White, SR; (2014) Gilles Deleuze and the Project of Architecture: An Expressionist Design-Research Methodology. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis analyses the potential of the Deleuzian philosophical concept of 'expressionism' in accounting for and driving architectural design and research. An expansive literature considering the import of Deleuze in architecture is characterised by his simultaneous use in both poles of debates concerning Critical architecture at the centre of mainstream practice and as foundational source for minoritorian approaches to both design and research. Identifying this contemporary vacillation as a reiteration of traditional reductions of design to products or processes, and seeking development of an alternative trajectory, I propose the architectural project as an 'embodied' epistemological and ontological third term of an expressionist account of architectural design‐research. A series of critical encounters between philosophy and architecture exploring the accounts and practices of Robin Evans, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman and both professional and pedagogic design‐research undertaken by the author, articulate six key principles of a non‐representational, expressionist methodology for design and research in architecture. First 'expressionism' insists on a substantive distinction between nominal and real denying any essentialist component to architectural products or production. An encounter with Evans shows how architectural bodies both produce and are constituted by 'projective relations' external to architect, drawing and discipline. Koolhaas and Eisenman's divergent positions then demonstrate how projective distinctions are always embodied in two actual forms which select content and express an exterior. Fifth, a design for a non-human 'client' makes explicit the parallel and serial nature of processes of selection and projection. Sixth, community‐engaged design‐research demonstrates that active speculation towards positive change (outside of self and social habit) is a mechanism for the serial production of simultaneously ethical and aesthetical affective relationships. Extending and sharing the production of capabilities and powers of expression beyond the architect and architecture demonstrates the overarching principle of expressionism ‐ affirmative speculation is correlative with the creation of ethical joy.

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