Thomas Mical
Thomas Mical is Professor of Architectural Theory and Superhumanities. His research traverses strange beauty and hidden order across Surrealism, Psychogeography, and Schizoanalysis --- in techniques of landscapes, subjectivities, chronotopes, and diagrammatics - each reconsidered as processes and tactics.
His agenda is to further understand the formation and transitions of subtle differences in spaces (conceived, perceived, lived). The frequent research methodology pursues an X-files like investigation of spatial curiosities. Within everyday late modern (hypermodern) life there are architectural conditions which should be parsed for indications of the presence of other systems and forces at play. These are analyzed primarily through media-philosophy and critical theory methodologies, to identify visible and invisible forces shaping species of spaces.
He completed his professional M.Arch. at Harvard GSD with a thesis on "Blade Runner Urbanism for Cyber-City Tokyo", and his doctorate in architectural theory at Georgia Tech and Emory, which examined the non-linear temporality of Nietzsche‘s Eternal Recurrence in Georgio de Chirico‘s representations of 'Metaphysical' Urbanism.
His long-term research includes projects on transparency and blurring conditions of modern and late modern spaces, investigations of the spatial conditions of alterity, and forms of generative contingencies. The resultant keynotes, architectural essays (e.g. Architectural Review, Pidgin, CLOG, MONU, IAAC Bits), and book projects are listed on Academia.edu site.
Thomas Mical has previously taught architectural design, modern architectural history, thesis research, and design theory at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic, the University of Florida, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Technical University of Vienna, the University of Chicago, and Carleton University. He has previously held cross-appointments in Art History, Film Studies, and International Studies.
Following his Visiting Teacher role at the Architectural Association in London, his research shifted to uncanny network theory and predatory landscapes - leading to a recent research fellowship at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks. His fellowship at the University of the Philippines Diliman developed a theory everyday magical urbanism. In 2015 he was appointed Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the Department of Media and Communication looking at spatial alterity through non-textual qualitative research methods.
His agenda is to further understand the formation and transitions of subtle differences in spaces (conceived, perceived, lived). The frequent research methodology pursues an X-files like investigation of spatial curiosities. Within everyday late modern (hypermodern) life there are architectural conditions which should be parsed for indications of the presence of other systems and forces at play. These are analyzed primarily through media-philosophy and critical theory methodologies, to identify visible and invisible forces shaping species of spaces.
He completed his professional M.Arch. at Harvard GSD with a thesis on "Blade Runner Urbanism for Cyber-City Tokyo", and his doctorate in architectural theory at Georgia Tech and Emory, which examined the non-linear temporality of Nietzsche‘s Eternal Recurrence in Georgio de Chirico‘s representations of 'Metaphysical' Urbanism.
His long-term research includes projects on transparency and blurring conditions of modern and late modern spaces, investigations of the spatial conditions of alterity, and forms of generative contingencies. The resultant keynotes, architectural essays (e.g. Architectural Review, Pidgin, CLOG, MONU, IAAC Bits), and book projects are listed on Academia.edu site.
Thomas Mical has previously taught architectural design, modern architectural history, thesis research, and design theory at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic, the University of Florida, Georgia Institute of Technology, the Technical University of Vienna, the University of Chicago, and Carleton University. He has previously held cross-appointments in Art History, Film Studies, and International Studies.
Following his Visiting Teacher role at the Architectural Association in London, his research shifted to uncanny network theory and predatory landscapes - leading to a recent research fellowship at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks. His fellowship at the University of the Philippines Diliman developed a theory everyday magical urbanism. In 2015 he was appointed Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the Department of Media and Communication looking at spatial alterity through non-textual qualitative research methods.
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Books by Thomas Mical
This pioneering work draws upon architectural history-theory, contemporary technology, certain aspects of contemporary film theory, and the emerging body of knowledge defined as “cinematic urbanism” to frame its arguments (as well as a running critique of theories of globalization). The text offers a sustained analysis of the role of technologically supplemented urban spectacles and derelict spaces that recall or reaffirm the Blade Runner stylistic vision of late modernity, as defined by industrial designer Syd Mead and director Ridley Scott. It is a book on the promise and influence of cinema upon urban spaces by design, a book on the dense and saturated urban environment of mega-cities in the contemporary, and a book on the reciprocity of cinema’s imaginary signifier of urbanism reflected in architectures “symbolic order” of that vivid polemical worldview. The intellectual concerns in Blade Runner include memory, originality, identity, cyborg corporeality and cyborg urbanism, ecological ruin, corporate totalitarianism, and a world of derelict spaces filled by a constant flow of crowd hydraulics. These visions are all familiar through the news today, and its is of extreme importance that this book analyzes and examines these forces as historical determinants and visual sources for contemporary design – to bring Blade Runner into the architect’s design studio, as an elaboration of the cinematic promise that keeps this film as the cult favorite of the profession.
This book grew out of a series of investigations into the growing demand for research methods and theories and a terminology for addressing the atmospheric and ambient qualities of spaces - particularly modern, late modern, and contemporary spaces - and to situate these qualitative values and distinctions within existing architectural discourse, both theoretical and technological. By addressing the role of sound, minimalism, and the correlations between sonic modernity and various refined categories of sensory reception, this work seeks to draw out and narrate a subtle but consistent line of ambient development within canonical architecture. The book condenses and distills, though well-known and specific examples, an interconnected intellectual terrain between sound and space, between sense and perception, and between minimalism and the spatial logic of modernity. It uses trans-disciplinary theories of media and the sensory, somewhat present in contemporary architecture, from McLuhan, Lefebvre, and Deleuze, without distorting the concern for quality of space to accommodate theories."
Essays by Thomas Mical
This pioneering work draws upon architectural history-theory, contemporary technology, certain aspects of contemporary film theory, and the emerging body of knowledge defined as “cinematic urbanism” to frame its arguments (as well as a running critique of theories of globalization). The text offers a sustained analysis of the role of technologically supplemented urban spectacles and derelict spaces that recall or reaffirm the Blade Runner stylistic vision of late modernity, as defined by industrial designer Syd Mead and director Ridley Scott. It is a book on the promise and influence of cinema upon urban spaces by design, a book on the dense and saturated urban environment of mega-cities in the contemporary, and a book on the reciprocity of cinema’s imaginary signifier of urbanism reflected in architectures “symbolic order” of that vivid polemical worldview. The intellectual concerns in Blade Runner include memory, originality, identity, cyborg corporeality and cyborg urbanism, ecological ruin, corporate totalitarianism, and a world of derelict spaces filled by a constant flow of crowd hydraulics. These visions are all familiar through the news today, and its is of extreme importance that this book analyzes and examines these forces as historical determinants and visual sources for contemporary design – to bring Blade Runner into the architect’s design studio, as an elaboration of the cinematic promise that keeps this film as the cult favorite of the profession.
This book grew out of a series of investigations into the growing demand for research methods and theories and a terminology for addressing the atmospheric and ambient qualities of spaces - particularly modern, late modern, and contemporary spaces - and to situate these qualitative values and distinctions within existing architectural discourse, both theoretical and technological. By addressing the role of sound, minimalism, and the correlations between sonic modernity and various refined categories of sensory reception, this work seeks to draw out and narrate a subtle but consistent line of ambient development within canonical architecture. The book condenses and distills, though well-known and specific examples, an interconnected intellectual terrain between sound and space, between sense and perception, and between minimalism and the spatial logic of modernity. It uses trans-disciplinary theories of media and the sensory, somewhat present in contemporary architecture, from McLuhan, Lefebvre, and Deleuze, without distorting the concern for quality of space to accommodate theories."
This design research will work across the architecture-urbanism spectrum, and engage the question of identity transformations (as cultural phenomena) dependent upon rapid urbanization, but also pose the question of identity transformations as a cluster of hypothetical design strategies for future growth. This research will move between scholarly analysis, historical evidence, and speculative design thinking (applied architectural theory) for a range of inter-connected audiences. The research project will adapt multiple methods from architecture and urban analysis, combined with mixed methods to define identities and transformative processes in contemporary China and Asia, drawing evidence from the humanities and social sciences. As cities are complex and changing entities, this hybrid research methodology will necessarily follow the evidence and insights as they develop in the proposed outcome-driven research collaboration.
The methods to be enacted from the questions above will work across disciplines through a shared attention to alterity, especially as alterity is difficult to detect in complex urban situations. The qualitative visual culture, media theory, and urban theory methods will clarify research acts of sensing and seeing – involving cognitively scanning and amplifying a range of nuanced and diverse visual media evidence, operating with new synthetic methodologies binding media studies and urbanism. This will include the relatively unexplored role of ethnographic photography and/or case studies formats from LSE to apply to new forms of architectural-urban knowledge production regarding alterity and the sacred in the everyday, and invention / adaptation of these cross-disciplinary methodologies. This will require robust composite and comparative qualitative research methods, and draw upon any existing quantitative studies of the select sites (Manila, Mexico City).
This inquisitive paper proposes a qualitative urban analysis (through images, experience, and theory) of these identities, and the possibility of a type of alterity at play in these identities and magical urbanism spaces. Alterity is proposed to be contingent upon spatial locations and visibilities and media / mediation. The spatial alterity of Quiapo is nominated as specific type of spatial alterity legible in the configuration of surfaces, screens, and projections through the functional and exchange spaces of this manifold city district.
Science, this paper concludes with a proposal to imagine a radical type of customized and distributed emergent knowledge network, as already exists in some industries, and as seen in the multi-sited doctorates now appearing in some disciplines.
This partially completed research project (including short trips to the Museum of Modern Architecture - New York City, Illinois Institute of Technology - Chicago, the Canadian Centre for Architecture – Montreal, and next Humboldt University and the museums of Berlin) turns towards the critical debates of postmodern theology between Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida concerning “negative theology“ as the unspeakable-unrepresentable absence grounding presence in theological discourse, and their medieval sources also influencing Mies (and his Hegelian understanding of Spirit). The abandonment of the 19thC mechanisms of allegorical signification is replaced in Mies with a spectacular mode of negation and absence, where minimalism and the theological entangle. Mies' writings at the time describe design in an emergent culture of technological determinism and scientific positivism following a certain Hegelian teleology, and yet Mies' works retain traces of the spiritual. The research project is intended as an original speculative and projective theoretical contribution that will revise our understanding of negation in the minimalist metaphysics of modern architecture. It will develop a historically informed vocabulary and theoretical system for understanding the work of architecture as a process critical subtraction and erasure, and will rethink the translations of myth, ritual, silence, and symbolic form driving early 20thC architecture reflectively and retroactively read through this “theological turn” – to ultimately appreciate Miesian architecture as a type of “spiritual machines” influencing future practice.
The research project draws upon the presence and persistence of the Miesian legacy, both as lessons incorporated into architectural profession, but also in cases of innovative recent works (particularly in Spain and Japan) and the belief in the methods of critical theory to open up new and better interpretations of architectural principles, as a type of theoretical research informing applied research and design. As such, it engages with historical scholarship on modern German architecture, medieval theories of logic and negation, modernist and contemporary architectural practices, and operates with aspects of contemporary speculative thought and projective theories – ultimately for imagining and improving new and better worlds, architecture’s timeless ethos.