One of the more curious aspects about Douglas Darden's creative and intellectual development over the years is his increasing interest in abstraction. Even in Condemned Building we see him moving toward a near anti-architecture, as his designs drift away from a function building and into more architectural statements, and in his final years we will find that he becomes almost totally abstract.
If we look at a timeline of his works, we find that his early projects of note, such as the Ford House, is a very real house for habitation, albeit it was never built. As he begins his career working in the field of visionary architecture, we see unusual structures, but understandably habitable nonetheless, such as his final studio project under Stanley Tigerman, Saloon for Jesse James, as well as Museum of Impostors and Night School. Once we get to some of the later projects in the Condemned Building collection, we see Darden drifting away from buildings per se, and more into the realm of conception. Hostel is a good example of a near non-building, and Confessional, the last project he develops for Condemned Building (Sex Shop had not been developed yet), it is more a conception of privacy becoming public than it is an actual architectural renovation.
Darden would largely be concerned with teaching, publishing Condemned Building, and his health between 1990 and 1993, and he would produce no new architecture designs until his final year of life. Starting in mid-1995 he would return to finish Sex Shop, which is curiously absent in Condemned Building, though it has a spread in the book. He states that the work was too controversial to be built and the drawings and model were confiscated. In reality, he never did any work on it apart from the Dis/continuous Genealogy. Nothing survives of Sex Shop except for the Dis/continuous Genealogy, three sheets of yellow trace paper with a significant array of conceptual drawings, collages, and notes, and a simple diagrammatic model. Given that Darden would die within a year of his return to Sex Shop, it feels almost as if he knew he was not going to survive his leukemia — it feels as if he knew his days were numbered and he wanted to wrap up Condemned Building by finishing Sex Shop. It almost feels like he just wanted to get it over with. He never communicated to anyone, as far as I am aware, that he was working on Sex Shop. Even Peter Schneider seems astonished when he writes about Sex Shop, especially when he was helping pack up all of Darden's materials following his dead. Further, the lack of any any research articles, inspirational imagery, or any other sketches indicate that the project had been maturating in his head for over three years, but ultimately he wanted to get it over with.
I have seen the trace paper drawings first hand, and I must admit, they are curiously abstract. It is difficult to discern the scale of the building apart from a simple infill site plan and some cut-outs of Adam and Eve curiously worked into the sections. Looking at Sex Shop is difficult to wrap one's head around. There is no clear sense of entry, habitation, movement through the building, or even an element of human scale. It becomes increasingly clear while looking at the drawings and model that Darden had become more interested in the idea of an immodest proposal and its conception than producing anything we can conceive as habitable. Plans, elevations, and sections feel more like one is looking at one of Lebbeus Woods's parasitic designs than anything seen out of Darden at this point.
All of this becomes more clear when Darden begins work on Laughing Girls. The earliest ideas for Laughing Girls appears in 1992 with a series of sketches Darden called Laughing Place, and these sketches are still fairly abstract. Whatever interest he had in this project ceases within a year, probably due to finalizing the publication of Condemned Building. Shortly after completing Sex Shop, Darden picks back up on Laughing Place, but this time calls it Laughing Girls, which appears to have been inspired by the laughing epidemic among the girls of the village Kashasha in Tanzania, Africa. A xeroxed article on this epidemic was found in the project file.
Given Laughing Girl's overwhelming abstraction, it is difficult to determine what direction Darden intended to take with it. Laughing Place had enough "architecture" to it to sense the direction he was going with it, but when he revives the project, he starts from scratch. He seems even more aware of what little time he has left, as in his sketchbook for Laughing Girls he includes a tumorous mass on a throat-like drawing of some kind of structure and adds the note: "The Cancer growing within us our doubts and all that is below this surface." Like Sex Shop, perhaps Darden did not want to leave Laughing Place unfinished.
Darden along with his assistant, James Trewitt, create a series of spectrograms of laughter. Based on a single photo in the project files of a woman, I presume one of the people being recorded was Allison Jo, Darden's wife. These spectrograms are then used to create a series of abstract forms, which Darden then overlays on profile outlines of female forms. These in turn were used to create extremely abstract models.
All of this culminates in an architectural comic (twenty years before Bjarke Ingles would have the idea to do Yes! Is More). The comic follows three girls named Helen, Cass, and Polly, who are travelling from Troy to Ithaca, New York. The comic loosely follows various Greek myths, and plays on Greek names, places, and archetypes. Darden even revisits his Dis/continuous Genealogy, not with ideograms, but with names and places. For instance, in the project files he indicates that Polly is Polyxena and Cass is Cassandra, yet he also indicates that they are twins. Polyxena and Cassandra are not twins, though both live during the time of the Trojan War (Polyxena is not mentioned by Homer). Yet, true to Darden's fascination with transgenderism, there are another set of twins closely connected to Helen: Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers of Helen, and are the Dioscuri that make up the constellation Gemini. The Dioscuri have many mythological connections with the Dardanelles, a strait between Turkey and Greece that connects the Black Sea with the Aegean Sea. The Dardanelles were fascinating to Darden, as they are similar to his name. In two postcards to his mother, Darden writes as Polly and addresses the postcards to the Dardans and the Dardanelles.
Darden appears to be creating his own narrative. Rather than relying on existing narratives, such as Faulkner's As I Lay Dying or Melville's Moby Dick, he is creating his own narrative. It is almost as if he wants to explore things in the other direction, i.e. architecture informs narrative. At the same time, it appears Darden is creating a narrative to use for an architectural project, perhaps to revisit Laughing Place, but that is all conjecture. There are several drafts of Laughing Girls in the project files, and it appears that the sixth iteration was a near final draft. However, his blast crisis began and six months later he passed away. He intended to publish it in Chora 2, but this did not come to fruition. In 2016 Marc Neveu was able to get the final or near final draft of Laughing Girls published in Chora 7 as well as in Confabulations.
We should not conclude that Darden had grown more interested in abstraction, but rather that Darden was becoming almost anti-architecture. If we are to believe the narrative Darden had built for himself, Condemned Building was the book that killed architecture, this will destroy that, then architecture is dead. Darden appears to have moved into the realm of abstraction out of necessity. If architecture was dead, then it became necessary for Darden to explore abstraction. For Darden, the architect could no longer rely on the old conventional forms of design. Architecture as a design profession relied on human habitation as the primary focus of design and expression. In both Sex Shop and Laughing Girls we see Darden relying on expression of the human body as the basis of architecture.
Expressions of the body are significant to Darden. This appears to have been a fascination for him from his days of dance and ballet. Darden speaks with great emphasis on drawing as an expression of the body in space when Rob Miller interviews him in the documentary Douglas Darden: Looking After the Underbelly. Sex and laughing are both very positive and intense expressions of the body in space, and as such become the primary motives behind their respective projects. Sex Shop appears to fall short of what Darden was exploring with Laughing Girls, probably due to the constraints of Condemned Building in completing the project. Darden had to work with the Dis/continuous Genealogy and other constraints he built for himself years earlier. But Laughing Girls could more purely be explored and realized without any previous design constraints imposed by previous work. This is probably why Sex Shop still has some discernible aspects of habitability, whereas these aspects are almost totally lost or too abstract in Laughing Girls.
Darden does proceed to produce some architectural drawings, mostly sketches with a handful of more refined technical drawings (see image at the top of this post). Few of his sketches are comprehensively "architectural," such as Helen's Water Tower above. They still are amorphic and abstract. The rest of his sketches are largely topographic. It appears Darden intended to do three separate structures, each representative of the three girls and each on its own hill in what appears to be Ithaca. The project files for Laughing Girls are immense; something like eight or nine bankers' boxes filled with photocopies and sketches and letters, et al. Without any sort of "finished product," it is difficult to reverse engineer his designs the way we can with his other projects. One can only follow the sketches, letters, and notes. Perhaps one day I will get James Trewitt to sit down and discuss Darden with me.
Darden was ultimately taking a completely new direction. Many things about Darden change direction in the period between 1990 and 1996. He tries to work at David Tryba's office, but this apparently became difficult for him. He sought to work on a physical architectural project, but this never yields anything. His designs take new levels of abstraction, and his approach radically changes. A great shift occurred in his approach to architecture, and this is most certainly reflected in Sex Shop and Laughing Girls. The publication of Condemned Building seems to be the turning point for Darden. Even simple designs he would do before giving his students a studio project, such as Killing Mountain, take on some levels of abstraction, becoming more amorphic and mechanical.
Whatever Darden's intended direction was in the event he did not die of leukemia, what is clear is that Darden was drifting away from architecture as we know it, and approached building design after the death of architecture.
