Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa & Madeline Gins. (Architecture - Technology - Culture)

227 Pages·2010·15.7 MB·English

by  Jean-Jacques Lecercle

Architecture and Philosophy
Architecture Technology Culture 6
Editors
Klaus Benesch
(University of Munich, Germany)
Jeffrey L. Meikle
(University of Texas at Austin, USA)
David E. Nye
(University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)
Miles Orvell
(Temple University, Philadelphia, USA)
Editorial Address:
Prof. Dr. Klaus Benesch
Department of English/American Studies
University of Munich
Schelling strasse 3/VG
80799 Munich
Architecture and Philosophy
New Perspectives on the Work of
Arakawa & Madeline Gins
Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Françoise Kral

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
In memory of Arakawa –
who crossed borders between continents, disciplines, and, ultimately,
life and death itself.

All illustrations, including the cover illustration:
© Arakawa and Gins/Reversible Destiny Foundation.
Cover design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence.”
ISBN: 978-90-420-3189-0
E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3190-6
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2010
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents

Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Françoise Kral
Preface........................................................................................... 7

Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Gins and Arakawa, or The Passage to Materialism.................................. 17

Jed Rasula
Endless House—Architectural Body.......................................................... 37

Alan Prohm
Architecture and Poetic Efficacy:
Architectural Poetics .................................................................................. 53

Fionn C. Bennett
“Autopoietic Event Matrices” in Architecture and in Literature:
Wordsworth Talks to Arakawa and Gins ................................................... 75

Joshua Schuster
How Architecture Became Biotopian: From Meta-Biology to Causal
Networks in Arakawa and Gins’ Architectural Body ................................ 95

Françoise Kral
Architectural Body as Generative Utopia? ............................................... 113

Chris L. Smith
Preceding an Architectural Body .............................................................. 125

Jondi Keane
A Bioscleave Report: Constructing the Perceiver ..................................... 143

Ronald Shusterman
Leafing Through a Universe: Architectural Bodies and Fictional Worlds 169
6
Simone Rinzler
Arakawa and Gins’s Architectural Body:
a Transgeneric Manifesto .......................................................................... 189

Linda Pillière
“No Mere Play on Words.” A stylistic Analysis of
Architectural Body ..................................................................................... 207

Authors ...................................................................................................... 223

Appendix ................................................................................................... 225
Preface

Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Françoise Kral

It is trivially true that philosophy has always attempted to read
architecture—to find a space for it in a general theory of aesthetics, to
account for it within a general theory of spatial experience, to assess
its contribution to the understanding of our daily life. And it is equally
true, and equally trivial, that philosophy has had to acknowledge that
architecture thinks, that is, produces its own concepts, and that such
concepts, in return, may help to read the philosophy that claims to
read architecture. This reciprocal relationship, which is not a case of
fusion, may be thought in the philosophical language of Gilles
Deleuze, as the creation of a disjunctive synthesis, whereby the two
heterogeneous series of philosophy and architecture form an assem-
blage, without losing their heterogeneity: such assemblage is rich with
the promise of lines of flight, deterritorializations and the emergence
of various haeccities.
The usual view of the relationship between philosophy and
architecture, there lies its triviality, still reasons in terms of two
independent discipline s, that is two independent series, which are
somehow assembled, at a certain stage of their development, to
produce new mixtures. But what if the two series are entwined from
the very beginning, what if the architect is, at the same time and
indissolubly, a philosopher (and also, why not, an artist and a
linguist)? Such a situation will probably induce in the professional
philosopher corporative reactions of the “keep off the grass variety”:
there is a specificity of philosophy, and an architect cannot be a true
philosopher, only a kind of philosophical fou littéraire. One of the
weaknesses of the Sokal hoax, and its attempted theorizing by Sokal
and Bricmont, is that when they left the safe territory of their
specialism, theoretical physics, to venture into philosophy, their
incompetence became painfully obvious.
8 Jean-Jacques Lecercle and Françoise Kral
But such dismissal by the specialist is not so easy to achieve in
the case of Arakawa and Gins, and it will take the combined efforts of
an array of specialists of several disciplines, philosophers, linguists
and literary critics, to resist their philosophical onslaught—this is
indeed what this book is about.
Arakawa and Gins are undoubtedly architects, even if both first
experimented with other artistic fields, where their work also gained
recognition, before turning to architecture: Arakawa’s relationship to
Duchamp is well-known, and his paintings have been celebrated by
Lyotard; as for Madeline Gins, she is a name among avant-garde
writers, in a scene dominated by the school of language poets. Their
early works, whether it be Arakawa’s abstract paintings or Madeline
Gins’ poetry show signs of the themes that were later to be central to
their architectural project. Arakawa’s move away from monochrome
painting in the 1960s to a growing interest in and research into the
three dimensions in the 1980s can be read as a sign of a growing
interest in architectural structures, in particular those reflecting on the
position of the subject in relation to the painting. As for Madeline
Gins, her reflection on the temporality of writing in her poems—in
which fragments, erased and written over suggest the palimpsestic
nature of art and its development through time—can be read as the
first step towards a reflection on temporality which underlies a work
such as Architectural Body. The block of flats they erected in Tokyo
was recently given half a page in the French newspaper Le Monde (the
irony of it, for whoever is aware of their insistence on reversible
destiny, was that the a rticle dealt with their architectural work as an
attempted solution to the problems of an aging population in Japanese
cities).
Since the publication of Architectural Body, we have discov-
ered, and had to acknowledge, that they are genuine philosophers, that
they have produced a body of work that cannot be dismissed as the
feeble effort of mere amateurs. There is an undeniable grandeur in
Architectural Body, the grandeur of the archetypal philosophical
gesture that abandons doxa to indulge in paradox, the outcome of
which is the production of philosophical truths, or rather, since De-
leuze has taught us that such is the object of philosophy, the creation
of new concepts, with duly picturesque names such as landing sites,
bioscleave or organism that persons: the result of this work of
Preface 9
philosophical creation is nothing short of a new mapping of our
experience and of the construction of our lived world.
Such weaving together of heterogeneous series, this disjunctive
synthesis of theories of space, of perception, of language and of
literature needs, in order to be read, that is to be understood and put to
work in various fields, the collaborative assessment of specialists of
each of those disciplines: you will find in this volume essays by
philosophers of language and of literature, specialists in linguistic
pragmatics and enunciation theory, literary critics and poeticians, as
well as theorists of architecture. Architectural poetics, autopoetic
event matrices, biotopian architecture, architecture as generative uto-
pia, architecture and postmodernist literary experiments, transgeneric
manifestoes, down to the materialism of space on which Arakawa and
Gins’s philosophy might be based: the volume seeks to do justice to
the sheer scope and diversity of their intervention in many fields.
Since all this is a little abstract, let me take three examples, in
three different fields. There is a sense in which the philosophy of
Arakawa and Gins is not only materialist, but Deleuzian: their interest
in the paradoxes of sense, rather than meaning (the fixed meaning of
doxa) echoes the Deleuze of Logic of Sense; their organism that
persons seeks to do the philosophical work the classical concept of
subject (as centre of consciousness and of agency) is no longer able to
do in our post-modern conjuncture, and echoes of the Deleuzian
concepts of haeccity and collective assemblage of enunciation can be
perceived in their work. As indeed Artaud’s body without organs, of
which Deleuze and Gu attari make systematic philosophical use, is not
far from the processual concept of the organism that persons (the
body without organs does not deny the existence of organs and
organisms, it seeks to make them the results of the freezing of a
process of becoming, even as the organism that persons emerges in a
process of tentativeness). We understand, when we read Arakawa and
Gins, why Deleuze considered architecture as “the first among the
arts,” and why his work is obsessively concerned with rhizomatic
connections between the concepts of philosophy and the percepts and
affects of art: of such connections is the work of Arakawa and Gins
made.
There is also a sense in which their conception of language (and
their version of architecture can always be phrased in terms of
language, as is manifest in the famous phrase, “the tense of