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Books Like Eupalinos ou l'Architecte by Paul Valéry
A Platonic dialogue on architecture, music, and the body — one of the century's great prose works
Socrates and Phaedrus converse in the underworld about architecture and what it means to make something perfectly (1921) — Valéry's most beautiful prose work, raising questions about the relationship between form, consciousness, and physical experience that have no easy answers.
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La Jeune Parque
by Paul Valéry
The poem and the dialogue share the same central obsession — consciousness and its relationship to the body, pure form and its relationship to physical experience; reading them together gives the verse and prose expressions of the same aesthetic position.
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Buy on AmazonCharmes
by Paul Valéry
The poetry collection Valéry was completing at the same time as Eupalinos — 'Le Cimetière marin' and the shorter Charmes poems are the verse realizations of the positions about consciousness, form, and beauty that the dialogue develops in prose.
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Buy on AmazonPoésies
by Stéphane Mallarmé
Mallarmé's collected verse is the aesthetic foundation that Eupalinos is building on — the dialogue's claim that a perfect building is like a piece of music is directly descended from Mallarmé's 'La Musique et les lettres.'
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Buy on AmazonPhaedrus
by Plato
The direct model for Valéry's dialogue form and the source of Phaedrus as a character — Plato's dialogue about beauty, the soul, and rhetoric enriches the encounter with Valéry's use of the same characters and the same Platonic questioning mode.
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Buy on AmazonThe Symposium
by Plato
The other great Platonic dialogue on beauty and art — the speeches in the Symposium about the nature of Eros and the ascent from physical to ideal beauty are the philosophical background for Valéry's dialogue about architecture and the body.
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Buy on AmazonThe Architecture of Happiness
by Alain de Botton
The 2006 book on how architecture shapes emotional and mental experience is a popular heir to Eupalinos's central insight — that buildings, like music, can be machines for producing specific states of consciousness; comparing the two shows how Valéry's claim looks in a more accessible register.
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Buy on AmazonTowards a New Architecture
by Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier's 1923 manifesto was published the same year as Eupalinos and shares the same emphasis on architecture as pure form and on the building's relationship to the body in motion — the two texts are contemporaneous and productively contrasting.
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Buy on AmazonDivagations
by Stéphane Mallarmé
Mallarmé's critical prose — especially the essay on music and letters — provides the theoretical context for the claim in Eupalinos that architecture and music are both arts of pure form organized in time; the genealogy from Mallarmé's essays to Valéry's dialogue is direct.
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