PIVOTAL TERMS: Architecture,Eros and the Movement Inhibition

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 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 the 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.