(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 35

Event-space

A performance model for spatial design

Dorita Hannah

Interior architecture shapes, articulates, and details both space and experience. It influences our quotidian existence generally through immersive settings designed to exemplify a contemporary condition and/or characteristics of specific occupants, environmental typologies, and communal identities. It could be approached as a kind of scenography that structures experience and interaction through open-ended spatial dramaturgies orchestrating material and immaterial elements as temporal, interconnected, and mutable phenomena.$^1$ Discrete from – yet implicated “within” – architecture, the design of interiors can be regarded as a discursive practice that falls anywhere on a trajectory “between” architecture’s claim to enduring structures and the dynamic flux of theatrical performance. It exists between the everyday and spectacle; between the seemingly eternal and the ephemeral. No longer bound to a structural inner envelope, this interstitial realm – as both discourse and built environment – is sited both within and without architecture.

Perhaps more germane in our increasingly liquescent age, where virtual and visceral worlds enfold and entangle each other, is the term “spatial design,” which expands the interior domain beyond architecture to include external sites as well as those of the imagination – gaming, cinematic, object, urban, landscape, and event design. My particular viewpoint is strongly inflected by performance; framed not only on conventional stages (performance spaces), but also as a means of understanding how we play out our daily existence through exhibitionary practices (spatial performances). In this case, it encompasses embodied modes of inhabitation within the complex dynamics (spatial performativity) of specific sites. As performance theorist Jon McKenzie claims – developing insights from sociologist Erving Goffman and philosopher Michel Foucault – we “perform or else!” How do the varying magnitudes of our socially prescripted and aesthetically devised performances in everyday life affect and influence spatial performativity, its fabrication, and its impact?

Casting a performance lens on architecture requires us to adopt what another performance theorist, Richard Schechner, calls “a broad spectrum approach,” recognizing that, while not everything is a conscious performance, everything can be studied as performance, including aesthetic, strategic, and operational acts occurring beyond theater. Such performances are inevitably tied to material sites, as well as less substantial realms of inhabitation. Emphasizing presentation, reception, and the experiential, a performance model also acknowledges that our highly mediated world – folding grand narratives, theatricality, and the everyday into each other – has become, what McKenzie asserts, “a designed environment in which an array of global performances unfold.” This means that the spatial designer is conventionally operating by kowtowing to politicians, institutions, lawmakers, and corporations – themselves designers of experience – and generally reinforcing, rather than challenging, prescribed performances. While space disciplines us to perform through architecture as a spatial discipline, it is also dependent on the co-creativity of its inhabitants, who simultaneously construct their environments through perception,

imagination, and sensory engagement via bodies, materials, technologies, and objects.

The spatial designer I advocate for not only operates through a spatial practice, but also acknowledges Henri Lefebvre’s claim that space is socially produced and practiced, in turn producing social relationships. This involves a move towards reflexivity in design, rather than objectification. Such criticality offers what architectural theorist, Jane Rendell, proffers as “self-reflective modes of thought that seek to change the world, or at least the world in which the inequalities of market capitalism, as well as patriarchal and colonial (or postcolonial) interests, continue to dominate.”

Rendell’s advocacy for transformation, rather than description, requires an emphasis on spatial performativity allowing for design itself to dynamically enact something. Reciprocal action between the spatial and social informs how we move, encounter, and perform as citizens, family members, lovers, and creative individuals, as well as participants in multiple local and global communities. What follows is, therefore, a theory of event-space as a performative model, which recognizes that constructed space is itself an event and an integral driver of experience.

Not what built space is, but what it does

Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.

— Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life

But one can say that there is no space, there are spaces. Space is not one, but space is plural, a plurality, a heterogeneity, a difference. That would also make us look at spacing differently. We would not be looking for one.

— Daniel Libeskind: The End of Space

The two epigraphs above assert space as contentious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable, to which I would add, “performative.” What is it for space to perform? In architectural discourse, the term “performance” has generally been associated with building science. As a technical and diagnostic tool for investigating the quantifiable workings of the constructed environment, building performance has focused on improving the operations and efficiencies of buildings and their physical impact on occupants who are rendered “users.” Implicated in modernism’s ongoing utopian project, its concerns with optimization have remained central in the engineering sciences, although twenty-first-century thinking has attempted to align pragmatic concerns with aesthetic considerations. As David Leatherbarrow maintains in the opening chapter of Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality,

[t]he continued dedication to a technical interpretation of performance will lead to nothing more than an uncritical affirmation of old style functionalist thinking – a kind of thinking that is both reductive and inadequate because it recognizes only what it can predict.

It is perhaps more productive to ask not what a building (as singular object) is, but what the fabricated environment (as a dynamic multiplicity) does. By folding performance into the mix, built environments no longer need be perceived in relation to singular works of architecture, but as multimodal spatial action itself – as spacing!

How space does

The question of architecture is in fact that of place, of taking place in space … an event.

— Jacques Derrida, “Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture”

As a compound term, event-space combines the disciplines of performance and architecture through the hyphen (-), a punctuation mark that simultaneously separates and joins while enacting a break or interruption. In Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida aligns this dynamic action in punctuation to “spacing” that “speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space.” For Derrida, punctuation enacts its own performative utterances designating not only the interval, but “a ‘productive,’ ‘genetic,’ ‘practical’ movement, an ‘operation,’ if you will.” The hyphen operates like a necessary membrane holding the fluid from the solid, the dynamic from the static, event from space. The pairing of these two terms, however, must not be understood as existing in opposition. As an expressive interval, the simple dash adopts a performative gesture reflecting the creative and conflicting relationship between the fields of performance and architecture, forming an-other space for productive expression.

Almost two decades after establishing the spatiotemporal in language through punctuation, Derrida proposed the notion of architectural performativity, whereby architecture, by “taking place,” becomes “the event of spacing.” This was through his critique of Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette (1982–98) in Paris, in which the philosopher maintains that, through an “acting out” and “taking place,” architecture puts something “into form.” In this case, the structure and placement of the park’s red architectural follies are associated with madness (la folie), or more precisely madnesses (les folies) “acting out dissociation.” What began for Derrida as a critique of the “confinements within language” and the “solid, real buildings of social constructs” led to an evaluation on how discourse is structured by physical space: an active reading of its potentiality, navigating between the space of architecture and architectural space, between spatial language (utilizing architectural metaphors) and tangible construction.

Spacing is an architectural act for both the designer formulating architecture and for the inhabitant experiencing it. This “provocation of an event” through spatial performativity specifically references the

“performative” outlined by language philosopher J.L. Austin in his seminal lecture, “How to Do Things With Words” (1975), where the dynamic nature of “speech acts” are expanded beyond language into action itself. Separating the constative (descriptive) from the performative (active), Austin articulated how in speaking we can also be doing; that phrases such as “I do” (marry), or “I bet,” or “I name” (a ship) actually enact what they state. Yet these speech acts require certain environments, actions, objects, and witnesses to accompany them; maybe no longer a white dress or even a wedding ring for marriage, but some sort of ritualized place, communal gathering, celebrant, and contract. Even a bet has an accompanying gesture and naming a ship requires the vessel itself. So these places and things, replete with cultural meaning, also perform rather than describe. As dramaturgical scenography – enacting multiple narratives – they are not mimetic (copies) but authentic elements inherent to the event, suggesting how spaces and things do.

If within the illocutionary act of speaking something is being done through the saying – which constitutes action itself, then within the illocutionary act of architectural construction something is being done through spacing as both the act of designing/building and embodied time-based inhabitation. Dramatic theorist Elin Diamond describes performativity within performance as “that risky and dangerous negotiation between a doing … and a thing done.” By both enacting and describing, the performative provides us with “access to cultural meaning and critique.” As an aesthetic invention, “design” is both a doing (creative act) and a thing done (cultural artifact). Spacing, like design, represents both noun and verb, thing and action. Because action in space has a reciprocal relationship with space in action, our banal everyday environments can be perceived and utilized as continually fluctuating performances. This is further confounded by how the so-called “real world” is informed by virtual worlds emerging from various media and our own imaginations.

Unlike design, which focuses on designer and creative output, spacing articulates the acts of both designer and inhabitant as always in the making, whereby both are constantly reconstructing their perception of, and

engagement with, the built environment through time-based, embodied occupation. This relates to the choreographic notion of spacing as a means of registering and apprehending changing relationships between bodies in motion and the place they occupy. Within the singular spatial event of architecture, multiple events are enacted through spacing.\textsuperscript{18} In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter takes up Austin’s performative, insisting that architecture confront its character as “an illocutionary event, or at the very least as an element inseparable from and in constant interface with the world of force, will, action and history.”\textsuperscript{19} He notes that this idea of the evental signaled a break with architectural history in which past epochs expressed their “will to form.”\textsuperscript{20} Through last century’s spatiotemporal revolutions in science, arts, and communication, architecture is now perceived as an intimate system of forces giving shape and rhythm to everyday life via “micro-architectures” and “macro-architectures” derived from a range of practices that are both private and political.\textsuperscript{21} Kwinter outlines how these modernist revolutions shifted the static spatialization of time to a more dynamic temporalization of space through an emphasis on movement, relativity, and duration.\textsuperscript{22} Architecture, no longer recognized as a fixed, eternal entity, is rendered performative and realigns itself as active becoming rather than passive being. Approaching space by way of the transitory event – whether historic (epic incidents), aesthetic (theatrical displays) or banal (daily occurrences) – exposes an intricate system of active forces that undermine architecture’s traditional role as a fixed, durable object designed to order space and those who inhabit it. As a multiplicitous event in motion, space (both actual and virtual) is an intricate and active player in our everyday lives.

Event-space and spatial events

The question of architecture is in fact that of place, of taking place in space … an event.

— Jacques Derrida, “Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture”

Event-space is a term attributed to contemporary architect Bernard Tschumi, whose mantra has long been “there is no space without event.” His alliances with thinkers like Jacques Derrida, as well as his belief in the active nature of the built environment, have served to influence and shape early twenty-first-century architectural theory as “the discourse of events as much as the discourse of spaces,” thereby challenging architecture to be more active. This link between event and space questions architecture’s traditional association with continuity, coherence, and autonomy by focusing on time, action, and movement.

Considering performance space as “evental” repositions built and imagined space as both embodied experience and evolving time-based event, where the constructed environment itself – whether permanent architecture or temporary installation – is no longer perceived as an immobile object but as a volatile spatial subject. Writing on theater in the early 1960s, Czech scholar Jiří Veltruský insisted action was not restricted to the human performer; “even a lifeless object may be perceived as the performing subject, and a live human being may be perceived as an element completely without will.” What if we were to extend this argument to built space itself, agreeing with architectural theorist Mark Wigley that “in an important sense, space precedes action,” and adding “– as action”?

As dynamic spatial action, event-space operates between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the subtle and the spectacular, the banal and the epic. Implicated in monumental, aesthetic, and daily events, places are shaped by significant historic moments, such as natural and human-made disasters as well as thought-shifting sociopolitical and philosophical revolutions. These dramatic spectacles demand and manipulate public attention, as well as the accumulation of intersecting quotidian performances happening all around us. While the aesthetically conceived event – theater, exhibition, installation, and dramatic interior – negotiates between real time and fictive time, existing site and fleeting interventions, as well as presentation and reception, a formulation of the quotidian event focuses on what Tschumi refers to as the “spectacle of everyday life.” These conditions are neither singular nor isolated, but manifold, fragmented,

overlapping, and mobile, implicating all as participants in the plethora of life’s daily performances. As a performative phenomenon, our daily event-spaces call into question both the materiality of the built world and the immateriality of the event, revealing the lived world as a space of potentiality. These occupancies are described by Elizabeth Grosz as “saturated with spaces of projections, possibilities, and the new,” allowing the unrealized and unthought to emerge.

The diverse nature of the event – as a turning point, an aesthetic presentation, and a singular moment capable of being perceptually isolated amid the plurality and chaos of reality – establishes the intricate system of forces at play in the constructed environment; they operate as realms of reality and possibility, both actual and virtual. The historic event-space occurs on the limits as a limit, through shock, containing within it elements of the dramatic event-space that takes place between the opposing terms of reality and illusion, presence and absence, here and there, now and then, performer and spectator. This complex interplay is further complicated when leaving the confines of buildings built specifically to house cultural performances – theaters, galleries, museums, nightclubs, and even restaurants – whereby the dramatic event intersects more overtly with the multiplicity of the quotidian event-space. It often lacks the explicit architectural frame, collapsing theatrical and representational onto the banal and presentational of our lived reality. Event-space, therefore, needs to be considered through a range of modalities, scales, and temporalities: always as a dynamic organism that defies calculation. This is made particularly evident by spectacular moments when the slow performance of a seemingly eternal architectural object collides with the dynamic and destructive nature of the catastrophic event. Such conditions include decisive early twenty-first-century incidences such as the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States (2001), the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), and Japan’s megaquake (2011). Architecture, like the banal quotidian event, is haunted by catastrophe as a moment of absolute failure and disruption from an exterior unrealized force, revealing civilization’s impossible interior, dislocating representation, and presenting a moment where what seemed solid disintegrates.

Disciplinary maneuvers, post-catastrophe

It is important to recognize that architecture mutely incorporates power systems into the built environment – defining, regulating, and limiting our daily practices. This has become acutely evident since the event of 9/11, after which our freedom of movement and expression has been purposefully curtailed – locally and globally – in the very name of “freedom.”31 It is interesting to note that architecture was deliberately attacked in that decisive terrorist event for what it represented. Surrealist writer Georges Bataille maintained that architectural monuments were themselves violent phenomena that had to be eradicated because as static, dominant, and regulated forms they “impose silence on the multitudes” and “inspire socially acceptable behavior, and often a very real fear.”32 Foucault, who aligned the history of powers with the history of spaces, highlighted architecture as a disciplining mechanism.33 His compatriot Lefebvre believed the “logic of space” conceals an authoritarian force through its “objectality,” conditioning the competence and performance of the subject experiencing it as a resistant element “at times as implacably hard as a concrete wall.”34

In his essay on “The Event,” Deleuze counters objectality with the object-event, which he refers to as the objectile, “a very modern concept of a technological object.”35 No longer essentializing but active, the object is rendered a “theater of matter.”36 Rather than framing and structuring space, which cannot be apprehended as a singularity, it overflows its boundaries so as to annihilate the frame. Actualized in the built environment, the event transforms architecture through the element of time; from passive, homogeneous container/object into something more uneven, contracting and expanding. Space, saturated with spaces, becomes a continual unfolding, temporally defined and multiplied by an accelerated succession of actions.37 Within the dilating layers of the architectural objectile, the interior can be experienced and understood as space-in-action.

Peter Eisenman refers to Deleuze’s formulation in his 1992 article “Unfolding Events,” where he claims that the new architectural object is an objectile because it involves “a temporal modulation that implies a continual

variation of matter.”38 However, such a temporalization of space and form is not so new; it was played out by the historical and second-wave avant-garde who focused on the dynamic event, rather than the autonomous object. Eisenman’s architecture of unfolding events announces a tardy embrace of the evental by architectural discourse; it acknowledges the active force of built form and the difficult, as well as complex, relations that take place in a constantly changing context.39 This displacement of the static conception of the built environment recognizes its complex temporality where the past and future are brought into a fluctuating present. Within the “play” of time, architecture is experienced through variable intensities of movement that occur within matter and by the body on the move. The Deleuzian ontology of becoming thereby challenges the invariable presence of modern architecture that has continued to rely on an ontology of stasis.

Spatial design as “Weak Architecture”

Our petrified idea of the theatre is connected with our petrified idea of a culture without shadows, where, no matter which way it turns, our mind (esprit) encounters only emptiness, though space is full.

— Antonin Artaud, Theatre and Its Double

In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi writes, “What is pertinent about an event-space is not its boundedness, but what elements it lets pass, according to what criteria, at what rate, and to what effect.”40 Architectural theorist Rubió Ignasi Solà-Morales suggests we combat the brutal nature of disciplinary space with “weak architecture” that utilizes the fleeting, vestigial, and ephemeral to construct a new type of monumentality “bound up with the lingering resonance of poetry after it has been heard, with the recollection of architecture after it has been seen.”41 Solà-Morales refers to the tendency for architecture to foreclose on chance by attempting to create itineraries of control. In order for architecture to be transformed into a

dynamic and co-creative event, the aleatory and temporal, found in the theatrical event, must be admitted. “This is the strength of weakness; that strength which art and architecture can produce precisely when they adopt a posture that is not aggressive and dominating, but tangential and weak.”42 Spatial design can align itself to Solà-Morales’s notion of weak architecture, which exerts its powers as both performative and resistant in defying attack through transience, permeability, and anti-monumentality. This could challenge architecture’s conformist tendency in times of fear and crisis. A free-flowing exchange of, bodies, and ideas can be made present by spatiality that operates figuratively and concretely as an accessible, porous, and unpredictable realm.

Acknowledgement

This chapter develops and extends an earlier text: “Event-Space: Performance Space and Spatial Performativity” in Performance Perspectives: a critical introduction (Palgrave McMillan 2011: edited by Jonathan Pitches and Sita Popat), applying the event-space paradigm to interior design. It also draws from my book Event-Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde (Routledge Press, 2017).

Notes

1 Scenography, generally associated with the practice of theater design, concerns the visual, experiential, and spatial composition of an event, as well as how these integrated elements are presented (via the production) and received (by the audience), although the boundaries have become increasingly blurred through interactive and immersive theater practices. For more detailed discussions on Scenography as an expanding field, see Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth, Introduction to Scenography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Thea Brejzek, ed., Expanding Scenography: On the Authoring of Space (Prague: Arts & Theatre Institute, 2011), Dorita Hannah and Olav Harslof, Performance Design (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), and Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer, Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2017).

Dramaturgy, as time-based dramatic composition in the performing arts, was adapted to sociology in order to observe sociocultural interaction as performances of everyday life. This chapter considers the dramatic and social in order to develop a notion of spatial dramaturgy.

2 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

3 Richard Schechner, “Performance Studies: A Broad Spectrum Approach”, in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 7–9, 29.

4 Jon McKenzie, “Global Feeling”, in Performance Design, ed. Dorita Hannah and Olav Harslof (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), p. 128.

5 Jane Rendell, “The Re-Assertion of Time Into Critical Spatial Practice”, keynote address in One Day Sculpture Symposium, 2009, http://onedaysculpture.org.nz/_symposium/jane%20rendell%20formatted.pdf.

6 Omar Khan and Dorita Hannah, “Introduction”, Performance/Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 4 (2008).

7 David Leatherbarrow, “Architecture’s Unscripted Performance”, in Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality, ed. Branko Kolarevic and Ali Malkawi (New York: Spon Press, 2005): 7.

8 Ibid.

9 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 68.

10 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (London: Continuum Press, 1997): 76.

11 This link to punctuation as a dynamic spacing was also discussed by Omar Khan and Dorita Hannah in relation to the term “performance/architecture”: “Introduction” Performance/Architecture, ed. Omar Khan and Dorita Hannah, Journal of Architectural Education, 61, no. 4 (2008).

12 Jacques Derrida, “Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture”, reproduced in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 324–336. Originally published in Bernard Tschumi, La Case Vide: La Villette (London: Architectural Association, 1986), pp. 324–336, 320, 335. Jacques Derrida, who was introduced “into” architectural discourse by Bernard Tschumi, saw an application of his philosophy of deconstruction to architecture within the project of the Parc de la Villette. As the philosopher noted, this invitation to participate in the project threw him “into the space of architecture,

rather than architectural space,” exposing him to a new discipline: Mark Wigley, “Jacques Derrida: Invitation to a Discussion”, Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory 1 (1992): 10–11, 7–27.

Jacques Derrida, “Point de Folie – Maintenant l’Architecture”, pp. 333–334.

Ibid.

Jacques Derrida in Mark Wigley, “Jacques Derrida: Invitation to a Discussion”, Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory 1 (1992): 12.

J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 8.

Elin Diamond, Performance and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge), p. 5.

Gilles Deleuze posits this multiplicity in his essay on “The Event” in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 14.

Ibid., p.13.

Kwinter defines “micro-architectures” as the relations that saturate and compose the architectural object, whereas in “macro-architectures” the relations envelop and exceed the object. Ibid., p. 14.

This is discussed by Sanford Kwinter who describes “evental”, with its alliance to time, as “concrete, plastic and active”, in Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture, 69n.29. Peter Hallward’s translation of événementielle is something akin to “of the event”, or that which constitutes the event as new and irruptive of the old, discussed in his introduction to Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Understanding of Evil (London and New York: Verso, 2001), pp. xxxvi–liii.

Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 139. Although Bernard Tschumi’s specific mention of this term is not prevalent in his texts, K. Michael Hays has cited him as its progenitor in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 216. Hays states in an interview, “the term ‘event-space’ belongs to Tschumi.” Manifold 3 (Houston, TX: Rice University Publication, Winter 2009), p. 82.

Ibid., p. 149.

Jiří Veltruský, “Man and Object in the Theatre”, in A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style, ed. P.L. Garvin (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1964), p. 88.

Wigley, “Jacques Derrida: Invitation to a Discussion”, p. 23.

Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 22.

28. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture From the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Spaces (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 78.

29. Elizabeth Grosz defines the “virtual” as resisting “an already preformed version of the real” in favor of that which “promises something different to the actual that it produces.” Ibid., p. 12.

30. Gay McAuley, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theater (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 255.

31. 9/11 sanctioned the infiltration of our personal spaces, both domestic and virtual, as revealed by U.S. IT professional, Edward Snowden, in his 2013 disclosures of the NSA’s global set of controls.

32. Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” in Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge Press, 1997), p. 21.

33. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books), p. 149.

34. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 57.

35. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 88. Deleuze is also referring to Bernard Cache’s notion of the objectile, which transforms the architectural subjectile, forming volume through surface, to the objectile as a spatial variability within that volume. See Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

36. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, p. 37.

37. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988), p. 118.

38. Peter Eisenman, “Unfolding Events”, in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), pp. 424, 422–427. Eisenman articulates a paradigm shift from the “placebound” architecture of the mechanical age to an “evental” architecture that takes account of the mediated world; “a new type of environment, comprised of light, sound, movement, an event-structure in which architecture does not simply stand against media, but is consumed by it” (Ibid.). Although discourse surrounding the objectile by Deleuze, Cache, and Peter Eisenman refers to effects of the digital age, Marco de Carpo points out that digital thought preceded digital technology (Architecture in the Age of Printing, p. 123). This chapter therefore maintains that the objectile, as active agent, is not dependent on digital media.

39. James Williams, “Deleuze’s Ontology and Creativity: Becoming in Architecture”, in Pli 9, Parallel Processes (2000): 200–219, 207.

40 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 79.

41 Rubio Ignasi Solà-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, trans. Graham Thompson, ed. Sarah Whiting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 71.

42 Ibid.