it ‘represents in a more decisive manner how separating and connecting are only two
sides of precisely the same act’. Moreover, the door through its very form, ‘transcends
the separation between the inner and the outer’. The door becomes emblematic of a more
flexible attitude towards the boundary. It allows for a ‘permanent interchange between
the bounded and the boundaryless’. The door does not deny the concept of boundary.
Indeed it is precisely part of that boundary. Rather it exposes how that boundary might be
treated as potentially more permeable. Andrew Benjamin likewise evokes the emblem of
the door in arguing against the foreclosure of function, teleology or the aesthetics of
form. ‘Works with open doors,’ he concludes, ‘must be what is henceforth demanded by
philosophy and architecture.’^25
The door as architectural member becomes a tool of conceptual thought that must
itself be returned to architecture. Architecture has long inhabited philosophy as metaphor,
as we are informed by Jacques Derrida and Andrew Benjamin. In returning to
architecture such a metaphor, architecture is reminded of its own metaphoricity, of its
very dependence on the realm of the conceptual. Philosophy inhabits architecture, no less
than architecture inhabits philosophy.
Such then is the project of this volume. It is a project that builds upon its own erasure.
Once the very conditions under which architecture has situated itself in relation to its
‘outside’, once the question of not only what is ‘outside’ but also the very nature of
exclusion has been recast, and once it has been shown that architecture could be
otherwise, this work will have cancelled itself out. The question of what is relevant to
architecture will have been reconsidered, and the very definition of architecture will have
been revised. Architecture will have been rethought.
NOTES
1 Fredric Jameson, ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, p. 238.
2 Hal Foster, preface to Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, London and Concord, Mass.:
Pluto Press, 1985, pp. ix–x.
3 Adorno, ‘Reconciliation Under Duress’ in Aesthetics and Politics, London and New York:
Verso, 1980, p. 167.
4 Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’ in Donald Bouchard (ed.),
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (trans.), Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 206.
5 Siegfried Kracauer, ‘On Employment Agencies: The Construction of a Space’, p. 60.
6 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, p. 349.
7 Henri Lefebvre, p. 143.
8 Adorno, ‘Functionalism Today’, p. 6.
9 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of
Resistance’ in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, London and Concord, Mass.: Pluto
Press, 1985, pp. 16–30.
10 Jacques Derrida, ‘Point de Folie’, p. 326.
11 Jacques Derrida in discussion with Christopher Norris, Deconstruction Omnibus, A.
Papadakis, C.Cooke, A.Benjamin (eds), London: Academy Editions, 1988, p. 72.
12 Ibid., p. 75.
13 Derrida, ‘Point de Folie’, p. 326.