ABE 008

Ecologies of Architecture 12
Architecture With a Twist
A. Radman and S. Kousoulas, TU Delft Spring Semester 2025

The Architecture Philosophy and Theory Group of the Architecture Department is offering ABE 008 seminar to PhD candidates and academic research staff, whose research topics relate to architectural and urban theory, philosophy, and contemporary concerns of spatial, socio-political, ethico-aesthetical, cultural and scientific relevance to the disciplines of design.

The course is framed within a seminar structure every second Monday from 14:30-17:30 (Zoom meeting) during the spring term, in which participants will engage in guided readings and group discussions on the thematic of each individual session. The aim is to generate an environment in which all participants will gain knowledge on a specific topic, while developing a set of useful methodologies and research skills.

The twelfth edition of the course Ecologies of Architecture will kick off in February 2025 under the guidance of Andrej Radman and Stavros Kousoulas. The Ecologies of Architecture XII will be devoted to the concept of monadology and nomadology. The formation and form, the emerging and the emerged, pertain to two modes of one reality. Everything starts from the sensible but is subsequently extended into the intelligible. It could be argued that sensations mobilise the differential forces that make thinking possible. This is what Deleuze means by ‘pedagogy of the senses’. The convergence of thought and matter is diagrammed in The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque (1988) as two floors of a baroque house connected by ‘draperies’. It is important to stress that there is no structural homology between the two floors. To borrow Dan Dennett’s powerful metaphor, there is no homunculus sitting in the Cartesian theatre (where all the evidence is gathered). The form of expression and the form of content do not share a form. There is no meta-form. There is only folding and unfolding of progressive different/ciation. What connects the two is a process.

Learning Objectives

In a desperate attempt to catch up with forms of contemporary image culture, architects tend to forget where their strength lies. To speak of culture as forms of life, as Scott Lash argues, is to break with earlier notions of culture as representation, as reflection. It is to break with judgement for experience, with epistemology for ontology, and finally to break with a certain type of cognition for living. While accepting multiple scales of reality the Ecologies of Architecture opposes the alleged primacy of the ‘physical’ world discovered by physics. By contrast, it posits that what we have to perceive and cope with is the world considered as the environment. The emphasis is on the encounter, where experience is seen as an emergence which returns the body to a process field of exteriority. The ultimate goal of the Ecologies of Architecture is to debunk hylomorphism – where form is imposed upon inert matter from without and where the architect is seen as a god-given, inspired creator and genius – and to promote the alternative morphogenetic approach that is at once more humble and ambitious.

At the conclusion of each seminar / course the participants will have:

• gained knowledge and understanding on the specific thematic and context of each seminar (content-based)
• associated the contents of the seminar to his or her own research topic, expressing this relationship in concrete, relevant ways (argument-based)
• developed skills relevant to carrying out advanced research: from following intensive readings and discussing them in a peer work-group, to preparing an academic research paper for publication (method-based

Teaching Method

This course will follow a seminar structure and advanced research methods. Depending on the individual seminar leaders, the seminar will follow a series of formats, but generally will be based on fortnightly research output presentations, followed by a discussion on sources, references and bibliographies, which will involve the creation of an information nexus for the seminar discussions. The ultimate goal of each seminar is to assist the participants to develop reasoned and convincing argument, as well as to develop scholarly research papers for publication.

Reading

Deleuze, Gilles, The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London and New York: Continuum, [1988] 2006).
The Deleuze Seminar Leibniz and The Baroque:
https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminar/leibniz-and-the-baroque/

October 28, 1986 to June 2, 1987
In his introductory remarks to this annual seminar (on 28 October 1986), Deleuze stated that he would have liked to devote this seminar to the theme “What is philosophy?”, but that he “[didn’t] dare take it on” since “it’s such a sacred subject”. However, the seminar that he was undertaking on Leibniz and the Baroque instead “is nearly an introduction to ‘What is philosophy?’” Thus, the 1986-87 seminar has this dual reading, all the more significant in that, unknown to those listening to Deleuze (and perhaps to Deleuze himself), this would be the final seminar of his teaching career.

Deleuze planned the seminar in two segments: under the title “Leibniz as Baroque Philosopher,” he presented the initial operating concepts on Leibniz, notably on the fold. Circumstances during fall 1986 limited this segment to four sessions with an unexpected final session in the first meeting of 1987 (6 January). For the second segment, Deleuze chose the global title “Principles and Freedom”, a segment consisting of fifteen sessions lasting to the final one on 2 June.

The transcriptions into French and corresponding translations into English were made possible through access to transcripts initially available from Web Deleuze (created by Richard Pinhas) and through access to the recordings available from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), faithfully produced over a decade by one participant in Deleuze’s seminars, Hidenobu Suzuki. According to François Dosse in Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (Columbia University Press, 2011), Suzuki “becomes an institution all to himself”, to whom Deleuze would refer colleagues if they weren’t able to attend one of the sessions.

The following sessions’ translations and transcriptions are original to this site: sessions 1 (Oct 28, 1986), 2 (Nov 4, 1986), 3 (Nov 18, 1986), 5 (Jan 6, 1987), 6 (Jan 13, 1987), 9 (Feb 3, 1987), 11 (Mar 3, 1987), 15 (Apr 24, 1987), 16 (May 5, 1987), and 20 (2 June 1987). All other translations and transcriptions are developed and augmented based on transcripts developed at WebDeleuze from the recordings available at the BNF thanks to Hidenobu Suzuki.

About the Lecturers

Andrej Radman is Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory, and coordinator of the Ecologies of Architecture research group at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. Over the past two decades Radman’s research has focused on the nexus between Architecture and Radical Empiricism. His latest publication is Ecologies of Architecture: Essays on Territorialisation (2021). In 2023, Radman was honoured with the Mark Cousins Theory Award presented by DigitalFUTURES. This award recognises leading theorists in the field of architecture and design who have demonstrated forward-thinking perspectives in the field.

Stavros Kousoulas is Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory, and research coordinator of the Theories, Territories, Transitions research section at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on the irreducibility between architecture, technology and culture. He is the author of the book Architectural Technicities (Routledge, 2022) and the edited volumes Architectures of Life and Death (RLI, 2021) and Design Commons (Springer, 2022).

Course Info

Course code
ABE 008

Course type
Advanced courses on a range of topics involving architectural/urban theory, philosophy, cultural analysis and science

Most appropriate for
PhD candidates at all stages

Costs
Free for PhD candidates of A+BE Graduate School

Number of participants
min. 8 / max. 24

Name of lecturer(s)/coach(es)
Dr.ir. Andrej Radman 
Dr.ir. Stavros Kousoulas

Course load
Active period: 24 hours contact (seminar) plus 24 hours self-study (preparation)​​​​​​​

Graduate School credits
4

Assessment
Attendance and active participation

Period
Once a year in Spring

Upcoming course dates and times
Spring 2025, Mondays 14:30-17:30
(see detailed schedule in course description)

Contact
a.radman@tudelft.nl