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non-projects for the 
uninhabitable:
lyotard's architecture 
philosophy

ashley woodward

       Jean-François Lyotard remains best known for 
his association with the postmodern, and in many 
circles there is little awareness of the significant 
difference between the way he used this term and 
other influential uses of it. Also little known are 
Lyotard’s writings on architecture, despite some 
casual recognition of his apparent relevance to this 
field due to the prominence of postmodernism in 
architectural theory.1  My aim here is to provide 
an introduction to Lyotard’s practically unknown 
contributions to architecture philosophy, and 
to suggest two ways in which his work might 
be thought to make an original and interesting 
contribution to the field. First, Lyotard critically 
intervenes in phenomenology, which has had an 
influential place in the philosophy of architecture. 2 

He challenges the values that tend to be accorded to 
the relations of the body to space in this tradition, 
celebrating dislocation over location, on the grounds 
that architecture should be understood as an art 
and should challenge the body to new experiences. 
Second, Lyotard’s understanding of the modern and 
the postmodern cuts across the way these terms are 
typically deployed in architectural theory, inviting 
a fresh perspective through the reorganization of 
critical categories. 



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       Lyotard’s writings on architects and architecture are relatively scant: 
there is an essay on Le Corbusier, a couple of pieces on Arakawa and Gins, 
an interview, a dialogue with the architect Piero Derossi, and a short 
contribution to a group dossier in an architecture journal.3  However, 
this field is broadened if we also consider reflections on the nature of the 
city and the built environment in general,4  which we can find in various 
forms throughout Lyotard’s writing career, from his early discussions of the 
political space of the “ideal city,” through his writings on the notion of the 
pagus, his reflections on California, and on ideas such as the oikos, domus, 
and megalopolis. I will focus here, first, on some of these main general ideas 
about space, the built environment, and human habitation, before moving 
on to a review of the main ideas which emerge from Lyotard’s writings 
on architecture as an art. These themes will then draw together with the 
critical comparisons with phenomenology and postmodernism which help 
to situate Lyotard’s reflections on architecture. As with Lyotard’s treatments 
of other arts—most famously, “the unpresentable” of postmodern sublime 
art5—he signals his point of interest in architecture with privative terms, 
in particular the uninhabitable and the non-project, for reasons which will 
be elucidated. 

Spaces: habitus, megalopolis

       Lyotard develops a thesis on the transformation of our lived space, the 
space inhabited by human beings, broadly consistent with his reflections 
on postmodernity in its other manifestations.6  This is a transformation 
from a rural or agrarian way of life and the villages or cities it involves, 
through the development of modern metropolises, to the postmodern 
“megalopolis.” Lyotard’s primary thesis is that this last is not simply a 
quantitative extension of the metropolis, but a qualitative transformation. 
Employing a device typical of continental philosophers, Lyotard elaborates 
these ideas using classical terms, drawing out suggested meanings in his 
own unique way. The value of doing this is that it gives the concepts an 
ontological status, and resists a simple reduction to the empirical which 
might be risked by using contemporary language. Lyotard conceptualizes 
a “traditional” way of inhabiting space under the various names of oikos 
(Greek), domus, and habitus (Latin). While oikos and domus could literally 
be translated as “house,” Lyotard uses these terms to indicate a manner of 
inhabiting space, a way of life or being much more general than the term 
“house” tends to invoke, and which can be understood to apply to spatial 
situations which are not literally houses.



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      We find an evocative description of the way of 
life indicated by the terms oikos, domus, and habitus 
(which Lyotard tends to use interchangeably) as a 
kind of domestic idyll in the essay “Domus and the 
Megalopolis”:

Let's suppose that it's pretty hot outside. The 
courtyard is surrounded by walls and farm 
buildings. A large tree of some kind, willow, 
horse chestnut, lime, a clump of pines. 
Dovecots, swallows. The child raises its eyes. 
Say it's seven o'clock in the evening. Onto the 
kitchen table arrive in their place the milk, the 
basket of eggs, the skinned rabbit. Then each 
of the fruges goes to its destination, the dairy, 
the cool scullery, the cooking pot, the shelf. The 
men come home. Glasses of fresh wine. A cross 
is made in the middle of the large loaf. Supper.7  

In this “domestic” model of space, there is a border 
between the inside and the outside. It is porous and 
non-exclusionary: strangers may be welcomed into 
the domestic space and offered hospitality. This 
extension of hospitality is in fact characteristic of 
the space of the oikos, domus, or habitus. 
       On this traditional model of the space of the 
human environment, outside the habitus is the 
pagus – the surrounds of the village which acts as a 
permeable boundary. Lyotard explains:

pagus always means the country, the region, the 
opposite of Heim, of home, that is, of village. 
It is moreover a very beautiful word, the word 
that gives us pax, companion, etc. It is precisely 
the place where one forms pacts with something 
else (it is the same root; let’s from time to time 
put up with parody-etymologies; this one in 
any case is “true”); it is a place of boundaries.8  



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       The pagus is described elsewhere by Lyotard as the zone; it refers to 
the area surrounding the village or city walls, which acts as a “zone of 
contact” between those belonging to the habitus, and strangers who come 
from other regions.9  The main distinction organizing this space is that of 
home/elsewhere, which can also be formulated as culture/nature, or more 
generally as inside/outside. The idea of nature is key to this traditional, 
rural, pre-industrial mode of existence: the domus is “[a] mode of space, 
time, and body under the regime (of ) nature.”10  It is a way of habitation in 
which domesticating a powerful, often hostile nature, and organizing life 
according to its rhythms, is the predominant concern.
       The great mutation in this model of space that Lyotard identifies is not 
between the rural village and the metropolis—he understands the latter 
as maintaining intact the inside/outside, and the border between them. 
The metropolis is only a “complication” of the space of the domus insofar as 
different suburbs become their own center, and the borders between them 
act to both link and separate them in relation to other suburban centers. 
The change, rather, comes with the transformation of the metropolis into 
the megalopolis. Lyotard has in mind here most specifically California, 
which he understands as a new model of space, one that has undergone a 
qualitative change. It is a model spreading to span the world: 

Through means of communication and of telecommunication, the 
great urban conglomerations extend like a dense network along the 
coast of California and will soon cover the globe, from San Francisco 
through Yokohama and Singapore as far as Ankara and Milan, and 
from Milan through the Ruhr, London, and New York as far as Los 
Angeles.11 

California is a space of “conurbation”: suburbs connected by highways, 
one after the other, without reference to any urban center. As the quote 
above suggests, technologies of communication and information also play 
an important role, as they liberate ties to fixed physical times and spaces, 
and connect things in a decentralized, “free” manner.12 
       The transformation Lyotard sees here is the displacement of the border 
and the decentering of the center. Human community is similarly diffracted 
and dispersed. Space is no longer divided between a “here” (home) and 
“elsewhere,” an inside and an outside – the border zone seems to have 
expanded indefinitely, such that “there is nothing left but surroundings.”13  
The “outside,” understood as nature, or as the place where the stranger or 



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the other dwells, also disappears. The implication 
is that there is no longer an idea of an external 
reference point, a nature which would provide a 
rhythm to regulate the ordering of the habitus. The 
space of the megalopolis is entirely artificial, if that 
term even continues to have meaning. Relations 
between different human groups are no longer 
structured through a mediating border which allows 
hospitality: while we might say that the megalopolis 
is certainly a space of integration or assimilation, of 
peaceful multicultural coexistence, Lyotard in fact 
emphasizes that the relations with other cultures in 
the megalopolis are also often “based on distrust, 
on conflict, on a latent state of war that explodes, at 
times, into violence.”14 
       What interests Lyotard is how the minorities, 
outsiders, or “remainders” of human communities 
are positioned in these different organizations, 
representations, or structurings of space. This leads 
him to a characteristically complex position on 
the relation of the domus to the megalopolis, in 
which neither is unambiguously touted as better 
than the other. First, Lyotard asserts that, contrary 
to what one might think, a space for otherness or 
the remainder is better preserved in the traditional 
domus than in the contemporary megalopolis. 
There, otherness not only existed outside, in the 
pagus or beyond, but was welcomed into the home 
as a guest. Moreover, Lyotard points to the otherness 
at the heart of the home, of domestic life, in the fact 
that it is the traditional location of the intrigues and 
dramas represented in tragedy.15  In this manner, 
in the privacy of the oikos a certain otherness or 
remainder is secluded and protected from the public 
life of the polis. In the megalopolis, by contrast, 
everything becomes a matter of public exchange, 
and there is no longer a space removed from this 
circulation, public scrutiny, and transparency. 
This accords with the capitalist economy in which 
everything can be translated into exchange value 

 

California is 
a space of 

“conurbation”: 
suburbs 

connected 
by highways, 

one after the 
other, without 

reference to 
any urban 

center.

“

”



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and sold on the market, and also to the all-pervasive sphere of human 
rights in which every aspect of life is expected to have a rational accounting 
and legitimate defense.16   The idea of the habitus, Lyotard suggests, today 
arouses our nostalgia, and this nostalgia can act as a kind of resistance to 
the contemporary system and a spur to thought and creativity. 17 
       However, Lyotard also maintains a strongly critical and vigilant attitude 
towards such nostalgia. First, he acknowledges that it is probably nostalgia 
for something which never really existed; a projection from the position 
of the contemporary megalopolis.18  Second, he warns of the danger of 
believing that the world of the habitus could be restored, aligning such 
a belief with Heidegger and the politics of National Socialism. He thus 
sees danger not in the old organization of space and society itself, but in 
the nostalgic desire to restore it. (“Homo re-domesticus in power kills in 
the street shouting ‘You are not one of ours: He takes the visitor hostage. 
He persecutes anything that migrates’.”)19 The task for thinking in the 
megalopolis is, for Lyotard, to resist the homogenization of thought along 
with the homogenization of space. In this way he sees a parallel between 
philosophy and architecture.

Architectures: project, non-project

       In a conversation with the architect Piero Derossi, Lyotard suggests 
that the task of both philosophers and architects has changed with the 
shift from the habitus to the megalopolis. Modern philosophers (and here 
the quintessential model is Descartes’s Discourse on Method) assumed an 
architectural model of thought. Descartes describes how thought was like a 
city which has been built up through generations, with conflicting designs, 
and what is needed is to raze the city to the ground, to begin again and, 
on a secure foundation, to build a city according to a consistent rational 
plan. Modern philosophers also thought that they could give prescriptions 
to architects and urban planners in terms of a general representation of an 
ideal city which would instantiate an ideal human community. Similarly, 
modern architects followed the model of believing that everything human 
beings need for dwelling well together can be rationally planned out in 
advance, and given to a population which will be perfectly suited to its 
use. We can recognize here the great modernist architectural projects of the 
early to mid-twentieth century, such as those of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, 
Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and so on, in which cities are 
planned, all ornamentation is sacrificed to function, and a single style is 
imposed everywhere (the International Style). In painting, Lyotard notes, 
there is also an analog insofar as urban planning has been represented using 



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a uniform organization of space – such as in “The 
Ideal City” by the school of Piero della Francesca 
(circa late 15th century), one of the first to apply 
the principles of perspective prescribed by Alberti’s 
On Painting.20

       Today things are quite different in philosophical 
thought, first of all because modern philosophy 
—in the sense of a project of finding a secure 
foundation for thought, and building a consistent 
and homogenous structure of knowledge upon it—
has been radically cast into doubt. Along with this, 
the possibility of political philosophy presenting an 
ideal for human community has also been seriously 
questioned. According to Lyotard, the philosopher 
today is no longer in a position to be able to prescribe 
to the architect a project, understood as a model of 
human community which could be followed as a 
guide for what to build to ensure an ideal being-
together.21 More strongly, Lyotard suggests that 
this term “project” implies a control or domination 
over “the totality of phenomena in the world and 
over human phenomena.”22 Such an attitude of 
mastery and control has also been subjected to 
extensive critique (as, for example, in Adorno 
and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, or 
Heidegger’s reflections on technology).
       Lyotard suggests that the architect, now in a 
similar position, can no longer believe that design 
for a human community is something that can be 
entirely thought out in advance. Both philosophers 
and architects are united in asking the question, 
“What can a community be today?” and in not 
knowing how to give an answer to this question.23 

Without a concrete answer, the model of the ideal 
city must be abandoned, and along with it the very 
idea of a “project” as something that the architect 
can plan from scratch. The architect must then 
find a new way of working, which Lyotard suggests 
might be something like a “non-project”:

 

 Lyotard 
suggests 
that the 

task of both 
philosophers 

and architects 
has changed 

with the shift 
from the 

habitus to the 
megalopolis.

“

”



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As you see we are dealing with a project that in the end is not even 
a project. Rather it is a sort of attitude, a frame of mind, that is, to 
be precise, an attitude of non-domination over the thing to be built 
or thought. We could say, a sort of passivity, or better still passibility, 
that seems to me an essential part of art, of the artistic attitude, and 
certainly of thought as well. I do not know whether we can still give 
everything the name of project, project of the non-project.24 

While fleeting and tentative, these suggestions put the architect in a 
position closer to that of the painter or the musician, insofar as they must 
open themselves to a “passibility,” as he says here – that is, to trying to feel 
and make judgements about what is to be done which are not based on 
any predetermined rule. No doubt there has always been much of this in 
architectural invention, but Lyotard’s model of the megalopolis suggests 
that this aspect of architecture must be accentuated today. Architects must 
become artists, because they can no longer work with an ideal model of 
human community. When they engage in (non-)projects, they must be 
attentive to the contingencies of the situation in which they build, the 
conditions which already pre-exist, the complexities of the communities 
they build for, and they must be willing to be open to the possibility that 
the effects their buildings will have, once actualized in the community, will 
be to a significant degree unpredictable. 

Architects: Le Corbusier, Arakawa and Gins

       Let us consider now some of the architects Lyotard discusses explicitly, 
and treats as artists. Despite his opposition to the modernist architectural 
project of the “total plan,” this does not prevent Lyotard from seeing a 
tendency contrary to total planning—and thus, the artistry—in the late 
work of Le Corbusier, one of the dominant figures of modernist architecture. 
In an essay on Le Corbusier—“Conventus,” from 1994—Lyotard repeats 
but also reconfigures some of the main ideas he had previously made in 
his fleeting encounters with architecture. Lyotard’s focus for the essay 
is a single work by Le Corbusier—the convent at La Tourette in Lyon, 
completed in 1961 (figure 1)—yet the scope of this short piece is ultimately 
much broader. Although the term is not used, we see the great modernist 
Le Corbusier positioned here as an architect of the non-project, insofar as 
he opposes his “free plan” (plan libre) to "the project." The idea of “the 
project” is here described in terms of an “Egyptian” ideal of space, where 



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all of urban planning is centralized in and unified 
by the fixed “block” of the pyramid: “Geometric 
plan, blind facades, identical in all directions, tons 
of amassed stone weigh on the land of the living. 
[…] All this crushing of time and space …”25  “The 
project” is evident here as a fixed and homogenous 
idea of space which is imposed on all space and 
lived relations in a dominating way. 
      In contrast, Lyotard presents Le Corbusier’s 
architecture as led by the ideal of a “free plan,” which 
he describes as a “variable” space conceived in terms 
of waves or vibrations: “Question of frequency. This 
is a variable of vibration: it’s the number of times by 
unit of time that a mobile object animated by a wave 
movement passes on the axis of its propagation.”26  

Despite this apparently precise physical definition, 
the use of the terms “waves” and “vibrations” 
is largely metaphorical, and concerns space as 
conceived and lived. These terms work simply to 
open architecture to alternative ways of conceiving 
the nature of materials and the experiences of bodies 
in space. 
       Le Corbusier decomposes the supposed unity 

Figure 1: 

La Tourette



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of space into component volumes, and considers these as having a “free” 
relation to each other, a relation not determined in advance. The emphasis 
in this essay appears largely to fall on the habitus, the problem of the 
habitation of space; of how architects can design buildings in which we 
can feel ourselves to be at home (thus recalling oikos and domus). But with 
Le Corbusier—or at least, Lyotard’s interpretation of him27—this turns 
out to be a matter closer to what he will call “the uninhabitable.” With 
the decomposition of the plan and the consideration of space in terms of 
vibrations, the question of habitation becomes one of the “resonance” of 
the body with the built environment, of the sensing body and the sensed 
architectural space: “In order to be my home, it need only resonate with the 
vibrations of my whole body. I only need it’s resonance with my rhythms 
in order to inhabit it.”28 

       To explain this idea of resonance, Lyotard plays on the similarity 
between frequency and frequentation.29  To be at home in a space is not a 
matter of inhabiting it in the manner of a homogenous body’s fixed relation 
to a given space, but of a variable relation, in which frequencies would be 
“modulated” by the body’s frequentation, its comings and goings, in that 
space. Describing the way we might get up in the night, half asleep, to 
get a glass of milk, and successfully navigate the space without turning 
on the lights, Lyotard writes that “[t]here, where I can be a sleepwalker 
without error, is my home.”30  Yet in posing the “at home” in terms of 
frequencies and frequenting, there is something which is never truly at 
home, at least as conceived on the old model of a natural fit between a 
given body and a given space. In this sense, being at home is a matter of 
“inhabiting the uninhabitable”—a degree of habituation to a space that 
will never settle into a fully tamed habitus, because it is always a matter of 
variable resonance between bodies and spaces which are never completely 
stable of fixed. 
       We can note here a first contrast with phenomenology. While 
schooled in the phenomenological tradition and a some-time follower of 
Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard criticized the latter for an overly harmonious view 
of the relations between the body and space, which he believed limited 
both the phenomenologists’ ability to explain disharmonious experiences 
(such as sleep and orgasm) in which the body doesn’t make sense of its 
surroundings, and art as the creation of the new.31  If art is understood as 
witnessing “the birth of perception,” as Merleau-Ponty contends, then this 
limits the scope of what kinds of art are viewed as legitimate. For Lyotard, 
art—and this includes architecture—should destablize the body’s habitual 
relations to the world by giving it disharmonious, challenging experiences. 



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It should dislocate the body in space, not simply 
help it to feel located. In the context of architecture, 
this disharmony and dislocation which produces 
new aesthetic sensations is precisely what he calls 
“the uninhabitable.”
       The uninhabitable is more heavily accented in 
Lyotard’s treatment of the experimental architecture 
of Shusaku Arakawa and Madelaine Gins. In their 
collaborative architectural projects – such as the 
Site of Reversible Destiny (Yoro, 1995), the Reversible 
Destiny Lofts (Mitaka, 2005), and the Bioscleave 
House (New York, 2008)32  – Arakawa and Gins 
seek to “reverse destiny” with respect to the human 
body. They created spaces in which the body will 
decidedly not feel at home, in order to provide it 
with constant stimulation. This sensori-motor 
stimulation is thought, in turn, to stimulate the 
brain and the immune system, and to keep the body 
young and healthy by promoting brain plasticity 
and freedom from disease. In their avant-gardist 
hyperbole, Arakawa and Gins announce a hope 
for defeating mortality through an appropriate 
architecture: “We Have Decided Not To Die” and 
“Making Dying Illegal” are two of their slogans.33 
What interests Lyotard in their work is not this 
rhetoric of immortality, but the dehabituation of 
the body as conducive to provoking an aesthetic 
experience.
       Arakawa and Gins develop the concept of the 
“architectural body,” which is the body considered 
as ontologically continuous with, and shaped by, its 
architectural environment.34  What interests Lyotard 
is the way that they conceive architecture as having a 
direct effect on the body, and of its capacity to make 
art of inhabitable space. Lyotard conceives of their 
work as a mutation of three-dimensional space, just 
as painting is a mutation of 2-dimensional space, 
or of color itself. This mutation, which is an artistic 
event in lived space, is precisely the uninhabitable: 
“For one instant, the body, the everyday body, 

 Despite his 
opposition to 

the modernist 
architectural 

project of 
the “total 

plan,” this does 
not prevent 

Lyotard 
from seeing 
a tendency 

contrary 
to total 

planning—and 
thus, the 

artistry—in the 
late work of Le 

Corbusier

“

”



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the body of the habitus, is exposed to the uninhabitable.”35  In order to 
feel the effects of this mutation, the body must undergo an “ascesis” in 
relation to the habitable36—its habits and habituations must be undone. 
Arakawa and Gins seek to produce this ascesis, for example, by making 
space difficult to navigate – introducing steep inclines, or placing barriers 
in unexpected places. (figure 2) The functional approach of modernist 
architecture is reversed. The aim is not to obliterate all function, however, 
but to introduce difficulties to be overcome by the body in its attempts to 
achieve its goals. Summing up and generalizing these conclusions from 
Arakawa and Gins’ work for all architecture, Lyotard writes:

[A]rchitecture seeks to transfer into inhabitable space a power of 
habitation that is not itself inhabitable. This art cannot offer human 
beings any topos where they might live and be sheltered, that is to say, 
where they might escape from this elsewhere.  Architecture as an art 
cleaves space-time in such a way that there and then are at home here 
and now while still being far away.37 

Riffing on Lyotard’s well-known theme of “presenting the unpresentable,”38 
the problem or stake of architecture as an art would then be how to 
“inhabit the uninhabitable.” The question for the architect would be: how 
to construct a habitation in which the uninhabitable can be encountered?

Comparisons: phenomenology, postmodernism

       Now that we have surveyed Lyotard’s relevant texts, we are in a 
position to draw out the critical contrasts announced at the outset. We 
have already noted Lyotard’s relation to Merleau-Ponty, but his challenge 
to phenomenology may also be extended to Heidegger, whose writings on 
dwelling have been highly influential in architectural theory. In a rare text 
on Lyotard’s writings on architecture, Rob Shields notes some similarities 
with Heidegger.39  However, there is also an important contrast to be made 
between Lyotard and the German phenomenologist. In short, we might see 
the Heideggerian perspective as expressing a nostalgia for the habitus, as 
Lyotard’s referencing of Heidegger in this regard suggests.40  While we have 
noted that Lyotard does not believe this mode of dwelling in itself, nor a 
nostalgia for it, signal anything worrying, we also saw that the same cannot 
be said for the attempt to reimpose it. And so we might well think that 
for Lyotard, any architectural model based on the Heideggerean notion 



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of dwelling will 
risk being out 
of step with the 
transformations 
of time, space, 
and being-
together that 
the megalopolis 
has effected.41  
At worst, such 
a r c h i t e c t u r a l 
projects might 
be conceived as 
conservative, even 
“fascistic,” in their 
attempts to make 
the body feel at 
home in a fixed 
place, with others 
who are part of an 
autochthonous 
c o m m u n i t y , 
while keeping 
strangers beyond the borders (or welcoming them 
only on the strictest conditions). 
       Although there are no explicit references to 
this in Lyotard’s writings (as far as I’m aware), 
it is easy to see his notions of space as linked far 
more closely to Emmanuel Levinas.’ In his essay 
“Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” Levinas bemoans 
the Heideggerean notion of place, with its fixed 
horizon, as ethically problematic, and instead 
celebrates the exposure of Gargarin—the first 
person to space-walk—to a space without fixed 
horizon as analogous to the nomadism of the Jewish 
peoples.42 Certainly Lyotard’s comments about 
Husserl’s notions of Earth, body, and space in his 
short text “Habitus” seem to head in this direction. 
According to Husserl, the relativistic discoveries 
of physics regarding time and space do nothing to 
change our body’s perception that “the earth does 

figure  2: 

site of reversible 
destiny--arakawa and 

gins



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not move,” the existential truth that we are grounded on an Earth with a 
fixed horizon.43  Rather than opposing the existential truth of the body to 
the scientific truths of reason, Lyotard instead asserts:

There is no need for the bodies to form a nature that would hold the 
secret of distances, and still less that the focal point they form should 
be a home. On the contrary, the failure of this metaphysics liberates 
another truth, one that can be reconciled with the relativism of the 
physicists. The focal point of the field is in the field and does not stop 
moving, just like everything that is in the field.44 

For reasons that are both ethical and political, then, as well as artistic, 
Lyotard challenges the dominant phenomenological views of the body and 
space.
       Because of Lyotard’s own deep association with the postmodern, 
there is the obvious need to compare his views with those of the famous 
postmodern architectural theorists, such as Robert Venturi and Charles 
Jencks. The latter is an especially interesting comparison to make, since 
Lyotard explicitly sought to distance what he meant by the postmodern 
from Jencks’ use of the term. For example: 

As for the 'trans-avantgardism' of Bonito Oliva and the similar currents 
one can observe in the USA and (including Jencks's 'postmodernism' 
in architecture, which the reader will do me the favour of not confusing 
with what I have called 'the postmodern condition'), it is clear that 
behind the pretext of picking up the tradition of the avant-gardes, this 
is a pretext […] to encourage the eclecticism of consumption. Mixing 
the same surface neo- or hyper-realist and abstract, lyrical or conceptual 
motifs means that everything is equivalent because everything is good 
for consumption. […] What is called on by eclecticism are the habits 
of magazine readers, the needs of the consumer of standard industrial 
images - this is the spirit of the supermarket shopper.45 

       As Lyotard makes abundantly clear here, he sees Jencks’ architectural 
postmodernism as nothing more than a market-driven eclecticism 
consistent with trans-avantgardism in painting (which was also sometimes 
called postmodernism). Certainly, if we compare some of Lyotard’s ideas 
on architecture which have emerged above with those of Jencks and other 
representatives of the “popular” form of architectural postmodernism, 



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we can identify at least some significant points of 
similarity. Most notably, with both we see a critical 
break with the modernist ideal of total planning for 
an ideal community. Jencks famously proclaimed 
the death of modern architecture and the birth of 
the postmodern with the demolition of the Pruitt-
Igoe housing estate in St. Louis, USA, at 3:32 pm 
on 15 July, 1972. For him, this demolition of a 
characteristically modernist project after the years 
of social dysfunction it had housed signaled the end 
of the modernist dream of planned community, and 
ushered in a new era, in which ornamentation and 
locality-specificity returned.46   
       However, Lyotard rejects this kind of clear linear 
periodization which seeks to delineate the modern 
and the postmodern, and—as we have already seen 
with the example of Le Corbusier—his concerns 
with the arts incorporate much that is usually 
delineated as “modern.” Briefly glossing a complex 
topic, Lyotard extols the virtues of experimentation 
in the arts, and highly values this dimension of 
modernism, but he critically rejects the tendency 
of modernism to construct a narrative of progress, 
with a particular style and an ideal of purification or 
perfection. Rejecting such notions does not mean 
for him the end of new developments in the arts 
and a pastiche of past styles, but a free pluralism 
of experimental creation.47 Lyotard’s approach to 
the postmodern then invites a more nuanced view 
of how different architectures might be understood 
and judged. 

Endnotes

1. See for example William M. Taylor and Michael 
P. Levine, “Philosophy of Architecture,” The Internet 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://iep.utm.edu/
architec/#SSH3ci
2. As noted by both Taylor and Levine “Philosophy 

   (Lyotard) 
sees Jencks’ 

architectural 
postmodernism 

as nothing 
more than a 

market-driven 
eclecticism 
consistent 

with trans-
avantgardism 

in painting

“

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of Architecture” and Saul Fisher, “Philosophy of Architecture in Historical 
Perspective” (supplement to “Philosophy of Architecture,” The Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/
architecture/perspective.html 
3. These texts are, respectively: “Conventus” in Misère de la philosophie 
(Paris: Galilée, 2000); “Reserves of Spatial Events” and “Dear Neverending 
Architectonic Reflective Wherewithal” in What to Paint?, ed. Herman Parret. 
Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists 5 (Leuven: Leuven University 
Press, 2012); “Dwelling and the Postmodern: A Conversation with Jean-
François Lyotard,”  Skala 22 (1990): 36-41; “What Are We Looking For?: 
A Conversation Between Architect and Philosopher,” Lotus International 
73 (1992): 67-75; and “Habitus” – contribution to “Il paradiso perduto = 
Paradise Lost,” Lotus International 79 (1993): 102-131.
4. Following for example Le Corbusier, who writes: “I consider architecture 
and city planning together as a single concept.” Precisions: On the Present 
State of Architecture and City Planning. Trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame 
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), p. 70.
5. See for example Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is 
Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 
Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1984).
6. Most famously in The Postmodern Condition.
7. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey 
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 191.
8. Jean-François Lyotard with Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming. Trans. 
Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 42.
9. See “The Zone” in Lyotard, Postmodern Fables. Trans. Georges Van Den 
Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Previously 
published in The Dimensions of Play: Ways of Thinking Architecture and the 
City. ANY : Architecture New York, 12. New York: Anyone Corporation, 
1995.
10. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 192.
11. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110.
12. For Lyotard on these effects of communication technologies, see for 
example “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy” in The Inhuman.
13. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110.
14. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110.
15. See the essay “Oikos” in Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings. 



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Trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press, 1993). And in 
“Domus and the Megalopolis” we read: “In the 
lowest depths of the domus, rumour of anti-nature, 
threat of stasis, of sedition. Father, mother, child, 
female servant with the heart of gold, niece, old 
man-servant, shepherd and ploughman, gardener, 
cook, all the figures of wisdom, the corner of 
the park under the fig tree, the little passage for 
whispering, the attic and its chests – everything is 
matter for obscene crimes. Something in the domus 
did not want the bucolic.” Lyotard, The Inhuman, 
pp. 195-6.
16. See Lyotard, “The General Line” in Postmodern 
Fables. 
17. Lyotard, “Domus and the Megalopolis” in The 
Inhuman.
18. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 201.
19. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 197.
20. See Lyotard’s discussion of this in “Painting as 
a Libidinal Set-Up,” translated by Kieth Crome, in 
The Lyotard Reader and Guide. Ed. Keith Crome and 
James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 
Press, 2006).
21. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking 
For?,” p. 70.
22. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking 
For?,” p. 69.
23. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking 
For?,” p. 70.
24. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking 
For?,” p. 72.
25. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 199. 
Translations from this text are mine.
26. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 200.
27. Lyotard openly acknowledges that his 
interpretation takes a great deal from that of Jacques 
Lucan. See the latter’s “Tout a commence là” in Le 



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Corbusier, une encyclopedié. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987.
28. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 201.
29. “Fréquence” and “fréquentation” in French.
30. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 201.
31. On Lyotard’s relation to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, see 
my article “Lesson of Darkness: Phenomenology and Lyotard’s Late 
Aesthetics,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology vol. 50, no. 2 
(2019): 104-119.
32. Some of these projects were realised only after Lyotard’s death, but 
embody earlier ideas on which he commented.
33. See Arakawa and Gins, Pour ne pas mourir / To Not To Die (Paris: 
Éditions de la difference, 1987) and Making Dying Illegal (New York: Roof 
Books, 2006).
34. See Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa: 
University of Alabama Press, 2002).
35. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 407. 
36. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 391.
37. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 407.
38. See Lyotard, “Answering the Question.”
39. Rob Shields, “Oblique Views and Heterodox Spaces: Le Corbusier’s 
Conventus” in Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: Essays on His Later Works. 
Ed. Heidi Bichis and Rob Shields (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), p. 111.
40. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 195.
41. See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Martin 
Heidegger: Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper 
Collins, 1993). A key distinction here that could be pursued is that of the 
boundary, which is essential to Heidegger’s account of space, locale, and 
dwelling, and which is the distinctive feature that disappears in Lyotard’s 
account of the space of the postmodern megalopolis.
42. Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” in Difficult Freedom: 
Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 
Press, 1990).
43. See Edmund Husserl, “Foundational Investigations of the 
Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary 
Ark, The Earth Does Not Move.” Trans. Fred Kersten in Edmund Husserl: 
Shorter Works (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1978).
44. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 111.

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45. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 127.
46. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern 
Architecture, 4th edn. (London: Academy Editions, 
1984), p. 9. In a later interview, in fact, Lyotard does 
seem to present Jencks’ architectural postmodernism 
as broadly in line with his own thinking of the 
postmodern insofar as both reject the tabula rasa 
approach of modernism, and instead connect with 
tradition. See “Dwelling and the Postmodern.” This 
would be a point from which to take up further 
comparison.
47. On this topic, see my article “Lyotard on 
Postmodern Music,” Evental Aesthetics 5.1 (2016): 
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