Earlier today, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) announced that Graham Harman, Ph.D. will be joining its Liberal Arts faculty. Harman, who taught previously at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, has played a pivotal role in the development of "speculative realism" and "object-oriented ontology" (OOO), two related strands of contemporary philosophy.

Since his early exploration of the concept of "tool-being" in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Harman has laid the groundworks for a popular and influential revision of metaphysics, characterized by the rejection of anthropocentrism, which privileges the human over the nonhuman, and "correlationism", or the post-Kantian assumption that reality emerges from human thinking.

“Graham is a unique and notorious figure in philosophy and the arts. His fresh metaphysical project offers a way of understanding reality not as a product of the human mind, but rather as a cornucopia of independent and vibrant objects, large and small, human and non-human," states Tom Wiscombe, Chair of the B.Arch. Program, in the announcement. 

"Graham is irreverent, with as many adversaries as acolytes; he is at home in the battlefield of ideas. His remarkable imagination and style, and his ability to leap in and out of realms of ideas and aesthetics will be huge assets for our school."

Over the course of his career, Harman has published twelve volumes, including The Quadruple Object, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, and Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy.

With a proclivity for accessible, easy-to-read writing, Harman and other disciples of object-oriented ontology have widely influenced discourses outside of philosophy, in particular art and ecology. 

But Harman's ideas have also generated a good deal of controversy. For some within the discourse of philosophy, object-oriented ontology and speculative realism are unserious but trendy "blog philosophies". Indeed, both discourses emerged online and can perhaps be characterized as the first major philosophies to emerge after the internet – or at least largely on it.

Others take issue, fundamentally, with a project concerned with granting equal ontological footing to human and nonhumans alike.

In any case, it's an interesting move on the part of both Harman and SCI-Arc. Historically, philosophy and architecture have had a close, if turbulent, relationship – although the past few decades have largely seen a decline in the status of theory for the discipline.

While object-oriented ontology has definitely already made in-roads into architectural discourse (including here on Archinect), it has yet to be taken up with the zeal that other philosophies once sparked. Harman's new job at SCI-Arc could very well change that. Check out one of his lectures directly addressing architecture, below.

SCI-Arc has announced a lot of new initiatives in the last few months. Check out some of the other goings-on at the school here:

• SCI-Arc launches "MEAT," a curatorial summer program
• Get Lectured: SCI-Arc, Spring '16
• SCI-Arc expands to Shanghai, with more global programs on the way
• Stories from the Anthropocene: Archinect Sessions One-to-One #4 with Liam Young