We are pleased to invite you to an upcoming lecture by Reinhold Martin titled “Ideal-Material: Aesthetics, Technics, and Dialectics.” The lecture will take place on 21 May 2026 at 7:00 PM.
Balanced at the limits of historical materialism, this talk proposes an inexhaustible dialectic of ideal and material processes in place of a metaphysics of the material base, whether of technology or of labor. An aesthetics that regards the artwork as a medium of thought rather than of experience or of ideological expression provides a resource for the study of technical media, including architecture, within this ideal-material dialectic. To preview the implications, the talk will outline an approach to technology as symbolic form that returns to the neo-Kantian philosophy of Ernst Cassirer and moves from there through twentieth-century philosophical aesthetics toward a contemporary politics of technological meaning. This is dialectics all the way down: an incessant encounter between a world of ideas and a world of material production, both of which remain vividly real.
Reinhold Martin is a professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a historian of architecture and media. His work focuses on architecture, media, urban infrastructure, postmodernism, and political economy. He is the author of several influential books, including The Organizational Complex, Utopia’s Ghost, The Urban Apparatus, and Knowledge Worlds. His latest publication is Architecture against Democracy (2024), co-edited with Claire Zimmerman.
Respondent: Jana Ndiaye Beránková
The lecture is organized in collaboration with the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and
@suturepress as part of the ArchConcepts project (reg. no. CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0008600), co-financed by the European Union under the Jan Amos Komenský Operational Program.
