Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemThinking through the space of the body : a performance account of the body and architecture( 2008)In the last few decades, there has been a shift within the humanities: may from text, may from objects, away from monuments, and from this the process of reading cultural objects as representations of cultural production. What has been highlighted instead is the dynamic processes of culture - the performative. This shift in emphasis is also shaping the discipline of architecture. Central to this shift in perspective is the focus on the body as a site and medium for understanding processual relations, which augments representational thinking, where architecture is framed, contemplated and mastered by man-as-subject through distance and objectivity. The analysis in this thesis investigates the ways in which the body is thought about in the explicitly theoretical works of both Judith Butler and Deleuze and Guattari, which emphasise a performative understanding of the space of the body. In turn, this thesis then looks at how the 'spacing of the body' is physically and conceptually realised through the performative spatial practices of Arakawa and Gins, Bernard Tschumi and Grundei Kaindl Teckert. Chapter Seven integrates theoretical and practical investigations through Learning-by-Making as a representative case study. The crucial point of this project is to suggest that the constraints and the restrictions that are imposed on the body are not just symbolic and discursive but also impact on the 'lived body.' This thesis also focuses on how the spacing of the body, through a performative rhetoric, becomes a site of utopian possibilities and dissolution, where neither mind, body nor space is privileged. In this framework the agency of the material is understood as an affective force in the construction of meaning. Thus the 'spacing of the body' is explored in this thesis as a composition of the two terms performance and performativity as a way to understand how the spacing of the body is both constrained by normative relations and also produced through bodily experience which privileges the concept of affect.
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ItemImpersonal effects : architecture, Deleuze, subjectivity( 2007)This thesis imagines and articulates an image of architectural subjectivity in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Subjectivity for Deleuze does not refer to a person but is rather a power to act and to produce effects in the world. Deleuze in fact tends not to use the word subjectivity, speaking instead of what he calls prepersonal singularities, meaning those irreducible qualities or powers that can be seen to act in the world, independently of any particular person with fixed traits. To walk, to see, to love-these are general or anonymous capacities that function in a very real sense prior to the personological subject. Singular, here, does not mean specific or rare, but the reverse: the function "to sleep" or "to laugh" is singular for Deleuze because "a sleep" always retains a certain abstractness and `impersonality,' no matter who sleeps. For Deleuze, the world is composed of so many singularities, which together resonate silently towards a mystery of something yet to come; this primary field of a pure encounter transcends formed identities and things. The `subject' is understood therefore not primarily as identity but as a convergence of singularities immanent to the encounter. While to speak of the `subject' in these terms-to rid oneself of identity-is a difficult thing, we might say architecture is already such a singular encounter and deindividualisation of self. There is, as soon as I step into a room, a street, or a town, a palpable mystery of the singularity "to walk inside," "to see an unfamiliar street"; each echoing and anticipating in that moment every other instance, past and future, of this primitive encounter. It is an anonymous sense of a primary production that lies beyond the individual, spatio-temporal experience I call "mine." To encounter, then, does not mean an in-between, a space between persons and concrete forms; rather, it is an event that comes before the crystallisation of these things, it is the abstract surface of all singularities. I will call architectural singularities the impersonal effects, to think the inchoate, not-yet determined fragments of architectural encounter (these I oppose to the `personal' effects of identity, such as a watch, a wallet, a cigarette case). I use "effect" in Deleuze's sense of production, in which the effect is not ephemeral, an effect of something more primary, but is in itself a primary production, an effect that works, and creates. The project here is to express, by architectural means, the image of effects. Image, here, does not mean a representation, such as a photograph or a media image, but refers to a live "arrangement" of effects. What individuates an image is precisely the mode in which it causes the effects to proliferate. I begin the project with an account of Deleuze's reception in the American architectural academy, so as to reveal the historical conditions that make Deleuze's theory of subjectivity important now. Chapter Two introduces the concept of the effect and the architectural formulation that functions in the dissertation; Chapter Three extends this work in the effects-image; Chapter Four turns to Guattari's reception in Japan, and what I observe to be a pursuit after the effects-image in Guattari's encounter with architecture; finally in Chapter Five I explore the psychoanalytic lining of Guattari's project, further engaging the working of the effects-image.