Debate on the papers of Session 2 455
is not what I am talking about in terms of Deleuze. I am referring to the systems
of thinking, the reforming of architecture, and the forming of an approach towards
architecture. So I would never want to take a literal term that seems to talk about
an architectural form and apply it in those ways. Another thing I would stress is the
fact that even if we are talking about structural performance we have to look at how
that falls into appearance. And it is strange, I think, in many ways that the kind of
logic that is coming out of, say, the N-TECH group in the AA, which is based totally
on structural performance, is actually looking for an aesthetic. Then there is the work
of Rem Koolhaas, for example, who tries to justify things in objective terms, in terms
of diagrams and processes and so on, but in the end, as Peter Eisenman pointed out,
wants to produce a beautiful form. So I think that there is a problematic kind of
question of what lies behind all this in terms of an aesthetic agenda. And I will be
the first to criticise it, because my book Camouflage is written precisely about this
question as well. But what I want to do is simply to try to focus on what I see as a
kind of shift that is inspired by some ideas from Deleuze, that is articulated through
De Landa’s work and that is setting a new agenda. And I think that what De Landa
actually does is to appropriate a small section of Deleuze – I mean, vis-à-vis Guat-
tari – and to focus mainly on a kind of scientific logic, a kind of performance logic
of that. And to see that actually it may be necessary, in a post-modern world that is
too dominated by images and commodities, to try to find another logic to celebrate
right now in order to redress the balance. So it is more of a strategic logic to try and
pick up something from Deleuze’s thinking about processes, about forces and flows,
and use that to challenge the new ways of thinking. So it is not about forms, it is
about ways of thinking.
Vana Tentokali, Thessaloniki, Greece
I have the impression that your answer is somewhat defensive, because you started
talking about Derrida and Heidegger. I will persist in asking you about Deleuzian
thought and how this thought is translated in the paradigm you showed us. My ques-
tion right now is whether, based on your own perspective at least, I have a right to
name it. Only you, of course, have the right to name your own perspective, and of
course I respect that absolutely; but I insist on asking you if you give yourself the
right to use this sentence, for instance, the one you mentioned by Eisenman, about
looking for the beauty of the form, after all this?
Neil Leach, London, United Kingdom
That is such a good question: I would not want to give anything away. No, actually,
what I find interesting (and I really do think that your question is a very interesting
one) is that I was talking to Serenati about these things, and he said that he was not
interested in engineering; he was interested in engineering in order to get beyond
engineering. I think there is a kind of dialectical process at work. My book Camouflage
is precisely about the problem of beauty which you have in architecture. It started off
as an essay about Rem Koolhaas, where the letters A and O appear in the word ‘cam-
ouflage’, trying to look at this kind of repression of anyone addressing the question
of beauty, of which I am, naturally, as guilty about as anyone else. I think that the
problem of beauty and how we understand beauty exists in architectural culture from