ABSTRACT
In his influential analysis of Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000, architect and theoretician Peter Eisenman draws upon Deleuze, Derrida, and others in demonstrating how modern architecture exemplifies a practice that cannot be reduced to the traditional dualisms of architectural practice – namely, the dualistic relations between subject/object, figure/ground, solid/void, and part/whole.1 Eisenman draws particular attention to Deleuze’s concept of the figural and Derrida’s understanding of the undecidable as effective starting points for rethinking architecture as a practice that is irreducible to an either/or relationship. Eisenman could equally well have stressed Deleuze’s concept of an assemblage, which, for Deleuze, entails a consistency of elements that is irreducible to a traditional dualism (e.g., the form-substance relation), and yet they “swing between a territorial closure that tends to restratify them and a deterritorializing movement that on the contrary connects them with the Cosmos.”2 In other words, for Deleuze assemblages risk yet manage to avoid collapsing into either an actualized stratification or an actualized deterritorialization (chaos), a blind repetition of the same or an unsustainable chaos. An architectural assemblage, likewise, and as will be discussed below, entails a similar “swing” between actualized opposites, and in doing so it is irreducible to either side of a dualistic relation.
