Arkhé-tech-túra: A város mint kozmológiai intervenció
The city as cosmological intervention

Summary/Abstract: Behind the dichotomies of city and nature, city and wilderness lies the fundamental problem of creation, of the cosmos – the separations, demarcations and demarcations necessary for the existence of the world and man’s existence in the world, as well as the implementation, i.e. primarily morphological and topographic, issues of material and cultural construction projects. Man’s existence here starts from a square garden embedded in a spherical cosmos and heads towards the cubic space of the perfect city (which, out of stubborn cosmopolitanism, is still so often depicted as a circle until the beginning of the modern era). The tradition of the circle and the square as the basic form of a dual cosmology (see also: squaring the circle) also appears in connection with Jerusalem, the umbilicus mundi of Judeo-Christianity: the iconography of Heavenly Jerusalem will at the same time become the subject of architectural and social theoretical speculation in “interdisciplinary theology”, when the strict Platonism of the idea of ​​utopia gives way to the constructibility of the perfect community, in short: modernism. The alleged end of history that is currently being experienced (the impending eschaton?) seems to be in the sign of return: urban planning has been virtualized since the critical radicalism of the sixties at the latest: the Plug-In City (Archigram) or the No Stop City (Archizoom) can hardly be read as anything other than a cosmological intervention in urban planning. This is of course related to the intervention practice of conventional, material design-construction-housing practice, which implicitly also assumes a traditional, shell cosmology along the discourse and spatial practice of public space and the common good, from the human scale (urban public space) to the god scale (Earth, world). In the homogeneous totality of postmodern collages, speculative city visions and technological innovations, futurisms and postutopias coincide with the ancient city, Atlantis built from the Platonic-Timaeus chora, archetypal architecture preceding qualities and form, and primordial world fabric.

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