Traverses in Les Immatériaux: An Inquiry into the Materiality of Architecture

Date

2025-8-28

Author

Eryılmaz, Emine Burcu

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This thesis aims to make an inquiry into the materiality of architecture to position it within a broader epistemic shift from material realities grounded in physical presence to mediated realities constituted through systems of representation. To that end, it offers a revisit to the 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux [The Immaterials], held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and curated by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and design theorist Thierry Chaput. The guiding premise of this study is that Les Immatériaux staged a rethinking of materiality, challenging inherited notions of presence, authorship, and meaning. Rather than approaching materiality as a fixed, physical condition, the exhibition conceptualized it as a relational framework, deeply entangled with epistemic transformations. Within this framework, architecture was situated within a philosophical project that redefined material presence in terms of mediation and representation, interrogated through the exhibition’s overarching theme of immaterials. To do so, the structure of the thesis is conceived as a series of traverses that center on architecture and space, while allowing for lateral expansions that extend the discussion into different domains, forms of knowledge, and media of representation. This study thus presents a set of ‘paths’ that are to be ‘traversed’: from the conceptual to the spatial, from writing to exhibiting, from one site to another within the exhibition space of Les Immatériaux, and from building to its representations. Reflecting on these traversals, the structure of the thesis follows the very operations it seeks to examine.

Subject Keywords

Materiality, Architectural Representation, Media, Les Immatériaux

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116098

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis