Kari Jormakka: 1959 - 2013

"Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes "concern"; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential." - Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher" Kari Jormakka died unexpectedly on January 13, 2013. With Kari, the scholarly community has suffered the great loss of an exceptionally learned theorist. He was a thinker who not only commanded the history of architecture and its theory, but also maneuvered capably through the field of philosophy and many - sometimes seemingly all - of its related disciplines. His personal library could keep a small town reading for months.