The Transverse Face: Architecture X Culture

The theoretical framework for this paper arrives from the cultural crossings between the work of Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu and French philosopher Felix Guattari on a dynamic conception of subject formation and citizenship of space that is different from the kind of ecstasies celebrated in phenomenology. The paper draws on Guattari's concepts of transversality or crossings that produce an irreducible uniqueness in architecture, and 'faciality' which describes a 'redundancy in the machinic unconscious' that bears upon the semiology of cultural construction, in relation to Takamatsu's architecture. This is a concept of culture not based on subjective identities or transcendent communities, but emerges at the transversal occasions in architecture as material works themselves. In this approach, architecture forfeits its quest for cultural identity through form, as identity becomes the result of mere happenstance. The architectural sense in cultural formation is therefore invested not in a predefined public, but one based on the figure of the onlooker and the passer by, an emergent public who are citizens by having nothing in common, except by the moment of their enchantment.