This chapter sketches out an architectural response to Gilles Deleuze's ‘expressionist’ re-examination of Spinoza's Ethics. Deleuze argues that Spinoza's ‘expressionism’ creates the potential to positively reframe a repressive Platonism which had been carried through the Enlightenment within Cartesianism (Deleuze 1992: 322; 1994: ch. 4). Deleuze explains that predominant – ‘representational’ – systems of thought privilege processes of identification on one or other side of an essentialist, Cartesian dualism – acting either as empiricism, ‘referring to causality within Being’ (emphasising functions) or as idealism, ‘referring to representation in Ideas’ (emphasising forms) (1992: 333–5). Spinoza is a key influence for Deleuze's contribution to what he sees as the ‘task of philosophy itself’, defined as the need to ‘overthrow Platonism’ by ‘abolishing the world of essences and the world of appearances’ (2003: 253). He claims that a triadic Spinozist principle of expression simultaneously addresses both of these essentialist tendencies in traditional epistemologies, producing an approach more able to account for the power or potential of creative acts. Deleuze's interpretation of Spinoza holds that his triadic epistemology creates an ethological philosophy for life through the ‘curious … intervention of a type of relative proportion’ (2003: 15). To explore these ideas in an architectural context I will discuss correlations between Deleuze's critique of ‘representation’ and the ideas of the architectural theorist Robin Evans, using Evans's concept of ‘projection’ as a ‘non-representational’ way of thinking through the role of architectural practice, processes, and products.

Evans examines the design processes of architects, exploring the relationship between the kinds of drawings and models they make and the buildings and spaces that ‘result’.