Architecture not conceptual but ideational

Gough, Tim (2008) Architecture not conceptual but ideational. In: Building, designing, thinking; 30 - 31 Aug 2009, Jyvaskyla, Finland. ISBN 9789525371420

Abstract

Deleuze, in Difference & Repetition, opposes Idea to concept. �The entire Idea is caught up in the mathematico-biological system of different/ciation.� (220) Concept is that of which Laugier, classically, speaks: the thought of architecture is that of static �firm principles� determining the architect�s judgement; concept exists in the realm of representation; the status of architecture is subsumed to the concept from which it derives; and the thought is, finally, merely expressed in the work. The Deleuzian Idea, by contrast, is anti-classical, anti-representational, anti-expressionist and genetic (anti-static). It is this by virtue of its status not as arché (principle) but as differentialising problem. As such, it exists in the intense play of difference and the eternal return of the same � which means for Deleuze (following Klossowski) not the return of the identical but the effect of primary difference. Thus architecture, thought outside the classical bind, can never be the translation of an apparently formal aspect of philosophy (the fold, for instance) into the form of architecture. Rather, as is said of art in Ozenfant/Jeanneret�s Purism manifesto, architecture raises space to the level of mathesis, and it does this as a genesis, as a development of the Idea by virtue of the process of differentiation (of the Idea as problem) and differenciation (of the actualisation of this) � �by posing the question of its own difference�(195). This genesis is a creative �triple genesis� of qualities, space and time, and concepts (173); thus architecture, as such a creative movement, does not follow concepts but rather generates them. A truly conceptual architecture does not begin, but ends, with the concept; and we can thus understand how it would be that philosophy, as conceptual, must perforce rely on the architectonic plan. It will be shown, in conclusion, that architecture will therefore stay true to Deleuze�s thought (in Logic of Sense) of the Event as that �battle which hovers over its own field�. neutral in relation to its temporal actualisations� all the more terrible.� (100)

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