I.  First Interview
Radicality-Singular Objects in Architecture-Illusion,
Virtuality,

Reality-A Destabilized Area?-Concept, 

Irresolution,
Vertigo-Creation and  Forgetfulness-Values of Functionalism-New York or Utopia-Architecture: Between Nostalgia and Anticipation-(Always) Seduction, 

Provocation,

Secrets-The Metamorphosis of Architecture-The Aesthetics of Modernity-Culture-A Heroic Architectural Act?-Art,
Architecture, 

and Postmodernity-Visual Disappointment, 

Intellectual Disappointment-The Aesthetics of Disappearance-Images of Modernity-The Biology of the Visible-A New Hedonism?

II.  Second Interview
Truth in Architecture-Another Tower for Beaubourg-A Shelter for Culture?-On Modification: Mutation or Rehabilitation-Architectural Reason-The City  ofTomorrow-Virtual Architecture,

Real Architecture-Computer Modeling and Architecture-lightness and Heaviness-What Utopia?-Architecture as the Desire  for Omnipotence-Berlin and Europe-Architecture as the Art of Constraint-Transparency-light as Matter-Disappearance-What Does Architecture Bear Witness To?-Singularity-Neutrality,

Universality, 

and Globalization-Destiny and Becoming-The  Idea of Architecture and History-Another Kind  of Wisdom-The Question of Style-Inadmissible Complicity-freedom  as Self-Realization

The Singular Objects of  Architecture should not create the expec-
tation that either architecture or philosophy will be treated in
this dialogue in anything like  a traditional way (which, were  it
,the case, would seem not so much old-fashioned as reactionary,
coming from  two  of the few  cultural figures  practicing  today
that we  could still dare  to  call progressive). Indeed, it is better
to state the reverse: what first strikes one as extraordinary about
this conversation is that architecture and philosophy are treated
with any distinction at all by progressive thinkers in our present
era.  In our own time. the de-differentiation of disciplines and
the tendentious erasure of boundaries between specific cultural
materials and practices promise to homogenize all distinction,
difference,  and otherness  into  a globalized,  neutralized  same-
ness. Much of what claims to be progressive thought is happy
to  aestheticize  this  situation,  to  accelerate  its  effects,  and  to
trade in any remaining individuality or singularity of thought
for  a  randomized,  spread-out delirium. The  flattening  seems
to have been chosen. Besides, any disciplinary autonomy or ex-
pertise that might counter this leveling tendency is destined to
be crushed anyway under the massive movement of the world
system itself,  to be emulsified along with everything else  into so many cultural and economic fluids. What is  extraordinary
about this conversation, then, is  its declaration, against all that,
to search for  singular objects  (ratber than globalized fluids)  as
might be found in architecture and philosophy.
"We're not heading for disaster, we're already  in tbe midst of
total disaster;' Nouvel declares at one point. Yet neither he nor
Baudrillard ever laments the loss of a real or idealized past, nor
do they accept, not even for a moment, the cynically complacent
preemption of  tbe future. The second surprise of The Singular
Objects  of  Architecture is  tbat what is  offered, botb as  program
and as practice exemplified in tbis particular dialogue,  is  a re-
newal of utopian thought, a revived attempt at envisioning a
possible future  out of our disastrous present, a way of think-
ing that has been under ban now for more than two decades.
Against the hegemony of  the antiutopian, real-time thinking
of our contemporary technocratic positivism and experiential
nominalism  ("What's mine is mine, and you can't feel it"), the
singular object must be anticipatory, inexhaustible, and shared;
it must destroy culture  (or what has become of  it)  and redis-
tribute tbe leftovers. And so, while architecture and philosophy
are treated  together as parts of  a period problem-as disciplines
and practices with  specific histories, transitions, and  transfor-
mations, subjected to the desultory  effects of  history now,  in our
own period-tbey will not remain unchallenged or unchanged
in tbis dialogue. If  tbe singular object is to be botb utopian and
destructive, future directed and exquisitely representative of  the
present, it will  be a peculiar object indeed. Its model will be nei-
ther architectore nor philosophy freestanding,  as  traditionally
practiced, but a productive enfolding of  one  into tbe otber-an
event more than an object, a constructional operation in which
each discourse  interprets the other but nevertheless produces a
new, irreducible, singular  thing: tbat peculiar  thing we call  tbeory.
"I  feel tbat  tbought,  theory, is inexchangeable;' says Baudrillard.
"It can't be exchanged for  trutb or for reality. Exchange is  im-
possible. It's because of tbis tbat tbeory even exists:' Theory is
tbe diagram of  tbe singular object of architecture. This, at  least,
should come as no surprise, for work of such large ambition as is  evidenced here  is  to be  found today almost nowhere  other
than theory.
Theory  is ready  to travel. Altbough at its best, tbeory will stay
dose to tbe historicity of  its material, mediating between specific
cultural practices and  specific historical contexts,  theoretical con-
structions also  possess an uncanny capacity to  cross over, drift,
and  expand across  disciplines, however much authors,  institu-
tions' and orthodoxies try to  confine them. Theory is autono-
moUS  ("inexchangeable"), but  it  is nourished by  circulation-by
borrowing and trading, by unconscious influence or wholesale
appropriation. Through  tbe accidents  of discourse,  a body of
tbeory can also be dislodged and pressed into tbe service of a
quite  different one,  reinvested with unpredicted  content,  and
refunctioned for unexpected vocations.
Not least among such transactions is  that between architec-
ture  and  philosophy, provided we understand  tbat  coupling  in  an
expanded sense to include urbanism, semiology, Ideologiekritik,
and certain strains of  poststructuralist  tbought; for it  is that  fu-
sion (what we now call, simply, architecture  theory)  that,  since
the mid-1960s, has so  energized architectural discourse  in aca-
demic and professional circles, turning us away from an earlier
functionalist,  empiricist,  foundationalist way  of tbinking  and
toward new registers of  signification. By the 1980s, architecture
tbeory had discovered affinities witb otber branches of tbeory
and developed concerns with textual  strategies,  constructions
of  subjectivity and gender, power and property, geopolitics, and
otber  themes  tbat were  already part of tbe general poststruc-
turalist repertoire but whose spatial dimension was now fore-
grounded. This  entailed that the  emphasis on tbe production
of architectural objects  (which  aimed to prescribe normative
standards for design and  layout metbods and motives for imple-
mentation) should give way to an emphasis on tbe production
of architecture as  a subject of knowledge. Theory took on the
task of  revealing the unintended ideological presumptions that
architectural procedures and techniques alternately enabled or
tried to remove from tbe possibility of  tbinking, which is to say that  theory understood architecture as one of culture's primary
representational systems.
The  concern with the specific internal workings of archi-
tecture-which tend to be mainly synchronic, synthetic, and
projective-was not abandoned so much as folded into various
discourses of context and exteriority, recalibrated according to
what was  sayable or tbinlcable in the idiolects of Marxism, de-
construction, psychoanalysis, and other  imported systems. But
these systems were not merely yoked together with architecture.
Rather,  something of a  shift  of level,  as much as  perspective,
took place,  in which architecture's  specific forms, operations,
and  practices  could  now more  clearly be  seen  as  producing
concepts whose ultimate horizon of effect lay outside architec-
ture "proper:'  in  a more  general  sociocultural  field. This new
activity of theory demanded not new ideas  for buildings but
the invention of  altogether new  techniques for rethinking issues
of representation, foundation, subjectivity, structure and orna-
ment, materiality, media, and more. What used to be called phi-
losophy, then, began to thiulc its problems  through  architecture
rather than the other way around. And  this inevitably attracted
some  of the most important thinkers  of our  time  (including
Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric
Jameson)  to ponder architectural problems.
There  has  rarely been  a  sustained  conversation between  a
philosopher and an  architect  of the  scope  and focus  that we
have here. Then again, a certain horizontality of  thought, along
with the desire to interpret  the totality, seems demanded by our
current situation. For all the apparently wild multiplicity of our
present  system of objects,  there  is  also  the  constant magnetic
pull of  the single global market and a corporate-controlled re-
totalization of  all the dispersed vocations and functions of social
life  into a single  space-time of consumption and communica-
tion. Our different  day-to-day activities  are  no  longer  tied  to
determinate needs or to specific exchanges between people and
objects, but rather  to  a  total  universe  of signs  and  simulacra
floating in economic and cultural-informational fluids. Even the
conscious ideologies of rebellion and negative critique  seem to be not so much co-opted by  the system as a strategic part of  the
system's internal workings. At  certain moments, in certain sin-
gular objects, architecture itself produces the perception of  this
conflictedly overdetermined  situation;  architecture becomes  a
kind of precipitate of the vapor that we used to call the social.
The twinness of  the World Trade Center, for exarnple-a  build-
ing that was  a replica of itself-was already,  in the 1960s when
the  towers were built,  an  anticipatory sign  of the  computer-
ized,  genetically networked,  cloning  society that was  emerg-
ing. In  the next decade, the Centre Pompidou, even more deeply
conflicted, signals the catastrophic finishing off of mass culture
by the masses  themselves:  a new breed  of cultural  consumer
who  is  also,  along with the paintings and the cash, both the
raw material and  the product of  the new museum. And  then  the
architecture of our own  time (the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao,
perhaps, one of infinite possible  clones  or  chimeras  spun out
of a software paclcage)  seems to become altogether virtual, for
an audience  that is ev~ryone and everywhere-not so much an
architectural readymade  (in the sense of Ducharnp)  as  an  ar-
chitecture  already made,  a transparent  cutout  that  is  its  own
template.
In  their  conversation,  Baudrillard  and  Nouvel  turn  over
and over  again possible ways  of understanding this  situation
and its  agents, mapping  it througl1  the languages of architec-
ture,  philosophy,  and both  together  (and  it  is  fascinating  to
register  the slippages  of perspective between the architect and
the philosopher,  to  compare how  the mind  feels  performing
work on the problem one way and then the other, but also  to
become aware  of the preference  that both have  for  a descrip-
tion of the  totality over  the  separate,  abstract  parts). But the
provocations, responses, and probes  are  not meant to preciser
the ways  in which  architecture simply replicates  the base-and-
superstructure  apparatus  of which  it  is  a  primary organ  (the
code words  for  such ideological  reproduction  include "screen
architecture" and "clone architecture;' but also  the neutral and
the global). Baudrillard and Nonvel search also for some autono-
mous force or effect produced by the object not in culture but alongside  it,  in  the penumbra of culture, a force  that thickens
the situation, obscures the  scene, and gums up  the hegemonic
workings of  visibility and  transparency. This attribute of  the ob-
ject  is alternately called its "secret," its "radicality;' its "literality;'
or indeed its  singularity. But clearly this is  an apprehension of
the singular object quite the reverse of any  that would fixate on
aesthetic properties to the exclusion of  larger, "extrinsic" factors.
Rather, the singular object is the way of  access, through the coils
of contradiction, to be sure, but nevertheless opening onto the
determining conditions of  its own cultural surround.
Take Nouvel's own work, which has famously found its iden-
tity in a logic of the surface. On the one hand, from  the earli-
est stone facades  to the steel and glass curtain wall, architecture
has always played a game of  contradiction with mass and gravi-
ty and their dematerialization into surface. On the other hand,
from our present perspective, the  logic of  the  surface  is  a per-
ceptuallogic we must now understand as having been given to
us by consumer-communication culture and  its slick advertis-
ing  two-dimensionality.  «Screen  architecture"?  «Clone  archi-
tecture"? Or singular object. It is the particular handling of  the
surface that must make a difference. As Nouvel has comment-
ed on his Cartier Foundation: "If I look at the facade, since it's
bigger than the building, I can't tell if  I'm looking at the reflec-
tion of  the sky or at the sky through the glass  ....  If  I look at a
tree through the three glass panes, I can never determine if I'm
looking at the tree through the glass, in front of  it, behind it, or
the reflection of  the tree. And when I plant  two trees in parallel,
even accidentally, to the glass plane, I can't tell if  there's a second
tree or if  it's a real tree."
For  Baudrillard,  this  form  of illusion  is  not gratuitous;  in
his essay "Truth or Radicality in Architecture," he referred to  it
as  a "dramaturgy of illusion  and seduction." Such  destabiliza-
tions  of perception  thwart  the  dictatorship  of the  smoothly
visible and install an alternative perception, a "secret image," an
almost  bodily recalcitrance  (Barthes's  punctum  is mentioned
as  a model), which will make itself felt  as  a kind of resistance,
lag, or refraction beneath the transparency. An object both of a culture and the culture's biggest threat, then: pained by the
loss, anticipating the gain, a representation of  the moment and
a momentary refusal.
The singular object is  deeply conflicted, and the conversa-
tion here takes on its subject's form. We can't go on; we must go
on. The  architect stretching  to  imagine what  it would take  to
actually make a singular object, the philosopher insisting that
no  intention, no  amount of individual  effort,  can  guarantee
singularity's  arrival  ("let's not think too much"). Both  against
premature clarification:  I know it's here, but I can't see  it; "the
important thing is  to have  looked." Rarely can  so many con-
flicting things be said about a singular subject. Rarely has such
conflict been so productive.