Know any Evolution books?

[Andre van der Kraan]

To be perfectly honest; Darwin's Dangerous Idea is one of the greatest 
books we've had the pleasure to read. But, perhaps is the Idea still to 
dangerous for a few essentialist thinkers. It would be a great thing for 
scientist to review their most common concepts once in a while. For those 
who agree, I've got a little anouncement to make:

LS
At this moment, we, two students from the departement of Architecture, 
Technical University of Delft, are working on an essay concerning the 
matter of ‘essence’ in Architecture. Although in the Post-modern 
philosophical discourse this search for the ‘core of concepts’ has lost 
its use, we experience the ‘quest for essence’ still being common practice 
in the architectural - justificational - debate. Just for clarity, we 
consider this ‘quest for essence’ to be a metaphysical operating 
procedure, which will do, of course, in esotherical concernings. But, in 
more serious debate, we wouldn’t like ‘miracles’ to occure. We consider 
this need for ‘fake clarity’ to be a call for easy-to-use prescriptions in 
architectural practice; a comfortable end point in research.

We would not only be grateful for remarks, references or even treatises on 
the redundancy of this essence quest, but also for provided links with 
historical or contempory architectural debate.

(books, to which we already have refered, in premature sketches on the 
topic of this essay are:

W. Calvin, The River that Flows Uphill*
R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 
D.C. Dennett, Consiousness Explaned
D.C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
D.R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
L. Lefaivre & A. Tzonis, De Oorsprong van de Moderne Architectuur, een 
Geschiedenis in Documenten (The Origin of Modern Architecture, a history 
in documents)*
D.R. Hostadter & D.C. Dennett, (editing and reflections), The Mind’s I
J. Leilich (editor), Immanuel Kant *
R.J. Hollingdale, A Nietszche-reader*
B. Russell, History of Western Phiosophy and its Connection with Political 
and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day*
O. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for His Hat
O. Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars
R. Scruton, The Aestetics of Architecture
M.Stephan: A Transformational Theory of Aesthetics

* = read in dutch translation)

If you feel to respond on this subject, please contact us at:

E-mail adress: J.Snellens at bktudelft.nl

Thank you for reading this,     Koen Mulder and Marcel Schreurs.