Six Aphorisms Envisioning Architecture: Douglas Darden's Final Thoughts

 
Random note found after Darden's death

I recently had the privilege of presenting on Douglas Darden's Condemned Building for Oxford Brookes. A question was asked by the Chair of the Post-Graduate Department, Scott Sworts, which concerned Darden's architectural theory and its impact on architecture. For almost any other architect this is a vague and open-ended question that could consume hours of discussion, but for Darden, it draws attention to a void in understanding him and his work: there is a near total lack of any formal writings from him on his theories and ideologies. I attempted to answer the question, but it is a difficult issue to address. Darden's architectural theory is embedded into his work, scribbled into the margins of sketches, scattered post-it notes and scrap paper in project files, etc. He publishes very little of his theories and ideologies, and most of that is early in his career. There is so little published of his early theory that I can list them all here:

• "Architecture in the Age of Spatial Dissolution," Oz, No. 9, 1987
• "The Architecture of Exhaustion," Pratt Journal of Architecture, No. 2, 1988
• "Confidences of a Spec-Writer," Oz, No. 14, 1992

That's actually about it. There are two book reviews, one on the Architecture of Frank Gehry and The Danteum, both published in the now defunct periodical Sites. These give us glimpses into Darden's interpretations of other people's architectural theory, but not much on his own opinions. There are a few other possible articles he may have published, but I cannot for the life of me — nor the librarians who helped me search — find these other publications, but are listed on Darden's resumes. Ultimately Darden's theories and critiques on architecture are in his designs, and most especially in his notes and the things he would scribble into the margins of his sketches.

Furthermore, and to be totally honest, his early theory isn't that great. It is pedantic and naive. His theories are more of a play on architectural discourse than actual architectural theory. He writes like a grad student who has enough knowledge and ideas to get published, but nothing with enough critical substance to be groundbreaking or to carry weight in larger arenas of architectural discourse. There is but one exception, and that is an obscure student-run publication at the University of Colorado in Denver called Installations, of which I have only found one copy in the rare books collection at the Auraria Library in Denver. In Installations 2, 1993, there is a dialogue of sorts called "In/n Conversation" between Darden, his student and assistant James Trewitt, and his colleague Keith Loftin. Here we see a much more mature and developed Darden in his ideologies and how he expresses them. Perhaps the only other example of Darden's theories that are recorded is Rob Miller's documentary on Darden called Looking After the Underbelly, 1991, of which only one copy exists in the library at Clemson University.

Ultimately, there is not an extensive corpus on Darden's theories. Even with what little of his ideas that are formally (and informally) published, there is little that can be cross-referenced and analyzed. It really is of little consequence. Thus, we really have to rely on the notes and letters found in the project files of his designs, his course syllabi, and Condemned Building. However, even his notes and comments on his sketches are not systematized, so establishing any sort of corpus would be problematic. I personally feel these notes and scribbles would need to cataloged by project, and allow them to stand on their own, rather than endeavor to systematize his thoughts across such a large spectrum of works. In reality there is only one thing Darden offers the world for further architectural discourse: the six aphorisms he gives at the end of Condemned Building.

Darden begins Condemned Building with ten projects, each representative the reversal of an architectural canon. These are what we are most familiar with in analyzing Darden's works in this book. However, this is not everything he offers. He ends the book with an excerpt from Hugo's Notre Dame of Paris, and six aphorisms for architecture. As mentioned in my previous post on Darden's increasing interest in abstraction, Darden considered that his book Condemned Building to be the book that would destroy architecture, "this will kill that." Seriously, the last words of the book are the passage from Hugo, "Architecture is dead, dead beyond recall, slain by the printed book," and a passage from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "Fall'n on the inventors' heads" (5.2.385). If we are to buy into Darden's narrative, he killed architecture. He designed ten buildings based on the inverse of the canons of architecture, demonstrating how invalid these canons are. If those canons cannot stand the test of Darden's underbelly, then they are invalid, and if they are invalid, then hundreds of years of architectural principles have been destroyed. And Darden killed them.

Of course, Darden does not abandon architecture, nor does he leave us abandoned to the ruin. He leaves us with "Six Aphorisms Envisioning Architecture," which are the following:

I. Architecture is the meditation on finitude and failure.
II. Architecture is the symbolic redistribution of desire.
III. Architecture is the execution of exquisite barriers.
IV. Architecture is the fiction of the age critiqued in space.
V. Architecture is the history of a place told in broken code.
VI. Architecture is carried out by a resistance to itself.

These are not a new set of canons. They are thoughts, brief observations on architecture that Darden can define with certainty based on his challenging the ten canons by exploring their underbelly. When we look at Darden's reversals of the canons, we see how they play into these aphorisms. For instance, the reversed canon for Sex Shop is "Architecture fulfills objectifies desire," and that for Hostel is "Architecture takes possession of a place displaces." These two reversed canons play into aphorism II. We see larger theories about architecture in these aphorisms. Architecture can't be anything and everything, hence it is finite, and to realize that architecture is finite is its own failure. Architecture aspires to great heights, but because it is finite, it resists itself. Thus we see the alpha and omega of these aphorisms: I and VI. 

Sadly, these aphorisms are published in 1993 and Darden spends the remaining years of his life promoting his book and the designs therein, focused on his health, and tying up loose ends in his life. Laughing Girls, and to some extent Sex Shop, are really the only projects that illustrate where Darden wanted architecture to go after he killed it. The abstraction and general concepts behind these projects give us glimpses into what Darden's new agenda for architecture would be, but it is not enough. Just like his formal writings on architectural theory are scant and weak, these two projects, as powerful and important as they are on their own, only give us scant and weak ideas of his new agenda.

In a way, Darden's untimely death is a part of his narrative. It is as if he understood he would die and never see his work fully realized, and these six aphorisms are the gift he leaves us. These are the final thoughts of a dead man, and he asks us to pick up the mantel to better realize a new agenda for architecture. Perhaps Darden could never realize a new agenda for architecture. Perhaps it was necessary for Darden to kill architecture, but someone else has to realize a new architecture.

We may never fully understand Darden's ideologies for architecture. Whatever clear ideologies he had, he worked into his designs and a single book. They are coded and rendered in architectural-literary "puns and reedles" (to quote Joyce's Finnegans Wake). They are haphazardly scribbled onto photocopies of renderings and post-it notes. One may even surmise Aphorism VI plays into why Darden could never fully articulate his agenda of architectural reformation: it is too lofty of a goal that is plagued by finitude, and thus resists itself.

In other words: I do not know. I have no idea where Darden wanted his reformation to go. All that is known is that he needed to kill architecture and rebirth it like Tashtego from Plato's honeyhead. It is an unknown agenda with no clear objectives or any tried and tested theorems or axioms. Darden left us with a tabula rasa, but never sets a new table; only parting thoughts of lessons learned. It is terribly pessimistic and bleak, but of course it would appear bleak if we accept Darden's narrative that architecture is dead, Darden killed it. He could have reformed it, maybe, but because of his early demise, the task to reform architecture is our bur[n]den to bear.