This chapter has emerged from a set of reflections and a body of work produced by

myself and Professor Rebecca Krinke for the AHRA conference on Transgression. In

it, I would like to tease out a number of issues arising from our work together and to

bring in other, related questions I have been reflecting on, in an attempt to address

the leading question of ‘what architecture might be’ (Troiani, Ewing and Periton 2013:

7). Rebecca has been working mainly through visual arts practice, thinking of herself

primarily as an artist who teaches landscape architecture and I have been operating

largely through theory as a researcher in visual culture, investigating the work of

German twentieth-century artist Joseph Beuys. While Rebecca opted not to co-author

this piece, I hope that I have honoured our experience here and indicated clearly where

observations are not my own. However I accept that my authorship has led me to focus

on elements that particularly interest me.1 I have a strong sense that questions I have

been grappling with around Beuys’ transgressive legacies constitute a still pregnant

aporia that might have some relevance for architecture. These relate to issues around

meaning and related anthropological notions of the human being that had initially led

me to work with Rebecca. I will begin by discussing the journeys that we made, then

give a brief introduction to Beuys and philosopher and anthropologist Georges Bataille’s

respective positions with regard to form and meaning and finally, in the third section,

consider how our work and these related critical debates have affected my thinking

about architecture and transgression.