Exception, Rule and Architecture out-of-field
Marko Jobst
Greenwich University
[1] One of the recurrent themes in architectural writing is the question of the viewing regimes that buildings establish, both internally and with regard to the various 'exteriors' that house them. This question has often been posed in the context of carefully 'framed' views. In modernity, framing becomes closely related to the question of architectural representations, the media and the various modes of 'imagining' that relate human perception to technology. From the rise of the perspectival drawing, to photography, to film and the various forms of digital production, frames are taken to define architecture and its relation to that which lies beyond it.
[2] This essay looks at the question of framing from several interlocking viewpoints in an attempt to indicate a direction that could, in philosophical terms, lead to a conception of immanent imaging in architecture, the way it is indicated in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, yet still insufficiently addressed in architectural writing. When tackled, the notion of immanence appears to be thought almost exclusively in the context of the digital realm and its so-called 'new' media.
[3] The first section looks at a 1992 essay by Beatriz Colomina, one of the more engaging and enduring texts to tackle modernism's close relationship with framing in relation to photography and film. However, Colomina's text is also representative of a reduced conceptual palette that architectural writing routinely utilises when concerning itself with the question of imaging. To frame, in Colomina's text, is to construct images statically, atemporally and discontinuously, and it implies the loss of an architectural 'real'. As a consequence, Colomina's approach to the media in question will inevitably lead to an understanding of this relationship that is almost exclusively negative.
[4] It is this kind of thinking that informed the majority of the debate about the relationship between architecture and film in the 1990s and unfortunately still does at present, lagging behind the developments both in film theory and philosophy. To address this, I will look at a specific example of artistic practice that refuses to support easy distinctions between imaging in architecture, imaging specific to film, and imaging categorised as artistic practice, from performance to installation art. It is not by accident that the work of Karen Mirza and Brad Butler continually oscillates between moving images and built environments, without ever finding it necessary to establish a reductive binary logic between the mobile perceptions of cinematic images and those of corporeally framed urban experiences. In their work no 'real' can be lost – it is a manifold, multilayered construct, inclusive and open-ended.
[5] These two strands – Colomina's canonical text and Mirza-Butler's work – are brought together through a closer look at Deleuze and Guattari's writing on framing, based on Bernard Cache and mediated by Elizabeth Grosz, in order to show that an 'immanentist' conception of imaging might be crucial for conceiving a richer conceptual framework for architecture than any that is currently in place. Deleuze and Guattari indicate the way only sketchily however, and without recourse to any of the histories of framing in architectural histories and theories that would have been present at the time of the writing of What is Philosohy? When addressing architecture, they tend to tread too close to an understanding of surface that proves hard to divorce from Cartesian conceptions of space and its accompanying understanding of architecture, the critiques of which have been many and widespread in architectural writing over the past fifty years.
[6] It is thus in his philosophy of cinema, rather than his writing on architecture, that Deleuze inadvertently indicates a way of addressing the relation between architectural and filmic imaging by focusing on the 'beyond' of the frame, through the concept of the cinematic out-of-field. While Deleuze writes about the relationship between the frame and its outside from the position of its function within the 'whole' of the film, it is with the acknowledgement of an unseen 'beyond' that he opens up a realm of imaging which goes not only past the relative unity of the filmic whole, but beyond cinema as such – ushering in an immanent conception of imaging in architecture. That examples of such practice should come from contemporary art should not be surprising; the extent to which this direction of thinking still remains unexplored, is. Both architecture's own historians and theoreticians, and the philosophers working in the tradition of Deleuze and Guattari, are yet to address the way in which the various framing and imaging practices might relate to each other in a universe that is immanently conceived.
[7] This essay, then, is only a starting point for a broader project that would address the question of immanence in architecture, and propose a take on imaging that would re-conceptualise the relation between thought and perception on one hand, and the so-called architectural representations on the other. As for Colomina's text, illustrations of the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier have deliberately been omitted. The intention is for the reader to accompany the text with moving images, all of which have been taken from Mirza-Butler's installation-become-film Where a Straight Line meets a Curve.
1.
Mirza and Butler, Where
a Straight Line meets a Curve.
click to play [or here for full size]
[8] An often overlooked aspect of Adolf Loos' domestic interiors, writes Beatriz Colomina in 'The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,' is that the windows are opaque, covered with curtains, or made difficult to access due to the in-built furniture – with the seating arrangement often placed in such a way that the occupant has their back to the window, facing the room (1992: 74-5). Each of these focal points establishes a theatre box oriented back towards the interior, she claims, and while this vantage point might provide a sense of protection by the virtue of being back-lit, it also inevitably draws attention to the person seated. The subsequent regimes of control established within the interior, represented in photographs, make it easy to imagine oneself in 'precise, static positions' whereby '[w]ith each turn, each return look, the body is arrested' (Colomina 1992: 75).
[9] Discussing the Moller and Müller houses specifically, she writes: 'The "voyeur" in the "theater box" has become the object of another's gaze; she is caught in the act of seeing, entrapped in the very moment of control. In framing a view, the theater box also frames the viewer. It is impossible to abandon the space, let alone leave the house, without being seen by those over whom control is being exerted. Object and subject exchange places. Whether there is actually a person behind either gaze is irrelevant' (1992: 82). This results in the inhabitants of the house becoming in Colomina's theatrical metaphor simultaneously actors and spectators and hence 'detached' from their own domestic space. The distinctions between inside and outside, object and subject, private and public, she claims, are thus 'convoluted' (Colomina 1992: 80).
[10] This passage is illustrative of Colomina's approach. The logic employed allows for clear-cut binary oppositions only, cancelling the possibility of a more complex, dynamic sense of their relation. Consequently, the so-called 'convoluted' paradigm is painted in distinctly negative terms. But could this 'convolution' be understood as an act of layering, of making-complex, an act of intensification? And if so, what kind of argument would this lead to?
[11] There is a hint of this possibility in the section on the positioning of mirrors in Loos' interiors, which Colomina claims are often located where openings would be expected, as is the case in the Steiner house. The inside/outside ambiguity is 'intensified,' she writes, by this apparent separation of sight from other senses. The physical and visual connections are often divorced in these interiors; she takes this to be a strategy of 'framing' characteristic of many of Loos' interiors, and it is the 'traditional scene' of domestic life itself that thus becomes framed (Colomina 1992: 86). In other words, framing in Loos presupposes a negative movement away from the historically inherited model of domesticity.
[12] Commenting on the Rufer House drawing, she writes: 'The interior is not simply the space which is enclosed by the façades. A multiplicity of boundaries is established, and the tension between inside and outside resides in the walls that divide them, its status disturbed by Loos' displacement of traditional forms of representation. To address the interior is to address the splitting of the wall' (Colomina 1992: 94). Why this 'tension' should be understood to lead to a symbolic splitting of the wall, and not, for instance, to its becoming complex, layered, or indeed 'intense', remains unclear.
[13] In contrast, Colomina claims, Le Corbusier's interior 'continuously throws the subject towards the periphery of the house.' This makes his houses 'frames for a view' (Colomina 1992: 98), a logic pursued even in the exteriors themselves, whereby a roof garden might be designed to frame the landscape, even though there is no physical enclosure to speak of. Perception is seen in these houses to occur in motion, unlike in Loos' houses, and frames acquire 'temporality' through the architectural promenade (Colomina 1992: 98).
[14] This take on framing in modernist architecture, and its crucial relation to technology, is brought to a head in Colomina's analysis of the Beistegui apartment, which she sees as 'symptomatic' of the look implicit in Le Corbusier's architecture. The implied reading of the relationship between technology, framing and vision is once again wholly negative. The apartment was conceived, she writes, as a 'frame' for parties (Colomina 1992: 107). It had no electric lighting, using candles (Colomina calls this the 'living' light), while electricity served to 'slide away partition walls, operate doors, and allow cinematographic projections on the metal screen [...] and, outside, on the roof terrace, to slide the banks of hedges to frame the view of Paris' (Colomina 1992: 109). Electricity was thus not a means of illuminating, but a 'technology of framing' since all the traditional architectural devices of framing (doors, walls, etc.) were operated by electricity.
[15] This is a crucial point for Colomina's argument regarding the relationship between architectural framing and the media that played an increasingly transformative role in the establishing of modernism in architecture. She sees this new, artificial lighting to have displaced the 'traditional forms of enclosure' and in the process to have made that all-important distinction between inside and outside 'problematic' (Colomina 1992: 110). Furthermore, the Beistegui apartment offers the 'spectacle' of the metropolis mediated through the use of the periscope, since the walls of the rooftop garden were deliberately made tall enough to cut off all but the tips of the tallest structures in Paris. In the projects that followed, in which Le Corbusier addressed the image of the 'city of tomorrow', this mediating gesture will disappear and for Colomina, this will mean that the house itself has become an artifice. While Loos' 'gaze' was an inward one, Le Corbusier's becomes a question of 'domination over the exterior world' (Colomina 1992: 112) and the window has become a flat image, merely a screen in 'the age of mass communication' (1992: 127-8). She takes this screen to undermine the status of wall by dematerialising it altogether, a move away 'from the humanist eye, to the camera angle' (Colomina 1992: 128).
[16] Several things are of note that summarise the issues with Colomina's text. First, the use of the term gaze and reliance on Lacan disallow any conception of seeing which would make for a more complex 'reading' regarding power; she follows the strict binary opposition between subject and object which disallows the possibility of a different conception of the self and pushes the argument to its logical, reductive, conclusion – that this mechanism of visual 'control' overrides any other set of forces that might be at play.
[17] Second, she can only allow for arrested, static conditions in Loos, and the movement in Le Corbusier, even though she writes of it as a 'temporal' dimension, is understood as evenly distributed i.e. homogenous and divisible. A closer reading of Deleuze's take on Bergson's theses on movement reveals the problems with this and it is surprising that Stan Allen's suggestion from 1994 (Allen, 1994: 42-47) was never picked up further in architectural theory: that to write about the mobility of perception in architecture might involve the question of Deleuzian movement-images and consequently address the conceptions of time modelled on Bergson's duration. (That Allen would have been writing about movement-images in relation to a Le Corbusier building should come as no surprise.)
[18] The series of frames that Loos imposes on the interior Colomina sees as the question of fixed positions even though it should be apparent that temporality implied in these suggested positions is inescapably a question of lived durations, despite being present in the guise of different regimes of movement. Le Corbusier's architecture is to play the opposite, yet equally reductive role. 'It is hard to think of oneself in static positions' (1992: 98), Colomina claims with regard to the Villa Savoye, failing to acknowledge the possibility of a temporary rest, a pause, of movement that is neither perfect stasis nor evenly distributed corporeal activity – even if the characteristics of a building do encourage one over the other.
[19] Third, the understanding of the technology of imaging and the 'media' is taken to be wholly negative in its relation to architecture. Filmic imaging 'dematerializes' architecture, and the understanding of a Corbusian building as camera-like implies the loss of architecture proper. While this position might have been symptomatic of the early 1990s, when the essay was written, it still seems to pervade architectural writing. Those working in the filed of 'digital' imaging would have bypassed the question altogether by the virtue of having to conceive a radically different paradigm (and here Deleuze came in as the only option available that would not lament the loss of the supposed 'real'); work written on the relation between film and architecture, however, is still firmly rooted in this distinction.
[20] As for the drawing of Rufer house elevation-sections, it is of 'neither the inside nor the outside,' Colomina claims, 'but the membrane between them' (1992: 95). And this inadvertently offers a crucial glimpse into thinking the question of the wall differently: the membrane is the wall, and the joint forces of masking and representation of inhabitation (named as such in Loos' own explanation) cannot be extracted from it. There is no splitting of the wall going on, either literal (since the wall is conceived as physically synthetic of the two realms, and depicted as such in the drawing) or 'psychological' (as Colomina terms the processes in question at the very outset). What is at stake is quite the opposite: a process of layering, of fusion and intensification, of going beyond the binary oppositions that separate inside from outside, private from public, body from architecture. It is the creation of an intensive wall. The Rufer house drawing is synthetic, not disjunctive; and it leaves a clear trace of this process of bringing together disparate elements into a novel entity, which Colomina names as the 'membrane.'
[21] 'Loos' subject,' Colomina writes, 'inhabits this wall. This inhabitation creates a tension on that limit, tempers with it' (1992: 95). The tension is certainly there, between the historically expected treatment of the exterior in relation to the interior and the emergent variants that architectural modernism will offer; but rather than suggest impossibility of inhabitation, it offers a different notion of the architectural frame, a different way of conceiving the 'screen.' In the reductive binary logic followed throughout the text, the screen, as concept, can be thought only in relation to Le Corbusier's work, and understood in negative terms: as the dissolution of the wall. But this is not the only way of thinking framing – or screening – in architecture.
2.
Mirza and Butler, Where
a Straight Line meets a Curve.
click to play [or here for full size]
Art is first architectural because its cosmic materials require demarcation, enframement, containment in order for qualities as such to emerge, to live, and to induce sensation. Architecture is the most elementary of binding or containment of forces, the conditions under which qualities can live their own life through the constitution of territory. (Grosz 2008: 16)
[22] The first 'gesture' of art is one in which the body is separated from the earth, writes Elizabeth Grosz in Chaos, Territory, Art. It is 'the construction or fabrication of the frame' (2008: 10). This relates the initial artistic impulse not to the body but to architecture, since it is architecture that stands at the threshold between the body and the earth; and all art should be understood as 'the extension of the architectural imperative to organize the space of the earth' (Grosz 2008: 10).
[23] This process presupposes an act of distancing, the production of a plane of composition that will abstract sensation from the body (Grosz 2008: 11). As a consequence, framing – once it has been defined as the act of establishing territory out of chaos – becomes the 'condition' of all the arts, constituting architecture as well as painting and cinema. As Grosz writes: 'This cutting of the space of the earth through the fabrication of the frame is the very gesture that composes both house and territory, inside and outside, interior and landscape at once and as the points of maximal variation, the two sides, of the space of the earth' (2008: 13).
[24] This understanding of framing, of its relation to the concept of the screen and in turn to the architectural wall, is in marked contrast to Colomina's approach. The wall that Grosz describes is already manifold: 'Architectural framing produces the very possibility of the screen, the screen functioning as a plane for virtual projection, a hybrid of wall, window and mirror' (Grosz 2008: 17). Furthermore, regarding the supposed convoluted, self-reflecting gaze in Loos and the exterior-bound one in Le Corbusier – and the so-called subsequent 'splitting' and 'dematerialization' of the wall – Grosz writes that '[t]he history of the frame is the evolution of an increasing dematerialization, a territory-wall-painting-window-mirror-screen-becoming' (17). In other words, the historical trajectory described by Colomina regarding the transformation of the wall in architectural modernism might well be an accurately observed one, but should by no means automatically lead to thinking the process in negative terms.
[25] And while the notion of framing/screening chaos via territory as architecture's primary gesture still needs to be properly questioned regarding its intrinsically planar and often orthogonal character (i.e., the term's limitation regarding what architecture is, or can become), it is nevertheless a useful one when discussing the issues that Colomina brings up: the various relations established in the twentieth century between the wall, window, mirror and the cinematic screen – and all the conceptions of 'imaging' that these imply. Most of all, it allows for a look at the relationship between architecture and film that would sidestep the question of representation, the way the term is still used in architecture today.
3.
Mirza and Butler, Where
a Straight Line meets a Curve.
click to play [or here for full size]
Art begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 186)
[26] The writing on the relationship between film and architecture still predominantly relies on the distinction between the original ('real' architecture) and the copy (its representation, be it drawing, model, photograph, film, etc.). When the two realms are flattened into a single one, as is the case with Colomina's essay, this is not done through the notion of immanent imaging (which would nevertheless recognise the differences between the two realms) but by shuttling both into a 'textual' plane. This has repeatedly been done in architectural analyses of narrative cinema. But being non-narrative, at least in the conventional sense of the term, artists' cinema demands a different approach to thinking the relationship between the various acts of framing and notions of imaging that run parallel in film and architecture, while also problematising the documentary and quotidian aspects of filming.
[27] The work of London-based artists Karen Mirza and Brad Butler persistently tackles these possible hinges between the various modes of framing in art, film, architecture, and urban environments. In an early film, Non Places (1999), Mirza-Butler offer static takes of empty underground passages, filmic frames trained on simple architectural enclosures, whose complex relationship to the 'outside' becomes intensified through this filmic insistence on still, seemingly eventless frames.
[28] In Where a Straight Line Meets a Curve (2003) this relationship is made more complex, with the frames multiplying, both cinematic and architectural. From the outset there are two visual frames and two corresponding screens, since what is now available in video format – and further fragmented for this essay – was originally conceived as an installation piece and experienced as such in a number of locations including the Serpentine Pavilion in 2005. The initial visual content is composed of frames cast in light, which gradually reveal themselves to be blinds, window frames, screens of daylight projected onto walls. Physical elements of architecture that produced these conditions of light are in turn framed by the camera, which constructs a secondary set of frames. These relate to their architectural 'origins' in a decidedly ambiguous way. The conditions of the room, a simple, white-walled enclosure, empty of furniture and re-framed by two sash windows (dual screens themselves), are repeated, multiplied and varied throughout the film. Even when figures enter these spatial frames, and with them the occupation of architecture, the focus of the piece remains decidedly on the acts of framing that relate them to their various contexts, including the recognition of the camera itself, reflected in the mirror, caught by one artist in the hands of the other, etc.
[29] The technology of imaging is mirrored in the technology of architectural construction through the process of whitewashing but also of replacement of windows, the architectural equivalents of cinematic frames. From the construction of architecture yet another parallel trajectory leads to the cleaning of windowpanes, another form of labour involved in the 'screening' of architecture. (And it is worth mentioning that all these have a further set of references, including the film's title, in precedents of artistic practice, which are referred to yet never quoted, remaining embedded, immanent as it were, in the actual room and its given conditions.) The content of the 'outside' of the room is framed fully in a couple of shots only, but even this apparent move into a 'beyond' of architectural framing is mediated by the reflections of the interior itself. The supposed exterior, the 'nature' that makes itself known in the guise of a (distinctly urban) park, is not to be understood as independent from the very acts that frame it, architectural or cinematic; it is an outside always related to a frame, to an identifiable inside.
[30] Out of all this emerges a complex, composite, multifaceted image of the room as a framing device itself, revealed as such by the framings of film, with the insistence on the beyond of every single frame. This constant shift from one definition of the frame to another disallows any false closures – of the film itself, of architecture, of the relationship between consciousness and the framings through which it negotiates chaos, creating territory.
[31] Yet it is The Exception and the Rule, the cinematic component of an open-ended project (which had its partial culmination in 2009) that takes the notion of framing – and the relations between built environments, filmic images and actions of art – to the next level. Part of the Museum of Non Participation, the work disallows false closures of any one of these realms, relating them in a way that pushes beyond any notion of a possible 'original' frame. In the context of the Museum, the film itself becomes just one of the many possible gestures of partial, contingent framing. The insistent dissolution of the cinematic frame and its inclusion in the environment – and conversely, the recognition of its possibility in 'chaos' and the acts of gentle, partial extrusion from it – is repeated at the level of institutions of art and architecture, what can be seen as the 'institutional frames,' since the very building of an art museum, absent from Karachi, is constructed within the city which assumes aspects of artistic, cinematic and architectural 'framing of chaos.'
[32] In this proliferation of frames the key lies with the way each act of framing relates not only to the content of the image it brings forth, but to everything that remains excluded from the frame. Karen Mirza refers to this as 'framing out;' I will discuss it as the question of the cinematic out-of-field.
4.
Mirza and Butler, Where
a Straight Line meets a Curve.
click to play [or here for full size]
The frames and their joints hold compounds of sensation [...] Frames or sections are not coordinates; they belong to compounds of sensations whose faces, whose interfaces, they constitute. But however extendable the system may be, it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 187)
[33] The crucial question when working out ways in which artistic practice, film and architecture might relate will not necessarily be derived from the 'content' of the frame, the 'within' of the image, however immanently conceptualised; it will be in the focus on that which remains beyond, the 'outside' of the various, multidimensional frames of imaging. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this aspect in relation to architecture in What is Philosophy? as a 'deframing,' but a variant of the term was already present in Deleuze's Cinema 1 and it was there that it received a more detailed rendering, in the guise of the cinematic out-of-field.
[34] Towards the end of the first section on framing, Deleuze writes that the out-of-field [hors-champ] is not a negation or a simple non-coincidence between the visual and aural frames; instead, it is a reference to that which is 'neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present' (Deleuze 1997: 16). It is an outside that every act of framing determines, a beyond the frame, which Deleuze writes of with regard to two specific 'modes' of framing.
[35] In the first sense of framing, the frame defines a visible 'set;' each set in turn indicates another set, a larger one of which it is part or with which it forms a larger set. Each of these sets, Deleuze writes, can become seen and in the process allow for the formation of a new out-of-field. All these sets together form a 'homogenous continuity, a universe or a plane [plan] of genuinely unlimited content' (Deleuze 1997: 16). This, however, isn't a 'whole' the way Deleuze understands it, even though all the sets relate to the whole in an 'indirect' way (1997: 16).
[36] This is because the whole is 'not a set and does not have parts;' instead, it is precisely that which prevents the closure of sets, however large they might be. 'The whole is therefore like thread which traverses sets and gives each one the possibility, which is necessarily realised, of communicating with another, to infinity. Thus the whole is the Open, and relates back to time or even to spirit rather than to content and to space' (Deleuze 1997: 16-7). Every act of framing not only relates the spatial logic of the continuous expansion of sets onto other sets but also indicates the presence of that which every frame defines as a more radical beyond of the frame, the very 'screening' of chaos. And in the context of Deleuze's Bergsonian project it shouldn't come as a surprise that it is time as duration that is identified as the force preventing the closure of spatial sets. Every frame, every apparent closure of imaging, of 'fixing' of content, is also traversed by time, opening onto the realm of the 'whole' proper.
[37] And so, the out-of-field 'designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around' but it also 'testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to "insist" or "subsist", a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time' (Deleuze 1997: 17). And while the two doubtlessly don't come isolated, certain modes of framing will bring one aspect to the fore more than the other. The clearer it is what spatial set the visible one might open onto, the more the out-of-field will function through adding spaces to other spaces, which Deleuze terms as its 'first' function (1997: 17). The less it is clear what the framed set opens onto in spatial terms, the more it will introduce the 'transspatial' component –assigned by Deleuze to time and spirit.
[38] This understanding of the aspects that every frame 'frames out' would offer a radically different understanding of Loos' as well as Le Corbusier's acts of architectural framing than the one developed by Colomina; the notion of an 'outside,' and therefore of the 'whole' that the frame relates to, would assume a more nuanced character, one that would have to address the notion of duration in architecture, and consequently its relation to thought. To 'tighten' the frame, to make its spatial sets less clearly interconnected, might not invoke the idea of an uninhabitable limit the subject is positioned at (as was the case with Colomina's analysis of Loos); it would open a different kind of 'space' altogether, that of thought and duration. And if Le Corbusier's interiors might be thought of in terms of movement-images, is it possible that we could still develop an understanding of architecture that would imply the architectural equivalent of the cinematic time-image?
[39] In such a case, space and time would no longer be forced onto a single, homogenous plane, leading to an understanding of architecture either as composed solely of mobile continuities or discreet collections of experiential stasis; to think 'wholes' as tied to duration would presuppose a different notion of movement, as well as thought – in and of architecture. This is a project that, despite occasional attempts at formulation (most notably in John Rajchman's Constructions from 1998) has not been picked up in the past decade sufficiently to comprehensively re-write the landscape of architectural thought. The question of thinking architecture as philosophy hasn't even been formulated properly.
[40] More pertinent to this discussion, though, is the question of the relations that various acts of framing forge when some are constructed in cinematic images, some in artistic practice, and some in the gestures of architecture and its urban environments. What is the 'outside' of the cinematic frame – and what its relation to the direct presentation of time – when the very notion of continuity of spatial sets is subverted by an artistic practice that refuses to see them as autonomous, regarding them to be only one of the many facets involved in 'extraction of sensation?' Over the past five years it has become clear that writing on Deleuze in art, film and dance is inching ever-closer to the forms of practice that refuse clear distinction along 'disciplinary' lines. But what seems to be missing in these Deleuzian takes on the arts is the acknowledgement that these common territories will not necessarily be arrived at directly, by addressing the questions of space and time as such; they will pass, dwell, and sometimes remain firmly grounded in the domain of architecture, of cities and the various 'built environments' they present. Rajchman's question, posed over a decade ago, of what 'the time of the city' might be, remains unanswered (Rajchman 1998: 3).
[41] And while each of these practices retains its own way of 'rendering chaos sensible,' as it were, it is the question of overlaps between the various 'beyonds,' the manifold out-of-fields, that really intrigues – since it might offer a way of addressing the processes of modernity, and of architectural modernism specifically, in as yet unthought ways.
References
Allen, S. (1994) 'Le Corbusier and Modernist Movement' in ANY : Architecture New York, Special Issue. Lightness. New York: ANYone corporation.
Colomina, B. (1992) 'The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism' in Sexuality and Space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Deleuze G. and Guattari F. (1994) What is Philosophy? London – New York: Verso.
Deleuze, G. (1997) Cinema 1: The Movement-image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Grosz, E. (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rajchman, J. (1998) Constructions. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.