Abraham Akkerman Livres

Exploring the interplay between the modern mind and urban environments, this book builds on Walter Benjamin's ideas, examining how built forms reflect gender dynamics throughout history. It traces the evolution of spatial allegories, highlighting a historical balance between masculine and feminine representations that has shifted towards dominance of volume over void in modern city design. By investigating these patterns across different time periods, the work delves into the psycho-cultural implications of urban development and its impact on human perception.

Exploring the historical interplay between gender and architecture, this work delves into the roots of gender allegories found in ancient parables of the Garden and the Citadel. It examines how these narratives have influenced perceptions of built environments over time, highlighting the evolving relationship between space and gender identity. Through a critical lens, the book uncovers the layers of meaning embedded in architectural forms and their societal implications.

This book explores how the weather and city-form impact the mind, and how city-form and mind interact. It builds on Merleau-Ponty’s contention that mind, the human body and the environment are intertwined in a singular composite, and on Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that mind and city-form, in mutual interaction, through history, have set the course of civilization. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, urbanism, geography, history, and architecture, the book shows the association of existentialism with prevalence of mood disorder in Northern Europe at the close of Little Ice Age. It explains the implications of city-form and traces the role of the myths and allegories of urban design as well as the history of gender projection onto city-form. It shows how urbanization in Northern Europe provided easier access to shelter, yet resulted in sunlight deprivation, and yielded increasing incidence of depression and other mental disorder among the European middle-class. The book uses the examples of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka, to show how walking through the streets, squares and other urban voids became the informal remedy to mood disorder, a prominent trait among founders of modern Existentialism. It concludes by describing how the connection of anguish and violence is relevant to winter depression in cities, in North America in particular.