningful confrontation. By taking medieval exegesis as a reading key, from its insertion within a collective and progressive work of interpretation of Scripture, we offer to read the critic of the errance of knowledge in the Middle Ages in its reception of the patristic problematics and through the anagogical paradigm ; the biblical themes of the deficiency of human understanding, of the paucity and vanity of knowledge, and of the condemnation of the wise and of the wisdom of words in the foolishness of the Cross are then read through the paradoxical expression of the reliability of language.