Sleeping on a Drunken Boat: Darden and Rimbaud

Clinic for Sleep Disorders by Douglas Darden

Of Darden's projects Clinic for Sleep Disorders stands out as a particularly significant one for today: October 20th, which was both Douglas Darden's and Arthur Rimbaud's birthday.

Clinic for Sleep Disorders was designed in 1987, and was designed in Liberty State Park, New Jersey. This is the same year Darden taught architectural design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He was the recipient of the Fellowship of the New Jersey Counsel of the Arts for this project, so the idea for it must have been on his mind for a couple of years, but drawings were executed for it in 1987. The NJCA usually awards  $1000 for this fellowship, but Darden received $4000; indicating that they regarded him and his work particularly promising.

I have addressed in a previous post (Dating Douglas Darden) Darden's use of deliberate dates in his designs and writings to add a little more significance and meaning into his work. When I first wrote that post I had not yet realized the deeper significance Darden put into the date October 20th provided in the doctor-patient interview in Condemned Building (pg. 56), nor some of the other aspects of that bit of text.

The date given is 20 October 1954. This is Darden's third birthday. It is also Rimbaud's 100th birthday.

The name of the doctor in the interview is Jean Nicholas, and the name of the patient is Arthur. Rimbaud's full name is Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud.

The name of the clinic where the interview is held is at the Charlesville Sleep Clinic in Marseilles, France. Rimbaud was born in Charleville, France, and died at the age of 37 in Marseilles, France.

The image provided on the same page with this interview is one of a young Rimbaud done by Pablo Picasso. Darden even writes that this is Rimbaud, though he conceals the name "Arthur" by simply writing "A. Rimbaud."

"Dreamed client profile: schematic representation of neurophysiological mechanisms of sleep states with Picasso lithograph of A. Rimbaud laid down to rest." —Condemned Building, pg. 56

Picasso's drawing of Rimbaud & portrait of 17-year-old Rimbaud.

Most of the patient's words in the interview are derived or taken completely from Rimbaud's poem, "The Drunken Boat." Without quoting the length of both texts, I will provide some examples (in parentheses will be the stanza followed by the line from that quartet):

Arthur: I have wept too much! (23:1)
This is a cold puddle (24:2). The sun is bitter and the moon atrocious (23:2).
I run (3:3), I am lighter than a cork (4:1).
Unbelievable Floridas! (12:1)
Immobile and blue (21:3).
I was on a boat hauling cotton (2:1-2).

Et cetera.

Ultimately, "The Drunken Boat" is the Archi-text for Clinic for Sleep Disorders—the piece of literature that in-forms and in-spires the project. It would have inspired the "ciphers" for the building elements and programs and the "stages" of a patient's progress through the clinic—from the bridges to the walls to the ferry boat that takes the patient out of the clinic.

Happy birthday Douglas Darden and Arthur Rimbaud.

Further reading:
Douglas Darden. Condemned Building. 1993.
Arthur Rimbaud. Complete Works.
Ben Ledbetter. Condemned Building (a book review), GSD News, Fall 1993. Pg. 42.

Sexy Sadie and Sadism: Douglas Darden's Sex Shop

Sex Shop by Douglas Darden

From MoMA Collection

One of the last (more or less) completed works of Douglas Darden was called Sex Shop, which was excluded from his 1993 book, Condemned Building, due to the controversial nature of the project. Prior to publication of Condemned Building Darden had not really worked on the project very much—though there was a completed Dis/continuous Genealogy with an ideogram, but not much else. He did not actually start working on the design and drawings until two years after publishing Condemned Building. After his death several finished drawings on yellow trace paper were found in portfolio boxes. Peter Schneider has written quite extensive on the project ("Douglas Darden's Sex Shop: An Immodest Proposal" is considerably the most informative of his writings on Sex Shop, of which I will reiterate some things). 

Darden construed the project to be an exploration of concepts of sin, shame, nakedness, pervertedness, and also redemption. In his Dis/continuous Genealogy he uses certainly images that have the potential of being perverted with a sort of middle school level mentality: the sex/tant, the fann(e)y coupler, the glass blow-ers, and the Marquis de Sade's Theater of Lubricity. He even dates the project by writing "Twenty-Sex June '95".

The client for the project is a woman named "Sexy Sadie", which Schneider discusses as a play on "Sade" for the Marquis de Sade—the man we name sadism after. Two of Darden's "Archi-text" he used for inspiration to the project are de Sade's Juliette and Justine (two books that make Fifty Shades of Grey look like a Disney story).

But in all I have read on Sex Shop I am amazed at how no one has put together that Sexy Sadie was also the name of a Beatles' song on The White Album—with lyrics like:

Sexy Sadie, what have you done
You made a fool of everyone
...
Sexy Sadie, you broke the rules
You laid it down for all to see

Further, the name "Sexy Sadie" was given to Susan Atkins by Charles Manson after the song was released (prior to The White Album her nickname was Sadie Mae Glutz). She is the infamous vampiress of the Tate-LaBianca murders, as she claimed to have tasted the actress Sharon Tate's blood after she stabbed her sixteen times (Tate was eight months pregnant). She participated in the killing of the others in house, as well as the Leno and Rosemary LaBianca murders the following night. Susan Atkins showed no remorse, and even boasted about the murders. 

Susan Atkins (AKA Sexy Sadie) on the stand for the Mason trials

Susan Atkins, the Sexy Sadie, was sexually wild and cute, but cruel and vicious. If Manson knew about the Marquis de Sade (which I doubt), he must have thought it clever to call this cute vampire "Sexy Sad(i)e."

I suppose Darden must have thought the same thing, at least somewhere in the back of his mind. Certainly Helter Skelter (or at the very least The White Album) must have been in his collection of books (and vinyls). Darden was seventeen when the Tate-LaBianca murders occurred, and I doubt he did not hear about them (my mother was only nine and living in Germany and she remembered hearing about the murders)... much less not read Vincent Bugliosi's famous book.

So it is that Sexy Sadie in Sex Shop probably has a further allusion in addition to the Marquis de Sade: that of Susan Atkins, that sadistic Manson girl, who murdered Sharon Tate and tasted her blood.

Further reading:

Douglas Darden. Condemned Building. Princeton Architectural Press. 1993.

Peter Schneider. "Douglas Darden's Sex Shop: An Immodest Proposal," Journal of Architectural Education, Volume 58, Number 2. November 2004.

Vincent Bugliosi. Helter Skelter. 1974.

The Laughing Girls from Troy, New York: Douglas Darden's Unfinished Work

The Delivery of Helen by Castor and Pollux
by Jean-Bruno Gassies, Prix de Rome 1817

Before Douglas Darden died one of the last projects he was working on was called The Laughing Girls from Troy, New York, or simply Laughing Girls. I have run across mentionings of this project several times: LaMarche's article "The Life and Work of Douglas Darden: A Brief Ecomium" mentions the project as an example of how not all of Darden's works were morbid; the obituary in The Rocky Mountain News said he was working on it for the three years before his death; and it comes up in his curriculum vitae 1995 as being published in Chora (publication never occurred, probably because of his illness).

Recently I was able to find a fairly obscure and hard-to-find student-run publication from the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado at Denver, Installation, Volume 2, Fall 1993. In it is an article called "In/n Conversation", which is a three-track conversation between Darden and himself, Darden and a former student of his James Trewitt, and Darden and Keith Loftin III. It is in the second track between Darden and Trewitt that we find some information on Laughing Girls.

It was an "architectural novel" (Darden's widow told me is was a graphic novel of sorts): "What we are attempting is to design and make sites, spaces, forms, objects, details, etc. as the narrative itself." The project centers around three characters, i.e. "clients", who are two fourteen year-old sisters named Cass and Polly, and their nineteen year-old friend, Helen.

These names easily ring a bell: Cass and Polly are feminine versions of the heavenly twins of Greek mythology: Castor and Pollux (better known for being the constellation of Gemini), and their sister, the infamous Helen of Troy.

The idea of the project was to make laughter into buildings—the laughter of these three girls and how that may inform space and produce architecture. As Darden puts it in his part of the conversation with Trewitt: "How could we make an architecture that would not simply represent laughing, but would itself laugh?" It is an unfamiliar approach to architecture. Trewitt discusses in the conversation that architecture often times honors something: values, the site, the client, construction traditions, aesthetic principles, et cetera; so why not honor laughter? Another way the process of this project was stated was that it was not so much about "whether we have made the girls' laughs but whether we have found a way of laughing in approaching their laughs." They continue: "Process is really about finding a set of actions that then become part of the building." In this case, the process is laughter.

In this day and age in which the design of a building is more generated by process of design rather than design principles and elements (i.e. the Classical approach, program, tectonics, et cetera)—how it is designed is more important than the building itself—it is interesting to read about a project that was very much driven by process, but in an extraordinarily different manner: a laughing novel.

I don't know why laughing in particular was significant: perhaps it is a sort of reversa of Oxygen House, or perhaps Darden decided to do something less morbid or controversial.

Ultimately the project was never complete due to Darden's untimely death, and its contents have never been published in any form. I was told by Marc Neveu that about three banker's boxes worth of material for Laughing Girls exists, and that he intends to publish an essay on Laughing Girls in the 2015 Chora issue (the same journal Darden had intended Laughing Girls to be published in).

Further reading:
Douglas Darden and James Trewitt. "In/n Conversation", Installation, Volume 2, Fall 1993.

Dating Douglas Darden

Study for Oxygen House
From the collection at MoMA

I have written previously on some of the references to works of literature, art, architecture, and visionaries in Douglas Darden’s book, Condemned Building: Moby-Dick in the title image, Lequeu and Duchamp in thefrontispiece, quotes from Hamlet scattered throughout the book, et cetera. These demonstrate how deliberate and the extent to which he references and contrives meaning in every aspect of his work, not just in his drawings, but also in his writings, which are very playful in their own right—even in the dates he gives in the projects: for instance, in the sketches and notes of the project file for Sex Shop there was found the title, signature, and date for the project: "Twenty Sex, June '95."

Upon actually reading Condemned Building, and not just looking at the pretty pictures (for they certainly are magnificent), one will notice how much narrative and story Darden puts into his works. Darden regarded literature as his patron, and sees works of literature as clients—hence projects like Melvilla, which is inspired on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, or Oxygen House, which is inspired by William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Sex Shop inspired by the writings of the Marquis de Sade, et cetera. Darden called the pieces of writing and literature that inspired his architectural designs "archi-texts." So it is that Darden would, as part of the narrative of his designs, contrive his own stories and writings to accompany the designs (like Eisenman's essays on each of his houses, which are as much a part of the house as the house is of the essays). 

Peter Schneider quotes and notes in his "House at the End of Time" (2001) how Darden borrows and is inspired by the first chapter of As I Lay Dying in the letter Abraham Burnden (an anagram of Bundren, and sounds like "burden", and perhaps burn-den, i.e. destroy the living room) writes to the architect. So it is that the date of this letter, too, has some significance. The date Darden gives is "6 July 1979". Originally, in an early iteration of this letter Darden uses "6 July 1962"—which just so happens to be the day William Faulkner died.

Taken from Schneider's "House at the End of Time"

Why Darden switched it to 1979 is somewhat of mystery to me; though, most likely, it was something significant in Darden's life...perhaps it was because that was the year he was accepted into Harvard...I digress.

[EDIT: I have recently found in a fairly obscure and hard to find journal, Installation, Volume 1, Fall 1992 (a student run publication from the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado at Denver—only 500 copies printed), a publication of Darden's on Oxygen House called: "Oxygen House: As I Lay Drawing", in which Darden uses the date "February 12, 1990." This is nearly two years after he finished designing and drawing Oxygen House (from his sketches the earliest date I can find is 20 March 1988). I am speculating here, but Darden had leukemia for five and half years before dying; having died 3 April 1996, this would place his diagnosis sometime in early- to mid-1990; it is possible that this was the date or roughly the time of his diagnosis—but this is pure conjecture.]

Even more thoughtful about this letter from Abraham Burnden is that it is written from Byhalia, Mississippi—the place where Faulkner died.

There is another playful date, and certainly one that has personal significance to Darden, in Clinic for Sleep Disorders. Darden writes a fictitious dialogue between a fictitious Doctor Jean Nicholas (perhaps the physician Jean Nicholas Corvisart, or the pathologist Jean Nicholas Marjolin) and a patient named Arthur, in the absurdly named clinic, Charlesville Sleep Clinic, in Marseilles. The date Darden gives for this interview is "20 October 1954." Why, I do not know, but this was Darden's third birthday—he being born 20 October 1951. [EDIT: see my post Sleeping on a Drunken Boat].

There is perhaps one other thoughtful date in Condemned Building, that of the architect's letter for Saloon for Jesse James. The date Darden writes is "1 April 1986." As best as I can tell this is probably when he began the project.

Douglas Darden was certainly an intense and thoughtful in every detail of his work and writings. Upon close examination of some of his drawings, one will notice that the exact direction his screwheads are turned. So it is that the dates he gives in his narratives for his projects have some meaning as well.

Further reading:

-Darden, Douglas. Condemned Building. Princeton Architectural Press. 1993.

-Schneider, Peter. "House at the End of Time: Douglas Darden's Oxygen House," Part 7. CUNY. 2001.

-Schneider, Peter. "Sex Shop: An Immodest Proposal," Journal of Architectural Education, V.58, N.2, Nov. 2004.