Socrates claimed Daedalus, the mythical first architect, as his ancestor. Taking this as a point of departure, the thesis explores the relationship between architecture and speculative thought, and shows how the latter is grounded in the former. A detailed examination of the Anaximander fragment, the earliest surviving record in Western philosophy, is considered in relation to Anaximander's built work. This three-part cosmic model which included a celestial sphere, the first map of the world, and a sun clock (the gnomon), reveals the fragment to be a theory of the work in that the cosmic order Anaximander was the first to articulate was discovered through the building of the model. The model is seen as comparable to a daidalon, a creation of Daedalus, whose legend reflects the importance of craft in the self-consciousness of archaic Greece where the kosmos (order) of civilization were seen as having emerged with the kosmos allowed to appear through the making of the artifact. Archaic self-consciousness is further examined through the emergence of the Greek city-state (the polis) and in the building of the first peripteral temples, both of which are revealed as necessary antecedents to birth of theory, understood as the wondering admiration of the well-made thing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.60468 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | McEwen, Indra Kagis |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Architecture (School of Architecture.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001237970, proquestno: AAIMM67689, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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