The constitution of Deleuzian “Philosophy of Repetition” in Bernard Cache’s design practice

While today’s technology, consumer culture and capitalism create a new world order, such order increasingly dominates architectural practice. Consumer culture and capitalism, supported by Cartesian thought, have a “homogenizing” effect on the architectural object. With ideational and visual repetitions, spaces become the same, and the standardization becomes normalized and admired. This representation-oriented repetition model in architecture limits the diversity, creativity and potentials. Accordingly, the study approaches repetition not as a homogenizing structure, but as one that generates difference. The study, taking Deleuze’s philosophy of repetition as its theoretical focus, employs theory-driven qualitative content analysis as its method. Within this framework, by establishing an ontological, epistemological and operative distinction, theoretical framework is related to architectural practice through Bernard Cache. Using MAXQDA software, codes generated from the theoretical concepts in Deleuze’s “Difference and Repetition” are comparatively analyzed against the content of Cache’s “Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories”. In this analysis the philosophy of repetition is framed not as the design of a singular form, but as the design of form-generating processes. This provides a conceptual framework that transfers Cache’s architecture from producing objects to producing processes; from copying to generating variations; and from static forms to dynamic topologies. Thus, what is constituted in the field of architecture is not merely a formal innovation, but a multilayered transformation encompassing conceptual, technical and productive dimensions.

Keywords: Deleuzian repetition, the production of difference, architectural practice, non-representational design; Bernard Cache.