architectonic

is a specific experience of assembling coherent totality and continuity of the system. They determine, induce, and inform, even if indirectly, all theory and criticism of architecture.

These four points of invariability do not adjoin. They delineate the chart of a system from the angles of a frame. We will not say only that they come together and remain inseparable, which is true. They give rise to a specific experience of assembling, that of the coherent totality and continuity of the system. Thus, they determine a network of evaluations... they induce and inform, even if indirectly, all the theory and criticism of architecture, from the most specialized to the most trivial. Such evaluation inscribes the hierarchy in a hyletics, as well as in the space of a formal distribution of values. (Derrida 'Point de folie' : 573)

is the science and politics through which ethics works.

In his introductory remarks in that work, however, Aristotle makes an incisive and, for my purposes, particularly relevant distinction between (what I am calling) ethics and the 'architectonic' (Aristotle 1934: 4-5 [NE 1093b.ii.4-6]) or 'science' for which ethics is propaideutic. The term he assigns to that architectonic is politike . One usually fi nds the term glossed into English as 'politics,' which serves if nothing else to make for a contrastof a very stark sort. (Fabian 2008 : themetical in ethical)

architectonic, n.Definitions

architectonic