Pas de deux

Image Credits: Babette Mangolte (PICTURED HERE: ROOF PIECE BY TRISHA BROWN). Courtesy of the artist.

“Je voudrais, moi aussi, poser des questions. En poser à vous et en poser à moi-même. Ce serait du genre: qu’est-ce que vous faites au juste vous, qui faites du cinéma? Et moi qu’est-ce que je fais au just quand je fais ou j’espère faire de la philosophie? 

Je pourrais poser la question autrement: qu’est-ce que c’est qu’avoir une idée au cinéma? Si l’on fait ou veut faire du cinéma, qu’est-ce que ça signifie avoir une idée? (…) Parce que, d’une part, tout le monde sait bien qu’avoir une idée, c’est un événement qui arrive rarement, c’est une espèce de fête, peu courante.” 

Gille Deleuze, Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création? (1)

Preamble 

On March 17th, 1987, Deleuze begins the lecture “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”, aimed at cinema students, by asking them: “What do you do exactly when you make cinema?” And right after he addresses the same question slightly differently: “What is that having an idea in cinema? If one does or wants to make films, what does it mean to have an idea? (…) Because, everyone knows that having an idea, it is an event that rarely arrives, it is a kind of fete, uncommon.” (2) Deleuze’s lecture on the creative act allows us to place several extremely relevant questions for the discipline of architecture and which still remain absent from the theory of architecture and architectural thought, as for example: What does architecture do or create? What belongs to architecture and only to it that makes of an idea an architectonic idea? What do architects borrow from other disciplines, but which already appears in an architectural process? And, the ultimate one: Can architecture be an act of resistance and a work of art? 

The present paper will follow through these very questions to consider, in a first approach, architecture’s own specificity, testing its very limits, and then exposing them to different disciplines and art forms, such as dance and philosophy, evaluating what these encounters produce and what, in its turn, allows to rethink about architecture’s own ideas, namely to rethink critically the position of the body in architecture after the clichés produced during the 90s and the beginning of the present century.

Part I - Architecture as a creative and inventive activity

At the same time Deleuze was posing the above quoted questions to the cinema students, he was also asking himself what does he do or hopes to do while doing philosophy. For him, philosophy is a creative or inventive activity just as cinema, painting or music. Even science, as Deleuze mentions, invents and creates functions. What differentiates all these creative and inventive activities is the matter - what, in fact, do they create which belongs only to themselves, because no other discipline has the means, the instruments, the techniques to create it (notwithstanding some resonances between disciplines). And, when it comes to art, this matter is (must be) an expressive matter, which, taking into consideration Deleuze’s Plane of Immanence and the concepts he created while doing philosophy, happens when a certain composition acquires an aesthetic quality or, in other words, holds a bloc of sensations, such is the definition of art by Deleuze (and Guattari).

Deleuze goes on: “I say that I do philosophy, this means that I try to invent concepts. If I say that you do cinema, what do you do? You don’t invent concepts - that’s not your affair - but rather blocs of movement-duration. If I fabricate a bloc of movement-duration, maybe I do cinema. It’s not a question of evoking a story or to refuse it. Everything has a story. Philosophy also tells stories. Stories with concepts. Cinema tells stories with blocs of movement-duration. Painting invents a whole different type of blocs. Those are not blocs of concepts, nor blocs of movement-duration, but blocs of lines-colours. Music invents another type of blocs, just as specific.” (3) This makes us wonder: what about architecture, what does architecture invent or create? What does an architect do when he does architecture? What is unique or specific to it that only architecture is able to create with its proper means?

In this lecture, Deleuze doesn’t mention the example of architecture, although we know that he considers it "the art of the house and the territory,” (4) along with Guattari in Mille Plateaux. And, later, in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, the authors return to this definition explaining that architecture is the first of all arts, as art begins with the animal that transforms or metamorphoses the elements that it finds in its natural environment into matters of expression, giving the example of the Brown Stage-maker. Every morning, the little bird picks leaves from the trees and turn them upside down so the paler side stands out against the dark color of the ground, creating an aesthetic composition, a “ready-made,” which do not fulfil any use or function, such as seducing a lover or keeping the enemies away. Then, from the branches above, the little bird sings a complex musical piece with notes from its own singing and notes from other birds that it imitates, at the same time it opens and shows its yellow bright feathers. Deleuze and Guattari add: “This is not a synesthesia in the full flesh, this is a bloc of sensation in the territory, colours, postures and sounds that sketch a total work of art.” (5) For the two authors, architecture does not cease to frame the emergent sensible qualities of the territory which the house - the intertwining composition of frames and planes - transforms into expressive qualities and holds within its composition. (6) 

Returning to our question - what does architecture create? - and following Deleuze and Guattari’s later ideas on architecture, we may feel tempted to consider that architecture creates blocs of space or blocs of frames-planes, and, nonetheless, if we remember the Brown Stage-maker, with its singing, its choreography, its postures, its colours, its mise-en-scène, all these resemble our very position within space. More than blocs of space, architecture invents blocs of space-body, (7) when it creates endless combinations between space and body, just as the lines and colours on the canvas of a great painter. Is this not the traditional idea of the architectural task, to provide shelter to man, to create an envelope for the body and protect it from Chaos? Certainly, this is the primary task of architecture, one that Deleuze himself recognises when he thinks of architecture as the art of the house and the territory, and yet, when we define architecture by what it seems to be irreducible to its inventive activity - blocs of space-body - we still need to ask: what space and body are these that are deployed, espouse each other and allow a plethora of works of architecture? Because we cannot forget what Deleuze points out and it’s also here in question, which is the expressive quality of the work of architecture (and not its primary task or function), what makes the work of architecture a work of art, the sensations it composes and holds, and only by means of its proper expressive matter or what belongs irreducibly to itself: the infinite play of blocs of space-body. Nevertheless, we must ask yet: do we find the combination of these two elements - space and body - in any other form of art?

Part II - The encounter between architecture and dance

Besides each activity’s specificity, there are, what Deleuze calls, the great encounters. Continuing on his lecture to the cinema students, he asks: “What makes a filmmaker really want to adapt, for example, a novel? It seems evident to me that it is because there are ideas in cinema that resonate with what the novel presents as ideas in novel. And there often happen the great encounters.” (8) Deleuze gives, then, the example of the encounter between Kurosawa and Dostoyevsky, (9) that happens mainly through the latent urgency that moves the characters of both authors, always arrested to questions of life and death, however with the certainty that, even after these, there is yet another urgent problem, which makes them deflect. In the end, “If Kurosawa could adapt Dostoyevsky, that’s because he could say: ‘I have a common affair with him, a common problem’.” (10) Each discipline actually proceeds with its proper means (or as Deleuze would say, through its own substances, codes and territorialities), but there are what Deleuze and Guattari call interferences, (11) when, for instance, and taking into consideration Deleuze’s own philosophical work on cinema, the concepts of image-movement and image-time are invented (by Deleuze) after the work of great filmmakers. Deleuze is not doing cinema when he invents those concepts, but the concepts crystallise and name, in themselves, the singularities and the expressive qualities of a cinematographic image (movement-duration), or in other words, the cinematographic image becomes a philosophical concept, when Deleuze’s own plane of thought encounters a Godard or Bresson film. The process of becoming is thus extremely important here, because, as Deleuze explains the a-parallel evolution which characterises the becoming: “It doesn’t happen between people, it happens between ideas, each one deterritorializing another one, following a line or lines, that are neither on one, nor in the other, and that carry a ‘bloc’.” (12) For instance: “It is not the man who sings or paints, it is the man who becomes animal, but exactly at the same time that the animal becomes musical or pure colour or line, admirably simple: the birds of Mozart, is the man who becomes bird, because the bird becomes music.” (13) Whenever architecture encounters a different discipline, we cannot talk in terms of comparison or metaphor, but trying to understand when an idea, for instance, in dance - the danced movement - becomes an architectonic idea, because architecture has a common problem with dance. 

There is that moment when architecture had a common problem with dance, that we would like to recover. (14) In the end of the 90s, Frédéric Flamand invites Diller + Scofidio to work with him on a piece dedicated to Nijinsky’s Notebooks, titled Moving Target (1996), which aimed to address the place between artistic creation and schizophrenia. (15) For that time, Flamand was looking to step back from the body created by the theatre, an inexistent body as body, as infinite plastic expression, being reduced to a collection of codified and established gestures: “All it does is to sit down, get up, get out and, eventually, to have a cup of coffee. The body’s gesture is completely submissive to the text.” (16) In opposition to this body, Flamand was trying to approach the memory-body that he found in Grotowski’s theatre (17): “The memory-body is a body that can work independently of the dictation of thought or established gestural codes, which can catch a certain spontaneity.” (18) “Memory is not nostalgia, but rather a possibility to combine different elements to create a new real.” (19) When Flamand encounters Diller + Scofidio, he immediately feels seduced by their work which was, for him, an attempt to dissolve the architectural codes, just as he was trying to dissolve the codes in dance (20) and rediscover a pure and free movement: “The body as the ultimate territory of freedom.” (21) As he refers: “I felt touched by what they say about architecture: ‘it is what happens between the skin of a man and another man’s skin, hence their interest by the body, their obsession for the body in architecture. If they speak of a person seated on a chair, it is not the chair that interests them, but what happens between the chair and the person that sits’.” (22) 

The piece Moving Target confronted different artistic expressions - danced movement (dance), music, text and objects (23) - but, in this choreographic experimentation, the composed sensation resided in the interval where the relations between the object, the space and the dancer occurred. As Flamand refers: “The space may dance with the object and the dancer may remain immobile in that precise moment.” (24) The dancer may remain immobile while the space around him/her dances, or in other words, the space, that surrounds the dancer, becomes a pure danced movement: the sensation of danced movement appears in the interval between body and object, or body and space, when one exerts a force upon the other and, there, encounters its resonance and effective actualisation (although there, it is already autonomous, free and of another type). Certainly, it is not any fixed position of the dancer (and even less because of a moving space) that makes the space dance, as it is not at all a metaphor: the dancer, in his/her immobile position, exerts a force that imprints, in the space, a sensation of a danced movement. This sensation occupies all the space that arises between the body and the object. And, in this way, it is the emptiness that acquires the weightlessness, the rhythm, the tonalities of a dance.

A few years before, Diller + Scofidio held an exhibition at the Storefront, in New York, titled Bodybuildings, (25) where we find two curious characters - The Bride and The Juggler - both from the play A Delay in Glass or The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate (1987), conducted by Susan Mosakowski and composed by Vito Ricci, to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Marcel Duchamp. Both characters express architecturally the interval of space-body, as defined by Diller + Scofidio: between the skin of a body and the skin of another body. Each one of the characters holds a space defined by a mechanism that determines every movement of the character when this one is on the scene, anticipating the action itself or, we could say, that the action is already contained in the mechanism. Just as the space around the character depends on the mechanism and its action, the mechanism depends on the body and its movements, which in The Bride are extremely intense, nevertheless too regulated: “The Bride is a physical specimen. She is exoskeletal. Her anatomy is a hinge. She wears chastity armour with a modesty mechanism. She is well oiled. She is a wasp on a leash. The Bride is introduced fettering her leash to the hinge point at ‘0’. She describes her radius, and falls to the ground as the obscuring plan is lowered. The Bride swings like a pendulum, she hangs herself on her leash.” (26) In his turn, the Juggler, despite the weights of which his balance depends on (constantly in the maximum threshold, close to imbalance and fall) acquires an extreme beauty from that constant challenge within gravity, proven by the body in the space that surrounds it, in a singular moment of suspension. As the architects mention: “The Juggler: He wears a mask on a pivot. He is the tender of gravity. He has the stability of a tripod, yet he is always out of equilibrium. He sways and gyrates. He is introduced as a force. In his movement sequence he measures linear distance against the resistance of weights with respect to time relative to his mood at the moment. His weights animate him. He is an automarionette; weight and counterweight. Gravity adjusts his will. Gravity and levity are physical forces and emotive ones. He is the master of irony. He specialises in black humor. He is the tender of levity.” (27) The Juggler is a suspended body, not just for the weights which give the body an extraordinary weightlessness as they produce a space between the body and the weights without gravity. And each action of body, each movement of the body changes the play between the weights, transforming the surrounding space, whenever the sensation of weightlessness and suspension resides in the interval of space-body. For each combination of the pair thread-weight, there is a difference of intensity in the sensation, whenever the Juggler tries to reach the maximum intensity: to float in a space without gravity. 

The difference between the Bride and the Juggler is the difference we find in several works of architecture. Both hold (and are, in fact) intervals of space-body where both terms are created by a mutual exchange of forces. Nevertheless, the Bride is the minimum expression of shelter, (28) whereas the Juggler, beyond the functions he fulfils, creates moreover a sensation of weightlessness and suspension. Curiously, in the exhibition From Here to Eternity, a few years before the Juggler, we find the same suspended body in a Diller + Scofidio’s drawing of a device to which they called The Balance. In the architects’ words: “The Balance suspends the body in space from 11 points. Provoked by Kafka’s bed for the condemned man, the apparatus is configured as a plan analogue to the body below. A hinged skeletal track aligns rolling components of the counterweight system. A circulatory network, powered by a hydraulic pump, stabilises any position assumed by the body. This state of equilibrium frees the brain for activities of gravity and levity.” (29) Once again, the sensation occupies the interval of space-body, nevertheless depending its expressiveness on both terms and the mutual intertwining. 

Part III - What the encounter between architecture and dance produces

But what do these examples allow us to think about architecture’s composition of blocs of space-body? What does this affinity with dance allow us to think critically about architecture? 

When thinking specifically about the dancer, José Gil, a renowned Portuguese philosopher, creates the concept of the space of the body, (30) which is a space created “really built around the dancer’s body without confusing it with the objective space: it is the space of the body, a ‘midst’ where, precisely, the dancer’s body goes beyond itself every moment, ‘there’ losing its weight. Indeed, one does not dance in the exterior space, nor in an inner subjective space. The weightlessness, the ease are experienced by the dancer, at the same time, as properties of a mobile in space and as experienced inside his/her body, as if its texture becomes space. The space of the body is the body becoming space.” (31) Being the danced movement the perpetual balance of the dancer, between his/her weight and its absence, between his/her corporeal balance, purely mechanic, and the balance that the consciousness of the body imprints to the danced gesture, the dancer experiences the danced movement in the space of the body, because it is in that zone that the gesture anticipates the movement, as if the entire body felt itself prepared, in absolute position, and the movement is then only the concretisation of the gesture in time, that befalls in the choreography, whereas the dancer, in the space of the body, always anticipates the movement. More than the body transformed in space, it is there that the body becomes movement and the dancer creates space (with his/her movement). It is there that the dancer has a molecular perception of his/her body, of the gestures and movements, in order to dance or to create a danced movement. José Gil attributes to the space of the body two important functions: “ (a) It augments the movement’s fluency by creating a proper milieu, with the least amount of viscosity possible; (b) it makes possible the positioning of virtual bodies, who multiply the dancer’s point of view.” (32)

If we go back to the previous examples of Diller + Socifidio’s work, we witness the fabrication of this space of the body especially in the Juggler or in the body of The Balance’s device. The body is transformed into an intensified topological surface (what José Gil call “secretion or reversal” (33)), which demands full knowledge of the body and its movements, its gestures and positions, in order to create a sensation of weightlessness (of absence of gravity) and pure balance, which, in fact, resides in the interval between the body (already transformed into an intensified surface) and the objective space (which, in the former examples, is the composition between pulleys, ropes or threads and weights). The sensation occupies the interval of space-body, but only when both space and body become an intensive space and intensive body (there is what we may call a mutual becoming of space-body), which is slightly different from what we have said before. In the Bride there isn’t any composed sensation and, nevertheless, there is an interexchange of forces: her body’s movements depend on the mechanism as the mechanism regulates and imposes precise movements to her body. There is indeed an interval of space and body, but it doesn’t possess any expressive quality, because it is built upon a cause-effect: a function. In the Juggler or in the body of The Balance, there are also cause-effects and mutual decisions, the created space depends on the location and positions of the weights, but the body performs certain postures and movements in order to create, at the end, the sensation of weightlessness, just like any dancer. 

Similarly to the dancer, the architect lives the sensations in the space of the body that he/she creates within the work of architecture: all the sensations are, then, as anticipated, when the architect feels himself/herself feeling them in the space that he/she creates between his/her own body and the objective space. In the case of the dancer, what is actualised is the danced movement, remaining within the space of the body, as if crystallised, the gesture that anticipates the movement or the energetic impulse that combines the temporary colocation of the body in the static and intensive position of the gesture, all the muscles and bones in a virtual position, because they come from a molecular perception of the body. In the architect, what is actualised from the space of the body is a contour to which the architect gives a materiality. If we think about the created objective space, we may recognise that the space of the body is also present there or it is actualised, precisely, when we are able to trace a limit through the maximum intensity of a sensation’s action upon our bodies (in our skin’s), enveloping us with its strength, rendering the space the closest to us, walls, floor, ceiling, windows as if bonded in intimate contact with our skin, so that there is no distance between us and the enveloping space. 

We consider that the architect, himself or herself, inhabit an interval of space-body, because it is only there that he or she is able to manipulate all the elements that enter the composition, in order to define the different levels a sensation passes through. This is actually an exercise we’ve witnessed several times, for instance, in Peter Zumthor’s process. (34) In the actual space of his home-office, he establishes some points in space, creates a window of temporality while transforming the space around (but this is not an actual transformation of the objective space, but a virtual one just as the one that the dancer creates in the space of the body) to control the imagined space and to define the correct position of the materials, the panelings, the colours, asking people to come in and look at the (virtual) space he is anticipating, and see what happens when someone comes in or leaves, or when someone sits down and looks out of the window, how the light gets in, what patterns does it create on the walls: what do we see and how do we feel? Zumthor creates within his working space a virtual interval of space-body that he experimentally tempers until its total and final composition. 

His process is not very different from that of Adolf Loos, who curiously loved to dance and used to flirt with women dancers (it’s not by chance that he dated several dancers and two of his wives were dancers as well, (35) not to mention the relationship between him and Josephine Baker to whom he designed a house). For Loos, the architect occupies himself/herself of the space between the wall and the inhabitant (what Colomina named the “inhabited wall”), but this space, in Loos’ works, implies several intervals or successive membranes which the architect manipulates to create a pure sensation, which has a direct action upon the inhabitant’s body, because it is already imbued in its composition (in the composition of the sensation) the position of the body in space. All the imperceptible movements, tensions and spasms of the body in Loos’ houses depend solely on the composition of sensation which is mastered by the architect. The body enters the plane of composition as matter of expression, similarly to other elements. The body, its postures and declinations are part of the code of sensation, implying however an experimentation of Loos’ own body and its transformation into a space of the body or intensive body, where he was able to localise the precise limits and thresholds of the sensation. For example, the device “window-sofa” was used numerous times by Loos (it is a singularity of his style), to the extent that this does not concern solely the location of a sofa under a window, but a set of indivisible and unique elements which Loos skilfully manipulated to create, sometimes a sensation of comfort, other times of discomfort (because the body stays in an unnatural movement, almost spasmodic), which are, in fact, inseparable from the body’s position and postures and these are regulated, tempered through the composition of all the other elements: the light, the position of the window and its solar orientation, its dimensions… (36)

Of course, Loos had several artifices to compose sensations. In Lina’s bedroom, there is again a sensation of pure comfort, swelling all around the planes of white furs and plush. In Villa Karma’s bathroom or Josephine Baker’s house, there is a sensation of intimacy or pure desire, and all these sensations may even coexist and form a sequence, which is, in fact, the difference of intensity of a single sensation (what Deleuze calls rhythm). A sensation of comfort may correspond to a degree of intensity of the sensation of intimacy, as in Lina Loos’ bedroom, for example. 

The Raumplan (37) - which we may consider an architectonic idea (to recall Deleuze) by Loos - is itself an endless principle of composition of blocs of space-body, where the interweaving of the two - space and body - edify a sensation. It is always a space in-between the wall and the inhabitant and the result, the effect as Loos called it, belongs to the mutual becoming. The Raumplan does not refer itself to an exterior, nor to an interior, nor to space in itself (the cubic dimension of space), nor to the inhabitant’s postures and gestures (to which Loos always paid extreme attention as the artifice of the window-sofa attests), but to the architectural fact in itself or the sensation it creates. And the Raumplan - as a compositional principle - draws the several frames that coincide, in space, with the maximum intensity of a certain sensation (that’s why if we move around a Loos’ house, when we pass a boundary or a threshold, the sensation changes its nature (38)). Curiously, that is what makes the work of architecture a work of art, contrary to what Loos thought: the work of architecture holds within it a bloc of sensations. As John Hejduk refers: “The architect is able to set a tonal framework, which is inevitably affected by the tones of the inhabitants of a house. Mysterious houses become so by the interweaving of the two (subjects and objects). Loos understood this. Loos made a thick internal space so that thoughts could be retained / caught / solidified until the opaque veils could be lifted, removed, dropped to the floor, exposing the nakedness of an anticipating sensual architecture. An architecture in love; an architecture making love.” (39) We dare to replace “an architecture in love” for “an intensive architecture,” a type of architecture defined by the sensations it composes, because, being aware of what Loos said about the projection of one’s feelings onto the walls of a house, the “thick internal space,” that he built in his houses, is not for the inhabitants’ thoughts, but for their bodies and their enveloping. At this point, Hejduk is correct when he speaks of a “nakedness of an anticipating sensual architecture,” and we may easily understand this eroticism in Josephine’s Baker house, for example, and draw the infinite lines which make the space of this house dance, between the body’s movement or immobile position and postures and the walls and the apertures… 

Part IV - Conclusion

It may be strange to propose to critically rethink the body in architecture today recalling Loos’ houses, which belong to the beginning of the past century and are often seen as bourgeois. Nevertheless, we would like once more to refer the examples given here of the works by Diller + Scofidio that helped us to understand a problem common to architecture and dance. Those same examples were understood by the architectural criticism of the 90s as examples of a discourse about the body in architecture focused mainly in the idea of prostheses. Curiously, José Gil, when defining the dancer’s space of the body, says that: “It is the first natural prosthesis of the body: the body gives itself new extensions in space, and in such ways it forms a new body - a virtual one, but ready to become actual and ready to allow gestures to become actualised in it.” (40) In those same discourses, the work of architecture was also understood as a prosthesis, following McLuhan’s ideas, as an augmentation and intensification of a determined sense or senses, depending thus on the amenities of the house. As we have been explaining, here we propose a different approach to architecture’s relation with the body, picking up those very examples (or some of them) that allowed the criticism on the 90s call upon the prosthesis, and yet introducing that same difference between the Bride and the Juggler. Whereas the Bride’s apparatuses are clearly understood as prostheses and the minimum expression of architecture’s primordial feature - shelter - the Juggler’s create a space as well (just as the Bride’s create a shelter for the feminine body), but it is through the interaction with the body (its postures, gestures, movements) that the space - or, to be more precise the interval - becomes expressive. When a space becomes expressive, it may be called a work of art, as we have already stated, and this implies other questions, namely the one with which Deleuze ends his lecture on the creative act: art as act of resistance. What does it mean for architecture to be an act of resistance? 

According to Deleuze: “Only the act of resistance resists death, either in the form of a work of art or as a struggle of men. What connection is there between the struggle of men and the work of art? The closest relationship is, for me, the most mysterious. Exactly what Klee meant when he said: 'You know, the people lack'. The people lack and, at the same time, do not. The people lack, it means that this fundamental affinity between the work of art and a people that does not yet exist, it will never be clear. There is no work of art that does not call for a people to come.” (41) Architecture holds a privileged position of creating spaces where the body becomes expressive matter. And even when the body is absent, in uninhabited and empty spaces, there are elements which belong to the architectural composition that will always wait for a body. The work of architecture is always in the absence of man (paraphrasing Cézanne). (42) 

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze, “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”. In Deleuze, Gilles; Deux Régimes de Fous: Textes et Entretiens 1975-1995. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2003, p. 291. 

2. “Qu’est-ce que vous faites au juste vous, qui fait du cinéma? […] Je pourrais poser la question autrement: qu’est-ce que c’est avoir une idée au cinéma? Si l’on fait ou veut faire du cinéma, qu’est-ce que ça signifie avoir une idée? Que se passe-t-il lorsqu’on dit ‘tiens, j’ai une idée’? Parce que, d’une part, tout le monde sait bien qu’avoir une idée, c’est un événement qui arrive rarement, c’est une espèce de fête, peu courante”, Gilles Deleuze, “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?,” Idem, Ibidem.

3. “Je dis que je fais de la philosophie, c’est-à-dire que j’essaie d’inventer des concepts. Si je dis, vous qui faites du cinéma, qu’est-ce que vous faites? Vous, ce que vous inventez, ce n’est pa des concepts - ce n’est pas votre affaire - mais des blocs de mouvements/durée. Si on fabrique un bloc de mouvements/durée, peut-être qu’on fait du cinéma. Il n’est pas question d’invoquer une histoire, ou de la récuser. Tout a une histoire. La philosophie raconte aussi des histoires. Des histoires avec des concepts. Le cinéma raconte des histoires avec des blocs de mouvement/durée. La peinture invente un tout autre type de blocs. Ce ne sont ni des blocs de concepts, ni des blocs de mouvements/durée, mais des blocs lignes/couleurs. La musique invente un autre type de blocs, tout aussi particuliers,” Idem, pp. 292-293.

4. Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix; Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2: Mille Plateaux. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980, p. 405. In the English translation (Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix; Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus. London, New York: Continuum, 1987, p. 362), by Brian Massumi, it appears “the art of the abode and the territory,” however, we should note that in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, the two authors return to this idea and write “maison,” which we should translate as house.

5. “Ce ne sont pas les synesthésies en pleine chair, ce sont ces blocs de sensation dans le territoire, couleurs, postures et sons, qui esquissent une oeuvre d'art totale”, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. In Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix; Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, pp. 174-175.

6. Deleuze and Guattari immediately refer: “Bernard Cache peut énumérer un certain nombres de formes cadrantes qui ne préjugent d’aucun contenu concret ni fonction de l’édifice: le mur qui isole, la fenÊtre qui capte ou sélectionne (en prise sur le territoire), le sol-plancher qui conjure ou raréfie (“raréfier le relief de la terre pour laisser libre cours aux trajectoires humaines”), le toit, qui enveloppe la singularité du lieu (“le toit en pente place l’édifice sur une colline…”). Emboîter ces cadres ou joindre tous ces plans, pan de mur, pan de fenêtre, pan de sol, pan de pente, est un système composé riche en points et contrepoints. (…) Les cadres ou les pans ne sont pas des coordonnées, ils appartiennent aux composés de sensations dont ils constituent les faces, les interfaces”, Idem, p. 177.

7. If we think about a proper architectural idea, we would dare to refer the disjunction between exterior and interior, of which the loosian Raumplan should be a primordial example. In the lecture on the creative act, Deleuze wonders about what is a proper cinematographic idea, an idea that can only be achieved by the means of cinema, an idea such as, he says, the disjunction between seeing and talking that he founds in recent cinema (Syberberg, Straub, Duras…). In the theatre, Deleuze adds, we may also find this difference between seeing and talking, nevertheless the composed sensation is totally different, because, in the theatre, the two planes occur at the same time and the sensations are concomitant. In Gilles Deleuze, “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”, p. 297. 

8. “C’est une manière de poser une question qui m’intéresse: qu’est-ce qui fait qu’un cinéaste a vraiment envie d’adapter, par exemple, un roman? Il me semble évident que c’est parce qu’il a des idées en cinéma qui résonnent avec ce que le roman présent comme des idées en roman. Et là se font souvent de très grandes rencontres”, Idem, p. 295.

9. Not only Kurosawa adapted Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot in a film dated from 1951, but also we may witness in his other films the influence of the latter’s characters. See next endnote. 

10. “Chez Dostoïevski, les personnages sont perpétuellement pris dans des urgences, et en même temps qu’ils sont pris dans ces urgences qui sont des questions de vie ou de mort, ils savent qu’il y a une question encore plus urgente - et ils ne savent pas laquelle. Et c’est cela qui les arrête. Tout se passe comme si dans la pire urgence. […] Tous les personnages de Kurosawa sont comme ça. Voilà une belle rencontre. Si Kurosawa peut adapter Dostoïevski, c’est au moins parce qu’il peut dire: ‘J’ai une affaire commune avec lui, un problème commun, celui-là’.” In Gilles Deleuze, “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”, pp. 295-296.

11. See Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. In Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix; Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, pp. 204-206.

12. Deleuze, Gilles; Parnet, Claire; Dialogues. Paris: Flammarion, 1996 [1977], p. 25.

13. Idem, p. 89.

14. In architecture, it is not unusual to think the body through the example of dance. See, for instance, Arata Isozaki and Akira Asada’s essay, “The Demiurgomorphic Contour,” in Davidson, Cynthia (ed.); Anybody. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press, Anyone Corporation, 1997. The authors seek a new image for the body in architecture and find in the molecular image a possibility of which William Forsythe is an example: “The key to conceptualizing a new image of the architectural body may lie in the molecular / viral imaging of the body that is surfacing at the cross section of biological and information sciences. […] “William Forsythe concretize the most radical image of the molecular body […]. Forsythe deconstructs and reconstruct the body into a multicentered and multipivoted manifold, rather than treating it as a unity that moves around a center and along an axis. The body is dislocated and decomposed into a bundle of multiple, contradictory movements,” p. 43. However, the hypothesis that these authors follow is different from ours, especially because we do not understand the molecular body as a fragmented and deconstructed body. This idea is originated in part in a misunderstanding of the deleuzian “Body without Organs,” which Georges Teyssot as well as Ignasi de Solà-Morales, among other authors, failed to understand. 

15. As Flamand recalls: “Nijinsky, that choreographer and dancer of genius, the father of this century’s dance, spent half of his life in psychiatric asylums. For me he conjures up the Russian Ballets, the artistic experience that typifies this inter-disciplinarity that I hold so dear. In choosing his uncensored diaries as a source of inspiration for Moving Target, created in 1996, I glimpsed the double link that could be established between schizophrenia as a ‘mental illness’ on the one hand and artistic creation and new forms of schizophrenia on the other.” In Flamand, Frédéric; Repertoire(s). Charleroi, Belgium: Charleroi / Danses, Plan K, May 1997, p. 27.

16. Bernard Degroote & Frédéric Flamand, “Faire danser l’espace: entretien avec Frédéric Flamand,” p. 49.

17. Nevertheless, Flamand’s body divers from that of Grotowski as he explains to Degroote: “Notre imaginaire était différent, il n’était imprégné ni de romantisme, ni de religion. Nous n’avions pas les mêmes références. Mon frère parlait beaucoup de Paul Klee...”, Idem, p. 50.

18. Idem, p. 49.

19. Idem, p. 51.

20. “J’ai été séduit par le travail de Diller et Scofidio parce que c’est une critique de l’architecture, un essai de briser les codes de l’architecture comme moi, j’essaie de briser les codes de la danse”, Ibidem. In another occasion, he would say: “I wanted to return to a purer form in relationship with dance, to concentrate much more on developing the choreography, the work with the body, the status of the post-modern body. I had this idea of working with architects. I became interested in Diller and Scofidio because the relationship with the body is self-evident in their work, much more so than in other architects’ work. Moreover, I find their analysis of our contemporary society very relevant, without lacking wit. What I also like a great deal is their in-between position: architects consider them as visual artists and plastic artists consider them as architects. Rather like myself, but for different reasons, they occupy an uncomfortable and yet extremely fluid position, a very interesting one in our time,” Frédéric Flamand, Repertoire(s), p. 8. 

21. Flamand quotes here the choreographer Stephen Petronio. We believe that it is the maximum expression of any contemporary dance. See Bernard Degroote and Fréderic Flamand, “Faire danser l’espace: entretien avec Frédéric Flamand”, p. 53.

22. Idem, p. 50.

23.  “The body itself is matter, authenticity. It is haunted by its wounds, fallible, sensual. At a time when there has been so much talk of caring for the body, when there is an obsession with maintaining the body in fitness clubs or gyms, the body has never been so absent. The performances bring the physicality of the body, its flesh and its sweat, face to face with immaterial and virtual technology, the performances thrive on this relationship of the body with or against the machine. It’s the relationships between the object, space, the dancer, the actor, the image that interest me. The performances are not solely anthropocentric. This choreographing of the relationships between the diverse elements leads to an explosion of space, even if the event takes place within a finite framework”. “I am interested in new technologies insofar as they have a significant impact on how we perceive the body, the way in which we experience it. The body as flesh and bone or the body as a material to be continually reworked with considerable reliance upon prostheses, yet still governed by the laws of gravity: a resistant body or a memory body, to quote Grotowski”, Frédéric Flamand, Repertoire(s), p. 5 & p. 24.

24. Bernard Degroote and Fréderic Flamand, “Faire danser l’espace: entretien avec Frédéric Flamand”, p. 52. 

25. See Diller, Elizabeth; Scofidio, Ricardo; Bodybuildings: architectural facts and fictions. New York: Storefront for Art + Architecture, Fall 1987.

26. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, “A Delay in Glass: The Bride”. In Auer, Gerhard; Conrads, Ulrich; Mattenklott, Gert; Oeschslin, Werner; Pieper, Jan (eds.); Daidalos 26: Architektur Kunst Kultur. Berlin: Daidalos, Editrice Abitare Segesta, August 1995, p. 99. 

27. Idem, p. 101.

28. As Nancy Princenthal confirms: “The Armor for the Bride, a costume from the performance, is also a kind of signature piece for Diller and Scofidio. It consists of metal breast plates, a stomach guard, and a pubic shield stitched to a spandex bodystocking and anchored by a vertical metal rod. Like the hardware in Para-site, the ‘armor’ is elegant, witty and a little cruel. A minimal carapace, protecting and highlighting the body’s most vulnerable parts, it reduces architecture to its most rudimentary components: shelter and display,” Nancy Princenthal, “Diller and Scofidio: Architecture’s Iconoclasts”. In Walker, Penélope (ed.); Sculpture, pp. 22-23. 

29. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, “The Balance”. In Valerie Smith, Valerie (org.), From Here to Eternity, p. 10.

30. “Space of the body” is a concept created/invented by the Portuguese philosopher José Gil, known as one of the major deleuzians. We prefer to quote some parts of his book Movimento Total: o corpo e a dança, which is in Portuguese, however we may consult his text “Paradoxical Body”, in the following book: Joy, Jenn; Lepecki, André (eds.); Planes of composition: Dance, Theory and the Global. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009. In this text, José Gil describes an experiment that everyone may test: “We can perform the following experiment: let’s immerse ourselves completely naked in a deep bathtub, leaving only our heads sticking out of the water; let’s drop onto the surface of the water, near our submerged feet, a spider. We will feel the animal’s contact on the entirety of our skin. What happened? The water created a space of the body defined by the skin membrane of the bathtub’s water. From this example we can extract two consequences pertaining to the properties of the space of the body: it prolongs the body’s limits beyond its visible contours; it is an intensified space, when compared with the habitual tactility of the skin”, José Gil, Op.cit., p. 86.

31. “[…] Realmente construído a toda a volta do seu corpo, sem que se confunda com o espaço objectivo: é o espaço do corpo, ‘meio’ onde, precisamente, o seu corpo se extravasa a cada instante, ‘aí’, perdendo o seu peso. Com efeito: não se dança nem no espaço exterior nem num espaço subjectivo interior. A ausência de peso, a facilidade, são vividas pelo bailarino, ao mesmo tempo, como propriedades de um móbil no espaço e como se os experimentasse no interior do seu corpo, como se a textura se tivesse tornado espaço. O espaço do corpo é o corpo tornado espaço”, José Gil, Movimento Total: o corpo e a dança, p. 19.

32. José Gil, “Paradoxical Body”. In Joy, Jenn; Lepecki, André (eds.); Planes of composition: Dance, Theory and the Global. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009, p. 87. 

33. “Indeed, the space of the body results from a kind of secretion or reversal (whose process we will have to clarify) of the inner space of the body toward the exterior. This reversibility transforms the objective space, giving it a texture close to the one of internal space - from now on, the dancer’s body unfolds movements as if traversing a body (its natural milieu),” Ibidem.

34. The author spent a period of two months at the Peter Zumthor’s studio during the PhD research (calling to this period “Research Residence”) in order to understand his creative process. During those months, the author accompanied all the works in process, held several conversations with Peter Zumthor and all the collaborators and consulted the studio’s archives. 

35. See Paul Groenendijk, Piet Vollaard, Adolf Loos: Haus für Josephine Baker, p. 6. 

36. Beatriz Colomina pays extremely attention to the perception of and between bodies in Loos’ houses, but forgets all the other implications. The bodies in Loos’ houses are closer to the Beckett’s characters or Bacon’s Figures than to the viewers on a theatre box, as this author reclaims. 

37. “Adolf Loos introduced to the world a new and essentially higher conception of space: free thinking in space, the planning of rooms situated on different levels and not tied in to a continuous storey level, the juxtaposition of rooms with one another to form a harmonious, indivisible whole and a spatially economical structure. The rooms, according to their purpose and use, not only have different sizes but also different heights. Loos can therefore create more living space within the same confines, since the same cubic capacity on the same foundations and under the same roof can now contain more rooms within the same external walls. Both, material and building-cube are exploited to the utmost,” Münz apud Künstler e Münz, Adolf Loos, p. 139.

38. This is noticed by Beatriz Colomina when she mentions the Rufer House’s drawings: “These are drawings of neither the inside nor the outside but the membrane between them: between representation of habitation and the mask is the wall. Loos’s subject inhabits this wall. This inhabitation creates a tension on that limit, tampers with it. This is not simply a metaphor. In every Loos house there is a point of maximum tension, and it always coincides with a threshold or boundary,” Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, p. 276.

39. John Hejduk, “Veins of marble”. In Leslie van Duzer, Kent Kleinman, Villa Müller..., pp. 14-15. 

40. José Gil, “Paradoxical Body”. In Joy, Jenn; Lepecki, André (eds.); Planes of composition: Dance, Theory and the Global. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009, p. 86. 

41. “Il y a une affinité fondamentale entre l’oeuvre d’art et l’acte de résistance. […] Quel est ce rapport mystérieux entre une oeuvre d’art et un acte de résistance alors que les hommes qui résistent n’ont ni le temps ni parfois la culture nécessaires pour avoir le moindre rapport avec l’art? Je ne sais pas. Malraux développe un beau concept philosophique, il dit une chose très simple sur l’art, il dit que c’est la seule chose qui résiste à la mort. […] L’acte de résistance a deux faces. Il est humain et c’est aussi l’acte de l’art. Seul l’acte de résistance résiste à la mort, soit sous la forme d’une oeuvre d’art soit sous la forme d’une lutte des hommes. Quel rapport y a-t-il entre la lutte des hommes et l’oeuvre d’art? Le rapport le plus étroit et pour moi le plus mystérieux. Exactement ce que Paul Klee voulait dire lorsqu’il disait: ‘Vous savez, le peuple manque’. Le peuple manque et en même temps, il ne manque pas. Le peuple manque, cela veut dire que cette affinité fondamentale entre l’oeuvre d’art et un peuple qui n’existe pas encore n’est pas, ne sera jamais claire. Il n’y a pas d’oeuvre d’art qui ne fasse appel à un peuple qui n’existe pas encore,” Gilles Deleuze, “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?”. In Deleuze, Gilles; “Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création?,” pp. 300-302.

42. “Le percept, c’est le paysage d’avant l’homme, en l’absence de l’homme. […] C’est l’énigme (souvent commentée) de Cézanne: ‘l’homme absent, mais tout entier dans le paysage’. Les personnages ne peuvent exister, et l’auteur ne peut les créer, que parce qu’ils ne perçoivent pas, mais sont passés dans le paysage et font eux-mêmes parties du composé de sensations,” Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, p. 159.

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