A Dissertation submitted to the - OhioLINK ETD Center

Difference and Repetition in Redevelopment Projects for the Al Kadhimiya

Historical Site, Baghdad, Iraq:

Towards a Deleuzian Approach in Urban Design

A Dissertation submitted to the

Graduate School

of the University of Cincinnati

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ARCHITECTURE

In the School of Architecture and Interior Design Of the college of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning

2018

By Najlaa K. Kareem

Bachelor of Architecture, University of Technology 1999 Master of Science in Urban and Regional Planning, University of Baghdad 2004

Dissertation Committee: Adrian Parr, PhD (Chair)

Laura Jenkins, PhD

Patrick Snadon, PhD

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Abstract

In his book Difference and Repetition, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze distinguishes

between two theories of repetition, one associated with the ‘Platonic’ theory and the other with the

‘Nietzschean’ theory. Repetition in the ‘Platonic’ theory, via the criterion of accuracy, can be

identified as a repetition of homogeneity, using pre-established similitude or identity to repeat the

Same, while repetition in the ‘Nietzschean’ theory, via the criterion of authenticity, is aligned with

the virtual rather than real, producing simulacra or phantasms as a repetition of heterogeneity. It is

argued in this dissertation that the distinction that Deleuze forms between modes of repetition has

a vital role in his innovative approaches to the Nietzschean’s notion of ‘eternal return’ as a

differential ontology, offering numerous insights into work on issues of homogeneity and

heterogeneity in a design process. Deleuze challenges the assumed capture within a conventional

perspective by using German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘eternal return.’

This dissertation aims to question the conventional praxis of architecture and urban design

formalisms through the impulse of ‘becoming’ and ‘non- representational’ thinking of Deleuze.

The research attempts to conceptualize the relationship between history and the occurrence of new

social contexts and to locate varying forms of active and temporal engagements with the material

formations of cultural environments and historical sites. This dissertation explores the possibility

of using history as a dynamic, intensive force in an architectural and urban design thinking process

as a mean to escape the historicism and representational image functionary towards a re-engineered

creative historical/architectural dialogue. The dissertation will conceptually analyze the difference

between mimicking historical styles in a decontextualized manner and repeating them with

difference using the theory of Difference and Repetition outlined by Deleuze. More precisely, this

dissertation will show what Deleuze creative ontology of becoming and change might offer to

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architectural and urban design discourses where their practices can be improved through repetition,

and where it is believed that reproducing history may reinforce pride and develop the sentiment of

nationalism while making way for more accepted forms of imitation. A good example is a

historical revivalism happening in Iraq. Although Deleuze’s influence on architectural and urban

design thinking has grown dramatically since the early 1990s, the affective strategies that have

resulted from his creative approach remain mostly unaddressed in Middle Eastern architectural

knowledge. This dissertation aims to fill that gap. Methodologically, it will compare and contrast

two different design strategies for the redevelopment of the Al Kadhimiya historical site in

Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. This comparative research investigates the problem of

representational thinking in architectural and urban design practices and to what extent repeating

the past produces sociocultural uniformity or cultural difference.

The significance of this dissertation ranges widely from exploring the ethico-aesthetics of

heterogeneous architecture in contemporary design associated within the innovative cultural

paradigms to the role of philosophy in emerging new subjectivity and relational practices in

architecture and urban design, including creative and strategic spatial practices.

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© 2018 Najlaa K. Kareem

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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DEDICATED

To my Beloved Parents & Family

Without whom this dissertation would never have come into existence

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and about all, I would like to thank the Almighty Allah (God) for providing me the

opportunity, health, knowledge, and skill to start this study and to persist and finish it in an

acceptably.

I would like to thank all those who contributed to this dissertation. I would like to start by

expressing gratitude to the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Iraq

(MOHESR) for awarding me a Ph.D. scholarship which supported me to do this scholarly research

and advance my academic career in architecture and urban design. I would like to extend my

deepest gratitude to the chair of my Ph.D. committee Dr. Adrian Parr, and Dr.Patrick Snadon and

Dr. Laura Jenkins, the members of the supervisory committee, who supported my early work on

this dissertation and sustain it to its completion. I am particularly grateful for Dr. Adrian Parr for

her confidence and the freedom she gave me to do this research, thank you for your effort,

guidance, and support over the years. You set an example of excellence as a scholar, instructor,

and role model. I wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Patrick Snadon who always gave me constant

encouragement, advice, and valuable suggestions for this research. I am also very grateful to Dr.

Laura Jenkins who is kindly and generously sharing her expertise and insights through this process.

I am deeply grateful to all my committee members for assenting to read the manuscript during the

summer and to participate in defense of this dissertation.

I would also like to express my deep gratitude to the faculty at the University of Cincinnati,

the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. I would particularly like to thank Professor

Craig Vogel for his invaluable guidance and suggestions, and I would like to thank Professor Edson

Cabalfin who has been so helpful and cooperative in giving his support.

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Gratitude and appreciation also extend to the Harvard College Library, Aga Khan

Documentation Center and Visual Archive at MIT, Library of Massachusetts Institute of

Technology (MIT) for supporting me in getting the original studies of the Al Kadhimiya historical

site (TAKHS). I would like to thank the administrative and librarians’ staff at the University of

Cincinnati Design, Art, Architecture and Planning (DAAP) Library for supporting me in obtaining

the first volumes and the original editions of studies related to the theories of the French

philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari. I would also like to thank the

mayoralty of Baghdad (Amanat Baghdad), and the staff of the Engineering Department in the Al

Jawadain Holy Shrine for providing me with the latest information, original materials, archival

date, achieved projects, and drawings related to the Al Kadhimiya historical site in Baghdad, Iraq.

This dissertation could not have been completed without the main source of my strength,

my parents, Mrs. Iqbal and Mr. Kadhim Kareem. Thank you for all your unconditional love. I

would also like to thank my brothers, Ali and Ahmed, my sisters, Ella and Zhara, for their love

and care, and for their assistance in getting important literature and documents on the

redevelopment of the Al Kadhimiya historical site in Baghdad, Iraq, from the libraries of Baghdad

University, University of Technology, University of Thi-Qar, governmental and religious

institutions and ministries.

Finally, special thanks to my small family, my husband, Mustafa Al Janabi, a Professor in

Modern History. I have been lucky to have his expert suggestions and unwavering support. My

son Mohammed, my daughters, Noor, Ruqayah, and Zainab, thank you for filling my life with

happiness. I owe the completion of this dissertation to all of you.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ii

Dedication v

Acknowledgments vi

Table of Contents viii

Table of Figures xi

ii

v

vi

viii

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Chapter One: Research Framework 1

1.1 Introduction 1

1.2 Research Questions 4

1.3 Research Aims 4

1.4 Research Scope 5

1.5 Hypothesis 6

1.6 Methodology 7

1.6.1 Historical Background 8

1.6.2 Formal Analysis 11

1.6.2.1 The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site 11

1.6.2.2 The Dewan Architecture and Engineer Firm Proposal 13

1.6.2.3 The Assemblage Architects Firm Proposal 15

1.6.3 Comparative Analysis 17

1.6.4 Conceptual Analysis 20

1.7 Literature Review 21

1.8 Theoretical Framework and Intellectual Apparatus 25

1.8.1 Helen Morgan Parmett’s Notion of ‘Disneyfication’ 26

1.8.2 Gilles Deleuze’s Notion of ‘Difference in Itself’ 27

1.9 Findings and Discussion 28

1.10 Organization of the Dissertation 29

Chapter Two: Literature Review

33

2.1 The Time of Architecture: Deleuze’s Reading of Nietzschean Eternal Return 33

2.2 Deleuze’s Philosophy in Difference and Repetition 35

2.3 Nietzschean Eternal Return 38

2.4 Urban Design Thinking in Eisenman’s Critical Practice 44

2.5 Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism 50

2.6 Machinic Urbanism in Eisenman’s Design Process 57

2.7 Conclusion 60

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Chapter Three: Qualitative Methodology 63

3.1 New Territories for Old Architecture: Nomadic History as a Design Strategy in the

Redevelopment Urban Project for the Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, Baghdad, Iraq 58

3.2 Capturing Old Architecture 66

3.2.1 Mixed Land Uses

3.2.2 Compact Building Design

73

74

3.2.3 Form and The Architectural Style 76

3.3 Deleuze’s Rejection of Representational Thinking 78

3.4 Machinic Urbanism: Cracking the Past 84

3.5 Conclusion 93

Chapter Four: Main Findings 96

4.1 Memory in an Experimental Preservation: Deleuze, Duration, and Nonlinear History 96

4.2 The Morphological Stages for the Al Kadhimiya Historical Site 98

4.2.1 The First Morphological Stage: Before 1936 98

4.2.2 The Second Morphological Stage: 1940-1975 99

4.2.3 The Third Morphological Stage: 1976-2003 101

4.2.4 The Fourth Morphological Stage: 2003 to present 101

4.3 Historical Background of the Planning and Urban Studies (approaches to the issue) 103

4.4 The Allusion of the History in the Traditional Mode of Preservation 111

4.5 Deleuze, Duration, and Nonlinear History 118

4.6 Machinic Mode to Preserve the Nonlinear History 120

4.7 Conclusion 129

Chapter Five: Discussion

131

5.1 Eisenman Critical Practice: Beyond Urban Formalism In-Between Actualizing

Function and Virtualizing Chaos

131

5.2 The Interstitial Spaces in Eisenman Architecture and Urban Formalisms 132

5.3 Assemblage Theory 135

5.4 Assemblage Design Thinking 137

5.5 The Logic of Sensation 142

5.6 Deleuze’s Affective Assemblage 146

5.7 Urban Assemblage 150

5.8 Conclusion 158

Chapter Six: Conclusion 160

6.1 Historical Materiality in the Realm of Contemporary Architecture: The Argument

of Differentiation in Design Thinking Process 160

6.2 Actualization of the Virtual in Eisenman’s Critical Practice 162

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6.3 Deleuze’s Critique of Fixed Identity 169

6.4 Deleuze’s Process of Differentiation 171

6.5 Representational Thinking vs. Differentiation 176

6.6 Places of Becoming in Diagrammatic Models 183

6.7 Urban Image Beyond Deleuze and Guattari 185

6.8 Conclusion 189

6.8.1 Contribution 192

6.8.2 Expected Outcomes 192

6.9 Further Research 194

Bibliography 196

Appendix 208

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TABLE OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Concepts Diagrams, 1991-1992. Figure 2.2: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Surroundings, 1991-1992. Figure 2.3: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Concepts Diagrams, 1991-1992.

Figure 2.4: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Drawing, 1991-1992.

Figure 2.5: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Drawing, 1991-1992.

Figure 2.6: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Model, 1991-1992.

Figure 2.7: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Design Concept, 1991-1992.

Figure 2.8: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Perspective View, 1991-1992.

Figure 2.9: Eisenman Architects, Rebstockpark Perspective View, 1991-1992.

Figure 3.1: MIT Libraries, Aga Khan Visual Archive, The Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1982.


Figure 3.3: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library, Golden Domes and Minarets of The

Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1923.

Figure 3.4: Dewan Architects and Engineers Firm, The Al Kadhimiya Redevelopment, 2009.

Figure 3.5: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library, The Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1923.





Figure 3.10: DAEF, The Al Kadhimiya Redevelopment, 2009.




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Figure 3.14: Assemblage Architects Firm, Holy City Masterplan, 2009.







Figure 4.1: FAL, Harvard College Library, Al Kadhimain Shrine Surroundings, 1923.

Figure 4.2: FAL, Harvard College Library, Entrance of The Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1923.

Figure 4.3: Sahar Mohamed Al-Kaisi, The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, Before 1936.

Figure 4.4: Sahar Mohamed Al-Kaisi, The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, 1940-1975.


Figure 4.6: John Warren, The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, 2003 to present.

Figure 4.7: Google Earth image, The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, 2003 to present.

Figure 4.8: Yasser Tabbaa Archive, Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, The

Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1980s.

Figure 4.9: International Quran News Agency, The Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1970s.

Figure 4.10: Doxiadis master plan of Baghdad, DA 1958.

Figure 4.11: Polservice Consulting, Engineers Warsaw-Poland, Masterplan of Baghdad,

1967.

Figure 4.12: Polservice Consulting, Engineers Warsaw-Poland, Masterplan of Baghdad,

1974.

Figure 4.13: Design of the Al Kadhimiya neighborhood in Baghdad, The mid-1970s.

Figure 4.14: MIT Libraries, Aga Khan Visual Archive, The Al Kadhimain Shrine, New

Surroundings, 1982.

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Figure 4.15: MIT Libraries, AKVA, Traditional House in The Al Kadhimiya site, 1982.

Figure 4.16: Google Earth image, Al Kadhimiya Neighborhood in Baghdad,

West of the Tigris River, 2007.

Figure 4.17: The Al Kadhimiya Neighborhood in Baghdad, 2013.

Figure 4.18: The Al Kadhimiya Neighborhood in Baghdad, 2013.


Figure 4.20: AAF, Holy City Masterplan, 2009.

Figure 5.1: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial, Perspective View, 1998-2005.

Figure 5.2: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial Design Drawing, 1998-2005.

Figure 5.3: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial Design Drawing, 1998-2005.

Figure 5.4: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial Perspective View, 1998-2005.

Figure 5.5: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial Design Concept, 1998-2005.


Figure 5.7: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial Model, 1998-2005.

Figure 5.8: Eisenman Architects, House III, 1969-1971.

Figure 6.1: Irene Fanizza, Freespace, the 16th International Architecture Exhibition,

Corderie dell'Arsenale, Venice, 2018.

Figure 6.2: EA, City of Culture of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1999- 2011.

Figure 6.3: Representational Image of the Thought.


Figure 6.5: AAF, Holy City Masterplan, 2009.

Figure 6.6: Marc Ngui, Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Rhizome, 2008.

Figure 6.7: Marc Ngui, Diagrams for D&G ATP, 2008.

Figure 6.8: Marc Ngui, Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Multiplicity, 2008.

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Figure 6.9: Marc Ngui, Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Assemblage, 2008.

Figure 6.10: Marc Ngui, Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, Becoming, 2008.

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CHAPTER ONE

Research Framework

1.1 Introduction

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how we can perceive the coming future that

creatively blends with the historic touch. The author of History and Becoming: Deleuze’s

Philosophy of Creativity, Craig Lundy, raises an intellectual question about the meaning of history

in Deleuze’s individual works and his collaboration with the schizoanalyst/political activist Félix

Guattari. Lundy puts forward various innovative suggestions to enable an escape from

representational thinking and to create a creative dialogue between history and becoming.1 Like

Lundy, the American architect and theoretician Peter Eisenman claims that “we cannot repeat the

iconic of the past in the present because they do not have the same iconic value.”2

In his incisive essay, The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the

End, Eisenman constructs a route to lines of flight, escaping the clamp of history and questioning

the authority of dominant systems that have captured architecture and urban design since the

classical period.3 However, the dilemma is that many architectural and urban design practices are

still imprisoned and limited to a very narrow imagistic mode of history. Consequently, this

limitation causes many issues related to three important aspects of architectural and urban design

projects in historic sites: socio-cultural preservation, tourism economic improvement, and

adaptability to modern environmental requirements. The problem is that architecture and urban

design are traditionally “subjected to dominant, ‘natural’ orders: structural, functional, symbolic,

1- Craig Lundy, History and becoming: Deleuze’s philosophy of creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2010), 1.

2- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “Eisenman's Machine of Infinite Resistance,” EI Croquis 83(1997):50-63.

3- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “A Conversation with Peter Eisenman,” EI Croquis 83 (1997a):12.

2

and linguistic,”4– which are “static, hierarchically-ordered structures of time and space.”5 Thus,

this largely representational notion overlooks the ontology of becoming and change in architectural

and urban design thinking. Consequently, this dissertation will draw parallels between dominant

architectural and urban design practices and Deleuze’s new intellectual framework, ‘radical

difference’ to analyze two proposals submitted in 2008-2009 for the Al Kadhimiya historical site

redevelopment project in Baghdad, Iraq. The two proposals included the winning proposal by the

Dewan Architecture and Engineer Firm and one of the top-ten finalist projects by Assemblage

Architects Firm. In the analysis, the dissertation examines the representational thinking in

architecture and urban design that conveys within it a norm of static and false identity in

comparison to the ontology of becoming and change defined by Deleuze in his theory of Difference

and Repetition.

Immense disciplinary literature addresses the problem of representational thinking in

architecture and urban design and the critical role of history and becoming to face this issue. Many

scholars, theorists, architects, urban designers, and planners, such as K. Michael Hayes, Fredric

Jameson, Elizabeth Grosz, Adrian Parr, Manuel Delanda, Peter Eisenman, Kim Dovey, and Jean

Hillier to name a few, all write about and critique representational thinking in architecture and

urban design. Using Deleuze’s philosophical notions is an essential component of their research

and methodology; they approach the study of architecture and urban design through an analysis of

the innovative variation and production of time and space. The main argument and the essential

element here is to designate intellectual constructs in what aspects the dogmatic image of history

4- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “The making of The Machine: Powerless Control as A Critical Strategy,” Eleven Authors

in Search of a Building: the Aronoff Centre for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati, ed. Cynthia C.

Davidson (New York: Monacelli Press, 1996), 30.

5- Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the ruin of representation (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1999), 2.

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becomes effective and energetic. This dissertation is a critical analysis of the creative conception

of history, and its vital role in the process of creation to produce the new. The dissertation will

compare and contrast representational architectural and urban design thinking with a notion of

architectures of becoming, offering a new intellectual framework for experimental design.

Furthermore, the dissertation inquiry into the openness of ‘difference’ is a central component of

Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and change to support the production of ‘machinic urbanism,’that

involves different bodies in different spatial practice. Deleuze scholar Adrian Parr coins the term

‘machinic urbanism.’ “Machinic urbanism would produce connections and relations between

elements to stimulate challenges to traditional economic, environmental, social and cultural doxa,

to create lines of flight and alternative discourses from which to imagine, or fabulate, different

futures.”6

Deleuze considers that the ontology of becoming and change has a particular duration, a

portion of the virtual firmness, and through the relations between forces this pure duration can be

apprehended as a transformation.7 It can be said that architectural and urban design practices can

interpose and open out of both spatiality and formality during this pure duration, and thus, be

considered as abstract machines in Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and change. Furthermore, the

non-representational manifestation of architecture and urban design practices is shaped from their

various functions and occur in the continuous connections and living requirements and desires

such as privacy, housing, safety, and personal boundaries, to name a few.

Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and change deals with the idea that a machine can

spontaneously improve thematic relations and energetic assemblages in which living desire and

6- Jean Hillier, Book Review: Adrian Parr (2009) Hijacking Sustainability (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), Deleuze

Studies, Volume 4, Issue 1, (2010):138-145.

7- Cliff Stagoll, “Becoming,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2010), 28.

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need can connect, motivate, and generate collections of components with various arrangements,

distinguishing ‘machinic’ relationships and potential networks. Eisenman elucidates that the

unpredictability in architectural and urban design practices can enable the way for a ‘machinic’ to

become animated. In this way, architecture and urban design cannot be subordinated to a scheme

of symbolism that represents classical norms and has “already” materialized meaning in the

architectural and urban design formalistic image.8 The notion of urban assemblage undermines the

static classifications of identity, subject, being, and reason in which they are associated with time

and space, awarding the importance to ‘difference’ in pure duration.

1.2 Research Questions

The interests in this dissertation are directed at bringing two questions together to mount a

nuanced theoretical discussion of the creative role that ‘difference’ can play in processes of

repetition and transformation. First, what might Deleuze’s creative ontology of becoming and

change offer to architectural and urban design discourses? And second, how can historical styles

be creatively repeated?

1.3 Research Aims

The primary aim of this dissertation is to question the conventional praxis of architecture

and urban design formalisms, by aligning the disciplines of architecture and urban design with the

philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. An interrogation of the theory, criticism, and practice of these

disciplines occurs through the philosophical thought of Deleuze. This dissertation also aims to

explore the ‘machinic’ mode of experimental design by which architectural and urban design

8- Peter Eisenman, “Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo's Idea of the Machinic,” El Croquis 83,

Madrid (1997): 21-35.

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practices can operate ‘difference,’ proposing a new transversal image of thought and grasping

various events and connections.

1.4 Research Scope

Architects and urban designers classically use historicism, in their ‘static,’ ‘hierarchical,’

and ‘structural’ approach and conceptual design thinking, which produces architecture and urban

design that are ‘fixed,’ and that deny the dynamic passage of time and cultural change. In contrast,

many architects and urban designers who directly lean upon and count on Deleuze’s ontology of

becoming and change, including and not limited to Peter Eisenman, Philippe Raham, and Greg

Lynn, use different techniques and concepts in their architectural and urban design practices to

produce ‘difference’ and creative change, moving beyond the representational image of thought.

Techniques and concepts such as seriality, fold, diagrams, assemblages, affect, rhizomes,

interstitial figural, machinic, geometry, and smooth and striated space have become part of their

architectural and urban design thinking and practices.

Covering this wide range of theoretical concepts in this dissertation is slightly challenging.

To narrow it and fill the gap in the literature, this dissertation focuses on Eisenman’s critical

practice. It does so by conceptually analyzing the revolutionary themes and strategies of Eisenman,

contrary to postmodern historicism’s approach, aiming to demonstrate his folding theme and

technique in the Rebstockpark project (RP), that differs from any previous geometry toward a self-

referentiality status, and the conditions of ‘interstitiality’ in the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered

Jews of Europe (BMMJE). This dissertation differentiates the repetition of the neo-avant-garde as

a process of self-organization that allows evolving connections and alterations to unfold as a virtual

difference and pure movement of becoming, from the representational trajectory of postmodern

experiments that has led to historicism in architecture.

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The scope of this dissertation involves eliciting valuable ideas from Eisenman’s critical

practice. This research will use these ideas as a metric for assessing the competition entries,

proposing structures and spaces that are open to appropriation and change, while also

acknowledging principles drawn from the history of the site, local modes, and possibilities for

living. In Eisenman’s critical practice, the notion of form constitutes outside the conventional

praxis of modern architecture, in which any character is already determined by codes, orders, and

subjects, and consequently, form is informed with precise meaning by rules of coping and function.

According to Eisenman, the conventional praxis of architecture and urban design uses a strict

contradiction between two dichotomies, such as ‘figure/ground,’ and ‘form/content,’ instead of

‘in-between’ relations in which the two dualistic oppositions are possibly combined and inserted

within one another, creating ‘figure/ figure’ groundless or interstitial figural condition.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the conceptual and affective assemblages are titled as

a productive machine, when the impulsive fluid border of destratification flow is shattered and

socialized. That productive machine more precisely echoes life and its numerous virtualities. The

benefits of Eisenman’s type of architectural and urban design machines are that they relate

noticeably with the concepts of assemblage and affect, thus cracking the conventional methods of

predominant formalism and engaging the logic of temporality, the logic of subjectivity, and the

logic of sensations.

1.5 Hypothesis

The hypothesis in this dissertation is that the shift to non-representational thinking and

Deleuzian approach has transformed architecture and urban design to critical practices, producing

new arrangements, temporal engagements, pure relations, and sustained connections that

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efficaciously encompass the materialist and intensive urban experimentations in cultural

environments and historical sites.

1.6 Methodology

The key primary sources for this dissertation will be the original writings of Gilles Deleuze,

as well as Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari that translate into English. Furthermore, this

dissertation intends to root analysis in the original texts written by Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri

Bergson. In addition to the primary sources directly focus on the key concepts of this dissertation,

there are numerous of secondary sources, such as Deleuzian scholars’ books and articles that

interpret and analyze Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari original writings.

The original documentation of two of the urban redevelopment proposals submitted in

2008-2009 for the Al Kadhimiya historical site redevelopment project in Baghdad, Iraq will be

primary architectural resources. Official websites and online articles of government and relevant

organizations will also provide primary sources. To offer indication to response to the thesis

questions, the data collection concentrated on the social, economic and environmental aspects of

both proposals.

I will closely trace the concept of ‘place character’ in each scheme of both redevelopment

practices of the firms from three phases: (1) “in which place character is experienced by

residents,”9 (2) constructed in urban design discourse either creatively or by the impact of urban

politics and marketing, and (3) “mobilized both to pursue difference and to protect against

difference.”10 This dissertation will scrutinize both the winning plan and the chosen finalist plan

to question whether or not the process of redevelopment has achieved what it seeks to accomplish

9- Kim Dovey, Becoming places: urbanism/architecture/identity/power (London: Routledge, 2010), 58.


8

or the opposite by erasing its historical personality through the illusionary neo-traditional styles,

which in fact, represent the past and lead to the closure of the processes of becoming.11 Through a

comparative analysis, the objective is to discover applicable methods to enhance the urban matrix

of Al Kadhimiya without demolishing the existing structures.

1.6.1 Historical Background

The Al Kadhimiya historical site is located in the Al Kadhimiya district, a northern

neighborhood west of the Tigris River, about five kilometers from the city center of Baghdad, the

capital of Iraq. Historians are in unanimous agreement, according to Al Yasin, that the “Al

Kadhimiya neighborhood was built on the site of the Shunizi cemetery, which certainly pre-dated

the foundation of Baghdad in 763AD, and it was named after renowned Imams buried on that

site.”12 The Al Kadhimain shrine (TAKS) contains the tombs of the seventh Twelve Shi’ah Imam

Musa bin Ja'far Al Kadhim who died in 799 AD and the ninth Twelve Shi’ah Imam, his grandson,

Imam Mohammad Al-Jawad who died in 834 AD. Both are considered direct descendants of the

Prophet Mohammad.13 In Islam, this adds a sacred aspect to the site, for those Imams had their

disciples carry on their legacies. The coming to being of this site followed two steps, consisting of

building the shrine over the tombs of these venerated Imams and then building the mosque itself.

Al Yasin describes Al Kadhimiya as a town having a distinctive organic shape, with small

buildings surrounding the mosque serving different functions, including housing people, offering

different services needed by the dwellers as well as offering religious services. Of these beads of

buildings, some are new, and others are defunct and soon to disappear. The buildings connect to

11- Ibid.

12- M.H. Al-Yasin, “Al-Mashhhad Al-Kazimi fi’Al-Asr Al-‘Abbasi,” Sumer 18, (1962):119-128.

13- Khalil J. Strika V., “The Islamic Architecture of Baghdad,” Instituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli, 1987, 3-

14.

9

one another with very tight streets, projecting the idealized image of what is known as the ‘Arab-

Islamic neighborhood.’ The shrine establishes the center of the township and the gradual growth

of the historical site as a slow gathering of urban fabric created from the increase of combinations

of micro buildings extending around the shrine to produce the unique dense urban site of the Al

Kadhimiya. “Most of its current form and structure dates back to the early decades of the 16th

century when it was completely rebuilt.”14 The buildings that survive today stand on the old street

lines and previous plots; therefore, they show the physical characteristics of massing and the

typical plan of the earlier site.

The Al Kadhimiya historical site is a clear example of the shrine-sites that are known in

the East, and particularly in Iraq; it was preceded by Najaf and Karbala historical sites and

replicated some of their features. The urban fabric surrounds the shrine giving the inhabitants some

intimacy to the area and thus attracting dwellers from Shiite Muslims. Accordingly, in the Al

Kadhimiya, the main pathway of wealth and life attraction which creates a living and growing

environment is its religious function. In other words, it is its function which caused the existence

of the site as well as identified the lifestyle at its very foundation and formation.

The shrine is the vital nucleus that attracts people through the ages; thousands and

thousands of visitors of all stripes, from all over the world, visit the site daily. These rituals revive

the local economy and improve the living conditions of the residents; some estimates put the

number of daily visitors from five to ten thousand, rising to fifteen or twenty thousand on

Wednesdays and Saturdays. During the religious season, such as Ashoura, the number goes up to

six million worshippers who roam the tiny streets of the site. Although the religious celebrations

14- John Warren, “Baghdad Two Case Studies of Conservation,” The Arab City: Its Characters and Islamic

Cultural Heritage: proceedings of Symposium Held in Medina, Kingdom of Saudi an Arabia, 24-29 Rabi II, 1401

AH, 28 Feb.-5 Mar. 1981 AD., eds. Ismail Serageldin and Samir El- Sadek, with the assistance of Richard R.

Herbert (Arlington, VA: I. Serageldin, 1982), 246.

10

may continue for few days, this always creates havoc as far as lodging, sanitation, and food

services are concerned. The demand for services is huge and necessary for the district. The need

for accommodation, public health, transportation, and sanitation services mandates the complete

renovation of the area. Considering this high demand for services in Al Kadhimiya, there was a

need to develop and commercialize the site. Consequently, some of the changes introduced in the

historical site, such as straight and wide streets caused a defect in the urban fabric that was

cohesive; thus, the features of the urban form have changed. During the 1970s, political demands

dictated many municipal authorities in Iraq adopt a “policy of ‘freeing’ important historical

religious buildings from their surroundings.”15 This proved to be detrimental to several historical

religious structures. Their demolition represents an unrecoverable loss of the authentic Iraqi setting

and urban environments, like the clearances surrounding the Al Kadhimain shrine.16

In 1980 the site went through an urban intervention that demolished its historical features.17

The shrine is isolated from its surroundings, and the old fabric is diluted. The new changes brought

some urban problems and negatively affected the social aspects and the psychological comfort of

the inhabitants.

The Iraqi government committed itself to safeguarding and developing the historical site

through a number of studies. The most important study is by the mayor’s office of Bagdad,

conducted in 2008-2009 whereby a request for proposals for the regeneration of the Al-Kadhimiya

historical site and was won in a tight competition by the Dewan Architects & Engineers.18 The

15- Akram J. M. Al-Akkam, “Urban Heritage in Baghdad: Toward a Comprehensive Sustainable Framework,”

Journal of Sustainable Development. 6 (2)2013: 39.

16- Ibid., 39.

17- John Warren, and Roy Worskett, “Conservation and Redevelopment of the Kadimiyeh Area in Baghdad,” in

Adaptive Reuse: Integrating Traditional Areas into the Modern Urban Fabric, August 16-20, 1982, ed. Margaret

Bentley Sevcenko (Cambridge, Mass.: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and MIT

Laboratory of Architecture and Planning, 1983), 32. 18- Hassaneen Murtada, “Expansion in Hadra Kadhimiya on the Urban Structure of the Surrounding Area,”

University of Baghdad, Higher Institute for Urban and Regional Planning, high diploma, 2012, 43-70.

11

mayor’s vision was to combine the religious, commercial and local inhabitants’ interests in a

design so that it is representative of the environment where people live. All the while, the mayor’s

call for proposal emphasizes the uniqueness of the Al-Kadhimiya historical site but at the same

time invokes the need to provide durable solutions to its ongoing urban challenges.

1.6.2 Formal Analysis

1.6.2.1 The Al-Kadhimiya Historical Site

The Al Kadhimiya historical site consists of four nearby residential complexes which are

Al Dabgh Kanah, Al Tell, Al Shiyoukh, and Al Qatana. Al Kadhimiya is considered one of the

four axes of old Baghdad. The Al Kadhimiya characterizes one of the significant historical centers

in the city of Baghdad, conserving its physical shape in the face of changes that occurred in the

other parts of the city. It is a neighborhood that is round in shape, with a diameter of about ½ km.,

an area of 60 hectares, and a population of 600 persons per hectare. The heart of the site consists

of the Al Kadhimain shrine, representing the nucleus where it populated and expanded over several

of the site’s periods. Its plan is a large U-shaped open court which surrounds the inner building

except on its northern side where the other Safawi mosque is located19 (it is now called the Al

Jawadain mosque). It can be said that it is the main factor that regulates the urban structure of the

ancient site. The Al Kadhimiya neighborhood was built right up to the walls of its mosque: the

mosque of the Al Kadhimain shrine. The tomb mosque of the Al Kadhimain shrine, which is about

40 x 50 meters, contains the inner holy sanctum, an essential rectangular tomb-room of about 11

x 21 meters which comprises the tombs of two respected Imams. Around the mosque of the Al

19- Ihsan Fethi, Urban Conservation in Iraq: The Case for Protecting the Cultural Heritage of Iraq with Special

Reference to Baghdad Including a Comprehensive Inventory of its Areas and Buildings of Historic or Architectural

Interest (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Dept. of Town and Regional Planning, 1977), 114.

12

Kadhimain shrine circulates a riwaq (arcade) on all sides of the shrine and directly above are two

impressively splendid and magnificent gilded domes of dual shell structure straight over the

silvery-screened sanduqs (boxes). The gilded domes are pointed and rise about 28 meters in height

and are raised on a 6 meter high circular drum.

“The domes rest on thick internal walls and triangular cross-ribbed pendentives.

The surrounding inner riwaq (arcade) has flat-roofed outer colonnaded porticoes.

The riwaq, which surrounds the tomb-room, consists of twenty domed bays which

are about 4 by 8.5 meters with deep polygonal niches on either side. While the

tomb-room is flanked on the outside by the two great domes and by four small

minarets at the corners, the riwaq is conjoined by four impressive and lofty minarets

at its corners. These stand about 40 meters high (the highest in Baghdad) and each

contains one canopied balcony or verandah. The verandahs are 5 meters in diameter

and assembled in three rows of well-pronounced muqarnas work. The riwaq is then

surrounded on three sides by colonnaded porticos, while the fourth side is linked

with the Safawi mosque. The most elaborate of these porticos is the southern one

which faces Mecca.”20

Mecca is a city in Saudi Arabia as well as the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad and

the site of the Prophet’s first revelation of the Quran. Mecca is considered the holiest city for the

Islamic religion, and a pilgrimage to the city (Hajj) is mandatory for all able Muslims. Mecca is

home to the Kaaba, regarded by most as Islam’s holiest site, and thus the direction of Muslim

prayer.21 The vast open courtyard that surrounds the mosque of the Al Kadhimain shrine on all

three sides is about 35 meters in width, and this courtyard is surrounded by a twelve-meter high

brick wall with 10 portals. “The wall also contains some eighty iwans (rooms) used for various

purposes. Each iwan consists of a pointed vault about 2 meters in depth while the room is about

2.5 by 3 meters.”22

20- Ibid., 114.

21- Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Mecca the Blessed, Medina the Radiant: The Holiest Cities of Islam, export edition (place

of publication not identified: Tuttle Publishing, 1997).

22- Ihsan Fethi, Urban Conservation in Iraq: The Case for Protecting the Cultural Heritage of Iraq with Special

Reference to Baghdad Including a Comprehensive Inventory of its Areas and Buildings of Historic or Architectural

Interest (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Dept. of Town and Regional Planning, 1977), 114.

13

The site is covered by two-story dwellings in addition to several small mosques, schools,

shops, public baths, workshops, as well as old and modern hotels. The site houses have shanasheel

(wooden rooms in the upper floor extended to the street) giving its building a high sense of privacy,

it also serves as honor and prevents the entry of sunlight, in addition to providing shade for

pedestrians walking in the streets. The marketplaces are the same as in other Islamic cities or other

shrine-sites; they are distinctive for their roofed corridors. The courtyard of the shrine is the only

widely open space in the site; it accommodates the religious activities and boosts the social and

cultural activities of the residents. The narrow alleys are open into small open spaces that allow

the light to penetrate the dark areas of the alleys and improve visibility. These open spaces are

integral parts of the alleys and help in circulation of air that cools down the hot weather.

Furthermore, the Al Kadhimiya historical site is distinctively known for its narrow and twisted

streets with dead ends and the heights of its buildings that do not exceed two floors. The shrine

becomes the basis for the organization of the urban form of the historical site, which characterizes

the heart of the site and the focal point of its religious and civic activities; just like the grand

mosque in other Islamic and Arabian cities.

1.6.2.2 The Dewan Architecture and Engineer Firm Proposal

In Dewan’s proposal, the basic idea is that the holy shrine is the heart of the site and its

nucleus, forming the basis for its activity and growth. The winning proposal depicted the shrine in

the center, circled by religious facilities, historic houses, and marketed within a radius of half a

kilometer. The focus of the proposed plan was to meet the needs of the huge number of the shrine

visitors during the religious events and to preserve the historical urban fabric around the shrine, as

well as the renewal of its urban areas. The aim was to detect the impact of changes in the spatial

structure of the site that occurred due to changes in demand for services. In Dewan’s proposal, the

14

shrine is surrounded by three various and successive rings of the urban fabric, separating the Haram

(empty arena surrounding the shrine) from the outside to form a whole unit. As a result, the shrine

and the urban fabric rings, together, composed an integrated component.

The three circles surrounded the shrine, and their heights elevated gradually toward the

outside area. The first circle is composed of what is left from the historic urban fabric as well as

reconstruction and maintenance of the distinctive historical buildings that include houses and

stores; so that they could be used for religious, social, cultural, and commercial activities. The

renovation and the reconstruction of the empty or demolished areas, between the established

heritage buildings, would be conducted in a compatible pattern to these buildings. The

conservation and reconstruction processes composed a model to revive the ancient neighborhood

of the Al Kadhimiya historical site with inner courtyards and shanasheel, forming more pedestrian-

friendly spaces, and preventing reliance on automobiles.

The second circle encompassed the residential area with limited architectural homogeneity

feature. The pattern of its buildings simulated some elements of the historic buildings adjacent to

them, without exact repetition. Also, contained a number of simple craft and industrial activities,

along with traffic passages and parking lots. The heights of the buildings are low, three floors at

most. In this proposal, urban development allowed people from different family types and income

levels to afford a home in the area.

The third circle encompassed a group of residential buildings and new hotel buildings;

aligning the main roads nearby the Al Kadhimiya historical site, and forming a ring of six-floor

buildings around it, utilizing the resources that existing site provides and maintaining the

importance of public and private investments.

15

Four main axes penetrated the three rings, surrounded the religious center; and linked the

Al Kadhimiya site to the other parts of the city of Baghdad. They were designed as wide

pedestrians’ roads, and have stores, designated markets, restaurants, exhibits, and hotels to serve

the visitors and the residents. Also, the roads encompassed craft shops infiltrated by rest areas.

Other supplementary buildings such as a library, multi-purpose hall, and host building were added

to the historical site in which their designs combined and balanced between the traditional Islamic

styles and the contemporary architecture through a comprehensive urban development within

potential growth principles.

1.6.2.3 The Assemblage Architects Firm Proposal

The scope of Assemblage’s proposal included creating a new spatial pattern around the

shrine. The spatial pattern would contribute remarkably to the uniqueness of the site, and it would

be protected and encircled by a building wall that contained vital services to the visitors. The

building wall is named the Sacred Wall. It formed a new circular shape around the shrine and

functioned to improve the spatial configuration and the urban dynamics of the space, reflecting

and filtering the everyday access to the shrine. The Sacred Wall designed to distinguish the space

of the sacred from daily life, making the physical connection that conveyed transparency to where

the shrine space finished and the urban fabric started. The Sacred Wall also designed to embed

mixable services and facilities such as local administration, security check-points, cloak-rooms,

maintenance/storage areas, toilets, washing, and the seven main portal gates that link the shrine’s

inner gates to essential streets and axes. Furthermore, Assemblage’s proposal offered a new

western axis to the dominant shrine area, connected the latter with a relocated railway station and

a large new pedestrian boulevard. Assemblage’s proposal offered an injection strategy to provide

new services and infrastructure to the local community of the Al Kadhimiya historical site. This

16

injection strategy enriched the urban fabric in the existing residential districts with a circular

“necklace” of small courtyards as nodes, providing important educational and economic services

such as primary schools, small local businesses, and small shops and cafes. The urban development

is continued by the historic encirclement of the shrine with this an outer circle of smaller squares

as a necklace of courtyards that went deeper into existing residential areas, expanding the services

for the visitors and the residents. In Assemblage’s proposal, Al Kadhimiya site is considered as a

living resident community, not just a religious destination. As a local neighborhood, social patterns

are made for families such as open shaded civic spaces, meeting places, greenery facilities, and

landmarks.

Regarding urban conservation, many historic buildings, markets, distinctive streets, and

character districts with their elements and features are protected and maintained. As infrastructure

nodes, the necklace of courtyards radiated new water, power, and sewerage supplies line more

rooted into the existing residential districts. The necklace of courtyards is linked by a ring of

revitalized streets and would be noticed when crossed or followed. It is also intersected by radial

paths leading from the shrine to the periphery. The proposed necklace of courtyards would be

placed instead of used open space with a minimum demolition of existing structures.

The design process in this proposal formed a new collection of buildings organized on a

lifted plane as a new quarter on the vast western plot of empty land nearby the new western axis,

equipping new and main facilities and logistical services, and providing an automobile-free

environment on the ground level. Moreover, a new mosque and other supplementary buildings

such as a library, religious school, and religious/general administration buildings were added to

the area. The new mosque, as a religious landmark, is positioned to match the shrine orientation

and has a large shaded courtyard and colonnades. It situated in new street axis towards the south-

17

west. The library and the religious school buildings shared the same ornamental elevation as a pair

in one screen. The urban movement through this new quarter is rich with spatial complexity and

natural daylighting.

1.6.3 Comparative Analysis

This dissertation will compare and contrast two proposals to redevelop the Al-Kadhimiya

historical site and will analyze two different design strategies that architects and urban designers

used to incorporate history in these two renewal projects. The two proposals include the winning

proposal by the Dewan Architecture and Engineer Firm and one of the top-ten finalist projects by

Assemblage Architects Firm (AAF). The fundamental goal is not to disprove or approve the inert

image of history that is recommended by Dewan’s proposal, but rather to examine the mode in

which this representational image of history converts to “active and energetic materialities in

movement.”23

Drawing from the Deleuzian ontology of becoming and change, architectural design

“elements such as columns, walls, and beams” 24 would be utilized unpredictably and powerfully,

precisely “as pure indexical integers.”25 However, the template of representational thinking in

urban regeneration projects, specifically in the preservation of historical sites, aims to protect a

static image of what constitutes the ‘past’ and in turn, what ‘traditional architecture’ is by imitating

the historical elements and reprocessing the traditional substances. This tendency is criticized as

being “Disneyfied” and an oversimplification of history and the passage of time.

23- Manuel DeLanda, “Material Complexity,” in Digital Tectonics, edited by Neil Leach, David Turnbull and Chris

Williams (London: Wiley-Academy, 2004),14-21.

24- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “A Conversation with Peter Eisenman,” EI Croquis 83 (1997a):8.

25- Ibid., 8.

18

The Dewan proposal’s major strength is the attempt to make the Al Kadhimiya site an

attractive and thriving regional and international center in the field of religious and commercial

tourism and to involve the private sector in completing the project.26

Moreover, the comparative analysis indicates that the Dewan’s proposal has more strengths

in its design. The proposed plan attempted to develop the existing residential areas and their

services. Furthermore, the project made adequate preparations for mixed land uses and pedestrian

movement zones. Dewan’s proposal aimed to expand the space surrounding the shrine in a

coherent with the historic areas and to mix the religious functions and occasions within a

comprehensive urban plan. Besides, the empty space around the shrine has been used to build

service buildings, achieving the complementation in the urban fabric. The pedestrian movement

zones were designed to improve the urban areas and the passageways. These zones were prepared

with green spaces, providing shaded corridors by a circular canopy of cloth on a folding metal

frame supported by a central rod, used as protection against sun or sometimes rain. Palm trees are

planted in the movement axes.

In Dewan’s proposal, the Al Kadhimiya historical site was linked with the public

transportation network of the city of Baghdad. The proposal provided multiple transportation

options such as metro transport, river transport, and rail, attaining well-organized and urban

operative system of transportation in the Al Kadhimiya historical site.

The project has adopted an economic factor, generating a comprehensive master plan that

integrated spatial and economic realms in the same design. The project has expanded a very vast

rehabilitated public space for religious and cultural tourism. Both are instruments for economic

26- The Municipality of Baghdad (Amant Al- Assima), The Development of the Al Kadhimiya district (Development

Administration – Heritage Section. Baghdad, Iraq, 2008).

19

rationality that attains economic growth by attracting more visitors from outside the local

community.

Escaping the static image of Baghdadi house style, the Assemblage Architects Firm did

not use history in a conservative or nostalgic mode. As an alternative, the Assemblage Architects

Firm attached history to an innovative mode, mixing the contemporary with the old. The

preservation practice in the Assemblage Architects Firm’s entry emphasized the collective,

commercial, and cultural relationships of the individuals who live in this historical site. The

Assemblage Architects Firm’s entry developed the qualities of the historical paths, streets, and

houses in addition to the vitality of its retail areas, giving the residents the sense of place. The

existing adjacent constructions opposed with the monument, which required more wide space for

safety in addition to more facility offices.

In this finalist entry, the preservation of the architectural context as a set of successive units

would ensure enhancing the creationist version of socio-spatial materialization, regardless of how

the new formal term adheres to the former format. Thus it gives high flexibility in dealing and

interacting with these formal terms, under the condition that it forms one conceptual assemblage.

Nonetheless, it also seeks to radicalize the conception of everyday life and urbanism to comprise

social life, environmental life, and economic life. “The Deleuzian concept shown in this alternative

is the freeing of thought from that which captures or captivates it, and to free thought from the

image, indeed to free thought from representation, from the transcendental illusions of

representation, to give it back its capacity to effect transformation or metamorphosis, to make

thinking itself a little bomb or scattergun.”27

27- Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the outside - essays on virtual and real space (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press,

2001), 62-63.

20

1.6.4 Conceptual Analysis

Deleuze proposes an ontology of becoming and change – originated from the creative and

contingent thinking of pure difference (thinking without representational information, such as a

previous image or sign). This dissertation of being is a reason to think of ‘difference in itself’– “in

terms of how we differentiate in ourselves in our inevitable and perpetual process of

transformation, rather than the difference between things, and being different from each other.”28

The logic of representation subjugates difference to identity, a practice that Deleuze finds

retrograde in terms of the creative human mind. Instead of thinking about what differs, minds are

attached to what is represented and thus lack the ingenuity to innovate by negating the true inherent

difference. As Dovey stated, “While representations and spatial practice are integrated in the field

of everyday life, they are seriously divided in architectural/urban practice and criticism where

avant-garde, form-makers and spatial analysts generally operate in quite separate fields.”29 Minor

architecture, as discussed by Jill Stoner, seeks to cause a rupture in structures of domination and

oppression. Minor architects are activist architects that excavate the underground of our system.

By attempting to crack these repressive traditions, which is a political action at the core of Deleuze

and Guattari’s philosophy, social-design activism will challenge any doxa, any taken-for-granted

distributions of power.

These emerging tendencies experiment with intensities and heterogeneous architecture in

an attempt to find more creative forms of opportunistic connections for our future, “implying a

break with static, fixed, closed and dangerously essentialist notions of place, but preserves a

provisional ontology of place-as-becoming: there is always, already and only becoming-in-the-

28- Michael Buser, “Thinking through non-representational and affective atmospheres in planning theory and

practice,” Planning Theory, 13 (3)2014: 227-243.


21

world.”30 Similar to tightrope walkers, these architects are progressing with agile but careful

movements on the powerful lines that surround and connect the globe; the suggested critical

strategy is to resist the political lines of force that are inherent in major architecture towards lines

of flight, towards a minor architecture.31 “Where everyday urbanism attends to the interaction

between mundane places and the urban fabric, ‘machinic urbanism’ denies the fundamental

separation between the everyday life of the city and the city as a whole in an effort to tangibly

active multiple urban scales, conditions, and forms.”32

1.7 Literature Review

This dissertation will focus on four main points that include 1) the notions of ‘difference,’

‘repetition,’ ‘empiricism,’ and ‘subjectivity,’ in Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and change 2)

‘place character’ and ‘Disneyfication’ 3) ‘nomadic history,’ ‘machinic urbanism,’ impersonality,

and ‘effects’ and 4) Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘assemblage’ and ‘affect.’ Many scholars

such as Deleuze, Guattari, Bergson, K. Michael Hayes, Fredric Jameson, Aldo Rossi, Christian

Norberg-Schulz, Peter Eisenman, Kim Dovey, and Simone Brott, write about these concepts and

I will examine the similarities and differences in their arguments in order to understand the

trajectory of thought as well as to develop my definitions and uses of these concepts.

The leading research for this literature review focuses on the Deleuzian theory of the

representational image of thought and his philosophy of difference. The theory of difference

developed by Deleuze defies the traditional theory of representation, whereby we consider each

object (re)presenting something is subordinated to a category or a grouping considered as the


31- Jill Stoner, Toward a minor architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

32- Adrian Parr, Hijacking Sustainability (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009), 142.

22

original. Seen as such, difference is subordinated to some accepted concept considered as the

standard everything else is measured to indefinitely. To think in terms of ‘difference-in-itself’

means to ignore the concept itself per se and reflect on its production. In Deleuze’s argument,

“representation” is the end result of giving more importance to “identity.” He views this as a

distortion of the truth which does not allow other truths to manifest themselves. This

“representation” can be qualified as a “misrepresentation.” To counter the proponents of

“representation,” Deleuze coined a new term, “internal difference,” which is free of the four

illusionary concepts of “representation,” namely: identity, resemblance, analogy, and opposition.

This literature review also provides a new image of thought to comprehend the formation

of an ethical succession of events in which architectural and urban design practices escape the

representational image functionary. It does so by merging the ideas and philosophies of

impersonality and effects of Deleuze (in his book Empiricism and Subjectivity), with that of

Simone Brott (an Australian architect), as the beginning for a diagramming analysis of the

empirical subjectivity that functions as a set of effects to reframe the architectural and urban design

practices.

The second essential concept is the idea of ‘place identity’ and ‘Disneyfication.’ The thesis

will discuss these concepts through its analysis of the winning proposal by the Dewan Architects

& Engineers Firm. ‘Disneyfication’ is criticized for “creating uniformity, privatization, and

commodification of public space as well as for its exclusionary nature and its mimicry of the

authentic qualities.”33 As reflected in architecture and urban design, a number of post-structuralist

critiques have developed similar concepts, along with ‘sense of place,’ ‘spirit of place,’

‘authenticity,’ and ‘home,’ to capture the passing aspirations of people in the form of identity,

33- Helen Morgan Parmett, “Media as a spatial practice: Treme and the production of the media neighborhood,”

Continuum 28 (3)2014: 286-299.

23

repressing difference through the imposition of some ideologies on a given culture.34 Kim Dovey

argues that when it comes to how people perceive a given space within a structure, the ‘identity,’

‘character’ or ‘sense of place’ are the most evolving concepts that come to mind.35 Thus, this

interpretation of Dovey’s standpoint is compatible with Deleuze’s notion of representation. “Truly

sustainable change will address more than just the material, spatial realities of slums: design that

reworks only buildings, sidewalks, and infrastructure will never be truly sustainable because it

fails to address the ideological definitions of people living within that space.”36

The main reason for selecting Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm was their “keenness,”

and “willingness” to preserve the historical area. Despite being approved by the government and

Iraqi architecture and urban design academics and the initiation of its implementation in 2014,37

the project comes under scrutiny in this thesis, which debates that its renewed elements and

principles conflict with the heritage of the old site. The thesis will argue that the project proposed

by Dewan Architects & Engineers, due to its enormous size and unsuitable nature, will be a design

of an unreal or artificial site. The method of copying the same site by repeating its former elements

and principles is inadvisable for the redevelopment of an urban historical project because it leads

to the potential ‘Disneyfication’ of historical identity.38 Thus, this thesis argues that returning to

tradition is bottled up in a system that always calls for the same to be reproduced and thus it

becomes a dogma, an imposed will of few on the society which does not encourage rejuvenation

and innovation.

34- Kim Dovey, Framing places: mediating power in built form (London: Routledge, 2008).


36- Aimee Wilson, Book Review: Adrian Parr (2009) Hijacking Sustainability: Capitalism, Militarism, and the

Struggle for Collective Life. Symploke, Volume 18, Numbers 1-2, (2010): 387-389.

37- “The Government Allocates 200 Billion Iraqi Dinars for the Expansion Project of the Kazimain Shrine.”

ALMADA PRESS. October 31, 2014, accessed on April 25, 2015.

http://www.almadapress.com/ar/NewsDetails.aspx?NewsID=38911.

38- Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London: Sage, 2004).

http://www.almadapress.com/ar/NewsDetails.aspx?NewsID=38911

24

The third critical element to this analysis revolves around the concepts and definitions of

‘nomadic history’ and what Parr calls ‘machinic urbanism.’ This dissertation is a critical analysis

of a transitional and productive return of history, ‘a nomadic history.’ The term ‘nomadic history’

is coined by the Deleuze scholar Craig Lundy, which is a conception that has been formulated by

Deleuze’s logic of creation. ‘Nomadic history’ attempts to cause a rupture in structures of

domination and oppression to provide “wandering distributions” that move back and forth between

old and new anarchic relations.

‘Machinic urbanism’ engages actively with the unusual style of everyday life and

urbanism, especially the impression of appearing to “not only what is present in the banality of

everyday life, but also on what is absent yet might be there.”39 By analyzing the proposal of the

Assemblage Architects Firm, it will be shown that these alternate possibilities have potential.

“Inspired by the morphology and poetics of the Baghdadi house, the Assemblage Architects Firm’s

design successfully resolves a complex matrix of religious, infrastructure, and conservation

demands.”40

“The machinic refers to the pattern of non-discursive practices organizing bodies, and is a

socio-technological machine.”41 Assemblage Firm’s courtyard design seeks to infuse new services

and infrastructure to the residents of the Al Kadhimiya site, highlighting and enhancing urban life.

The goal of enhancing the active public urban spaces is to facilitate the process of redevelopment

over time, including different urban actors as well as the residents. The processes of resistance

have been analyzed here following Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage and affect.

39- John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, Everyday urbanism: featuring John Chase (New York, N.Y.:

Monacelli Press, 1999), 32.

40- Assemblage Architecture + Urbanism Frim. Holy City Masterplan. http://assemblage.co/0905_07.html, accessed

on 01 Jan 2015.


http://assemblage.co/0905_01.html


25

These concepts present the fourth element in this research. They will be explored as practices of

deterritorialization in revolutionary spaces in opposition to the dominant structures. “Becoming is

concerned with the not-yet, with ensuring that something remains for the people-to-come.” 42

Furthermore, there will be additional research on the architectural and urban design

practices in the Middle East and Arab countries. Authors to be included are Yasser Elsheshtawy,

Khaled Asfour, and Waleed Alsayyad. Most of them “point to the theme of the ‘struggle,’ as Arab

cities have traditional centers desiring to move away from the restrictions of the end of tradition

to embrace modernity, and they are viewed as both recipients of modernity and at the same time a

focal point for Arabic-Islamic identity.”43

1.8 Theoretical Framework and Intellectual Apparatus

Most of the chapters of this dissertation have a solid comprehension, not only of the key

theoretical texts by Deleuze, Guattari, Nietzsche, and Bergson but also of other theorists and critics

who offer sympathetic perspectives on an architecture and urban design. That is "re-orienting,"

that provokes thematic connections beyond formalist gestures, and that collaborates with (rather

than dictates to) its users and inhabitants. This dissertation gives a clear sense of what the

historiographical traditions are with respect to the Al Kadhimiya historical site. Many of the

theoretical principles are derived from primary sources.



43- Yasser Elsheshtawy, The evolving Arab city: tradition, modernity and urban development (London: Routledge,

2008).

26

1.8.1 Helen Morgan Parmett’s Notion of ‘Disneyfication’

The repetition of the historical styles and the need to protect the ‘tradition’ of the Al

Kadhimiya site caused some critics to label the winning proposal a “Disneyland,’ insinuating that

it embodies socially engineered identities rather than a ‘real’ urban character.44 This repetition

begins to articulate a specific “norm” as a form of hegemonic practice. For the winning proposal,

‘Disneyfication’ can be described as the transformation of the Al Kadhimiya site into a carefully

controlled and safe environment with homogenized qualities that divest the site of its unique

character, repackaging and reproducing the past in a standardized style. Further, authenticity is

often a term debated on unjustified, moralistic and circular arguments. “The fragility of the term

‘authenticity’ is exposed when one considers how it ‘claims’ its authenticity against the supposed

absence of authenticity elsewhere.”45 This research intends to demonstrate that the winning

redevelopment project for the Al Kadhimiya site may indeed lead to a potential ‘Disneyfication’

of the historical site. To develop my arguments, I rely on Helen Morgan Parmett’s definition of

‘Disneyfication,’ in which she primarily equates it to consumerism, for the goal is to create “an

optimal space for the marketing and consumption of consumer goods and branded experiences.”46

This definition fails to win the unanimous support of theorists, according to Morgan. Moreover, I

parallel Parmett’s definition of Disneyfication to Alan Bryman’s explanation of the term:

“Disneyfication is typically associated with a statement about the cultural products.” 47 This is to

say that “to Disneyfy” is to translate or change an object into something shallow and even

44- Kim Dovey, Becoming places: urbanism/architecture/identity/power (London: Routledge, 2010).

45- Neil Leach, “Less aesthetics, more ethics,” Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas edited by Nicholas Ray

(London and New York: Taylor & Francis Inc., 2005), 140.

46- Helen Morgan Parmett, “Disneyomatics: Media, Branding, and Urban Space in Post-Katrina New Orleans,”

Mediascape (winter, 2012). http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2012_Disneyomatics.html, accessed on

February 20, 2015.

47- Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London: Sage, 2004), 5.

http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2012_Disneyomatics.html

27

oversimplified. Thus, it can be purported that the idea of ‘authenticity’ is merely a tactic to fulfill

specific agendas.

In contrast, Adrian Parr advocates a form of ‘machinic urbanism’ in which architects and

urban designers would “experiment with the material movements of life in all its variation.”48 This

dissertation explores another entry submitted to an international-wide competition for the

redevelopment of the Al Kadhimiya historical site. It will compare the traditionally conventional

winning proposal by the Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm to another proposal by the

Assemblage Architects Firm. It may be thought that the latter firm does not establish as much of

imagistic use of history as the winning one, but I will argue unlike the winning entry, demonstrates

a more creative and less harmful approach towards the Al Kadhimiya historical site. In the first

proposal by Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm, it will be argued that the creation of a

‘Disneyfied’ historical identity has become an important marketing device that guides the

developers’ design strategy whose interests are predominantly driven by turning a quick profit. In

contrast, it will be shown that the proposal by Assemblage Architects Firm applies a creative

alternative: a ‘machinic urbanism’ detached from this predetermined method. These variables can

impact people’s social, political and economic lives.

1.8.2 Gilles Deleuze’s Notion of ‘Difference in itself’

Gilles Deleuze challenges the assumed capture within a specific perspective by using

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘eternal return.’ For Nietzsche, the

eternal return is an ontological concept in which the repetition is produced via the affirmation of

difference. Architecturally, the repetition in postmodern historicism is a mode of imitation. It

represents factitious or artificial copies of timeless precedents, establishing a homogenous


28

architecture as a ‘false movement of the abstract’49 in which the meaning is stabilized, the work is

idealized, and postulating the creation of difference based on prior resemblances, icons, and

oppositions. Nietzsche’s version of repetition explicitly refers to the hybrid products (contents) of

the neo-avant-garde, in which the architect-critics have desire and ‘will to form’ a heterogeneous

architecture based on wholly formal-material emergences and effects that are freed from any

authorial intervention, while not representing the real or repeatedly producing a plane of

identification. Human classification fails to attain identity in its whole: ‘difference in itself.’

Although pure difference cannot be identified and is unattainable in the present, it underlies all

identities and enables us to explain their coming to being. Furthermore, Olkowski argues, “the

system of representation, whether in the realm of philosophy, psychology, social and political

theory, ethics, or aesthetics, operates by establishing a fixed standard as the norm or model.”50 In

her development, Olkowski holds the position that the system of representation is put to question

by Deleuze’s ‘logic of difference.’

1.9 Findings and Discussion

By problematizing that system of representation, which functions as a norm or model,

meaning can be created for the minorities; “hierarchically organized time and space”51 can be

dismantled and turned toward fluid processes called ontology of becoming and change.52

According to the Deleuzian theory of Difference and Repetition, the practice of thinking is random

and may direct to a zone not imagined at the beginning. That means the thought process cannot be

described as stable; instead, it can seriously affect people’s social, economic and environmental


1999).

50- Ibid.

51- Ibid, 2.

52- Ibid, 14.

29

lives. Some of Deleuze’s famous themes, which are parts of his theory of Difference and

Repetition, are the ideas of repetition, copies, original, and the ideal and its reproductions.53

Deleuze accordingly disapproves this ‘dogmatic image of thought’ because of its association to

the system of representation.54 Deleuze suggests that we do not know what the future holds for us,

and ethically this is a good case to make. Regarding architecture and urban design, uncertainty

might lead the thinking process to entirely different particularities.

1.10 Organization of the Dissertation

The Organization of this dissertation is as follows:

Chapter One

The first chapter exposes the research framework and offers an introduction to the overall

structures of this dissertation. It consists of a description of the dissertation thesis statement, aims,

questions, and scope. It also contains a setting of the urban scene with historical background,

formal analysis, and a brief history of the issue. The first chapter also presents the theoretical and

methodological approaches, intellectual apparatus, comparative and conceptual analyses of two

different design strategies and proposals for the redevelopment of the Al Kadhimiya historical site.

Chapter Two

The second chapter compares the literature review that is directly relevant to the key

concepts of this dissertation. It reviews the relevant Deleuzian literature in collection of multi-

disciplinary texts and contemporary academic research related to the disciplines of architecture

and urban design as an orientation in which cultural artifacts would have an engagement mode

with non-traditional events /paths /energies/ materials that flow to cast history in prolific relations

53- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),

128.

54- Daniela Voss, Conditions of thought Deleuze and transcendental ideas (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 13.

30

with the present, creating a different appreciation of the past. Theoretical framework and

intellectual apparatus resulted from this second chapter will constitute the groundwork for this

thesis and will be used as a guide to analyze the two proposals. The central theoretical thought will

come from Deleuze’s conceptualization of difference, and his reading of Nietzschean ‘eternal

return,’together with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and affect.

Chapter Three

The third chapter presents and extends on the dissertation theoretical framework and

qualitative methodology. The methodology chapter introduces the data that was collected from the

two proposals and data analysis procedures that will be included in findings and discussion

chapters. It also contains a description of the location where the urban issue exists and why it

exists. This chapter will present a comparative analysis of the two different design strategies. The

analysis of these two proposals will be examined through theoretical texts to develop a

poststructuralist analytical framework. Focusing on ‘nomadic history,’ and ‘machinic urbanism’

in comparison to ‘place identity’ and ‘Disneyfication,’ this chapter will survey various

architectural and urban design theories, mechanisms, and inspirations in which architects and

urban designers apply them to practice, exploring the intersections between the theories of the

Gilles Deleuze and the subjects of architecture and urban design. Moreover, a theoretical

argument, evolving from a global range of literature, including Middle Eastern argument, will be

examined along with Deleuze’s theory of Difference and Repetition as a critical groundwork for

multiple responses and opportunities to expand the image of history beyond the traditional notions

conveyed by architectural historians as tracing methodology.

31

Chapter Four

The fourth chapter remarks on the findings, reporting what the data analysis exposed. Henri

Bergson’s philosophy of time, used by Deleuze when he developed his theory of Difference and

Repetition will be adopted as a poststructuralist analytical framework to critically analyze the two

proposals. It will first outline the history of the site and its developments to examine and compare

the architectural and urban design practices in the Al Kadhimiya historical site in the past and

present. It contains an extended description of the urban context, including the morphological

stages for the Al Kadhimiya site with the historical background of the planning and urban studies

(approaches to the issue). This chapter provides new understanding of memory, relating

architectural and urban design thinking to the ‘machinic’ mode of experimental design and

preservation in which architectural and urban design practices can produce difference, affect, and

assemblage.

Chapter Five

For further discussion, the fifth chapter offers a conceptual analysis and interpretation of

published literature. It explores Eisenman’s ideas of history, memory, and monument with the

complexity theory and poststructuralist theory. This chapter scrutinizes the interstitial spaces in

Eisenman’s critical practice through their temporary arrangement and flows in urban zones as a

set of conceptual and affective assemblages associated with social localities in cultural

productions. The flows of complex urban lines and singularities in Eisenman’s critical practice

undermine the traditional oppositions, challenge homogeneous architecture, and revise the entire

concept of modernist form.

32

Chapter Six

Lastly, the conclusion is the sixth chapter and gives a summary of the main points of this

dissertation, implications for the potentials, contribution, and further work. It will expand the

research on ‘nomadism’ in many ways for future academic agenda. By focusing primarily on the

reconfiguration of historical materiality in the realm of contemporary design, and the process of

difference and differentiation in architectural design, this chapter will explore the possibility of

creating architectural image regarding Deleuze’s Spinozism frame of ethical-aesthetic.

33

CHAPTER TWO

Literature Review

2.1 The Time of Architecture: Deleuze’s Reading of Nietzschean Eternal Return

In his book Difference and Repetition, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze distinguishes

between two theories of repetition, one associated with the ‘Platonic’ theory and the other with the

‘Nietzschean’ theory. Repetition in the ‘Platonic’ theory, via the criterion of accuracy, can be

identified as a repetition of homogeneity, using pre-established similitude or identity to repeat the

Same, while repetition in the ‘Nietzschean’ theory, via the criterion of authenticity, is aligned with

the virtual rather than real, producing simulacra or phantasms as a repetition of heterogeneity. It is

argued in this chapter that the distinction that Deleuze forms between modes of repetition has a

vital role in his innovative approaches to the Nietzschean’s notion of ‘eternal return’ as a

differential ontology, offering numerous insights into work on issues of homogeneity and

heterogeneity in architecture. This chapter compares the literature review that is directly relevant

to the fundamental concepts of this dissertation.

The purpose of this comparison is to explore the possibility of distinguishing the repetition

of the neo-avant-garde as a process of self-generation, or as a ‘simulacra of the electronic

paradigm,’1 which allows emergent connections and transformations to unfold as a virtual

difference and pure movement of becoming from the representational thinking of postmodern

experiment that has led to historicism in architecture. It does so by conceptually analyzing the

transformational strategies of architect and theoretician Peter Eisenman in direct contrast to that

of postmodern historicism, focusing on Eisenman architectural folding techniques in the Rebstock

1- Peter Eisenman, “Folding in Time: The Singularity of Rebstock,” in Written into the Void: Selected Writings 1990-

2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 32.

34

project, Frankfurt, Germany (Figure 2.1), that diverge from any prior geometry toward a self-

referentiality status. It will compare and contrast representational architectural and urban design

thinking with a notion of architectures of becoming, using Deleuze’s theory of Difference and

Repetition that offers a new intellectual framework for experimental design, specifically it will use

Deleuze’s thinking on ‘radical difference.’ The leading exploration for this literature review relies

on the Deleuzian concept of the representational image of thought and his philosophy of difference

that offers a new intellectual framework for architectural and urban design practices.

Figure 2.1: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark Concept Diagram, 1991-1992.

Source: http://www.eisenmanarchitects.com/rebstockpark.html#images.

http://www.eisenmanarchitects.com/rebstockpark.html#images

35

2.2 Deleuze’s Philosophy in Difference and Repetition

Difference and Repetition is a comprehensive text in which Deleuze explains, develops,

and keeps track of two ideas: pure difference and complex repetition. Ever since its publication in

1968, it has been valued as a classic book in the realm of contemporary philosophy and the

masterpiece of Deleuze’s works. In the introduction, Deleuze claims that “repetition is not

generality.”2 Repetition is not a particular body of the same entities resembling one another in a

relevant way or applicable (subjected) to a particular law, reoccurring over and over again. Instead,

repetition is the “historical condition under which something new is actually produced.”3

Repetition is comprehended in the context of radical difference, as an innovative process that

produces entirely new variation and new differences in and through each recurrence. Often

considered a philosopher of radical difference, Deleuze’s work emphasizes how critical

‘difference’ is in his research, placing repetition outside the domain of generality, identity, and

law.

Along these lines, “repetition is a more powerful and less tiring stylistic procedure than

antithesis, and moreover, better suited to renew a subject,”4 allowing new experiences to emerge.

Following Deleuze, repetition can be read in terms of experimentation, variation, and discovery;

it is a creative repetition since it emerges from the multiple planes (sheets) of memory instead of

out of the imitation or representation of the habitual mode of living that produces a complete

reformation of repetition. To repeat: “We are not, of course, doing history: we are not saying that

people invent this regime of signs, only that at a given moment a people effectuates the assemblage

2- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1.

3- Ibid., 90.


36

that assures the relative dominance of that regime under certain historical conditions.”5 To repeat

is to make a change; to reject remaining principally the same; to renew not to represent; to reveal

the revisionary force of difference; to affirm the new in the face of clichés. To repeat the biases of

something is to begin again, like life itself begins accurately with the untimely performance of a

dynamic act of repetition, leading to mutation or ‘becoming.’

“To reach a repetition which saves, or which changes life, beyond good and evil,

would it not be necessary to break with the order of impulses, to undo the cycles

of time, reach an element which would be like a true ‘desire,’ or like a choice

constantly beginning again.”6

Deleuze scholar Adrian Parr poses two questions regarding the concept of repetition in Deleuze’s

work. The questions that Parr raises are difficult to answer in a direct way without intellectual

analysis that would comprise a wide variety of Deleuze’s notions, such as ‘becoming,’

‘differentiation,’ ‘eternal return,’ and ‘deterritorialization.’ Deleuze’s claim that repetition is

eternally produced to affirm difference and to make a radical disruption, not to reiterate the same,

is the first analysis of the first question: “how is repetition produced?”7 Repetition is the

ungrounded moment that falls out of the authority of representational schema, by which every

reproduction is read as the replication or copy of some original scene. In fact, Deleuze undermines

the Platonic method for repeating with the purpose of producing false copies.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze focuses on the issue of the Platonic model of

repetition as a model of representation; he argues that the Platonic model of repetition lacks the

5- Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1987), 121.

6- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 133.

7- Adrian Parr, “Repetition,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


37

ability to conceive difference in itself, raising Nietzsche’s motto “overthrow of Platonism.”8 Plato

contends that identity has an upper hand over difference. Plato does not hesitate to undermine

difference by tying up identity with thought, knowledge, intellect, and being. Furthermore, Plato

reduces difference to subordination by relating it with identity, opposition, resemblance or analogy

as phantom and with reduced-existence. Repetition has been subordinated to designed

representation, for it is “grasped only by means of recognition, distribution, reproduction or

resemblance.”9 For Deleuze, the Platonic model serves to justify or legitimize repetition that

established habitually around the call for categorical generalization, rigidity, and hegemony.

Deleuze considers that maintaining the Platonic model of repetition is a kind of instigation to use

the power of representation, erasing difference as a conception or as reality. This happens, indeed,

according to the principles of judgment that are entirely accurate from a specific point of view,

mirroring images in a series of reflection; the judgment of these reflex determinations is made in

which difference is subordinated to the authority of representation.

“The Platonic copy is the Like-the claimant who receives at one remove. To the

pure identity of the model or the original, there corresponds exemplary similitude,

to the pure resemblance of the copy, there corresponds a similitude called imitative.

But for all that, one cannot say that Platonism continues to develop this power of

representation for itself.”10

Wherever repetition fails in achieving the original, representation is situated instead,

subsuming and categorizing difference under an inert four-part judgment: identity, opposition,

resemblance, and analogy. “In the concept of reflection, indeed, the mediatory and mediatized

difference submits itself fully to the identity of the concept, to the opposition of predicates, to the

analogy of judgment, and to the resemblance of perception, here we rediscover the necessarily

8- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 59-

71.

9- Ibid., 138.

10- Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27 (Winter 1983), 56.

38

quadripartite character of representation.”11 Deleuze rejects the originary point of the thing that is,

to begin with, original identity or an already given structure to the homogenous and static

spatialization of time in which “repetition can cyclically reproduce itself.”12 Deleuze’s post-

structuralist approach rethinks the process of repetition as a process of self-generation that is not

tied to a subject or object. In this sense, repetition is a dynamic process of a powerful resistance

and a self-maintainability that resists the nostalgia and any attempt to reproduce a past tense. Thus,

repetition seems to be extending and flowing beyond any finite perception of judgment or actual

image.13 Deleuze relates his interest in repetition to the power of difference, specifically to his

attempt to rethink difference in itself. For Deleuze, repetition is a new beginning, and it is produced

through nonlinear successions of qualitative changes rather than “a linear sequence: the end of one

cycle marking the beginning of the next.”14

2.3 Nietzschean Eternal Return

In his influential reading of Nietzschean eternal return, Deleuze refuses the teleological

doctrine of repetition that is directed not only by mechanical forces but that also moves toward

a particular goal or purpose, criticizing such understanding in which the distinguishing of

difference is concealed, that is the instant when difference descends under the control of

representation. As an alternative, Deleuze asserts that the distinguishing of difference in the

Nietzschean process noticeably cracks the representation: the return is a differentiating of

difference as a dynamic affirmation of what becomes as a heterogeneous series that intensifies and

11- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 34-

35.



13- Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2002), 91.



39

activates as the process returns, opening it up eternally to occasions and chaos. The system of

heterogeneous series contains differential elements that are “intensities.” To state it in another way,

heterogeneity emerges out of intensity.

Furthermore, the reoccurrence indicates a whole that occurs through variation and

difference, in which the affirmation of what becomes is the multiple of chance and connections.

Deleuze clarifies in his book, Difference and Repetition, that the Nietzschean eternal return is the

“power of beginning and beginning again.”15 This cycles of return lead Parr to pose the second

question: “What is repeated?”16 The facility of making endless connections is precisely what

repetition is about; repetition is not moving or operating in a single direction. In other words, the

movement of repetition is not unidirectional, it cannot guide us anywhere final, and it does not rely

on a specific object or subject to repeat. Rather, it sets in motion, in “perpetual disequilibrium,”17

in heterogeneity of time and space, so that differences can be created from every direction or point

of view. “What repeats, then, is not models, styles or identities, but the full force of difference in

and of itself, those pre-individual singularities that radically maximize difference on a plane of

immanence, it is this innovative understanding of the process of difference and differentiation that

mutates the context through which repetition occurs.”18 What emerges from this intellectual

analysis is the realization that repetition is an innovative action of transformation, it is a chance of

reinvention.


136.




1999), 14.



40

Explicitly, repetition liquefies the identity as it attempts to transform it, producing entirely

something else, something new, unidentifiable and inventive. Therefore, Deleuze maintains

repetition is vital to the idea of the virtual power of transformation. In reference to Thomas

Pynchon’s book Mason & Dixon, the American architect and theoretician Peter Eisenman aptly

reminds us that “time is the space that is not seen.”19 Eisenman means that “time is a condition of

space.” 20 Furthermore, Eisenman refers to Fredric Jameson, who thinks that the “postmodern

condition involved the transformation of time into space.”21 Eisenman significantly transforms the

architectural forms by relocating them in a non-representational sequence of expressions as

opposed to fixed schemas, theorizing and offering an alternative model of repetition. His work not

only ruins and cracks the hierarchical system of representational thinking debated above and

below, but also performs as a creative activity of something else that will not be represented even

if it is presented in images. The eternal return in Eisenman’s architecture is not a historical addition,

or simply an ornament; in contrast, it creates an active and essential task of transformation.

Traditionally, architecture has always been tied to or situated within a particular condition,

identifying the conventional categories of functional, structural, and symbolic orders which are

fixed, ‘hierarchically-organized structures in time and space,’22 and turned into an ideational

representation that proposes a reductive formalism with ultimate ground and a specific outcome.

Participating in the system of signification to give a transcendent meaning to ‘the phenomenal

subject,’23 the conventional sense of architecture conceals difference with a false identity. The

19- Peter Eisenman, “Time Warps: The Monument,” Anytime, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson (Cambridge: The MIT

Press, 1999), 250.

20- Ibid., 250.

21- Ibid., 250.


1999), 14.

23- Simone Brott, “Toward a Theory of the Architectural Subject,” Deleuze and Architecture, ed. Hélène Frichot and

Stephen Loo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 151.

41

repetition process in postmodern historicism is a method of mimicry representing faked or artificial

replicas of timeless precedents, forming homogenous architectural and urban designs in which the

meaning is embedded, and the work is exemplified, and assuming the formation of difference

based on prior resemblances, icons, and oppositions.

By contrast, Nietzsche’s theory of repetition clearly proposes hybrid products or (contents)

that the architects of the neo-avant-garde use in their design, in which the architects have ‘will to

form’ heterogeneous architectural and urban designs based on entire emergences and effects that

are released from any authority, while representing the virtual, not the real or not repetitively

constructing a plane of identification. Aiming to set in motion divergent architectural series that

occur as continual processes of differentiating, Eisenman announces the end of all architectural

styles and traces a time in which architecture is a creative transformation rather than reflection.

Eisenman marks a radical change in the idea of repetition that involves both space and time. In his

essay, Folding in Time: The Singularity of Rebstock, Eisenman argues that repeating the past is

not the probable solution to the present urban form. In that introductory essay, Eisenman proposes

an alternate manner of repetition that diverges from the design of the modernist avant-gardes and

visualizes repetition as the invention of pure difference rather than false identity, and in his design

process of the Rebstock project, he produces creative rather than representational thinking and

practice (Figure 2.2). Eisenman formulates the idea that the repetition has been altered due to the

paradigm shift when the world moved from mechanical reproduction to the electronic reproduction

in all fields of the design arts.

“The idea of repetition has changed because the idea of time has changed.”24 Time in the

electronic paradigm is active, nonlinear, and non-sequential, and it is liable to forfeit its

24- Peter Eisenman, “Folding in Time: The Singularity of Rebstock,” in Written into the Void: Selected Writings

1990-2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 28.

42

immediacy. Consequently, the individual has lost the expressive response to an immediate action,

and the solution is not to restate representational models in order to create “the old forms of

individual expression.”25 Eisenman has continually argued that architecture is traditionally

conceived as Cartesian space in classical time that contains representational image taken for

granted as a neutral or natural condition.

Figure 2.2: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark’s surroundings, 1991-1992.


In his other essay, Unfolding Events: Frankfurt Rebstockpark and the Possibility of a New

Urbanism, Eisenman stresses that architecture can no longer be subordinated to the static terms of

space and time. Furthermore, he insists that architecture must deal with the ‘presentness,’ in which

people become part of the present environment.26 “Eisenman posits the term ‘presentness’ as one

possibility for a ‘weak’ practice, the hazard of architecture as an event.”27 The event is a component

of time that is not observed as a sequential series, by which the end of one instant decides the start

of the next one; nor is it a calculated time or quantifiable time. According to Eisenman, the notion

25- Ibid., 28.

26- Peter Eisenman, “Unfolding Events: Frankfurt Rebstockpark and the Possibility of a New Urbanism,” in Written

into the Void: Selected Writings 1990-2004 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 13.

27- Robert Edward Somol, “Dummy Text, or The Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture,” in Diagram

diaries, Peter Eisenman (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), p.19.

43

of the event offers ‘other time’ that it is not narrative nor dialectical. This “otherness” of the time

reveals itself in real repetition, and it is “the time of the present which must contain the before and

the after.”28

Our habitual memory is tied to general forms, in which we routinely repeat these forms of

exact past experience; therefore, the habitual memory reduces all the small differences in life to

be the same. However, if we recall a specific moment in the past that resonates with another

moment in the present, our memory is different in kind; therefore, we succeed to achieve the real

repetition of time and produce singularity. Following Gilles Deleuze, Eisenman mentions that

“singularity refers to the possibility in a repetition or a multiple for one copy to be different from

another copy.”29 According to Deleuze, regarding the logic of subjectivity in Bergson’s

philosophy, “subjectivity is time. ....time is not the interiority in us, but just the opposite, the

interiority in which we are, in which we move, live and change.”30 Putting that differently, the

flexibility of Deleuzean time characterizes the event of new time, in which innovative

developments, or forms of transformations, reveal in that singular flow of time as impersonal

effects and material powers, opening towards the pure becoming. “Time is truly sensed when

memories rather than habits are repeated; for a habit is pretty much the same from moment to

moment, while a memory recalls the specificity of a distinct moment of the past, when a singular

and involuntary memory invades the present, then what is repeated is the force of time itself, for

time is nothing other than this radical and singular difference.”31

28- Peter Eisenman, “Folding in Time: The Singularity of Rebstock,” in Written into the Void: Selected Writings 1990-


29- Ibid., 29.

30- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The time- image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University

of Minnesota Press, 1989), 110.

31- Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2002), 178.

44

2.4 Urban Design Thinking in Eisenman’s Critical Practice

The design process in the Rebstock project attempts to create an innovative combination

in order to reconceptualize the idea of the repetition of urban components (Figure 2.3). According

to Eisenman, Deleuze’s notions of ‘the fold and the event’ open up alternative modes of neutrality

and new conceptions of time and space.32 Specifically, in the sphere of Eisenman’s architecture

and urbanism, the notion of ‘the fold’ has gained conceptual ground in parallel with the notion of

‘becoming.’ According to Parr, the notion of ‘the fold,’ coined by Deleuze, came to light as he was

evolving his “philosophical project of univocal being and an ontology of becoming and change.”33

Deleuze terms this becoming a ‘pure incorporeal Event,’34 which has limitless perennial qualities.

The motions of this pure becoming create ‘incorporeal beings’ as events that are attributed to the

bodies, and they have an infinitive identity. These unlimited events-verbs are about what the bodies

can do. They are not an ‘adjective,’ not about what the bodies are.

32- Peter Eisenman, “Folding in Time: The Singularity of Rebstock,” Written into the Void: Selected Writings 1990-


33- Adrian Parr, “Politics + Deleuze + Guattari + Architecture,” Deleuze and Architecture, ed. Hélène Frichot and


34- Craig Lundy, History and becoming: Deleuze's philosophy of creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,

2012), 3.

45

Figure 2.3: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark Concept Diagram, 1991-1992.


In addition, the author of History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity, Craig

Lundy, points out that we can describe this becoming as ‘surface becoming;’ he makes his point

based on Deleuze’s hypothesis that pure becoming floats over and assails the whole depth below

it. The events of pure becoming are expressed through the bodies’ actions, they are on the exterior

surfaces of these bodies, and they are always unfinished. Deleuze insists on elaborating the

‘enfolded’ forces of difference that are successively and creatively associated with the change and

transformation. This operation functions ‘between’ a gamut of bodies’ actions and movements,

around these bodies’ identities, liberating the ‘real’ from the dualisms, “such as inside/outside,

figure/ground and organic/inorganic.” 35

From there, folding causes boundaries to be porous and blurred, to be mixed territories of

dynamism and instability.36 For example, Eisenman opens the boundaries of the Rebstock site to

the future (Figure 2.4), dissolving them into different spaces, where the soft becomings fold and



36- Ibid., 198.

46

smudge the limit relations between the dialectic syntheses ‘figure/ground and plan/section’37 that

resolutely surround each building.38 Eisenman reconstitutes the figure within the ground, the plan

within the section, refreshing them ‘in-between’ bodies and spatial experiences. The external

connections between space and bodies practices and the openness to the outside enable the binaries

to escape the oppositional relation, acted upon and re-functioned as a third spatiality. Deleuze’s

concept of ‘the fold’ supports Eisenman’s conscious realization.

Figure 2.4: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark Drawing, 1991-1992.


The true problematization is about the indefinite possibilities of becoming that is not

grounded in the depths or the virtual processes of the surface, yet can occur ‘in-between.’

According to Lundy, the endless movement of this ‘in-betweenness’ has the potential to disrupt

the outlines between history and becoming, and can permeate externally and successively ‘in-

between’ deranging their routine relation. As for history and becoming, Deleuze refers to the

37- James Williams, “Deleuze’s Ontology and Creativity: Becoming in Architecture,” Pli 9 (2000): 206.

38- Ibid., 206.

47

notion of history as ‘the power of domination or control (pouvoir)’ 39 that tames the passive

synthesis of the depths. However, becoming is ‘a productive force for change (puissance),’40

certain virtuality that functions as a ‘pure incorporeal Event,’41 consisting of ongoing successions

of transmutations to create the new.

In representational design thinking, the architectural form is shaped and recognized as a

finished artifact with a predefined meaning and function. For Immanuel Kant, a German

philosopher, the personal subject experiences the real world outside his/her consciousness, making

a distinction between his/her perceptions (inside) and the apparent world (outside), and connecting

received effects into a reasonable order.42 Deleuze re-orientates the logic of division in Kant’s

philosophy by calling into query the way in which the personal subject perceives the real world

(reality) as a starting point of the relationship between inside and outside (or subject and object),

insisting that there is not a personal subject. Rather, there are combinations (desires) from which

individual subjects are shaped; happening at the limits of signification, producing singular points

or terms that remain relatively stable, and making an open set of “critical connections in order to

engender transformation of a subject.”43

According to Simone Brott (an Australian architect), architectural and urban design

practices are subjected to a system of signification: “Notwithstanding architecture’s vexed history

of phenomenology and its recourse to a Heideggerian reading of being – the belief that


2012), 3.

40- Ibid., 3.

41- Ibid., 3.

42- Claire Colebrook, “Disjunctive Synthesis,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 80.

43- Simone Brott, Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real (England:

Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011), 39.

48

architecture’s purpose is to stabilize ‘meaning’ for the phenomenal subject.”44 Deleuze’s

transcendental empiricism affirms the process of becoming as learning from unexpected

experience. These encounters have not reconstructed from abstractions (being) or restricted to the

actual; the subject in the process of becoming is shaped from pre-subjective shares which are

caught together by a network of intensities.45 Architecture is reduced to a scheme of symbolization

that represents traditional assumptions and has “already” embodied meaning in the formalistic

architectural image.

In Deleuze’s view observations have to be formed as a self-inspired process that diverges

from any assumed configuration, dualistic signification, and previous resemblance, inserting in

active relations with percepts and affects. In an architectural sense, this refers to the person who

no longer spaces herself /himself into a symbol-arrangement with the aim of creating a precise

meaning. However, in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, this subject is an exact double

selection which arises from within the field of architectural effects. These encounters have not

reconstructed from abstractions (being) or restricted to the actual; the subject in the process of

becoming is shaped from pre-subjective shares which are caught together by a network of

intensities.46

In Empiricism and Subjectivity, “Deleuze discusses the linkages between ideas, habits of

thought, ethics, patterns, and repetitions of systems; all the while describing the relationship

between affect and difference in terms of temporally specific subjective situations.”47 Similarly,

Eisenman states that architecture’s well-known mantra, ‘form follows function,’ points out that

44- Simone Brott, “Toward a Theory of the Architectural Subject,” in Deleuze and Architecture, ed. Hélène Frichot

and Stephen Loo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 151.

45- Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V.

Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 103.

46- Ibid., 103.

47- Felicity J. Colman, “Affect,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


49

shape defines usage, which means that shape is “already” informed with meaning, and therefore

form is determined by rules of imitation and function.48 Furthermore, Eisenman suggests, in his

“Notes on Zaera-Polo’s Idea of the Machinic,” following different thinking about design may

liberate architecture from the representational image of thought as a“natural” status and its relation

to functionality (Figure 2.5). Likewise, Brott expounds:

“While traditionally the personal subject is independent of and, in some senses,

antecedent to the architectural encounter, the encounter has primacy, and through

it, the individual subject is constructed.”49

Figure 2.5: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark Drawing, 1991-1992.


48- Peter Eisenman, “Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo’s Idea of the Machinic,” El Croquis 83,

Madrid (1997): 21-35.




50

2.5 Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism

Brott explains that Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism starts with the point of inquiry

without any already given or transcendent idea. Focusing more on the issue of architecture’s

“natural” status, Zaera-Polo, in his conversation with Eisenman, refers to the fact that Vitruvius

established the iconic role of architecture as a representation of society, precisely expressed in his

legendary statement regarding “commodity, firmness, and delight.”50 Even more thought-

provoking, Zaera-Polo corroborates that Vitruvius was not saying that “buildings should stand

up”51 because it is obvious that “buildings stand up.” 52Vitruvius’ real message was that buildings

must resolutely demonstrate firmness and permanence.53 In his response to what Zaera-Polo says,

Eisenman emphasizes that the practice of architecture is usually captured by the conventional

model, precisely by the traditional logic of creation.

Moreover, architecture has been grounded on the notion of inherent meaning, that is, a

static structure made to serve a specific purpose. Thus, it can be said that architecture has an

‘iconicity’ encased in its ‘instrumentality.’ To be precise, this ‘iconicity’ is part of the sign system

of image and form. Representational thinking must be deserted by conceptualizing architecture

differentially, precisely, resisting the submission to a fixed identity (Figure 2.6).

50- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “A Conversation with Peter Eisenman,” El Croquis 83, Madrid (1997a): 8.

51- Ibid., 8.

52- Ibid., 8.

53- Ibid., 8.

51

Figure 2.6: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark Model, 1991-1992.


While the configuration of concepts in philosophy creates its own consistency, it facilitates

further theoretical constructs to arise implicitly out of the system on the ‘plane of immanence’ that

offers divergent expressions through different experiences.54 People first experience places

through their immediate stable environments where they interact routinely in everyday life.

Furthermore, the illusory of false identity that constructs in dominant stabilized orders not only

cause resemblance to represent reality but also suppresses any variation that may occur.

Conversely, and in the midst of all this criticism to identical thinking, Deleuze observes ‘real life’

events. He questions the architects and planners of modern society whose attitudes tend to erase

diversity and limit people’s potential creativity.

Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and change that produces pure difference enables the real

to be in a flow of consciousness. Lived practices consist of effective complex networks and

connections that operate through temporality in terms of spatial- relations. The architecture here is

free from the fixed substance and open to change without subjection to the resemblance and utility.

54- Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: an introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 19.

52

In other words, the boundaries between architecture and philosophy are blurred to create spaces

for an opportunity outside the devouring force of the hierarchized space.

Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and change articulates the “virtual reality” underlying and

inherent in lived, “actual reality,” to that degree, and it may be seen as a concept relating to a way

of dealing with the different intensities that underlie our identities. As Todd May says in his

introduction about Deleuze, this ontology gives rise to the thoughts of conceiving the concealed

difference behind fixed and deterministic identities structure, eluding the dominance of stable

conceptions.55 Deleuze’s philosophy is one of “setting in motion,” resisting specific transcendental

forms, vibrating, and deterritorializing the material of bodies that are grounded to the depths. It

consists of indeterminate outlines without fixed or limited expressions.

Deleuze’s philosophical perspective challenges the identical and the rigid frame of origins,

so as to produce new terms from the outside – outside the materiality of existing terms in

consideration of the actual practices and advents.

According to Deleuze, the process of thinking is unpredictable and may lead to a territory

not envisaged at the beginning. This means that the thought process is not an anticipated process

to be qualified as stable, but rather has a variable constant which can encompass other aspects of

life beyond its intended premise. It can profoundly affect human life socially, politically and

economically. Unpredictable effects of genuine thinking happen by coming into contact with a

concealed difference in response to the process of deactivating and eliding the false identity which

is masking that difference. “As a consequence of this central role of becoming, Deleuze’s effect

on architecture is far from the most obvious connection of a philosophy of difference with the

nostalgic fragmentation and pluralism of postmodern architecture.”56 In contrast to the modernist

55- Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: an introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 19.


53

discourse, Deleuze’s work avoids idealisms but tries instead to evoke untapped and abstract

identities. His ontology of becoming and change has no center or origin, and even more

importantly, has no system of reference but is defined by movement and fluidity.

The interesting concept of architectural form within this pliability occurs in the ‘in-

between’ spaces, the spaces of difference. Lundy poses an intelligent query about the role of

history in Deleuze’s solo work and his cooperation with Guattari. Lundy searches the option of

using history as an active force and the ways in which we can grasp an impending future which

productively mix with a historic touch.

Lundy proposes numerous new Deleuzian ways to deterritorialize the representational

image functionary towards the historicism, aiming to re-engineer a creative dialogue between

history and becoming.57 Similar to Lundy, Eisenman in his conversation with Zaera-Polo, declares

that architects cannot repeat the same historical styles in their contemporary design because that

will lead to impractical replication.58 In response to this challenge, Eisenman calls for an

architecture that sits in motion and has shattering practices. In Deleuze’s ontology of becoming

and change, shattering happens when a new perception of difference blows away a centered order

or abstract concept and ruins the dominant image.59 Through his design of the Rebstock site,

Eisenman finds “that the complete isolation of a building”60 from its historical roots may result in

lifelessness to the site; recalling the past by using its image fails to achieve the historical value.61

Eisenman commences from the middle, where the body can respond to the virtual

possibility of architecture. He adds fold forms, creating different places and assemblages. The ‘in-


2012), 1.

58- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “A Conversation with Peter Eisenman,” El Croquis 83, Madrid (1997a): 14.


1999), 14.

60- James Williams, “Deleuze’s Ontology and Creativity: Becoming in Architecture,” Pli 9 (2000): 204-205.

61- Ibid., 204-205.

54

betweenness’ and indeterminacy in Eisenman’s architectural practice destabilizes and disbands the

restrictive dualisms (Figure 2.7). The Rebstock, in this sense, is the site for the movement between

old and new, “where folds in the plan, façade, and figure-ground relations bring to mind older

relations as well as new ones.”62 In contrast, the method of copying or repeating the former

elements and principles is inadvisable for the re-development of a building or site with an old

portion or historical units because it leads to simplifying the relations between the building’s

spatial contexts (between the old and new boundaries).

This perception within the context of architecture merges, generally, with the notion and

the ontology of place into one whole without interruption, a simplification which does not take

into account the social approach to place character.

62- Ibid., 206.

55

Figure 2.7: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark Design Concept, 1991-1992.



56

As an alternative to such views, Deleuze’s philosophy of history advocates a loose

conception of ‘place,’ whereby place identity and character is temporary and not finalized with

any parameters. This is more of a progressive approach to ‘place’ which opens up to diverse

identities and past experiences, with its ‘character’ determined by current and immediate

circumstances instead of what has been already established. Furthermore, Lundy expresses how

Deleuze gives an advantage to ‘creativity over representation.’63 Deleuze’s creativity undoes the

despotic power of history, invariably and alternatively, as he reorients history to be viewed as

historicism. Indeed, Parr dissipates the dominant question of what the folding is, asking instead

what folding can do.

In order to articulate the latter question, Parr revisits Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche,

specifically his use of Nietzsche’s ideas pertaining to the ‘reactive and active forces.’64 Of

importance is how these forces connect and constitute in their relationship with both ‘folding and

becoming.’65 The active powers have the capacity to generate the new and the transformative

identities through ‘folding and becoming.’66 However, contrary to active powers, reactive forces

act as representation in stable and equilibrium states, giving the primacy to identity and enabling

dualisms to appear which reduce the difference to negation. Based on Deleuze’s perceptions about

creativity, Eisenman addresses the issue of “relationship between figure and ground to social and

technological influences in a postmodern”67 context. He argues that in postmodernism, problems


2012), 1.



65- Ibid., 198.

66- Ibid., 198.


57

in architecture are solved by mimicking the “historical ground-figure relations in new contexts,”68

whereas an innovative approach to space is needed.

In this approach, the relation between architecture and its reference and depth is blurred,

re-conceptualized and shuddered. The process of blurring, where the outlines are traversed and

destabilized, causes the whole system to be more permeable and less static. As a consequence, the

inside that represents a specific function spills towards the outside to generate and produce

complex assemblages with a variety of purposes. Further, pure architecture is not contained and

subjected to the dualistic relation, and it can be re-intellectualized in terms of emergence and

creativity. Eisenman attaches importance to both Deleuze’s and Derrida’s notions of ‘the figural’

and ‘the undecidable.’ He demonstrates that the binarized categories have the potential

deterritorialization to connect and change to a different position or state producing dynamic

machine assemblages.69 Eisenman’s theoretical practice results in a form of resistance to static

notions of form, while at the same time maintaining the concept of the Zeitgeist, avoiding

traditional dualisms. This resistance reveals itself in his exploitation of the notion of ‘the fold,’

where there is no solid ground, but rather ‘a machine of limitless resistance,’70open to all

possibilities.

2.6 Machinic Urbanism in Eisenman’s Design Process

In addition, the product of ‘machinic urbanism’ in Eisenman’s philosophy is always new

and different and possesses the ability to be a part of machines to come. In these machines the

relations between the components are not stable or static, rather they have the potential for

68- Ibid., 204.

69- Jeffrey A. Bell, “Assemblage + Architecture,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 19.

70- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “Eisenman’s Machine of Infinite Resistance,” El Croquis 83, Madrid (1997b): 50-63.

58

movement and interaction. Thus, they are temporary and fragile.71 Eisenman argues even though

the ‘machinic’ is a repetitive process, the singular occurrences of becoming are not similar, they

are entirely unforeseen and surprising products.72 As it can be understood, describing the

conception of ‘machinic’ is not easy and requires close examination. In the Deleuzo-Guattarian

sense, the word ‘machinic’ implicitly refers to productive actions and endless dynamic

connections. To formulate a conceptual articulation of the ‘macihinc,’ Eisenman introduces Brian

Massumi, who provides an effective analysis of ‘machinic’ in his book, A User's Guide to

Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Massumi notes that the expression of ‘machinic’ “is a metaphor

between the body as an organism and the machine as technological apparatus,”73 which highlights

its lack of rationality and linearity.74

The word machine has many connotations in modern life. For example, a house represents

a machine for a dwelling.75 It comes into existence by the construction of intangible and tangible

assemblages, such as plans, materials, manpower, and investment. However, without

accommodating humans, a house serves no real function. Hence, it is the dynamism of the lives of

the inhabitants that give meaning to the machine, much like that of the image. Signs only hold

value when they are interpreted; the human relation to the machine is, therefore, an inherent part

of its existence.76 Thus, the ‘machinic’ is seen as the in-between of a technological device and the

organic desires of human life. The mechanistic alludes to constructs that individually separate and

71- Jean Hillier, and Gareth Abrahams, Deleuze and Guattari: Jean Hillier in Conversation with Gareth Abrahams

(Association of European Schools of Planning, Poland: Wroclaw, 2013), 36.

72- Peter Eisenman, “Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo’s Idea of the Machinic,” El Croquis 83, Madrid

(1997): 21-35.

73- Brian Massumi, A user's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge,

Mass: MIT Press, 1993), 192.

74- Peter Eisenman, “Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo’s Idea of the Machinic,” El Croquis 83, Madrid

(1997): 21-35.

75- Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, trans. Etchells F. and John Rodker (London, 1929).

76- Jean Hillier, and Gareth Abrahams, Deleuze and Guattari: Jean Hillier in Conversation with Gareth Abrahams,

Association of European Schools of Planning (Poland: Wroclaw, 2013), 36.

59

then link closely together in the unlocalizable process. The co-occurrence of the organic side is

relevant to a ‘living body’ and lies in nonspecific location. The ‘machinic’ process, however,

arises with new random, ‘arbitrary,’ or even dissipative actions and capacities.77

“Central to such a passible ‘machinic’ process is a shift from ‘forming’—which

entails the classical systems, such as the classical value system of aesthetics; the

classical system of signs and signified; and conditions of use, that have traditionally

demanded certain conditions of signing which are all “already given” or embodied

in architecture, to what can be called ‘spacing’, in an attempt to produce an

architectural object that is no longer complicit with its previous terms of

embodiment, there is no classical system for a process called ‘spacing.’ ”78

Wood and Dovey pose the question of whether such capacities can be drawn up or traced in urban

space. Can this mapping occur? And if so, can it achieve the primary technique of getting to the

sources of the assemblage to find out how it operates in concrete relations? “The space of the

possible, while not the same as the actual, is a form of capacity that needs to be treated as part of

reality.”79 The hierarchical homogeneous space that is a reflection of the traditional practice of

architecture and urban design has been brought into question by one of Eisenman’s most

prominent techniques: the accomplishment of being able to create a situation of ‘interstitiality.’

The point of this question is to steer away from ‘forming’ space to an architecture of ‘spacing.’

What is critical for Eisenman is to reconceptualize the space that has always been conceived as a

passive container. He is intent on reversing the primacy awarded to the formality since the time of

Vitruvius by conceiving spatiality and pure perception as it is experienced.80

77- Peter Eisenman, “Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo’s Idea of the Machinic,” El Croquis 83,

Madrid (1997): 21-35.

78- Ibid.

79- Stephen Wood, and Kim Dovey, “Creative Multiplicities: Urban Morphologies of Creative Clustering,” Journal

of Urban Design, 20, no.1 (2015): 52-74. Doi: 10.1080/13574809.2014.972346 (accessed June 01, 2015).



60

2.7 Conclusion

In conclusion, “the neo-avant-garde institutionalizes the avant-garde as art and thus

negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions, this is true independent of the consciousness artists

have of their activity, a consciousness that may perfectly well be avant-gardiste…. neo- avant-

gardiste art is autonomous art in the fullsense of the term, which means that the avant-gardiste

intentions of the returning art to the praxis of life is negated.”81 Eisenman, as a neo-avant-garde

architect, rethinks architecture in light of the Deleuzian notions of ‘the fold and the event.’

Eisenman contributes that the intensity of urban life can be formalized by the potentiality of spatial

and temporal relations that challenge the old system. The potentiality of urban spaces, or ‘machinic

urbanism,’ can be reassessed in design thinking process through the ontology of becoming and

change. Furthermore, the connectivity and hybridity in ‘machinic urbanism’ produce open-ended

forces and events, disrupting bound identity and pushing up the submerged difference to the

surface. In his attempt to deconstruct formalist mannerisms, Eisenman seeks to show the flexible

relationship between figure, ground, structure, and content as a means for a “non-dialectic”

impetus to architecture. In other words, his goal is to produce ‘undetermined’ figures and spaces.

He contemplates design practices in architectural styles to generate the space. What Eisenman calls

spacing (becoming-space) in the design process is the sketching with stammering on empty white

papers, and the intervention of pure thoughts without any reference or pre-knowledge of the image.

Moreover, he asserts that design with an assumption is framing, which is to design with a full list

of origins and an expectation of the outcome.

81- Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984),

58.

61

Until the representational image is broken, classifications that previously existed will

control thought. In this tactic, architecture is reduced to a model of negation and a structure of rigid

opposition, excluding its ‘in-betweenness’ and potentiality. Architecture was established on the

foundation of binaries and dualisms; Deleuze has criticized, deconstructed and eliminated those

binaries and dualisms through his interstitial and indeterminate approach. Following a Deleuzian

path to define the problematic, Eisenman rejects the claims that allege that there is a specific and

immediate solution for every architectural and urban problem. In his extensive urban renewal

project of the Rebstock Park periphery in Frankfurt, Eisenman comes up with a new approach of

analyzing the complex connection of environment and architectural ideas (Figure 2.8). The work

is based on the paradigm shift from omnipresent and repeated problems that usually challenge

architects when designing in complex urban contexts. There is no single solution to the infinite

problems that architectural constructions provoke; it is only productive to think about the

impossibility of solving problems, leaving issues open for interpretation and experience. As Grosz

says, “architecture itself should not be so much concerned with seeking to build, perform, or enact

ideals or ideal solutions to contemporary or future problems; indeed, it is a goal-directedness that

utopic visions orient us toward, in neglecting the notion of process, precisely because they do not

understand the role of time.”82 Like Grosz, Lundy indicates that people tend to forget the

generative role of history that is linked to (or associated with) the actions of alteration and

invention. Lundy inscribes history within Deleuze’s theoretical and creative work of becoming. In

his articulation of the concept of ‘historical creativity,’83 Lundy elucidates the innovative role of


2001), 148.


2012), 12.

62

history that links to Deleuze’s new philosophical constructs of creativity. Eisenman introduces this

innovative collaboration between history as an active and mobile force (Figure 2.9), and creativity

as a continuous practice to create the Rebstock site, where the repetition has insistently challenged

the traditional architecture by both purifying and obscuring its boundaries while introducing it to

external dialogues.

Figure 2.8: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark Perspective View, 1991-1992.


Figure 2.9: Eisenman Architects (EA), Rebstockpark Perspective View, 1991-1992.



63

CHAPTER THREE Qualitative Methodology

3.1 New Territories for Old Architecture: Nomadic History as a Design Strategy in the

Redevelopment Urban Project for the Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, Baghdad, Iraq

This chapter begins by analyzing two different design strategies that architects and urban

designers use to deal with history in urban projects that have been submitted to an international-

wide competition for the redevelopment of the Al Kadhimiya historical site. Afterward, the chapter

presents and extends on the dissertation qualitative methodology. The methodology part introduces

the data collected from the two proposals and data analysis procedures that included findings and

discussion. The analysis of the projects will then be examined through theoretical texts to develop

a poststructuralist analytical framework to analyze the urban formalisms of these two

redevelopment projects. The central theoretical thought will come from Deleuze’s

conceptualization of difference. This chapter aims to explore how the possibility of using history

as a dynamic, intensive force in an urban design thinking process can escape the historicism and

representational image functionary towards a re-engineered creative historical/ architectural

dialogue. By comparing two existing urban project strategies for the redevelopment of the Al

Kadhimiya historical site, this chapter will examine the difference between mimicking historical

styles in a decontextualized manner and repeating them with difference using the theory of

Difference and Repetition outlined by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

This chapter will compare the historically conservative, winning proposal by the Dewan

Architects & Engineers Firm to another entry by the Assemblage Architects Firm. It may be said

that the latter firm shows a much less retrospective and conservative use of history than the winning

firm, but I will argue that it presents a more creative and prolific source regarding future design,

as well as a less detrimental approach towards the historic urban fabric. It will be shown that the

64

Assemblage Architects’ design does not use history in a reactionary or nostalgic way: “history as

historicism.”1 Instead, Assemblage Architects Firm employs history in creative ways, blending it

with the present and future. The comparison of these two projects reveals the need for a more

precise definition to the term ‘preservation’ since the two firms followed different approaches to

architectural reconstruction and historical revivalism. In his book Historic Preservation:

Curatorial Management of the Built World, James Marston Fitch, an American architect, and

preservationist, mentioned in chapter four; Conceptual Parameters of Historic Preservation, that:

“ ……in the United States, the term ‘historic preservation’ will continue to serve

as the umbrella name for the field for the simple reason that it has become

institutionalized, ……It is true that somewhat different terms are employed abroad.

The concept of protection of the historic and artistic patrimony is embedded in

European practice, while the term conservation is standard in Great Britain. In the

United State, however, this term already belong to a highly structured field of

expertise, the conservation of works of art, with its own specialized profession in

being.”2

This dissertation offers a precise nomenclature to the concept of protection in each proposal to

accommodate the various and levels of architectural and urban intervention. Concerning the

winning proposal by the Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm, the dissertation considers their

approach to redeveloping the Al Kadhimiya historical site as a conservative practice. The term

conservation is used in this chapter to describe the physical intervention in the urban fabric and

‘the continued structural integrity’3 that Dewan proposed in their project for redevelopment the Al

Kadhimiya historical site. The chapter presents Dewan’s proposal as a conservative practice.


2012), 14.

2- James Marston Fitch, Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World (Charlottesville:

University Press of Virginia, 1998), 39.

3- Ibid., 46.

65

Away from the British term conservation and inspiring from the American spirit, the term

preservation that “implies the maintenance of the artifact in the same physical condition,”4 is used

to describe the unobtrusive interventions that offered by the Assemblage Architects Firm’s

proposal to preserve the physical integrity of the Al Kadhimiya historical site. The root of the word

preserve comes from Latin prae + servare, “pre-serve,” “to keep safe” or “to protect,” counting

the idea of ‘contributing to the future.’5 As mentioned by “John Lawrence, former dean of Tulane’s

School of Architecture, the basic purpose of preservation is not to arrest time, but to mediate

sensitivity with the forces of change, it is to understand the present as a product of the past and a

modifier of the future.”6

Regarding the conservative proposal, by the Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm, it is

argued that the formality of a “Disneyfied” historical character has become “a string of

actualities.”7 The redevelopment design in the winning entry exists as an allusion. In contrast, it

will be shown that the proposal by Assemblage Architects Firm applies a creative alternative

detached from this predetermined method. The use of history in Assemblage’s proposal is beyond

the false frozen-time image. In this chapter, the main goal is not to refute or confirm the static and

fixed image of history that is proposed by the winning entry, but rather to scrutinize the way in

which this representational image of history becomes operative and dynamic. This chapter is a

critical analysis about a provisional and creative return of history, ‘a nomadic history.’8 The term

4- James Marston Fitch, Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World (Charlottesville:

University Press of Virginia, 1998), 46.

5- Norman Tyler, Ted Ligibel, and Ilene R. Tyler, Historic preservation: an introduction to its history, principles,

and practice (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 14.

6- Ibid., 14.


2012), 20.


2012), 64.

66

‘nomadic history’ is coined by the Deleuze scholar Craig Lundy and is a conception that has been

formulated by Deleuze’s logic of creation.

3.2 Capturing Old Architecture

The Al Kadhimiya historical site is located in the Al Kadhimiya district, a northern

neighborhood west of the Tigris River, about five kilometers from the city center of Baghdad, the

capital of Iraq. In the midst of the old complex sits the mosque of the Al Kadhimain shrine, which

contains tombs and dominates the historic urban landscape (Figure 3.1), greatly influencing “the

functional as well as the socio-religious composition.”9


“Aerial view of the shrine and its surrounding fabric before demolition.”

Source: MIT Libraries, Aga Khan Visual Archive.

Copyright: Architecture & Planning Partnership.

< https://archnet.org/media_contents/5325>

9- John Warren, “Baghdad Two Case Studies of Conservation,” The Arab City: Its Characters and Islamic Cultural

Heritage: proceedings of Symposium Held in Medina, Kingdom of Saudi an Arabia, 24-29 Rabi II, 1401 AH, 28

Feb.-5 Mar. 1981 AD., eds. Ismail Serageldin and Samir El- Sadek, with the assistance of Richard R. Herbert

(Arlington, VA: I. Serageldin, 1982), 246.

https://archnet.org/media_contents/5325

67

In 1980, the site went through an urban intervention that demolished its historic features

and urban fabric (Figure 3.2).10 This destroyed 9 hectares of the most significant architectural

elements of the site’s historic core.11


“Plan showing demolitions around the shrine 1982.”




“The present problem is to reestablish the integrity of the whole site as an urban complex,

providing adequate facilities for servicing, and scope for growth in prosperity.”12 The central

redevelopment dilemma stems from the desire to protect the past and the conflicting notion of

bringing to life the urban or neighborhood “character” of the site. The current federal government


Adaptive reuse: integrating traditional areas into the modern urban fabric, August 16-20, 1982, ed. Margaret


Laboratory of Architecture and Planning, 1983), 32.





12- Ibid., 246.

68

is safeguarding and developing Kadhimiya by conducting many studies (Figure 3.3).13 The most

important study was performed by the Mayor’s Office of Baghdad in 2008-2009, which sought

proposals for the regeneration of the Al Kadhimiya historical site. To encourage the Baghdad

officials of the economic viability of their offer, Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm emphasized

the fact that their project for the Al Kadhimiya site would renovate its historical and religious

images. The task of the winning proposal would be that, by reviving the past, a precise structure

and renovation would be achieved.

Figure 3.3: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library, The golden domes and minarets of The

Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1923.

‘The golden domes and minarets of the Kadimain Mosque and Shrine.”

Source: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.

Copyright: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.

Photographer: A. Kerim


13- Kadhimiya is a predominantly Shiite area; thus, part of the current Shiite government’s political goals is to

preserve the past to create and maintain a certain political image.


69

In fact, reproducing history may not only stymie the “productive force of creation,”14 but

also re-enforce pride, becoming a catalyst in the development of the sentiment of nationalism, as

well as opening the way for more accepted forms of imitation and representational urban design

thinking. Using Deleuze’s theory on the logic of representation and the logic of surface, this project

proposal potentially constitutes a ‘Disneyfication’ of the historical buildings and site (Figure 3.4).

It decomposes traditional architecture into its elements and principles, at the level of either facades

or plans, and merges these elements into the Al Kadhimiya urban design project. This “merging”

may be evident or may involve a level of modification. The result may be simpler than the original

in detail, but it must visually recall, in an almost cut and paste manner, the historical source from

which it is derived.15


View of the Qiblah Gate of the Al Kadhimain shrine, Baghdad, Iraq.

The representational image of thought in the winning entry.

Source: Dewan Architects and Engineers Firm (DAEF).

< http://www.dewan-architects.com/work-planning-kadhimiya.html>


2012), 138.

15- Khaled Asfour, “Identity in the Arab Region: Architects and Projects from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,

Kuwait and Qatar,” in Constructing identity in contemporary architecture: case studies from the South 2009, eds.

Peter Herrle and Stephanus Schmitz (Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2009), 152.

70

One of Deleuze’s most substantial ideas, which is part of his theory of Difference and

Repetition, is the idea that repetition in itself, copies an original, specifically the ideal and its copies

and reproductions.16 Dorothea Olkowski, an American philosopher, argues that representational

thinking in any field, such as aesthetics, philosophy, ethics, or psychology, works by forming a

static model.17 This repetition represents a predetermined “norm” as a formula for hegemonic

architectural practice. For my example, ‘Disneyfication’ can be described as the transformation of

the Al Kadhimiya site (Figure 3.5) into a conservatively controlled environment that is imprisoned

and limited to a very narrow imagistic mode of history with homogenized qualities that “strip the

place of its original character and repackages it in a sanitized format.”18 Although it could be

understood and indicated from this proposal that the situation for the Al Kadhimiya historical site

“in depth,” meaning “to have experience, familiarity or knowledge of its past.”19 The repetition

and renovation of the historical styles and the essential need to protect and shield the tradition of

the Al Kadhimiya site have produced kind of a ‘Disneyfied site,’ suggesting fixed identities rather

than a slippery urban character,20 as reported by Kim Dovey, an Australian architectural critic.


130.


1999), 5.

18- Hein Schoer, The sounding museum: four worlds: cultural soundscape composition and trans-cultural

communication (Bielefeld: Transcript; Hanau: Gruenrekorder, 2014), 296.


2012), 14.


71

Figure 3.5: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library, the Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1923.

“The Kadimain, the Holy City near Baghdad from an airplane.”


Copyright: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.



The winning project depicts the shrine in the center, circled by religious facilities, historical

houses, and markets within a radius of a half kilometer. The holy site will have within its vicinities

traditional residential homes as well as traditional social and economic gathering places like

markets and religious cultural exhibitions. The initial plan displays how the Al Kadhimiya site will

be transformed from its current state to a more modernized architectural recreation, whereby some

wider streets are traced with some open spaces to offer entry to the shrine; these are bordered with

new constructions (Figure 3.6). At the same time, this will require demolishing older buildings and

erecting new and more “welcoming” first-sight structures. The historic buildings would be

concealed by the “new” and “bright” facades, to attract more regional and international

worshippers and visitors. The Masterplan suggested more demolition and new large-scale

buildings. A small amount of current fabric is conserved within the inner site blocks. The entire


72

site will have to be converted into a big construction site with existing inhabitants relocated. New

construction for religious purposes and facilities will take place on the site.


The winning entry project for the Al Kadhimiya historical site, Baghdad, Iraq.



What Dewan Architects & Engineers firm suggests in their design of the Al Kadhimiya

historical site is actually more demolition of the existing urban fabric except for a few valuable

old buildings. Dewan’s reason for that demolition is to build new buildings instead of keeping the

old. The most prominent of these new building will be the mosque, multi-purpose hall, library, and

host building (food hall). Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm, in its proposal, is utilizing Islamic

and traditional Iraqi architectural elements and urban principles. It decomposes traditional

architecture into its elements and principles, either at the level of facades or plan types, and then

copies them into the Al- Kadhimiya design project. The copying can be literal or may involve

some modification. The winning entry replicates tradition. This approach involves several stages.

At the level of principles, copying from traditional architecture includes:

73

3.2.1 Mixed Land Uses

The strategy of mixed land use is considered, by far, the most cost-effective one and the

most important tool to the social and economic lives of the dwellers in the urban area. The bazaar,

which is actually part and parcel of the Islamic culture, plays a powerful role as a vehicle of human

interactions in that context, standing as the cornerstone of the society and equally reflecting the

proportionate growth of that society. All the while, the neighborhood remains the nucleus of the

city, its center fulfilling the daily needs of each inhabitant. Historically speaking, the

Caravanserais, at the outskirts of Baghdad, provided accommodation to travelers. This kind of

traditional structure could be found in urban areas until the eve of the 20th century. The fast pace

of modernization and restructuring of the environment with the introduction of mechanized means

of transportation have lessened the importance of the bazaar and relegated it to second class in the

city’s life. The bazaar no longer has the economic impact of its former days, but it still carries a

symbolic socio-economic might of bonding people.21 To put all this into perspective, one must

scrutinize the Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm in its design of the Al Kadhimiya historical

site. In fact, mixed land uses were prepared in the project’s plans (Figure 3.7). The goal is to blend

the religious, commercial and social activities. The whole idea is to adopt new strategies of land

uses that presuppose mixed uses by implementing new regulations supportive of making available

opportunities for neighborhood integration of all aspects of people’s lives in their design. This

means a mixing of same residential, commercial, cultural and religious building structures.22 The

holistic proposal by Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm will expand the surrounding areas of the

21- Fereshteh Ferdowsian, Modern and Traditional Urban Design Concepts and Principles in Iran, a thesis

submitted to the faculty for Architecture and Town Planning of the University of Stuttgart (Shushtar/Iran: University

of Stuttgart, Institute of Urban Planning, 2002).

22- A. Hussein, Wadhah, and Zaynab R. Abaas. "Effectiveness of Sustainable Urban Projects in the City of

Baghdad." Tha Iraq Journal of Architecture 9, no. 27 (2013): 111-28.

74

shrine by imitating the configuration of the traditional city in coherence with the integrated

religious functions of the historic site.


Mixed land use in the winning entry project for the Al Kadhimiya historical site, Baghdad, Iraq.



3.2.2 Compact Building Design

In some Arab cities, the geographical setting determines, or at best imposes, a certain urban

structure to minimize, if not prevent, the deterioration of people’s mode of life. Such is the case of

cities in the desert, whereby houses are designed and built to form one unit, losing their

individuality. Even alleys and roads are reduced to the minimal. This concept is rooted in societies

where this tightness translates the closeness of the people composing them. Family ties and blood

relations are sacred and revered. The basic elements and remnants of these societies remain the

neighborhood center, the bazaar, the mosque and the madrasah or Islamic learning centers which

have eroded in the history of urbanism in the Arab world.

“The integrated conservation and development scheme presented by Dewan

Architects & Engineers Firm was intended to materialize the basic idea to conceive

the shrine as the innermost “kernel” of the city, enveloped and protected by

75

different urban layers that mediate between the interior and the exterior world and

together form a coherent whole. The inner urban layer includes important elements

of the historic urban fabric, which will be upgraded, renovated and substituted on a

plot-by-plot basis according to information to be collected in the future, with the

aim of retaining the scale and the main characteristic of historical Baghdad. Other,

more peripheral layers introduce contemporary residential structures that cater to

modern needs of vehicular accessibility, public facilities, and commercial

functions.”23

Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm’s proposal is according to the designers, geared towards

rehabilitating the urban areas but paradoxically, it will rid the site of more than 95% of its

traditional building structure (Figure 3.8). Nevertheless, the firm’s argument in proceeding this

way is to respond to the current needs of the society, bringing the past into the modern world while

maintaining the mystical, religious and spiritual aura of the site, renowned all over the world.24





23- Sebastian Jordana, “Dewan Architects, wins first prize in Baghdad competition,” February 27, 2010. Arch Daily,

http://www.archdaily.com/?p=51225, accessed on November 27, 2014.

24- “Dewan Creates Winning Design in Baghdad Municipality Contest.” Ameinfo.com. February 16, 2010.

http://ameinfo.com/blog/agriculture-&-horticulture/dewan-architects-&-engineers/dewan-creates-winning-design-in-

baghdad-municipality-contest/, accessed on November 10, 2014.

http://www.dewan-architects.com/work-planning-kadhimiya.html

http://www.archdaily.com/?p=51225

http://ameinfo.com/blog/agriculture-&-horticulture/dewan-architects-&-engineers/dewan-creates-winning-design-in-baghdad-municipality-contest/


76

3.2.3 Form and the Architectural Style

In Arab-Islamic architecture, several elements are recurrent but comprise of a variety of

styles depending on the traditional values attached to the city and which has a psychological impact

on the inhabitants. Regarding the elements and the heritage vocabulary, copying from the

traditional Iraqi architecture includes: the mashrabiyya, dome, or, the shanasheel, the arch, are

evocative in people’s lives. The minaret, for example, is associated with Islamic religion and serves

as directional guidance for worshippers who rarely mistaken its function. Today, that consideration

is less important because mosques do not necessarily need minarets or even domes to project that

understanding. Nevertheless, the younger generation of Arab architects consciously choose to

revisit these two elements in their projects to construct, keep, and maintain the Arab-Islamic

architecture, and thus evoke this sentiment of belonging in the society.25 It is in that spirit that the

Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm, in designing the Al Kadhimiya project, makes use of domes

and riwaqs in the structure of the peripheral buildings just as it uses the shanasheel (Figure 3.9),

and the arches in the additional buildings (Figure 3.10).




77


Constructing of new hotel in the Al Kadhimiya historical site, Baghdad, Iraq.

Using the shanasheel in the Dewan’s proposal.




Using the arches in the Dewan’s proposal.



Harmoniously marrying the objects and their environment is the main reason to resort to

the traditional architecture.26 Traditional methods and materials used to build public and private

buildings include bricks and local materials to colorfully adorn the buildings and their facades to

26- “Dewan Creates Winning Design in Baghdad Municipality Contest.” Ameinfo.com. February 16, 2010.

http://ameinfo.com/blog/agriculture-&-horticulture/dewan-architects-&-engineers/dewan-creates-winning-design-in-

baghd ad-municipality-contest/, accessed on November 10, 2014.



http://ameinfo.com/blog/agriculture-&-horticulture/dewan-architects-&-engineers/dewan-creates-winning-design-in-baghd%20ad-municipality-contest/

http://ameinfo.com/blog/agriculture-&-horticulture/dewan-architects-&-engineers/dewan-creates-winning-design-in-baghd%20ad-municipality-contest/

78

reflect the image of the old cities. Typical buildings have flat roofs with sections that are arch-like.

It is also documented that the Al Kadhimiya historic site has buildings constructed using mud-

bricks with roofs, studs, and floors made out of timber.27 The characteristics of the above-described

buildings differ depending on what part of Iraq you are in. The internal design of the buildings

relates more to the local culture, and differentiation is noticeable through the harmony sought in

the use of color on the outside for a given region.28

3.3 Deleuze’s Rejection of Representational Thinking

In his rejection of representational thinking, Deleuze estimates that it is a source of false

identity, “incorporeal and virtual forces that stretch over a sea of corporeal bodies and actual states

of affairs.”29 Deleuze describes this as a “dogmatic image of thought,” and he ardently refutes it

because of its correlation to the model of representation which has its roots in the concepts of

identity, which he vilifies due to its tendency to exclude difference.30 His critique of identity stems

from his view that the power attributed to identity is a usurpation when it comes to the

representation of the supposed pre-existing image, and that process is the source of rejecting

difference.31 Deleuze’s stand on the logic of representation is straightforward. He thinks that the

logic of representation has nothing to do with the ‘difference in itself’ or anything in connection

with the life since in depth it sorts out thoughts in conjunction with some type of fixed elements




Laboratory of Architecture and Planning, 1983).





2012), 40.


31- James Williams, “Identity,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


79

as well as some parameters that depend on a false image.32 This is what Craig Lundy, called

‘surface becomings.’ “Surface becomings, according to Deleuze, are sterile, fixed and

immobilized, they create identifiable states, and here the logic of surface is defined by its processes

of virtual becoming in contrast to the depths of actualities.”33 Deleuze goes further in defying the

imposed moralistic nature of such an image assumed to be part and parcel of everyday life. A

British sociologist, John Marks, points out that, “the image that Deleuze challenges, is essentially

dogmatic and moral, in this sense, it is representational in nature, and in that it presupposes that

‘everyone knows.”34 As humans, we first experiment places through our immediate stable

environments, where we interact routinely in daily life and which allow us to firmly establish our

actual identities; this we almost take for granted. Human classification fails to attain identity in its

whole, ‘difference in itself.’ Even though pure difference cannot be identified and is clearly

unattainable in the present, it stretches beneath all actual identities and enables us to expound their

coming to being. The theory of Difference and Repetition, developed by Deleuze, defies the logic

of representation, whereby we contemplate each element as (re)presenting something that is

subordinated to a category or a grouping considered as the original. Seen as such, difference is

subordinated to some kind of conventional concept considered as the standard by which everything

else is measured to indefinitely. This is the reasoning behind the selection of the Dewan Architects

& Engineers Firm; their “keenness,” and “willingness” to preserve the historical, cultural, and

social features of the area. The jury, primarily composed of local politicians and businessmen,

decided that Dewan’s proposal was the most “aesthetically pleasing” among the submissions and

32- Jing Wu, The Logic of Difference in Deleuze and Adorno: positive constructivism VS negative dialectics

(Saarbrucken: Lambert, 2011), 127.


2012), 39-45.

34- John Marks, “Thought,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


80

demonstrated that it is an excellent illustration of a rich, and well-improved proposal. At the award

ceremony, the Iraqi Prime Minister, joined by the mayor of Baghdad, reiterated the necessity of

promoting religious tourism in Iraq, and he praised the Baghdad Municipality for announcing this

competition to conserve the pristine heritage of the Al Kadhimiya site, including its sacred and

remarkable premises.35 This dissertation purposes to show that the winning entry’s architectural

and urban design practices lead to a potential ‘Disneyfication’ of the Al Kadhimiya site. To

enhance that claim, this dissertation counts on Parmett’s definition of ‘Disneyfication,’ which she

mainly compares to consumerism—for the aim is to produce “an optimal space for the marketing

and consumption of consumer goods and branded experiences, and thus, it is criticized for creating

uniformity, privatization, and commodification of public space, as well as for its exclusionary

nature and its mimicry of authentic qualities.”36 Additionally, this dissertation extends the

definition of ‘Disneyfication’ by adding Bryman’s definition. In his explanation of the term:

“Disneyfication is typically associated with a statement about the cultural products.”37 That is to

say, ‘Disneyfication’ is the process of interpretation to change historic features into something

shallow and oversimplified.38 The American critic and theorist Fredric Jameson provides the most

insightful analysis of postmodernity in his book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late

Capitalism, a public cultural sphere where every historic feature “becomes semi-autonomous and

floats above reality,”39 as an image and a commoditized product.40 This idea relates to

35- “Dewan Wins Baghdad Design Contest,” iraq-businessnews.com, February 25, 2010, http://www.iraq-

businessnews.com/2010/02/25/dewan-wins-baghdad-design-contest/, accessed on November 10, 2014.

36- Helen Morgan Parmett, “Disneyomatics: Media, Branding, and Urban Space in Post-Katrina New Orleans,”

Mediascape (winter, 2012), http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2012_Disneyomatics.html, accessed on

February 20, 2015.


38- Ibid., 5.

39- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University

Press, 1991), 275 - 76.

40- Ibid., 275 - 76.


81

‘Disneyfication’ and authenticity in its argument that we live in an environment of

superficial appearance, where everything is motivated by the authentic image of the old but is

entangled with the socio-economic state of the capitalism system.41 “Above all, we must be wary

of any discourse which nostalgically calls for a return to some ‘golden age,’ an originary state of

oneness with the world, which was somehow erased by contemporary existence.”42 According to

Jameson, urban renewal projects risk slipping into ‘Disneyfication,’ the blatant opposite of

authenticity, mainly if there exists a search for appealing to or repeating some historicism.43 The

work of scholars such as Jameson, Parmett, and Dovey warns us to be careful of participating in a

similarly nostalgic dialogue of ‘authenticity.’ Jameson’s work suggests a theoretical framework

that involves the comprehensive variety of subjects included in architecture, much like Deleuze

scholar Adrian Parr’s concept of “machinic urbanism,” a nomadic practice that challenges the

oppositional dualisms of history and becoming in representational urban design thinking.

This dissertation argues that the project proposed by Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm,

due to its enormous size and unsuitable nature, will be a design of an ideal or artificial site. The

method of duplicating the same site by repeating its former elements and principles is inadvisable

for the re-development of an urban historical project because it leads to the potential

‘Disneyfication’ of historical identity (Figure 3.11, Figure 3.12, and Figure 3.13). Thus, this

dissertation argues that the return to tradition is more or less a dynamic of a system that always

calls for reproduction, and thus it becomes a dogma. However, this is not the end, according to

41- Ibid., 279.

42- Neil Leach, “Less aesthetics, more ethics,” in Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas, ed. Nicholas Ray (London

and New York: Taylor & Francis Inc., 2005), 140-41.

43- Fredric Jameson, “History lessons,” in Architecture and revolution: contemporary perspectives on Central and

Eastern Europe, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 1999), 79.

82

Lundy. There is another kind of history; a “nomadic history,” in Deleuze’s work, “that is

irreducible to both historicism and pure becoming, but rather falls between them.”44

Figure 3.11

Figure 3.12

Figure 3.13

Dewan Architects and Engineers Firm, The Al Kadhimiya Redevelopment, 2009.

Representational Model: “Disneyfied” Historical Identity




2012), 9.


83

The battle among contemporary architects and their critics cannot pass unnoticed. Alan

Colquhoun, an English architect, historian, critic, and teacher, and Khaled Asfour, an Egyptian

architect, stand out as their tenacious critics who argue on their lack of understanding of the true

traditional and passionate meaning conveyed by the relation existing between form and function

in architecture. Asfour, in particular, points out that contemporary architecture in the Arab world

can be termed as “cut and paste,” a process that has been in practice all over the world in ages

where newer generations borrow architectural ideas from older ones.45 Although Asfour

acknowledges borrowing as a global phenomenon, he does question its practice in the Arab world

because of its hollowness and lack of critical approach.

According to Asfour, the process is more guided by emotions than reason, and as such, it

does not accurately weigh the input and the output. As for his counterpart Colquhoun, he flatly

states that: “The recent tendencies toward stylistic reference seem to be motivated by a need to

reintroduce the notion of figure into architecture and to see architectural configurations as already

containing a set of cultural meanings.”46 Colquhoun’s point is justifiable and is exemplified in the

abundant use of the courtyard in contemporary designs. As a reference to traditional architecture,

a practice cannot be understood unless the evaluation is made to connect the form to its function

between past and present to account for the rationale of this use, assuming we take for granted that

this reference to the past goes beyond the form. Yasser Elsheshtawy made a poignant and

overarching remark in which his critique sees modern Arab architects and urban designers clinging

to their heritage and tradition when it comes to examining cities designated as historical sites.47

45- Khalid Asfour, ‘Abdel- Halim’s Cairo Garden: An Attempt to ‘Defrost’ History,’ MIMAR 36, Concept Media,

Singapore (1990): 72-77.

46- Alan Colquhoun, Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architectural and Historical Changes (The MIT

Press, MIT, Cambridge, 1985).

47- Yasser Elsheshtawy, Planning Middle Eastern cities: an urban kaleidoscope in a globalizing world (London:

Routledge, 2004).

84

This consideration inevitably leads to the territory of the equation of understanding the impact of

the form and function in relation to the creativity of the architect at work.

All in all, it is safe to say that the identity of a place is not determined by the history of the

terroir. Rather, it comes from the type of interactions it maintains with the outside world. Doreen

Massey rightfully says that place is a process, something in the making rather than a product that

is static, fixed and immovable.48 This means place, after all, is a complex and unattainable concept.

This is exactly the goal of this thesis, to use Deleuzian philosophy to critique, rather than to refute

or confirm the Al Kadhimiya historical project proposed by the Dewan Architects & Engineers

Firm. Although this thesis supports the revival of the site, it does not subscribe to the approach of

Dewan in copying the past of Al Kadhimiya in the present because it is a static approach when

considering Deleuze’s theory on the problematic of the fixed identity and representation.

3.4 Machinic Urbanism: Cracking the Past

Deleuze makes clear in his argument that, when it comes to architectural styles, it is

unrealistic to cut and paste the past of our ancestors into the present, whereby we merely reproduce

the forms and the adornments of the past. Deleuze wants to regain the history from the governing

authority of the representational image of thought, and thus to liberate urban design thinking from

the dualisms of historicism and surface becomings to produce unpredictable territories.

Furthermore, Deleuze characterizes this return as nomadic history that functions as a dynamic

mediator between the historicism and surface becomings. “A new middle emerges, where a new

monism and pluralism can be pursued that brings about continual creativity.”49 In fact, Deleuze’s

goal is to reverse the primary importance given to identity and representation in the European logic

48- Doreen Massey, A Place Called Home? New Formation 17, (1992):3-15.


2012), 102-3.

85

of difference.50 His approach thus defies two conditions that are assumptions, namely the special

place given to “Being” and the representational image of thought.51 Nonetheless, in Deleuze’s

approach, the two conditions have important and unexpected consequences on the “political,

aesthetic and ethical”52 lives of people, for they constitute the established canon that Deleuze

undertakes to disrupt by means of “his notion of empirical and non-conceptual difference in

itself.”53

The main key regarding the concept ‘difference in itself,’ as discussed by Deleuze in the

first chapter of his book Difference and Repetition, describes the approach as a ‘determining of a

conception of difference,’54 while avoiding the outlining of it via the assumed canonical terms of

identity and/or representation. In her development, Olkowski holds the position that the system of

representation is put to question by Deleuze’s logic of difference. To counter the proponents of

representation, Deleuze coined a new term: ‘internal difference.’ It is free of the four illusionary

concepts of representation, namely: “identity, resemblance, analogy, and opposition.”55 In

Difference and Repetition, Deleuze achieves two essential shifts from the Kantian transcendental

philosophy.56 First, instead of striving for the circumstances of “possible experience,” Deleuze

offers a vital “account of the genesis of real experience, that is, the experience of this concretely

existing individual here and now.”57 Second, to emphasize his concept of difference, Deleuze

argues that “the genetic principle must itself be a differential principle.”58 In doing so, Deleuze

50- Cliff Stagoll, “Difference,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


51- Ibid., 74.

52- Ibid., 74.

53- Ibid., 74.

54- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).


1999), 20.

56- “Gilles Deleuze,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified September 24, 2012, accessed on March

18, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/#Dif.

57- Ibid.

58- Ibid.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/#Dif

86

seeks to refrain from viewing difference as perpetually being in opposition to what is accepted as

a social norm, something that counters what is perceptible or identifiable by humans. Difference

is a genetic mechanism through which any representation becomes a dual force of illusion-identity

in perpetual interaction with deepening and widening gaps as time goes by.

The most important element to this analysis revolves around the concept and definition of

the term Adrian Parr calls “machinic urbanism.” “Machinic urbanism produces connections and

relations between elements to stimulate challenges to traditional economic, environmental, social

and cultural doxa, creating lines of flight and alternative discourses from which to imagine, or

fabulate, different futures.”59 An analysis of the proposal of the Assemblage Architects Firm will

show that these alternate possibilities have this potential. Avoiding the visual reference of the

Baghdadi house and using its spirit, this finalist entry did not utilize history in a reactionary or

nostalgic way. Instead, AAF creatively employed history, blending the present and future. In their

proposal they design a very effective urban matrix, overlapping with everyday life and manners

and facing numerous challenges to preserve the sacred and urban structures.60

To redevelop the main area around the Al Kadhimain shrine, Assemblage Architects Firm

designed a plan on a large scale, taking advantage of the vacant land available around the historic

core (Figure 3.14). They considered it necessary to move the demanded services to the edge of the

historic site (Figure 3.15).



60- “Holy City Masterplan, Al-Kadhimiya, Iraq,” Assemblage, accessed on January 01, 2015,

http://www.assemblage.co/holy-city-masterplan/.

87


The Masterplan for the Al Kadhimiya historical site, Baghdad, Iraq.

Source: AAF, Holy City Masterplan (HCM).

< http://www.assemblage.co/holy-city-masterplan>

Figure 3.15: Assemblage Architects, Holy City Masterplan, 2009.

The Masterplan for TAKHS, Baghdad, Iraq.

The courtyards in the finalist entry as a “wandering distributions,” that moves back and forth

between old and new anarchic relations.



The redevelopment plan had two objectives: to enhance the living environments of

inhabitants and to achieve a higher level of effectiveness around the shrine. The current

88

neighboring buildings conflict with the shrine, which needs more space for security checkpoints

as well as additional service offices. In this light, a new protective wall, called Sacred Wall (Figure

3.16), with internal and external lines, has been recommended, which would surround and support

the shrine, creating a machinic link between the actuality and virtuality. “The Sacred Wall encircles

the shrine, working to enhance the intensity of the space around the shrine, filtering access and

providing numerous functions for visitors. The Wall acts to mark the space of the sacred from

everyday life.”61


The Sacred Wall.



The Assemblage Architects Firm’s courtyards strategy emphasized (and at the same time

enhanced) the commercial phase of urban life by infusing different services and substructure to

the inhabitants of the Al Kadhimiya site. Besides, government financed educational facilities

would support and give more importance to these courtyards, which would promote the

61- Yana Golubeva, “Evolutionary approach towards redevelopment of historical sites versus complete erasure.

Case study Kadhimiya historical center, Baghdad, Iraq” (presentation, 47th ISOCARP Annual World Congress,

Wuhan, China, October 24-28, 2011).

89

development of small businesses, including but not limited to small stores, tea shops and small

guesthouses, filling the dynamic urban space. Waleed Al Sayyed, a Palestinian/Jordanian architect,

undertakes extensive research into the thermodynamics of certain elements and geometric forms

in the spatial organization of the environment. The author notes that the courtyard, for example,

plays the role of regulating the temperature and filtering the polluted city air. He also remarks that

the main reception room, or Qa’a, is surrounded by two iwans.62 Spatial organization is another

dimension of Arab-Islamic architecture. The courtyard, the Qa’a, the entrance, or the iwan and

riwaq, are part of this space organization. Buildings are organized in a way that allows the design

of small pedestrian paths with protective functions against bad weather. Space is thus organized to

act as a climate control both inside and outside of the building structures.63 The private and public

space concepts are designed to reflect the continuation of the suitable climatic situation for the

dwellers and pedestrians.64 These airy buildings are infiltrated by transitional open courtyards

providing public spaces and thus creating a microclimate. Daylight and natural ventilation are

integrated whenever possible. Arcades also provide shade for the pedestrians taking strolls along

the edge of the project. The goal of the energetic public spaces would be to allow economic

assemblages to occur over time, the inhabitants comprised of different urban bodies. “The Sacred

Wall and the courtyards are inscribed in the existing urban pattern, these new elements in the

historical site are embedded in the urban fabric and feel as though they have evolved there over

62- Waleed Al Sayyed, "Contemporary Arab Architecture: Space, Form, and Function." Lonaard Magazine 2, no. 7

(2011): 24-75.




Laboratory of Architecture and Planning, 1983).




90

time.”65 The machinic strategies adopted by Assemblage Architects Firm crack the past, propose

new, pragmatic, and open experiments in uncertain, pliable and transitional spaces for all present

and future proposes, connecting historical materiality with the flows of time.

According to Parr, a central feature underlying “machinic urbanism” is the non-

regularizing methodology of everyday life where the human and non-human singularities are

connected. “Machinic urbanism” characterizes the hybrid multiplicity occurring in the urban

fabric, while it challenges the detachment “between the everyday life of the city and the city as a

whole.”66 Assemblage’s proposal in its entirety is adapted to the environment and is prudent

regarding its possible impact on the rich existing urban diversity. Very few demolitions were

required, and Assemblage’s proposal upgraded the uniqueness of the ancient roads and dwellings

along with the activity of its commercial zones, reproducing the spirit of the old Iraqi suqs

(markets). The walkable neighborhoods are resulting from the traditional urbanization where

pedestrians have more access to space. In the case of the Al Kadhimiya historical site, streets

inherited from the past are not suited for the modern system of transportation. Those streets were

designed primarily for pedestrians to accommodate them during cold and hot seasons.67 It is pretty

much the same historical street patterns that Assemblage’s proposal is actually reproducing to the

benefit of the pedestrians, including bicycling opportunities for people instead of driving. To

achieve this goal, more precaution was taken by creating more friendly environments such as

corridors, urban areas with a traditional touch, and green spaces with shade and palm trees for

pedestrians’ delight, enjoyment, and free movement. These artistic elements for people’s use are

65- Yana Golubeva, “Evolutionary approach towards redevelopment of historical sites versus complete erasure.

Case study Kadhimiya historical center, Baghdad, Iraq” (presentation, 47th ISOCARP Annual World Congress,

Wuhan, China, October 24-28, 2011).


67- Waleed Al Sayyed, "Contemporary Arab Architecture: Space, Form, and Function." Lonaard Magazine 2, no. 7

(2011): 24-75.

91

shaped like axes for further appreciation by the pedestrians. Even though these architectural merits

are characteristic of historic structures because of their relation to the movement of pedestrians

and human scale of the site, they nonetheless pass between the dualisms of historicism and surface

becomings, stimulating minor usage of history and energizing new social collectives.

Deleuze’s concept of nomadic history, shown in this alternative, is to liberate urban design

thinking process from the doxa, a ‘taken-for-granted’ model of reflection. Deleuze proposes an

ontology of becoming, “founded in celebration of the creativity and contingency of pure

difference.”68 This ‘study of being’ facilitates thinking of ‘difference in itself’ – “in terms of how

we differentiate in ourselves in our inevitable and perpetual process of transformation, rather than

the difference between things, and being different from each other.”69 The logic of representation

subjugates difference to identity, a practice that Deleuze finds retrograde in terms of creative

thinking. Instead of thinking about what differs, minds are attached to what is represented, and

thus lack the ingenuity to innovate by negating true inherent difference. “Becoming is concerned

with the not-yet, with ensuring that something remains for the people-to-come.”70 Following this

thought, Parr as an activist ardently recommends a practice of “machinic urbanism” for every

architect and urban designer who seeks to achieve the “logic of collectivity” in his/her design

(Figure 3.16).

68- Michael Buser, “Thinking through non-representational and affective atmospheres in planning theory and

practice,” Planning Theory 13, no. 3 (2014): 229-30.

69- Ibid., 229-30.



92


“Machinic Urbanism”



Nomadic history attempts to cause a rupture in structures of domination and oppression to

provide “wandering distributions” that move back and forth between old and new anarchic

relations. These emerging movements are mixed with intensive and heterogeneous assemblages in

an attempt to find more machinic forms of “opportunistic events” for our future. By struggling to

crack the repressive and representative traditions, which is a political action at the core of both

Deleuze’s and psychoanalyst/political activist Feliix Guattari’s concept of becoming minoritarian,

social-design activism will challenge any doxa, any taken-for-granted distributions of power.

Minor architects are activist architects that excavate the underground of our representational

thinking, “implying a break with static, fixed, closed and dangerously essentialist notions of place,

preserving a provisional ontology of place-as-becoming: there is always, already and only

becoming-in-the-world.”71 The suggested strategy is to acknowledge, analyze, express, and resist


93

the lines of force that are intrinsic to static history towards lines of flight, towards a nomadic

history.72 (Figure 3.17, Figure 3.18, Figure 3.19, and Figure 3.20).

Figure 3.17 Figure 3.18

Figure 3.19 Figure 3.20


“Nomadic History”



3.5 Conclusion

This chapter scrutinizes both the winning proposal and finalist proposal for redevelopment

of the Al Kadhimiya historical site, questioning whether or not the process of redevelopment has

achieved what it sought to accomplish: a nomadic history, or, in fact, the opposite, by erasing its

historical personality through the illusionary neo-traditional styles, which in fact represent the now

and lead to the closure of the processes of becoming. To provide a clear distinction (the

72- Jill Stoner, Toward a minor architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

94

‘singularity’ of each competition entry, not the dualist distinction between them), this chapter

advocates the particularities of activity and event that can be mapped in each proposal as a

movement of life. Through a comparative analysis, the objective is to offer suitable techniques of

adding to the urban matrix of Kadhimiya without destroying the existing life structure. The goal

is to “engage the creative lines of flight,”73 and stimulate the interplay of the old and new in

contemporary spaces that are endowed with curiosity and contingency instead of simply seeking

expressions of the nostalgic past, which are loyal to the fictional idea of a frozen past.74 Using

history as historicism to preserve the urban form features is the most widely advocated pattern

among the historic preservation patterns; mainly, because of its direct impact on the viewer.

According to Deleuze, the characteristics of the form can be comprehended by the human senses

as an illusion; the observer can perceive the context and the architectural values through the form,

by viewing representational image of the architectural object. In general, the preservation of the

form features that the winning entry used can be divided into:

Complete Preservation (Classical): This has two patterns; first, preservation of an existing

building; second, preservation of the form features of the previously existing building

(coping). For example, the winning entry deliberately simulated the traditional Arabian

city, confirming the existence of a gap between the shrine and the historic urban fabric.

Partial Preservation: This can be done by maintaining certain elements or features, or a set

of elements and features selected by a designer, and it could be classified into patterns and

levels as in the ‘complete preservation.’ In this proposal the city would lose a lot of its


74- Galdieri Eugenio, “Project and Tradition,” in Understanding Islamic architecture, eds. Attilio Petruccioli and

Khalil K. Pirani (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2002), 114.

95

urban fabric, expanding the gap between the shrine and the historic urban fabric. The

buildings that are not included in the reservation list will be replaced by new ones that

simulate the style and construction material of the old buildings.

The analysis of the proposals reveals that the proposal which showed a construction of history on

displaced immanence as a dynamic, virtual set of contingent ‘machinic’ connections, can supplant

the representational image of thought, generating new realities and virtual possibilities to think

differently. At the end of this chapter, nomadic history stays an open-ended practice– a unique

approach that must certainly stay open. By dismissing the old question of what the history of the

city is, asking instead the question of what nomadic history can do, this approach keeps

architectural and urban design practices open to complex environmental, economic, and social

lives. Through this vital question, and by thinking via temporal engagements and spatial

organizations of different urban scales, future generations of architects, urban designers, planners,

and educators will be detached from representational image of history. They will encounter a doubt

and an uncertainty about the notion of “history” that must continue to share an ethics of design.

Nomadic history enables architects, urban designers, and planners to stay creative and critical, as

an important part of an architectural and urban design resistance to the representational thinking

where history is being “idealized” in a capitalist system. The capacity to think via different scales,

to generate affective experiences and to connect the present events to the past that produce them,

is an important design strategy. Seeking nomadic history means to start from the “middle” or with

what urban context have toward the future becoming rather than start from the past designing for

a finished image.

96

CHAPTER FOUR

Main Findings

4.1 Memory in an Experimental Preservation: Deleuze, Duration, and Nonlinear History

By adapting the Deleuze-Bergsonian new interpretation of memory and engaging

subjectivity, art, and duration, this chapter explores the ‘machinic’ mode of experimental

preservation by which architectural and urban design practices can operate difference, affect, and

assemblage. This is especially manifest in a proposal by the Assemblage Architects Firm to

redevelop the Al Kadhimiya historical site in Baghdad, Iraq. The political forces of Assemblage’s

project both document and create an ontology of becoming and change within a real yet virtual

past that produces durational events. In contrast, the winning proposal by the Dewan Architects

and Engineers Firm (DAEF) offered “a string of actualities.”75

This chapter remarks on the findings, reporting what the data analysis exposed.

Architecture and urban design are traditionally exposed to dominant representational systems,76

which are fixed assemblies of time and space. Therefore, this mostly representational thinking

condones any practice that involves the ontology of becoming and change in architectural

preservation. Accordingly, this chapter examines the traditional ways of thinking about and

preserving architecture that carries within it a principle of fixed and false identity and the

‘machinic’ mode of experimental design that generates difference. This chapter describes the

morphological stages and the historical background of the planning and urban studies around the

Al Kadhimiya historical site as different approaches to resolve the dilemma of preservation for the

Al Kadhimiya historical site in Baghdad, Iraq (Figure 4.1, and Figure 4.2).


2012), 20.

76- Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “The making of The Machine: Powerless Control as A Critical Strategy,” in Eleven

Authors in Search of a Building: the Aronoff Centre for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati, ed. Cynthia

C. Davidson (New York: Monacelli Press, 1996), 32.

97

Figure 4.1: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library, The Al Kadhimain Shrine Surrounding,

1923. “Bird’s eye view of the shrine and its surrounding fabric from North West showing twin

domes over tombs and the low dome covering the mosque.”


Copyright: FAL, HCL.


Figure 4.2: Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library, The Entrance Gate of The Al Kadhimain

Shrine, 1923.

“The entrance gate of the Kadimain Mosque leading to the tomb of the Imam Moosa Al Kadim.”


Copyright: FAL, HCL.





98

Subsequently, the chapter critically assesses and analyzes two different modes of urban

design practice that have been submitted to an international-wide competition by two different

firms to redevelopment the Al Kadhimiya historical site. The analysis precisely attempts to

illustrate how the architects, urban designers, and preservationists in the winning entry

intentionally used customary mean and inflexible mode to preserve the visual character of the

historical site. In contrast to this view, there has been a critical engagement with the ‘machinic’

mode of experimental design in the finalist entry that escaped the historicism and the frozen-time

image functionary towards a re-engineered creative historical/architectural dialogue, sketching

affective assemblage with non-representational and temporary installations.

4.2 The Morphological Stages for the Al Kadhimiya Historical Site

Old Al Kadhimiya went through several morphological stages like any other historical area.

The stages can be identified as follows:

4.2.1 The First Morphological Stage: 1869-1940

This stage (Figure 4.3) extends until 1940 where the city was exposed to the updating of

projects that began in 1869, which is the beginning of modernization at Kadhimiya.77 In this period

the separation from Baghdad was finalized, and the Al Kadhimiya was incorporated with the Karkh

(the name of the western half of Baghdad) through the Tramway. The creation of streetcars in 1869

caused obvious, radical changes in the city’s morphology, especially in the southern borders where

several public baths and commercial buildings were established.78 The commercial buildings were

erected near the Tramway Station, like El-Esterbadi Market, in 1920, which extends southwest of





78- Sahar Mohamed Al-Kaisi, The influence of natural and cultural environment on the fabric of the city, with

special reference to Iraq, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, Vol.3 (Sheffield University, 1984), 679.

99

the holy shrine for a 200-meter distance. As for the public baths, they are an important factor that

completes the traditional markets, which are open services and entertainment connected to the

commercial corridor. Of the most famous public baths are Bab Eddarazwa, El-Mirza Hadi, and

Al-Amir.79 This new path for travel and transportation caused many commercial enterprises and

businesses to develop near the tram terminal, such as big hotels khans. In addition, The Wooden

Bridge was constructed by connecting wooden boats on the Tigris River in 1883 to facilitate

transporting the increased number of visitors. This bridge connected Kadhimiya and Adhamiyah

in 1884. In 1920 the weaving factory was constructed along with the Royal Hospital in 1930 and

the Post Office in 1935. However, most of this modern development effected only the function

and periphery of the area and did not disrupt the historic fabric of the core.80

4.2.2 The Second Morphological Stage: 1940-1975

In this stage (Figure 4.4), Al Kadhimiya and Al Adhamiyah were connected with a

permanent bridge in 1957. Thus, obvious commercial and residential developments took place,

especially in the southern part.81 Also, new important streets were built, like Al Shareef Alradi

Street (12 m.), Al- Qiblah Street (22 m.) and Al Zahra Street (30 m.) These streets caused partial

damage to the urban fabric, especially in both Al Shiyoukh and Al Qatana areas. Besides, more

damage to the urban fabric occurred around the shrine.82 During this period, three types of streets

are included: 1) the individual streets and the narrow alleys in the traditional site, 2) the streets of

geometric system in the modern neighborhood, and 3) the long streets that penetrated the old

79- Ibid., 665.



81- Ibid., 683.





100

traditional fabric (the radiant streets), which extended from the center towards the edges. In 1957,

the permanent Iron Bridge was opened; named Al Amma Bridge it replaced the Al Adhamiyah

Floating Bridge which was removed in advance.83

Figure 4.3: Sahar Mohamed Al-Kaisi, The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, Before 1936.

The First Morphological Stage.

Source: Al-Kaisi, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, 1984, 671.


The Second Morphological Stage.




101

4.2.3 The Third Morphological Stage: 1976-2003

The roads and the clearance of areas surrounding the mosque not only destroyed more than

9 hectares of some of the old urban fabric, but it also brought an inevitable array of modern multi-

story blocks which have drastically and unsympathetically changed the overall historic character

of the town.84 Another important impact on the historic fabric is overcrowding, which leads to a

rapid deterioration of the structural condition of buildings and the decay of the environment

(Figure 4.5). Destroying this space caused the formation of wide open space around Al Kadhimain

shrine, leaving it difficult to identify the place and discover its character.85 Also, this open space

destroyed the humanistic scale which was found in the old historical fabric. The architectural fabric

was distinguished during this period by being directed to the outside, away from the shrine,

without, as previously taking into consideration the functional side. To some degree, this can be

traced to the introduction of the modern air conditioning techniques and the popularity of using

the automobiles in most Iraq provinces. The opening to the outside became a basic feature to the

modern part of this traditional area where the line of building was restored and left a wide field as

a front garden and a garage.86

4.2.4 The Fourth Morphological Stage: 2003 to present

Some vehicle routes were closed, and some were changed to one-way directional roads.

Despite these drastic alterations and population problems, there is still a unique opportunity to











102

rescue the situation by stopping further destruction, conserving the remaining fabric and by

carefully weaving back the delicate urban pattern following characteristics of traditional Arab

architecture as explored in this dissertation (Figure 4.6, and Figure 4.7).


The Third Morphological Stage.


Figure 4.6: John Warren, The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, 2003 to present.

The Fourth Morphological Stage.

Source: John Warren, “Baghdad Two Case Studies of Conservation,” 1984, 249.

103

Figure 4.7: The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site, 2003 to present.

Source: Google Earth image. 2013 to present.

4.3 Historical Background of the Planning and Urban Studies (approaches to the issue)

The dilemma of preservation for the Al Kadhimiya site is easily seen when one examines

its history of development and commercialization (Figure 4.8, and Figure 4.9).

Figure 4.8: Yasser Tabbaa Archive, Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT, The Al Kadhimain

Shrine, 1980s.

Source: Yasser Tabbaa Archive (YTA), AKDC at MIT.

Copyright: DG Antiquities, Iraq.



104

Figure 4.9: The Al Kadhimain Shrine, 1970s.

Source: International Quran News Agency.

< http://iqna.ir/en/news/3362320/old-photos-of-holy-shrines-in-al-kadhimiya>

This historical area is caught between conservation and redevelopment. In 1973, the Iraqi

government approved the detailed Polish master plan, proposed by Polservice Consulting

Engineers (Warsaw-Poland). Unlike the Doxiadis master plan (Figure 4.10), (proposed by

Doxiadis Associates of Greece, 1958), that encouraged the whole destruction of Baghdad’s

historical sites, the Polish planners suggested, in their first project for mapping Baghdad in1967,

and their second detailed masterplan in 1973 (Figure 4.11, and Figure 4.12) , to preserve the

historical neighborhoods of the Al Kadhimiya, and surrounding them with four main streets

(Figure 4.13).87 The 1967 study of Polservice accomplished the following operations:

Constructing a green belt around the traditional city to preserve its religious and

historical identity and ensuring the domination of the Al Kadhimain shrine over the

adjacent area;

87- Łukasz Stanek, “Miastoprojekt goes abroad: The transfer of architectural labor from socialist Poland to Iraq

(1958-1989),” Journal of Architecture 22:4 (2017): 786-811. DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2016.1204075, accessed 10

July, 2017.

105

maintain the historical and religious buildings;

adapt the traditional city and the areas adjacent to the Al Kadhimain shrine for

modern life requirements;

place a suitable transportation network in the traditional city while keeping the lines

of the traditional activity in the residential sections in its style and identity that was

built to serve the pedestrians and suit the climate; and,

increase the level of services offered to the visitors by establishing hotels and

restaurants.

In contrast, the Doxiadis proposal specifically suggested that: “The old, central areas of Al Rusafa

and Al Karkh, together with the smaller areas of Al Adhamiyah and Al Kadhimiya, largely

comprise a dense mass of congested buildings, intersected by narrow, winding alleys. They are

without any open space or other amenities. These areas should be demolished and comprehensive

layouts prepared for their development.”88

Based on the oil-boom, political demands dictated many municipal authorities in Iraq to

approve a “policy of freeing important historical religious buildings from their surroundings,”89

which proved to be detrimental to several historic religious structures. Their demolition represents

an unrecoverable loss of pristine Iraqi setting and urban environments. It was an obvious violation

of the Polish master plans, “an action that caused the head of the Polish team in Baghdad to resign

in protest.”90

88- Panayiota Pyla, “Back to the Future: Doxiadis's Plans for Baghdad,” Journal of Planning History 7 (1) 2008: 3-

19. http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jsd/article/view/24042.

89- Akram J. M. Al-Akkam, “Urban Heritage in Baghdad: Toward a Comprehensive Sustainable Framework,”

Journal of Sustainable Development 6:2 (2013): 39.

90- Łukasz Stanek, “Miastoprojekt goes abroad: The transfer of architectural labor from socialist Poland to Iraq

(1958-1989),” Journal of Architecture 22:4 (2017): 786-811. DOI: 10.1080/13602365.2016.1204075, accessed 10

July 2017.

http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/jsd/article/view/24042

106

Figure 4.10: Doxiadis Masterplan of Baghdad, DA 1958.

Source: Doxiadis, Constantinos. Ekistics: an Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements,

485.

.

Figure 4.11: Polservice Consulting Figure 4.12: Polservice Consulting

Engineers Warsaw-Poland, 1967. Engineers Warsaw-Poland,

Masterplan of Baghdad, 1967. Masterplan of Baghdad, 1974.

Source: Stanek, Łukasz. “Miastoprojekt goes abroad: The transfer of architectural labor from

socialist Poland to Iraq (1958-1989),” Journal of Architecture 22:4 (2017).

107

Figure 4.13: “Design of the restructuring of the Al Kadhimiya neighborhood in Baghdad,

The mid-1970s.”

Polservice Consulting Engineers

Source: Stanek, Łukasz. “Miastoprojekt goes abroad: The transfer of architectural labor from

socialist Poland to Iraq (1958-1989),” Journal of Architecture 22:4 (2017).

In 1980 the site went through an urban intervention that demolished its historical features

(Figure 4.14).91 During this period a radical change occurred in the planning idea due to the

destructive operations which took place immediately around the Al Kadhimain shrine. This

resulted in the destruction of 9 hectares of the most architecturally motivating parts of the site’s

core, and the construction of new multi-story buildings that are unsympathetic and out of character

with the historical fabric of the area.92 The government at that time appointed the Architectural

and Planning Partnership, A.P.P Firm, to redevelop the Al Kadhimiya site (Figure 4.14). The

founder of the firm, British architect John Warren, said: “to predict naturally desired lines in









108

conjunction with community needs, our task was to create a new segment of the city, sympathetic

to the character of the past, but designed for the needs of the future.”93 The A.A.P. plan proposes

the use of smaller than usual traditional housing units that do not completely surround the

courtyard (Figure 4.15). These smaller units with semi-open courtyard plans yield a rather different

relationship between the dwellings of the traditional pattern. The new housing caters to modem

needs such as the motor car (parking), air-conditioning and smaller families. The A.P.P projects

can be considered one of the first attempts in the Arab world to re-create a substantial part of a

traditional Arab medina with modem conveniences and standards, without directly imitating the

designs of the old buildings.94

Figure 4.14: Architectural and Planning Partnership (A.P.P) proposal for the restructuring of the

Al Kadhimiya Neighborhood in Baghdad, 1983.




93- Sherban Cantacuzino, “Baghdad Resurgent,” Mimar 6: Architecture in Development, ed. Hasan-Uddin Khan

(Singapore: Concept Media Ltd., 1982): 56-71.

94- Ibid., 56-71.

109

Figure 4.15: MIT Libraries, Aga Khan Visual Archive, Traditional House in the Al Kadhimiya

site, 1982.

“House to be restored by Architecture & Planning Partnership.”




Unfortunately, authorities were torn between keeping the traditional values which conserve

both the fabric of this historic town and Iraqi way of life (its customs, architectural values, and

Islamic cultural practices), and eliminating the historical elements to make way for modern

innovations. The indecision of authorities stems from diametric positions: to completely clear the

area and construct afresh with “global” modern buildings and urban environment or to retain and

restore all the historical buildings and urban fabric. Essentially, from the 1980’s until now, due to

the opposing opinions regarding the planning of the area, the decision-making process has been

thwarted; so much so that the demolished area remains unbuilt (Figure 4.16, Figure 4.17, and

Figure 4.16).

110

Figure 4.16: Al Kadhimiya Neighborhood in Baghdad, west of the Tigris River, 2007.

Source: Google Earth image.

< http://iraqslogger.powweb.com >

Figure 4.17: Al Kadhimiya Neighborhood in Baghdad, 2013.

Source: www.skyscrapercity.com

Figure 4.18: Al Kadhimiya Neighborhood in Baghdad, 2013.

Source: www.skyscrapercity.com

111

In 2008-2009 the federal government announced an international competition, performed

by the Mayor’s Office of Baghdad, which sought proposals for the regeneration of the Al

Kadhimiya historical site. The mayor of Baghdad announced a request for proposals for the

redevelopment of the historical site. The mayor’s vision was to combine the religious, commercial

and local inhabitants’ interests in a design that would be representative of the true nature of the

environment where people live. The mayor’s call for proposals emphasizes the uniqueness of the

Al Kadhimiya historical site, but also reveals the need to provide durable solutions to its ongoing

urban challenges.

4.4 The Allusion of the History in the Traditional Mode of Preservation

In order to persuade the Baghdad authorities of the viability of their proposal, the winning

proposal stressed the fact that the preservation project for the Al Kadhimiya site would revive its

historical image. The mission of the potential bid winner would be that, by a repetition of the past,

an exact construction and restoration would be accomplished. One of the most important themes,

which is part of Deleuze’s theory of Difference and Repetition, is the perception that repetition, by

its nature, precisely replicas an original, the model and its reproductions.95 Deleuze states that

individuals frequently normalize their thinking as a set of rules and dogmas, which have their roots

in identical notions. Their classifications and judgments tend to exclude difference. Deleuze

consequently criticizes this ‘dogmatic image of thought’ since it correlates with a system of

imagistic representation.96 As British sociologist John Marks points out, Deleuze thus goes further

to defy the imposed and moralistic nature of one such image which is assumed to be part and parcel

95- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994):

128.

96- Daniela Voss, Conditions of thought Deleuze and transcendental ideas (Edinburgh University Press, 2013): 19.

112

of people’s everyday life, and therefore “ought to be known by every member of society.”97

Deleuze proposes that individuals do not see what the future holds, and properly this is a

respectable point of view. Architecturally, uncertainty might lead the design thinking process to

fairly different zones. Sketching from the Deleuze’s ontology of becoming and change,

architectural and urban design ‘elements and features would be used in an unexpected and

influential way. Conversely, the prototype of representational architectural and urban design

thinking for renewal projects, precisely in the preservation and conservation of historical sites,

aims to guard a stationary image of history by repeating the historical styles and recycling the

traditional elements. This practice is disapproved as being “Disneyfied” and a generalization of

history. The immobile result of these forms evokes a predetermined image, an artificial frozen-

time image. Dewan’s proposal reflects the challenge to make the Al Kadhimiya historical site an

eye-catching and prospering local and global focus in the domain of sacred and profitable tourism.

The holy site would have traditional residential homes as well as traditional social and economic

gathering places like markets, as well as religious exhibitions within its vicinities (Figure 4.19).

By involving the private sector in finishing the project,98 Dewan Firm sheds light on the importance

of helping domestic economy by using positive branding and globalization. Branding motivates

the mind of the consumer and creates trust,99 feeling, and experience that the consumer had with

the original. Alan Bryman explains that “Disneyization is depicted as a process by which the

principles of the Disney theme parks dominate more and more sectors of society.”100 Bryman

claims that the concept of Disneyization becomes so powerful and its influence is scattering

97- John Marks, “Thought,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


98- The Municipality of Baghdad (Amant Al- Assima), The Development of the Al Kadhimiya district (Development

Administration – Heritage Section. Baghdad, Iraq, 2008).

99- Leonard L. Berry, “Cultivating service brand equity,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 28:1(2000),

128-137. Doi: 10.1177/0092070300281012.


113

globally into zones that we do not easily notice.101 Moreover, globalization is “a trend towards

increased economic and political interdependence, which at once fosters and is fostered by cultural

homogenization.”102 Understanding the globalization of the Disney brand, makes easier to grasp

the principals of the re-development in Dewan’s proposal to attract international tourists using a

branded experience. “Branding is not just for tangible goods; it is a principal success driver for

service organizations as well.” 103

From a social perspective, Dewan’s proposal highlighted two phases of social-religious

tradition. It decomposed traditional architecture into its elements and principles, at the level of

either facades or plans, and merged these elements into the Al Kadhimiya design project. This

“integration” might be obvious or might merely include a level of alteration. Initially, at the main

phase, this proposal expanded the areas around the shrine by imitating the configuration of the

traditional city in coherence with the integrated religious functions of the historical site. During

the second phase, this proposal copied the traditional architecture by including Islamic motifs,

such as the domes and riwaqs that were used in the structure of the peripheral buildings, arches,

and shanasheel that were used in the additional buildings. The end outcome might be simpler than

the old in some aspects, but it necessity visually evoke, in a nearly cut and paste method, which it

is obtained from the old source.104 This repetition represents a predetermined “norm” as a formula

of hegemonic urban design practice.

From an economic standpoint, the historic buildings would be hidden by the “new” and

“bright” facades, to attract more local and international worshippers and visitors and to enhance


102- Joshua P. Hochschild, “Globalization: Ancient and modern,” The Intercollegiate Review, 40-48.


104- Khaled Asfour, “Identity in the Arab Region: Architects and Projects from Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,

Kuwait and Qatar,” in Constructing identity in contemporary architecture: case studies from the South 2009, eds.

Peter Herrle and Stephanus Schmitz (Berlin: LIT Verlag Münster, 2009), 150.

114

the religious tourism. In fact, what Dewan Architects & Engineers Firm actually suggested in their

design of the Al Kadhimiya historical site consisted of more demolition of the urban fabric with

the exception of a few valuable old buildings. In Dewan’s proposal, the formation of authentic

identity had turned into an important marketing device as a Disneyfication practice that directed

design strategy for developers and businessmen whose interests were only motivated by the ability

to make a fast profit. Disneyfication can be labeled as the alteration of the Al Kadhimiya site into

a conventionally measured environment that is captive and restricted to a representational image

of history with homogenized assets that divest the place (the Al Kadhimiya site) from its unique

character and repackages and reproduces it in a scoured design.

The urban design practice adopted by the winning entry focused on the urban form of local

structures, such as shanasheels (Iraqi windows) and arches. They constantly used these structures

as measurable and determinate material properties at the residencies because of their distinctive

local style, not because of their architectural values. Moreover, the project did not observe or take

into account the relationship between urban form and architectural values as it would in any

historic fabric, creating routinized repetitions and customary habits. In fact, the urban design

practice and methods subjected the Al Kadhimiya site to a formalized image, reducing the

historical site and the urban form to a representational portrait that conveys an authorized narrative.

As a result, this project is an example of an easy solution that gives no room for

reorientating the view of urban design practice towards the creative transformation of the site,

instead it enforces the stability of a standard series of conventional events, images, and episodes

that are frequently repeated in the identical order of organized cycle and time. The urban design

practice in the winning entry exists as an allusion. Urban design practice is designed

conventionally to reflect the image of the thought and social platform that refers to a traditional

115

object, which always already defines cultural patterns. Moreover, historical architecture in the

winning entry is reduced to a system of symbolization that represents traditional assumptions.






116

According to K. Michael Hays, an American architectural historian, the representational

image and conventional realm of the architectural form appear as a reference through the

materiality, function, and connotation.105 The characteristics of the form can be comprehended by

the human senses as an illusion; the observer can perceive the context and the architectural values

through the form by viewing a representational image of the architectural object. Architectural and

urban design practices have always conventionally located the personal subject at the focus of its

interpretations. The designer aims to preserve a specific sense by visualizing and materializing the

distinct character of a site, converting its genius loci into an inert image to reflect a determinate

meaning to be deciphered by the subject. Christian Norberg-Schulz, a Norwegian theorist, defines

genius loci as the distinctive ‘character’ of a setting before it has been imagined and converted into

architectural form.106 Consequently, the preservation of a specific environment can be included

under the architectural representation if genius loci is truthfully real, meaning it has “already”

embodied specific meaning and has become an operation of impersonal packaging effects

throughout its exclusionary mode. Besides, the impressive mimicry of authentic qualities to

preserve a specific site serves the representational image because it is performed through selection

of a set of elements and features or shared relations that can be repeated in a certain pattern for

various successive ‘form’ units as a sort of imitation and act of copying.

“Because the idea of genius loci has often been criticized as an anthropomorphic

projection of human agency onto the landscape, it registers as an example of the

fantastic elements that circle pure agency. If, however, genius loci is phantasmatic,

it returns only insofar as the subject brings it back to the new subjective field formed

by the architectural encounter, effectively re-imagining it as surplus affect.”107

105- K. Michael Hays, Architecture's desire: Reading the late avant-garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 55.

106- Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980).


Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011): 46.

117

In Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s book, The Architecture of the City,108 the established shape of the

city is synthesized as a mnemonic tableau, yet the impersonal effects of urban architecture do not

take into account the collective human will or spirit and their cultural memory-the agency of genius

loci. Rossi’s phenomenological assumption and postmodernist representation of the urban subject

persists in considering urban architecture as a limited-formalism, using historical elements as

reductive objects to serve the transcendental ego that excludes the process of becoming for the

reason of being. Genius loci, thus, has been excluded by the coding rules from the productive

model of impersonal effects; it remains either “as the shadow of a primordial, predetermined whole

forming worlds, or as phantasmatic surplus consistent with the fragments of symbolic and

discursive orders within the subject’s psyche.”109 The cultural memory in Rossi’s depiction is

defined regarding the collective ego that forges relations outside the fixed force of the higher

principle (such as the superego). However, Rossi’s depiction does not have the capacity to surpass

“the realm of the cognizing subject, and forms of memory that are, in part, invented or

constructed.”110

Consequently, the architectural form is hunted by meaning and the architectural values

visualized by cultural patterns; thus, both of them are experienced and pass themselves off as

representational and unquestionable objects, reflected by the mirror of nature, performing a

predictable scheme of meaning. In the winning entry, the historical tradition of the Al Kadhimiya

site is used as a stabilized framework of reference in the preservation process, representing fixed

identity in which its formal features are kept without any changes and as a result, are considered

108- Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the city, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA, 1982).




Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011): 48.

118

and measured as ‘ending’ image (or completed practice). Hays mentions that “any traditional or

conventional form is likely to have more authority, to engage our assent more readily, than a form

that tries to expose the complex matrix of disciplinary procedures and institutional apparatuses

through which the object is actually constructed.”111 The winning entry symbolizes a dominant

result in the process of mimetic preservation work, providing a representational image of the

traditional architecture that blocks future perspectives.

4.5 Deleuze, Duration, and Nonlinear History

Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time as duration was adopted by the French theorist Gilles

Deleuze when evolving his theory of Difference and Repetition. The tremendous achievement via

Deleuze’s philosophy of difference is the outlining of the most fundamental mechanisms of the

theories of time and memory which were developed in Bergson’s works and the exposing of them

to an idiosyncratic approach and rigorous analysis. According to Deleuze, the novelty of Bergson’s

conception of a pure past that is preserved in itself and not perceived in the closure of present lies

in the lack of actualization of this real yet virtual past in space. Instead, this non-representational

past can only exist in various planes of temporality and memory and be actualized by the pure

perception that materializes it, opening the way for “Bergsonian intuition,” the ability “to think

intuitively---to think in duration.”112 Deleuze insists that we can mentally grasp the notion of

duration if we use Bergson’s critical method of ‘philosophical intuition,’ an intentional deep

awareness or self- willed consciousness. “Bergsonian intuition” revolves around a nomadic

resonance that can be perceived between various, concealed, and inner impulses of becoming, or

planes of memory, which produce new models of subjectivity. “Bergsonian intuition” asserts that

111- K. Michael Hays, Architecture's desire: Reading the late avant-garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 55.

112- Samuel Enoch Stumpf, Philosophy: history and problems (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1982): 371.

119

“questions relating to subject and object, to their distinction and their union, should be put in terms

of time rather than space.”113

The problematic situation, as Bergson claims, is that, in representational thinking, an

ontological version of temporalization has been established based on a pre-given form of

homogeneous and static spatiality. Thus, Bergson criticizes the derivative interpretation of time

that originates from that pre-given understanding, which is “to think in terms of space rather than

time.”114 Therefore, Bergson’s critical method of ‘philosophical intuition’ aims to recognize the

unnoticeable differences and qualitative changes that structure an organized and perceived whole.

According to Bergson, we intuitively grasp the nature of life as a whole—as a comprehensive

process of the dynamic truth of things in our spiritual consciousness. Bergson argues that the

individual needs to affectively enter into the heart of the thing and engage the whole experience,

to immediately ‘coincide’ and directly ‘sympathize’ with it.115 The main point lies with the body’s

affectivity to empower the forces of perception and memory that are often overlooked by

representational thinking. “Bergsonian intuition” exposes consciousness (or mental life, in a

general sense), to be basically temporal. In this regard, consciousness is a continuing body’s

affectivity, an ongoing process of mental action and activities that create an internal time connected

to a passive subject, indicating a link between affectivity, temporality, and life itself. Following

Deleuze’s assertion, every human subject on the plane of life itself must not be considered as a

stable being or rational individual. Instead, each individual self is an active present and must be

perceived as a continually altering assemblage of forces that already create a past and future.

113- Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988): 71.

114- John Marks, “Representation,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh:


115- Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988): 71.

120

4.6 Machinic Mode to Preserve the Nonlinear History

In the text Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, postmodern philosopher

Dorothea Olkowski looks for concepts and alternative structures that promote abstract and flowing

models of time and space to combat “static, hierarchically- dualistic ordered structures.”116 She

seeks flexible ontologies that can absorb diversity and difference in an open yet pragmatic way.

“The task will be to create an image of difference”117 she writes, one “that sweeps away the

metaphysics of being and identity and their representation, so as to practically and conceptually

acknowledge the stuttering practice of an ontology of becoming.”118 Olkowski posits that the rigid

modes and categories in every major discipline, whether theoretical or practical, do not simply

disrupt the openness of thinking, they also subordinate the difference to the representation

authority.119 In his refusal of this type of representational thinking, Deleuze considers that it is a

basis of stable and false identity.120 Using Deleuze’s work on difference, Olkowski grasps the point

that the scheme of representation is placed in query by Deleuze’s ‘logic of difference.’ In

experimental practice, the transformation from a ‘logic of identity’ to a ‘logic of difference’

activates a process of differentiation. Olkowski explain:

“In order for there to be movement and mobility, the nomadic nomos, distortion

must destabilize representation, representation must be torn from its center and

from the identity of the concept, as well as from the perfect hierarchy of

distribution that Aristotle establishes.”121


1999): 2.

117- Ibid., 2.

118- Ibid., 14.

119- Ibid., 1-2.

120- Jing Wu, The Logic of Difference in Deleuze and Adorno: positive constructivism VS negative dialectics

(Saarbrucken: Lambert, 2011), 48.


1999), 25.

121

Furthermore, the examination of the notion of pure difference is a vital part of Deleuze’s ontology

of becoming and change. Despite the fact that pure difference cannot be identified and is

unattainable, it underlies all identities, “affirming that any identity is always riven with forces,

with processes, connections, movements.”122 Olkowski believes that Deleuze confirms what

Michele Montreley calls the ‘ruin of representation;’ the shaking up of the whole system —“that

is, of the static, hierarchically put-together structures of time and space,”123 in order to support the

production of ‘machinic’ relations, linking diverse bodies in diverse spatial and temporal practice.

Deleuze contemplates that the ontology of becoming and change has “its own duration, a measure

of the relative stability of the construct, and the relationship between forces at work in defining it;

becoming must be conceived neither in terms of a ‘deeper’ or transcendental time nor as a kind of

‘temporal backdrop’ against which change occurs.”124 Consequently, architectural and urban

design practices, intervening and inserting between both formality and spatiality, seem to be as an

abstract machine. The non-authoritative occurrence of architecture is produced from its multiple

functions and emerges in the perpetual interactions and living desires such as, ‘shelter, security,

privacy, and boundary control,’125 to name a few. As part of Deleuze’s ontology, a machine can

freely develop thematic connections and dynamic assemblages which, because desire can link and

drive ‘multiplicities of elements’126 with different arrangements, recognize ‘machinic’ relations

and potential. The American architect Peter Eisenman articulates that the uncertainty in design


2001), 95.

123- Colin Gardner, Review of the book Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation by Dorothea Olkowski

(New York: College Art Association, Inc., 2000), 1. http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/212#.V2btHY-cHmQ. Doi:

10.3202/caa.reviews.2000.53, accessed 11 May 2015.

124- Cliff Stagoll, “Becoming,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


125- Kim Dovey, “Assembling Architecture,” in Deleuze and Architecture, ed. Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo


126- Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: an introduction to the politics of desire (London: Sage, 1996): 4.

http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/212#.V2btHY-cHmQ

122

practice can facilitate the mode of ‘machinic’ to be activated. In this manner, architecture cannot

be reduced to a system of symbolization that represents traditional assumptions and has “already”

embodied meaning in the architectural formalistic image.127 The idea of assemblage destabilizes

the fixed categorizations of ‘identity’ and ‘being’ in relation to time and space, giving priority

to‘difference’ and ‘becoming’ in pure duration. Bergson states that: “Pure duration is the form

taken by the succession of our inner states of consciousness when ourself lets itself live when it

abstains from establishing a separation between the present state and anterior states.”128 The

crystalline temporality of duration is a constituent of time that is not perceived as a chronological

succession, by which the terminus of one instant determines the outset of the following one; nor is

it a mathematical time or measurable time that is divisible into separate units of seconds, minutes,

hours, and so on which do not construe as the movement of real-time or lived consciousness.129

The logic of subjectivity that Deleuze notices in Bergson’s thinking is this: “the only subjectivity

is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not

the other way round. . .....time is not the interiority in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in

which we are, in which we move, live and change.”130 In other words, the fluidity of Deleuze’s

ideas about duration marks the occurrence of time and becoming, in which all forms of life, or

creative evolutions, unfold in that movement of time as intensive affects and material forces,

opening towards the status of indeterminacy. Deleuze terms this becoming as a ‘pure incorporeal


Madrid (1997): 21-35.

128- Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Data of Immediate Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson

(London: Dover, 2001[1910]): 74-75.

129- Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Data of Immediate Consciousness (New York: Dover

Publications, 2001), 100.

130- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1989): 110.

123

Event,’131 which has limitless perennial qualities. The motions of this pure becoming create

“incorporeal beings”132 as events that are attributed to the bodies, and they have an infinitive

identity. These unlimited events-verbs are about what the bodies can do. They are not ‘adjectives,’

not about what the bodies are. The events of pure becoming are expressed through the bodies’

actions, they are on the exterior surfaces of these bodies, and they are always unfinished.

In his book, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History,133 Manuel De Landa, a Mexican-

American philosopher, constructs his own interpretation of ‘history and new materialism’ based

on the philosophies of Deleuze and the French theorist Felix Guattari. De Landa perceives the

potential of human evolution as a ‘generative’ process of materiality to be inserted in the flows of

dynamism and vitality. De Landa develops a new method of ‘meshworks’ that thrive within

synergistic relations of their component parts outside the hierarchical-historical system, generating

possible assemblage with infinite variations. The component parts in one assemblage can be

distinguished by their material aspect and territorializing and deterritorializing alignments. They

can generally form contingent exteriors and arrange heterogeneous elements, affirming the

potential to pick one assemblage and attach it to another, avoiding any destruction of its

individuality. The substantial characteristics and forming principles of creating points and relations

between an assemblage and its parts are ungoverned complexity and non-linearity. Therefore, the

new components and rearranged signs interact as an assemblage to create a pure spatial positivity.

This inventive assemblage generates and reproduces multiple experiences and identities.134

Eisenman calls for a ‘machinic’ process in design to operate a different relation between the

131- Craig Lundy, History and becoming: Deleuze's philosophy of creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2012): 3.

132- Ibid., 3.

133- Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history (New York: Swerve Editions, 2014).

134- Manuel Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London:

Continuum, 2006): 106.

124

“natural” and “technical” aspects of architecture. Eisenman states that in the Deleuzo-Guattarian

logic of the ‘machinic’ there exists a chaotic nature that enables the system to be open to the

external connections and to deterritorialize its elements to interact with others. That does not mean

that the process is already collapsed, but it is free of the rules and laws that hegemonic systems of

organism and mechanism possess. As a result, ‘machinic’ architecture occurs in the mediation of

a “mechanism and organism on the one hand, and chaos on the other hand.”135 Eluding the direct

graphics style of the Baghdadi house and via its essence, Assemblage Architects Firm deals with

history creatively (Figure 4.20).

To improve the core part nearby the Al Kadhimain shrine, Assemblage Architects Firm

proposed a master plan using the large area that is available around the core. Assemblage

Architects Firm planned a very active urban matrix that intersects with everyday life actions and

at the same time solves many problems in preserving the shrine and urban buildings. The master

plan had dual purposes: to attain an advanced sphere of influence nearby the shrine and to improve

the atmosphere of the residents. The Assemblage Architects’ proposal emphasized the social

aspect by offering a string of courtyards containing temporary installations with multiple functions.

Although installations typically avoid the stability associated with the architectural form, both

emphasize the urban spatiality and the created movement of ‘embodied’ viewers and users. These

installations completely engaged with their various senses and bodies, who activate, intensify, and

participate as affective assemblages and potentials in the creation of urban space. By creating

moving models of duration and repeatedly altering temporary design with cognitive spatial

movement, the Assemblage Architects’ proposal presented a unique opportunity for a ‘machinic’

process to occur in the urban design practice and to be utilized in the experimentation of new


Madrid (1997): 21-35.

125

relations and the abandonment of limited functions and all social norms, in order to produce and

generate a pure sense of art and architecture. The design of each courtyard followed different

patterns, consisting of social assembly places for residents, green open spaces with shaded areas,

landscapes and a variety of facilities for visitors. This would enhance and empower the bottom-up

social activities. The courtyard design strategy seemed to deliver new facilities and infrastructure

to the residents of the historical site, highlighting and improving the economic aspect of the urban

life. Furthermore, the government is intended to fund learning services and small businesses to fill

the urban spaces with dynamic activities.

The aim of these active public spaces with their experimental design is to generate

economic and social assemblages over time within different and diverse urban bodies, reaching

beyond their practical function of advertising as a representational image and offering a production

to comprise a little bit of creativity of life, freedom, fluid change, and the fantastical. The urban

design practice in this proposal stressed the social, economic and cultural bonding of the people

living in the immediate environmental aspect of the site. Assemblage’s proposal improved the

character of the historic streets and houses as well as the vitality of its commercial areas, giving

them the sense of belonging. These qualities, so typical of historic cities, are closely related to the

human scale of the built environment and to pedestrian modes of movement that foster strong

social interaction. At the same time, the renewed historical site would increase its fame and attract

more regional and international worshippers and visitors who identify themselves as culturally

connected to Kadhimiya. By liberating the potentialities of images from the “transcendental

illusions of representation,”136 diagrammatic production of different affects can be produced. The

preservation of the architectural pattern is revealed by giving priority to cultural difference through

136- Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture form the Outside - Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2001): 62.

126

the continuous preservation of the initial function of the buildings and the temporary installations.

In this case, the urban renovation of the Al Kadhimiya site and the preservation was freed from

the representation. The old urban fabric is maintained and supported by a new urban assemblage

matrix that is coherently integrated with the old one in terms of its block heights and its method of

processing its main function in serving as the Imams’ mosque while dedicating the surrounding to

enhance it efficiently. The finalist entry intends to preserve most of the old urban fabric, and the

gap would be filled by new buildings that have mixed modern style with heritage structures, such

as arches. The preservation included the distribution of the main streets that diverge from one

central point; namely, the Imams’ mosque. Therefore, the outlines of spaces are undefined and

regularly defied, violated and prolonged as new affections and associations are born and deep-

rooted ones break. The fortuitous intensities of conditions, events, sensations, and activities

generate the unpredicted arrangements of relations among various human and non-human bodies,

and, more importantly, Deleuze’s stuttering practice ‘and, and, and’ is formed socially; which

means that the logic of relationality entails social practices.137 Through the logic of ‘and,’ one part

of any assemblage is not distributively categorized or typically represented by another, but occurs

in attached and temporary form with it.138

137- Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (London: Athlone Press,

1987): 56.

138- Jean Hillier and Gareth Abrahams, Deleuze and Guattari: Jean Hillier in Conversation with Gareth Abrahams,

Association of European Schools of Planning (Poland: Wroclaw, 2013): 19.

127


The necklace of the courtyards in the finalist entry, and the new street axis, and the new quarter.

Source: Assemblage Architects, Holy City Masterplan.


http://www.assemblage.co/holy-city-masterplan

128

Following Deleuze, assemblages not only imply an arrangement of component parts that

cannot be reduced to a conventional duality,139 but also can operate under that arrangement various

complexities and vitalities of lived experiences. Assemblages work through lived reality and occur

within virtual-actual variations. The component of virtual-actual assemblages are characteristically

built from material and expressive part, and they are fundamentally unsteady and dissolved.

Assemblage frontiers are penetrated and tarnished, they are unspecified and repeatedly challenged,

transcended and/or stretched as innovative relations happen and used ones break.

From a linguistic perspective, the French word agencement refers to the various and

plentiful component parts of an assemblage that are put adjacent to each other in specific relations,

to create an affective interaction, having no determined limits or boundaries. Consequently, an

affective assemblage is a variety of desires and percepts, which continue to come together spatially,

relating architects, urban designers, planners, and educators’ visions to the logic of sensation. An

assemblage is a set of open component parts whose uniqueness arises from the relations between

these component parts on the one hand, and the whole relations with the outside forces on the

other. It is a set of relations that array spatially and temporally as one piece without a determined

or former direction. The experimental preservation of the architectural and urban contexts as a set

of continuous entities would ensure the improvement of the evolutionary form of socio-spatial

emergence, regardless of in what way the new term follows the previous format. Consequently, it

offers great pliability in cooperating and interrelating with these new terms, under the state that it

generates unique conceptual assemblage.



129

4.7 Conclusion

From the beginning, this dissertation adopts the idea that memories are not housed in our

brains or consciousness, nor is time an internal to the consciousness. Instead, as Deleuze has

claimed, “it is we who are internal to time,”140 to the fluidity of duration, it is we who move

cognitively within the occurrence of real-time as we recall different planes of memories and

intensities—we must live them and act them—producing a pure line of subjectivity. For Deleuze,

remembering something is primarily an action—we act before we think---it is an initial action of

memorizing; it becomes a part of productive associations with our present, which also becomes a

part of our acts of reminiscence, recollection, memory, and perceptual recognition, in which the

past might be lived afresh and differently as a durational event in life that carries a date and that

will certainly not happen all over again.

The chapter provides a theoretical framework for contemporary architects, urban designers,

planners, and educators who are directing their talent, work, and course towards what functionally

fits the present time, instead of merely remodeling and replicating traditional design.141 Merely

imitating and duplicating past models would control the quality of architectural designs and make

it limited to a specific frame since creativity becomes disabled or imprisoned in a specific context,

subordinating dynamic change and flow of life to the logic of mimesis.142 The task of persistently

reproducing and implementing traditional design will not contribute much to the field of

architecture and urban design, and unoriginal and repeated designs will “confine difference to

identity, and they impose a goal on movement.”143 Deleuze discovers the option for a perspective

140- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1989): 110.

141- Galdieri Eugenio, “Project and Tradition,” Understanding Islamic architecture, edited by Attilio Petruccioli,

and Khalil K. Pirani (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002).

142- Ibid.

143- Adrian Parr, “Politics + Deleuze + Guattari + Architecture,” in Deleuze and Architecture, ed. Hélène Frichot


130

that comprehends life in terms of duration, superhuman, and inhuman. Deleuze outlines the inquiry

of ‘life itself,’ that is to say, the force that perseveres over time and the alterations that follow, as

an ontological experimental, critical, spontaneous, and aesthetic, the consequence of active force

that affirms its own difference and opens a process of alteration. The fluidity of the intense

moments of duration carries the past within the present, creating a great affect in the evolution of

the subject by using memory creatively and productively for willed self-consciousness. Similar to

Bergson, Deleuze addresses the creative aspect inherent in evolution, namely the force of life that

perseveres, accordingly, through alteration and change, the vital life of the spiritual consciousness

is affirmed.

131

CHAPTER FIVE

Discussion 5.1 Eisenman Critical Practice: Beyond Urban Formalism In-Between Actualizing

Function and Virtualizing Chaos

By examining the work of architect Peter Eisenman, this chapter offers a conceptual

analysis and discussion for published literature. This chapter links Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts

of assemblage and affect to what Eisenman calls ‘interstitial spaces’ in order to underline some of

his diagramming techniques in which posthumanist, materialist, and environmental rearrangement

of subjectivity assist architects, urban designers, planners, and educators in learning and thinking

creatively and critically about “history.”

This chapter aims to question the predictable practice in architectural and urban design

thinking process. Drawing on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theoretical concepts of assemblage and

affect, this chapter will conceptually analyze the conditions of ‘interstitiality’ in Eisenman’s

critical architecture, moving to non-representational thinking, multi-disciplinary research, and

sustained connections in order to encompass the old materialist and new intensive urban forms. In

his practice, Eisenman experiments with a notion of form that is outside the traditional dominion

of modern architecture, in which any shape is “already” informed with meaning, and therefore

form is determined by rules of imitation and function. According to Eisenman, the traditional

process of design relies on a strict dichotomy between two dualisms, such as ‘figure/ground,’

instead of a ‘in-between’ condition in which the two binary oppositions are potentially merged

together and embedded within one another - producing an interstitial figural or ‘figure/ figure’

groundless condition. This chapter will examine the interstitial spaces in Eisenman’s project, the

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Figure 5.1), through their transitory engagement with

flows and territories as a set of affective assemblages and social locales in cultural productions.

132

The flows of complicated lines and singularities in Eisenman’s project challenge homogeneous

architecture, destabilize the traditional dialectics, and alter the whole traditional concept of

modernist form, holding potential for ‘radical passivity.’144 According to Deleuze and Guattari,

the affective assemblage is designated as a production machine, when the unpredictable, fluid

frame of destratification movement is shattered and socialized, one that more accurately mirrors

life and its countless virtualities. The advantages of Eisenman’s version of an architectural

machine are that it correlates considerably with the notions of assemblage and affect, thereby

rupturing the conventional approaches of dominant formalism and bringing together the logic of

temporality and the logic of sensations.


Source: http://www.eisenmanarchitects.com/berlin-memorial.html#images.

5.2 The Interstitial Spaces in Eisenman Architecture and Urban Formalisms

Through his defamiliarization practices, architect and theoretician Peter Eisenman

constantly reconceptualizes the notion of form, producing perceptions of difference in the

144- Adrian Parr, Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma (Edinburgh:



133

Holocaust Memorial,145 as well as demonstrating status of separation from its representational

image and conservative mean that may represent “the memory of the Holocaust as a nostalgia.”146

Eisenman has continually argued that: “Traditionally, processes of architectural design have used

what can be called on/off procedures, of choosing between two alternatives, solid/void,

figure/ground, rather than operating where the two conditions are possibly embedded within one

another.”147 (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial Drawing, 1998-2005.


145- Stefano Corbo, From formalism to weak form: the architecture and philosophy of Peter Eisenman (London:

Routledge, 2016), 94.

146- Peter Eisenman, and Silvio Cassara, Peter Eisenman: feints (Milano: Skira,2006), 152.


Madrid (1997), 21-35.


134

In his project the Holocaust Memorial, Eisenman situates his architecture landscape in the

space of intensities: in the field of the weak form.148 In other words, Eisenman became more related

and involved in what people feel and how they react in his interstitial spaces, “to what he calls

affect.”149 Eisenman borrows from Deleuze’s particular queries in respect to the creative

transformation that is noticeably placed in the social milieu, in which constant creative

transformation occurs in an empirical environment, starting “in the middle,” “in-between,” and “in

the margins.”150 Deleuze engages with the conceptual theme of affect in Baruch Spinoza, and

Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is to characterize the creative “transformation of a body, a thing,

or a group of things over a period of space and time through the processes of becoming, movement,

and over duration.”151 Deleuze’s notion of ‘in-between’ is a powerful criticism of the numerous

dualisms that mainly abound the history of architecture in Western thinking,152 such as

public/private, structure/ chaos, and rationality/affect. Likewise, architects, urban designers,

planners, and educators can exceed dualistic relation in their design thinking process and practice

by opening architectural system for life, affect, difference, and regenerative encounters.

As a result, the visitors’ perceptions of urban formalism in the Holocaust Memorial project

reoriented from a standard convention. Blurring the boundaries between actual and virtual, public

and private spaces in the Memorial project makes urban spaces fall in-between, destabilizing their

dualism.153 Additionally, Eisenman’s notion of form that he experiments with in Holocaust

148- Stefano Corbo, From formalism to weak form: the architecture and philosophy of Peter Eisenman (London:


149- Ibid., 94.






2001), 92.



135

Memorial is outside the bounded fields of modern architecture, by which any figure is already

limited to a specific meaning, and thus architectural form is specified by rules of convention and

utility. The complexity of “creative transformation becomes a system of involution where

transversal movements engage material forces and affects.”154 Thus, the creative transformation

that happens to the intensive topography of the Memorial site emerges in-between figure and

ground, creating affective interstitial spaces, altering the whole traditional concept of modernist

form, and holding potential for ‘radical passivity’ that implies social assemblage determination.155

5.3 Assemblage Theory

Assemblage is a signature concept of Deleuze in Manual De Landa’s view, and this

constitutes the backbone of ‘assemblage theory’ itself.156 In 2006, De Landa delved deeper into

the experimental, expressive, and spontaneous aspects of everyday lives in his social theory,

searching immanently for causal explanations of what assemblage can do, and dispelling the

traditional query of what assemblage is.157 Thoughtfully, in order to escape any reductionism

pertaining to both dominant principles and “textual permanency,” assemblage theory calls for a

new perception of social reality that cannot be reducible to any discourse that has a certain

authority, and thus “it gives priority to experience and sensation.”158 (Figure 5.3).

154- Adrian Parr, “creative transformation,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh:




156- Manuel De Landa, A new philosophy of society assemblage theory and social complexity (London: Continuum,

2006).




136

Figure 5.3: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial Drawing, 1998-2005.


Assemblage theory proposes that paradigms shift in architectural and urban design

dominant thinking and practice, where place experience undermines and reduces to stable material

text. It eludes the essentialism in architecture by avoiding reduction of architectural and urban

design thinking and practice to a certain stratum of historicism that has encumbered such

disciplines for different periods of time. Furthermore, through the substratum, fortuitous processes

that generate assemblages, materiality/expression components endlessly take part in more than one

architectural and urban assemblage, enabling further and more items or entities to be connected.

These component parts that are involved in architectural and urban assemblages are very creative

in that they may lead to a phenomenon called ‘sense of place.’159 It is worth noting that the

conceptual expression of assemblage, put forth by Deleuze and Guattari, derives from the French

notion of agencement or ‘arrangement,’ which in mathematics is understood as different and



137

productive ways to organize things, as such it is an affective conception, not a fixed articulation.160

“Deleuze appears to have developed the notion of agencement from his work based on Spinoza’s

idea of the common notion; the quality of sharing commonality and ‘becoming a third body’ in a

given event”161 Moreover, the word agencement entails activity and policy.

An agencement is a practice of ‘agencing’– a dynamic existence of a particular intervention

or action as a link, expressly to produce a specific affect.162 In the notion of agencement, the

composing components and sensations meet at a point of intersection, mobilized together,

temporarily deterritorialized, and go through metamorphosis while transforming one another. The

relations “between” the components, in terms of the transformation and change, are rather vital

compared to the components themselves: “in a multiplicity, what matters is not the elements, but

what there is between.”163 When inquiring “what makes an assemblage into an agencement,”164 the

logic of collectivity would be critically examined, in terms of how Deleuze thinks about the middle

as an extraordinary point to start an assemblage, in which intensities, affects, events, sensations,

and elements of two layers or strata link in- between, sharing mutual environments. Accordingly,

assemblage is a concept based on the fact that things in life are not solitary; they are a combination

of diverse things that act together and affect each other.

5.4 Assemblage Design Thinking

Assemblage design thinking can only occur in risk relations that threaten the whole

architectural system, affecting the identities that establish it and allowing new events to emerge. It

160- J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Deleuze and Guattari on architecture: critical assessments in

architecture, ed. Graham Livesey (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 162.

161- Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: practical philosophy, trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988).

162- Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: essays in transverse ethics and aesthetics (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2007), 145-146.


1987).

164- Ibid.

138

requires flows of substance/affect, relations/separations, and most notably the spaces in between;

the interstitial spaces, “the in-betweenness, as its primary subject, embodying the immanent and

productive forces of an assemblage.”165 The intermediary status within interstitial transitional

spaces are affective spots for architectural and urban design thinking and practice since they

espouse new intervened arrangements of lived experiment(Figure 5.4).166



Therefore, Eisenman evokes in his works “Deleuze’s concept of ‘the figural,’ and Derrida’s

understanding of ‘the undecidable’ as effective starting points for rethinking architecture as a

165- Kim Dovey and Stephen Wood, “Public/private urban interfaces: type, adaptation, assemblage,” Journal of

Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability 8 (2014): 1-16. Accessed February 28,

2017. Doi: 10.1080/17549175.2014.891151.

166- Danica Lau, “Interstitial urbanism: inhabiting the "In-between"” (Ph.D. diss., Carleton University, 2012).


139

practice that is irreducible to an either/or relationship.”167 Eisenman here is obviously describing

himself as the theorist of the “in-between” as he characterizes interstitial spaces as going from the

middle, creating assemblages and links that contain complex movements and intensities instead of

historic origin or rigid classification.168 Eisenman looks to philosophers such as Deleuze, Deleuze

and Guattari, and Derrida in his critical text, Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950- 2000, to deconstruct

how architecture has battled essentialist binaries, including “subject/object, figure/ground,

solid/void, and part/whole,”169 since the beginning of its traditional history.170 It is shown that most

stages of architectural design rely on a strict dichotomy between two options or dualisms, such as

‘solid/void, figure/ground’ (which is a reductive method), instead of a flexible ‘in-between’ and

the fluid idea of interstitial spaces.171 Moreover, by creating innovative mediated forms of

experiential affect forces, these in-between transitional spaces can become heterogeneous

assemblages for social interactions.

“The ‘in-between,’ shaped by juxtapositions and experiments, is formed by realignments

or new arrangements, as a potential to transform.”172 Eisenman demonstrates that the binarized

categories have the potential deterritorialization to connect and change to a different position or

state producing dynamic machine assemblages.173 Thus, the idea of ‘in-between’ can emerge as

“an assemblage that is a multiplicity irreducible to the dualistic terms that are employed to identify



168- Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the outside - essays on virtual and real space (Cambridge, Mass: MIT

Press, 2001), 94.

169- Peter Eisenman and Ariane Lourie Harrison, Ten canonical buildings 1950-2000 (New York: Rizzoli

International Publications, 2008).

170- Ibid.


Madrid (1997), 23.


2001), 94-95.



140

what it is the architect is doing.”174 Eisenman mentions: “So I’m looking for those conditions in

architecture which are like the music in film, which are secondary.”175 Eisenman’s conceptual

formalism and post-functionalism practice resist the dualisms in architecture; his project of the

Memorial site shifts the viewers’ engagement from the static notion of form and traditional

utilization to consider the “contextual, narrative, or associational potentials of built form.”176

Deleuze portrays one of the main characteristics of an assemblage ‘a logic of AND;’177 a

‘geography of relations.’178 Consequently, in order to articulate the function of a social

assemblage, it important to know the contexts where an assemblage can occur as a form. An

assemblage works in contexts of collective forces with the capacity to perform activity that enables

heterogeneous objects, things, or elements to be incompletely and affectively connected in

interstitial spaces, resituated within exterior relations,179 and restructured by provisional

arrangements that go beyond any previous thought or territory and always undermine every fixed

context or stable schema.180 Interstitial space mark outs are cracked and smeared in Eisenman’s

architectural practice, and they are immanently dissolved and unsettled.

By distorting obvious classifications, generating sensory interactions, and connecting

shattered narratives, Eisenman’s approach in the Memorial site crosses the limits of binary

either/or, innovating opportunities for interstitial spaces that co-function throughout intensive

assemblages and affect transitional products. There is a form of differentiation in which different

174- Ibid., 20.

175- Stefano Corbo, Fr om formalism to weak form: the architecture and philosophy of Peter Eisenman (London:


176- K. Michael Hays, Architecture's desire: Reading the late avant-garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 54.

177- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (Minneapolis:



1987), 70.



180- Ben Anderson and Colin McFarlane, “Assemblage and geography,” Area 43(2011): 124-127, accessed on March

12, 2017. Doi:10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01004.x.

141

parts of assemblages can be removed from one assemblage and inserted into a different one,

concealing, supplanting, and altering their system identity, according to De Landa; they can be

affected by the contingent exteriority of diverse forces.181 The interlinks and sensory experiences

between composite quantities in interstitial bodily spaces in Eisenman’s project of the Memorial

site construct and create affective capacities for something new to emerge, in which “the identities

and functions of both parts and wholes come out from the flows between them.”182

According to Roffe, an assemblage behaves like a tree in autumn, whereby any external

environmental action such as: “A flash of red, a movement, a gust of wind”183 sets the constituent

elements into a variable specific motion “to create the sensation of a tree in autumn.”184 While the

prearranged nature of a tree only exists in representational thinking, creative alteration for the tree

of autumn is fortuitous, happening on a plane of immanence and comprising virtual relations. In

this instance, the tree in autumn becomes a noticeable creation of an exterior net– “wind, leaves,

or color” – that operates as a collective assemblage, inspiring continuous alteration into something

else.185 Therefore, there is an affective potential for exteriority when a single component, like the

color red, may escape or transcend the material edge of one assemblage, in this case, the autumn

tree, moving functionally and temporally among and within aggregative flows of becoming and

entering into (catching up) different assemblages, such as the British post box. Thus, elements

related by external agents keep some relative level of independence vis-à-vis the assemblage in

which they take part.186 “All life is a process of connection and interaction. Anybody or thing is


2006).



183- Jon Roffe, “Gilles Deleuze,” http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/deleuze.htm, accessed on January 04, 2016.

184- Ibid.



186- Ibid., 16.

142

the outcome of a process of connections. A human body is an assemblage of genetic material,

ideas, and powers of acting and a relation to other bodies.”187 Progressively, the relations between

the elements of an assemblage are accidental rather than essential, made through mixed qualities

and collaborative transindividual intensities.188 In other words, the instability of assemblages

through interrelationships differentiate their “relations of exteriority” in which the composed

assemblages function in their totality while simultaneously interacting with immeasurable

mixtures of elements.189

5.5 The Logic of Sensation

For Deleuze, the work of any art is a block of sensations, movements, and affects. Affect

here refers to the logic of sensation that embodies multiple intensities and dynamisms, releasing

new assemblage through ‘urban form’ and ‘architectural values’ in the practices of affective

configurations and spatial rhythms. According to David Olson, a Canadian psychologist, the

configuration of the urban form is produced from the relationship between space and block of

sensations.190 Likewise, Steven Peterson, an American urbanist, articulated that space is the

medium of urbanism and the vital part needed for urbanization;191 it is the intermediary plateau

where all urban fabrics can be created. Peterson also argues that the urban design thinking process

is a synthetic and artistic mapping of bodily sceneries that have potential to be affective spaces by

exploring the corporeal and incorporeal parts of the city.192 Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari also

187- Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2002), xx.


2006), 9.

189- Ibid., 9.

190- David R Olson and Ellen Bialystok, Spatial Cognition: the Structure and Development of Mental

Representations of Spatial Relations (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1983), 246.

191- Steven Peterson, “Urban Design Tactics,” Architectural Design, Profile 20, nos. 3-4 (1979): 76.

192- David R Olson and Ellen Bialystok, Spatial Cognition: the Structure and Development of Mental

Representations of Spatial Relations (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1983), 247

143

give highlighting to the occurrence of a space that penetrates with affect through the concept of

mapping in the ‘zone of indetermination’ in their cartographic approach.193 So, the ‘zone of

indetermination,’ in urban design thinking process, allows bodies to be situated in the middle,

linked, and connected in the sphere of sensations. Architects and urban designers can transcend

dualism relationship in their architectural and urban design thinking process by going beyond the

limits of architectural systems, moving toward difference and reformative encounters: “a critical

architecture that claims for itself a place between the efficient representation of preexisting cultural

values and the wholly detached autonomy of an abstract formal system.”194 The intermediary status

within transitional spaces is an affective spot for architectural and urban design thinking and

practices since it espouses new intervened arrangements of lived experiment.195

The intermediary status within transitional spaces is an affective spot for architectural and

urban design thinking and practices since it espouses new intervened arrangements of lived

experiment.196 Whereas in representational design thinking, the urban form is shaped and

recognized as a finished artifact with a predefined meaning and function, for example, the Iraqi

architect Rifat Chadirji defines form as the end result of a dialectical interaction between two

factors; namely, social demand and technological demand.197 Franco Trabattoni, an Italian ancient

philosophy historian, used the Platonic doctrine in defining the form as a physical representation

of an idea.198 Further, Herbert Read, an English art historian, sees the architectural form as a

configuration illustrated by an actual object to express the content; and it has a mutual relationship

193- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi

(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987).

194- K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984): 14-29, accessed on

March 08, 2017.

195- Danica Lau, “Interstitial urbanism: inhabiting the "In-between"” (Ph.D. diss., Carleton University, 2012).

196- Ibid.

197- Rifat Chadirji, Al Ukhaider and the Crystal Palace (Landan: Riyāḍ al-Rayyis, 1991), 11.

198- Franco Trabattoni, Essays on Plato's epistemology (Leuven (Belgium): Leuven University Press, 2016), 234.

144

with the material and the technique.199 In his rejection of this kind of representational thinking,

Deleuze estimates that it is a source of false identity.200

As a result, architectural form is designed conventionally to reflect the image of the thought

and social platform that refers to a traditional object and already always defines cultural values.

According to K. Michael Hays, an American architectural historian, the power of the conventional

form appears when the individuals accept the meaning that associated with it, indicating a rigid

medium, static technique, and organized tool to construct the architectural object.201 Consequently,

the form is hunted by meaning, and the architectural values visualized by cultural patterns; thus

both of them are experienced and pass themselves off as representational and unquestionable

objects, reflected by the mirror of our natural bodies, performing a predictable scheme of meaning.

On the contrary, defamiliarization and non-representational practices have the potential for

eliminating the traditionalist meaning, trying to make “the object’s production process and the

mechanisms of its representation part of its content.”202 Additionally, Deleuze and Guattari insist

on the non-representational characteristics of life through lines of flight, and they are reluctant to

approve the historical interpretation of the objects as predefined artifacts. By drifting away from

identified spatial configurations with representational practices, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to

create innovative artistic sensibility of architectural values. “Based on the co- imbrication of the

virtual reality and the actual real, the conception of the virtual is a differentiated flow of events,

singularities and intensities; meanwhile, the actual is understood as the differentiated realm of

199- Herbert Read, Art now: an introduction to the theory of modern painting and sculpture (New York: Pitman,

1968), 89.

200- Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze Philosophy of creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 2010), 40.


202- Ibid., 55.

145

bodies, their mixtures, and states of affairs.”203 Moreover, the capacity to continuously transform

and change in any specified condition or event, according to Deleuze and Guattari, can generate

different affects on the body, free the mind, and create new ways of thinking, documenting,

evaluating, and engaging in new realities.

This thesis focuses on and follows the non-representational and modernist definitions for

the term form that is suggested by Deleuze and Guattari. They point out that the form is virtual

capacity of the body in space, and that body can map concepts and ideas, generating transformation

with unlimited “possibilities for translat(ing) and creat(ing),”204 as in the case of the term ‘urban,’

which is “a linkage of the spatial to the social, identifying a certain kind of place with a certain

kind of person.”205 Therefore, this thesis considers the physical formations, patterns, and

constructions that shape the urban space, collectively termed the urban form. Hence, the urban

form is a physical-materialistic actual entity and abstract/virtual ethical entity. In this sense,

Deleuze and Guattari notably remark that any kind of art is a sensory experience and its

creativeness is inspired and stimulated by sensations; the affect of tactics, technique, materials,

sensible, memories, and entities: “We paint, sculpt, compose, and write with sensations.”206 In this

instance, the city becomes a perceptible product of an exterior network: the urban form and

architectural values that operate as collective assemblages, motivating perpetual transformation.207

203- Constantin V. Boundas, “Individuation,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh:


204- Kim Dovey, Urban Design Thinking: a conceptual toolkit (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 9.

205- Ibid., 9.

206- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 166.



146

5.6 Deleuze’s Affective Assemblage

“Deleuze uses the term ‘affection’ to refer to the additive processes, forces, powers, and

expressions of change – the mix of affects that produce a modification or transformation in the

affected body.”208 Therefore, the outlines of interstitial spaces are undefined and regularly defied,

violated and prolonged as new affections and associations are born and deep-rooted ones break.

Through the logic of ‘and,’ one part of any assemblage is not distributively categorized or typically

represented by another, but occurs in attached and temporary form with it.209 The fortuitous

intensities of conditions, events, sensations, and activities generate the unpredicted arrangements

of relations among various human and non-human bodies, more importantly, Deleuze’s stuttering

practice ‘and, and, and’ is formed socially; which means that the logic of relationality entails social

practices.210

Following Deleuze, assemblages not only imply an arrangement of component parts that

cannot be reduced to a conventional duality211 but also can operate under that arrangement various

complexities and vitalities. Assemblages function through lived experience and come into

existence with relational and affective variations. The component parts of “relational assemblages

are inherently unstable and fluid, assemblage boundaries are perforated and smudged, they are

indeterminate and frequently challenged, transgressed and/or extended as new connections occur

and old ones rupture.”212 Connotatively, the French term agencement also means that the diverse






1987), 56.





147

and numerous components of an assemblage are not just juxtaposed or linked with each other in

particular connections, but also collaborate to produce an affective synergistic and open-ended

tendency.213 Subsequently, an active assemblage is a multiplicity of affects and percepts in itself,

which persist to congregate, combining the creativity of architects and designers’ work as

autonomous expressions of visual experiments and the intensities of sensation. “An assemblage is

not a set of predetermined parts that are then put together in a specific order or into an already-

conceived structure,”214 but it is a set of connections that arrange temporally and spatially as a

whole without a certain or previous order. According to Hays, the outlines of any symbolic system

in Eisenman projects have been hollowed out, “in his cities of artificial excavation Eisenman

strives to find an architecture of pure trace, which effaces itself before the theory, the critique, and

the thought it is asked to convey.”215 In Eisenman manner, architecture cannot be reduced to a

system of symbolization that represents traditional assumptions and has “already” embodied

meaning in the architectural formalistic image.216

In contrast, architecture in Eisenman’s practices includes strategies of temporality and

defamiliarization, in which an architectural object is shifted to alienation and self-reflexivity,

reintroducing the notions of affectivity and sensibility in different ways (Figure 5.5).217

“Within a Deleuzian framework, affect operates as a dynamic of desire within any

assemblage to manipulate meaning and relations, inform and fabricate desire, and generate







Madrid (1997), 21-35.


148

intensity – yielding different affects in any given situation or event.”218 In Deleuze’s thought of

creative transformation, experiential affect that occurs as a transitory force prior to the meaning

and away from the interpretative mode of cognition reveals the ‘limits of semiotics’ that have a

tendency to actualize sensitive reactions out of their indefinite virtuality and materialize them to

visual and physical contexts.219 Likewise, Eisenman stresses the syntactic aspect of form over the

semantic one; his concept of ‘cardboard’ architecture drops the visual and physical use of the

architectural object in the traditional sense that associates with stable materiality.220



Eisenman rethinks formalism in his ‘cardboard architecture,’ in which he creates interstitial

spaces in dynamic machine assemblages that destabilize the hierarchy and the dominance of “the







149

architectural material, scale, function, site, and all semantic associations in favor of architecture as

‘syntax.’”221 (Figure 5.6).



Assemblage is thus a whole that is shaped by multiple desires, engaging both unchanging

strata and flows of intensities, and where heterogeneous relations remain immanent to existence,

away from stability, and subordinate to the process of change in a creative sense. Accordingly,

function reveals the occurrence of an assemblage. The definition of an assemblage is determined

by the work that the assemblage is able to do, and its meaning comes from its usage rather than its

significance.222 Assemblage can produce specific expressions and innovative performativity by the

221- Iman Ansari, “Interview: Peter Eisenman,” 2013, https://www.architectural-

review.com/view/interviews/interview-peter-eisenman/8646893.article, accessed on 21 February 2018.




https://www.architectural-review.com/view/interviews/interview-peter-eisenman/8646893.article


150

multiple spatiotemporal constellations and unforeseen connections that are preferably novel and

inherently social.

5.7 Urban Assemblage

For the purpose of illustrating how an assemblage works in specific context, specifically

in the urban landscape, Kim Dovey provides an example from everyday life, a street. As stated in

his book Becoming places: urbanism/architecture/identity/power, the street is not a stabilized

entity in an extensive city system with a hierarchical standard, nor is it simply a combination of

measured and separate objects in the urban atmosphere with no relations. It is a part of a whole,

“buildings, trees, cars, sidewalks, goods, people, signs,”223 and functions as a multiplicity of

morphogenetic capacities, situating the two levels of content and expression in virtual relations to

one another as a street. By describing the singularities of everyday life, “buildings–sidewalk–

roadway; the flows of traffic, people and goods;”224 as urban assemblages, we perceive how the

hidden relations with their familiar formations collaborate and connect to compose a ‘street’ at the

scale of the content and the expression through the activation of the spatial senses that

differentiates the street from other urban assemblages, “parks, plazas, freeways, shopping malls

and marketplaces.”225 Furthermore, the urban assemblage is a configuration of actions and entities

that is motivated by the contingency and complexity of intersecting urbanized forces as revealed

in visual sense and connectivity within the real urban life (Figure 5.7). “Although assemblages are

composed of relations, they are not reducible to them, assemblages have their own speeds and

slownesses; their own vitality.”226


224- Ibid., 16.

225- Ibid., 16.

226- Ian Buchanan, Deleuzism: a metacommentary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

151

In their research, Deleuze and Guattari envision assemblage as associated with two

different arrangements when two planes, the plane of organization and the plane of consistency,

cross each other and unify through a machinic process to form an assemblage.227 The plane of

organization delineates the dominant mode of territorializing and stratifying in actual forms,

enforcing hierarchical powers and incarnating codes, in which their order and organization

confines components or elements to be organized, modulated, regulated, and stabilized on lines of

slowness.228 Deleuze and Guattari perceive the plane of consistency “as flows of human life that

is not subject to an organizing principle, to a sign, to a force that orders it.”229 Deleuze and Guattari

practice the transitory alliance ‘and’ instead of the stationary dualisms ‘is’/‘is not’, either/or; since

each ‘part’ is a multiplicity of others that deal with and occupy the plane of consistency where

these parts collectively can sustain themselves outside the relational dualisms.230




2006).


1999), 101.

230- Jean Hillier, “Assemblages of Justice: The ‘Ghost Ships’ of Graythorp,” International Journal of Urban and

Regional Research 33 (2009): 640-661, accessed on March 22, 2017. Doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00861.x.

152

Figure 5.7: Eisenman Architects, Berlin Memorial Model, 1998-2005.


Furthermore, these planes are known as the interface between materiality and expression,

it simply connects the materialist actions of spatial bodies with various expressions of meaning

through linear representation, including hypotheses, language, and visual models. An affective

assemblage is a mixture of both relational forms: material and expression. By articulating some

points of similarity between these two forms, specifically, both can be stabilized and destabilized,

both are not utopian, and certainly, they are not finalized.231 This approach can be explained by

the previously mentioned illustration of “street” as an urban pattern assemblage. In fact, that urban

sample allows us to perceive the street as an assemblage of material components equated to



153

movements and spatial networks, co-functioning with expressive components and narratives that

include urban design key codes and obscure intensities.232 Through the complexity and temporality

of reciprocal formation of assemblages, forms of material and expression are an innovative

arrangement in urban life. The fact that assemblage involves the dynamics of a process implies

that there is no final order or organization of an assemblage, and the law governing it comes from

its unique and unlimited connections with other organizations of territorial elements to produce

unexpected and new intensities.233 Despite the fact that assemblages are shaped by complex links

or cooperative connections between material and expressive components, they are not the end

outcome of the assets of their different parts. In other words, assemblages cannot be reduced to

their component parts, according to Deleuze, assemblages proceed from identified codes and vital

movement, mutual in an irreducible way.

For Eisenman, architectural object verification and purification play a key role in the design

process. Eisenman gives in his works the impression of resistance to all-encompassing

predetermines of architectural form that subordinate design process to final outcome. He is

interested utterly in finding a way to affirm the shift towards the autonomy and self-reflexivity in

architecture.234 “Eisenman stresses the autonomy of architecture, which for him means that an

architect ought to concern himself with addressing purely architectural problems and solutions,

and they should avoid drawing non-architectural elements into their work. Eisenman’s Houses I-

XI (Figure 5.8), for example, are thus for Eisenman purely architectural assemblages that do not

refer to anything other than architectural elements.”235 Since assemblage is both material and

232- Ibid., 17.

233- Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2002), xx.




154

expressive, it goes against any lowering to basic nature, to textuality or to materiality.236 Overall,

it is understood that an “assemblage is a whole, whose properties spring from the relationships

between parts.”237 Elements, taken individually, delineate the assemblage by their added role, and

they can be stabilized, meaning territorialized or reterritorialized, or even destabilized or

deterritorialized. Although it is the correlations between elements that compose the assemblage,

nonetheless these (co)relations cannot be narrowed down to simple, specific characteristics.238

Consequently, an assemblage cannot be assimilated to any preordained relations, or considered as

a haphazard gathering of discrete particulars, “since there is a sense that an assemblage is a whole

of some sort that expresses some identity and claims a territory.”239 In other words, assemblages

are comprised of mixed elements and actualized by heterogeneous items “that may be human and

non-human, organic and inorganic, technical and natural,”240 which, due to the complexity of the

relationships between these elements, cease to be relevant alone.




2006).

238- Colin McFarlane, “The city as assemblage: Dwelling and urban space,” Environment and Planning D: Society

and Space 29 (2011): 649-671. Accessed February 14, 2017. Doi: 10.1068/d4710.

239- J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Deleuze and Guattari on architecture: critical assessments in architecture,

ed. Graham Livesey (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 162.

240- Ben Anderson and Colin McFarlane, “Assemblage and geography,” Area 43(2011): 124-127, accessed on

March 12, 2017. Doi:10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01004. x.

155

Figure 5.8: Eisenman Architects, House III, 1969-1971.

Source: https://eisenmanarchitects.com/House-III-1971.

In order to be meaningful, they must belong to a cluster with no predetermined role.241

“Assemblages, therefore, risk, yet avoid collapsing into actualized stratification or actualized

deterritorialization (chaos).”242 Moreover, the involvements of assemblages in urban life demand

heterogeneous groups of territories. Territories in urban assemblages are both areas of regions,

districts, and provinces under the absolute authority of the state, and areas of data, activities, and

capabilities, where urban entities can express their spatial identities in the sense of here and now.243

Actually, the way in which Deleuze and Guattari use and refer to the term ‘territory,’ is metaphoric.

Turning away from representational thinking, Deleuze and Guattari obviously express that a









156

territory can engage in any various kinds of events that erected as a morphological, common,

theoretical, disturbing, social, and affective system.244

Deleuze and Guattari consider the occurrence of territories to be a combination of both

Aristotle’s classification of being (there are many kinds of areas and lands that are categorized or

classified under the term (territories), and their own articulation of the concept as a

deterritorialization and reterritorialization processes. In short, the processes of reterritorialization

and deterritorialization, in which things or concepts are assembled, coalescing and fitting together,

both deterritorializing movements that are operated by the forces of deterritorialization, as well as

a socio-spatial materialization, is a machinic arrangement of the assemblage’s functionality, and

can be interpreted and planned as a diagram.245

The constant occurrence of doing and undoing manner is a process very similar to the

assemblages. Assemblages are accidental and continually altering, as well as constantly regrouping

and parting.246 “The territory itself is a malleable site of passage.”247 The inquiries of ‘territory as

an assemblage,’ that is to say, the dynamisms that persist over time and the variations that follow,

are addressed by Deleuze and Guattari as empirical, impulsive, and unpremeditated changes by

which these territories repeatedly transform into something else.248 In A Thousand Plateaus,

Deleuze and Guattari refer to the process of deterritorialization as movements where the

boundaries of any territory are worn away and prone to be obliterated.249 Likewise, for Eisenman,

244- Paul Patton, Political Normativity and Poststructuralism: The Case of Gilles Deleuze. Lecture,

Institutscolloquium des Philosophischen Instituts der Freien from Instituts der Freien, Berlin, 2007.

245- J. Macgregor Wise, “Assemblage,” in Deleuze and Guattari on architecture: critical assessments in architecture,

ed. Graham Livesey (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2015), 162.

246- Ibid., 163.

247- Kylie Message, “Territory,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


248- Ibid., 280.



157

territories are not spaces that are considered as constant zones of measurable elements that last

forever, but rather there are ‘lines of flight’ within interstitial spaces in which changes can occur.250

Territories, according to Eisenman, are not permanent or stable all the time; they are continuously

in the making, and therefore go through the processes of reterritorialization and

deterritorialization.251 They do not consist of merely fixed and fastened boundaries; their actions

involve more than shaking up the foundation or eroding the boundaries.

To further explain, the interior and exterior relations that are produced in Eisenman’s

projects, respectively, emphasize the ideas of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and this

action is dependent upon the access and ability to occupy a specific territory, yet “release a feeling

of groundlessness and vertigo.”252 Therefore, particular actions can discover, describe, outline, and

combine territories through imperceptible or perceptible movements with different flows and

speed, sustaining the pulses of life and generating uniformities from the disorder.253

Eisenman, in all his thoughtful projects that are derived from Deleuzian concepts, considers

the way in which the deterritorialized traditional architectural elements are captured by

experiential affect forces, subjected to new immanent and productive assemblages, changing their

relations to reshape different collections in interstitial spaces, this is a process of

reterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari portray the process of territorialization and

deterritorialization in three stages, which are designed to establish a centered order, to mark out a

border around it, and then to violate that boundary by daring to escape it. The territory is a

stabilized zone of the assemblage, setting up a hierarchical range of representation that keeps chaos

250- William Bogard, “Smoothing machines and the constitution of society,” Cultural Studies 14(2000):269–94.






University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 315- 27.

158

and difference in interstitial spaces in the area of connection.254 Through the process of

reterritorialization, deterritorialized elements are reconstituted into a new assemblage that appears

as a set of dynamisms merged together. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the

(deterritorialization: undo) and (reterritorialization: do) are the territorial characteristics of an

assemblage that portray the forces that deconstruct and construct territories.255

Deleuze and Guattari also state that assemblages exposed to two orientations: first, the

strata or the lines of segmentarity that have been conventionally structured by rigid categories.

This is reterritorialization or the making. The other orientation occurs when assemblages tend

towards lines of flight, the unpredictable and fluid frame of destratification movements in which

these assemblages come to be shattered, and their fundamentals socialize and

intensively disseminated. This is deterritorialization, or the unmaking.256 The relations of

deterritorialization and reterritorialization themselves can create new territories. A Thousand

Plateaus concludes by describing deterritorialization as the manner or movement when one or

more elements evade or leave a certain territory. Conversely, within the reterritorialization process,

deterritorialized fundamentals reconstitute and establish new affective relations in the formation

of a new assemblage or within the change of the old.257

5.8 Conclusion

In conclusion, the flows of innovative mutations, affective interstitial spaces, and

singularities in built environments can transpire by questioning the conventional architecture and


255- Graham Livesey, “Assemblage,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh:




257- Paul Patton, Political Normativity and Poststructuralism: The Case of Gilles Deleuze. Lecture,

Institutscolloquium des Philosophischen Instituts der Freien from Instituts der Freien, Berlin, 2007.

159

urban design approaches and methods. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s definitions of an assemblage and

affect stem from their ‘experimental philosophy,’ expressing that the transitory functionality of

affective assemblage is a formation of territorial elements and flows of differential force that

struggles to construct the fabric of the social.258 If the disciplines of architecture and urban design

intensively engage with the notions of assemblage and affect, architects, urban designers, and

planners can convert their representational thinking and consequently transform the configuration

of dominant formalism. The ethical practices are vital in conveying various formats to produce

affective attachments – precisely affective assemblage. And for Eisenman, who celebrates

machinic connections in his architectural forms with impulses of virtuality through pragmatic and

experimental manners, achieves success by surpassing the essentialism, reductionism, and the

functionalism of traditional architecture. Finally, regarding the unexpected movements of design,

it is important to link Deleuze’s intensive views of assemblage and affect with pioneering trans-

disciplinary attitudes in architecture and urban landscape, highlighting the character of the

multiplicity that is portrayed when philosophical notions that dodge dualisms are merged. Deleuze

rejects the allegation that there is a propensity in his solo work or his collaboration with Guattari

for using “dualisms – such as virtual/actual, deterritorialization/reterritorialization,

intensive/extensive,”259 and the reasons that what he and Guattari have intended to do is to “find

between the terms. . .whether they are two or more, a tight gorge like a border or a frontier which

will change the set into a multiplicity, with no consideration of the number of parts.”260

258- William Bogard, “Smoothing machines and the constitution of society,” Cultural Studies 14(2000):269–94.

259- Ibid.


1987), 132.

160

CHAPTER SIX Conclusion

6.1 Historical Materiality in the Realm of Contemporary Architecture: The Argument of

Differentiation in Design Thinking Process

This chapter illustrates the implications of the dissertation findings, including implications

for architectural and urban design thinking, practices, and future research. It also outlines the

potentials of this dissertation. This concluding chapter proposes and recommends a new

architectural image to grasp the creation of an ethical series of events and incorporeal

transformations in which architectural and urban design practices engage in new connections with

heterogeneous qualities. It does so by placing an argument in favor of design practices and thinking

infusing a principle of differentiation into how the past is invoked in contemporary architecture

and urban design (Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1: Freespace, the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Corderie dell'Arsenale,

Venice, 2018.

Photo: Irene Fanizza.

Source: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/202487/this-is-not-an-exhibition/.



161

Traditionally, architecture and urban design appear to be informed largely by its formal,

hegemonic and dualistic model. The separation between subject and object in such dualism

perseveres habitually in architectural thought. This is a particularly problematic method in

Deleuze’s mathematical notion of differentiation that asserts hybrid connections and variations

over forms of identity, resemblance, and separation.

In his text, The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and the Processes of Differentiation,

Eisenman argues that the “futile object and the process of decomposition are no longer arbitrary

objects and anomalous processes, nor a mutation of classicism.”1 In that text, Eisenman explains

the impracticality of a return to the history by describing a process of decomposition and the

processes of differentiation that evade starting with a “ground zero.” As Eisenman mentions: “In

decomposition, there is no type form, there is no ground zero.”2 Eisenman’s using of history

involves a starting from the middle, “a break from the tradition of an architecture of categories, of

types which in their essence rely on the separation of things as opposites.”3 Eisenman attempts to

achieve the internal displacement by bringing history up-to-date through a scheme of virtual

representation. He states that the process of decomposition “has no direct relationship to an ideal

past but only a memory of that past, and a future that is only in the present. In a futureless present—

an ‘immanent’ immanence—there is a removal of the extrinsic, conventional identity and the

significance of the object.”4

1- Peter Eisenman, “The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and the Processes of Differentiation,” Eisenman Inside

Out: Selected Writings 1963-1988 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 187.



3- Peter Eisenman, “En Terror Firma: In Trails of Grotextes,” Peter Eisenman Recent Projects, ed. Arie Graafland

(Nijmegen: SUN; Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Idea Books, 1989), 22.



162

6.2 Actualization of the Virtual in Eisenman’s Critical Practice

By actualization of the virtual, Eisenman reinvents the space in terms of becoming and

duration away from identity and resemblance. “Actualization of the virtual can never be a matter

of resemblance since there is no longer any conception of time as unfolding recollection that

represents the mythical Platonic Idea with the greatest possible degree of resemblance. Thus, the

actualization of the virtual is a matter of difference, divergence, or creation.”5 In his article, En

Terror Firma: In Trails of Grotextes, Eisenman criticizes the previous way of conceptualizing

architecture that relies on the contrast between things. Eisenman suggests a decentralized idea of

‘containing within,’ as an alternative to the logic of contradiction, challenging the rigidity of

oppositional categories in representational thinking and starting to re-conceptualize architecture

by displacing its formalism as a unique post-structuralist shift (Figure 6.2). “Continually dividing

and combining, differentiation can be likened to a zone of divergence and as such it is

fundamentally a creative movement, or flow, that conditions a whole in all its provisional

consistency.”6

The effectiveness of Eisenman’s suggested idea lies in proceeding directly to overturn or

deconstruct ideological stances dominant in the construction of identity and architectural history.

Eisenman outlines the possibility of displacing architecture to produce a state of uncertainty, using

the notion of grotesque as “the manifestation of the uncertain in the physical.”7 Eisenman claims

that the grotesque will “provoke an uncertainty in the object, by removing both the architect and


1999), 232.

6- Adrian Parr, “Differentiation/Differenciation,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr




163

the user from any necessary control of the object ... it is now the distance between object and

subject-- the impossibility of possession --which provokes this anxiety.”8

Architecture is reduced to the logic of contradiction. Eisenman deconstructs how

architecture and urban design practices have engaged binaries, containing ‘figure/ground

subject/object, part/whole, and solid/void,’ since the establishment of their tradition.9 It is shown

that the phases of architectural design depend on a rigid contradiction between two options or

dualisms, such as ‘solid/void, figure/ground’ (which is a reductive method), instead of a flexible

‘in-between’ condition and the fluid idea of space.10 The hierarchical system prevents any

connection or relationships between decoded ‘things’ situated at the separate branches of the

classified tree. The tree includes an arborescent thought, that is, a logic of division; the static

relation between impressions and formulas, content and structure to form and maintain a catalog

of the representational image that results in various but set types.

In Eisenman’s critical practice, creating an architectural image is a creative process that

identifies a frame of reference for spatial invention and complexity.

“Eisenman sees Campo Marzio as an example of a new type of urban form

that is defined through the relationship between figures. This type of

urbanism may be regarded as the first modern plan because of its complex

internal logic. It was the first town plan to emphasize an anti- hierarchical

ideology. A conception that breaks the linear continuity with tradition

from an extensive point of view, the space-time continuum where every step

is directly linked to the one before.”11





10- Peter Eisenman, “Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo's Idea of the Machinic,” in El Croquis 83,

Madrid (1997): 21-35.

11- Luca Galofaro, Digital Eisenman: An Office of the Electronic Era (Basel: Birkhauser, 1999), 19.

164

Figure 6.2: Eisenman Architects, City of Culture of Galicia, Santiago de Compostela, Spain,

1999- 2011.

Source: https://eisenmanarchitects.com/City-of-Culture-of-Galicia-2011

Deleuze explains that human beings habitually classify and stabilize their ideas as a set of

dogmas, rules, and principles, which have their backgrounds in identical notions. His tree metaphor

is an illustration of the classificatory method, or a hierarchical erection, based on exact definitions

and judgments that serve as a tendency to exclude difference and foundation, or ground, for

reasonably verifiable knowledge. “For Deleuze, these kinds of transcendent totalities are

fundamentally illusory, they are the product of certain habitual ways of thinking common to

western culture and the metaphysical tradition Deleuze calls ‘dogmatic image of thought.’”12 In

Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze refuses the conception of total unities, working to investigate

how existing sets of things which are, basically, unified, such as human beings, cultures, and

thoughts. Deleuze’s critique of this ‘dogmatic image of thought’ comes from its association with

12- Jonattan Roffe, “Whole,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh






165

representational thinking (Figure 6.3).13 And, learning cannot occur as representation or

resemblance. This is a problematic situation that leads to reproduction of the same and proposes a

reductive knowledge with ultimate ground and a specific outcome. In representational design

thinking, the architectural and urban design form is shaped and accepted as a completed artifact

with an idealized meaning and utility. For instance, the art historian, Herbert Read, comprehends

the architectural and urban design forms as configurations demonstrated by an actual which

reflects the content; and they have a shared relation with materiality and performance.14

Dewan project for Al-Kadhimiya in Iraq The Municipality of al-Madina al-Munawwara

2009. (Amana) in Saudi Arabia, 2002.

Source: Dewan Architects and Engineers, Photo: Beeha

The Al Kadhimiya Development (TAKD). Ali, Shuaibi. The Search for Appropriate

< http://www.dewan-architects.com> Architecture. In Petruccioli, Attilio,

and Khalil K. Pirani.

Understanding Islamic Architecture

(Routledge Curzon: London, 2002), 101.

Figure 6.3: Representational Image of the Thought.


14- Herbert Read, Art now: an introduction to the theory of modern painting and sculpture (New York: Pitman, 1968),

90.


166

Further, the Italian ancient philosophy historian Franco Trabattoni employed the Platonic

theory in describing the form as a material representation of an idea.15 The term ‘meaning’ is

defined traditionally in dictionaries as purpose, intention, purport, or indication; and according to

Juan Bonta, an American architect, the meaning is the set of values that are subjected to the form,

specifically subjected to the transformation that is imposed on the form.16 Ferdinand De Saussure,

a Swiss linguist and semiotician, mentions the linguistic nature of the ‘meaning,’ which is the

value that exists wherever terminologies are found; and the idea of value is purposely included in

the idea of the terminology. He states that value is equivalent to the ‘meaning’ that is born from

the connection between the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’; and he explains that this value has two

approaches to determining the ‘meaning’: the first is automatous, and it comes from the structure

of the word, apart from the linguistic system; whereas the second is universal and depends on its

connection to other close terminologies in the linguistic system, so that the specific meaning could

be exclusively determined.17 A person experiences the actual world with external realization,

creating a division between the inside and the outside, and linking established effects into a rational

system in space. Geoffrey Broadbent, a British architecture educator, classified the design process

model into four categories:18

Pragmatic Design

Iconic Design

Analogical Design

Canonic Design

15- Franco Trabattoni, Essays on Plato's epistemology (Leuven (Belgium): Leuven University Press, 2016), 234.

16- Juan Bonta, “Notes for a Theory of Meaning in Design,” in Signs, symbols and architecture, eds. Geoffrey

Broadbent, Richard Bunt, Charles Jencks (Chichester ; New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1981), 276.

17- Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and semiotics (London: Routledge, 2005), 8.

18- Geoffrey Broadbent, “Building Design as an Iconic Sign System,” in Signs, symbols and architecture, eds.

Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, Charles Jencks (Chichester; New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1981), 311-313.

167

These categories may interfere in some respects; and they are different from the triadic model

introduced by Charles S. Peirce, an American philosopher and semiotician, who identified the

following categories:19

Icon: It is a “sign” that points to an object. Here, the attributes of the “sign” and the object

are identical, regardless of the actual existence or non-existence of an object.

Symbol: The symbol is also defined as a “sign” that points to an object. However, the

indication here is dictated by following a rule that usually connects a general mental

thought to the object; leading to the interpretation of the symbol through pointing to that

object.

The Sign: It is a “sign” or an illustration that indicates an object, and it has a dynamic

connection to that unique object as well as to the senses or memories of the observers.

The Italian semiotician Umberto Eco also used that famous “semiotic triangle” to classify the

“sign” into thought or reference (De Saussure’s “signified”), the symbol (De Saussure’s

“signifier”), and the referent.20 Eco explains that any building may manifest these three types

simultaneously. However, he argues that the element or the object representing the symbol could

possibly indicate its own self the function it fulfills. Based on the above classification, we can

summarize several conventional patterns that identify the relationship between the ‘form’ and the

‘meaning’:

The Thought: Represented by reference design.

The Symbol: Corresponds to expressional design.

The Sign: Corresponds to analogical design.

19- Ibid., 314-315.

20- Umberto Eco, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,” in Signs, symbols and architecture, eds.

Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt, Charles Jencks (Chichester; New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1981), 16.

168

The Icon: Corresponds to canonic design.

The Prevalent Pattern: Corresponds to iconic design.

These patterns represent the various major levels of relations between the form and the

architectural values.

The architectural value is a set of notions, ideas, emotions, or purposes- whether it is an

automatous or universal – that becomes tangible whenever it is associated with the architectural

form that expresses this value. As a result, architectural form is designed conventionally to reflect

the representational image of the thought and social platform that refers to a traditional object and

already always defines cultural values.

In Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, thoughts must be created as a self-motivated

process that deviates from any given structure, binary signification, and prior resemblance,

embedding in dynamic relations with percepts and affects. Architecturally, this means that the

subject no longer places himself/herself into a sign-scheme with the purpose of producing a

specific meaning (phenomenology), yet this subject, in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, is a

specific selection which emerges from within the domain of architectural effects; it is subject-

arrangement.

This dissertation concentrates on the non-representational thinking and poststructuralist

explanations for the term ‘form’ that are proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, who indicate that the

form is the virtual ability of the body to engage spatially in the process of becoming.21 Then, that

engaging body can chart ideas and thoughts, producing change with indefinite potentials for

interpreting and constructing.22 The same idea follows for the term ‘urban,’ in non-representational

21- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167.

22- Nigel Thrift, Non-representational theory: space, politics, affect (London and New York: Routledge, 2008),

237.

169

thinking the term ‘urban’ means a connection between the spatial and the social, and distinguishes

a particular place with a particular bodily movement.23 Consequently, this dissertation considers

the bodily movements, configurations, and structures that compose the urban space, together called

the urban form. Therefore, the urban form is a body-material actual object and immaterial/virtual

ethical object.

6.3 Deleuze’s Critique of Fixed Identity

Deleuze’s critique of fixed identity has been tested within the context of the architectural

and urban design practices (Figure 6.4). Kim Dovey argues that when it comes to how people

perceive a given space with a structure, the ‘identity,’ ‘character’ or ‘sense of place’ are the most

evolving concepts that come to mind.24 Thus, this interpretation of Dovey’s standpoint is

compatible with Deleuze’s notion of identity. Most architectural and urban design practices have

the tendency to equate the participants in a social environment to specific inanimate items and how

life is lived around and with those items which makes it difficult to part the social from the

physical. As Dovey said, “While planning codes and consultants’ studies generally try to reduce

character to a set of formal elements, the ways it is experienced in everyday life tend to resist

attempts to separate the social from the physical.”25

The fact that modern architects substitute place identity with planning tools to proof that

they move from the daily experience of pre-consciousness to the production of place and

character.26 Deleuze, in all of this criticism, turns his attention to real life events. He questions

modern architects and planners whose attitudes tend to erase diversity and limit people’s creativity

23- Ibid., 238.


25- Kim Dovey, Woodcock I. and Wood S. “A test of character: Regulating place-identity in inner-city Melbourne,”

Urban Studies 46(12)2009: 2595–2615.

26- P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

170

in terms of their potential. This perception within the context of urban design merges, generally,

with the notion and the ontology of place into one whole without interruption, a simplification

which does not take into account the social approach to place identity. Doreen Massey opposes

this view because she thinks that any notion of place coming from it poses a problem and thus is

backward-thinking:27


Fixed Identity in the winning entry project for the Al Kadhimiya historical site, Baghdad, Iraq.





171

“Such view of place have been evident in a whole range of setting – in the

emergence of certain kinds of nationalism, in the marketing of places ….

In the new urban enclosures and … by those defending their communities

against yuppification … All of these have been attempts to fix the meaning

of place, to enclose and defend them: they construct singular, fixed and static

identities for places, and they interpret places as bounded enclosed spaces

defined through counter position against the Other who is outside.”28

As an alternative to such views, Massey advocates a loose conception of “place,” whereby place

identity is temporary and not finalized with any parameters. This is more of a progressive approach

to “place” which opens up to diverse identities and past experiences, with its “character”

determined by what is at play now, the current and immediate circumstances instead of what has

been already established, defined and stamp-proofed with no possibility of escaping human

scrutiny.29

6.4 Deleuze’s Process of Differentiation

Deleuze primarily clarifies the concept of ‘differentiation’ in his book Difference and

Repetition. Deleuze argues that the process of differentiation is a dynamic movement that is prior

to any recognizable image (Figure 6.5). In result, Deleuze specifies that “what are differentiated

are intensities and heterogeneous qualities and this is what makes the virtual real but not actual, in

short, differentiation in the way Deleuze intends it happens only in the virtual realm.”30

28- Doreen Massey, “A place called home,” New Formations 17 (1992): 3–15.

29- Doreen Massey, “A place called home,” New Formations 17 (1992): 3–15.

30- Adrian Parr, “Differentiation/Differenciation,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr


172


The Process of Differentiation.

Source: Assemblage Architects, Holy City Masterplan.


http://www.assemblage.co/holy-city-masterplan

173

According to Deleuze, a human has a certain characteristic to consider difference as the

difference between things, diminishing and reducing all intensive differences to representational

image. For Deleuze, the human process of labeling something, or categorizing it, happens based

on a pre-known form of homogeneous understanding.31 In the representational thinking,

differentiation is shaped by human’s system of signification. Human classification fails to attain

identity in its whole, ‘difference in itself.’ This ‘pure difference’ is lost in the way we want to label

items. Deleuze wants us to unfetter ourselves from these prior categories. He wants us to shed pre-

conceived notions. A return to our perceptual access, which lies beneath this categorization, would

give pure, real notions of reality. Our labels and names are, in this sense, like ghosts of an original,

or bad carbon copies. Somers-Hall notes that the limits of representation have been tested and

proven to be reliable in systems based on judgment occurring at the same time as the difference

leading to identity.32 Deleuze’s stand on the mode of representation is somewhat straightforward.

He thinks that the mode of representation has nothing to do with ‘difference in itself,’ or anything

in connection with the ground of life since it sorts out thoughts in conjunction with some fixed

elements as well as some parameters that depend on some form of identity.

Drawing substantially on Brott’s Architecture for a Free Subjectivity, the conception of

genius loci enters the architectural dualism and stays outside Deleuze’s principle of differentiation,

forming a representational reference to act as a symbolic shadow of imaginary elements that cover

the purely immanent plane of architectural intermediary, mirroring the language of transcendental

ego in a dialectical manner and becoming a form of ‘arborescent’ thought pitched toward a

homogeneous schema as a vexed tool for constructing false identity. Talking specifically about the

31- Henry Somers-Hall, 2012. Hegel, Deleuze, and the critique of representation dialectics of negation and

difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 41.

32- Henry Somers-Hall, 2012. Hegel, Deleuze, and the critique of representation dialectics of negation and

difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 239.

174

architectural and urban design practices in Arab countries, Elsheshtawy made a poignant and

overarching remark in which the critique sees modern Arab architects and urban designers clinging

to their heritage and tradition when it comes to examining their cities designated as historical

sites.33 This argument merits a more profound conception of how architecture and urban design

might itself ethically function in relation to the process of differentiation. “The problem this poses,

given that Deleuze is not a representational thinker, is how difference differenciates without itself

turning into a system of representation?”34 To place the question in Deleuze’s Spinozism frame of

ethical-aesthetic terms, how do we create an architectural image within impersonal effects that is

irreducible to conventional formalism or traditional dualism as an either/or relationship, opening

a process of differentiation and creative transformation? In Deleuze’s concept of creative

transformation, experiential and spontaneous affect that occurs as a ephemeral force prior to the

fixed meaning and away from the interpretative framework of reasoning exposes the ‘limits of

semiotics’ that have a central tendency to actualize complex reactions out of their indeterminate

virtuality and materialize them to physical and visual contexts. Hence, Deleuze’s critique of the

system of representation turns into the concept of the ‘rhizome,’ (Figure 6.6).

33- Yasser Elsheshtawy, Planning Middle Eastern Cities: an urban kaleidoscope in a globalizing world (London:

Routledge, 2004).

34-Adrian Parr, “Differentiation/Differenciation,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr


175

Figure 6.6: Marc Ngui, Diagrams for Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 2008.

“Introduction: Rhizome.”

Source: http://www.bumblenut.com/drawing/art/plateaus/index.shtml

“Deleuze and Guattari characterize a rhizome as indeterminate and experimental, steering

the emphasis away from representational interpretative frameworks, they clearly state that a

rhizome is a map, not a trace, explaining this distinction they write that what”35 ‘distinguishes the

map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the

real.’36 Deleuze utilizes the idea of an ‘arborescent’ model as a counterpoint to his rhizomatic

philosophy. In his collaboration with Guattari, when they write the first chapter of their book A

Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze targets the vertical proceeding of the ‘arborescent’ schema as a model

of conventional epistemology and characterizing the ‘rhizome’ as a horizontal structure which

‘proceeds from the middle’ to replace it (Figure 6.7).

35- Adrian Parr, “Creative Transformation,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh:




http://www.bumblenut.com/drawing/art/plateaus/index.shtml

176


Source: http://www.inflexions.org/n1_t_nguihtml.html

6.5 Representational Thinking vs. Differentiation

The purpose of this concluding chapter is to reveal the impersonal effects of combinations

of architectural practice and Deleuze’s productive process of differentiation. Deleuze considers

the process of differentiation as a vehicle for conveying the doubled selection of singularities that

embed in ‘sensible aggregates’ of an experiential event. It continually requires ethical principles

to allow collective voices to reverberate and new forms of subjectivity to proliferate in

heterogeneous milieus, rather than intelligible and recognizable experiences and memories that

represent conventional ways of thinking of self and other. Deleuze and Guattari use ‘rhizome’ as

a decentralized model for empirical subjectivity, with ensconced and constituted subjects that

challenge and exceed the hierarchical ways in representational thinking, re-conceptualizing

tendencies of reorienting ‘thought’ as a unique production of the mind in the creative practice.

“The rhizome is conceived of as an open multiplicity (Figure 6.8), and all life is a rhizomatic mode

http://www.inflexions.org/n1_t_nguihtml.html

177

of change without firm and fixed boundaries that proceeds”37 ‘from the middle, through the

middle, coming and going rather than starting and finishing.’38 Nonetheless, Deleuze and

Guattari’s positive using of the term ‘open,’ which they never mean the opposite of ‘closed’;

indicates “the machinic character of a rhizome that arises out of the virtual as well as the dynamic

boundaries that constitute it.”39


Multiplicity


Representation in itself deforms difference by subjugating it to identity, a practice that

Deleuze finds retrograde in terms of the creative minds of humans. Instead of thinking about what

differs, the minds are attached to what is represented, thus lacking the ingenuity to innovate by

negating the true inherent difference. As Dovey said, “While representations and spatial practice

are integrated in the field of everyday life, they are seriously divided in architectural/urban practice








178

and criticism where avant-garde, form-makers and spatial analysts generally operate in quite

separate fields.”40

In contrast, differentiation exists in the investigational and heterogeneous construction of

meanings, it divaricates into other texts as newly generated thoughts. That being said, the more

effective purpose of architectural practice would be the creation of concepts through

multidirectional lines of becoming, which produce aggregate networks. Deleuze and Guattari

pondered this issue using the metaphor of rhizome, a botanical term defined in the online Oxford

dictionary as “A continuously growing horizontal underground stem that puts out lateral shoots

and adventitious roots at intervals.”41 The main argument at the core of Deleuze’s study is that

concepts were complicated, simply because they generate ‘new lines of becoming’ and pave the

way for new ideas.42 “A rhizomatic plateau of thought, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, may be

reached through the consideration of the potential of multiple and relational ideas and bodies.”43

Deleuze, together with Guattari, built their argument, using the botanical term

“rhizomatic”44 as a metaphor to describe the styles of thinking whereby there is no stationary center

nor order due to the entangled ramifications of the various links.45 In order to establish a rational,

Deleuze and Guattari contrast Rhizome/Rhizomatics with another botanical term: ‘arborescent.’46

The rhizomatic concept is similar to the actual botanical definition of the term “rhizome”

characterized by the notion of lateral expansion of the multitude of links in contrast to the

centeredness represented by the stem’s verticality. In light of that consideration, one can assume a


41 - https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/rhizome, accessed on January 18, 2018.


43- Felicity J. Colman, “Rhizome,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr



(Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 1987), 3–26.

45- Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2002), xix.

46- Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin, 2002), xxvii.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/rhizome

179

connection with the notion of lateral thinking. Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-British author, is one

of the few thinkers to dedicate their research on the new connections created during the lateral

expansion of ideas, and he viewed those connections as a sign of creativity whereby ideas that

initially seem random come together to stand for something meaningful for the mere fact that they

are part of a system.47 Koestler is seconded by Edward de Bono,48 a Maltese physician and

psychologist who reasons that the creative logic of lateral thinking is an antithesis of the

hierarchical logic of practical thinking. Deleuze, for his part, states that tree-thinking suppresses

creativity and keeps the main concepts in a transcendental field.49

The traditional way of thinking, also known as arborescent, has a defined origin from which

it shoots out a multitude idea like the stem of a tree spreading its branches, in an orderly manner.

Conversely, rhizomatics have no center, are haphazard and proliferate loosely. In order to make a

powerful point, Deleuze and Guattari titled the first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus ‘Introduction:

Rhizome’ and proceeded to demonstrate what they meant by “rhizome,” as discussed above. Their

concept was welcomed as a God-given gift or mantra within the artistic sphere, especially that of

the visual arts, and set the tone for the common use of plant imagery in the visual arts discourse,

including but not limited to the terms of “hybridization, hybrid, and rhizome-related phenomena

such as crisscrossing and in-between or interstitial fields.”50 Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari’s

concept has seen its application in modern architecture and urbanism with the emphasis on the

rhizome as an everlasting, restructuring, interrelated system. In fact, what seems to appeal more to

the architects and urbanists is the description of the principles of the concept by Deleuze and

Guattari, which, by the way, expands the possibilities of creativity but remains a true challenge to

47- Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964).

48- Edward de Bono, The Mechanism of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).


50- Annette W. Balkema, Exploding aesthetics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 52.

180

apply in the field, precisely because describing rhizomatic structures entails linkage, diversity, and

plurality of mapmaking, heterogeneity, and transfer printing. However, when successfully applied

by architects and urbanists, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic concept offers the possibility of

appreciating the internal organization of a building and how that specific building relates and

connects to others in the city to form a unity.51 Complex networks keep appearing in design

research. A consideration of networks brings us into contact with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept

of the rhizome.

“Rhizome, studied in this perspective, can, therefore, be described as the

connections that occur between the most disparate and the most similar of objects,

places, and people, all of these people and entities are linked by a secret chain of

reactions interwoven and hardly perceivable, for they appeal to our sense of

intuition and the concept of assemblage.”52 (Figure 6.9).


Assemblage


51- Felicity J. Colman, “Rhizome,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh


52- Ibid., 232.

181

A striking example of a rhizome city, representative of the descriptions above, is

Amsterdam in the Netherlands, a city often compared to the canalled city of Venice, Italy. The

particularity of Amsterdam derives from the different physical and geographical elements that

have come together to give this city the image it has been carrying over the years. In fact, the city

is composed of a system “of canals, water ways, locks, alleys, and embankments, held together by

the stem-canals formed by the ring of canals, the Kloveniersburgwal, Oude Schans, and Amstel.”53

Deleuze and Guattari portrayed Amsterdam as a ‘rhizome- city’ considering the way the city

presents itself.54 The curiosity of an onlooker or visitor to its Historic Museum is a testimony

because one feels like not leaving that place at all. In their effort to explain/define rhizome, Deleuze

and Guattari compare it to an open space with multiple entries and exits which allow for the

connections between the different parts, with different vital functions for its dwellers on social,

economic, political and artistic levels. In a sense, the authors define rhizome as a figure of speech

applicable to architectural structures regardless of time and place.55 “Deleuze describes the city as

a labyrinth in terms that strongly invoke the rhizome.”56 Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari push

their comparison of the rhizome to a labyrinth, thus establishing an undeniable metaphorical

approach to their concept, all the while affirming the ability of a rhizome to connect any particular

point to any other point.57 This characteristic of the rhizome implies that dissimilar elements may

also be connected together in this way. The rhizome cannot be simplified to individual elements,

for it does not involve units but aspects, or, more aptly stated, aspects in movement.

53- Arie Graafland, “Of rhizomes, trees and the IJ-Oevers, Amsterdam,” Assemblage, no. 38 (1998): 28-41.




56- Gilles Deleuze, 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1993), 24.


182

Rhizomes thrive in certain special conditions of a given environment at that specific

moment, and, as such, they rely on short-lived features and provisional thoughts that are constantly

evolving. What the end results in such situations is “deterritorialization,” according to Deleuze and

Guattari, which, undoubtedly, causes more changes.58 Due to its nature and its ramifications within

spatial and social arrangements, ‘rhizome’ may be likened to American sociologist Richard

Sennett’s notion of ‘narrative space,’ which he defines as a place where something not thought

about can happen, and where there is an invocation of the necessity for change and transition.59

This line of thought in the ‘narrative space’ marks its indefiniteness, a fortunate original occurrence

at that time.

The thought that an architectural structure, be it a building, space, a location, or something

else, is linked to an infinite quantity of other points or sites is a dynamic concept. Any architect

who wishes to apply Sennett’s concept of narrative space in their work or in their pedagogical

agenda will certainly have to reckon the indefiniteness of its use. This means taking some specific

measures whereby ‘conjunctions and composites’ are favored in lieu of “segmentation,

complexity, and obscurity, which are emphasized instead of simplicity and lucidity.”60 The focus

on the potential lines inherent in the rhizome stresses connectedness and movement. This appeals

to communication systems and at the same time to the movement of people, goods, and services.

Architecture and cities are therefore largely involved in these functions. As a spatial configuration,

the rhizome cannot at all be seen differently from the strata of society that prospers while living in

it.61 These outcomes in configurations and relationships are ‘acentered, nonhierarchical,



59- Richard Sennett, The conscience of the eye: the design and social life of cities (New York: Knopf, 1990).


61- Ibid.

183

nonsignifying.’62 The impersonal effects as a dynamic model of subjectivity involve a new primary

subjectivity in which personal perception becomes progressive and freshly liberated from the

submission to the system of signification. When defining the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari place

particular stress on cartography so as to espouse architectural and urban practices. Nevertheless,

the mapping they depict as a strong formulation63 “affects to a map that must be produced,

constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple

entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.”64 The rhizomatic flows counter the inertia of

segments. However, an interacted spatial construction is vital to the enabling of such smooth flows

– the traffic flow and the chat in the bazaars cannot take place without opulently interlinked but

arranged and striated architectural designs. The complex network is obviously more related to

smooth space and rhizomatic preparations than the organized characters and linear orders. This

unexpected encounter is what gives a specific place its genius loci in which it plays an important

role in character creation, for pleasant cities exemplify places of becoming.

6.6 Places of Becoming in Diagrammatic Models

The process of diagramming is the key theme for non-representational urban design

thinking that can critically engage in order to understand how the spatial configuration of the city

works empirically. “For Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of mapping is defined in opposition to

the simple ‘tracing’ of territory; rather it is a creative practice that analyses the hidden forces

within a territory to produce an abstract and diagrammatic understanding of how an assemblage



63- Graham Livesey, “Rhizome + Architecture,” The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr




184

works.”65 The main goal here is basically to utilize this diagramming and mapping process with

Lynch’s work on the image of the city as an assessment tool, generating one or multi-diagrams

that indicate what possibilities can and cannot occur as becoming (Figure 6.10).

“In a classic work, The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch taught us that disalienation

in the traditional city involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or

reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the

individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.”66


Multidirectional Lines of Becoming


The existence of various relations between space and block of sensation may result in

multi-diagrams, emphasizing the importance of blocks of sensation and space elements.67

65- Kim Dovey and Elek Pafka, “What is functional mix? An assemblage approach,” Planning Theory & Practice 18

(2017): 249-267.

66- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,

1991), 51.

67- David R Olson and Ellen Bialystok, Spatial Cognition: the Structure and Development of Mental Representations

of Spatial Relations (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1983), 246.


185

Therefore, an alternative definition of urban form structure was presented through the study of the

urban image, based on the argument that states “each image has a unique pattern of spatial relation

for the observers.”68 Furthermore, Kevin Lynch cited five urban elements as integral parts of a city

image that is comprehended (cognized) as a whole unit; these urban elements are paths, edges,

districts, nodes, and landmarks;69 a set that has developed and used for inspiring urban design

thinking process. The motivation by which the expression ‘cognitive map’ was created and is

utilized by Lynch in his book is to examine the function of the mental image that affects the ability

of the viewer’s body to respond to complex identities and aesthetic influences in urban scenes.

These sensitive feelings or perceptions result from memories that come into contact with the body

and can occur in a particular urban scene making the city unforgettable and conceivable. 70

6.7 Urban Image Beyond Deleuze and Guattari

This section is designed to analyze the urban image diagrammatically; the diagrammatic

analysis can enable us to know and read the status of the city and its urban image. It is clear that

all cities will continue to keep its urban elements, and we can cite the most important traits in

accordance with the urban elements of the city identified by Lynch in his influential model. But

these urban elements no longer need to be used as transcendent figures to express a fixed image.

Rather, these urban elements could deal with the block of sensations, movements, and affects:

Paths: “are the channels of movement through the city whether by foot, car or public

transport.”71 The city is distinctively known for its paths. By analyzing these paths and

local streets through the concepts of mappings, networks, and connections, Deleuze and

68- Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960), 160.

69- Ibid., 108-109.

70- Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960).


186

Guattari stress the appearance of powerful spatial affects, characterizing their relative

capacity assessed on the basis of human scale (designated solely for pedestrians) or on the

basis of highways. Deleuzo- Guattarian’s spatial affect is a route of dynamism in the

movement which comprises of all potential paths, orientations, and affects. Free-flowing

movements of bodies become sensory visualities linked to the urban form and activate

architectural values, producing subjectivity or sensual experience in urban space. Paths are

always scattered and interspersed among or between nodes.

Nodes: “are those sites where there is an intensity of intersecting pathway; places of intense

encounter,”72 “strategic spots,” 73 and “moments of the shift from one structure to

another.”74 The nodes used in public and private districts of all cities could be classified

into two types, based on their pattern of activity and the attained social interactions:

a- Single or central space of power: This is found in the courtyards and plazas,

because it rotates and is centered on the building, so the building becomes the

central power or point of attraction. The courtyard of the Here, the experience

is shaped by the ways spatial affects occur in which urban form and

architectural values are connected to each other and affect each other. In this

urban context, spatial bodies and material/immaterial environments are not

controlled or structured in a stable system, but rather they are open to urban

narratives and everyday affective flows.

b- The market space: or urban bazaars can be founded in some cities; they are

distinctive, not as urban landmarks, but for their roofed alleys corridors that are


73- Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960), 110.

74- Ibid., 110.

187

surrounded by khans and sarais.75 In this pattern, the focus is on prevailing

activities as affective energies inherent in bodily contours. “This very basic

relation of pedestrian flows as a tangent to items of desire is a major driver of

urban morphology.”76

Nodes are open spaces in which all conceivable arrangements and shapes can transpire.

They are urban spaces of the possible body that “can actualize something that has not

previously been.”77 Rethinking urban spaces through Deleuze and Guattari puts forward a

possible shift to envisage urban space as practices of becoming instead of a previously

determined entities.

Landmarks: “are those elements that stand out as figures against the ground of the urban

context, a phenomenon that is linked to Gestalt psychology which suggests we perceive

our world by organizing it into figures that stand out from a surrounding ground – identities

that emerge from differences: it is this difference that catches the eye and registers as an

image in the mind.”78 Furthermore, most of the landmarks have strong connections with

their surrounding structures and are considered part and parcel of their cohesive fabric that

are linked by a complex network of paths comprised of public, private and semi-private

spaces. Driven by the logic of sensation, “landmarks mark the land through their relative

differences from their contexts- what we see is not a thing but a relationship of

difference.”79

75- Mohammad Gharipour, The Bazaar in the Islamic City: Design, Culture, and History (Cairo: American

University in Cairo Press, 2012), 27.


77- Andrew Ballantyne, Deleuze and Guattari for Architects (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 8.



188

Districts: “are patches of the city that are perceived as different from their surroundings,

identified by consistencies of texture or character within the urban fabric.”80 They are

marked according to the type of buildings they contained and divided into public and

private districts. For example, in the public district, we find government, religious,

administrative, and commercial buildings; whereas in the private district we find the

residential buildings. Every district, whether public or private, is a compound of urban

form, persistent function in a mode of sensory engagement, and the dynamism of everyday

life, with unactualized possibilities to “stress [and highlight] certain elements of an

image,”81 that is both deliberate and unanticipated. Moreover, two patterns of building

complexes are identified in these districts: First, branching-tree complex; this is the

prevailing pattern in Arabian cities. Second, the grid system; rarely found in the center of

old Arabian cities.

Edges: “the clear boundaries between part of the city are what Lynch calls edges- barriers

to movement that include”82 two types:

a- Natural edges exploited by the inhabitants to protect the city, such as hills and rivers

and that may be the reason for choosing the location of the city.

b- Man-made edges, such as walls surrounding the city to identify its boundaries and

to protect the city from enemy attacks, tunnels, and the streets that represent the

major channels for the traffic movement and determines the limits for the districts.

80- Ibid., 80.

81- Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies (London and Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2007), 48.


189

The effectiveness and the expediency of Lynch’s study, typology, and interpretation of urban

types, inspired by gestalt concepts of perception, generate ways in which we can indicate and

analyze the difference between these elements of the city as a combination of assemblages. This

mix of elements in different assemblages enables a construct of the image of the city as a perceptual

whole that works together to form multiple identities out of difference, beyond the stillness and

the lifelessness of formularized image. These objects, or components, manifest themselves with

exceptional ability as the arrangement of ‘information,’ as the English social scientist and

semiotician Gregory Bateson proposes that “information is a difference that makes a difference.”83

Consequently, “the landmark is a difference between figure and ground, and it makes a difference

because we use it to navigate the city, what we recognize as nodes, paths, districts, and boundaries

are differences that we see as identities because they help us form a cognitive map of the city, it is

the relationships that matter: to see these elements as ‘things-in-themselves’ is to misrecognize

them.”84

6.8 Conclusion

This chapter offers a heterogeneous series of impersonal architectural effects that function

at the productive moment of becoming: not at the frozen time of being in which architectural image

transforms through movement of affirmations and operates in multiple bodies, constituting the

doubled selection. This doubled selection transforms thought into a selection of becoming;

something new is present here and is now brought into being – which seems to be the impersonal

effects of the reassessment of forces, which constitute any coherent arrangement of an architectural

image that may connect with but is irreducible to personhood. Deleuze and Guattari’s constructive

83- Gregory Bateson, Steps to an ecology of mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 459.


190

vision of rhizome enlivens this trajectory toward both empirical and impersonal effects. Empirical

subjectivity is an accurate effect of practices of individuation as a real material development; it is

“what makes the individuality of an event.”85 The Deleuzian subject (the subject yet to come) is

the subject that has first to be released from arborescent structure and control of signs. In this view,

the architect and urban designer personality is not eliminated, but “envelop[s] a finite number of

the singularities of the system.”86 A pure thought (the impersonal field) comes from outside, in

time, colliding or coming into contact with subjects in its ethical and lived dimensions to make a

difference, to make a change.

The ‘Disneyfication’ concept captivates the architectural and urban design thinking since

it represents a model of an element that links protection to the economic survival of local

communities. It has been adopted in many countries around the world. Many cities, districts, and

neighborhoods are being reshaped in the image of Disney’s popular fantasy theme parks. “Theme

parks are capital intensive, highly developed, self-contained recreational spaces, which are usually

organized around themes or unifying ideas such as a specific period in history or a particular

geographic region.”87

American art history educator Karal Ann Marling, the author of Architecture of

reassurance: designing Disney's theme parks, coins the term “architecture of reassurance,”88 the

meaning is connected to Disney’s specific brand of nostalgic in architecture and urbanism. The

cultural differences are reduced to a form of homogeneity and standardization with miniaturized

scale, historical features, and nostalgic design as a controlled, global, and abstract model.

85- Gilles Deleuze, “A Philosophical Concept ….,” in Who Comes after the Subject? Eds. Eduardo Cadava, Peter

Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: 1991), 95.

86- Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 109.

87- Jafar Jafari, Encyclopedia of tourism (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).

88- Karal A. Marling, Architecture of reassurance: designing Disney's theme parks (Abberville Press, 1997).

191

“Certain aspects of Disneyland and its offshoots are positive – such as the urban

planning strategies at Celebration, the urban renewal ideals behind South Street

Seaport, the imaginative and also educational programs at Disneyland amusement

parks, the attempt to introduce cultural diversity at places like EPCOT. But there

are also limits to this vision and danger in suppressing conflict and difference in

order to create sanitized, controlled, consumer-based experiences. Celebration

operates like a gated community – its population self-selects by income. This

fosters intolerance or indifference to the ongoing challenges of living in real-world,

democratic communities.”89

Nowadays, several modern and post-modern associated issues that touch the local character

are perceived as a result of the globalization phenomenon. Locality is more an incorporeal structure

than a physical space existing in the electronic era and age of globalization. The media and the

impact of capitalism and innovative techniques of communication have added to the continuing

apprehension about globalizing culture. With historical environments become gradually more

marketable, and branded products, traditional cities, districts, and neighborhoods seem to be

enjoyable, stress-free, and manageable. This phenomenon, united with global tourism, has

encouraged some countries around the world to renovate and reconstruct their neglected and lost

heritage, presenting a product for global consumption.

The cultural heritage centers have the mission to support the cultural heritage by creating

more awareness of global possibilities such as superficiality and neutrality and threats such as

homogenization and uniformity.

This dissertation is intensively pursuing a possible project from a diagrammatic or post-

representational position that seeks an alternative mode of repetition. A view that considers

repetition as a metamorphic becoming other, producing radical difference rather than safeguarding

89- Sonya James, “What Disney can teach us about urban planning,” https://www.zdnet.com/article/qa-what-disney-

can-teach-us-about-urban-planning/.

192

resemblance. The flow of new connections between incorporeal events and corporeal bodies

operates as a kind of difference machine, as a swerve, rather than as a false identity machine, as

the stationary reproduction of a representational model. This alternative mode of repetition would

operate through a condensation where a continuous whole-part would eternally provoke new

assemblages.

6.8.1 Contribution

While the works of Gilles Deleuze are broad, as this dissertation has shown, his theory of

Difference and Repetition has potentiality to generate a perpetual connection between history and

becoming in architectural and urban design thinking and practices that go beyond the historicism

and representational image of thought, strengthening architecture and urban designs’ relevance to

the Deleuze’s philosophy. This dissertation is developed as one such small contribution to this

increasing call, arguing that Deleuze’s theory of Difference and Repetition provides critical

engagement, and proof for, the continuing relevance of this theorist to the disciplines of

architecture and urban design. Such argument has been improved by offering intellectual

commentaries and comparative, conceptual, and diagrammatic analyses in which architectural and

urban design thinking may connect within Deleuze’s philosophy through the design process.

6.8.2 Expected Outcomes

This dissertation explores the concepts of difference and repetition within two different

design strategies by relating Deleuzian theoretical discourse to architectural and urban design

practices, focusing primarily on the particularities of affective assemblages and folding techniques

in Eisenman critical practice. The way that the dissertation conceptualizes the architectural and

urban design practices through Deleuze’s theory of Difference and Repetition highlights the active

relations between history and becoming in the design of the cultural environments and historical

193

sites. In the case of the Al Kadhimiya historical site, the winning bid by the Dewan Architects &

Engineers Firm, and its proposal to imitate the past may reflect an inability to accept change. As a

result, one can realize the tendency to pit the past against the present on an uneven terrain which

is not actually the functional use of the past as stipulated. The state of affairs of Islamic

architectural legacy is not an invention of today’s thinkers. Any urban civilization which has no

vision and is not able to adapt to the current situation and environmental conditions by breathing

life into what exists today is doomed to destruction.90 A good example is a historical revivalism

happening in Iraq. At this point, it becomes crucial to acknowledge the need to abdicate choosing

between place as a decreed notion or as a complete societal construct. Thus, “character” is viewed

as the doxa of an organized society which runs counter urban design and planning for modern-day

inhabitants.91 Because of the incessant flux of changes, predetermined and established identities

naturally give way to the current reality proclaimed by the human creative mind. The main

impediment to “character” may be our tendency to reduce it and transform it into a series of

features rendering the “character” a mere puppet.92 Deleuze’s approach to difference may be

summed up as the resistance to the temptation to believe that difference depends on representation,

a derivative of the identity which has the primacy. Deleuze advocates breaking the chains of

interdependency to allow difference to manifest itself as it should and actually does if we only

have the courage to perceive it.

90- Stefano Bianca, Urban form in the Arab world: past and present (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 50.

91- Kim Dovey, Woodcock I. and Wood S. “A test of character: Regulating place-identity in inner-city Melbourne,”

Urban Studies 46(12)2009: 2595–2615.

92- Ibid.

194

6.9 Further Research

There is a numerous amount of interesting discussion yet to come regarding the process of

differentiation in design, particularly in relation to the architectural and urban practices and

theories. An engagement between the processes of differentiation in design and the posthumanist

movement has been taken up lately by Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali. Their book

Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari addresses the thought of Deleuze

and Guattari to understand their intellectual role in the course of actualization of the virtual in

posthumanist movement that has given rise to new architectural and urban practices and theories.

Dorothea Olkowski reviews this book and poses this question: “what kind of architecture can

realize the virtual plane of Ideas of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy?”93 According to Olkowski,

“this because in spite of many years of theorizing about Deleuze and Guattari’s possible view of

the role of architecture in their philosophy, there still has been no satisfactory answer to this

question.”94 Olkowski said that “the difficulty of this question and the complexity and diversity of

the answers in this volume are due to the possibility or impossibility in the contemporary era of a

nomadic architecture constituted as an immanent plane of trajectories, a swarm of intensities, the

unlivable site of the body without organs, the differentiating principle of the fold, the unleashing

of sensation, the perceptible realization of imperceptible forces, a map that deterritorializes, or an

instrument of the propagation of light.”95 Olkowski continues saying that “this accomplished

assemblage of architects, urban planners, and philosophers urge us to consider how the ideas of

Deleuze and Guattari both organize and derange their architectural visions as they ceaselessly

93- Dorothea Olkowski, Review of the book Architectural and Urban Reflections after Deleuze and Guattari by

Constantin V. Boundas and Vana Tentokali (London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018).

94- Ibid.

95- Ibid.

195

experiment with the very idea of the worlds architecture might be capable of creating.” 96 A

comprehensive text of philosophies of architecture and urbanism, vital materiality, digital

production, and feminist practices have been explored in this book. Indeed, it may carry more

appealing futures, attached both ethically and creatively, to architectural and urban practices and

theories. Possibly, this will become further research.

The hope is that the final document clarifies the significance of what Kim Dovey explores,

“the quest to rethink conceptions of ‘place’ and to move on from the views of place as essentially

closed and stabilizing, another is the focus on the nexus of place to power; the ways that the sense

of place is inextricably wrapped up with questions of authority and authenticity, there is an attempt

to rethink the idea of place and place identity without the suffocating ideal of place as closed or

finished.”97 Furthermore, the hope that through a detailed comparison of the two proposals for

redevelopment of the Al Kadhimiya historical site, there will be practical evidence supported by

the theoretical framework of this dissertation (Deleuze’s theory of Difference and Repetition) that

will demonstrate new ways of thinking and approaching architectural and urban design practices

in the Middle East and other similar regions in the world. This can offer an alternative approach

(a Deleuzian approach) for the advancing study of how history can be used in different diagrams,

actions, and relations, as an affective mediation that occurs in current architectural and urban

design practices, an approach which has potential for future examinations and investigations.

96- Ibid.


196

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Appendix

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

EA Eisenman Architects

RP Rebstockpark Project

D&G Deleuze & Guattari

MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology

AKVA Aga Khan Visual Archive

TAKS The Al Kadhimain Shrine

DA Doxiadis Association

A.P.P Architecture & Planning Partnership

FAL Fine Arts Library

HCL Harvard College Library

DAEF Dewan Architects and Engineers Firm

TAKD The Al Kadhimiya Development

AAF Assemblage Architects Firm

HCM Holy City Masterplan

TAKHS The Al Kadhimiya Historical Site

YTA Yasser Tabbaa Archive

AKDC Aga Khan Documentation Center

BMMJE Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

D&G ATP Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus

A Dissertation submitted to the - OhioLINK ETD Center

Documents