How do we live well? The first sentence of Grace and Gravity raises the fundamental question that constantly occupies our minds—and of all those who lived before us. Paradoxically, the impossibility of answering this question opens up the very room needed to find ways of living well. It is the gap where all disciplines fall short, where architecture does not fit its inhabitants, where economy is not based on shortage, where religion cannot be explained by its followers, and where technology works far beyond its own principles. According to Lars Spuybroek, the prize-winning former architect, this marks the point where the “paradoxical machine” of grace reveals its powers, a point where we “cannot say if we are moving or being moved”. Following the trail of grace leads him to a new form of analysis that transcends the age-old opposition between appearances and technology. Linking up a dazzling and often delightful variety of sources—monkeys, paintings, lamp posts, octopuses, tattoos, bleeding fingers, rose windows, robots, smart phones, spirits, saints, and fossils—with profound meditations on living, death, consciousness, and existence, Grace and Gravity offers an eye-opening provocation to a wide range of art historians, architects, theologians, anthropologists, artists, media theorists and philosophers. Grace and Gravity raises the discussions on the digital turn in architecture out of its largely administrative, historiographical condition to a spiritual, daringly ambitious, quick and genuinely exciting, and also ethical new level, that gives us a taste of how the digital turn's somewhat narcissistic preoccupation with the production of "novelty" might be overcome— Theory, Culture & Society In comparison to his earlier work, Grace and Gravity is more sweeping and more intimate ... an ambitious volume— Aesthetic Investigations Throughout Grace and Gravity Spuybroek displays a gift for synthesizing complex ideas in ways that do not reduce or deny their difficulties but rather behold them in simultaneity— Log nr. 52 As he ranges from Minoan bull-jumping to Beatles lyrics and back again, via Thomas Aquinas, Martin Heidegger, and St Paul, there is a relentless breathlessness to the text. This is part of its joy ... This is a book in which there is much (as Spuybroek's own responses to Italian architecture would have it) "blossom, flourishing, efflorescence, flowering."— Art & Christianity Lars Spuybroek is Professor of Architectural Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He is the author of NOX: Machining Architecture (2004), The Architecture of Continuity (2008), Research & Design: The Architecture of Variation (2009) and Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011). He is an award-winning architect with his practice NOX. Archsoc.com listed Lars Spuybroek in the 'best of the best' category in the world-wide rating of architecture professors (2010–13).