Plato for Architects Thinkers for Architects series

Renée Tobe

Plato for Architects in the Thinkers for Architects series will be published by Taylor and Francis in 2023.

The aim of this book is to examine the nature of thinking itself, which is the basis for design and architectural decision making. Plato asks what it means to know, and how we can ever communicate what we know to others. Introductions to Plato situate his thinking in his own era, and dissect his thoughts one from the other in the different dialogues. The dialogues are structured to be interpreted and translated in our own eras, so that they are always contemporary. This book carefully extracts the points relevant to architects and urbanists, weaving them together so that we can learn from them while maintaining continuity with the discussion from which they derive.

Excavation through layers of Western thinking identifies two distinctly divergent directions for architects and urbanists both of which trace their origins back to Plato. In the first, lie centrally planned ideal cities; Utopias, urban typologies in the structured language of the new order of the French Republic and the architecture of 20th century fascist regimes. The canonical texts of urban design by Jan Gehl, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Cullinan, among others that describe forms of communicative and community life or Christopher Alexander’s The Pattern Language combinations of urban elements to enhance our existence follow the second line of thought. Many of our current structures whether in government, urban design or education find their descriptions in the Platonic dialogues. This book helps decode terms and provides the points relevant to architects. The objectives are to deliver them in a manner that informs other thinking about architecture, and how we practice it.