The Appearance of Modern Architecture: Deleuze on the Baroque

Lecture date: 2004-01-23 How can we specify the characteristics of modern architecture? This question has particular force in relation to the growing interest in organicism within architectural practice, a movement that seems to recall certain baroque motifs rather than ostensibly modern ones. To attempt an answer Andrew Benjamin’s lecture series will look at three distinct areas: the writings of Emil Kaufmann for whom there is a distinct break between the baroque and the postbaroque; Colin Rowe’s analysis of the relationship between the classical and the modern, according to which the pretensions of the modern are undone by the retention of ideal forms; and the use of the baroque in order to stage the concerns of the modern - this position finds its most emphatic expression in the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and their use by contemporary theorists.