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Minor houses/minor architecture

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Abstract

Deleuze and Guattari develop a notion of “minor literature” in their short book on Kafka, and the opposition major/minor has been used with varying degrees of success by critics working in a range of disciplines including architectural theory. Teasing out the potentially subversive implications of the major/minor opposition requires reading it in relation to other binarisms developed by Deleuze and Guattari in those same years, e.g., state/nomadic science, striated/smooth space, optic/haptic, as well as Guattari’s useful concept “machinic heterogenesis.” Then, one ends up with a minor architecture concerned with partially subversive practices rather than with structure per se. A building’s minor status is figured through its deployment in and production of a space that is a technological, social and political pattern as well as a line of flight. This paper reads minor architecture by examining the minor house built by Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond and those currently being assembled by the Mad Housers in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Notes

  1. Something, for those who are not convinced, he did do in his Maine woods excursion. All disbelievers are advised to go climb Katahdin with today’s state-of-the-art gear and then continue objecting.

  2. Their theses and an archive of material about the Mad Housers including video interviews, architectural plans, etc. can be found online at http://www.smartech.gatech.edu/simple-search?query=mad+housers&submit=Go.

  3. On the striation of the sea, see Crawford (1997).

  4. On a side note, when advocating for the homeless, the Mad Housers have been known to put up brightly painted huts in public places, see their web site for examples: http://www.madhousers.org/.

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Acknowledgments

I want to thank Victor Lesniewski, Lindsay Anglin and Nirouz Elhammali for teaching me about civil disobedience and the Mad Housers.

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Correspondence to T. Hugh Crawford.

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Crawford, T.H. Minor houses/minor architecture. AI & Soc 25, 379–385 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-010-0296-0

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