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Architectural Theory Review

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ARCHITECTURAL SERIALISM
Sandra Kaji-Ogrady
Published online: 28 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Sandra Kaji-Ogrady (1998) ARCHITECTURAL SERIALISM, Architectural Theory
Review, 3:2, 17-31, DOI: 10.1080/13264829809478342

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 Architectural Serialism

ARCHITECTURAL SERIALISM *

SANDRA KAJI-OGRADY

The serial form employed by Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk since the late 1960s
undermines a representational model of architecture and offers a productive use of
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repetition of profound consequences for practice and criticism. In light of the

argument made by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze that repetition is not a
reiteration of the same but a dynamic process of affirming difference, die lateral
repetitions made by Eisenman and Hejduk can be seen to dissolve tlxe distinction
between origin and copy, form and idea. These distinctions are preserved, albeit
with a sense of irony, in the appropriation of historical examples which is consistently
regarded as the defining practice of postmodern architecture. Thus, the series and
repetition in Eisenman's and Hejduk's work has consequences for the recent history
of architecture in addition to its effects on their subsequent work and the challenges
it presents for us now faced with technologies of repetition which take these
operations to new speeds and intensities.

Introduction
In 1967 John Hejduk exhibited three projects, the 'Diamond series', in the gallery
of The Architectural League in New York. The projects were presented as drawings
in series from Al through to A l 1, Bl through to Bl 1 and Cl and C2. Under the
programmatic guise of two houses and a library Hejduk employed repetition to split
architectural drawing conventions from any reference to building. The same year
saw construction begin on a house in Princeton, New Jersey, designed by Peter
Eisenman. This house was given the promising title of House I. From the 'first' until
the 'last' in the series, the Fin d'Ou T Hou S (project, 1983), repetition and seriality
figured in the avowed struggle to "dislocate architecture from its metaphysic of
center."

* A version of this paper was published in FIRM (ness) commodity DE-light!: questioning the canons,
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia
and New Zealand, Melbourne, Australia, Septemberl998.

17
 Architectural Theory Review Vol. 3, No. 2,1995

Hejduk's and Eisenman's preoccupation with seriality and repetition was shared
during this period by artists, composers, choreographers and philosophers. Pop art
was characterised by the production of images in multiples, as in Andy Warhol's
screenprints, and repeated gestures within the one image, as in Jasper Johns'
drawings and paintings of numerals. In 1966 Sol le Witt embarked upon sculptures
determined by serial composition which he explained as "multipart pieces with
regulated changes. The difference between the parts are the subjects of the
composition ... the entire work should contain subdivisions which could be
autonomous but which comprise the whole."2 Le Witt's A 2 5 8 explored the
potential of serial growth using Fibonacci numbers. Jean Dubuffet proposed a series
of tower designs in 1968 in which the itinerary of descent and ascent is structured
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around doublings and repeated turns and twists from clockwise to anti-clockwise
direction and vice-versa. Commentators such as Jean Baudrillard and Hans-Georg
Gadamer regarded serial tendencies in art as the tragic symptoms of an age in which
the unique work and the original model had been replaced by unauthentic and
redundant copies of copies.4 Serial art was lamented by Gadamer as adhering to the
"rule of number" in the form of "the series, aggregate, addition and sequence."

Serial practices in pop art are more than the mere reflection of the age. They work
with and inform a larger critique of representation which was concurrently waged
by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze.6 Derrida and Deleuze
individually contest the idea that repetition and seriality are simply the negative
result of a failure of creative acuity or passive resignation to the historical failure of
representation.7 Alternatively, they suggest that repetition is at the very heart of
representation and that seriality is an apriori form which can be strategically used
to expose and undo the limits of representation. This paper will make use of Deleuze
and Derrida's efforts in rethinking the significance of repetition for representation
in order to investigate the effects of using the serial form in architecture. Ultimately
this leads to speculation on the terms and concepts called for in the face of serial
architecture. The wholeness of a work, its uniqueness and its truthfulness in relation
to an Idea are inadequate in apprehending the work in series. Not only does this
work demand an alternative vocabulary, its suspension of traditional criteria for
judgement leads ultimately to a revision of the architectural canon and its
underpinning assumptions.

The Critique of Representation

There is no doubt that the idea that architecture should and can represent has a
long history and for many still holds. Robert Stern claims that,

A building must be a public act of communication: a coherent presentation,

representation ... of the things that belong to the world outside it that it must

10
 Architectural Serialism

serve, honor, and depict...

Architecture is considered to require understanding because it represents

something, either the real world or ideas which exist outside itself. That architecture
also makes and remakes the world is forgotten in the representational model. Dissent
has largely been around the problem of what or who gets to be represented and how
meaning might adhere to form. Rarely contested is the notion of architecture as a
showing, not a forming or making of the world. The slippage between building, text,
model and drawing as the material locations occupied by the sign has made it
difficult for architecture to conform to a model of representation which philosophy
has long held to be wanting. 9
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Architecture's lack in regard to representation arises because the model is founded

on language conceived as a transparent, neutral and immaterial mediating system
for representing an idea or Truth. The notion that the material of language, be it
audible speech or written text, is insignificant carries over into thinking about art
and architecture and is coloured by Plato's moral assessment of representation.
Plato's model attributes a one-to-one relationship between the work and an idea or
reality external to it, which it resembles and this splitting of form from idea is
maintained in the privileging of meaning over the sensible experience of art in
subsequent art theory. He distinguishes between arts which utilize things, those
which produce them and those which imitate them. 1 Plato argues that the artist
creates an image of reality but that this image is itself unreal—a faithful copy would
be superfluous but an unfaithful copy would be a lie. Plato's assessment of art is
negative. It is neither right nor useful; it either deforms things or only represents
their surfaces.

Representation lost its primacy with the development of nineteenth century

aesthetic theory, in which the question of the meaning of the work was substituted
by the effects of its material specificity as work. The experience of the beauty of art
was heralded as a quality inherent in the work and independent of its descriptive
accuracy. In artistic practices the late nineteenth century saw pictorial depiction
give way to abstraction yet the impulse to ascribe a meaningful referent to a
work—an idea or emotion—remained such that the aesthetic framework for
considering art never replaced the representational one, rather the competing
claims of both co-existed. In the late twentieth century both the aesthetic and the
representational models are in crisis and credit for this lies partly with the practices
engaged in by artists and architects. Repetition is the most virulent.

In the sense that representation is the reappearance of that which appeared before,
it involves the maintenance of identity. Repetition and seriality partake in, maintain
and provoke the crisis of representation by undermining the identity of the object.
Repetition shows itself to be at the heart of representation since any convention of

19
 Architectural Theory Review Vol. 3, No. 2,199S

reference and indeed presence itself, depend upon the possibility of its repetition.
Deleuze and Derrida both propose that representation is an effect produced by
difference and repetition which are primary, not the other way around.

Repetition breaks with the symmetry of idea and form, model and copy essential to
representation. Repetition can take a number of forms in architecture, of which
historical appropriation is perhaps the most theorised. Within any architectural
work there are also repetitions of material, structure and of actions in construction,
yet the repetition enacted in the series works in specific ways—its goal is the
production of difference by means of formal similarity, not the maintenance of
identity. Living up to its Latin root ser-ere, meaning to join or connect, the series
privileges the relations between its members, of the similar to the similar.12 The
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series is paradoxically constituted by the differences between its elements as much

as by their resemblances and connections. In the series there is not the possibility
of exchange and substitution suggested by the model of a signifying form and a
signified concept—identical twins cannot be substituted for each other. 13

The Model and the Copy

For Derrida, who is mainly concerned with language and literature, representation
is unstable, relative and conventional. The meaning of words is arbitrary and
ultimately d e p e n d e n t upon a repetition which both subverts and serves
representation. His notorious statement that "there is no outside of the text" is part
of a well-developed argument that every text contains an infinite number of texts,
an effect set into play as much by the reader's expectations as the text itself.14

The serial form revels in the relative and is celebrated in Derrida's essay
"Cartouches" in The Truth of Painting. The essay was included in a 1978 catalogue,
Gerard Titus-Carmei. The Pocket Size Tlingit Coffin, in which were reproduced the
127 drawings and the photograph of the so-called 'coffin' made by Titus-Carmel. In
Titus-Carmel's work Derrida finds that the series follows a paradigm quite unlike
the sort of natural, pre-given and autochthonous models of representation. Rather,
the paradigm is a product with "no privilege with respect to a series of production
or reproductions." 15 He calls the paradigm the "monumental waste product of the
series," yet not in a derisive sense. Derrida claims that the material remainder or
'turd' propels the series and is "generative at the same time that it is contingent." 16

In Titus-Carmel's The Great Cultural Banana Plantation (1969-70) fifty-nine plastic

bananas are exhibited along with the natural model, the sixtieth in the series which
the others pretend to copy yet which during the course of the exhibition
decomposes. What remains, without the model, are no longer copies, nor originals
but rather copies of copies without example, which Derrida terms phantasmata.17

20
 Architectural Serialism

The peculiar nature of the series is that the construction of the paradigm is the
moment of its inscription into the series. In the case of the 'little coffin' there is
nothing which prevents it "occupy [ing] all the places, and any place, with the same
authority as the other simulacra." The paradigm could just as well descend from
its 'copies' and as product "must have been preceded by its following," hence the
"dynamic instability" which binds the out-of-series to the series. Derrida concludes
that the series of Titus-Carmel drawings reduces to ashes the remains of a moribund
"art which would claim the originary presentation of the thing, the production of
pure presence, with no trace of doubling and with no past." Might such an
operation take place in architecture?
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Eisenman's Houses of Cards

The serial nature of the Houses of Cards collapses content and technique with effects
which exceed its function as a vehicle for de-anthropomorphism, formal
transformation and signification. The auspicious and pregnant title of House 1 given
to the house in Princeton, New Jersey, anticipates at the same time that it lies about
its location as a primary term. This house is neither the first nor is it one. It doubles
over, it repeats itself, it already recalls and resembles what is yet to come, namely,
the other houses in the series. It fulfils its promise as the first when it is joined by
House II, House 111, House IV (1971) and House V, House VI (1972-76), House X
(1975-1977), House lla (1978), House El Even (1980) and Fin d'Ou T Hou S
(1983). 21 Each house is irreducible to the others yet exists because of and for the
others. Within each house the repetitive gestures of specified operations upon a
cube are preserved as an aggregate trace in an arbitrarily foreclosed sequence. Each
work is as incomplete as is the series and is itself internally serial.

The philosophical framework for thinking about seriality was not available to
Eisenman in English translation until after the production of these first houses. His
work in the 70s and 80s engaged with a body of theory outside of architecture which
was concerned with the operation and structure of systems of signs. Eisenman's
declarations of shifts in position and breaks in the notation of houses within the
series reflect a searching reading of Saussure, Chomsky, Barthes and, later,
Derrida. The Fin d'Ou T Hou S implies finality and an epiphanic closure to the
house series yet it spawns new series. House lla is repeated at different scales for a
1978 project in Canneregio, Venice, the first of a second series of eleven projects
he gathers together under the title Cities of Artificial Excavation. These projects,
aligned with cartography and pursuing the traces of memory in an urban condition,
are followed by a return to compositional concerns. Each series, while internally
multiple, provokes a second series constituted by texts—some explicitly connected
to the projects, others only implicitly." The third series, which begins around 1990,
responds to tropes of the fold and the machinic taken from Deleuze and Guattari.

21
 Architectural Theory Review Vol. 3, No. 2,1993

The challenge of seriaiity put forward by Deieuze has been considered by Eisenman
within the problem of authorship. In the first series the Corbusian villa functions as
the rotting banana docs in Titus-Carmel's work and concurs with Derrida's argu-
ment that"... serial practice is pushing the putting-to-death of the paradigm ..."24
If the shift enacted by modernism is the installation of the author-artist as the
genius-creator or model from which works originate then Eisenman's Houses of
Cards are a murderous homage to the master in which the knife of autonomous
process eventually turns on its bearer. The difficulties are evident in this 1988
statement,

... we are trying to use the computer as a design tool and draw from it. All of
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these things came from stopping the computer at a point and saying 'that's where
we want to be!' Obviously there is an author at work—the computer didn't do
all this willy-nilly. I am the author. I sit there and watch the screen until I say
'There!' Now that 'there' is as far away ... from classical aesthetic desire of the
object as I can get ... The intention is to move away from the old authenticity
towards a different kind of authenticity. 25

By 1997, Eisenman had adopted more sophisticated animation software and found
support for the dilemma between authorial control and 'self-generating' form in
Guattari's analogy of the 'desiring machine' and in Deieuze's notion of the objectile
and the fold. Eisenman understands his process to be 'machinic' in the sense that
it attempts to displace origin through the establishment of constraints which put
into play a process beyond 'authorial control'. Interested in the "possibilities of
self-similar repetition" through "self-generating algorithms" Eisenman's recent work
brings together the establishment of rules leading to unpredicted formal events with
mathematical techniques for producing variation across time and space. 26 Taking
up the Deleuzian notion of an object no longer defined by an essential form, an
'objectile', through computer programming Eisenman pursues a temporally charged
architecture of seamless animation.

The purpose of the Eisenman-machine is to "produce an architecture that has

traditionally been repressed by the laws of resemblance and utility"—that is, by
representation. However, in the face of a specific brief with a history of
iconographic form, for example the 'Church of the Year 2000' in Rome (project,
1996) Eisenman's solution to the problem of "what does a church look like today?"
is to deploy the formal metaphor of a liquid crystal. Using multiple layers and
overlaps which are deformed and twisted horizontally and vertically Eisenman
intends that the form of the church resemble the "between phase in the molecular
order before it reaches the isotropic or liquid phase." 28 Curiously the liquid crystal
metaphor is also used for the BFL Software Headquarters in Bangalore, India (project
1997) where it "is analogous to the current state of Indian culture." 29 The church
and the software headquarters resemble each other as much as they resemble their

22
 Architectural Serialism

model and both point to an external and determining referent. There is a strange
irresolution in Eisenman's recent work between the formal conceits, the production
process and the problem of architecture's use. Architecture's "already given
difference" is clearly not to be confined to the problem of authorial imagination, nor
to the production of the work in a neutral field. Eisenman's consistent recourse to
seriality and to repetition underpins a sustained assault on representation yet there
are points at which the Platonic distinction between form and idea, ot form as
mediating idea, resurface. The distinction between building and drawing,
experience and idea, are difficult to dislodge. In addressing how senality might lead
to alternative outcomes it is necessary to return to Deleuze's writings on repetition
and seriality written at the onset of Eisenman's tirst series ot projects and the work
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of his colleague, John Hejduk.

A Productive and Critical Repetition

Deleuze's interest in repetition and seriality is inseparable from his effort to "think
difference in itself." In Difference and Repetition he takes issue with a number of
theonsations of repetition including Freud's model of repetition as a mechanism for
the return ot repressed material in the unconscious. His tocus is on a model ot
representation denved trom Plato which he argues is incapable of conceiving of
difference in itself or positively thinking the relation oi different to different.
Difference has been subordinated to relations ot identity, analogy, opposition or
similitude. Repetition fairs no better in representation for it is "grasped only by
means ot recognition, distnbunon, reproduction or resemblance." Deleuze turns
this around and argues that opposition, resemblance, identity and analogy are only
effects produced by presentations of difference, products of a fundamental dispanty
or an "Ocean of dissemblance.' 0- Repetition is,
... the formless being ot all differences, the formless power of the ground which
carries every object to that extreme 'form' in which its teptesentation comes
undone ... ditference is behind everything, but behind difference there is
nothing.

We might use the analogy of the empty space or blank paper which is much more
than the opposite ot a fullness ot a presence, but is rather an infinite possibility which
is always present and always displaced as it makes room for form.

Deleuze looks to repetition as it emerges out of an internal difference or acting cause

which is then earned and incorporated at each moment or point.' 4 While the results
mav rely on formal resemblance, it is the dynamic process, not the effect, which
matters. He uses examples such as rhvme in poetry and music to illustrate the way
in which an internal difference might be enacted through repetition, but it is serial
artwork which will be tocussed on here.

22
 Architectural Theory Review Vol. 3. No. 2,1995

For Deleuze, the series and the artwork are privileged events, in which difference
is shown in action and the "single center" of representation is intensely denied. He
finds that each 'term' in a series is already a difference and consntutes other series,
each devoid of a centre and affirming divergence. The series is made up of
singularities, which like points have no extension nor comprehension, yet every
series is "essentially multi serial."35 Art for Deleuze does not imitate but repeats by
virtue of an internal power; it is the realm of simulations, not copies. He argues
that art tends towards a distortion of representation since it forces movement upon
the viewer with the effect of opening up a "plurality of centres, a superposition of
perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence ot moments." ' If art affirms
the world of difference and is the undoing of representation then modern art,
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bringing together the serial and its own inherent powers, is a cause for celebration.
Indeed he claims that modem art is a veritable theatre of metamorphoses and
permutations. 33 In pop art the copy mold is broken such that the multiplied, stylised
images take on their own life in order to open a new space for the simulacrum's
proliferation. Whereas copies are defined by the presence of a model and
resemblance to it, the simulacrum bears only an external resemblance to a putative
model; its resemblance is a surface effect. The simulacrum affirms its own difference
in which resemblance is a mask tor the advent ot a new dimension.

The simulacrum is "the instance which includes a difference within itself, such as
(at least) two divergent senes on which it plavs, all resemblance abolished so that
one can no longer point to the existence of an onginal and a copy." Deleuze not
only refuses the distinction between the copy and the model, he reverses the value
given to the simulacrum and the Ideal. We have come across this elimination of the
distinction between copy and model in Baudrillard and Demda but what
distinguishes Deleuze is his appeal to "real experience," a "lived reality ot a
sub-representative domain." 41 For there is

... no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life
... Each art has its interrelated techniques or repetitions, the critical and
revolutionary power of which may attain the highest degree and lead us from
the sad repennons oi habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and then to
the ultimate repetitions ot death in which our freedom is played out.

Trace, memorv and everyday life are bound up with the problem of repetition and
difference which are oi the order of the mask. The explicit framing of a work in
senes is a device tor maximising divergence and cleanng a space for the proliferation
ot the simulacrum and mask. Although Eisenman explored these concerns in the
senes oi works published as Artificial Excavations, it is perhaps the work of his
colleague John Hejduk that shows how these can be brought together with lateral
repennons.

24
 Architectural Serialism

Hejduk's Phantasmata

Hejduk's series published as Three Projects in 1969 is contemporary with Eisenman's

first houses and like his repeats a modernist formal vocabulary. Projects A, B and
C investigate formal composition from a number of constraints decided prior to the
work. Structural grids existing alongside structural walls pose the problem of
redundancy and repetition. Function, scale and notions of domesticity are eschewed
in the imposition of an order which is derived from a set of methodological and
formal criteria without regard to the history and iconography of domestic form.

Repetition occurs not just in the formal device of the series but internally within
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the frames of the diamond boundary as the recurrence of elements through

sub-division and multiplication. Walls repeat themselves across the space as
truncated planes, serving a logic of pattern-making which denies resolution into
rooms. In Hejduk's Project B, the failure of the walls to meet each other suggests a
shrinkage of internal elements compounded by a subterranean spatiality suggested
by the view from above. The resultant spaces are labyrinthine and condensed yet
the abrupt interruption of the frame, which is of a different order, also suggests
spatial extension.

It is at the level of drawing that repetition is most intensely employed in order to

question representation. The individual drawings, each a single image of plan or
axonometric, are identified as the elements within each series, not the 'houses'. The
central notion of the work is that a diamond plan when drawn as an isometric
presents itself as a cube, that the presence of the 45 degrees leads to an ambiguity
as to both the nature of the drawing as well as the architecture. Axonometry refuses
to locate a viewer as does a perspective and in his exploration of projection systems
Hejduk ultimately discovers that "a whole representation could be enfolded into a
single line. Then, in projecting it in a certain way, it again appears." This folding of
surface and volume in the Wall Houses leads to the impossible "planar elevations." 44

The architectural blueprint is a conventional means for conveying information

which anticipates and which struggles to make possible the realisation of a
three-dimensional structure. Never intended to be built, Hejduk's drawings are
assemblies of the coded graphic gestures of the working drawing repeated without
referents. Signs and conventions are mimicked in such a way that any link to a
referent is severed and only the graphs remains, the signs of architecture divorced
from building.

In The Mask of Medusa (1985) axonometry is abandoned for a flatness of image

which imitates perspective or axonometric drawing but makes no allusion to
volumes with stable boundaries. His work becomes increasingly and more densely
peopled with the effect that the signs of an anthropomorphic tradition are deployed

25
 Architectural Theory Review Vol. 3, No. 2,1996

to such excess that the distinction between human figure and building is eroded.
The architecture takes on an animate life with hints at a sinister cloning in twinned
and quadruplet buildings, pairs, rows and multiples. The effects of representation
are repeated without reference to a content which sits over and above the form.
Each image is but a mobile element in a restless series which is only temporarily
halted in the drawings which pour into the piles of sketchbooks which Hejduk
produces, the covers of which only arbitrarily mark off the ends of series. His
drawings record the fatigue of repetition as they endlessly assemble and dissemble
signs without referents. These are not representations of a real, but masks of masks
for which there is no hidden face.
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Hejduk's work opens up a metaphysical paradox touched upon by Derrida in his

essay "The Double Session." Derrida points out that without its capacity for
remembrance, the soul would be unable to intuit meaning as an enduring essence.
But this capacity presupposes the mimetic activity of duplication which in fact
replaces the original events which it imitates. Whereas Western metaphysics has
struggled to establish the primacy of truth over imitation, of what is present over its
representation, Derrida argues that the paradox of the double, the mime and
repetition lead us beyond the either/or logic of metaphysics to a realm of play.
Derrida cites the example of Mallarme's Mimique, in which we are faced with a
mimicry imitating nothing,

... a double that doubles no simple (origin), a double that nothing anticipates,
nothing at least that is not itself already a double.

Hejduk's work produces in architecture an effect of parody similar to Mallarme's.

In the projects after the Diamond series, projects and poems included in the
Lancaster/Hanover Masque (1992), Mask of Medusa (1985) and Vladivostok (1989)
signs without referent congeal into a wider but quite unspecific repertoire of
carnivalesque characters—caped and winged figures without faces, white bears and
melancholy lions, crowned or Medusa-like heads, apparatus for capture and con-
cealment—where they merge, couple and multiply with the signs of architectural
drawings. It is not a personal history of mythical figures upon which Hejduk draws,
nor is he referencing a shared coda of archetypes or allegorical figures as published
in the 18th century. Rather the 'remembered' is an invention produced as an interior
with its production concealed, confirming Deleuze's insight that "the double is never
a projection of the interior, it is on the contrary an interiorization of the outside."47

Unlike Eisenman, Hejduk has not engaged with Derrida's or Deleuze's work,
although he shares a fascination with some of the same literary, cinematic and
artistic sources. Recent writings on Hejduk use Deleuzian concepts such as minor
practice, faciality and de-territorialisation. The importance of his early work, and
particularly its seriality, however, is overlooked, despite his claim that his work is

26
 Architectural Serialism

incremental and the Diamond projects are "as mysterious as the recent work. There
is no separation."49 Rather than use Deleuze to explain Hejduk's work I have
attempted to sound the resonances in the shared project of rethinking
representation through repetition. It is the challenge of working around and with
the failure of representation in a productive way that brings together Eisenman and
Hejduk, Derrida and Deleuze. The task that remains is to find a way to encounter
their work. Deleuze and Derrida have put forth alternative ways of reading
philosophical and literary texts, ways which emphasise the creative production of
re-assembling and of putting to use. These might be a suitable place to begin to find
new ways of thinking through the architecture of seriality.
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Encountering Repetition

Deleuze and Guattari consider a book to be an assemblage which exists in

connection with other assemblages. Forgoing the pursuit of meaning or truth, they
ask what the book "functions with, in connection with what other things it does or
does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities are inserted and
metamorphosed ..." Deleuze and Guattari urge us to set the book to work,
prolonging, multiplying and pushing its entanglements. Whereas a hermeneutic
mode of apprehension attempts to contain the concept behind a form, their mode
of 'reading' calls for a productive encounter leading to infinite possibilities
particularly suited to repetition and seriality.

Representation has a substantial language of criticism developed around its core

notion of the sensible form as the mediating presence for an idea which determines
it. Criteria of evaluating a work such as beauty, truth, uniqueness, functionality,
clarity of 'meaning' are all consistent with a representational model and unwieldy
in the face of work in series. Terms to describe the relations or intervals between
repeated elements in series and between series are needed and might apprehend
their speed, agility, intensity, proliferation and fecundity.

Different kinds of repetition in architecture require specific techniques and have

effects of varying critical power. A knowledge of the structure of repetition and a
vocabulary for describing the formal range of repetitions is needed which would
avoid the reification, legislation and generalisation of repetitions. Such a vocabulary
would distinguish between numerical, proportional, geometric and algebraic
repetitions and between repetitions of form, gesture, order, material and operation,
of quality, substance and quantity. Repetition can take place through symmetries,
metonymy, the telescoping and amplification of scale, the play of the part and the
whole, and each of these have different effects. The interstices between elements
in series can be manipulated through doubling and redoubling, rhythm and
syncopation, quickenings and slowdowns, oppositions, contradictions, amplification

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 Architectural Theory Review Vol. 3, No. 2,1995

and aggregation, dispersal and condensation and reversal, ultimately leading to the
spiralling generation of ever more series.

Notes
1 Peter Eisenman, Peter Eisenman: Howes of Cards, New York : Oxford University Press,
1987, p. 181.
2 Carla Gottlieb, Beyond Modem Art, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1976, p. 1
3 See Jean Dubuffet's "Tour aux Figures," in Edifices, New York: Museum of Modem Art,
1968.
4 For Gadamer and Baudrillard the serial form was symptomatic of the failure of
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representation brought about by the dissolution of identity concomitant with

technologisation and consumerism. Baudrillard laments that the work of art in modernity
is nothing more than a succession of moments in the artist's career, its value as a commodity
ensured by the signature. In his For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, (orig.
1972) trans. Charles Levin, St Louis: Telos Press, 1981, p. 104, he writes, "We're no longer
in space but in time, in the realm of difference and no longer of resemblance, in the series
and no longer in the order [that is, of things]." Furthermore [Baudrillard, For a Critique of
the Political Economy of the Sign, p. 106],"... that which was representation—redoubling
the world in space—becomes repetition—and indefinable redoubling the act in rime." In
Baudrillard's account repetition arises in response to the failure of representation and
paradoxically is a truthful representation since it represents accurately the bankruptcy of
representation characteristic of the age.
5 Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The speechless image" (1965), in The Relevance of the Beautiful
and Other Essays, transl. by Nicholas Walker, edited by Robert Bernasconi, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 90
6 Repetition was also a central subject for Jacques Lacan's revisions of Freud, although this
cannot be adequately discussed in this short paper. Jacques Lacan's seminars, "The
Unconscious and Repetition," were first delivered in 1964 and published in French in The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis in 1973 and need to be recognised as
making a significant contribution to thinking on repetition and representation. Expanding
on Freud's concept of repetition as a mechanism for the oblique representation of repressed
traumatic material, Lacan and Freud's work has been taken up by a number of theorists in
reference to repetition in art and architecture. See Michael K. Hays, "Allegory unto Death:
An etiology of Eisenman's repetition," in Jean-Francois Bedard (ed), Cities of Artificial
Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988, New York: Rizzoli, 1994, pp.
104-117, and Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the
Century, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
7 Derrida's Speech and Phenonmena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs was
published in 1967, Deleuze's Difference and Repetition was published in French in 1968
and the Logic of Sense in 1969. Thus these texts on difference, repetition and seriality in
structures of signification could be considered contemporary with Hejduk and Eisenman's
first use of the serial form in architecture
8 William Lillyman et al. (eds), Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture, New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 61.
9 Derrida claims architecture "does not represent anything" and so repeats a long held
philosophical tradition but now without the contempt. Jacques Derrida, The truth in

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 Architectural Serialism

painting, (orig. 1978) transl. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987, p. 59.
10 Plato is considered to have in some senses initiated the idea of art as imitating or representing
reality. The earlier Greeks were more intereseted in art as that which creates illusions. The
term 'mimesis', by which Plato meant repeating the appearance of things, had been used by
the earlier Greeks to mean the expression of character and acting the part.
11 Modernists rejected the idea that a work should mimic or conjure a tangible visible scene
or imitate nature or strive for illusion, and the abstract work they produced is sometimes
referred to as 'non-representational'. The purpose of doing away with the object of depiction
was aimed at a more universal Truth for artists such as Wassily Kandinsky for whom an
itemized 'grammar' of colours and abstract graphic marks was to lead to a universal language
for all the arts which could communicate essential emotional states to all viewers through
direct access to feeling. Within the sense that representation posits a model of art which
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retains the idea of the original and the copy and the distinction between form and idea
modernism's attack on pictoriality makes only a small dent on representation.
12 Michel Foucault, This is not a Pipe, trans, and intro. by J. Harkness, University of California
Presss, 1983, p. 10.
13 In Sartre's view the series is a model for alienation in which the individual is a passive cypher
in a series of more or less identical units. Serialised language is that which disappears, and
is recessive to the content and the illusion of realism.
14 Attending to the sensible or material condition of language he distinguishes between the
mark and the trace. The trace is the possiblity of instituted meanings within any system of
signfication which carry with them a duration of the same, a repeatability. The mark refers
to the actual means, the particular system of signifiers used by a language or practice. The
mark is "both an originary inscription and a secondary re-presenting where what it
re-presents is the trace or difference, which in its differing and deferring movement brings
both phenomena into their being in the system of differences that Language provides and,
at the same time, perenially defers their full presence as things." Michael Phillipson,
Painting, Language and Modernity, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 118.
15 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 195.
16 Kant is the target of Derrida's critique for Kant is unable to account for the sensible without
first reducing it to a supplementary and residual location within the operation of indifferent
taste judgements. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p. 201.
17 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 218.
18 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 220.
19 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 221.
20 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 231.
21 House II (Falk residence, Hardwick, Vermont, constructed, 1969-70) and House III (Miller
residence, Lakeville, Connecticut, 1969-71. House IV (1971) and House V are not realized,
House VI is constructed in 1972-76 (Frank residence, Cornwall, Connecticut). House VII
to IX are conspicuous by their absence. House X leads to (Aronoff residence, Bloomfield
Hills, Michicgan, unbuilt design, 1975-1977), House Ha (Forster residence, Palo Alto,
California, unbuilt, 1978), House El Even Odd (unbuilt design, 1980) and Fin d'Ou T Hou
S (project, 1983).
22 After House VI Eisenman declared that he wished to distance himself from the earlier work
which he perceived as being motivated by "the search for the essence of the sign, the
transformation of form to produce autonomy, and so forth." [Peter Eisenman, Peter
Eisenman: Houses of Cards, New York : Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 182]. Eisenman

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 Architectural Theory Review Vol. 3, No. 2,199&

sought to open architecture up to texts from outside the immediate object, claiming a more
open-ended pursuit of dislocation in place of "an hermetic logic and an autonomous
operation" [Eisenman, Peter Eisenman: Houses of Cards, p. 1821.
23 These texts include 'Cardboard Architecture: House I' (1972), Cardboard Architecture:
House II (1972), 'House IV Transformations' (1973),'House III: To Adolf Loos and Bertolt
Brecht' (1974), House VI (1977), etc. The relationship between written work and project
in series is confirmed by Derrida who insists that "A written text accompanies the series,
inseparably. It is therefore inscribed in that series, even if it seems to present itself as outside
the frame and outside the series." [Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 205) About texts Eisenman
has commented, "The critique that I make of a project is always the text or the program for
the next project. But the program is never clearly stated as a program for the work." [Peter
Eisenman and Alejandro Zaero-Polo, "A conversation with Peter Eisenman," El Croquis
83 (1997) p. 13]
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24 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p. 205.

25 Peter Eisenman, "The authenticity of difference: Architecture and the crisis of reality,"
Center4(1988),p.55.
26 Eisenman and Zaero-Polo, "A conversation with Peter Eisenman," p. 20.
27 Eisenman and Zaero-Polo, "A conversation with Peter Eisenman," p. 10.
28 Peter Eisenman, "Church of the Year 2000," El Croquis 83 (1997), p. 158.
29 Peter Eisenman, "BLF Software Headquarters," El Croquis 83 (1997), p. 162.
30 The first part of Repetition and Difference reworks Freud's insights on repetition and
memory. Deleuze demonstrates the negativity and inadequacy of the proposition that "...
the less one remembers... the more one repeats." [Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
(orig. 1968) transl. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 15]. This
negative interpretation of psychical repetition is taken from Freud's "Remembering,
Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of
Psycho-Analysis)," II, 1914, in James Strachey (trans, and ed., The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, London: Hogarth, 1953-73
(1958) vol. 12, pp. 147-56. Deleuze notes that Freud "was never satisfied with such a
negative schema" in which repetition appears by dint of not knowing with the implication
that remembering would lead to the cessation of repetition. This was discounted by the
more dramatic operation of transference, in which the patient is supposed to repeat the
whole of their trauma in artificial conditions taking up the analyst as their object. Freud
unfortunately "was unable to prevent himself maintaining the model of a brute repetition"
as a tendency (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 17) but his discovery of the deauS
instinct as a positive and originary principle for repetition leads Deleuze to affirm repetition
through its relation to disguise. He claims that the mask is the true subject of repetition and
is what is formed from one mask to another. Masks do not hide anything and there is no
first term which is repeated because "repetition differs in kind from representation, the
repeated cannot be represented: rather, it must always be signified, masked by what signifies
it, itself masking what it signifies." (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 17). We can think
of this in terms of the substitution of remembered actual childhood events for fantasised
events immersed in the death instinct. The trauma which is repeated is a fantasised one
and it is repetition which enables repression and forgetting. Repetition according to Deleuze
is thus what makes us ill and in the process of transference is also what heals us. [Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition, p. 19). We do not repeat because we repress, we repress because
we repeat. Moreover—which amounts to the same thing—we do not disguise because we
repress, we repress because we disguise, and we disguise by virtue of the determinant centre
of repetition. [Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 105]

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 Architectural Serialism

31 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 138.

32 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 145.
33 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p . 57.
34 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 20.
35 Chiles Deleuze, T h e Logic of Sense, (orig. 1969) transl. M a r k Lester with Charles Stivale,
N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 37-38.
36 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 293.
37 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 56.
38 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 56.
39 Gilles Deleuze, "Plato and the Simulacrum," October 27 (Winter, 1983), pp. 52-53.
40 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 69.
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41 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 69.

42 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 2 9 3 .
43 The work was exhibited in November 1967 in the gallery of The Architectural League in
New York along with paintings on the same theme by Hejduk's friend Robert Slutzky and
subsequently published in a limited edition of 500.
44 John Hejduk and Mimi Lobell, "A Conversation with John Hejduk," Abstraction in
Architecture, Pratt School of Architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1985, p. 48.
45 It is an exercise which reminds one of Andy Warhol's claim that, "I don't want it to be
essentially the same—I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the
same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier your feel."
[Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol '60s, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, p. 50). Repetition for Warhol becomes an operation of draining significance,
of nullifying the function of representation to convey meaning, akin to meditative
chanting—a clearing out of identity at the level of both the artist and the object or sign.
Foucault has suggested that in Warhol's reproductions of consumer images we are
confronted with the total dissolution of the idea of the unique model, "by means of similitude
relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears,
loses its identity, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell." (Foucault, This is not a Pipe,
P-54].
46 Jacques Derrida, "The Double Session," in Dissemmination, London: Athlone Press, 1981,
p. 206.
47 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988, p. 105.
48 See K. Michael Hays "Hejduk's Chronotope (An Introduction)," in K. Michael Hays (ed),
Hejduk's Chronotape, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, pp. 7-21.
49 John Hejduk and David Shapiro, "Conversation: John Hejduk or The Architect Who Drew
Angels," Architecture and Urbanism 224 (January, 1991), p. 60.
50 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 4-

31