Artforum excerpt: Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment by Henri Lefebvre

Henri Lefebvre's theories—of the everyday, of the city, of space—are integral to our understanding of contemporary life and urban experience.

Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment by Henri LefebvreHENRI LEFEBVRE’S THEORIES—of the everyday, of the city, of space—are integral to our understanding of contemporary life and urban experience. Yet, remarkably, the full breadth of the late French philosopher’s thinking on the built environment was unknown until 2008, when scholar Łukasz Stanek rediscovered a forgotten manuscript penned by Lefebvre some forty years ago. A rethinking of the spaces and politics of leisure as much as a consideration of enchanting structures ranging from Roman baths to the Alhambra, that book-length study,Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, will be published for the first time in May by the University of Minnesota Press. Here, Stanek introduces a sneak preview for Artforum, situating the “architecture of enjoyment” within the arc of Lefebvre’s groundbreaking oeuvre.

Read the excerpt.

Published in: Artforum