Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari

Vana Tentokali is a Dr Architect and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Vana has held a number of positions, including being a member of the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Roger Williams College (Bristol Rhode Island U.S.A., 1986); a Research Fellow at the Behavioral Science Research Group in Architecture (Department of Architecture) and the Program for Gender Studies (Department of Humanities) at MIT Cambridge Massachusetts, U.S.A. (1982-1985); aVisiting Scholar for the Program of History, Theory and Criticism (Department of Architecture MIT, spring semester 1992), and a Visiting Research Fellow for the Program in Hellenic Studies, (Princeton University, U.S.A., fall term 2008). Constantin V. Boundas (Trent University, Ontario) holds M.A. Ph.D. from Purdue, and he is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and a member of the Centre for the Study of Theory, History and Culture at Trent University. He is the editor of The Deleuze Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); with Dorothea Olkowski, of The Theater of Philosophy: Critical Essays on Gilles Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 1994); and of Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); the General Editor of The Companion to the Twentieth Century Philosophies, jointly published by Edinburgh and Columbia University Presses in 2007; and of Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction (London and New York: Continuum, 2009).

This book dares to pose the question of what kind of architecture can realize the virtual plane of Ideas of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. This because in spite of many years of theorizing about Deleuze and Guattari’s possible view of the role of architecture in their philosophy, there still has been no satisfactory answer to this question. The difficulty of this question and the complexity and diversity of the answers in this volume are due to the possibility or impossibility in the contemporary era of a nomadic architecture constituted as an immanent plane of trajectories, a swarm of intensities, the unlivable site of the body without organs, the differentiating principle of the fold, the unleashing of sensation, the perceptible realization of imperceptible forces, a map that deterritorializes, or an instrument of the propagation of light. This accomplished assemblage of architects, urban planners, and philosophers urge us to consider how the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari both organize and derange their architectural visions as they ceaselessly experiment with the very idea of the worlds architecture might be capable of creating.

• Introduction, Constantin Boundas and Vana Tentokali / Part One - Architecture and Urbanism: Arts of the Built Space /Schizoanalytic City, Andrew Ballantyne / Deleuze, Space and the Architectural Fragment, Marko Jobst / Architectural Translations of Deleuze and Guattari’s Thought on the Concept of Place, Dimitra Chatzisavva / The Skin of the Public Space, Vana Tentokali and Constantin Boundas / Bodies without Organs and Cities without Architecture, Chris Smith / Part Two - Architectural and Urbanist Tool Boxes /Gilles Deleuze and Chaos Theory, Stathis-Alexander Zoulias /A Thousand Models of Realization: Toward a Deleuzoguattarian Critical Urban Theory, Keith Harris / Non-Correlational Athens, Stavros Kousoulas / Architecture at the Age of Its Digital Production: The Force, Differentiation and Humanity of the Fold as an Architectural Principle, Constantinos Proimos / Design of Earth Movement: Objects, Buildings and Environment Conceived as Landscape Formations, Konstantinos Moraitis / Spatial Transcriptions of the Concept of the Fold in Architecture as a Landscape Sensitive Approach, Anthi Verykiou / Part Three - Vital Materiality /Laocoon and the Snakes of History, Bernard Cache / Reterritorializing Concrete as an Actor of Comfort in Architecture, Athena Moustaka / Radicalizing Architecture by redefining the Monument, Mike Hale / Diagrammatic Narratives: Graphic Fields of Rupture and Catastrophe, Anthia Kosma / The Concept of the Map in the Homeric Odyssey, Aspasia Kouzoupi / Part Four - The Clinical / From the Exhaustion of the Dogmatic Image of Thought that Circumscribes Architecture to Feminist Practices of Joy, Hélène Frichot / Bibliography / Index / Contributor Biographies