ABSTRACT
Architecture in the nineteenth century was largely an architecture of divided identity. In can be put in the formula ‘One divides into Two’. By contrast, the twentieth century in a good part of its ‘short’ history adhered to a formula in which ‘fusion’ replaces ‘division’, and Two, as Badiou says in The Century, ‘is fused into One’. In this chapter, I attempt to transpose Badiou’s formulas for the divided political identity to the century’s architecture. As it is argued, since 1980, architecture has progressively moved away from the fusional impulse of twentieth-century modernism. Such a reversion, as the chapter amplifies, takes the characteristic form of a reactive repetition in which re-enchantment again takes center stage. The aim is to disenchant this reactionary re-enchantment.
