Final Reading: With Gilles Deleuze + Félix Guattari
This will be our final reading group and we will conclude with Gilles Deleuze, and also with Deleuze and Félix Guattari. We will read the first chapter from Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, “The Pleats of Matter” (1993) in order to go in search of a very special understanding of material and its intimate rapport with immaterial forces. I recommend that you bring to the reading group examples of how the fold has found its way into architecture through the work of Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, UN Studio (Bos and van Berkel), and others (see the issue of AD dedicated to Folding in Architecture). The fold is usually interpreted in a very literal way by architects, and we will discuss the benefits and limits of this approach.
We will also read what is sometimes referred to as the aesthetic chapter from Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, “Percept, Affect, Concept” (1994), here we will be in pursuit of an understanding of sensation, and we will assess the way in which Deleuze and Guattari offer an account of architecture “as the first of all the arts”.
