Architecture A Derivative Practice

Architecture, a Derivative Practice
PREMISES FOR THE RESUMPTION

OF THE DISCUSSION
OF COPY & DERIVATIVE WORKS
…the old styles or the modern style? […] The answer to that burning
question however is that everything created in earlier times can be
copied today provided it is still usable. For the form on new phenomena
in our culture (railway carriages, telephones, typewriters etc.) solutions
must be found that do not consciously echo a past style. Changing
old objects to adapt them to modern need is not permissible. We must
either copy or create something completely new. By that, however, I do
not mean the new must be the opposite of what went before.
— Adolf Loos, The New Style and the Bronze Industry, 1878
Thesis project 2013/2014
Felipe Guerra
Advisor:
Ido Avissar
THE BERLAGE
The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture
and Urban Design.
Tu Delft, Faculty of Architecture.
January 30 2014
ABOUT THE TYPE

The Relevant typeface has its name from the notion of
relevance, the notion of measuring how much something
influences reality, or how well a piece of information or a
theory can convey knowledge about reality, regardless of
the truth of this knowledge.
The ‘Relevant’ typeface emerged from a typographic

attempt to create a font family with a systematic
structure, both in terms of development and design, and,
at the same time, maintain optimum legibility and read-
ability.
ABOUT THE PAPER

The book is printed in antalis Bioset Cream White 120grs.
contents
INTRODUCTION 8
ARCHITECTURE, A DERIVATIVE PRACTICE
IMITATION, MIMESIS AND COPY 14

FROM MIMESIS & APPROPRIATION TO DERIVATION
NEORENAISSANCE 24
NIHIL DICTUM QUIN PRIUS DICTUM: NOTHING CAN BE SAID
WHICH HAS NOT BEEN SAID ALREADY
WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHO IS SPEAKING? 32

THE LION IS MADE OF ASSIMILATED LAMB
AUTHORSHIP & THE NEW
TYPE AND TYPOLOGY EXPANDED 72

A TAXONOMY OF ARCHITECTURE
THOU SHALT NOT COVET 88

COMMONS & LAWS
SELECTION 134
ARCHITECTURAL PRECEDENTS
POSTSCRIPT 162
PREMISES FOR THE RESUMPTION OF THE DISCUSSION &
PRACTICE OF COPY & DERIVATIVE WORKS
CONTRIBUTORS 166
Introduction
Architecture, a Derivative Practice

The fate of ‘all that is solid’ in modern life to ‘melt into
air.’ The innate dynamism of the modern economy, and
of the culture that grows from this economy, annihilates
everything that it creates—physical environments, social
institutions, metaphysical ideas, artistic visions, moral
values—in order to create more, to go on endlessly
creating the world anew. This drive draws all modern
men and women into its orbit, and forces us all to
1. Marshall Berman, grapple with the question of what is essential, what is
All That Is Solid Melts
into Air (USA: Penguin
meaningful, what is real in the maelstrom in which we
Books, 1988). Pg. 288 move and live. 1
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 1988
The condition of an architectural language constitutes a

series of unarticulated repressions, and the formal can
2. Peter Eisenman,
be critical precisely because it operates on the borders
“Terragni and the Idea
of a Critical Text,” in of historical precedent. While all architecture engages
Giuseppe Terragni:
formal components, the formal is potentially critical
Transformations,
Decompositions, when it participates in the reinvention of disciplinary
Critiques (New York:
languages not simply for the sake of invention alone but
Monacelli Press, 2003).
Pg 299 as an analytical commentary on disciplinary precedents.2
Peter Eisenman, Terragni and the Idea of a Critical Text,

2003
8
Architecture is reified by repeating itself. This thesis investigates
how architectural knowledge is appropriated and transformed, in order
to resume the discussion of copy and derivative works. Architecture has
developed through time as the transformation and reinterpretation of
a body of knowledge, through processes of appropriation, repetition,
iteration, seriality and difference, amongst others. The appropriated
knowledge is presented in diverse forms; built, unbuilt and written.
And varies from; a discourse, program, physical context, particular
formal language, technical feature to a method. All these features
lend themselves to being appropriated and thus being used for the
production of architecture.
Architecture has undergone a process of rejection to copying,

derivative works, and a rejection of history as a form of knowledge.
Such rejection has been mainly caused by; the semantic transformation
the word copy went through, having a positive connotation from its
Latin root copia—abundance, plenty, multitude—to the pejorative
meaning of copy as a ‘degraded version of an original,’ the emergence
of the romantic figure of the author as a genius creator during the
renaissance, the establishment of intellectual property laws and the
innovation imperative that started with modernity and its capitalistic
economy. The reason for the continuous obsession for innovation has for
the most part been driven by the creation of new forms.
By putting forward the notion of architecture fundamentally as

a derivative practice, the thesis criticizes the myth of originality, the
unethical view against copying and derivative works, and frees from the
innovation imperative surrounding the practice. The project argues that
there is a potential for the production of architecture, by transforming
our mimetic desire into an operative and projective tool for architectural
production. By putting forward premises for the resumption of
the discussion and practice of copying and derivative works into
architecture.
What makes architecture derivative is the constant reformulation

and commentaries on ‘disciplinary precedents.’ Derive comes from
English deriven, from the French deriver and the Latin derivare (‘to lead,
turn, draw off’), from de (‘away’) + rivus (‘a stream’). Derive as a verb in
ARCHITECTURE, A DERIVATIVE PRACTICE 9

the widest sense is to create something by means of something else,
or that stems from something else. Here derivative is understood as
anything that is obtained by derivation or stemming from something
or several things. Practice is used in order to broaden the discussion
and consider both the discipline and the profession of architecture
as one. Practice comes from the English practizen, a variation of
practisen, from French pratiser, practiser, from Latin practico (‘to do,
perform, execute, propose, practise, exercise.’), from prāctica (‘practical
affairs’, ‘business’), from Greek πρακτική (prāktikē), from πρακτικός
(praktikós, ‘practical’), from πράσσειν (prassein, ‘to do’). Here practice
is understood as anything that an architect does, be it writing, drawing,
etc. If all architectural knowledge is considered—all its forms, oral,
written, drawn and built—as potentially being transformed, practice
seizes all architectural actions into one.
The project investigates six topics; i. Mimesis, Imitation, Copy &

Appropriation, ii. Derivative practices, iii. Authorship, iv. The New, v.
Type & Typology, vi. Intellectual property. The first text, ‘From Mimesis
& Appropriation To Derivation,’ explores the relation between imitation,
mimesis and copy, and traces the origin of the word copy, elaborating
on the reasons on why we copy. What drives our mimetic desire and
how could it be used for the production of architecture. The second
text, ‘Neorenaissance,’ looks at the emergence of architecture as
the discipline we know today, expanding on Leon Battista Alberti’s
architectural method, particularly how he translated methods used
in rhetoric to the production of architecture, what Anke Naujokat has
compared to a collage technique. The third text, ‘What Difference
Does It Make Who Is Speaking? The Lion Is Made Of Assimilated Lamb.
Authorship & The New,’ explores the relation between the emergence of
the figure of the author as creator and notions of originality, innovation
and creativity, criticizing the figure of the architect genius. The text also
argues that copy and derivative works, or repetition in a broadest sense,
is in itself the production of the new, what Gilles Deleuze refers to as
the production of a new difference, repetition but with difference. The
text criticizes the innovation paradigm that emerged with modernity as
a constant redefinition and recreation, what Rosalind Krauss has called
the myth of originality. The fourth text, ‘Type & Typology Expanded. A
Taxonomy,’ argues that the notion of type and working typologically
10
are architecture’s most derivative practices. The text puts forward
an expanded taxonomy of architecture, such taxonomy could allow
the coexistence of principle and single case, dialectic between type
and model. Considering that architectural objects are assemblages
of different types. The fifth text, ‘Thou Shalt Not Covet. Commons &
Laws,’ looks at the relation of intellectual property and the notion of the
commons in architecture, following the argument of the usage of type,
as ideas or principles that cannot be copyrighted, therefore available
for appropriation and transformation. The text explores the relation
between the emergence of intellectual property and the figure of the
author, and the relation between knowledge and cognitive capitalism.
The text argues that, architecture should clearly establish what is of
public domain and procure that architecture is treated as a common, a
collective project.
The texts are written investigations, they criticize notions of

originality and innovation, and explore copying and repetition with the
use of intertextual assemblages, meaning that the texts are composed
primarily from fragments of existing texts. Shifting the task of the writer
from the production of ‘original’ text to the compilation, classification,
selection and assemblage of text. Even though architecture is
fundamentally a derivative practice, not everything is produced
intentionally with a derivative approach. This thesis is concerned with
intentional and operative practices of appropriation, transformation
and derivation, opposed to the sea of copycats and plagiarism
cases surrounding architecture. Parallel to the texts, a selection of
architectural projects that use a conscious derivative approach was
redrawn as an act of appropriation in itself and an investigation on
architectural precedents. In order not to speculate, all the projects that
were selected stated somehow that they were repeating, appropriating
or transforming a precedent.
The postscript is meant to open up the discussion with a set of

premises derived from the texts and the investigated topics. Finally the
investigated topics, texts, projects and premises here presented, intend
to provide a common ground on which to discuss, and resume copying
and derivative works into architecture.
ARCHITECTURE, A DERIVATIVE PRACTICE 11

IMITATION, MIMESIS AND COPY
From Mimesis & Appropriation to Derivation

1. Walter Benjamin, The gift which we possess of seeing similarity is nothing
“Doctrine of the Similar,”
New German Critique,
but a weak rudiment of the formerly powerful compulsion
no. 17 (1933). Pg. 69 to become similar and also to behave mimetically.1
Walter Benjamin – Doctrine of the Similar - 1933
With the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style—what is as

unique and unmistakable as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as
your own body—the very source, for an early Roland Barthes, of stylistic
2. Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or,
invention and innovation—the producers of culture have nowhere to
the Cultural Logic of turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the
Late Capitalism (Duke
University Press, 1991).
masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global
Pg. 64 culture.2
Gabriel Tarde, in The Laws of Imitation (1890), sets out the three
principles of universal imitation: a vibratory principle operating at the
physical level; a reproductive principle working at the biological level;
and imitation working at the social level. All phenomena result from
repetition at these various levels, and from the interpenetration of
3. Marcus Boon, In repetitions, which give rise to variation.3 Plato’s writings on mimesis—a
Praise of Copying
(Harvard University
word usually translated as ‘imitation’ but also ‘copy,’ ‘representation,’
Press, 2010). Pg. 82 ‘reproduction,’ ‘similarity,’ or ‘resemblance’—play a key role. In Plato’s
Republic, Socrates presents the argument that everything in this world
is an imitation, because it is an echo or reproduction of an idea that
4. Ibid. Pg. 18 exists beyond the realm of sensible forms.4
For Martin Heidegger, mimesis means copying, that is, presenting

and producing something in a manner which is typical of something
else. Copying is done in the realm of production, taking it in a very broad
sense. Thus the first thing that occurs is that a manifold of produced
items somehow comes into view, not as the dizzying confusion of an
arbitrary multiplicity, but as the many-sided individual item which we
5. Ibid. Pg. 18 name with one name.5 In architecture, forms are constructed and
buildings designed on the basis of processes of correspondence,
14
similarity, and difference. The reference points here are extremely 6. Hilde Heynen,
Architecture and
varied in character: the program of demands, the physical context, a Modernity: A Critique
typological series, a particular formal idiom, a historical connotation. All (Mit Press, 2000).
Pg. 193
these elements lend themselves to being treated mimetically and thus
to being translated in the design.6
The word copy comes from the Latin word ‘copia,’ meaning
‘abundance, plenty, multitude.’ Copia was also the Roman goddess
associated with abundance.7 The word ‘copia’ was in common use, 7. Boon, In Praise of
Copying. Pg. 41
meaning ‘abundant power,’ ‘wealth,’ ‘riches,’ ‘abundance,’ ‘fullness,’
‘multitude.’ It is derived from ‘cops’—’abundance’—, and ‘cops’ is
derived from ‘ops’ and either ‘con’ or ‘co.’ This is a matter of some
significance, since it links ‘copia’ to a rather more well-known goddess
Ops, who was also a goddess of abundance, associated with the
harvest, and with another harvest deity, Consus, who was the protector
of grains and of the storehouses in which the harvest was kept.8 8. Ibid. Pg. 44
Although we no longer associate copying with abundance, but link it

rather with the theft or deterioration of an original, and thus a decrease,
the phenomena we label ‘copies’ and the activities we call ‘copying’ still
9. Ibid. Pg. 42
manifest this abundance and this increase.9 The copy as an object that
is inherently multiple, that is more than one, that is a copy of something,
and thus part of an excess or abundance, of a more.10 10. Ibid. Pg. 45
Copia, according to a contemporary of Erasmus, meant the ‘faculty

of varying the same expression or thought in many ways by means
of different forms of speech and a variety of figures and argument.’
The three components of rhetoric, inventio—the selection of matter
or elements—dispositio—the arrangement of those elements—and
elocutio—the style of presentation—did not include imitation per se,
but it was understood that the practice of imitation was fundamental
to rhetoric. This was a matter of some concern—the Roman rhetorician
Quintilian, for example, stressed that good rhetoric could not just be
imitation. Thus, we can see a gap opening up between mimesis and
copia, between copying understood as a crude act of thoughtless
repetition—Quintilian’s main objection to a speech that is solely
imitation is that it does not charm the listener—and copying as the many
possibilities for variation within the act of repetition.11 11. Ibid. Pg. 47
FROM MIMESIS & APPROPRIATION TO DERIVATION 15

Copy was used to denote a duplicate of a text as early as the
fourteenth century; the more general meaning of ‘something made or
formed, or regarded as made or formed, in imitation of something else’
did not emerge until the end of the sixteenth century. It was also around
this time that ‘copia,’ which has an affirmative sense of resources,
power, or plenty, started to take on a pejorative meaning: the copy
as a degraded version of an original. The reasons for this shift are
connected with the emergence of the printing press, the book, and other
12. Ibid. Pg. 48 technologies of mass production.12
When we talk about copying today, when controversy around copying

occurs, these meanings of ‘copia’—coming to us from before the age of
print, the age of mechanical reproduction, or the age of the computer—
13. Ibid. Pg. 41 reassert themselves.13 In every case that one can think of, copying
involves repetition. Repetition—a copy repeats, is a repeat of something.
But in this act of repetition, as Tarde and others have suggested,
something else happens, difference manifests itself in repetition and
14. Ibid. Pg. 91 marks a transformation that happens within repetition.14
Copying in its Platonic form would emerge out of the belief that
there is an original object with an essence that could be copied; and this
belief could be logically refuted. For if objects really did have essences,
there could be no copying of them, since that which one would make
the copy out of would continue to have its own essence, and could have
only this essence, rather than that essence which is implied by the
transformed outward appearance that would make it a copy. Similarly,
if the essence of a thing were truly fixed, it could not be transported to
15. Ibid. Pg. 27 the copy, and imitation, even as a degradation of the original, would not
be possible.15 Copying cannot be understood without recognizing that
the difference between original and copy is merely one of designation,
16. Ibid. Pg. 226 and that both original and copy are ultimately nondual.16 Acts of
designation, rather than guarantors of essence; as such, they are
impermanent and they can themselves be copied. It is the emptiness of
all phenomena, their lack of essence, which makes copying possible; but
17. Ibid. Pg. 29 more important, this emptiness is what makes it possible for anything to
appear at all.17 Copying, rather than being the production of a distorted,
inferior version of an original, emerges from emptiness and from the
18. Ibid. Pg. 79 impermanence, dependent origination, or lack of essence of all things.18
16
Copying requires the recognition of a similarity between two things; but
without essences, how could there be such a similarity?19 19. Ibid. Pg. 29
Copying itself is neither good nor bad—it all depends on what it is

used for, and what is intended with it.20 Copying can be split into two 20. Ibid. Pg. 10
forms, one good and one bad, the bad one associated with deception,
an act of deception. Something is presented in the guise of something
else. This something is produced so that its outward appearance
corresponds to something else, to something that it is not.21 But the 21. Ibid. Pg. 108
‘original’ itself is also necessarily an appropriation, translation, and

imitation of other materials now presented, packaged, and marketed in
ways that objectively constitute deception.22 22. Ibid. Pg. 111
Copying was an integral part of the visual arts until the eighteenth
century, when the rise of originality and authenticity as aesthetic values,
and the rise of various forms of intellectual-property law, retrospectively
transformed the copier into a forger, and the multiplicity of similar and
imitations into fakes. Where copying persisted, in name if not in fact, it
was relegated to the applied arts or to folk arts, until the postmodern
period, when the pervasiveness of copying in industrial societies was
recognized.23 23. Ibid. Pg. 116
But why do we copy, suppose copying is what makes us human—

what then? More than that, what if copying, rather than being an
aberration or a mistake or a crime, is a fundamental condition or
requirement for anything, human or not, to exist at all?24 Is there 24. Ibid. Pg. 3
anything that does not involve ‘copying’? Indeed, many of the most
vibrant aspects of contemporary culture indicate an obsession with
the act of copying and the production of copies, and it seems that
we find real insight into what human beings and the universe are like
25. Ibid. Pg. 4
through thinking about how and what we copy.25 We live in a culture
of downloads, filesharing, networks in which information, data, music,
images can be exchanged almost instantaneously.26 Copying is a 26. Ibid. Pg. 5
fundamental part of being human, we could not be human without

copying, and we can and should celebrate this aspect of ourselves,
in full awareness of our situation.27 Where does the desire of copying 27. Ibid. Pg. 7
comes from, supposing copying is what makes us human, such desire

might be caused by; an admiration for what has been done or an

emulative desire, a desire for knowledge, acknowledging the fact that
we learn by copying, vast resources at hand which can be appropriated,
complete a task with ease or a disregard for innovation.
All cultural practice appropriates alien or exotic, peripheral or

obsolete elements of discourse into its changing idioms. Appropriation—
the act of claiming the right to use, make, or own something that
someone else claims in the same way. Thinking about appropriation
28. Ibid. Pg. 205 enables us to ask: Who has the right to make a copy?28 The motivations
29. Benjamin Buchloh, and criteria of selection for appropriation are intricately connected
Neo-Avantgarde and
Culture Industry:
with the momentary driving forces of each culture’s dynamics.29
Essays on European Appropriation of historical models may be motivated by a desire to
and American Art from
1955 to 1975 (Mit Press,
establish continuity and tradition and a fiction of identity, as well as
2003). Pg. 380 originating from a wish to attain universal mastery of all codification
30. Ibid. Pg. 385 systems.30
31. Boon, In Praise of

Most of what we call history is arguably the history of
Copying. Pg. 205 appropriation,31 appropriative practices have been carried out in all
fields of human production, from the use of rhetoric, historicism, all
the historical neo styles, to appropriation art at the beginning of the
twentieth century with the emergence of the modern collage. What has
changed respecting the current derivative practices such as collage,
assemblage, remix, mash-up, cut-up, amongst others. The assemblage
of a new artifact from fragments of preexisting objects or forms is one
of the key practices of modernist aesthetics, and can be dated back as
far as 1869 when Lautréamont proclaimed the beauty of ‘the chance
32. Ibid. Pg. 144 meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.’32
Historically, montage and collage as modernist aesthetic practices date
to the early decades of the twentieth century. The scientific context
for the ‘discovery’ of these practices includes the formalization of
a number of scientific systems which consist of the permutation, by
chance or otherwise, of various basic components: chemistry’s periodic
table of the elements —Dmitri Mendeleev, 1869—, atomic physics—the
electron, the nucleus, quantum physics, the isotope, 1897–1918—,
genetics —Gregor Mendel, 1866—and set theory—Georg Cantor, 1874.
Technologically, the advent of the camera —1826—, the telephone
33. Ibid. Pg. 155 —1876—, the phonograph —1877—, and the movie camera —1889. 33
18
Theodor Adorno delivered the following damning critique of
montage-based art: ‘But montage disposes over the elements that
make up the reality of an unchallenged common sense, either to
transform their intention or, at best, to awaken their latent language. It
is powerless, however, insofar as it is unable to explode the individual
elements. It is precisely montage that is to be criticized for possessing
the remains of a complaisant irrationalism, for adaptation to material
that is delivered ready-made from outside the work.’34 34. Ibid. Pg. 164
Nicolas Bourriaud has claimed that montage, and other practices

of citation, repetition, and appropriation, constitute the core of a
contemporary art practice, which he variously names ‘postproduction.’
Bourriaud situates this centrality of montage within the context of
globalization, the culture of the DJ as curator, selector, and sequencer
of a vast historical and geographical archive, and the Internet as a
limitless virtual space of assemblages governed by the logic of the click
and the hypertextual trace.35 35. Ibid. Pg. 143
What are the reasons for the contemporary interest and persistent
usage of derivative practices, such as collage, assemblage, remix,
mash-up, cut-up, etc. Is this just a different way to satisfy our desire
to appropriate, imitate or copy? Or is there something more than a
mere desire to appropriate? Some of the motives for this could be;
acknowledgment or recognition of the potential of produced cultural
production, access to material with the advent of digital technologies,
a response to the modernist dictum of innovation and originality, and
a reaction to cognitive capitalism, due to the way it has fetishized
knowledge and the increase of intellectual property laws. One could
argue that mainly the current interest and usage of derivative practices
lays in two reasons, the compulsion to become similar and behave
mimetically and a way to deal with all the knowledge at hand.
One thing only seems to hold fairly constant in the vanguardist

discourse and that is the theme of originality. Understanding originality
here as more than just the kind of revolt against tradition that echoes
in Ezra Pound’s ‘Make it new!’ or sounds in the futurists’ promise
to destroy the museums that cover Italy as though ‘with countless
cemeteries.’ More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-

36. Rosalind Krauss, garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground
“The Originality of
the Avant-Garde,” zero, a birth.36
The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (1986).
The Statute of Anne of 1709, the first copyright law, was in part
Pg 157 a rearguard effort to protect the rights of the Stationers Company
in the face of the effects of the English Revolution; copyright and
patent law was inscribed in Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution
—1787—, and in a law of 1793 in France; the Russian Revolution was
accompanied by a variety of changes to copyright law —which had
hitherto been in line with those of bourgeois European law—, including a
1923 decree nationalizing the works of authors such as Tolstoy, Gogol,
37. Boon, In Praise of and Chekhov.37 Intellectual-property law functions through Platonic
Copying. Pg. 10
concepts. Intellectual property law’s three constituent parts—copyright,
trademark, and patent law—are each built around the paradox that
you cannot protect an idea itself, but can protect only a fixed, material
38. Ibid. Pg. 21 expression of an idea.38Since ideas do not or cannot receive legal
protection, intellectual property law encourages those who produce
commodities to exaggerate the inevitable distortion of the idea as
manifest in the actual object. And the result of this is the kitsch version
of originality, ‘thinking outside the box,’ that prevails in the marketplace
39. Ibid. Pg. 22 today.39
Appropriation in architecture is nothing new, from the time of

Alberti borrowing methods from rhetoric, the German discussion on
style, to the postmodern pastiche, architecture has been appropriating.
Postmodern appropriation could be characterised by, a pastiche
approach and a ‘parodistic appropriation.’ Each act of appropriation
seems to reaffirm precisely those contradictions it set out to eliminate.
Parodistic appropriation reveals the divided situation of the individual
in contemporary artistic practice. The individual must claim the
constitution of the self in original primary utterances, while being
painfully aware of the degree of determination necessary to inscribe the
utterance into dominant conventions and rules of codification; reigning
signifying practice must be subverted and its deconstruction must be
placed in a distribution system—the market—, a circulation form—the
commodity—, and a cultural legitimation system—the institutions of
art—. All these double binds cancel out the effect of avant-garde
interference within the signifying practice, and turn it into a renewed
20
legitimation of existing power structures.40 While pastiche is, like parody, 40. Buchloh, Neo-
Avantgarde and Culture
the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language: but it Industry: Essays on
is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior European and American
Art from 1955 to 1975.
motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any Pg. 387
conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily
borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus
blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs: it is to parody what that other 41. Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, the
interesting and historically original modern thing, the practice of a kind
Cultural Logic of Late
of blank irony, is to what.41 Capitalism. Pg. 64
A derivative approach to architecture can be better understood

in terms of what Eisenstein called ‘mimesis of principle’ opposed
to ‘mimesis of form.42 Derivative practices offer the possibility to 42. Boon, In Praise of
Copying. Pg. 148
appropriate the principles of a given work and combine them with
others in order to produce a different outcome under new conditions
and context. Architecture is then not reduced to a design problem,
instead it involves an appropriation of form and principles, broadening
the range of material that can be appropriated, turning architecture
into a compositional task. From appropriation to derivation, material
needs to be studied, transformed, reformulated, and re-contextualised.
Appropriations should not depend on iconic references, getting
immersed in an allusive act that only an inner circle of architects
will read, instead it should appropriate and transform any kind of
architectural knowledge that might be relevant for the given task.
A derivative approach to architecture would take advantage of our
mimetic desire and change it into a transformative appropriation act,
in which architecture is recombined. Appropriation should not be
only a commentary of past architecture but a critical combination of
architecture, of existing architectural knowledge, rather than translating
other cultural production to architecture, considering that architecture
has its own language and vast body of knowledge.

NEORENAISSANCE
Nihil dictum quin prius dictum

Nothing can be said which has not been said already
1. Anke Naujokat, “Ut
Should he find anything anywhere of which he approves,
Rhetorica Architectura.
Leon Battista he should adopt and copy it.1
Alberti’s Technique of
Architectural Collage,”
Candide 02(2010). Pg 87
Leon Battista Alberti – De re aedificatoria Book IX, 10
In the fifteenth century Leon Battista Alberti formalized architecture

as the practice we know. What is most striking of Alberti’s architectural
theory was the contradiction between his idea of authorship in
architecture, notions of originality and his architectural method. As a
humanist, he had spent years internalizing a methodology that was
regarded as valid for the production of literary and rhetorical texts as
2. Ibid. Pg 85 an art of compilation and recombination.2 These assumptions were
3. Ibid. Pg 77 transferred to his approach of architectural and artistic design.3 He
was not trained to engage in free literary invention—an emphasis that
would have been atypical for a humanistic education of the times—but
was instead taught to imitate classical literary models. Gasparino da
Barzizza showed Alberti how quality literature and rhetoric emerged
from the imitation of the classics, and taught him with his own
pedagogical texts De imitatione and De compositione to incorporate
4. Ibid. Pg 77 anecdotes from the classics into their own efforts.4
The first step was inventio, which places emphasis not on

independent invention, but instead on discovery, that is, on the
compilation and assembly of the arguments and materials required for
5. Ibid. Pg 77 the effective treatment of a given topic.5 In a second step, students
concentrated on dispositio, referring to the selection and arrangement
of individual arguments, with an eye directed in equal measure toward
the subject matter, the purpose of the discussion, and the anticipated
audience. In illustrating the importance of a calculated arrangement of
6. Ibid. Pg 83 materials and ideas for the effectiveness of an oration.6 The conclusion
of the creative process of classical oration as studied and practiced by
Barzizza’s Latin students was elocutio, the actual production of the
speech through stylistically ingenious verbalizations and the formulation
of ideas. Essentially, the iron law of the teaching of imitation in antiquity
was to avoid plagiarism, that is to say, to avoid copying a given model
directly, and to strive instead to create an original work by transforming
24
its premises.7 Alberti’s understanding of inventio, then, mirrors his 7. Ibid. Pg 83
conception of classical rhetoric: inventio is less invention in a sense of

the creatio of romanticism, and instead discovery, which is to say the
selection, appropriation, manipulation, and recycling of pre-existing
materials, and their assembly and reformulation in conformity with the
principles of classical rhetoric, including dispositio and elocutio.8 8. Ibid. Pg 87
In De re aedificatoria, Alberti indicates that he adapted the collage

technique familiar from the art of rhetoric as a methodology for
architectural composition and design. He expressly advises the architect
who is engaged in designing a funerary chapel, for example, to exploit
various prototypes from his collection of models, provided that these
seem suitable to the task at hand: ‘Nor will I object if lineaments are
incorporated from any other building type, provided they contribute
to both grace and permanence.’9 For Alberti, accordingly, every 9. Ibid. Pg 93
architectural design is—like every literary creation—characterized by

a conscious connectedness to proven prototypes, and as paradoxical
as this might sound, each derives its originality precisely from this
intertextuality.10 10. Ibid. Pg 93
With the use of intertextuality and a collage technique, Alberti was

able to transpose rhetorical methods into the realm of architectural
production. At the same time Alberti created the idea of the architect
as an author, by clearly separating the act of designing and the act
of building, regarding the design—set of drawings—as the original
architectural piece and the building as a copy. Architecture was 11. Mario Carpo, The
Alphabet and the
established as what Mario Carpo has called an ‘allographic, notational Algorithm (MIT Press,
and authorial art.’11 2011). Pg 44
A clear example of Alberti’s collage technique is the sepulchre

in the Cappella Rucellai. The Tempietto Rucellai was commissioned
to Alberti in order to reproduce the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The
Florentine Tempietto of the Holy Sepulcher is an outstanding object for
exploring the practical implementation of Alberti’s conception of design
as derived from his knowledge of rhetoric. The visual language of this
work of miniature architecture betrays an astonishing affinity for the
forms of literary expression favored by the humanist. When engaging
in architectural design, and in ways analogous to the procedures
NEORENAISSANCE 25
of rhetorical and literary production, Alberti handles a repertoire of
knowledge and anecdotes of the most various provenance confidently,
and without shying away from joining the contradictory and the
incongruous. In selecting his elements, he always ensures that a highly
diverse vocabulary supports and reinforces a unified rhetorical intention,
the architectonic statement toward which he is striving. Both the
12. Naujokat, “Ut
Rhetorica Architectura.
shrine-style miniaturization of the Tempietto by means of the crowning
Leon Battista lily element and its monumentalization by means of the classical
Alberti’s Technique of
Architectural Collage.”
frieze inscription are intended to present the building as a venerated,
Pg 93 reliquary-style triumphal monument to the Risen Christ.12
Alberti’s architectural eclecticism even involves the adoption

of non-classical details. The rhetoric of the Tempietto of the Holy
Sepulcher is not restricted to an architectural vocabulary of ancient
Roman provenance, but is also enriched by local idioms as well as by
tried-and-true and appropriate locutions drawn from other contexts, for
example medieval or Oriental traditions, to the extent that these can be
13. Ibid. Pg 93 integrated with his architectural intentions.13
Alberti’s contradiction was on the one hand establishing the image

of the architect as an author and on the other hand transgressing
authorship by collecting, appropriating and collaging anything at hand.
If architecture was founded as the discipline we know today by Alberti,
using a collage approach to architectural production, one could say that
architecture was founded on derivative principles. If architecture was a
14. See AD, The
derivative practice at the time of Alberti, when did this collage method
Innovation Imperative: stopped being used? When did innovation in architecture become an
Architectures of Vitality.
Volume 83 Issue 7
imperative? When did architecture become an innovative practice? Was
January/February-2013 architecture ever innovative or original?14
Six centuries later, a similar approach to Alberti’s cultural

production is taking place. More and more derivative methods are
used among different fields of cultural production, from the pictorial
collage to the musical remix, selection, appropriation, manipulation,
and recycling of pre-existing materials, and their assembly and
reformulation seem to be the current mode of production. Not new since
appropriation and imitation are human practices that go far before
the renaissance. In 1915, the historian and philosopher of art Heinrich
26
Wölfflin defended a cyclical view of the evolution of man-made forms,
which would swing from classical sobriety to baroque fancifulness,
then back to reason, and so on ad infinitum.15 Are we experiencing
15. Carpo, The Alphabet
a swing ‘back’ from ‘innovative’ parametric baroque to a derivative and the Algorithm.
neorenaissance? Pg 83
Under the label of postproduction, Nicolas Bourriaud notes that 16. Nicolas Bourriaud,
Postproduction: Culture
since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have as Screenplay: How Art
been created on the basis of pre-existing works; more and more Reprograms the World
(Lukas & Sternberg,
artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others 2005).. Pg.13
or available cultural products.16 These artists who insert their own
work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional
distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy,
readymade and original work.17 Notions of originality—being at the origin 17. Ibid. Pg 13
of—and even of creation—making something from nothing—are slowly

blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of
the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting
cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.18 The artistic 18. Ibid. Pg 13
question is no longer: ‘what can we make that is new?’ but ‘how can
we make do with what we have?’ In other words, how can we produce
singularity and meaning from this chaotic mass of objects, names,
and references that constitutes our daily life?19 Here is important to 19. Ibid. Pg 17
distinguish singularity rather than originality, whereas originality has an

authorial connotation singularity is something exceptionally good, great
or remarkable, singularity frees production in general from originality
20. oxforddictionaries.
and its dependency on authorial ideas, inventiveness and novelty.20 com
The difference with what Bourriaud has noticed in the field of

artistic production and architectural production is a matter of intent
and the use of cultural references. While art has been able to surpass
and transgress—to a certain extent—notions of originality, creativity
and authorship, architecture is caught up in copyright and plagiarism
discussions. Should architecture appropriate all cultural references,
translating anything into architecture or should it remain within its own
field? Not to say that architecture is an autonomous practice but that
architecture has a vast body of knowledge that can be appropriated
without the need of using external influences. What is the difference
between this ‘new’ mode of production and the humanist mode in
NEORENAISSANCE 27
the renaissance? Is the contemporary DJ similar to the renaissance
architect, collecting and recombining? To what extent are appropriation
art and postproduction similar? Is it the same modus operandi but
under a different cultural condition? What are the consequences of
the immediate access to knowledge and media, and the advent of
digital technologies? Much has changed since the renaissance, in
terms of means of production and reproduction, what advantages or
obstacles does digital technologies pose to derivative methods relying
on compiling and combining? What possibilities could derivative methods
offer for the production of architecture, under the contemporary socio-
cultural condition and the use of digital tools?
The contemporary interest and usage of derivative work seems to

be a response or a reaction to the modernist dictum of innovation and
originality. Now we are going back to renaissance modes of production
in which culture was produced by means of collecting, appropriating,
reformulating and mixing. What nowadays is called the remix culture
is nothing but a neorenaissance an appropriation culture. The current
stage of capitalism, cognitive capitalism, has fetishized knowledge,
Intellectual-property law functions through Platonic concepts. Its three
constituent parts—copyright, trademark, and patent law—are each
built around the paradox that you cannot protect an idea itself, but can
21. Marcus Boon, In protect only a fixed, material expression of an idea.21 As a reaction to
Praise of Copying
(Harvard University
this we are experiencing an increasing interest, discussion and usage of
Press, 2010). Pg 21 derivative practices.
Bourriaud has mentioned that the history of appropriation remains

to be written, is it possible that this history is still to be written due to
the ubiquity of appropriation, in the sense that all production on one
form or another is an act of appropriation and reformulation.
Most of what we call history is arguably the history of

22. Ibid. Pg. 205 appropriation.22
28
‘…tante cose tante varie poste in uno e coattate e insite
e ammar ginate insieme, tutte corrispondere a un tuono,
tutte aguagliarsi a un piano, tutte estendersi a una linea,
tutte conformarsi a un disegno.’
Leon Battista Alberti - ed. Grayson 1960–1973, vol. II:

162
‘various things joined together into one, and in such

a way that all are aligned with one another, unified
with one another, so that all produce the same tone,
correspond to a plan, extend along a single line, conform
to a design.’
Engl. trans. Ian Pepper.
NEORENAISSANCE 29
WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHO IS SPEAKING?
THE LION IS MADE OF ASSIMILATED LAMB
Authorship & the New

I
1. Michel Foucault, First of all, discourses are objects of appropriation.1

“What Is an Author,” The
Foucault Reader, New
York: Pantheon Books What difference does it make who is speaking? 2
(1984). Pg. 108
2. Ibid. Pg. 120 Enough of the original geniuses! Let us repeat ourselves unceasingly! 3
3. Adolf Loos,
“Heimatkunst, 1914,” in
It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the
Trotzdem (Vienna: Georg author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep
Prachner Verlag, 1982).
Pg 130
repeating—after Nietzsche—that God and man have died a common
death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author’s
4. Foucault, “What Is an
disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch
Author.” Pg. 105 for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.4
Among the myths that appear central to the development and

maintenance of the discipline of architecture from its modern beginnings
5. Tim Anstey, Katja is the notion of authorship. From the fifteenth century architects have
Grillner, and Rolf
Hughes, Architecture staked their claims, defended their territories and maintained their
and Authorship (London: status through arguments modulated around subtly changing notions of
Black Dog Publishing,
2007). Pg. 6 authorship and intention.5
If architects claim to be authors, one might ask, first, exactly what

6. Ibid. Pg. 6 are they authoring?6 This is to investigate the nature of architectural
action and the context for this action. Second, who is to be identified
with the role of authoring in architecture—and who is excluded from
such an account? This is to consider the challenges that exist to the
7. Ibid. Pg. 9 hegemony of architects in the fashioning of the built environment.7
Despite provoking a range of responses and attitudes, authorship

provides a kind of topography for architectural action, therefore, forming
a conceptual surface that allows architecture to develop as a coherent
8. Ibid. Pg. 6 discipline.8
9. Ibid. Pg. 7 The author is a construction produced out of the work as vice versa.9
From Leon Battista Alberti to Cedric Price, architectural figures

and the debates and theories that surround them oscillate around
paradoxes and ambiguities that emerge from the projection of the
32
‘classical’ model that produces a link between a work and an ‘authorial’
10. Ibid. Pg. 9
creator.10
The concept of authorship in architecture has always been tied 11. Louise Pelletier,
“Genius, Fiction and the
to questions of architectural responsibility, but since the beginning of Author in Architecture,”
modernity, it increasingly raises issues of copyright, and underlines a in Architecture and
Authorship, ed. Tim
blind quest for originality, somewhat shifting the emphasis from the work Anstey, Katja Grillner,
and its appropriateness to the individuality of the creative mind.11 and Rolf Hughes
(London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2007). Pg. 92
in Ezra Pound’s ‘Make it new!’ or sounds in the futurists’ promise 12. Rosalind Krauss,
“The Originality of
to destroy the museums that cover Italy as though ‘with countless the Avant-Garde,”
cemeteries.’ More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant- The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other
garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground Modernist Myths (1986).
zero, a birth.12 Pg 157
Since the Renaissance, and certainly since the Enlightenment, 13. Tom Avermaete
et al., “Editorial,
the concept of invention has been associated with the idea of rupture, Architecture and
a breaking away from traditions or conventions and their forms and Moments of Invention,”
Oase Invention, no. 74
practices.13 (2007). Pg. 2
Invention denotes the moment when the supposed ‘genius’ of 14. Ibid. Pg. 2
the architect-artist comes to the surface, when new expressions or 15. Simon O’Sullivan,
solutions appear suddenly, without earlier announcement.14 “The Production of the
New and the Care of
the Self,” in Deleuze,
The new does not arrive from some ‘other place’—transcendence— Guattari and the
but is produced from the very matter of the world, after all what else is Production of the New,
ed. Simon O’Sullivan
there? And where else can the new come from? The new then involves and Stephen Zepke
a recombination of already existing elements in and of the world—a new (Continuum International
Publishing Group, 2008).
dice throw as Deleuze might say.15 Pg 91
The new would then be a repetition, but with difference.16 16. Ibid. Pg 91
The new—as it is figured in science, or indeed, the humanities—is

really just more of the same—more ‘knowledge’ as it were.17 17. Ibid. Pg 94
In 1914 Adolf Loos wrote: ‘Architects failed when they wanted to
WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHO IS SPEAKING? THE LION IS MADE OF ASSIMILATED LAMB 33
18. Loos, “Heimatkunst, reproduce the ancient styles and they are failing now after having
1914.” Pg. 122
tried without success to discover the style of our times.’18 Almost forty
19. Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe, “Technology years later Mies van der Rohe was equally cautious about generating
Architecture (Speech formal inventions, stating that: ‘architecture has nothing to do with
Delivered at Iit, 1950),”
in Programs and the invention of forms . . . Architecture depends on its time. It is the
Manifestoes on 20th crystallisation of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.’19
Century Architecture, ed.
Ulrich Conrads (London: These statements indicate that, despite the declared ambition
1970). Pg. 154 of modern architects to break away from the past, inventions in
20. Avermaete et al., architecture are never the result of a total renunciation of the existing.20
“Editorial, Architecture
and Moments of
Invention.” Pg. 2 II
The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar

as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French
rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered
the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human
21. Roland Barthes, “The person’. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism,
Death of the Author,”
the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached
Image, music, text (1977).
Pg. 142 the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.21
The very term auctor—from which author is derived—was very late

to garner the connotations of originality with which it is today (dis)
credited. Of the four terms from which auctor is held to derive, the three
Latin verbs don not imply any sense of textual mastery. Agere, ‘to act
or perform’, is close to the Medieval Barthesian ideas of the scriptor as
acting through a text which in some sense precedes its performance,
augere, ‘to grow’, for all its organicist resonances, does not suggest
that the text originates with its author. Auieo, ‘to tie’, derived from the
poetic lexicon and referred to the connective tissue—metre, feet, etc.—
by which pets such ad Virgil structure their verses—in which regard it is
more pre-figurative of the structuralist notions of bricolage and authors
as assemblers of codes than the concept of author as a creative
potency. Only the fourth root, the Greek noun autentim, ‘authority’,
is suggestive of authorship as hegemonic, and even here the idea of
authority is entirely remote from that of in the first instance from their
relation to tradition and ultimately from canon. If the Medieval view
of the book could be unanchored from its theological moorings, it is
unlikely that anti-authorial theories would find much to contest in this
34
structural placement of the author.22 22. Sean Burke,
Authorship: From Plato
to the Postmodern
The coming into being of the notion of ‘author’ constitutes the (Edinburgh University
Press Edinburgh, 1995).
privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, Pg XVII
literature, philosophy, and the sciences.23
23. Foucault, “What Is
an Author.” Pg. 101
It would be worth examining how the author became individualized
in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment
studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of
valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount
the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental
category of ‘the man and his work criticism’ began.24 24. Ibid. Pg. 101
Prior to the nineteenth century, the author was defined less in terms
of the individual who held most control over the end product than in
the mind that generated the intention for a project. Consequently, the
author of a medieval cathedral was more likely to be identified with the
patron who ordered the construction than with the Master Mason who
supervised the construction. In the Renaissance, with the development
of tools of representation, the process by which an idea was conveyed—
through drawings and their translation—became a determining factor
The architect, through his ability to convey the intention of a project,
was considered the true author of a building even if the process of 25. Pelletier, “Genius,
Fiction and the Author in
construction was delegated to a third party.25 Architecture.” Pg. 97
As it emerged historically, therefore, the notion of the authorial

work appeared to bind production to the individual creator, suggesting
that there is something of the ‘self’ in the work—the work becomes in
some sense the ‘property’ of the creator. And it is worth noting, in this
respect, that the patriarchal notion of an author ‘fathering’ his text,
rather as God purportedly ‘fathered’ the world, has been an enduring
26..Anstey, Grillner, and
myth in Western literary thought, metaphorically linking the male author
Hughes, Architecture
with the authority of writer, deity, mid paterfamilias.26 and Authorship. Pg. 9
Within classical and medieval thought, mimesis—be it Plato’s

notion of an artist copying a natural world that is itself an inferior
copy of the higher realm of Ideas or Aristotle’s theory of imitation as
the representation of a significant action—allows very little room for
authorial inventiveness. Instead poets and tragedians were deemed
to work within pre-established systems, rules or conventions of the
sort specified in Aristotle’s Poetics. As Sean Burke observes, other
manifestations of this paradigm of authorship include medieval
designations of the artist as copyist working within long established
traditions, Russian Formalist notions of the author as craftsperson,
the Structuralist concept of the writer as an impersonal assembler
and arranger of literary codes, and traditional Marxist criticism of the
Lukacsian variety wherein the author’s primary duty is not to his or her
inner feelings, but to allow the truth of a historical moment to find its
27. Ibid. Pg. 8 expression within the text.27
[T]o make something that appears to be convenient for use, and

that can without doubt be afforded and built as projected, is the job
not of the architect but of the workman. But to preconceive and to
28. Leon Battista Alberti
et al., On the Art of determine in the mind and with judgement something that will be perfect
Building in Ten Books
and complete in its every part is the achievement of such a mind as we
(The MIT Press, 1988).
IX, 10 seek.28
The modern history of architecture as an authorial art began with

a building, Brunelleschi’s dome for the cathedral of Florence; but the
29. Mario Carpo, The new definition of architecture’s allographic and notational status came
Alphabet and the into being only with Leon Battista Alberti’s theory and his treatise, De re
Algorithm (MIT Press,
2011). Pg 71 aedificatoria.29
30. Tim Anstey, Alberti claims that there is a structural distinction between the
“Architecture and
Rhetoric: Persuasion,
building as physical object, over which the builder rules, and the
Context, Action,” building as idea, which is the architect’s province and it becomes clear
in Architecture and
Authorship, ed. Tim
that architects do not ‘make’ buildings; they make representations of
Anstey, Katja Grillner, buildings.30
and Rolf Hughes
(London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2007). Pg 20 Alberti endowed architectural discourse with a continuing
relationship with rhetoric, which continued to condition the way in
which architectural discourse developed through to the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Much of the radical quality of De re aedificatoria
emerges out of the way in which Alberti translated terms and ideas from
one category of intellectual activity into another, in this case from the
studia humanitatis, which addressed the complexities of contemporary
36
life through the medium of ancient texts, to the ‘Art of Building’. Both
Alberti’s discourse on the architectural object, and that on the architect,
have their origins in models and ideas adapted from antique texts on
oratory ethics and law, particularly those of Cicero.31 31. Ibid. Pg 18
In oratory the condition where the relationship between a

composition and its context is convincing was called decorum—
appropriateness. In the best known accounts from antiquity, particularly
that of Cicero, the persuasiveness of actions in oratory is thus read in
terms of their appropriateness ‘in context’, and this context, as much
as the content of the actions themselves, guarantees their decorous
nature. It is this assumption that is moved over to discussions about
‘appropriate action’ in architecture—that what will be appropriate in one
place is not correct in another—because of the relation between that
architectural action and its context.’32 32. Ibid. Pg 20
Alberti asserts the presence in the phenomenal object of a single

persuasive, this quality is distinct from the building’s physical presence,
and its existence is evidence of the will and mind of a—single— ‘creator’.
The architect as author/artist has arrived.’33 33. Ibid. Pg 19
According to Alberti an architect may claim an authorial link to a

work, but not necessarily an authoritative one.34 34. Ibid. Pg 19
When did architecture evolve from its pristine autographic status

as a craft—conceived and made by artisan builders—to its modern
allographic definition as an art—designed by one to be constructed by 35. Carpo, The Alphabet
others?35 and the Algorithm. Pg 16
An original, autographic work—for example, a painting made and

signed by the artist’s hand—is the unmediated making of its author. But
in the Albertian, allographic way of building the only work truly made by
the author is the design of the building—not the building itself, which by
definition is made by others.36 36. Ibid. Pg 22
A building and its design can only be notationally identical: their

identicality depends on a notational system that determines how
to translate one into the other. When this condition of notational
identicality is satisfied, the author of the drawing becomes the author of
the building, and the architect can claim some form of ownership over
a building which in most cases he does not in fact own, and which he
certainly did not build—indeed, which he may never even have touched.
The transition from Brunelleschi’s artisanal authorship—’this building
is mine because I made it’—to Alberti’s intellectual authorship—’this
37. Ibid. Pg 23 building is mine because I designed it.’37
Two instances of identicality were crucial to the shaping of

architectural modernity. The first was Alberti’s invention of architectural
design. In Alberti’s theory, as mentioned previously, a building is the
identical copy of the architect’s design; with Alberti’s separation in
principle between design and making came the modern definition
of the architect as an author, in the humanistic sense of the term.
After Alberti’s cultural revolution, the second wave of identical copies
in architecture came with the industrial revolution, and the mass
production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes,
38. Ibid. Pg x imprints, or molds.38
Thanks to the cultural and technical logic of mechanical replication,

authorship was extended from the author’s original to all identical
39. Ibid. Pg 25 copies of it.39
40. Anstey, “Architecture What is implicit in the argument of De re aedificatoria, yet remains
and Rhetoric:
Persuasion, Context, invisible in the text, is the potential use of visual representation as a
Action.” Pg 20 rhetorical tool.40
The Albertian definition of the architect as a figure produces

a tendency to read architectural intention primarily through an
analysis of the architectural ‘work’—whether built or otherwise. This
reading of architecture introduced habits that can appear long-lived
in architectural history and criticism. Once intention must be read
in projected buildings the habit of reading works of architecture as
objects—like pieces of art, things with discreet beginnings and ending
41. Ibid. Pg 20 points—becomes established.41
Alberti created an important equivalence between the architect

and the ‘work’ in that he attributes to both a similar responsibility to
38
define their places in the world through persuasion. Taken to its logical
conclusion, this double responsibility created space in architectural
discourse for a final notion that was to re-emerge during the late
twentieth century—that of context.42 42. Ibid. Pg 20
A certain number of notions that are intended to replace the

privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege
and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance. The first is the
idea of the work. What is a work? What is this curious unity which we
designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed? 43 Is it not what 43. Foucault, “What Is
an architect has composed? an Author.” Pg. 103
The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as
problematic as the status of the author’s individuality.44 44. Ibid. Pg. 104
III
In literary studies the author has appeared variously as a scribe,

medium, prophet or genius—i.e. as a vessel for external inspiration
that originates from the divine, from Nature or from recreational drugs,
Coleridge’s Kiibla Khan being a celebrated example of the latter—or
as an exceptional individual—a visionary an embodiment of universal
human spirit, a scientific experimenter, one capable of creatio ex nihilo—
creation out of nothing—actively shaping the materials thus produced.
45. Anstey, Grillner, and
Burke, refines this distinction as dependent on whether cultural Hughes, Architecture
production is regarded as an inspirational or an imitative practice.45 and Authorship. Pg. 8
The personifications of the artist, for example, as a persona

mixta, which arose out of the intersection of humanist discourse and
jurisprudence in fifteenth century Italy and which fixed much of the
modern idea of the artist as a producer of unique works, imbued that
figure both with the facility to articulate in terra firma the divine beyond
the confines of the world and, specifically’ to use existing material to
create ‘something from nothing.’46 46. Ibid. Pg. 8
The modern representation of the author as the originator and

proprietor of a special commodity—the oeuvre—is held to derive from
a blend of Lockean discourses of property and selfhood with the
eighteenth century discourse of original genius.47 47. Ibid. Pg. 9
Systems of ownership at the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century-the possibility of transgression
attached to the act of writing took on, more and more, the form of an
an Author.” Pg. 108 imperative peculiar to literature.48
The figure of the Romantic author accordingly, by virtue of stamping

the imprint of a unique personality on original works, takes them into
ownership and thereby provides the paradigm and reference point
for intellectual property law—as well as for author personality cults,
a strategy that remains effective today for shifting units in saturated
and Authorship. Pg. 9 markets.49
From the middle of the eighteenth century in Europe, a work of

imitation came to have a definite derogatory meaning and its author was
criticised for lack of imagination, while a mind of genius was celebrated
for its ability to transcend rules and create new forms and ideas. Soon,
50. Pelletier, “Genius,
Fiction and the Author in
the expression ‘fire and genius’ had become a well-known expression of
Architecture.” Pg. 92 praise in architectural discourse.50
Preceding Nicolas Le Camus de Mezieres’, ‘The Genius of

Architecture, Or the Analogy of That Art With Our Sensations’ by only
a decade, Jacques-François Blondel also discusses at length the
distinction between talent, taste and genius in his Cours d’architecture.
The man of talent, he writes, is an individual who is well versed in the
theory of architecture and in the practice of building construction, but
who produces nothing that might depart from principles and proportions
established by traditional authority. The man of genius, Blondel
continues, also needs to be familiar with all the rides of the art, but is
guided in his choices by a higher form of inspiration and an enthusiasm
that will free him from enslaving rules. He knows how to create the
different genres and assign the proper character to a building; he will
take advantage of the natural conditions of a site and the available
materials. Most importantly, the man of genius will produce creations
51. Ibid. Pg. 92 that surpass the masterpieces they were meant to imitate.51
For Le Camus, however, rules were no longer dictated from Antiquity

but were drawn from other disciplines such as theatre, music, and
literature. Le Camus’s theory of architectural expression assumes
40
that all shapes, colours, light, and texture employed in the design of
a building convey to the senses specific predictable sensation in the
observer.52 52. Ibid. Pg. 93
The article ‘Genie’ from Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie describes a

mind of genius not in its rationality or its ability to formulate complex
abstract concepts, but rather in its great sensitivity. A mind with a fertile
imagination combines ideas to create new concepts, by transcribing
abstract ideas into sensitive ones. The genius not only uses memory
and association to create new meanings for a particular object, but
also engages her/his mnemonic faculty to transform the tragic into the
terrible and the beautiful into the sublime, to animate matter and to
colour the mind by re-enacting every sensation.53 53. Ibid. Pg. 93
The article from the Encyclopedie also traces the origin of the word
‘Genie’ in classical mythology. The genies were beings whose bodies
were made of an aerial substance and who inhabited the vast realm
between the sky and the earth. These subtle spirits were considered
to be ministers sent by gods to mediate in human affairs. As inferior
divinities, the genies were immortal like gods but felt passions like
humans. They were assigned to protect specific humans during their
life and to guide their souls after death. From this interpretation, genie
came to mean the human soul delivered and detached from the human
body.’ This notion of freedom of the mind and proximity to the divine
remained the most powerful attributes of the genius, and still lingers—
even if secretly—in the highest aspiration of the contemporary author.54 54. Ibid. Pg. 93
According to Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s definition, the

philosophical constructions of a mind of genius do not rest on reason,
nor can they be appreciated in terms of truth or falseness. They are
more akin to poems, revealing their meaning through the beauty of
proportions. This analogy with literary works became an important
model for artists and architects in the eighteenth century Following the
radical changes in the nature of architectural expression brought about
by Claude Perrault’s questioning of the Vitruvian canon, the proportions
of the architectural orders lost some of their natural legitimacy as the
shared language of architecture.55 55. Ibid. Pg. 93
56. Tim Anstey, The crucial changes that turned architecture into a profession in
“Architecture and
Rhetoric: Persuasion, the middle nineteenth century, through the establishment national
Context, Action,” ibid. institutes, can be read in terms of a more or less clear reification of
Pg 21
the shadowy authority that results from the Albertian definition of the
architect.56
Alberti’s definition of architecture as an authorial, allographic,

57. Carpo, The Alphabet
notational art held sway until very recently, and defines many if not all of
and the Algorithm. Pg 44 the architectural principles that the digital turn is now unmaking.57
IV
Most extant classical texts were mosaics of citations, interpolations,

58. Ibid. Pg 24 additions, subtractions, and plain copy errors.58
It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all
writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible
voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to
which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that
composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap
59. Barthes, “The Death
where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that
of the Author.” Pg. 142 writes.59
As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting

directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of
any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself,
this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters
60. Ibid. Pg. 142 into his own death, writing begins.60 Accepting the principle and the
61. Ibid. Pg. 144 experience of several people writing together.61
The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no

way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not
the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that
of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. The
fact is—or, it follows—that writing can no longer designate an operation
of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’—as the Classics would
say—; rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford
philosophy, call a performative, a rare verbal form—exclusively given in
the first person and in the present tense—in which the enunciation has
42
no other content—contains no other proposition—than the act by which
it is uttered.62 62. Ibid. Pg. 146
The scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings,

impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a
writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book
and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost,
infinitely deferred.63 63. Ibid. Pg. 147
The total existence of writing is revealed: a text is made of multiple

writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations
of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this
multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto
said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations
that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a
text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.64 64. Ibid. Pg.148
Roland Barthes questioned the relevance of the author to the

work, thereby liberating the text from the automatic presumption of its
holding a fixed and unified meaning.’ By this argument the act of writing
becomes one of severance; it is the reader, for Barthes, not the author
who endows a text with its meaning. He understood the assignation
of the link between works and authors, together with the confirmation
of authorial status that it implies, as habitual—something socially Hughes, Architecture
produced and subject to challenge.65 and Authorship. Pg. 7
A common criticism of Barthes’ work has been how his argument

forces him to construct an over- simplified—some would say idealised
or even ‘heroic’—author, whose very existence prior to suffering a
66. Ibid. Pg. 8
Barthesian death may be questioned.66
There appears to be a paradox at the core of the Western concept

of literary authorship; mastery of the materials of authorship in their
passage from idea, inspiration or commission to audience involves a
surrendering of self-mastery—to influences ‘beyond one’s control’
such as divine afflatus or Romantic inspiration—combined with a highly
disciplined command of materials—and therefore self.67 67. Ibid. Pg. 8
While in literature this shift was mortgaged to the development of
post-structural theory in architecture it was related on one hand to
technology particularly the growth of computer technologies, and on the
68. Ibid. Pg. 9 other to the rise of user-oriented—participatory—design.68
69. Carola Ebert, “Post- ‘The Death of the Author’ is interesting for this discussion in that
Mortem: Architectural it presents three protagonists, the author, the reader and the scriptor,
Postmodernism and the
Death of the Author,” among whom the location of significance and meaning of any text is
in Architecture and negotiated. Barthes’ text shifts focus onto the reader, who individually
Authorship, ed. Tim
Anstey, Katja Grillner, recreates the text in the act of reading, and onto a new writer or
and Rolf Hughes scriptor whose writing is based on the intertextual, and thus implicitly
(London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2007). Pg. 45 quotational practice of all reading and writing.69
When one system is superimposed on another, the subject—the

architect—is erased. Barthes wants the critic, or reader in general, to
70. Ibid. Pg. 46
take an active role as producer of meaning.70
We can say that today’s writing has freed itself from the dimension
of expression. It is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its
signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. In
writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it
to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a
an Author.” Pg. 102 space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.71
Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what
he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular
individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing
more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of
72. Ibid. Pg. 102 the dead man in the game of writing.72
None of this is recent; criticism and philosophy took note of the

73. Ibid. Pg. 103 disappearance—or death—of the author some time ago.73
To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in

74. Ibid. Pg. 105 transcendental terms, of both.74
The author function is characteristic of the mode of existence,

75. Ibid. Pg. 108 circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.75
A characteristic of the author function is that it does not develop
44
spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual.76 76. Ibid. Pg. 110
It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as
to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried
out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance.77 77. Ibid. Pg. 112
1. the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional

system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe
of discourses; 2. it does not affect all discourses in the same way
at all times and in all types of civilization; 3. it is not defined by the
spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but rather by
a series of specific and complex operations; 4. it does not refer purely
and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to
several selves, to several subjects positions that can be occupied by
different classes of individuals.78 78. Ibid. Pg. 113
‘Founders of discursivity.’ They are unique in that they are not just
the authors of their own works. They have produced something else:
the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts. Freud
is not just the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and
Their Relation to the Unconscious. Marx is not just the author of the
Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital: they both have established an
endless possibility of discourse. On the other hand, when speaking of
Marx or Freud as founders of discursivity, it is meant, that they made
possible not only a certain number of analogies, but also —and equally
important— a certain number of differences.79 79. Ibid. Pg. 114
What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has

it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for
himself?80 80. Ibid. Pg. 120
Like Barthes, Foucault acknowledges authorship as a social

construction; unlike Barthes, he also suggests that the mechanisms
of authorship are enduring and might usefully reveal the mechanisms
of society. To study how what he termed the ‘author-function’
operates differently across disciplines is to reveal much about such
disciplines, their legitimising institutions and the allegiances in their
discourses. Foucault accordingly historicises the author-function and its
81. Anstey, Grillner, and attachment to varying kinds of texts in different discursive cultures.81
and Authorship. Pg. 7
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single
‘theological’ meaning—the ‘message’ of the Author-God—but a multi-
dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
of the Author.” Pg. 146 innumerable centres of culture.82
A reversal occurred in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The

author function faded away, and the inventor’s name served only to
an Author.” Pg. 109 christen a theorem, proposition, particular effect.83
The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.

As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author.
We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author
is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth
84. Ibid. Pg. 118 and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations.84
85. Ibid. Pg. 118 The author does not precede the work.85
The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman

who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or
less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the
of the Author.” Pg. 143 author ‘confiding’ in us.86
Since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the
regulator of the fictive, a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial
and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property, still, given
the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem
necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity,
an Author.” Pg. 119 and even in existence.87
The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never
original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the
others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish
to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he
thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words
of the Author.” Pg. 146 only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely.88
46
Making good architecture is like learning to speak all over again.
Everything that has already been said is fundamental; all the words
already exist. So they do not have to be created in an inventive way,
but employed in an intentional way. The result is new sentences, which
89. Kersten Geers,
emerge in conjunction with their grammar, and yet never—if done “Intentions, Inventions,”
correctly—end up as complete nonsense.89 Oase (2013). Pg 13
Two important observations. First, that although the subject

of authorship in architecture might seem to be one that has been
projected recently into the limelight, the ambiguities and challenges
that precipitate that emergence are long established. Architecture
as a discipline is arguably defined by the complex issue of how we
define architects as authors; if the issue of how we define authorship
in architecture is currently ‘at stake’, this is merely to acknowledge
that a long-standing ambiguity is again accorded the significance it
deserves for architectural practice. Second, that the new discourse
on architectural authorship, and the new paradigms of authorship
in architecture that are currently being suggested, are neither a
clarification, an advance nor a solution to some traditional and
clearly defined ‘problem.’ Rather, contemporary discussions around
architectural authorship can be read within a complex fabric of
accounts that both react to changing temporal conditions and that Hughes, Architecture
introduce conditions of change.90 and Authorship. Pg. 9
It can be suggested that the complexities unfolding from the

definition of the architect in De re aedificatoria conditioned the way in
which architecture developed as a discipline from the sixteenth, through
the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The class of the decorous
appears to have had a long and lasting fascination for architects, who
habitually frame their arguments around the trope of appropriateness.
The fact that architects during the gestation of and at the birth of
Modernism used a moralised rhetoric of appropriateness, defined in
terms of societal ‘need’, to argue their case, did nothing to undermine
the authority of this category; modern debate and criticism was thus 91. Anstey, “Architecture
and Rhetoric:
played out on a field that, to a certain extent, took the moral authority Persuasion, Context,
of ‘the fitting’ as its given topography.91 Action.” Pg 22
Cedric Price and Colin Rowe are intriguing specifically in relationship
to the question of architecture’s engagement with rhetoric. The lines
of thought developed in their work between 1960 and 1970 can be
seen to operate on three similar fronts: to query what is the nature of
architectural action; to question the sovereignty of the architectural
‘work’; and to challenge the sovereignty of the architect as author of the
92. Ibid. Pg 21 work.92
Cedric Price promoted the idea of architecture as ‘service’ and

which questioned the status of the architect as artist. The career and
architectural rhetoric of the English architect Cedric Price, 1934-2003,
can be seen as emblematic of the period. Price contested the ground
on which architectural actions take place, a challenge made particularly
Hughes, Architecture evident in the body of architectural production—drawings, diagrams
and Authorship. Pg. 10
notes and correspondence—that defines a project like the Fun Palace.93
The Fun Palace was developed by an interdisciplinary team and was

to be a building with an open programme, whose form and organisation
should be steered and temporarily altered by its users. Its authorship
was proclaimed as diffused in relation to the object, therefore, both
in terms of promoting the notion of a team rather than an individual
initiator, and in terms of the hoped-for relation between occupation
and spatial definition in the building. The project was to ‘redesign’ an
invisible topography of contractual and institutional conditions that
surrounds architecture as object. The Fun Palace also questioned the
status of visual imagery as the benchmark for defining architectural
94. Anstey, “Architecture
and Rhetoric:
projects. This seems entirely logical given Price’s position. The rhetorical
Persuasion, Context, control of ‘drawing’ must be seen as one of the principle tools by which
Action.” Pg 24
the traditional hegemony of the architect was maintained.94
Price’s activities began to suggest that traditional architectural

drawing was no longer sufficient for the action of producing
95. Ibid. Pg 24 architecture.95
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City reconfigured the

idea of the ‘project’ produced by the ‘architect figure’ as a category.
This alignment can be seen in one sense as a shift in concern from
96. Ibid. Pg 25 single buildings to the city.96The emphasis on collage readmitted to
48
architectural thought the category of the fragment; and suggested a
sophisticated means to evaluate the happenstance of reality according
to its correspondence with a preconceived ‘projection’ of ideal
architectural forms.97 97. Ibid. Pg 26
Rowe and Koetter shared with other proponents of contextualism

a tendency to define boundaries in the city that reflected forces other
than authorial architectural intention. The emblematic example used to
represent this condition in ‘Collage City’ is the Villa Adriana, Hadrian’s
Villa at Tivoli outside Rome.98 98. Ibid. Pg 26
Like Alberti’s twinning, which relied on the categories of rhetoric,

this identity places ‘context’ as a central issue for architecture.99 99. Ibid. Pg 26
From its resurrection as a term during the 1960s, context was used
to describe the physical, and often specifically historic, surroundings
of a project. It was as a term used within an extremely object-based
interrogation of architecture. Yet it is noteworthy that the discourse on
context and Price’s questioning of the nature of architectural action
developed contemporaneously and that both see the experiential space
around architectural projects on one side the space of institutional and
contractual relations, on the other the physical space of the city—as
profoundly important. In this sense Price’s iconoclastic challenges can
be linked into the emergence of this discourse on context, in which Colin
Rowe’s engagement was central.100 100. Ibid. Pg 25
Price espoused a highly contingent version of authorship in relation

to the control of architectural projects, particularly at the urban level.
Partly this appears ideologically connected with the perception that
architects in the mid-twentieth century pretended an authority over
the built environment that they did not deserve and which did damage.
Partly it appears the result of his acknowledgement of the fluidity of the
context, political and social, in which architectural decisions must be
made.101 101. Ibid. Pg 27
Self-evidently, neither Price nor Rowe had problems with being

an ‘author’ in the latter sense. What is refreshing, both reassuringly
familiar and radical about both Price and Rowe is the way in which they
relax into the realm of rhetoric; they clearly eschew dictatorial authority
102. Ibid. Pg 27 for demonstration.102
Rowe and Koetter suggest that the strategy of bricolage may

present a way to liberate architecture from this restrictive ideology.
For this discussion, they make use of the work of French structural
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and his concept of bricolage. Levi-
103. Carola Ebert,
“Post-Mortem:
Strauss terms bricolage ‘a ‘prior’ rather than primitive activity’ on the
Architectural level of speculation. Rather than a specialist operating from a grand
Death of the Author,”
scheme, the bricoleur is a versatile ‘odd-job-man’ who works with
ibid. Pg. 43 material that is at hand and has already been used.103
104. Claude Lévi- It might be said that the engineer questions the universe while the
Strauss, The Savage
Mind (London: ‘bricoleur’ addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, human endeavours.104
1966). Pg. 19
Rowe and Koetter thus simultaneously rethink the authorial role of

the architect, via the bricoleur, and suggest architectural appropriations
of collage as potential new means of authorship. By arguing for an
105. Ebert, “Post-
incorporation of bricoleur qualities into the role of the architect, Collage
Mortem: Architectural City aims not only for an extended responsiveness to the world but also
Death of the Author.”
for the ability to address problems individually without the need for a
Pg. 44 new meta-theory as ‘blueprint’.105
A close relationship between collage and bricolage is already

suggested by Levi-Strauss’ description of collage as ‘the transposition
of ‘bricolage’ into the realms of contemplation’, and it also resonates
in Werner Oechslin’s critical statement that—despite more obvious
suggestions that the term collage holds for architecture —Collage
City ‘in the best tradition of art history’ uses the term primarily as an
abstraction collage as a state of mind. Collage City also counters the
dominance of formal and functional aspects in canonised Modernism
with a stimulating contemplation of materiality and a sensibility towards
106. Ibid. Pg. 45 surface qualities innate to the visual syntax of collage.106
Rowe and Koetter, like Price, challenged the sovereignty of the

architect at an urban level. Collage City asserted that the line around
any authorial ‘set piece’ in a composition could not be considered to
50
have any sure status of closure—that the region that existed outside
that line, that was defined by the collection of many such lines, was of
equal status for the success of failure of the work. And to take account
of this condition they advanced the model of the architect as bricoleur,
one who reacts to the situation at hand and who, although predisposed
to a take a particular path, can act like ‘a dog straying or a horse
swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle’. The actions of 107. Tim Anstey,
this figure, like those of Price’s architect, are likely to be contingent, a “Architecture and
contingency that has much to do with a specific distrust of unilateral Context, Action,” ibid.
authorial ‘vision’ at the urban level.107 Pg 27
The questioning of the architect’s position in relation to authorship,

authority and representation, which began in the twentieth century
discourse of Collage City and of Cedric Price, appears to have a
valuable legacy. It allows historical conditions to be brought into
perspective and forms the platform for new definitions of architectural
action in the future.108 108. Ibid. Pg 27
With regard to architectural authorship, it is important to note how

postmodernist theories are combined with the practice of montage,
109. Carola Ebert,
and seamlessly developed into a disjunctive approach to architectural “Post-Mortem:
design that is based on the idea of the fragment and on the formulation Architectural
of various strategies for its superimposition, montage or collision with Death of the Author,”
fragmented forms or unexpected programmatic contents.109 ibid. Pg. 42
Collage City, and Bernard Tschumi’s early writings, 1975-1984,

as assembled in his book Architecture and Disjunction, both explicitly
employed modern artistic practices based on fragmentation as a
critique of modern architecture.110 110. Ibid. Pg. 40
A very general notion of montage aligns the term with collage and
assemblage in that it contains ‘preformed natural or manufactured
materials, objects, or fragments’. Peter Bürger characterised avant-
garde artwork by the importance of the key principle of montage, in
which discrepancies and dissonances are imported by way of its being
constructed from fragments that are separated from a contextual origin
and made to take on new relationships.111 111. Ibid. Pg. 41
Tschumi’s works must be seen in the light of surrealist and dadaist
actions, especially because of his regular habit of juxtaposition. His
strategy, then, is to further disjunction, via ‘cross programming’ or
‘transprogramming’, and he establishes a design method based on
fragmentation and montage practices such as irrational combination
112. Ibid. Pg. 42 and superimposition.112
Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette project in Paris in which three different

systems of lines, points and surfaces are each to represent ‘a different
and autonomous system —a text—, whose superimposition onto another
makes impossible any ‘composition’, maintaining differences and
113. Ibid. Pg. 43 refusing ascendancy of any privileged system or organizing element.113
Collage City and, Architecture and Disjunction have in common that

in their critique of architectural Modernism, drawn from innumerable
sources outside the discipline of architecture, they employ fragmentary
Modernist practices for a critical re-affirmation of architecture in the
114. Ibid. Pg. 45 light of the ‘postmodern condition.’114
Tschumi’s theory of architecture assumes a homogeneous

coherence at least for the cultural world. His critique and his
architectural theory are grounded in the seamless applicability of other
discourses’ theories for the discourse of architecture. In the process
of transposition, the content of each theory and its relevance for the
architecture are not questioned, nor is the compatibility of different
115. Ibid. Pg. 48 theories with each other at all addressed.115
Once an esoteric modernist theory, now an ordinary postmodern

practice, the death of the author affects today but one, particular,
116. Carpo, The
Alphabet and the
time-specific category of authors: the author of identical, mechanical
Algorithm. Pg 47 copies—the modern, Albertian author.116
VI
117. Rene Girard,
“Innovation &
Repetition,” in As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, innovation
Architects & Mimetic
Rivalry, ed. Samir
became the god that we are still worshipping today.117 The new
Younes (Winterbourne: cult meant that a new scourge had descended upon the World -
papadakis, 2012). Pg 41
‘stagnation’. Before the eighteenth century, ‘stagnation’ was unknown;
118. Ibid. Pg 42 suddenly, it spread its gloom far and wide.118
52
Is there such a thing as ‘absolute innovation’? 119 119. Ibid. Pg 46
Innovation, from the Latin innovare, innovatio, should signify

renewal, rejuvenation from inside, rather than novelty, which is its
modern meaning in both English and French. Judging from the examples
in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Littré, the word came into
widespread use only in the sixteenth century and, until the eighteenth
century, its connotations were almost uniformly unfavourable.
In the vulgar tongues, as well as in medieval Latin, the word is used

primarily in theology, and it means a departure from what by definition
should not change—religious dogma.120 120. Ibid. Pg 39
Hostility to innovation is what we expect from conservative thinkers,

but we are surprised to find it under the pen of authors whom we
regard as innovators. When Calvin denounces ‘l’appétit et convoitise de
tout innover, changer et remuer’—the appetite and desire to innovate,
change, and stir up everything.121 121. Ibid. Pg 40
A social and political component is present in all this fear of the

new, but something else lies behind it, something religious that is more
archaic and pagan than specifically Christian. The negative view of
innovation reflects an external mediation, a world in which the need
for and the identity of all cultural models is taken for granted. People
mutually accuse each other of being bad imitators, unfaithful to the true
essence of the models. Not until a little later, with the great querelle des
anciens ct des modernes, does the battle shift to the question of which
models are best, the traditional ones or their modern rivals?122 122. Ibid. Pg 40
The reason, for the change in meaning, was the shift away from
theology, and even philosophy, toward science and technology. The
foul smell of heresy finally dissipated and was instantly replaced by the
inebriating vapours of scientific and technical progress.123 123. Ibid. Pg 42
As in most semantic revolutions, rhetoric plays a role, but more than

rhetoric is involved. The world that reviled innovation was changing very
fast, faster, no doubt, than at any previous time in its history, but the
world that exalts innovation has been changing even faster. Our little
revolution coincides with two big ones that have not yet completed their
course: the democratic revolution and the industrial revolution. The
124. Ibid. Pg 42 latter is rooted in a third, the scientific revolution.124
125. Antoine Picon,

In technology and economics, experts usually distinguish between
“Architecture, Innovation ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ by contrasting the new as a mere singularity,
and Tradition,”
Architectural Design 83,
with newness as a spreading phenomenon that changes entire fields of
no. 1 (2013). Pg. 128 practice.125
Invention denotes the moment when the supposed ‘genius’ of

the architect-artist comes to the surface, when new expressions or
solutions appear suddenly, without earlier announcement. Since the
126. Avermaete et al., Renaissance, and certainly since the Enlightenment, the concept of
and Moments of
invention has been associated with the idea of rupture, a breaking away
Invention.” Pg. 2 from traditions or conventions and their forms and practices.126
The negative view of innovation is inseparable from a conception of

the spiritual and intellectual life dominated by stable imitation. Being
the source of eternal truth, of eternal beauty, of eternal goodness,
the models should never change. Only when these transcendental
models are toppled can innovation acquire a positive meaning. External
mediation gives way to a void in which, at least in principle, individuals
127. Girard, “Innovation
and collectives are free to adopt whichever models they prefer and,
& Repetition.” Pg 42 better still, no model at all.127
During the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, as the

passion for innovation intensified, the definition of it became more and
more radical, less and less tolerant of tradition, that is, of imitation.
As it spread from painting to music and to literature, the radical view
of innovation triggered the successive upheavals that we call ‘modern
art.’ A complete break with the past is viewed as the sole achievement
128. Ibid. Pg 43 worthy of a ‘creator’.128
129. Picon,
The past decades have been marked by a strong tendency to
“Architecture, Innovation
and Tradition.” Pg. 129 neglect historical references.129
But why are history and historical consciousness so important?

The answer perhaps lies in the strong self-referential character of
54
the architectural discipline. From the Renaissance to the end of the
eighteenth century, at the time when the doctrine of imitation still
prevailed in the arts, theorists often remarked that whereas painting
and sculpture imitate nature, architecture had a propensity to imitate
itself. Architecture is partly based on the meditation of its former
achievements as well as its shortcomings. Modernism did not break
with this self-reflexive stance, and now modern architecture itself has
become a legacy that must be reinvested with new meaning.130 130. Ibid. Pg. 132
In the case of architecture, self-referentiality does not mean that

external conditions do not matter; to the contrary. 131 131. Ibid. Pg. 132
The relation to the past represents in reality a convenient way for

architectural design to open itself to the challenges of the present
without becoming trapped by its limitations. To be aware of its legacy
makes design more receptive to the unforeseeable future that true
innovation entails. It appears as the necessary stabiliser that makes the
passage from mere novelty to widespread change—from invention to
innovation—possible in the field of design.132 132. Ibid. Pg. 132
Another way to understand the role of history is to recognise

that architecture is as much a tradition as a discipline. A tradition, a
living tradition that is not something static. At each stage it implies
transmission, but also a series of reinterpretations as well as abandons,
the price to pay for innovation.133 133. Ibid. Pg. 133
In its freewheeling rewriting of the past, architecture uses history as

a slingshot into the future. It endlessly re-stages itself, self-consciously
folding its own past into its future, rewriting its own myth into its very
fabric. At the same time it legitimises its new propositions by embedding
them within lineages of existing languages, materials and typologies.
The re-enactment’s repetition of the existing helps to naturalise the
shock of the new, declaring itself an inevitable product of historical
circumstance. Architecture, then, mythologizes its own creation while 134. Sam Jacob, Make
It Real: Architecture
making a historical argument for itself and proposing a future world—all
as Enactment (Strelka
within the substance of its own body.134 Press, 2012). Pg. 7
‘It is easier to imitate than to innovate.’ 135 135. Girard, “Innovation

& Repetition.” Pg 45
This conception is false, its falsity is easier to show in some domains
than in others. The easiest illustration is to be seen in contemporary
market economies. In a vigorous economy, it is a matter of survival,
pure and simple. Business firms must innovate in order to remain
136. Ibid. Pg 45 competitive. 136
Competition, from two Latin words, cum and petere, means to

‘seek together’. What all businessmen seek is profits; they seek them
together with their competitors in the paradoxical relationship that we
137. Ibid. Pg 45 call ‘competitive’.137
By imitating its successful competitors, an endangered firm can

innovate in relation to itself; it will thus catch up with its rivals, but it will
138. Ibid. Pg 46 invent nothing really new.138
The specificity’ of innovation is not denied. But simply observing

that, concretely, in a truly innovative process, it is often so continuous
with imitation that its presence can be discovered only after the fact,
through a process of abstraction that isolates aspects which are
139. Ibid. Pg 46 inseparable from one another.139
All imitators select models whom they regard as superior. In ‘internal

mediation’, models and imitators are equal in every respect except one:
the superior achievement of the one, which motivates the imitation of
the other. This means, of course, that the models are successful at their
imitators’ expense. Unlike external mediation, the internal variety is a
reluctant mimesis that generally goes unrecognized because it hides
140. Ibid. Pg 47 behind a bewildering diversity of masks.140
The tendency to define ‘innovation’ in more and more ‘radical’ and

anti-mimetic terms—the mad escalation that was briefly sketched
earlier—reflects a vast surrender of modern intelligence to this mimetic
pressure, a collective embrace of self-deception which Marx himself, for
all his insights, remarkably exemplifies. Marx sees competitiveness as
an unmitigated evil that can and should be abolished, together with the
free market, the only economic system that, for all its faults, channels
the competitive spirit into constructive efforts instead of exacerbating it
141. Ibid. Pg 48 to the level of physical violence or discouraging it entirely.141
56
The urge to imitate successful rivals is so abhorrent that all forms
of mimesis must be discredited. Instead of re-examining imitation and
discovering its conflictual dimension, the eternal avant-garde has
waged a purely defensive and ultimately seif-destructive war against it.
In the arts, the scorched- earth policies of the recent past have led to a
world in which radical innovation is so free to flourish that there is little
difference between having it everywhere and having it nowhere at all.142 142. Ibid. Pg 49
Most people still try to convince themselves that our ‘arts and
humanities’ will remain forever ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’, fuelled by
‘individualism’, but even the most enthusiastic espousers of recent
trends are beginning to wonder Innovation is still around, they say, but
143. Ibid. Pg 50
its pace is slackening.143
The Latin word innovare implies limited change rather than total
revolution—a combination of continuity and discontinuity. The main
prerequisite for ‘real innovation’ is a minimal respect for the past and a
mastery of its achievements, that is, mimesis.144 144. Ibid. Pg 50
At the beginning of the Modern Age, the power of identical copies

arose from two parallel and almost simultaneous developments: on
the one hand, identicality was an intellectual and cultural ambition of
the Renaissance humanists; on the other, it would soon become the
145. Carpo, The
inevitable by-product of mechanical technologies, which it has remained
Alphabet and the
to this day.145 Algorithm. Pg 44
Inventions in architecture are hardly ever the result of a total 146. Avermaete et al.,
renunciation of the existing.146 and Moments of
Invention.” Pg 2
After Alberti’s cultural revolution, the second wave of identical

copies in architecture came with the industrial revolution, and the mass
production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes,
147. Carpo, The
imprints, or molds. Industrial standardization generates economies of Alphabet and the
scale—so long as all items in a series are the same.147 Algorithm. Pg x
Mechanization was changing the world, and architecture had to

rise to the challenge. Architects should invent new architectural forms,
made to measure for the new tools of mechanical mass production;
and town planners should invent new urban forms, made to measure
for the new tools of mechanical mass transportation. For the rest of
the twentieth century many architects and urbanists did just that.
Oddly, many architects and urbanists are still doing that right now, as
they ignore, or deny, that today’s machines are no longer those that Le
Corbusier and his friends celebrated and sublimated almost a century
148. Ibid. Pg 13 ago.148
The new architectural books in print—manuals, treatises, pattern

books, etc—changed the course of architecture first and foremost
149. Ibid. Pg 13 because of the printed images they contained.149 The most successful
spin-off of this media revolution was the new ‘method’ of the
Renaissance architectural orders—the first international style in the
150. Ibid. Pg 14
history of world architecture.150
The modern power of the identical came to an end with the rise of
digital technologies. All that is digital is variable, and digital variability
goes counter to all the postulates of identicality that have informed the
151. Ibid. Pg X history of Western cultural technologies for the last five centuries.151
The sequential chronology of these three technical ages—the ages

of hand-making, of mechanical making, and of digital making—lends
itself to various interpretations. Some objects were still handmade
well into the mechanical age, and some will still be handmade, or
mechanically made, well into the age of digital making. But, by
and large, the second break in this sequence, the passage from
mechanically made identical copies to digitally generated differential
variations, is happening now. The first break, the transition from
artisanal variability to mechanical identicality, occurred at different
times in the past—depending on the classes of objects and technologies
152. Ibid. Pg 11 one takes into account.152
For centuries the classical tradition was based on the recording,

transmission, and imitation of architectural models. In turn, this
tradition, or transmission, was and still is dependent on the media
technologies that are available, at any given point in time, to record a
153. Ibid. Pg 12 trace of such models and to transmit them across space and time.153
58
The capacity to mass-produce series of no identical items led to a
new range of theoretical and practical issues. The idea of nonstandard
seriality, as this mode of production is often called.154 154. Ibid. Pg 40
Nonstandard seriality, in turn, already contains the seeds of a

potentially different authorial approach. As digital fabrication processes
invite endless design variations —within given technical limits—and
promise to deliver them at no extra cost, the question inevitably arises
as to who is going to design them all.155 155. Ibid. Pg 42
The bottom line seems to be that digital technologies are inherently

and essentially averse to the authorial model that rose to power with
mechanical reproduction, and is now declining with them.156 156. Ibid. Pg 44
The copy must be distinguished from the imitation—which seeks

to act as the original—and plagiarism—which wants to erase or deny
the presence of the original. To copy is to approach the new from
the oblique, to swerve away from traditional notions of authorship,
157. Alex Maymind,
originality, and creativity. The copycat works as an editor, a “Copycat,” Conditions,
choreographer, and a connoisseur. Of primary importance to the copycat no. 2 (2009). Accessed
November 15, 2013,
is how to pick and choose, remix, blend, add, shake, share, crop, and http://alexmaymind.
cut.157 com/Copycat Pg. 2
Whether at the scale of copying a mullion detail, copying an

elusive style, copying a theoretical idea, copying a method, copying
unknowingly, copying as serial repetition, to copying as appropriation,
quotation, and sublimation, all the way to copying a building, and the
exportation of cultural artifacts, copying is ingrained in the very nature
of architectural culture. Copying liberates architecture from proliferating
platitudes, endless repetition of popular clichés, and antiquated
psychological limitations.158 158. Ibid. Pg 2
The copycat believes that the very notion of the original has become
out of sync with today’s multivalent culture and that instead a work
is never closed or complete but can continue to move, update and
evolve.159 159. Ibid. Pg 2
At any given moment architecture projects its historical situation—

the great teeming mass of narratives that prefigured its existence—into
160. Jacob, Make It the contemporary world. And in doing so it fundamentally rewrites that
Real: Architecture as
Enactment. Pg. 5 history, splicing and sewing the narratives together to make a radical
new proposition for the future.160
In contrast to written history, architecture’s victorious narrative

manifests itself as reality. It not only represents and illustrates this
fictional history but physically embodies it, playing it out through
161. Ibid. Pg. 5 substance, space and programme.161
In Greek architecture too we can read architecture’s compulsion to

re-enact. Not only is the Egyptian column re-staged in the Doric, Ionic
and Corinthian orders, but re-enactment generates the entire language
of classical architecture through the re-staging of primitive timber
162. Ibid. Pg. 5 Greek temples.162
VII

in Ezra Pound’s ‘Make it new!’ or sounds in the futurists’ promise
to destroy the museums that cover Italy as though ‘with countless
cemeteries.’ More than a rejection or dissolution of the past, avant-
163. Krauss, “The
Originality of the Avant-
garde originality is conceived as a literal origin, a beginning from ground
Garde.” Pg 157 zero, a birth.163
Now, if the very notion of the avant-garde can be seen as a function

of the discourse of originality, the actual practice of vanguard art tends
to reveal that ‘originality’ is a working assumption that itself emerges
from a ground of repetition and recurrence. One figure, drawn from
avant-garde practice in the visual arts, provides an example. This figure
164. Ibid. Pg 157 is the grid.164
In saying that the grid condemns artists not to originality but to

repetition, it is not suggested a negative description of their work.
Instead trying to focus on a pair of terms—originality and repetition—and
to look at their coupling unprejudicially; for within the instance we are
examining, these two terms seem bound together in a kind of aesthetic
60
economy, interdependent and mutually sustaining, although the one—
originality—is the valorized term and the other—repetition or copy or
reduplication—is discredited.165 165. Ibid. Pg 160
We can see that modernism and the avant-garde are functions of

what we could call the discourse of originality, and that that discourse
serves much wider interests—and is thus fuelled by more diverse
institutions—than the restricted circle of professional art-making. The
theme of originality, encompassing as it does the notions of authenticity,
originals, and origins, is the shared discursive practice of the museum,
the historian, and the maker of art.166 166. Ibid. Pg 162
What would it look like not to repress the concept of the copy?
What would it look like to produce a work that acted out the discourse
of reproductions without originals, that discourse which could only
operate in Mondrian’s work as the inevitable subversion of his purpose,
the residue of representationality that he could not sufficiently purge
from the domain of his painting? The answer to this, or at least one
answer, is that it would look like a certain kind of play with the notions
of photographic reproduction that begins in the silkscreen canvases of
Robert Rauschenberg and has recently flowered in the work of a group
of younger artists whose production has been identified by the critical
term pictures.167 167. Ibid. Pg 168
Roland Barthes. In his characterization, in S/Z, of the realist as

certainly not a copyist from nature, but rather a ‘pasticher,’ or someone
who makes copies of copies. As Barthes says:
To depict is to . . . refer not from a language to a referent, but from

one code to another. Thus realism consists not in copying the real but in
copying a —depicted— copy. . . . Through secondary mimesis [realism]
copies what is already a copy.168 168. Ibid. Pg 168
In deconstructing the sister notions of origin and originality,

postmodernism establishes a schism between itself and the conceptual
domain of the avant-garde, looking back at it from across a gulf that in
turn establishes a historical divide.169 169. Ibid. Pg 170
Invention in architecture involves an engagement with traditions,
170. Avermaete et al., which resurface and become visible in the new. Invention cannot be
and Moments of
separated from a deep, if intuitive knowledge of the repository of formal
Invention.” Pg. 4 and technical solutions that an architect inherits.170
In a culture that treats architecture as purveyor of entertaining

images, it could be said that the need for invention is more than
amply satisfied. Creating architecture is not served by looking for
the exceptional. On the contrary, invention in architecture thrives on
a precise understanding of precedents, technical requirements and
171. Ibid. Pg. 8 conventions.171
A characterisation of what ‘true innovation’ means in architecture,

is namely a reflexive stance on history and tradition. Such a stance
constitutes one of the prerequisites of long-term design innovation.
172. Picon,
Without it, architectural change remains at the level of superficial trend
and Tradition.” Pg. 129 and fashion.172
173. Avermaete et al., Re-discovering architecture itself through the generation of

and Moments of knowledge paired with intellectual independence, and responsibility.173
Invention.” Pg. 8
174. Irénée Scalbert, Architecture has become a pleasing and often absurd diversion
“Invetion and the
Market,” ibid.Pg. 140
within the larger plot of modernity.174
The market, it appears, has been more favourable to the creation of

175. Ibid.Pg. 140 successful townscapes than it has to the design of great buildings.175
A warning sign of collapse was the relentless search for novelty.

More and more new varieties came on the market to challenge
176. Ibid.Pg. 140 established favourites.176
177. Simon O’Sullivan Today this euphoria of creation operates in the everyday, and is a
and Stephen Zepke,
“Introduction,” in
favoured buzz-word of capitalism’s new entrepreneurial class.177
Deleuze, Guattari
and the Production of The production of the new proposes a schizo-aesthetics against
the New (Continuum
International Publishing schizo-capital, a logic of sensation against a logic of profit, embodied
Group, 2008).Pg. 4 in strategies succinctly summarized by Deleuze, and extendable to all
178. Ibid.Pg. 9 strategies of resistance.178
62
The question then is not whether capitalism also colonizes the 179. O’Sullivan, “The
Production of the New
virtual/produces the new—it most certainly does—but rather what types and the Care of the
of relationship might there be with the virtual, with the new and so on.179 Self.” Pg 97
Paradoxically, our culture is one of both instant gratification

generated by the media saturation of images and simultaneously one
in which the original, unique, and new object is regarded as the sign
of progress. While architecture has already passed through a period
where copying and engaging history was a central design strategy and
a major theoretical issue, currently questions of why have never been 180. Maymind,
overshadowed as much by more recently pressing questions of how.180 “Copycat.” Pg 2
Today, copying seeks to emancipate potential futures and not

archaeologize the past.181 181. Ibid. Pg 2
Copying problematizes the linear progression of history, and brings

forth questions in relation to historicism and historiography. The
question is not one of reference—i.e. from where did you copy? —but one
of affects—what is the new result and for whom?182 182. Ibid. Pg 2
Copying today wants to repeat the lessons of the past without being
simply repetitive. Instead, copying today begs the question: what kind
of repetition can be theorized that is not simply emulative, historicist, or
pastiche?183 183. Ibid. Pg 3
Not only can anyone copy, everyone already has copied. Yet to be a
copycat is to not simply copy but to think and benefit from copying in an
unexpected way.184 184. Ibid. Pg 3
Emancipate history into an active source.185 185. Ibid. Pg 3
To copy is not to refuse the creative potential of our discipline but to

engage it wholeheartedly.186 186. Ibid. Pg 3
Copying once worked best after dark, when the lights were off and
no one could see you. Now it thrives in broad daylight.187 187. Ibid. Pg 3
Through the unfolding of architectural history we see culturally,

technologically or programmatically redundant fragments of
188. Jacob, Make It architecture re-enacted. In each case, this re-enactment of a pre-
Enactment. Pg. 6 existing image is a radical new iteration.188
Fast-forwarding through history, we see Greek architectural

language stretched around new Roman typologies. We see
architecture’s classical language resurrected—and re-invented—to
ennoble and legitimise Renaissance culture. We see medieval forms
of construction re-enacted by the arts and crafts movement as a
means of opposition to the industrial revolution—a visual, material
and structural analogue to its proto-socialist politics. And we see
modernism’s appropriation of the language of industrial buildings, where
the grain stores of Buffalo, for example, are cited by Le Corbusier as
‘the magnificent first fruits of the new age’. Modernism’s re-performing
of industrial architecture’s logics of mechanisation and efficiency
operated as a polemic. First it was a way of undermining the social and
political hierarchies that Beaux-Arts architecture represented. Secondly
it allowed modernism to lay claim to a pre-existing machine aesthetic,
to propose an architecture already embedded in the contemporary
189. Ibid. Pg. 7 condition it described.189
What architecture chooses to re-enact, as well as the manner of its

190. Ibid. Pg. 6 re-enactment, constitutes an ideological statement.190
VIII
191. Daniel W. Smith,

The production of the new, that is, the production of a new
“Deleuze and the
Production of the New,” difference.191
in Deleuze, Guattari
and the Production of
the New, ed. Simon The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains
O’Sullivan and Stephen forever new, just as the established was always established from the
Zepke (Continuum
International Publishing outset, even if a certain amount of empirical time was necessary for this
Group, 2008). Pg. 153 to be recognized. What becomes established with the new is precisely
192. Gilles Deleuze,
not the new. For the new—in other words, difference—calls forth forces
Difference and in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow,
Repetition (Columbia
but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and
Pg. 136 unrecognizable terra incognita.192
For Deleuze, the conditions of the new can be found only in a
64
principle of difference-or more strongly, in a metaphysics of difference. 193. Smith, “Deleuze
and the Production of
If identity—A is A—were the primary principle, that is, if identities were the New.” Pg. 151
already pre-given, then there would in principle be no production of the
new—no new differences.193
If the new means ‘what did not exist earlier’ then everything is new.
On the other hand, one can say with almost equal assurance, and with
the writer of Ecclesiastes (1 :9-10), that there is nothing new under the
sun: the dawn of today was just like the dawn of yesterday, and simply
brings with it more of the same.194 194. Ibid. Pg. 151
The concept of the new in Deleuze, which resists this threat,

attempts to lay out the conditions under which novelty itself would
become a fundamental ontological concept—Being = Difference = the
New.195 195. Ibid. Pg. 151
In Deleuze’s theory of repetition—temporal synthesis—the present

plays the role of the foundation, the pure past is the ground, but the
future the ungrounded or unconditioned, that is, the condition of the
new.196 196. Ibid. Pg. 154
When a differential relation reciprocally determines two—or

more—virtual elements, it produces what is called a singularity, a
singular point.197 For Deleuze, the question ‘What is singular and what 197. Ibid. Pg. 156
is ordinary?’ is one of the fundamental questions posed in Deleuze’s

ontology, since, in a general sense, one could say that ‘everything is
ordinary!’ as much as one can say that ‘everything is singular!’198 198. Ibid. Pg. 157
An assemblage of ordinary and singular points constitutes

what Deleuze calls a multiplicity—a third concept. The singularities
are precisely those points where something ‘happens’ within the
multiplicity.199 199. Ibid. Pg. 156
At the very least, Deleuze is breaking with a long tradition which

defined things in terms of an essence or a substance—that is, in terms
of an identity. He replaces the traditional concept of substance with the
concept of multiplicity, and replaces the concept of essence with the
concept of the event.200 200. Ibid. Pg. 157
The problem of causality stems from the fact that an event A
causes event B, B causes C, C causes D and so on, and that this causal
network stretches indefinitely in all directions. If we could grasp the
totality of these series, we would have the World. But in fact, we cannot
grasp this infinite totality. The true object of the idea of the world is
precisely this problem, this causal nexus. When, rather than grasping
it as a problem, we instead think of it as an object —the World—and
start posing questions about this object—’Is it bounded or endless?’
‘Is it eternal or did it have a beginning?’—, we are in the domain of a
201. Ibid. Pg. 158 transcendental illusion, prey to a false problem.201
A certain depth, or move beyond the horizontal plane of matter—the

202. Simon O’Sullivan, ‘what-is’. Put simply, the new involves accessing something outside’
“The Production of the
New and the Care of the the present plane of existence. The new might be rephrased here
Self,” ibid., ed. Simon as freedom, freedom from habit and from he present plane of purely
O’Sullivan and Stephen
Zepke. Pg 92 utilitarian interests.202
In this place the new—as it is figured in science, or indeed, the

humanities—is really just more of the same—more ‘knowledge’ as
203. Ibid. Pg 94 it were.203Through the unfolding of architectural history we see
culturally, technologically or programmatically redundant fragments
204. Jacob, Make It
of architecture re-enacted. In each case, this re-enactment of a pre-
Enactment. Pg. 6 existing image is a radical new iteration.204
Architecture constantly repeats itself, re-enacts its own body

in order to create itself. It repeats typologically, where genres of
programme such as house or tower block are reiterated countless times.
Even in architecture’s most novel formations, fundamental architectonic
205. Ibid. Pg. 23 forms repeat: floor, wall, door and so on.205
We might even say that architecture only achieves its reality through
replication, when its forms, aesthetics or materiality appear in multiple
sites, to the point where its qualities achieve total ubiquity—and
206. Ibid. Pg. 24 architecture becomes a totalised environment on a planetary scale.206
When Mies said it was better to be good than original, perhaps he

meant that originality is a problem because it impairs architecture’s
ability to provide a totalising system for the world, whereas repetition
66
sharpens architecture’s innately mimetic core.207 207. Ibid. Pg. 24
Architecture’s repetitive mode turns away from endless creativity,

preferring instead the endless cycle of re-enactment that has the same
quality as any ritual.208 208. Ibid. Pg. 24
This repetitive mode is not explicitly one of re-enactment. That

is to say, repetition is less explicit than re-enactment, in that it does
not attempt to manufacture a copy or a replica of a past event or
structure. In fact, there is no relationship of original to copy, of referent
to reference, or even of signifier to signified—they are all equivalents, all
enactments of each other.209 209. Ibid. Pg. 26
Once may be exceptional, twice is coincidence, three or more

and the serial nature of architecture begins to operate, each
iteration reinforcing its fabrication of reality, its manufacture of the
commonplace.210 210. Ibid. Pg. 26
Architecture’s repetitive and mimetic mode allows it to make an

image of itself. As it repeats itself, architecture uses building as a
medium to represent architecture. Repetition, then, does not necessarily
condemn us to the production of direct simulations, but can be a
method by which radical change is achieved.211 211. Ibid. Pg. 27
Is it enough to affirm a recombination of matter in order to produce

something new? For example, a new art—or indeed a new subjectivity?
Would this not merely involve playing with that which is already here,
already has reality as it were? Or, following Deleuze, would not such a 212. O’Sullivan, “The
recombination involve playing with that which is ‘possible’, the latter and the Care of the
being a mirror-image or isotope of the real.212 Self.” Pg 91
Architecture’s own history is one of radical re-enactment of its own

pasts—the Egyptian stone version of the wooden column, for example.
But architecture’s mode of repetition is not only confined to its past,
nor to exceptional examples. In the way that it repeats an image of
an actual ceiling, and in its modular repetition to form this image, it
213. Jacob, Make It
presents us with an example of how architecture uses repetition to Real: Architecture as
become real. 213 Enactment. Pg. 23
IX
If the sovereign architect is a myth—architectural actions are

carried out in, and are subject to, a technical, political and institutional
topography which conditions such actions—and if the self-sufficiency of
the project asserted by modernism is a myth—projects have an equally
large responsibility to the surroundings they cannot control as they
214. Anstey, do to the contents which they can—then in both cases the explosion
“Architecture and of this myth is based on the significance of the surroundings for any
Context, Action.” Pg. 26 architectural action.214
The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.

As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author.
We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author
is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth
an Author.” Pg. 118 and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations.215
216. Ibid. Pg. 118 The author does not precede the work.216
We are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a

perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him
function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author
is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite
of his historically real function. When a historically given function is
represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.
The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the
217. Ibid. Pg. 119 manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.217
218. Avermaete et al., In a culture that treats architecture as purveyor of entertaining

“Editorial, Architecture images, it could be said that the need for invention is more than amply
and Moments of
Invention.” Pg. 8 satisfied.218
Creating architecture is not served by looking for the exceptional. On

the contrary, invention in architecture thrives on a precise understanding
of precedents, technical requirements and conventions. Re-discovering
architecture itself through the generation of knowledge paired with
219. Ibid. Pg. 8 intellectual independence, and responsibility.219
Invention in architecture involves an engagement with traditions,
68
which resurface and become visible in the new. Invention cannot be 220. Ibid. Pg. 4
separated from a deep, if intuitive knowledge of the repository of formal

and technical solutions that an architect inherits.220
The band, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of
inscription—and not of expression—traces a field without origin - or
221. Barthes, “The
which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which Death of the Author.”
ceaselessly calls into question all origins.221 Pg. 146
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single

‘theological’ meaning—the ‘message’ of the Author- God—but a multi-
dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the
innumerable centres of culture.222 222. Ibid. Pg. 146
The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never
original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the
others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish
to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he
thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words
only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely…223 223. Ibid. Pg. 146
In the case of architecture, self-referentiality does not mean that 224. Picon,
external conditions do not matter; to the contrary. 224 and Tradition.” Pg. 132
The relation to the past represents in reality a convenient way for

architectural design to open itself to the challenges of the present
without becoming trapped by its limitations. To be aware of its legacy
makes design more receptive to the unforeseeable future that ‘true
innovation’ entails. It appears as the necessary stabiliser that makes
the passage from mere novelty to widespread change—from invention to
innovation—possible in the field of design.225 225. Ibid. Pg. 132
In this place the new—as it is figured in science, or indeed, the 226. O’Sullivan, “The
humanities—is really just more of the same—more ‘knowledge’ as it and the Care of the
were.226 Self.” Pg 94
227. Carpo, The

Poggio and Alberti were active wikipedists of the late scribal age.227 Alphabet and the
Algorithm. Pg 24
TYPE & TYPOLOGY EXPANDED
A Taxonomy of Architecture
1. Gerhard Richter, The better we know tradition—i.e., ourselves—and the
Gerhard Richter: Text:
Writings, Interviews more responsibly we deal with it, the better things
and Letters, 1961-2007 we shall make similar, and the better things we shall
(Thames & Hudson,
2009). Pg 129 make different.
Gerhard Richter1
2. Werner Oechslin, The discussion of typology was at the front ranks in architectural
“Premises for the
Resumption of the circles in the 1960s and early 1970s, but has lately fallen back to the
Discussion of Typology,” second echelon.2
assemblage, no. 1
(1986). Pg 37
Crisis, sustainability and parametricism now take all the headlines
instead.
Over the past years, architecture has lost much of the historical
knowledge by which it formerly understood not just itself, but the
3. Brett Steele, “Going whole world around it. Architecture’s greatest forms of knowledge and
against Type,” in
Working in Series,
expertise have always been those related to its own disciplinary history.
ed. Christopher M. For 2,000 years, from the Ten Books of Vitruvius, historical knowledge
Lee and Kapil Gupta
(London: Architectural
was embedded within a decidedly iterative and serial embodiment of
Association, 2011). Pg. 2 architectural design.3
It seems that the question of type and typology could become

4. Marina Lathouri, extremely effective if it is rethought in terms of 4 an expanded taxonomy
“The City as a Project:
Types, Typical Objects of architecture. Recognising the generative potential of thinking in
and Typologies,” groups and at the same time considering the projective capability of the
no. 1 (2011). Pg 29 single case, example, model or archetype.
II
A work of architecture can be seen as belonging to a class of

repeated objects, characterized, like a class of tools or instruments,
5. Rafael Moneo, “On
by some general attributes. It can be said that the essence of the
Typology,” Oppositions
13, no. 1 (1978). Pg 23 architectural object lies in its repeatability.5
72
To understand the question of type is to understand the nature of
the architectural object today,6 whereas to raise the question of typology 6. Ibid. Pg 44
in architecture is to raise a question of the nature of the architectural

work itself. To answer it means, for each generation, a redefinition of
the essence of architecture and an explanation of all its attendant
problems. This in turn requires the establishment of a theory, whose first
question must be, what kind of object is a work of architecture? This
question ultimately has to return to the concept of type.7 7. Ibid. Pg 23
Thinking through type allows the architect to reach the essence of 8. Christopher M. Lee,
“Working in Series,
the element in question, rather than using it as a model to be copied. Towards an Operative
This affirmation for the essence or idea draws attention to type as a Theory of Type,” in
Working in Series,
primarily cultural and aesthetic construct it is abstract and constitutes ed. Christopher M.
a form of critical reasoning.8 Lee and Kapil Gupta
(London: Architectural
Association, 2011). Pg 5
III
9. Moneo, “On Typology.”
What is then type and typology? Type can most simply be defined Pg 23
as a concept which describes a group of objects characterized by the
10. Christopher M.
same formal structure,9 and typology is the discourse, theory, treatise— Lee and Sam Jacoby,
method—or science of type.10 “Typological Urbanism
and the Idea of the City,”
Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy first introduced the no. 1 (2011). Pg. 17
idea of type in the architectural discourse. He wrote in his dictionary, 11. Samir Younés,
the word type presents less the image of a thing to copy or imitate The True, the Fictive,
and the Real: The
competely, than the idea of an element which must itself serve as a rule Historical Dictionary
for the model.11 of Architecture of
Quatremère De Quincy
(Papadakis, 1999).
Type derives from the Greek word typos, a word which according Pg. 254
to general acceptance, and consequently applicable to many nuances

or variaties of the same idea, expresses what is understood by model,
matrix, impession, mould, figure, in relief or in bas relief.12 12. Ibid. Pg. 254
Type consequently is an element, an object, a thing that embodies 13. Lee and Jacoby,
“Typological Urbanism
the idea. Type is abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and and the Idea of the City.”
literal.13 Pg. 19
It is fundamentally based on the possibility of grouping objects by
A TAXONOMY OF ARCHITECTURE 73
14. Moneo, “On certain inherent structural similarities. It might even be said that type
Typology.” Pg 23
means the act of thinking in groups.14
The ‘type’ therefore, is formed through a process of reducing

a complex of formal variants to a common root form. It has to be
15. Giulio Carlo Argan, understood as the interior structure of a form or as a principle which
On the Typology of
contains the possibility of infinite formal variation and further structural
Architecture (1963).
Pg 565 modification of the ‘type’ Itself.15
For Quatremère the concept of type-enabled architecture to

reconstruct its links with the past, forming a kind of metaphorical
16. Moneo, “On
connection with the moment when man, for the first time, confronted
Typology.” Pg 28 the problem of architecture and identified it in a form.16
17. Anthony Vidler, He successfully introduced the neo-platonic theory into the tradition
“The Idea of Type: The
Transformation of the of neo-classicism by the 1830’s; for him the eternal type of architecture
Academic Ideal, 1750- was the primitive hut, and its perfect achievement the Greek temple.
1830,” in Oppositions
Reader, ed. K. Michael The type theory of Durand, on the other hand, stressed the productive
Hays (Princeton capacity of rules and elements according to programs inductively
Architectural Press,
1998). Pg. 437 defined.17
Quatremère drawing upon Plato’s theory of art, goes on to define

18. Lee, “Working in the notion of idea more as an ideal, and this idea—that must serve as
Series, Towards an
Operative Theory of
the rule to the model—compels the creative process to imitate the idea
Type.” Pg 5 and to strive for the ideal.18 The type was thus intimately related with
19. Moneo, “On
“needs and nature.” “In spite of the industrious spirit which looks for
Typology.” Pg 28 innovation in objects.”19
Architecture has always recurred to studies of language from

Alberti’s translation of rhetoric procedures to the production of
architecture, to Quatremère’s notion of type. The concept of type in
20. Lathouri, “The City architecture has a function inherently related to the one of language
as a Project: Types,
wherein type enables a manner in which to name and describe the
Typical Objects and
Typologies.” Pg 24 artefact, primarily as part of a group of objects.20
The very act of naming the architectural object is also a process

that from the nature of language is forced to typify. Type, implies the
21. Moneo, “On idea of change, or of transformation,21 and operates something like a
Typology.” Pg 24
74
literary metaphor.22 22. Anthony Vidler,
“The Third Typology,”
in Architecture Theory
Architecture, however—the world of objects created by since 1968, ed. K
Michael Hays (The MIT
architecture—is not only described by types, it is also produced through Press, 2000). Pg 286
them.23 23. Moneo, “On
Typology.” Pg 23
Based in this way on history, nature, and use, the type had to be
distinguished from the model—the mechanical reproduction of an
object.24 24. Ibid. Pg 28
According to Quatrèmere, the idea of type —the originating reason 25. Younés, The True,
the Fictive, and the Real:
of a thing—which cannot command nor furnish the motif of an exact The Historical Dictionary
similitude, is confused, with the idea of model—the complete thing— of Architecture of
Quatremère De Quincy.
which compels a formal resemblance.25 Pg. 255
Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand develops the idea of the ‘model’, in his

typological design method of the Precis des lecons. For Durand, the first
aim of architecture is no longer the imitation of nature or the search for 26. Moneo, “On
pleasure and artistic satisfaction, but composition or ‘disposition.’26 Typology.” Pg 28
Composition is the tool by which the architect deals with the variety
of programs offered by the new society; a theory of composition is
needed to provide an instrument capable of coping with a diversity that,
with difficulty, can be reduced to known types.27 27. Ibid. Pg 28
According to Durand, the architect disposes of elements—columns,

pillars, foundations, vaults, and so on—which have taken form and
proportion through their relationship with material and with use.
These elements, argues Durand must be freed from the tyranny of the
Orders; the classical orders should be seen as mere decoration. Having
established the elements firmly through use and material, Durand says
that the architect’s task is to combine these elements, generating
more complex entities, the parts of which will—at the end, through the
composition—be assembled in a single building. These parts, ordered
and presented like a repertoire of models, constitute the materials
available to the architect. By using these parts, the architect can
achieve architecture through composition and still retain responsibility
for final unity—a classical attribute that Durand does not deny to the
28. Ibid. Pg 29 building.28
The old definition of type, the original reason for form in

architecture, was transformed by Durand into a method of composition
based on a generic geometry of axis superimposed on the grid. The
connection between type and form disappeared. Both mechanisms—the
axis and the grid—are essentially contrary to Quatremère’s idea of type
as based on elemental and primitive forms. Type had become a mere
29. Ibid. Pg 32 compositional and schematic device.29
Durand does not speak only of a “geometrical reduction of

architecture.” On the contrary, he is concerned with clarifying the
30. Oechslin, “Premises relationship in architecture between a concrete—historically—existing
for the Resumption
of the Discussion of
typology and the general form based on the universal laws of
Typology.” Pg 50 geometry.30
Durand attempts to establish a systematic method of classifying

buildings according to genres and abstract them into diagrams. This
31. Lee and Jacoby, notion of type as model, graphically reducible to diagrams, introduced
and the Idea of the City.”
precepts that are fundamental to working typologically: precedents,
Pg. 19 classification, taxonomy, repetition, differentiation and reinvention.31
Describing the ends of architectural activity—the social needs—

Durand, began the nineteenth century project of typological
construction on the basis of the inner structure or programmatic
functioning of things. He nevertheless permitted architecture for the
32. Vidler, “The
first time to think of its autonomous, technical existence in the full
Idea of Type: The consciousness of the absolute relativity of that existence to social
Transformation of the
Academic Ideal, 1750-
development. Thus it became possible for architecture to predict its own
1830.” Pg. 452 death.32
Signifying a process as much as an object, type claimed a functional

justification as well as an active role in the process of design. It was
in these terms that it became extraordinarily evocative in late 19th and
33. Lathouri, “The City early 20th century. Not a fixed ideal to imitate or aspire to, but instead a
Typical Objects and
historically contingent idea, subjected to functional and programmatic
Typologies.” Pg 25 changes.33
76
The final effect of Durand’s system was in a very real way 34. Vidler, “The
Idea of Type: The
to introduce, however unwittingly, the concept of historicity into Transformation of the
architecture.34 Academic Ideal, 1750-
1830.” Pg. 452
IV
Anthony Vidler outlined three critical moments in the history and

theory of architecture when the question of type was raised to revalidate
and renew the discipline of architecture: in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, the legitimization was found in nature to sustain
35. Christopher M. Lee,
the doctrine of imitation; in the early twentieth century, it was in the “The Fourth Typology:
processes of industrial production; and in the 1970s the historical city— Dominant Type and the
Idea of the City” (Phd.
both as concept and artifact—became the site for this revalidation and Diss, Berlage Institute
renewal.35 and TUDelft, 2012). Pg. 1
From the middle of the eighteenth century three dominant

typologies have served to legitimize the production of architecture: The
first returned architecture to its natural origins—a model of primitive
shelter—seen not simply as historical explanation of the derivation of
the orders but as a guiding principle, equivalent to that proposed by
Newton for the physical universe. The second, emerging as a result
of the Industrial Revolution, assimilated architecture to the world of
machine production, finding the essential nature of a building to reside
in the artificial world of engines. Laugier’s primitive hut and Bentham’s
Panopticon stand at the beginning of the modern era as the paradigms 36. Vidler, “The Third
of these two typologies.36 Typology.” Pg 288
The second typology of modern architecture emerged toward the

end of the nineteenth century, after the takeoff of the Second Industrial
Revolution; it grew out of the need to confront the question of mass- 37. Ibid. Pg 290
production, and more particularly the mass-production of machines by 38. “The Idea of Type:
The Transformation of
machines.37 The classical ideal type was thus, by 1927, firmly wedded to the Academic Ideal,
the cause and processes of mass production.38 1750-1830.” Pg. 437
With the third typology, as exemplified in the work of the new

Rationalists, however, there is no attempt at validation. Columns,
houses, and urban spaces, while linked in an unbreakable chain of
continuity, refer only to their own nature as architectural elements, and
their geometries are neither naturalistic nor technical but essentially
architectural. It is clear that the nature referred to in these recent
designs is no more nor less than the nature of the city itself, emptied of
39. “The Third
specific social content from any particular time and allowed to speak
Typology.” Pg 291 simply of its own formal condition.39
When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new sensibility

sought the renovation of architecture, its first point of attack was the
academic theory of architecture established in the nineteenth century.
The theoreticians of the Modern Movement rejected the idea of type as
it had been understood in the nineteenth century, for to them it meant
40. Moneo, “On immobility, a set of restrictions imposed on the creator who must, they
Typology.” Pg 32 posited, be able to act with complete freedom on the object.40
Introducing typology to design practice would not—as, for example,

Bruno Zevi seems to do—replace the creativity of the design process
that would necessarily follow, but rather would merely set out more
demanding conditions and premises. The self-evident interaction with
these conditions has been lost to the architect in the new myth of
the unbound desire for invention—even the doctrine of mimesis had
41. Oechslin, “Premises decisively limited this! This myth leaves the architect wholely at a
for the Resumption loss, so that architecture is then surrendered ever more completely to
Typology.” Pg 51 accidents and to forces foreign to architecture itself.41
Architects now looked to the example of scientists in their attempt

to describe the world in a new way. A new architecture must offer a
new language, they believed, a new description of the physical space
42. Moneo, “On
in which man lives. In this new field the concept of type was something
Typology.” Pg 32 quite alien and unessential.42 Architecture, in its final apotheosis of
mechanical progress, was consumed by the very process it sought
to control for its own ends. With it, the city, as artifact and polis,
disappeared as well. In the first two typologies of modern architecture
we can identify a common base, resting on the need to legitimize
architecture as a “natural” phenomenon and a development of the
natural analogy that corresponded very directly to the development of
43. Vidler, “The Third
Typology.” Pg 291 production itself.43
78
Modern Movement architects wanted to offer a new image of
architecture to the society that produced it, an image that reflected
the new industrialized world created by that society. This meant that a
mass- production system had to be introduced into architecture, thus
displacing the quality of singularity and uniqueness of the traditional
architectural “object.” Industry required repetition, series; the new
architecture could be pre-cast. Now the word type—in its primary and
original sense of permitting the exact reproduction of a model—was
transformed from an abstraction to a reality in architecture, by virtue of 44. Moneo, “On
industry; type had become prototype.44 Typology.” Pg 33
Functionalism-the cause/effect relationship between requirements

and form seemed to provide the rules for architecture without recourse
to precedents, without need for the historical concept of type. And,
although functionalist theory was not necessarily coincident with the
other attitudes already described, all had in common the rejection of the
past as a form of knowledge in architecture.45 45. Ibid. Pg 35
The ethical value of the Modernist type consisted in the combination 46. Lathouri, “The City
of the ideal of architectural perfection with the laws of economy and the Typical Objects and
reality of mass production46 Typologies.” Pg 25
The doctrine embedded in the modern movement, consists of a 47. Alan Colquhoun,
“Typology and Design
tension of two apparently contradictory ideas—biotechnical determinism Method,” Perspecta
on the one hand, and free expression on the other.47 (1969). Pg 73
The removal of the type from the artistic process of mimesis shows— 48. Oechslin, “Premises
for the Resumption
though admittedly not as radically or as clearly as in Zevi—the rejection of the Discussion of
of the corresponding creative process.48 Typology.” Pg 41
The exclusion by modern architectural theory of typologies, and

its belief in the freedom of the intuition, can at any rate be partially
explained by the general theory of expression. Expressionist theory
rejected all historical manifestations of art, just as modern architectural 49. Colquhoun,
“Typology and Design
theory rejected all historical forms of architecture.49 Method.” Pg 73
VI
Throughout the 1970s the writings of Rossi and others on typology

ended up being morphed into various kinds of contextualism that sought
above all a justifiable fit between architectural form and its real—or
50. Steele, “Going
imagined—historical setting - a condition that quickly devolved into a
against Type.” Pg. 3 weakened architectural historicism.50
Now it is also true, however, that in Italian discussions of typology,

such positions have been worked out, in part independently. And
as a result, it is precisely in these discussions—specifically within
the so-called rationalist tradition—that history as a problem has
51. Oechslin, “Premises been rediscovered, and in a much more clearly refined way than
for the Resumption
postmodernism is able to manage, relying as it does on a superficial
Typology.” Pg 44 conception of mimesis, as invoked by Argan, or on mere imitation.51

In the case of Robert Venturi, type is reduced to image, or better, the
image is the type, in the belief that through images communication is
achieved. As such, the type-image is more concerned with recognition
than with structure. The result is an architecture in which a unifying
image is recognized whose elements belong clearly to architectural
history, but in which the classic interdependence of the elements is
definitively lost. The type as inner formal structure has disappeared, and
as single architectural elements take on the value of type-images, each
52. Moneo, “On
becomes available to be considered in its singleness as an independent
Typology.” Pg 39 fragment.52
For Aldo Rossi the logic of architectural form lies in a definition of
53. Ibid. Pg 36 type based on the juxtaposition of memory and reason.53
Any architectural form, existing or new, was the expression of its

particular character at a specific time and place, but also embodied the
memory of previous forms and functions. If the work was to be read, by
means of associations, within the construct of this collective memory,
54. Lathouri, “The City type was the ‘apparatus’—using Rossi’s term—which, fusing history and
Typical Objects and
memory, could produce a dialectics between the individual object and
Typologies.” Pg 27 the collective subject.54
80
The technique or rather the fundamental compositional method
suggested by the Rationalists is the transformation of selected
types—partial or whole—into entirely new entities that draw their
communicative power and potential criteria from the understanding of
this transformation. It refuses all eclecticism, by resolutely filtering its
“quotations” through the lens of a modernist aesthetic. In this sense,
it is an entirely modern movement, and one that places its faith in the 55. Vidler, “The Third
essentially public nature of all architecture.55 Typology.” Pg 294
Here, in fact, one is confronted with a broken structure, shattered

into formally autonomous pieces. Venturi has intentionally broken the
idea of a typological unity which for centuries dominated architecture.
He finds, however, and not without shock, that the image of architecture
emerges again in the broken mirror. Architecture, which in the past has
been an imitative art, a description of nature, now seems to be so again,
but this time with architecture itself as a model. Architecture is indeed
an imitative art, but now imitative of itself, reflecting a fragmented and 56. Moneo, “On
discontinuous reality.56 Typology.” Pg 39
57. Lee and Jacoby,

The misunderstanding of type and typology, attacked by many for its “Typological Urbanism
perceived restrictions—in addition to the functionalist misunderstanding and the Idea of the
City.” Pg. 19 “Far from
of type—has resulted in the deliberate rejection of typological rules being injurious
knowledge. This is evident in the exotic formal experiments of the past to invention, it must
be said that invention
years: every fold, every twist and bend, every swoosh and whoosh is does not exist outside
justified as being superior to the types it displaces. However, it remains rules; for there would
be no way to judge
unclear what these ill properties or characteristics of type are that the invention” - Quatremère
novel forms want to replace and to what ends. These architectural de Quincy – in Younés,
Samir. The True, the
experiments have no relevance beyond the formal and cannot be Fictive, and the Real:
considered an invention, for invention, as Quatrèmere stated, ‘does not The Historical Dictionary
of Architecture of
exist outside rules; for there would be no way to judge invention.’57 Quatremère De Quincy.
Papadakis, 1999.
It can be argued that the indexical obsession in academia and

in some speculative practices for the past two decades draws from
the same ambition to institute the rigorous system of architectural
knowledge afforded by the diagram. However, the focus for this 58. Lee, “Working in
Series, Towards an
continued obsession has largely been around the generation of novel Operative Theory of
form—with today’s latest incarnation of parametric design.58 Type.” Pg 6
VII
The concept of the city as the site of a new typology is evidently

born of a desire to stress the continuity of form and history against
the fragmentation produced by the elemental, institutional, and
mechanistic typologies of the recent past. The city is considered as a
whole, its past and present revealed in its physical structure. It is in
itself and of itself a new typology. This typology is not built up out of
separate elements, nor assembled out of objects classified according
to use, social ideology. or technical characteristics: it stands complete
and ready to be decomposed into fragments. These fragments do not
reinvent institutional type-forms nor repeat past typological forms:
they are selected and reassembled according to criteria derived from
three levels of meaning-the first, inherited from the ascribed means of
the past existence of the forms; the second, derived from the specific
fragment and its boundaries, and often crossing between previous
types; the third, proposed by a recomposition of these fragments in a
Typology.” Pg 292 new context.59
60. Lee and Jacoby,

The relationship between architecture and the city is reciprocal and
and the Idea of the City.” the city is the overt site for architectural knowledge par excellence.60
Pg. 17
The city, that is, provides the material for classification, and the
Typology.” Pg 288 forms of its artifacts over time provide the basis for recomposition.61
If the city is considered as a whole, its past and present revealed

in its physical structure. It is in itself and of itself a new typology. This
typology is not built up out of separate elements, nor assembled out
of objects classified according to use, social ideology, or technical
characteristics: it stands complete and ready to be decomposed into
62. Ibid. Pg 292 fragments.62
The fragmentation and recomposition of the city’s spatial and
institutional forms can never be separated from their received and newly
63. Ibid. Pg 293 constituted political implications.63
On the one hand, the city was read, in the Italian context, as a
structure that constantly evolves and changes, yet certain features
82
were constant in time, and therefore typical; that is, constituent
factors of that structure. On the other, this was an attempt to
develop a working method; a method which invoked history in a series
of transformations rather than a sequential unfolding of time. This
method brought together ideas on history and principles of morphology
already formulated in the 1930s by thinkers such as Henri Focillon. In
particular, Focillon’s idea of art as a system in perpetual development of
coherent forms and of history as a superimposition of geological strata 64. Lathouri, “The City
that permits us to read each fraction of time as if it was at once past, Typical Objects and
present and future is interestingly relevant.64 Typologies.” Pg 27
As Rossi wrote in the early 1960s, ‘the city is in itself a repository

of history’.This could be understood from two different points of view.
In the first, the city is above all ‘a material artefact, a man-made
object built over time and retaining the traces of time, even if in a
discontinuous way’. Studied from this point of view, ‘cities become
historical texts’ and type is but an instrument of analysis, to enter into
and decipher this text, a function similar to the archaeological section.
The second point of view acknowledges history as the awareness of
the historical process, the ‘collective imagination’. This leads to one of
Rossi’s prominent ideas that the city is the locus of the ‘relationship of
the collective to its place’.65 For him there is only one ideal city, filled 65. Ibid. Pg 28
with types—rather impure types, but types nonetheless, and the history 66. Moneo, “On
of architecture is none other than its history.66 Typology.” Pg 37
VIII
Once again the issue of typology is raised in architecture, not

this time with a need to search outside the practice for legitimation
in science or technology, but with a sense that within the city and
architecture itself resides a unique and particular mode of production 67. Vidler, “The Third
and explanation.67 Typology.” Pg 288
No other recurring modem project within architecture has a greater

capacity to renovate design theories than architectural typology, with
its focus on the inherently iterative, serial aspects of architectural 68. Steele, “Going
production itself.68 against Type.” Pg. 2
To work typologically is to analyse, reason and propose through
things which are of the same type, thus considering them in series.
Working in series allows us to understand the shared traits between
things—be it architecture or the city—and to harness the embodied
and cumulative intelligence of that series into architectural projections,
considering the fundamental precepts of working typologically:
precedents, classification, taxonomy, continuity, repetition,
differentiation and reinvention. Although the process begins with a
69. Christopher M. Lee,
“Working in Series, precedent type, the fundamental goal of working typologically is to
Towards an Operative
surpass the precedent type whilst maintaining its irreducible traits or
Theory of Type,” ibid.
Pg 5 DNA in the transformed or reinvented type.69
It further becomes apparent that the discussion of typology is by

no means a matter of simplification or standardization or of a reductive
model of architectural invention. On the contrary, we must perceive
as in the work of Quatrèmere, an intelligently developed construct in
70. Oechslin, “Premises which the link is ensured between the systematic and the historical or
for the Resumption
conventional—and therefore always societally oriented—limitations of
Typology.” Pg 51 architecture in their reciprocal dependence.70
What is required, then, are fundamental, systematic, analogic,

rational, and combinatory kinds of processes in the context of the
71. Ibid. Pg 45 encounter with history71—past, present and future.
IX
Derivative practices and working typologically share fundamental

precepts, nevertheless there is one essential difference between these
modes of production. The distinction and validity between type and
model. On the one hand working typologically considers the type, as a
fundamental principle, which informs the production of the new, making
paramount the type over the model. On the other hand a derivative
approach to architecture looks at the potential of fragmentation and
combination, assemblages of architectural knowledge. The potential not
only in the group as a whole and its type but also the potential in the
archetype as an example or single case.
84
To better understand the distinction between type and model,
Eisenstein’s differentiation between mimesis of form and mimesis
of principle, could be useful when translated to the production of
architecture. Using typology for the production of architecture relies
primordially on principles, on types, whereas using a derivative approach
to architecture could allow a sort of dialectic between form and
principle, model and rule, type and archetype.
The category of archetype is advanced here as an alternative to

the idea of type. If type traditionally indicates the idea that regulates
72. Pier Vittorio Aureli,
the development of a group of forms—and for this reason is irreducible “City as Political Form,
to any particular form—, archetype offers the possibility of addressing Four Archetypes of
Urban Transformation,”
a found singular form as a definition for a possible group of forms. In Architectural Design 81,
architecture, an archetype is thus a paradigmatic form.72 A singular no. 1 (2011). Pg. 34
form that due to the clear exhibition of its generative principle is able
to define a milieu of possible forms. While a type is never reducible
to a singular form and it can only emerge from a variety of forms, the
73. “A Simple Heart:
archetype is always put forward by the individualisation of a precise and
Architecture on
recognisable form. For this reason, while the type indicates a model of the Ruins of the
Post-Fordist City,”
design based on the concept of evolution, an example is always based
on the idea of decision.73 no. 1 (2011). Pg. 113
We are no longer under a scientific paradigm but a legal paradigm.

In that sense working typologically could allow bypassing this current
legal paradigm—where everything is being copyrighted, a sort of fetish
for intellectual property—if types are ideas, fundamental principles
and ideas can’t be copyrighted. Typology enables the appropriation
of principles generating the potential for new combinations, therefore
freeing architecture from what is commonly regarded as an ‘unethical
practice’ such as copying.Therefore transgressing authorship by
appropriating types as fundamental principles derived from architectural
knowledge.
One could go as far as saying that typology is a ‘scientific’ method

to copy or an attempt to make scientific the act of copying, by copying
principles—mimesis of principles. Architecture frees itself from matters
of appropriation and authorship by working typologically relying on types
as principles derived from architectural objects.
If the third typology rescued the city as the ‘overt site for
architectural knowledge par excellence’, a taxonomical understanding
where type and model coexist, could rescue the architectural project,
in all its forms of representation. Providing a middle point between
the abstraction of the type and the concreteness of the single case,
a taxonomy that does not only see the city as Rossi would call a
repository of history as the base of its classification and re-composition
but all architectural knowledge, which is subject to appropriation and
transformation. A non-linear—vertical and horizontal—usage of history.
An expanded taxonomy of architecture. Recognising the generative
potential of thinking in groups and at the same time considering the
projective capability of the single case, example, model or archetype.
Such taxonomy would allow in a way the transgression of both the

type—thinking in groups—and the archetype—a model or example with
the capacity to generate a group—by fragmenting and assembling
different elements in order to produce the new. The possibility of
abstract and concrete, as well as the potential of both working with the
whole or fragmenting it, in order to produce new assemblages.
Ultimately typology is always a question of origins. Working

taxonomically while acknowledging the potential of the type, is put
forward, as a way to steer and open up from the rule to the single case.
Considering that single cases can be appropriated and transformed
without necesarily entering a question of origin.
The taxonomy here proposed is not meant to question the idea of

type or typology, all the contrary acknowledges type’s and typology’s
potential while expanding it in order to coexist with the notion of model,
not as something that must be followed as the carrier of the truth but
as material available for appropriation and transformation. A singular
form that due to the clear exhibition of its generative principle is able to
74. Ibid. Pg. 113 define a milieu of possible forms.74 A dialectic between type and model.
86
THOU SHALT NOT COVET
COMMONS & LAWS

1. Thomas Jefferson,
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than
The Writings of Thomas
Jefferson, vol. 7 all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the
(Washington: Thomas
thinking power called an idea, which an individual may
Jefferson Memorial
Association, 1903). exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself;
Pg. 93
but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispose
himself of it.1
Thomas Jefferson, 1813
Copyright and other intellectual property rights are often defended

using claims for the superiority of the ‘rationality’ of private property by
using an economic model of the market. This justifies private property
by the claim that only by allocating value to a particular resource can
2. David M. Berry, “Copy,
it efficiently be used and its use maximised. By fostering progress in
Rip, Burn: The Politics of economic organisation and increasing efficiency, it is argued that society
Copyleft and Copyright,”
(Pluto Press, London,
as a whole will benefit from increased wealth and greater quantities of
UK, 2008). Pg. 71 culture and information.2
There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and

engages the affectations of mankind, as the right of property; or that
sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over
the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of every
other individual in the universe. And yet there are very few, that will give
themselves the trouble to consider the original and foundation of this
right. Pleased as we are with the possession, we seem afraid to look
back to the means by which it was acquired, as if fearful of some defect
3. Ronan Deazley, On in our title; or at best we rest satisfied with the decision of the laws in
the Origin of the Right
to Copy: Charting the
our favour, without examining the reason or authority upon which those
Movement of Copyright laws have been built. 3
Law in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (1695-
1775) (Hart Publishing, John Locke’s theory of property, provided the philosophical basis
2004). Pg. 212
for the first formulations of copyright law in Britain in the eighteenth
90
century, he stated property is appropriated from nature through labour. 4. Marcus Boon, In
Praise of Copying
Ownership, says Locke, begins with our bodies, and their capacity for (Harvard University
labour and work. Through the sensuousness of labour, man establishes Press, 2010). Pg. 210
ownership of the commons of nature and God:4
Although Locke does not say so, ownership is established

mimetically: the contagiousness of the conceptual “me” and “mine”
passes through “my” work on the world around me, allowing me to
appropriate elements of that world.5 5. Ibid. Pg. 211
The key to Locke’s thought was the axiom that an individual’s 6. Mark Rose, Authors
‘’person” was his own property. From this it could be demonstrated that and Owners: The
Invention of Copyright
through labour an individual might convert the raw materials of nature (Harvard University
into private property. 6 Press, 1993). Pg. 4
If the individuality of the work is identical to that of the author, then

the category of the work has been dissolved. Interestingly, this action
traces in reverse the Lockean notion of the creation of property in which
property originates when an individual “person’ is impressed on the
world through labour: 7 7. Ibid. Pg. 126
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men,
yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any
Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands,
we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the
State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour 8. John Locke, Two
Treatises of Government
with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his (Awnsham and John
Property.8 Churchill, 1965). Pg. 305
William Blackstone’s philosophical rock proved to be the writings

of John Locke. Asserting that the natural foundation of property was
“invention and labour” he explained that an original composition
exhibited both these qualities: its originality implied invention; the
composition implied industry and labour. Of labour in particular, he
argued that the “exertion of animal faculties” and “the exertion of the
rational powers” should have “as fair a title to confer property” as
each other. “Property” he declared “may with equal reason be acquired
by mental, as by bodily labour”. Blackstone was clearly influenced by

Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, but had obviously failed to
acquaint himself with Locke’s personal views as to what property
subsisted in books. He continued with two logically spurious arguments.
The first, born out of common utility, operated as follows:
Without some advantage proposed, few would read, study,

compose or publish. This advantage can only arise from the profits of
9. Deazley, On the Origin publication: and those profits can only be secured, by vesting in the
of the Right to Copy:
Charting the Movement
author an exclusive right of publication. Universal law has established
of Copyright Law in a permanent perpetual property in bodily acquisitions: and reason
Eighteenth-Century
Britain (1695-1775).
requires, that the property in mental acquisitions should be equally
Pg. 142 permanent.9
The second turned upon the fundamental premise that “[t]he

one essential requisite of every subject of property is, that it must be
a thing of value”. From this he continued that value consists in an
object’s capacity to be exchanged for other valuable things. Therefore,
if something can be so exchanged, it must have value and “[w]hatever
therefore has a value is the subject of property”. That is, property
equals value equals opportunity to exchange; therefore, an ability to
10. Ibid. Pg. 142 exchange equals value equals property.10
For Joseph Yates, property was, above all, a physical rather than
a metaphysical entity; it was something “that may be seen, felt, given,
delivered, lost or stolen”, something that one could lay one’s hand
11. Ibid. Pg. 144 upon.11
In Yates’ consideration there could exist no natural common law

right to literary property. Only the state, through legislative intervention
could provide succour for the author. Agreeing with Edward Thurlow,
that there was no difference between the work of an author and that of
12. Ibid. Pg. 145 an inventor. 12
Both are the productions of genius, both require labour and study,
13. Ibid. Pg. 145 and both by publication become equally common to the world.13
Moveable property was of two kinds: “the product of the hand, and
of the mind; as an utensil made; a book composed”; moreover, “the
92
product of the mind is as well capable of becoming property as that
of the hand”. This, for William Warburton, was self-evident in that a
product of the mind had in it “those two essential conditions … namely
common utility, and a capacity of having its possession ascertained.”14 14. Ibid. Pg. 157
Property, originality, personality: the construction of the discourse

of literary property depended on a chain of deferrals. The distinctive
property was said to reside in the particularity of the text-”the same
conceptions, cloathed in the same words”-and this was underwritten by
15. Rose, Authors and
the notion of originality, which was in turn guaranteed by the concept of Owners: The Invention of
personality.15 Copyright. Pg. 128
The valorization of the expressive power of the individual artist

emerged around the same time as copyright laws, during the Romantic
period. But the integration of the original artist into the marketplace
was also accompanied by the rise of an avant-garde whose work has
constantly been built around a critique of notions of originality, identity, 16. Boon, In Praise of
and property.16 Copying. Pg. 206
II
All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual

within and through a specific form of society. In this sense it is a
tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a precondition of
production. But it is altogether ridiculous to leap from that to a specific
form of property, e.g. private property. (Which further and equally
presupposes an antithetical form: non- property.) History shows rather
common property (e.g. in India, among the Slavs, the early Celts, etc.) 17. Karl Marx,
Grundrisse: Foundations
to be the more original form . . . But that there can be no production of the Critique of
and hence no society where some form of property does not exist is Political Economy, trans.
Martin Nicolaus (London:
a tautology. An appropriation which does not make something into Penguin, 1993). Pg.
property is a contradictio in subjecto.17 87-88
Appropriation—the act of claiming the right to use, make, or own

something that someone else claims in the same way. Thinking about
appropriation enables us to ask: Who has the right to make a copy?
Which people have the right to prohibit someone else from copying them
or that which they believe belongs to them?18 Copying. Pg. 205

19. Ibid. Pg. 205 Most of what we call history is arguably the history of appropriation19
Man appropriates his all-sided essence in an all-sided way, as a

total man. Every one of his human relations to the world, seeing hearing,
smelling, tasting, feeling, observing, sensing, willing, acting, loving,
20. Karl Marx,
“Economic and
in short, all the organs of his individuality . . . are, in their objective
Philosophic Manuscripts relation, or in their relation to the object, the appropriation of it. The
of 1844,” in Early
Writings (Penguin UK,
appropriation of human actuality, its relation to the object, is the
2005). Pg. 351 exercise of human actuality, human activity and passivity or suffering.20
The act of appropriation involved solely the individual in relation to

nature. Property was not a social convention but a natural right that
was prior to the social order. Indeed, the principal function of the social
order was to protect individual property rights. Extended into the realm
of literary production, the liberal theory of property produced the notion
put forward by the London booksellers of a property founded on the
author’s labour, once the author could sell to the bookseller. Though
Owners: The Invention of
immaterial, this property was no less real and permanent, they argued,
Copyright. Pg. 6 than any other kind of estate.21
We cannot actually live in a world without mimesis. For Locke and

for Marx, appropriation is constitutive of being-in-the-world through
labour or sensuous activity; for Hegel, property, ownership of self, is
the basis of society. Both appropriation in general, and ownership as
a particular form of appropriation, are mimetic in that they bestow a
Copying. Pg. 243 particular name on something—a name that identifies and frames it.22
It is possible to think of copying outside the realm of right and

ownership if we conceive of copying as a practice, or rather a multitude
23. Ibid. Pg. 246 of practices.23
The “original” itself is also necessarily an appropriation, translation,

24. Ibid. Pg. 111 ways that objectively constitute deception.24
25. Neil Weinstock

All authorship builds upon pre-existing expression. Authors—not just
Netanel, Copyright’s the greats, but all of us who share our thoughts and creative impulses
Paradox (Oxford
through traditional media or the Internet—regularly take from existing
Pg. 58 art, literature, music, and film.25
94
Copyright expansion has sharply constricted authors’ liberty to
take from others’ expression in creating their own. Throughout most of
the nineteenth century, authors were free to build upon existing works
as long as they made their own substantial contribution and did not
displace demand for the original work in its original form.26 26. Ibid. Pg. 59
Today, copyright law’s governing premise, far from being solicitous

to secondary, transformative authorship, is that ‘‘no plagiarist can
excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate.’’27 27. Ibid. Pg. 59
Creative appropriation ranges from modifications and adaptations of

a single work to samplings, remixes, and mashups that incorporate an
array of discrete components from numerous existing works.28 28. Ibid. Pg. 196
What happens when all questions of authorship, originality, use, 29. Siva Vaidhyanathan,
Copyrights and
and access to ideas and expressions become framed in the terms of Copywrongs: The Rise
“property rights”? The discussion ends. There is no powerful property of Intellectual Property
and How It Threatens
argument that can persuade a people concerned about rewarding Creativity (NYU Press,
“starving artists” not to grant the maximum possible protection. How 2003). Pg. 12
can one argue for “theft”?29
Depropriation means indifference to possession. It indicates

a willingness to relate to the world without imposing conditions
of ownership in doing so, an ethics of care that does not require
ownership, that requires an ethos other than that of ownership in
order for there to be caring. It means allowing to circulate according to
context, and therefore to remove from the logic of appropriation, and
from enslavement to a particular context that is naturalized as “what 30. Boon, In Praise of
must be.” Depropriation is a form of “renunciation.”30 Copying. Pg. 224
Can depropriation and what we call “copying” coexist? Copying

is a form of appropriation because making a copy involves positing a
relationship between two objects, the name of one being given to an-
other, the form of one being produced or recognized in the other. “To
appropriate” means to make a claim of identification and property, in
the sense that the claimed object has a name or form that belongs to
it.31 31. Ibid. Pg. 226

III
Discussions of copyright frequently regard intellectual property as

an “ancient and eternal idea” or “a natural need of the human mind”.
But copyright-the practice of securing marketable rights in texts that
are treated as commodities-is a specifically modern institution, the
creature of the printing press, the individualization of authorship in
the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and the development of
the advanced marketplace society in the seventeenth and eighteenth
Copyright. Pg. 3 centuries.32
Indeed, objects can be exchanged and treated as property and in

some cases as a commodity. But when it comes to creative work, claims
to intellectual property become contestable and problematic. For these
33. Berry, “Copy, Rip, types of objects it is also necessary to create new subjects of rights;
Burn: The Politics of
thus the classification of the object and the subject become vitally
Copyleft and Copyright.”
Pg. 72 important.33
Intellectual-property law functions through Platonic concepts. Its

three constituent parts—copyright, trademark, and patent law—are
each built around the paradox that you cannot protect an idea itself, but
Copying. Pg. 21 can protect only a fixed, material expression of an idea.34
One claims an idea as property by materially fixing it through

describing a process for realizing it (patent law), by inscribing or figuring
it materially in the form of a picture, text, notated music, film sequence
(copyright law), or by developing some method of inscription that one
35. Ibid. Pg. 21 uses to mark otherwise generic objects as one’s own (trademark law).35
IV
Copyright is not a transcendent moral idea, but a specifically

modern formation produced by printing technology, marketplace
economics, and the classical liberal culture of possessive individualism.
It is also an institution built on intellectual quicksand: the essentially
religious concept of originality, the notion that certain extraordinary
beings called authors conjure works out of thin air. And it is an
institution whose technological foundation has recently turned, like a
96
vital organ grown cancerous, into an enemy. Copyright developed as a
consequence of printing technology’s ability to produce large numbers
of copies of a text quickly and cheaply. But present-day technology
makes it virtually impossible to prevent people from making copies of
almost any text-printed, musical, cinematic, computerized- rapidly and Owners: The Invention of
at a negligible cost.36 Copyright. Pg. 142
In many ways, copyright now stands for private censorship, not

public liberty. Copyright once helped to free authors and the press
from servile dependency on royal and church patronage; it now gives
behemoth media conglomerates control over the images, sounds, and
texts that are the very language of our culture. Copyright once made it
possible for authors to disseminate their message to a broad audience;
it now makes outlaws of millions of individuals who post their creative
digital remixes and mashups of copyrighted expression on Pinterest
and Soundcloud, amongst others. Copyright once underwrote new
contributions to our store of knowledge; it now places archival material
out of reach for documentary filmmakers and online libraries. Copyright
once supported Thomas Paine and Charles Dickens; it now provides
37. Netanel, Copyright’s
corporations, churches, and authors’ estates a tool to silence critics.37 Paradox. Pg. vii
The U.S. Supreme Court has famously labelled copyright ‘the engine
of free expression.’ 38 38. Ibid. Pg. 3
It is with copyright. Property rhetoric, whether invoked reflexively

or strategically, has tended to support a vision of copyright as a
foundational entitlement, a broad ‘‘sole and despotic dominion’’ over
each and every possible use of a work rather than a limited government
grant narrowly tailored to serve a public purpose.39 39. Ibid. Pg. 7
In the Middle Ages the owner of a manuscript was understood to

possess the right to grant permission to copy it, and this was a right
that could be exploited, as it was, for example, by those monasteries
that regularly charged a fee for permission to copy one of their books.
Perhaps this practice might be thought to imply a form of copyright, and
yet the book owner’s property was not a right in the text as such but in Owners: The Invention of
the manuscript as a physical object made of ink and parchment.40 Copyright. Pg. 9

The earliest genuine anticipations of copyright were the printing
privileges, which first appeared in fifteenth-century Venice. ‘Privileges’
were exclusive rights granted by the state to individuals for limited
periods of time to reward them for services or to encourage them in
41. Ibid. Pg. 9 useful activities.41
Essentially, copyright is understood as a monopoly, a bundle of

rights that applies to the ‘expression’ of an idea. It establishes the
42. Berry, “Copy, Rip, author as the creator of an intellectual work and creates exclusive legal
rights for the author to control derivatives, duplication, performance or
Pg. 70 distribution of their creative works.42
43. Deazley, On the
Origin of the Right to The transformation of copyright as publishers’ right to copyright
Copy: Charting the
Movement of Copyright as authors’ right takes place in the years following the 1709 Statute of
Law in Eighteenth- Anne.43
1775). Pg. xxi

Copyright is increasingly treated more akin to conventional property
Paradox. Pg. 7 than a finely honed instrument of expressive diversity.44
Thomas Jefferson explicitly dismissed a property model for

copyright, and maintained his skepticism about the costs and benefits
of copyright for many years. Fearing, justifiably, that copyright might
eventually expand to encompass idea protection, not just expression
protection, Jefferson elucidated the flaw in the political economy of
copyright as property. Unlike tangible property, ideas and expressions
are not susceptible to natural scarcity. As Jefferson wrote of copyright,
“Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because
every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me,
receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights
his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Therefore,
45. Vaidhyanathan,
Copyrights and
Jefferson feared, the monopolists could use their state-granted
Copywrongs: The Rise power to strengthen their control over the flow of ideas and the use of
of Intellectual Property
expressions. Monopolies have the power to enrich themselves by evading
Creativity. Pg. 24 the limitations of the competitive marketplace.45
Copyright law was designed to create order in the publishing trade,

to prevent ruinous competition when unscrupulous firms engage in
wholesale commercial piracy. So how does copyright law apply in an age
98
in which millions of individuals are both authors and publishers? How
is copyright to respond when anyone can easily make perfect copies
of existing works, as well as cut, paste, edit, remix, and post them on 46. Netanel, Copyright’s
Tumblr, Soundcloud, and a multitude of other Web sites online?46 Paradox. Pg. 8
In the discourse of copyright, the goal of protecting the rights of

the creative author is proudly asserted even as the notion of author is
drained of content This is because the legal concept of authorship is
“simultaneously an artifact of the marketplace in commodity art and
a throwback to early, pre-industrial ideas of the artist’s relation to 47. Rose, Authors and
society”.47 Copyright. Pg. 136
Copyright issues are now more about large corporations limiting

access to and use of their products, and less about lonely songwriters
snapping their pencil tips under the glare of bare bulbs. Instead
of trying to prevent “theft,” we should try to generate a copyright
policy that would encourage creative expression without limiting the
48. Vaidhyanathan,
prospects for future creators. We must seek a balance. Historically Copyrights and
and philosophically, “intellectual property” accomplishes neither. The Copywrongs: The Rise
idea and the phrase have been counterproductive. Instead of bolstering and How It Threatens
“intellectual property,” we should be forging “intellectual policy.”48 Creativity. Pg. 12
Through most of the nineteenth century authors were free to build

on existing works so long as they made a substantial independent
contribution. But today, works that build upon existing works commonly
runs afoul of the copyright holder’s broad proprietary rights. Copy- right
now includes an exclusive right to make derivative works. Moreover, the
reproduction right has expanded dramatically. In addition to substantial
literal or near-literal copying, it now encompasses nonliteral ‘‘total
concept and feel’’ similarity and literal copying of small fragments of the
original work.49 Paradox. Pg. 196
To envision the best possible copyright system—one that would

encourage creativity and democracy—we must revise our notion of
intellectual “theft.” You cannot “steal” an idea, a style, a “look and
feel.” These things are the raw material of the next move in literature,
art, politics, or music. And using someone’s idea does not diminish its
power. There is no natural scarcity of ideas and information. To enrich

50. Vaidhyanathan, democratic speech and foster fertile creativity, we should avoid the
Copyrights and
Copywrongs: The Rise rhetorical traps that spring up when we regard copyright as “property”
of Intellectual Property instead of policy.50
Creativity. Pg. 14
V
The Stationers’ Charter and the licensing acts that followed it were
clearly publishers’ laws. They regulated printing, yet had no dimension
of property to them. Although authors had status and a place in the
commercial process of bookmaking, they were not mentioned as parties
to the legal calculus. That changed in 1709, when publishers appealed
to the interests of authors to renew their monopoly protection. To secure
what would become known as the Statute of Anne, printers argued that
the interests of both authors and the public were harmed by the lack of
price stability in the marketplace. The title of the legislation read: “An
Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of printed
Books in the Authors, or Purchasers, of such Copies, during the Times
51. Ibid. Pg. 39 therein mentioned.”51
The 1709 British Statute of Anne, established two levels of

copyright. The first level was issued in the name of the author for all
books that would be published after the act took effect. The term of
protection was for fourteen years, renewable for another fourteen years.
In other words, this reward for authorship was an “encouragement
of learning,” an incentive to produce more books. The second level
reinforced the Stationers’ exclusive rights to previously published works
for a non-renewable twenty-one-year term. The addition of these term
limits created the first codified notion of a “public domain,” a collection
of works old enough to be considered outside the scope of the law and
thus under the control of the public and the culture at large. Although
the author was mentioned as the beneficiary of the statute, the act
was really another regulation of the practice of printing and selling
books, not writing them, and a recognition of the public’s interest in
the process. The codification of authorship was merely an appeal to a
straw man. A manuscript is worth nothing on the market until an author
assigns the rights to a publisher. At that point, the publisher is the real
player in the legal and commercial game. Mainly, the Statute of Anne
was an elabourate attempt to regulate publishers, a way to balance the
100
interests of the book printing industry with the concerns that monopolies
were growing too powerful in England.52 52. Ibid. Pg. 40
The Statute of Anne marked the beginning of the modern concept 53. Berry, “Copy, Rip,
of copyright that accorded exclusive rights to authors and their Copyleft and Copyright.”
publishers.53 Pg. 67
The Statute of Anne of 1709, was in part a rearguard effort to

protect the rights of the Stationers Company in the face of the effects
of the English Revolution; copyright and patent law was inscribed
in Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution (1787), and in a law of
1793 in France; the Russian Revolution was accompanied by a variety
of changes to copyright law (which had hitherto been in line with those
of bourgeois European law), including a 1923 decree nationalizing the 54. Boon, In Praise of
works of authors such as Tolstoy, Gogol, and Chekhov.54 Copying. Pg. 10
The focus shifts away from the bookseller and over the course of
the next seventy years the Statute of Anne, and copyright law, comes 55. Deazley, On the
Origin of the Right to
to signal and embrace the emergence of the modern proprietary author.
Copy: Charting the
As Mark Rose suggests, this second story is one of progression from Movement of Copyright
Law in Eighteenth-
trade regulation and marketplace economics to the liberal culture of
possessive individualism.55 1775). Pg. 221
Beginning with the Statute of Anne of 1709, copyright law has

been premised on the intuition that authors and publishers will not
make works available to the public unless they can prevent others from
making copies, at least for a limited time. Definitive empirical support for
that intuition is difficult to come by. Accordingly, commentators dating
back to Adam Smith have generally found justification for copyright
in economic theory. Economic analysts posit that copyright provides
authors and publishers with a financial incentive to produce and
disseminate creative expression. It does so by preventing ‘‘free riders’’
from undermining the market for books, paintings, sound recordings, 56. Netanel, Copyright’s
films, and other works of authorship.56 Paradox. Pg. 84
In the Statute of Anne, the author was established as a legally

empowered figure in the marketplace well before professional
authorship was realized in practice.57 Copyright. Pg. 4

58. Vaidhyanathan, Gradually the law has lost sight of its original charge: to encourage
Copyrights and
Copywrongs: The Rise creativity, science, and democracy. Instead, the law now protects the
of Intellectual Property producers and taxes consumers. It rewards works already created and
Creativity. Pg. 4 limits works yet to be created. The law has lost its mission, and the
people have lost control of it.58
Digital reproduction, international commerce, and digital music

sampling have exposed gaps in the law’s ability to deal with new forms
59. Ibid. Pg. 4 of production and new technologies.59
The most significant change to the copyright law in the United

States of America in the 1909 revision, however, was largely unexpected.
The new law created a new definition of authorship: corporate
60. Ibid. Pg. 99 authorship.60
The creation of corporate copyright in 1909 was the real “death of

the author.” Authorship could not be considered mystical or romantic
after 1909. It was simply a construct of convenience, malleable by
61. Ibid. Pg. 102 contract.61
According to the Copyright Act of 1976, a work is protected in

all media and for all possible derivative uses as soon as it is fixed
in a tangible medium of expression. This means that as soon as a
writer types a story on a computer or typewriter, the work carries the
protection of copyright law. Authors need not register the work with the
Copyright Office of the Library of Congress unless they plan to pursue
62. Ibid. Pg. 24 legal action against someone for violating the copyright.62
63. Deazley, On the Copyright today is entirely the creature of statute. It is no longer
Origin of the Right to
Copy: Charting the an emanation of the common law. It extends to both published and
Movement of Copyright unpublished works.63
Law in Eighteenth-
1775). Pg. 221 There is an alarming and steady erosion of a very valuable—
yet theoretically suspect—legal construction: the idea/expression
64. Vaidhyanathan,
Copyrights and
dichotomy. American copyright law has clearly protected only specific
Copywrongs: The Rise expressions of ideas, yet allowed free rein for ideas themselves.64
Creativity. Pg. 28 The idea/expression dichotomy came into being when copyright
holders’ rights expanded to encompass creative adaptations and
102
reformulations of existing expression. Once copyright holders’ exclusive
rights extended beyond mere verbatim and near-verbatim copying,
it became necessary to define some outer limit to those rights, lest
copyright holders’ proprietary control over existing expression unduly 65. Netanel, Copyright’s
burden new speech.65 Paradox. Pg. 61
At bottom, the problem is not simply that expression has steadily

gob- bled up idea, but that there is no clear line between idea and
expression. The idea/expression dichotomy is notoriously malleable
and indeterminate, far more useful as a shorthand for justifying judges’
case-by-case conclusions regarding when a defendant has prima facie
inappropriately copied than as a mechanism for predicting what sorts of
copying and borrowing are permissible.66 66. Ibid. Pg. 61
The dichotomy is not merely a given. It has many complications

and flaws. But it is best explained through textual examples. Consider
the specific string of text: “And he said, Take now thy son, thine only
son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and
offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I
will tell thee of.” The same underlying idea could be expressed as: “Oh,
67. Vaidhyanathan,
God said to Abraham kill me a son. Abe said, ‘man, you must be putting
Copyrights and
me on.’” While the first expression is unprotectable under American Copywrongs: The Rise
copyright law because the King James Version of the Old Testament is in
the public domain, the second expression is quite protected.67 Creativity. Pg. 28
Since the 1976 copyright revisions, the idea/expression dichotomy

has been part of the federal statute. The text of section 102 (b) of the
copyright law reads: “In no case does copyright protection for an original
work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system,
method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the
form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such
work.”68 68. Ibid. Pg. 29
When very different words and phrases such as “idea theft,”

“copyright violation,” “appropriation,” and “plagiarism” are used
interchangeably in the public discourse surrounding the commerce of
creativity, the idea-expression dichotomy becomes harder to define,
harder to identify, and therefore harder to defend.69 69. Ibid. Pg. 35

The move from solicitude to general intolerance for a secondary
author’s creative appropriation is manifested in both statute and case
law. The Copyright Act of 1976 now accords copyright owners a broad,
exclusive right to prepare derivative works based on the original. These
include translations, arrangements, versions in other media, and ‘‘any
other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.’’
At the same time, courts have liberally construed the exclusive right to
reproduce copies, holding that a secondary author may infringe that
right by evoking an existing work’s ‘‘total concept and feel,’’ without
Paradox. Pg. 60 literally copying or even paraphrasing any of the original’s expression.70
71. Mario Carpo, The Similarity, imitation, and mimesis are essentially premodern,
Alphabet and the
Algorithm (MIT Press,
nonquantifiable notions, and as such are hard to appraise in a modern
2011). Pg 46 marketplace, and hard to defend in a modern court of law.71
VI
Article 1. The authors of literary, scientific and artistic works shall

enjoy protection for their works as laid down by this Law and, in so
far as they are compatible with it, by ordinary legal provisions. This
72. “Law 23 1982 Law shall also protect performers, producers of phonograms and
Copyrights in Colombia,” broadcasting organizations with respect to their rights neighboring on
(Bogota: Diario Oficial,
1982). copyright.72
Article 2. Copyright shall subsist in scientific, literary and artistic

works, which shall be understood as being all creations of the mind in
the scientific, literary and artistic domain, whatever may be their mode
or form of expression and purpose, such as: books, pamphlets and other
writings; lectures, addresses, sermons and other works of the same
nature; dramatic or dramatico-musical works; choreographic works and
mime; musical compositions with or without words; cinematographic
works to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous
to cinematography, including videograms; works of drawing, painting,
architecture, sculpture, engraving and lithography; photographic works
to which are assimilated works expressed by a process analogous to
photography; works of applied art; illustrations, maps, plans, sketches
and three-dimensional works relative to geography, topography,
architecture or science and, finally, any production in the scientific,
104
literary or artistic field that can be reproduced or executed by any form
of printing or reproduction, or by phonographic, radiophonic or any other
known or future means.73 73. Ibid.
Article 39. It shall be permissible to reproduce, by painting,

drawing, photography or cinematography, works that are permanently
located on public highways, streets or squares, and to distribute such
reproductions or works and communicate them to the public. With
regard to works of architecture, this provision shall be applicable solely
to outward views. 74 74. Ibid.
Article 43. The creator of an architectural design may not prevent

the owner from making alterations to it, but he shall have the right to
prohibit his name from being associated with the altered work.75 75. Ibid.
Colombia is one of the few countries in the world to have an

established copyright law that seeks to balance the moral rights of
architects and the rights of building owners. Article 43 of Law 23 of
1982 on Copyright essentially states that if the owner of an architectural 76. Jorge Ortega,
“Architecture
work wishes to modify it, the architect of that work has no legal grounds & Copyright
on which to stop this. It does, however, add that the architect “may Controversies,” WIPO
Magazine, no. 05 (2011).
prohibit his name from being associated with the altered work.” 76 Pg. 3
This practice is uncommon in Europe where the right to the integrity

of a work includes protecting it against any unauthorized material
modification or against damage to the author’s reputation.77 77. Ibid. Pg. 3
The Bern Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic

Works Is an international agreement governing copyright that was
first accepted in Bern, Switzerland, in 1886. Its purpose was to extend
copyright protection internationally. It was strongly supported by Victor
Hugo and the Association litteraire et artistique Internationale. The
convention has been updated several times, with the latest version 78. Fabrizio Gallanti,
“Slippery Dialogues:
dating to 1979. In 1967 the United International Bureaux for the Recent Copyright
Protection of Intellectual Property that conceived and managed the Infringements in
Architecture,” San
Convention became the World Intellectual Property Organization (WlPO). Rocco Collaborations,
In 1974, WlPO became an organization within the United Nations.78 no. 06 (2013). Pg. 138

The Copyright Act in the U.K., which was approved in 1988,
considers both designs and built buildings as works of architecture.
In American law, the application of the term “intellectual property” to
architecture was established in 1990 through the amendment of the
Copyright Act with the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act
79. Ibid. Pg. 138 (AWCPA).79
in France architecture was included among the intellectual and

creative activities protected by copyright in 1992 with the promulgation
of the Code de la propriete intellectuelle, American and French
legislation share a common and not insignificant detail: they both
protect “original” and “creative” features but not the functional
elements of projects, with the distinction between the “artistic” and the
80. Ibid. Pg. 138 “functional” being left to the determination of the courts.80
Copyright legislation appears to be based, perhaps unconsciously,

on the Hegelian notion that architecture is characterized by an
undefined artistic supplement that provides an aesthetic and symbolic
81. Ibid. Pg. 138 content which goes beyond simple construction.81
82. Hancks Gregory, A building design can qualify for copyright protection as an
“Copyright or Copy
Wrong?,” (2012), http:// “architectural work” regardless of whether it was created by an
www.aia.org/practicing/ architect.82
AIAB093915. accessed,
November, 27, 2013
An American court ruled that architectural works are akin to
“compilations,” that is, works formed by the “collection and assembling
of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or
arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes
an original work or authorship.” Under copyright law, protection for a
compilation is frequently described as “thin” because the creator of the
compilation might not hold any copyright in the individual parts, which
83. Ibid. themselves may not be original to the compilation’s creator.83
The core legal argument, especially in California, was the question

of whether construction was equivalent to publication; only such a
84. Gallanti, “Slippery loophole would have allowed the consideration of architectural drawings
Dialogues: Recent
Copyright Infringements
as “words” and their “publication” through as an infringiment of
in Architecture.” Pg. 138 copyright.84
106
Copyright protects against copying. It is the simplest right as it 85. Rebecca Singleton,
“Architecture and
automatically arises without registration as soon as a drawing, letter, Intellectual Property,”
list etc. is produced and protects original literary.85 Architectural Research
Quarterly 15, no. 03
(2011). Pg. 294
Within the field of architecture many copyright works arise. The
artistic works category in the CDPA describes three types: graphic
works, photographs, sculptures and collages; works of architecture
being a building or a model of a building; and works of artistic
craftsmanship. An architect’s sketches, detailed drawings, models of
buildings and buildings themselves are all protected under copyright.
Copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus seventy years
from the end of the year in which they die.86 86. Ibid. Pg. 294
The customer or client only obtains a licence to use the material

– which is not the same as ownership of the copyright in it unless
the relevant contract between the parties states that the person
commissioning the copyright work will own the resulting copyright.87 87. Ibid. Pg. 294
The distinction between the author and the owner is significant. If

an architect designed a building in the course of employment they would
be the author, but not the88 If nothing is said about IP rights in the 88. Ibid. Pg. 295
contract, or there is no written contract, then the rights remain with the
architect unless the client did the designs.89 89. Ibid. Pg. 295
The copying of a building by a two-dimensional representation, such

as a photograph or drawing, is not an infringement of copyright.90 90. Ibid. Pg. 295
91. Ortega, “Architecture

Sometimes it is impossible for architects to know whether their ideas
& Copyright
are truly novel or whether they have been conceptualized before.91 Controversies.” Pg. 5
92. Gallanti, “Slippery

Who owns an idea? Who can claim design concepts and Dialogues: Recent
architectural solutions as their exclusive property?92 Copyright Infringements
in Architecture.” Pg. 137
Copyright in architecture is a peculiar matter. For the better part

of its development. Western architecture has been based on - and has
even encouraged - copying.93 93. Ibid. Pg. 137
How much of the ‘original’ work derived from previously copyrighted

work that had since lapsed into the public domain as copyrights

94. Vaidhyanathan, expired? Isn’t all creative work, when it comes right down to it,
Copyrights and
Copywrongs: The Rise derivative?94
Creativity. Pg. 85 The conceptual shift from the established custom of repeating
95. Gallanti, “Slippery exemplary models and formal archetypes to the recognition of originality
Dialogues: Recent
or a novelty of design as something that needs to be protected by law is
Copyright Infringements
in Architecture.” Pg. 137 extremely recent.95
With the singularity of a design having become an important real

estate asset, the alleged imitation of typologies has been at the heart of
96. Ibid. Pg. 142 several cases.96
Architecture has entered a new era in which what is being falsified

and replicated has begun to be not design ideas, but also the authors of
97. Ibid. Pg. 142 these: architects themselves.97
One cannot understand copying without recognizing that the

difference between original and copy is merely one of designation, and
Copying. Pg. 226 that both original and copy are ultimately nondual.98
The “original” itself is also necessarily an appropriation, translation,

99. Ibid. Pg. 111 ways that objectively constitute deception.99
VII
Copyright is founded on the concept of the unique individual who

creates something original and is entitled to reap a profit from those
labours. Until recently, the dominant modes of aesthetic thinking
have shared the romantic and individualistic assumptions inscribed in
copyright. But these assumptions obscure important truths about the
processes of cultural production. As Northrop Frye remarked many years
ago, all literature is conventional, but in our day the conventionality of
literature is “elabourately disguised by a law of copyright pretending
100. Rose, Authors and that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be
Copyright. Pg. 2 patented.’100
The representation of the author as a creator who is entitled to
108
profit from his intellectual labour came into being through a blending of
literary and legal discourses in the context of the contest over perpetual
copyright.101 101. Ibid. Pg. 6
In the early modern period, in connection with the individualization

of authorship, the transformation of the medieval auctor into
the Renaissance author, there developed a general sense that it
was improper to publish an author’s text without permission. The
acknowledgment of an author’s interest in controlling the publication
of his texts is not necessarily the same as the acknowledgment of
a property right in the sense of an economic interest in an alienable
commodity. In practice, however, the right to control publication has
economic implications, and it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish
what we might call matters of propriety from matters of property.102 102. Ibid. Pg. 18
The production of the discourse of original genius coincided with

that of authorial property. The logical point of connection was the idea
of value: both were concerned with the worth of texts.103 103. Ibid. Pg. 115
104. Terry Eagleton,

The representation of the artist as a transcendent genius is “The Ideology of the
born ‘just when the artist is becoming debased to a petty commodity Aesthetic,” Cambridge,
MA (1990). Pg. 64
producer,’104 and this mystification can be understood in part as
‘spiritual compensation for this degradation.’105 105. Rose, Authors and
The distinguishing characteristic of the modern author, is Copyright. Pg. 120
proprietorship; the author is conceived as the originator and therefore

the owner of a special kind of commodity, the work. How are origin and
ownership related, and how are these notions incorporated in what
Foucault calls ‘the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the
work.’106 106. Ibid. Pg. 1
Along with the concept of the author as a creator and proprietor

came that of the property itself, the ‘’work” as an immaterial commodity.
In response to the challenge from those who denied that ideas could be
property, William Blackstone worked out his influential representation
of the original work as ‘’the same conceptions, cloathed in the same
words”, a formulation that anticipates the present-day distinction
between idea and expression.107 107. Ibid. Pg. 132

As far as immaterial labour being an “author” is concerned, it
is necessary to emphasize the radical autonomy of its productive
synergies. Immaterial labour forces us to question the classical
definitions of work and workforce, because it results from a synthesis
of different types of know-how: intellectual skills, manual skills, and
entrepreneurial skills. Immaterial labour constitutes itself in immediately
collective forms that exist as networks and flows. The subjugation of
this form of cooperation and the “use value” of these skills to capitalist
108. Maurizio Lazzarato,
logic does not take away the autonomy of the constitution and meaning
“Immaterial Labour,” of immaterial labour. On the contrary, it opens up antagonisms and
Radical thought in Italy:
A potential politics
contradictions that, to use a Marxist formula, demand at least a “new
(1996). Pg. 144 form of exposition.”108
The figure of the proprietary author depends on a conception of the

individual as essentially independent and creative, a notion incompatible
with the ideology of the absolutist state. It was in direct opposition to
the absolutist court as celebrated by Ben Jonson that a new form of
political subject, the autonomous private man, came into being; and
it is in John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), published in angry response
to the reinstitution of licensing by Parliament, that the figure of the
autonomous author, the man whose authority is based not on public
office or sanction but on personal experience, study, and deliberation, is
Copyright. Pg. 28 defined.109
The claim that there is a connection between the invention of the

author as original genius and the invention of copyright was prefigured
110. Ibid. Pg. viii by Benjamin Kaplan in An Unhurried View of Copyright (1967).110
Foucault defined the author as a legal and cultural function,

111. Vaidhyanathan,
Copyrights and
but one that matters deeply to how a culture understands, uses,
Copywrongs: The Rise and is manipulated by texts. So for Foucault, the author matters.
But it matters for what it does in a culture, not necessarily whom it
Creativity. Pg. 10 represents.111
We must get beyond such esoteric discussions about the rise of

the romantic author. Instead, we should define an “author” broadly, as
a cultural entity: a “producer.” Since 1909, the copyright statute has
recognized this broad sense of authorship, the “unromantic” author.
110
The unromantic author might be a young rapper with a $2,000 MIDI
sampling machine or a corporation like Disney, through a team of writers
working on the cartoon version of Don Quixote. American copyright law
itself undermines any romantic sense of individual genius. It recognizes
both Microsoft and Miles Davis as authors in a legal sense.112 112. Ibid. Pg. 10
The historical origins of originality and authorship are as murky

as the concepts themselves. What is clear, however, is that during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British authors organized to
protect their financial interests and place in society. They called for a
valorization of their profession. They recognized that they controlled
a valuable financial and cultural commodity in a thriving empire that
based its imperialistic motivations on the superiority of its culture. They
lobbied for copyright laws to protect their financial interests.113 113. Ibid. Pg. 46
The “author” must lose its individual dimension and be transformed

into an industrially organized production process (with a division of
labour, investments, orders, and so forth), “reproduction” becomes
a mass reproduction organized according to the imperatives of
profitability, and the audience (“reception”) tends to become
the consumer/communicator. In this process of socialization
and subsumption within the economy of intellectual activity the
“ideological” product tends to assume the form of a commodity.
However, the subsumption of this process under capitalist logic and
the transformation of its products into commodities does not abolish
114. Lazzarato,
the specificity of aesthetic production, that is to say, the creative “Immaterial Labour.”
relationship between author and audience.114 Pg. 143
All along, the author was deployed as a straw man in the debate.
The unrewarded authorial genius was used as a rhetorical distraction
that appealed to American romantic individualism. As copyright historian
Lyman Ray Patterson has articulated, copyright has in the twentieth
115. Vaidhyanathan,
century really been about the rights of publishers first, authors second,
Copyrights and
and the public a distant third. If we continue to skewer this “straw Copywrongs: The Rise
man” of authorship with our dull scholarly bayonets, we will miss the
important issues: ownership, control, access, and use.115 Creativity. Pg. 11

VIII
Originality is a fundamental principle of copyright. It implies that the

author or artist created the work through his or her own skill, labour,
116. Ibid. Pg. 20 and judgment.116
Creativity has become the key source of value in late capitalism,

which draws on the source of value that can be extracted from living
117. Berry, “Copy, Rip, labour. That is, the productive labour to form immaterial objects through
intellectual and affective endeavour is a growing and important source
Pg. 56 of value in capitalism.117
With its concerns for origins and first proprietors, the liberal
discourse of property blended readily with the eighteenth-century
discourse of original genius. As David Quint has shown, the notion of
originality had roots in Renaissance literature, but the representation of
originality as a central value in cultural production developed, as M. H.
Abrams’ classic study reveals, in precisely the same period as the notion
of the author’s property right. As late as 1711 Alexander Pope could
still evoke the idea of the poet as the reproducer of traditional truths,
speaking of ‘True Wit,’ as ‘Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was
Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest,’ Seven years earlier, however, John
118. Rose, Authors and Dennis made originality the basis for his praise of Milton, and in 1728
Copyright. Pg. 6 Edward Young was also insisting on its importance.118
While the idea itself exists in a realm beyond the human realm, the
expression belongs to this world, and to the person who, receiving the
idea as author, inventor, or owner, fixes it materially as self-expression
through his or her labour and turns it into property. This is called
119. Ibid. Pg. 6 “originality.”119
Over the past forty years, ‘creativity’ has become the focus of an
intensified interest by governments and capital. Claims are made that
120. Berry, “Copy, Rip, creativity is the key to the functioning of modern economies and as such
creativity must be ‘democratised’, that is that we must all equally be
Pg. 42 able to ‘be creative’ and through this creativity, more productive.120
The eighteenth-century discourse of original genius can be

understood as an anticipation of romantic doctrines of creativity.
112
These anticipations of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s distinctions between
the material and immaterial aspects of a book and between content
and form also suggest the continuity between the issues raised in the
English debates and those raised by the German romantics. Why should
an author have a property right in his work? What does that work consist
of? How is a literary composition different from a mechanical invention?
In representing the author as a specially gifted person able to produce
from the depths of personal experience an organically unified work of
art, romanticism provided codified theoretical answers to these critical Owners: The Invention of
legal questions.121 Copyright. Pg. 132
Questioning the assumptions of the ‘information’ or ‘creative’

society. One of the most common of these is the argument that
‘incentivation’ can encourage individual creativity and hence economic
growth. Thus the motivation for the artist, musician, designer or
writer is explained purely through their desire for profit t; to stimulate
their creativity and innovation more intellectual property rights (IPR)
legislation is required. The argument for a ‘creative’ economy can
therefore be used to cast everyone in the unlikely Thatcherite model of 122. Berry, “Copy, Rip,
one-dimensional profit-motivated entrepreneurs rather than complex Copyleft and Copyright.”
and multifaceted human beings.122 Pg. xii
Much of the notorious difficulty of applying copyright doctrine to

concrete cases can be related to the persistence of the discourse of
original genius and to the problems inherent in the reifications of author
and work. But much also has to do with copyright’s role as mediator
between private and public.123 Copyright. Pg. 141
The attempt to anchor the notion of literary property in personality

suggests the need to find a transcendent signifier, a category
beyond the economic to warrant and ground the circulation of literary
commodities. Thus the mystification of original genius.124 124. Ibid. Pg. 128
At the core of this problem is the creative industries’ attempt to link

copyright and creativity – they argue that without copyright there could 125. Berry, “Copy, Rip,
not be creativity. Here, creativity is correlated with a nation’s economic Burn: The Politics of
success that, it is argued, relies on the creative productivity of its.125 Pg. 36

Creativity is generally linked to the concept of immaterial production
or mental labour of all kinds which connects to computerisation;
explicitly because computers rely on the work of human minds in order
to produce, code, control and communicate using technology. Today
the discourse of creativity is also used widely to distinguish between
an older industrial form of capitalism, and the new world of media,
126. Ibid. Pg. 43 information and knowledge, often titled the ‘creative’ economy.126
127. Vaidhyanathan, Artists collabourate over space and time, even if they lived centuries
Copyrights and
Copywrongs: The Rise and continents apart. Profound creativity requires maximum exposure
of Intellectual Property to others’ works and liberal freedoms to reuse and reshape others’
Creativity. Pg. 186 material.127
128. Berry, “Copy, Rip,
Burn: The Politics of No woman or man is an island and creativity is always a collective
Copyleft and Copyright.” achievement.128
Pg. xii
129. Umberto The author must invent every time a “new” crime and “new”
Eco, “Innovation &
Repetition: Between secondary characters, but these details only serve to reconfirm the
Modern & Post-Modern permanence of a fixed repertoire of topoi.129
Aesthetics,” Daedalus
114, no. 4 (1985). Pg. 193
Lets consider the case of an historical period (our own) for which
iteration and repetition seem to dominate the whole world of artistic
creativity, and in which it is difficult to distinguish between the repetition
130. Ibid. Pg. 194 of the media and the repetition of the so-called major arts.130
The repetitiveness and the seriality that interests us here look

instead at something that at first glance does not appear the same as
131. Ibid. Pg. 195 (equal to) something else.131
The first type of repetition is the retake. In this case one recycles
the characters of a previous successful story in order to exploit them, by
132. Ibid. Pg. 195
telling what happened to them after the end of their first adventure.132
The second type of repetition is the remake. It consists in telling again a
133. Ibid. Pg. 195 previous successful story.133
Seriality and repetition are not opposed to innovation. Nothing is

more “serial” than a tie pattern, and yet nothing can be so personalized
134. Ibid. Pg. 201 as a tie.134
114
Rather, there is an aesthetics of serial forms that requires an
historical and anthropological study of the ways in which, at different
times and in different places, the dialectic between repetition and
innovation has been instantiated.135 135. Ibid. Pg. 201
Much art has been and is repetitive. The concept of absolute

originality is a contemporary one, born with Romanticism; classical
art was in vast measure serial, and the “modern” avant-garde (at the
beginning of this century) challenged the Romantic idea of “creation
from nothingness,” with its techniques of collage, mustachios on the
Mona Lisa, art about art, and so on.136 136. Ibid. Pg. 203
The human baby protects itself by means of repetition (the same

fairy tale, one more time, or the same game, or the same gesture).
Repetition is understood as a protective strategy in the face of the
shock caused by new and unexpected experiences. So, the problem
looks like this: is it not true that the experience of the baby is transferred
into adult experience, into the prevalent forms of behavior at the center
of the great urban aggregates (described by Simmel, Benjamin, and so
many others)? The childhood experience of repetition is prolonged even
into adulthood, since it constitutes the principal form of safe haven in
the absence of solidly established customs, of substantial communities,
of a developed and complete ethos. In traditional societies (or, if you
like, in the experience of the “people”), the repetition which is so dear to
babies gave way to more complex and articulated forms of protection:
to ethos; that is to say, to the usages and customs, to the habits which
constitute the base of the substantial communities. Now, in the age of
the multitude, this substitution no longer occurs. Repetition, far from
being replaced, persists. It was Walter Benjamin who got the point. He
dedicated a great deal of attention to childhood, to childish games,
137. Paolo Virno,
to the love which a baby has for repetition; and together with this, he A Grammar of the
identified the sphere in which new forms of perception are created with Multitude (Semiotext
(e) Los Angeles, 2003).
the technical reproducibility of a work of art.137 Pg. 39
Classical literary tradition is no different. Shakespeare borrowed

heavily from Plutarch; Milton from the Bible; Coleridge from Kent,
Schelling, and Schlegel; Yeats from Shelly; Kafka from Kleist and
Dickens; Joyce from Homer; and T. S. Eliot from Shakespeare, Whitman,

and Baudelaire, all in ways that would infringe today’s bloated
copyright. In literature and music, as in other forms of expression, such
138. Netanel,
Copyright’s Paradox.
‘‘patterns of influence—cribbing, tweaking, transforming— [are] at the
Pg. 22 very heart of the creative process.’138
What is of interest now is the distinctive form of that churning in

relation to the general economic and social churning that Joseph A.
Schumpeter, in his classic phrase about capitalism, called “creative
destruction.” A “perennial gale of creative destruction,” Schumpeter
wrote in 1942, “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from
within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new
one.” The real competition, Schumpeter said, is not the normal furor
over prices, quality, and sales effort, but “competition from the new
commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type
of organization . . . [competition] which strikes not at the margins of the
profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and
their very lives.” Recent scholars of business and economic history take
such furious creativity to be simply post-industrial business as usual. In
“post-capitalist society,” Peter F. Drucker says, “creative destruction”
is “innovation,” compelling the “systematic abandonment of the
established, the customary, the familiar, the comfortable.” The “spirit
139. Alan Liu, The Laws of informationalism,” Manuel Castells adds, “is the culture of ‘creative
of Cool (University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
destruction’ accelerated to the speed of the optoelectronic circuits that
Pg. 2 process its signals.”139
In the age of corporatized “creativity,” the modernist and originally

Romantic premise that critique goes hand in hand with “renovation,”
which is to say “innovation” and “originality,” is now dysfunctional as
an overarching aesthetic, no matter how functional creativity may be
at lower levels of ideology (e.g., as motivation for individual artists and
authors, as an argument for funding, or as the rationale for an arts
140. Ibid. Pg. 325 festival).140
Innovation is no longer subordinated only to the rationalization

of labour, but also to commercial imperatives. It seems, then, that
141. Lazzarato,
“Immaterial Labour.”
the post-industrial commodity is the result of a creative process that
Pg. 141 involves both the producer and the consumer.141
116
Creativity and productivity in post-industrial societies reside, on
the one hand, in the dialectic between the forms of life and values they
produce and, on the other, in the activities of subjects that constitute
them. The legitimation that the (Schumpeterian) entrepreneur found in
his or her capacity for innovation has lost its foundation. Because the
capitalist entrepreneur does not produce the forms and contents of
immaterial labour, he or she does not even produce innovation.142 142. Ibid. Pg. 145
The concept of creativity is being reconfigured to meet the needs

of capital, no longer limited to the Romantic myths of authorship, nor
predicated on the concept of the ‘Great Men’ or the ‘Genius’. Instead, 143. Berry, “Copy, Rip,
creativity is understood as a ‘floating signifier’, that is it can correspond Copyleft and Copyright.”
to a number of different meanings across society.143 Pg. 42
Paradoxically, since ideas do not or cannot receive legal protection,

IP law encourages those who produce commodities to exaggerate the
inevitable distortion of the idea as manifest in the actual object. And
the result of this is the kitsch version of originality, “thinking outside the 144. Boon, In Praise of
box,” that prevails in the marketplace today.144 Copying. Pg. 22
If capitalism is new in its modes of accumulation, in its centres

of initiative, in its ideology, this is not because it is itself creative, 145. Yann Moulier-
innovative and revolutionary. It is because it is forced to mutate in order Boutang, Cognitive
Capitalism (Polity, 2012).
to survive.145 Pg. 36
The fate of ‘all that is solid’ in modern life to ‘melt into air.’ The
innate dynamism of the modern economy, and of the culture that grows
from this economy, annihilates everything that it creates—physical
environments, social institutions, metaphysical ideas, artistic visions,
moral values—in order to create more, to go on endlessly creating the
world anew. This drive draws all modern men and women into its orbit,
and forces us all to grapple with the question of what is essential, what 146. Marshall Berman,
All That Is Solid Melts
is meaningful, what is real in the maelstrom in which we move and
into Air (USA: Penguin
live.146 Books, 1988). Pg. 288
IX
The information society usually refers to a shift in Western

economies from the production of goods to the production of innovation.
Sometimes referred to as ‘post-fordism’, this identifies a shift from a
Fordist mass industrial society that was epitomised by Henry Ford’s
huge mass-production factories, to that of an economy based on
information and technology, and shifts in the patterns of consumption,
flexible changes in the workplace and a higher intensity of profit-related
growth by the move from a mass market to concentrating on a higher
stratum of high-earning consumers. Generally, the shift is understood
147. Berry, “Copy, Rip, to have occurred in the 1960s and 1970s in response to various factors
such as union activity, the high cost of the welfare state, strikes and the
Pg. 43 oil shock that led to a drop in competitiveness in the West.147
Manuel Castells, exploring the rise of networks, has argued that we

can see the emergence of an information society that is built around the
growing importance of knowledge and information to the generation of
148. Ibid. Pg. 44 profit.148
[There has been a] deepening of [the] capitalistic logic of profit

seeking in capital-labour relationships; enhancing productivity of
labour and capital; globalising production, circulation and markets,
seizing the most advantageous conditions for profit making everywhere;
and marshalling the state’s support for productivity gains and
competitiveness of national economies, often to the detriment of social
149. Ibid. Pg. 45 protection and public interest regulations.149
The information society remains a capitalist society, which Castells

argues has grown from three major causes; the information technology
revolution, the restructuring of capitalism in the 1980s and the long-
term effect of social and political movements in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, Castells stresses that the actual deployment of information
technology is the result of conscious social action – not merely a
150. Ibid. Pg. 45 deterministic result of technical change.150
The development of information and knowledge as important new

economic resources differs from previous usages of information and
151. Ibid. Pg. 45 knowledge that were embedded within the commodity.151
There has been a move away from the importance of material inputs
118
(which previously were critical elements in production) to ideas and
knowledge as contributing significant value to the product. But this
information has also become disarticulated from its carrier (that is, the
commodity) and consequently has been accorded a separate value.
Therefore value-added is increasingly reliant on non-material inputs
into products and services.152 152. Ibid. Pg. 45
On one hand, there is immaterial or mental activity which 153. Virno, A Grammar
“results in commodities which exist separately from the producer [...] of the Multitude. Pg. 53
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1
books, paintings and all products of art as distinct from the artistic (London: Penguin Books,
achievement of the practicing artist.’153 1887). Appendix
The debates around the constitutive role of intellectual property

laws in commercial and popular culture and its monopoly on the use 154. Berry, “Copy, Rip,
and reuse of meaning, interpretation and transformation is increasingly Copyleft and Copyright.”
excluded from the political sphere and articulated through the market.154 Pg. 52
The consequences for democracy and creativity have largely

been ignored in the rapid enclosure of ideas and expressions that
has intensified in the past decade. With a world economic system
being created on the basis of a global monopoly on property rights in
intellectual and immaterial production, nations and corporations are
increasingly focusing on the collection of intellectual property portfolios
and securing rights in knowledge.155 155. Ibid. Pg. 52
Whereas industrial capitalism could be characterised as the

production of commodities by means of commodities, cognitive
capitalism produces knowledge by means of knowledge and produces
the living by means of the living. It is immediately production of life, and
thus it is bio-production. The production of new knowledge can only be
done on the basis of an accumulation of knowledge that is not reduced
to technical material means. But it can therefore only take place on
the basis of collective brain activity mobilised in interconnected digital
networks. This type of capitalism corresponds to a development in
society that has come to be known as ‘the knowledge society’. Insofar
as invention-power (far more than physical labour power) is what is
mobilised specifically by cognitive capitalism, this creates a situation in
which cognitive capitalism produces knowledge and the living through

156. Moulier-Boutang, the production of the population.156
Cognitive Capitalism.
Pg. 56
To help distinguish new modes of alienation of labour-produced
goods, here the analytical category of immaterial goods is used, that
is, the form of goods and services within an informational milieu. This
category is aimed at helping to distinguish a particularly informational
mode of exploitation, whereby through the use of enclosing techniques,
including IPRs and digital locks, the ownership and control of
information can be organised and manipulated. The concept of
157. Berry, “Copy, Rip, immaterial goods raises questions about a new class of ownership
that is supported through the monopolisation of information, data or
Pg. 54 knowledge talk about a new feudalism.157
Non-material inputs (such as design, marketing, advertising,

quality-control and technical ideas), or what Marx called ‘universal
labour’, are now the subject of furious competition amongst states and
158. Ibid. Pg. 56 corporations.158
Information has always been important to capitalism, of course,

but the relative weight of the ownership of information is increasing as
the potential for monopoly control of its creation, dissemination and
use has been strengthened. The control and codification of knowledge
has become increasingly subject to the attention of capitalists as
accordingly, while the weight of current economic output is probably
only modestly higher than it was a half-century ago, value added [i.e.
knowledge and non-material additions], adjusted for price change, has
159. Ibid. Pg. 56 risen well over threefold.’159
These questions are not new, but they point to issues over the
changing structure of creativity referred to earlier, and how it is being
160. Ibid. Pg. 56 configured to serve as a locus for profit in late capitalism.160
The expansion of capital into information, knowledge and

communicational arenas raises particular questions about the extent to
which capitalism intervenes in our social life to a different degree than
161. Ibid. Pg. 57 in previous modes of production.161
Today with knowledge becoming a key resource for capitalism,
120
the question remains as to what lengths capital may go to control
the raw materials of creative or informational production. This has
been achieved in the past through what some theorists refer to as the
‘enclosure of the common’ or the privatisation of knowledge objects.162 162. Ibid. Pg. 144
As capital expands it seeks ownership of more of the common

intellectual space in order to control the production of immaterial goods
and services. This tendency can contradict some of the requirements for
creative production (such as access to knowledge).163 163. Ibid. Pg. 145
164. Matteo Pasquinelli,

Carlo Vercellone’s motto goes “rent is the new profit” in cognitive “The Ideology of
capitalism. Rent is parasitic because it is orthogonal to the line of the Free Culture and the
Grammar of Sabotage,”
classic profit.164 Policy Futures in
Education 8, no. 6
Rent is the parasitic income an owner can earn just by owning an (2010). Pg. 8
asset and it traditionally refers to land property. Profit on the contrary is

meant to be productive and it refers to the power of capital to generate
and extract surplus (from commodity value and workforce).165 165. Ibid. Pg. 8
The digital revolution made the reproduction of immaterial objects

easier, faster, ubiquitous and almost free. But as the Italian economist
Enzo Rullani points out, within cognitive capitalism, “proprietary logic
does not disappear but has to subordinate itself to the law of diffusion.”
Intellectual property (and so rent) is no longer based on space and
objects but on time and speed. Apart from copyright there are many
other modes to extract rent.166 166. Ibid. Pg. 9
For Rullani the value of a knowledge (extensively of any cognitive

product, artwork, brand, information) is given by the composition of
three drivers: the value of its performance and application (v); the
number of its multiplications and replica (n); the sharing rate of the
value among the people involved in the process (p). Knowledge is
successful when it becomes self-propulsive and pushes all the three
drivers: 1) maximising the value, 2) multiplying effectively, 3) sharing the
value that is produced.167 167. Ibid. Pg. 9
A taxonomy of rent and its parasites is needed to describe cognitive

capitalism in detail. Taxonomy is not merely a metaphor as cognitive

systems tend to behave like living systems. According to Vercellone, a
specific form of rent introduced by cognitive capitalism is the cognitive
rent that is captured over intellectual property such as patents,
copyrights and trademarks. More precisely Rullani contextualises the
new forms of rent within a speed-based competitive scenario. He shows
how rent can be extracted dynamically along mobile and temporary
168. Ibid. Pg. 9 micro-monopolies, skipping the limits of intellectual property.168
All these types of rent are immaterial parasites. The parasite is

immaterial as rent is produced dynamically along the virtual extensions
169. Ibid. Pg. 10 of space, time, communication, imagination, desire.169
Over the last thirty years or so it has become standard wisdom, both
inside and outside business, that capitalism requires the appliance of
more and more brain power in conjunction with information technology—
170. Nigel Thrift, the construction of collective intelligence in order to run complex
“Foreword,” in Cognitive
Capitalism (Polity, 2012).
operations, in order to foster innovation, in order to provide better
Pg. vi service experiences, in order simply to reproduce.170
Capitalism is not just interested in codified knowledge but equally

in noncodified knowledge, which it can codify by all kinds of means—
an activity that was one of the keys to the Industrial Revolution and
has now become. Indeed, the emphasis on teaching ‘creativity’ in
educational systems the world over is a tacit acknowledgement of an
even greater ambition: in the cases of both codified and noncodified
knowledge, it is supposedly somewhere within the excess of creativity,
however defined, that new knowledge and innovation can be found that
171. Ibid. Pg. vii can continually get the system off the hook.171
Cognitive capitalism is not only a type of accumulation oriented

172. Moulier-Boutang,
Cognitive Capitalism.
towards the valorisation of knowledge and innovation. It is also a new
Pg. 59 mode of capitalist production.172
Literature on freeculturalism is vast but can be partially unpacked

through focusing the lens of surplus. Reading authors like Stallman and
Lessig, a question rises: where does profit end up in the so-called Free
122
Society? Free Culture seems to focus only on the issue of immaterial
property rather than production. Although given a closer look, the
ghost of the surplus reappears. In his book Free Culture Lawrence
Lessig connect the Creative Commons initiative to the Anglo-American 173. Pasquinelli, “The
Ideology of Free Culture
libertarian tradition where free speech always rhymes with free and the Grammar of
market.173 Sabotage.” Pg. 5
With The Future of Ideas, Lessig began to link his ideas to a concept
of the commons and social creativity, highlighting the importance of
‘the freedom to tinker’ in order that innovation and new forms of social
and technical practices emerged. Perhaps due to his legal background,
or his instinctive liberal desire to achieve a consensual ‘middle-ground’
position, Lessig used a somewhat idiosyncratic term ‘open code’ –
presumably to avoid offending either the free software or the open
source movement. In the end he was forced to revise his ideas with Free 174. Berry, “Copy, Rip,
Culture where he admitted that a return to the focus on ‘free culture’
was important.174 Pg. 22
Lessig takes inspiration from the copyleft and hacker culture

quoting Richard Stallman, but where the latter refers only to software,
Lessig applies that paradigm to the whole spectrum of cultural
artefacts. Software is taken as an universal political model. The book
is a useful critique of the copyright regime and at the same time an
apology of a generic digital freedom, at least until Lessig pronounces
the evil word: taxation. Facing the crisis of the music industries, Lessig
has to provide his “alternative compensation system” to reward creators
for their works. Lessig modifies a proposal coming from Harvard law
professor William Fisher: Under his plan, all content capable of digital
transmission would 1) be marked with a digital watermark [...]. Once
the content is marked, then entrepreneurs would develop 2) systems
to monitor how many items of each content were distributed. On the 175. Pasquinelli, “The
basis of those numbers, then 3) artists would be compensated. The Ideology of Free Culture
and the Grammar of
compensation would be paid for by (4) an appropriate tax.175 Sabotage.” Pg. 5
Lessig launched the Creative Commons organisation in 2001 to

provide a unified front for a number of different free culture movements,
through a variety of Creative Commons licences. However, this project
has been fraught with infighting, institutionalisation and controversial

176. Berry, “Copy, Rip, relationships with industry that have been widely criticised. He now
Copyleft and Copyright.” positions himself as a spokesperson for the ‘free culture’ movement,
Pg. 22 although increasingly it is defined within a narrow conception of remixing
and reuse of culture, which he calls ‘read/write culture.’176
The open source movement conception of the social good is

strongly neoliberal and libertarian. It privileges both a vision of a highly
individualistic social order, a vision strongly influenced by Darwin and
the theory of the survival of the fittest, and also holds that collective
177. Ibid. Pg. 178 goods can be produced through the selfish action of individuals.177
Open source certainly highlights questions regarding the ‘common’

production of public goods that have been lost from our contemporary
vocabulary, especially through viewing the monopoly granted by
178. Ibid. Pg. 38 intellectual property rights through a narrow public/private binary.178
179. Pasquinelli, “The In the “tradition of free culture” the solution is paradoxically a new
and the Grammar of tax.179
Sabotage.” Pg. 5
After an initial honeymoon the Creative Commons (CC) initiative is

facing a growing criticism that comes especially from the European
media culture. Scouting articles from 2004 to 2006, two fronts of
critique can be distinguished: those who claim the institution of a real
commonality against Creative Commons restrictions (non- commercial,
share-alike, etc.) and those who point out Creative Commons complicity
with global capitalism. An example of the first front, Florian Cramer
provides a precise and drastic analysis: To say that something is
available under a CC license is meaningless in practice. [...] Creative
Commons licenses are fragmented, do not define a common minimum
standard of freedoms and rights granted to users or even fail to meet
the criteria of free licenses altogether, and that unlike the Free Software
and Open Source movements, they follow a philosophy of reserving
180. Ibid. Pg. 6 rights of copyright owners rather than granting them to audiences.180
Berlin-based Neoist Anna Nimus agrees with Cramer that CC

licences protect only the producers while consumer rights are left
unmentioned: “Creative Commons legitimates, rather than denies,
producer-control and enforces, rather than abolishes, the distinction
124
between producer and consumer. It expands the legal framework for
producers to deny consumers the possibility to create use-value or
exchange-value out of the common stock.”181 181. Ibid. Pg. 6
They are “Creative Anti-Commons.”182 182. Ibid. Pg. 6
Although Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and James Boyle’s Public

Domain make a liberal critique of existing intellectual-property law,
these critiques accept the capitalist system as it currently stands, and
propose modifications of IP law that basically support the expansion of
that system and its need to exploit creative labour, entrepreneurship of
ideas, and so on. If those seeking a “free culture” can posit the freedom
of culture only in terms of the existing system, then how free can such a 183. Boon, In Praise of
culture really be?183 Copying. Pg. 239
The logic of Free/Libre/Open Source Software seems only to 184. Martin Hardie,
“Change of the Century:
promise a new space for entrepreneurial freedom where we are never Free Software and the
exploited or subject to others’ command. The sole focus upon ‘copyright Positive Possibility,”
Mute 2013(2006),
freedom’ sweeps away consideration of the processes of valorisation http://www.metamute.
active within the global factory without walls.184 org/editorial/articles/

change-century-free-
software-and-positive-
Martin Hardie criticise Free/Libre/Open Source Software precisely possibility.
because it never questions the way it is captured by capital and its

185. Pasquinelli, “The
relations with the productive forces.185 Ideology of Free Culture
and the Grammar of
Sabotage.” Pg. 6
A tactical notion of autonomous commons can be imagined to
include new projects and tendencies against the hyper-celebrated
Creative Commons. In a schematic way, autonomous commons 1) allow
not only passive and personal consumption but even a productive use
of the common stock — implying commercial use by single workers;
2) question the role and complicity of the commons within the global
economy and place the common stock out of the exploitation of large
companies; 3) are aware of the asymmetry between immaterial and
material commons and the impact of immaterial accumulation over
material production (e.g. IBM using Linux); 4) consider the commons
as an hybrid and dynamic space that dynamically must be built and
defended.186 186. Ibid. Pg. 6

Many of the subcultures and political schools emerged around
knowledge and network paradigms (from Free Culture to the ‘creative
class’ and even many radical readings of these positions) do not
acknowledge cognitive capitalism as a conflictual and competitive
scenario. Paolo Virno is one of the few authors to underline the
“amphibious” nature of the multitude, that is cooperative as well as
187. Ibid. Pg. 11
aggressive if not struggling “within itself.”187
The constitution of autonomous and productive commons does not

pass through the traditional forms of activism and for sure not through
a digital-only resistance and knowledge sharing. The commons should
be acknowledged as a dynamic and hybrid space that is constantly
configured along the friction between material and immaterial. If the
commons becomes a dynamic space, it must be defended in a dynamic
way. Because of the immateriality and anonymity of rent, the grammar
of sabotage has become the modus operandi of the multitudes trapped
into the network society and cognitive capitalism. The sabotage is the
only possible gesture specular to the rent—the only possible gesture to
188. Ibid. Pg. 12 defend the commons.188
Various popular practices of copying already contain a politics that

is not only resistant to the dominant logic of late capitalism, but that
Copying. Pg. 8 already operates in a semi-autonomous manner.189
XI
The common is a key aspect to thinking in terms of the ways in

which a ‘technology of the common’ could raise critical awareness of
the collective moment in production. But it also contributes positively
190. Berry, “Copy, Rip, to new ways of approaching and applying methods of working, which
legitimate and encourage the flourishing of social action and political
Pg. xi practices.190
According to Roger Silverstone the common is that material

space we share and the precondition for our commonness, our shared
understandings as human beings. Hannah Arendt argues that without
commonality we are condemned to a ‘private world of self- interest
and political impotence’. Arendt uses the metaphor of a table, around
126
which we can sit and which provides a material environment for us
to communicate and share a common world – it both connects and
separates us.191 191. Ibid. Pg. 26
The discussion of the citizen in the space of the public or ‘common’

is by no means a modern phenomenon. These questions are made up
of multiple historical, philosophical, cultural, political and economic
understandings of the citizen and public identity vis-à-vis the rest
of society. However, what is a relatively new phenomenon is the
association with and appropriation of a ‘creative’ citizen that inhabits
a common world of technology within the process of the emergence of
an information-based economy and, more particularly, new intellectual
property laws.192 192. Ibid. Pg. 27
Recent moves to try to protect some ideal of the commons in

liberal discourse have resulted in the hollowing out of the concept
of the commons. The commons has been transformed into a
‘Creative Commons’, which is a distorted and diminished concept of
the commons, predicated on a system of private rights codified in
intellectual property rights.193 193. Ibid. Pg. 28
This is important in regard to debates and contradictions found

in discussing the concept of the ‘common’ in general, but useful to
explore the case of the ‘intellectual commons’. The commons itself is an
essentially contested concept, and categorical slippage is frequent in
the literature between (i) ‘common’; (ii) ‘commons’; (iii) ‘common-wealth’;
(iv) ‘public domain’; (v) ‘public sphere’; (vi) ‘freedom’; (vii) ‘commonalty’ (or
‘commonality’); (viii) ‘copyleft’; (ix) ‘sharing’; and (x) ‘anti-copyright.’194 194. Ibid. Pg. 79
According to Cicero, the meaning of res publicae is res populi

(the people’s business) where ‘the people’ is ‘a union of a number of
men, acknowledging each other’s rights and pursuing in common their
advantage, utility or interest’. Indeed, the English ‘republic’ is derived
from the Latin res publicae meaning ‘the public thing’, ‘the public
concern’ or the ‘people’s business’. Cicero had a particular interest
in justice, and in the distinction between commons and private goods,
and argued that one should treat common goods as common and
private ones as one’s own. He argued that no property is private by

nature – instead it becomes private: 1) by long occupation (by custom);
2) by victory (the spoils of war); or 3) by law (settlement, contract or
lot). Today, the term most often associated with this definition of res
publicae is ‘commonwealth’. For Cicero, private owners must ‘contribute
195. Ibid. Pg. 86 to the common stock of things that benefit everyone together.’195
The ‘common’ is often understood with regard to commonalty (the

common body of man) or commonality (that which we share in common).
For example, Hardt and Negri argue that it should be considered with
regard to the common interest, that is the general interest that is not
made abstract in the control of the state (that is, the public interest) but
rather is held in common by ‘the singularities that co-operate in social,
196. Ibid. Pg. 89 biopolitical production ... managed by the multitude’.196
Res communes define things that are capable of non-exclusive

ownership or incapable of ownership. In other words, things that are
197. Ibid. Pg. 89 open to all by their nature.197
An excursus on the concept of the common. Outlines a genealogy

that includes res nullis (things belonging to no-one), res privatae (private
things), res publicae (public things), res universitatis (things belonging
to a group), res communes (common things), res divini juris (things that
are under the jurisdiction of the gods) and res imperium (things owned in
the international arena). This genealogy highlighted how these property
forms are based on contingent turns in history, rather than rational
or planned outcomes. These concepts were intended as an ongoing
contribution to research into the way in which we understand our
current formation of property rights, and more importantly, to bring back
to our attention older forms of communal and shared rights (in many
198. Ibid. Pg. 189 cases the concept of ownership would not apply here).198
There are two main issues relating to the privatised nature of

the commons in the twenty-first century. 1) Where previously the
commons was a non-owned community resource, today we see many
dispersed private projects opened up ostensibly for the commons (such
as the Creative Commons project) but which still reserve copyright
and intellectual property rights to the private licenser. This book has
examined whether a new concept of the commons is beginning to
128
develop through conflicts over intellectual property rights, perhaps
as a form of community-owned intellectual property (such as a res
universitatis, as a state-backed utility or collecting society that protects
and licenses materials freely) or through a market-based system based
on contract and private property (that is, res privatae); and 2) The
concept of the creative citizen as a new subjectivity is being contested
by hackers within free/libre/open source software, in practices like the
distribution/creation of open source material/software and discursive
practices that reject the policies, advocacy and governmentality of state
interests that promote corporate ownership and copyright culture.199 199. Ibid. Pg. 195
The crisis of the copyright system and the contradictions of the

so-called Free Culture movement are taken as a starting point to design
the notion of autonomous commons against the creative commons. A
new political arena is outlined around Rullani’s cognitive capitalism and
the new theory of rent developed by Negri and Vercellone. Finally, the 200. Pasquinelli, “The
sabotage is shown as the specular gesture of the multitudes to defend and the Grammar of
the commons against the parasitic dimension of rent. 200 Sabotage.” Pg. 2
Among all the appeals for “real” commons only Dmytri Kleiner’s idea
of ‘Copyfarleft’ condenses the nodal point of the conflict in a pragmatic
proposal that breaks the flat paradigm of Free Culture. In his article
“Copyfarleft and Copyjustright” Kleiner notices a property divide that is
more crucial than any digital divide: 10% of the world population owns
85% of the global assets against a multitude of people owning nearly
nothing. This material dominion of the owning class is consequently
extended thanks to the copyright over immaterial assets, so that these
can be owned, controlled and traded. In the case of music for example
intellectual property is more crucial to the owning class than musicians,
as they are forced to resign author rights over their own works. On
the other side the digital commons do not provide a better habitat:
authors are sceptical that copyleft can earn them a living. In the end
the authors’ wage conditions within cognitive capitalism seem to follow
the same old laws of Fordism. Moving from Ricardo’s definition of rent
and the so-called “Iron Law of Wages” Kleiner develops the “iron law of
copyright earnings.”201 201. Ibid. Pg. 7
The solution advanced by Kleiner is copyfarleft, a license with a

hybrid status that recognises class divide and allow workers to claim
back the “means of production.” Copyfarleft products are free and can
be used to make money only by those who do not exploit wage labour
(like other workers or co-ops). For copyleft to have any revolutionary
potential it must be Copyfarleft. It must insist upon workers ownership
of the means of production. In order to do this a license cannot have
a single set of terms for all users, but rather must have different rules
for different classes. Specifically one set of rules for those who are
working within the context of workers ownership and commons based
production, and another for those who employ private property and
202. Ibid. Pg. 7 wage labour in production.202
Kleiner says that if money cannot be made out of it, a work does
not belong to the commons: it is merely private property. How does
cognitive capitalism make money? Where does a digital economy extract
surplus? While digerati and activists are stuck to the glorification of peer
production, good managers — but also good Marxists — are aware of
203. Ibid. Pg. 8 the profits made on the shoulders of the collective intelligence.203
Why, then, don’t we abandon copyright as an archaic and

cumbersome system of cultural regulation? Why don’t we launch
into the brave new world that Michel Foucault imagines at the end
of “What Is an Author?” where the authorial function disappears and
texts develop and circulate, as Foucault puts it, “in the anonymity of a
murmur.” The institution of copyright is of course deeply rooted in our
economic system, and much of our economy does in turn depend on
intellectual property. But, no less important, copyright is deeply rooted
in our conception of ourselves as individuals with at least a modest
grade of singularity, some degree of personality. And it is associated
with our sense of privacy and our conviction, at least in theory, that it is
essential to limit the power of the state. We are not ready to give up the
Copyright. Pg. 142 sense of who we are.204
The world is one and common to those who are awake, but that
everybody who is asleep turns away to his own. Heraclitus (2006,
Fragment 89)
130
SELECTION
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
Mundaneum, Musée mondial, Geneva- 1929
Musée d’art Contemporain , Paris- 1931 Centre d’esthétique contemporaine, Paris - 1937
Musée Chandigarh - 1952 Musée, Ahmedabad - 1951
Musée à croissance illimitée, Sans lieu, 1939
Musée National d'Art Occidental, Tokyo, 1957 Palais des congrès, Strasbourg, 1964 Hôpital, Venice, 1964
142
al, Geneva- 1929
Mundaneum, Musée mondial, Geneva- 1929
143
Paris- 1931
144
mporaine, Paris - 1937
145
e, Sans lieu, 1939
Musée à croissance illimitée, Sans lieu, 1939
146
ndigarh - 1952
147
148
Musée National d'Art Occidental, Tokyo, 1957
149
ongrès, Strasbourg, 1964
Palais des congrès, Strasbourg, 1964
150
Hôpital, Venice, 1964
151
Altes Museum
152
Hotel Berlin
153
154
155
156
157
plans
134. Corner detail, Lake Shore Apartments, 1951, Ludwig Mies Van der
Rohe
135. Corner detail, Pepsi Cola Co. World Headquarters, 1960, Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill
136. Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, 325
137. Rucellai Sepulchre, Florence, 1467, Leon Battista Alberti
138. Farnsworth House, 1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
139. Rosen House, 1963, Craig Ellwood
140. Churchill College, Cambridge, 1968, Richard Sheppard
141. Churchill College, Cambridge, 2009, 6a Archatects
142. Squares, Spirals and Swastikas, Le Corbusier
143. Mundaneum, Musée mondial, Geneva, 1929, Le Corbusier
144. Musée d’art Contemporain , Paris, 1931, LC
145. Centre d’esthétique contemporaine, Paris, 1937, LC
146. Musée à croissance illimitée, Sans lieu, 1939, LC
147. Musée Chandigarh, 1952, LC
158
148. Musée, Ahmedabad, 1951, LC
149. Musée National d’Art Occidental, Tokyo, 1957, LC
150. Palais des congrès, Strasbourg, 1964, LC
151. Hôpital, Venice, 1964, LC
152. Altes Museum, Berlin, 1830, Karl Friedrich Schinkel
153. Hotel Berlin, Berlin, 1977, Oswald Matthias Ungers
154. School, Klotzsche, 1925, Heinrich Tessenow
155. Student Housing, Chieti, 1976, Giorgio Grassi
156. Locomotiva 2, Torino, 1962, Aldo Rossi
157. Locomotiva 3, Torino, 2010, DOGMA
159
POSTSCRIPT
Premises for the Resumption of the Discussion &

PRACTICE of Copy & Derivative Works
There is nothing new.
Everything is new.
Everyone copies.
Architecture is reified by repeating itself.
All architecture is singular.
Architecture has a vast body of knowledge, suitable to be appropriated

and transformed.
Derivative practices from other fields of cultural production can be

useful for the production of architecture.
Architecture has always translated different aspects from other fields,

in this sense architecture is not autonomous.
Architecture is fundamentally a derivative practice.
Architecture is a mimetic practice.
After the death of God, architecture started repeating itself and not
imitating nature–God.
The mimetic desire can be transformed into an operative and projective

tool for the production of architecture.
Copying is inherent to architecture.
Copy should be distinguished from plagiarism, copycat and replica.
162
Copying requires a commitment to architectural history.
What is required, are fundamental, rational, and combinatory

kinds of processes in the context of the encounter with history
— Werner Oechslin
Every act of copying is an act of appropriation.
Depropriation means indifference to possession

— Marcus Boon
Most of what we call history is arguably the history of appropriation

— Marcus Boon
Derivative works are destructive in order to produce the new.
Derivative works allow history to be operative rather than a mere

account of objects, facts and events.
Copying should not only limit to re-employ knowledge that is already

available and public.
Appropriation should be both from the past and laterally from the
present.
Architecture as the practice we know was founded on derivative

principles, translating methods used in rhetoric to the production of
architecture.
The so-called ‘remix culture’ is a neorenaissance, in terms of cultural

production.
POSTSCRIPT 163
The better we know tradition —i.e., ourselves—and the
more responsibly we deal with it, the better things we shall
make similar, and the better things we shall make different
— Gerhard Richter
Architecture has nothing to do with the creation of new forms

— Mies van der Rohe
Through repetition architecture becomes a language

— Sam Jacob
Copying today wants to repeat the lessons of the past

without being simply repetitive. Instead, copying today
begs the question: what kind of repetition can be theorized
that is not simply emulative, historicist, or pastiche?
— Alex Maymind
The new is the production of a new

difference, repetition but with difference
— Gilles Deleuze
Originality is a myth
— Rosalind Krauss
Everything made since Duchamp has been

a readymade, even when hand painted
— Gerhard Richter
Innovation is capitalism’s biggest driving force, a never-ending progress.
164
Innovation went through the reverse process of copy, whereas innovation
was negative and is now a positive term, copy was a positive term and
now it has a negative connotation.
Copying still relates to abundance.
The figure of the architect as author/creator/genius sustains the myth

of originality and the innovation imperative.
Typology could be understood as a systematic or ‘scientific’ method to

copy—mimesis of principle.
Working typologically might allow bypassing the current legal paradigm,

by copying principles, types.
Copyrights in architecture are pervasive for the development of the

practice.
Chicago Manual of Style for architectural production.
Copying transgresses traditional intellectual property.
The notion of the commons should be well defined in architecture, if

what is common can be copied.
Architecture should establish clearly what is of public domain.
Architecture is a collective project.
If architects want to keep their status of authors/creators/genius maybe

all public architecture should be really public, of common property,
even its intellectual property, and all private architecture could remain
private, as ‘art works.’
POSTSCRIPT 165
Contributors
Law 23 1982 Copyrights in Colombia. Bogota: Diario Oficial, 1982.
Adorno, Theodor W, and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. “Punctuation Marks.” The
Antioch Review 48, no. 3 (1990): 300-05.
Alberti, Leon Battista, Joseph Rywert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. On the
Art of Building in Ten Books. The MIT Press, 1988.
Anstey, Tim. “Architecture and Rhetoric: Persuasion, Context, Action.” In
Architecture and Authorship, edited by Tim Anstey, Katja Grillner and
Rolf Hughes. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.
Anstey, Tim, Katja Grillner, and Rolf Hughes. Architecture and Authorship.
London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.
Argan, Giulio Carlo. On the Typology of Architecture. 1963.
Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “City as Political Form, Four Archetypes of Urban
Transformation.” Architectural Design 81, no. 1 (2011): 34-39.
———. “A Simple Heart: Architecture on the Ruins of the Post-Fordist City.”
Architectural Design 81, no. 1 (2011): 110-19.
Avermaete, Tom, Christoph Grafe, Anne Holtrop, and . “Editorial, Architecture
and Moments of Invention.” Oase Invention, no. 74 (2007).
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text (1977).
Baumesiter, Ruth, and Sang Lee. The Domestic and the Foreign in Architecture.
010 Publishers, 2007.
Benjamin, Walter. “Doctrine of the Similar.” New German Critique, no. 17 (1933):
65-69.
———. “The Author as Producer.” Reflections 229 (1978).
———. “On the Mimetic Faculty.” In One Way Street, 1978.
———. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Penguin UK,
2008.
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air. USA: Penguin Books, 1988.
Berry, David M. “Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Copyright.” Pluto
Press, London, UK, 2008.
Boon, Marcus. In Praise of Copying. Harvard University Press, 2010.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms
the World. Lukas & Sternberg, 2005.
Boyd, Cameron. “Appropriation, Collage and the Cultural Condition.” (2007).
http://theorynow.blogspot.nl/2007/01/appropriation-collage-and-
cultural.html.
166
Buchloh, Benjamin. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in
Contemporary Art.” Artforum 21 (1982): 43-56.
———. Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American
Art from 1955 to 1975. MIT Press, 2003.
Burke, Sean. Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Edinburgh University
Press Edinburgh, 1995.
Carpo, Mario. The Alphabet and the Algorithm. MIT Press, 2011.
Colquhoun, Alan. “Typology and Design Method.” Perspecta (1969): 71-74.
Conrads, Ulrich. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture.
London1970.
Deazley, Ronan. On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement
of Copyright Law in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1695-1775). Hart
Publishing, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press, 1994.
Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis. Précis of the Lectures on Architecture: With
Graphic Portion of the Lectures on Architecture. Getty Research
Institute Los Angeles, 2000.
Eagleton, Terry. “The Ideology of the Aesthetic.” Cambridge, MA (1990).
Ebert, Carola. “Post-Mortem: Architectural Postmodernism and the Death of the
Author.” In Architecture and Authorship, edited by Tim Anstey, Katja
Grillner and Rolf Hughes. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.
Eco, Umberto. “Innovation & Repetition: Between Modern & Post-Modern
Aesthetics.” Daedalus 114, no. 4 (1985): 161-84.
———. The Open Work. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Eisenman, Peter. Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques.
Monacelli Press New York, 2003.
———. Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000. Rizzoli New York, 2008.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Sacred Wood; Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Alfred
A. Knopf, New York, 1921.
FAT. “Villa Rotunda Redux.” http://www.fashionarchitecturetaste.com/2012/08/
villa_rotunda_redux.html.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author.” The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon
Books (1984).
Fumaroli, Marc. Las Abejas Y Las Arañas: La Querella De Los Antiguos Y Los
Modernos. El Acantilado, 2008.
Gallanti, Fabrizio. “Slippery Dialogues: Recent Copyright Infringements in
Architecture.” San Rocco Collaborations, no. 06 (2013).
Geers, Kersten. “Intentions, Inventions.” Oase What is good architecture?, no. 90
CONTRIBUTORS 167
(2013).
Girard, Rene. “Innovation & Repetition.” In Architects & Mimetic Rivalry, edited by
Samir Younes. Winterbourne: papadakis, 2012.
Grassi, Giorgio. Architettura, Lingua Morta= Architecture, Dead Language.
Electa, 1988.
Graw, Isabelle. “Dedication Replacing Appropriation: Fascination, Subversion and
Dispossession in Appropriation Art.” George Baker, Jack Bankowsky et
al, Louise Lawler and Others, Ostfildern-Ruit (2004): 45-67.
Gregory, Hancks. “Copyright or Copy Wrong?”, (2012). http://www.aia.org/
practicing/AIAB093915.
Hardie, Martin. “Change of the Century: Free Software and the Positive
Possibility.” Mute 2013, (2006). http://www.metamute.org/editorial/
articles/change-century-free-software-and-positive-possibility.
Hays, K Michael. Architecture Theory since 1968. The MIT Press, 2000.
Heynen, Hilde. Architecture and Modernity: A Critique. Mit Press, 2000.
Hvattum, Mari. Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism. Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Jacob, Sam. Make It Real: Architecture as Enactment. Strelka Press, 2012.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke
University Press, 1991.
Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Vol. 7, Washington:
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903.
Jencks, Charles, and Andreas Papadakis. Post-Modernism & Discontinuity.
Architectural Design, 1987.
Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
mit Press, 1986.
Lathouri, Marina. “The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies.”
Architectural Design 81, no. 1 (2011): 24-31.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labour.” Radical thought in Italy: A potential
politics (1996): 133-47.
Lee, Christopher M. “Working in Series, Towards an Operative Theory of Type.”
In Working in Series, edited by Christopher M. Lee and Kapil Gupta.
London: Architectural Association, 2011.
———. “The Fourth Typology: Dominant Type and the Idea of the City.” Phd. Diss,
Berlage Institute and TUDelft, 2012.
Lee, Christopher M., and Kapil Gupta. Working in Series. London: Architectural
Association, 2011.
Lee, Christopher M., and Sam Jacoby. “Typological Urbanism and the Idea of the
168
City.” Architectural Design 81, no. 1 (2011): 14-23.
Lee, Sang. “Architecture Remixed.” The Domestic and the foreign in Architecture
(2007).
Lessig, Lawrence. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books (AZ), 1999.
———. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down
Culture and Control Creativity. Penguin, 2004.
Lethem, Jonathan. The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism. Sound Unbound:
Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966.
Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Loos, Adolf. “Heimatkunst, 1914.” In Trotzdem. Vienna: Georg Prachner Verlag,
1982.
———. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Ariadne Press, 1998.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books, 1887.
———. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London:
Penguin, 1993.
———. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In Early Writings:
Penguin UK, 2005.
Maymind, Alex. “Copycat.” Conditions, no. 2 (2009).
Moneo, Rafael. “On Typology.” Oppositions 13, no. 1 (1978): 22-45.
Moulier-Boutang, Yann. Cognitive Capitalism. Polity, 2012.
Naujokat, Anke. “Ut Rhetorica Architectura. Leon Battista Alberti’s Technique of
Architectural Collage.” Candide 02 (2010): 73-100.
Navas, Eduardo. “Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture.” In
Mashup Cultures, edited by Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss: Springer, 2010.
———. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. Springer, 2012.
Netanel, Neil Weinstock. Copyright’s Paradox. Oxford University Press, 2008.
O’Sullivan, Simon. “The Production of the New and the Care of the Self.” In
Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New, edited by Simon
O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke: Continuum International Publishing
Group, 2008.
O’Sullivan, Simon, and Stephen Zepke. Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of
the New. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.
O’neil-Ortiz, Javier. “The Mashup and the Remix: Fetishizing the Fragment.”
(2008).
Oechslin, Werner. “Premises for the Resumption of the Discussion of Typology.”
assemblage, no. 1 (1986): 37-53.
Ortega, Jorge. “Architecture & Copyright Controversies.” WIPO Magazine, no. 05
CONTRIBUTORS 169
(2011).
Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism Part
I.” October 12 (1980): 67-86.
———. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism Part Ii.”
October 12 (1980): 67-86.
Pasquinelli, Matteo. “The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of
Sabotage.” Policy Futures in Education 8, no. 6 (2010): 671-82.
Pelletier, Louise. “Genius, Fiction and the Author in Architecture.” In Architecture
and Authorship, edited by Tim Anstey, Katja Grillner and Rolf Hughes.
London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.
Petit, Emmanuel J. Irony: Or, the Self-Critical Opacity of Postmodern
Architecture. Yale University Press, 2013.
Picon, Antoine. “Architecture, Innovation and Tradition.” Architectural Design 83,
no. 1 (2013).
Richter, Gerhard. Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961-
2007. Thames & Hudson, 2009.
Rohe, Ludwig Mies van der. “Technology Architecture (Speech Delivered at Iit,
1950).” In Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture,
edited by Ulrich Conrads. London, 1970.
Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Harvard University
Press, 1993.
Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Mit Press, 1983.
San, Rocco. “Book of Copies.” http://www.sanrocco.info/bookofcopies.html.
Scalbert, Irénée. “Invetion and the Market.” Oase Invention, no. 74 (2007).
———. “The Architect as Bricoleur.” Candide 4 (2011): 69-88.
Singleton, Rebecca. “Architecture and Intellectual Property.” Architectural
Research Quarterly 15, no. 03 (2011).
Smith, Daniel W. “Deleuze and the Production of the New.” In Deleuze, Guattari
and the Production of the New, edited by Simon O’Sullivan and
Stephen Zepke: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.
Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan. Mashup Cultures. Springer, 2010.
Steele, Brett. “Going against Type.” In Working in Series, edited by Christopher M.
Lee and Kapil Gupta. London: Architectural Association, 2011.
Thrift, Nigel. “Foreword.” In Cognitive Capitalism: Polity, 2012.
Ungers, Oswald Mathias. Architettura Come Tema: Architecture as Theme.
Electa/Rizzoli, 1982.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual
Property and How It Threatens Creativity. NYU Press, 2003.
170
Valéry, Paul. “Tel Quel.” San Rocco 4 (2012 1943).
Vidler, Anthony. “The Third Typology.” Oppositions 7 (1976): 1-3.
———. “The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the Academic Ideal, 1750-
1830.” In Oppositions Reader, edited by K. Michael Hays: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1998.
Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. Semiotext (e) Los Angeles, 2003.
———. “General Intellect.” Historical Materialism 15, no. 3 (2007): 3.
Vitruvius. De Architectura - Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture. Translated
by Morris Hicky Morgan. New York1960.
Williams, Robert W. “Politics and Self in the Age of Digital Re (Pro) Ducibility.”
Fast Capitalism 1, no. 1 (2005).
Younés, Samir. The True, the Fictive, and the Real: The Historical Dictionary of
Architecture of Quatremère De Quincy. Papadakis, 1999.
Younes, Samir, Rene Girard, Leon Krier, and Kent Bloomer. Architects & Mimetic
Rivalry. edited by Samir Younes Winterbourne: papadakis, 2012.
CONTRIBUTORS 171
Enough of the original geniuses! Let us repeat ourselves unceasingly!
— Adolf Loos, Heimatkunst, Trotzdem, 1914

Architecture A Derivative Practice

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Architecture A Derivative Practice

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Architecture, a Derivative Practice

PREMISES FOR THE RESUMPTION

ABOUT THE TYPE

The ‘Relevant’ typeface emerged from a typographic

ABOUT THE PAPER

IMITATION, MIMESIS AND COPY 14

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHO IS SPEAKING? 32

TYPE AND TYPOLOGY EXPANDED 72

THOU SHALT NOT COVET 88

Architecture, a Derivative Practice

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, 1988

The condition of an architectural language constitutes a

Peter Eisenman, Terragni and the Idea of a Critical Text,

Architecture has undergone a process of rejection to copying,

By putting forward the notion of architecture fundamentally as

What makes architecture derivative is the constant reformulation

ARCHITECTURE, A DERIVATIVE PRACTICE 9

The project investigates six topics; i. Mimesis, Imitation, Copy &

The texts are written investigations, they criticize notions of

The postscript is meant to open up the discussion with a set of

ARCHITECTURE, A DERIVATIVE PRACTICE 11

From Mimesis & Appropriation to Derivation

Walter Benjamin – Doctrine of the Similar - 1933

With the collapse of the high-modernist ideology of style—what is as

For Martin Heidegger, mimesis means copying, that is, presenting

Although we no longer associate copying with abundance, but link it

Copia, according to a contemporary of Erasmus, meant the ‘faculty

FROM MIMESIS & APPROPRIATION TO DERIVATION 15

When we talk about copying today, when controversy around copying

Copying itself is neither good nor bad—it all depends on what it is

‘original’ itself is also necessarily an appropriation, translation, and

But why do we copy, suppose copying is what makes us human—

fundamental part of being human, we could not be human without

comes from, supposing copying is what makes us human, such desire

FROM MIMESIS & APPROPRIATION TO DERIVATION 17

All cultural practice appropriates alien or exotic, peripheral or

31. Boon, In Praise of

Nicolas Bourriaud has claimed that montage, and other practices

One thing only seems to hold fairly constant in the vanguardist

FROM MIMESIS & APPROPRIATION TO DERIVATION 19

Appropriation in architecture is nothing new, from the time of

A derivative approach to architecture can be better understood

FROM MIMESIS & APPROPRIATION TO DERIVATION 21

Nihil dictum quin prius dictum

In the fifteenth century Leon Battista Alberti formalized architecture

The first step was inventio, which places emphasis not on

conception of classical rhetoric: inventio is less invention in a sense of

In De re aedificatoria, Alberti indicates that he adapted the collage

architectural design is—like every literary creation—characterized by

With the use of intertextuality and a collage technique, Alberti was

A clear example of Alberti’s collage technique is the sepulchre

Alberti’s architectural eclecticism even involves the adoption

Alberti’s contradiction was on the one hand establishing the image

Six centuries later, a similar approach to Alberti’s cultural

of—and even of creation—making something from nothing—are slowly

distinguish singularity rather than originality, whereas originality has an

The difference with what Bourriaud has noticed in the field of

The contemporary interest and usage of derivative work seems to

Bourriaud has mentioned that the history of appropriation remains

Most of what we call history is arguably the history of

Leon Battista Alberti - ed. Grayson 1960–1973, vol. II:

‘various things joined together into one, and in such

Engl. trans. Ian Pepper.