Filip Kinnert received the Jacques Derrida Prize
Architect Filip Kinnert came second in the Jacques Derrida Prize for his doctoral thesis, 'Wholeness as a Starting Point for Understanding Meaning Mediated by Architectural Language'. He received his prize on 22 June at the Buquoy Palace in Prague.
Symbolism can be found in almost everything today, including architecture, and people often refer to it. But can the meaning of architectural works also be perceived from another point of view? This question was precisely the focus of Filip Kinnert's work, in which he investigated whether the significance of architecture can be viewed independently of symbolic referencing. More precisely, he considered how we can think and talk about architecture and how this affects how people build and relate to their environment.
The origins of this topic date back to 2015, when Filip Kinnert was on an Erasmus exchange at the Faculty of Architecture in Ljubljana, where he was introduced to Christopher Alexander's theory. Three years later, he began studying architectural language with historian and theorist Martin Horáček. Under his guidance, and alongside Christopher Alexander's theory, Kinnert began to explore architecture from a different perspective. In Alexander's concept, architectural works are not perceived as assembling parts into functional units, but rather the other way around. A quality of 'wholeness' is always present, and the architect/designer intends to deepen this integrity and support the fulfilment of needs. As an architect, Filip Kinnert wondered how such a place could be created within this approach.
Using examples such as a church tower, a column and wayside shrines in the landscape, Filip Kinnert describes the nature of meanings that communicate with others, i.e. meanings that help people to orient themselves and identify, or simply put, live, without reference to semantics.
"The potential benefits of the submitted work lie in a deeper understanding of our relationship with the environment. Through every design decision and creative intervention, we can become closer to or distant from it. Ultimately, I would argue that our inner relationship with the environment is the spiritual essence of our efforts towards sustainable development. It is important to remember that our technical engineering efforts to remedy the damage are merely a means to an end," adds Kinnert.
The Jacques Derrida Prize in the field of humanities and social sciences is jointly organised by the French Embassy and Michal Martinko. The aim is to recognise the best research work of Czech doctoral students and recent holders of a doctoral degree in the social sciences and humanities.
| Inserted by | Šedová Táňa Mgr., Ph.D. |
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