Clemens Court or Ifadeum - Douglas Darden's Precursor to the Melvilla

 

Samuel Langhorne Clemen, Mark Twain, Greatest American Author?

The Danteum by Giuseppe Terragni was a work of architecture so admired by Darden that he sought to make his own work of architecture in dedication of a great American author. The only problem was... who? Today we know that person to be Herman Melville, and thus the Melvilla was in-formed by his magnum opus, Moby-Dick; just as the Danteum was in-formed by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. However, this is not the original author Darden had in mind when he first began conceiving of doing an American Danteum. No, he originally considered using Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, and the building would be called Clemens Court.

The Danteum, as it were, was so central of a structure to Darden that it in-forms Temple Forgetful and is included in the site plan. He would write a book review for Thomas Schumacher's book The Danteum in the periodical Sites (January 1986, p. 107-108). The fact he wanted to do an American equivalent is not surprising in the least, especially given his immense interest in literature and architecture inspired by literature. As Darden writes:

In 1938 amid the highly charged political climate of Fascist Italy, Mussolini commissioned the architect, Giuseppe Terragni, to design a building for the planned exposition of 1942 that would honor the greatest of Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and his monumental allegory, The Divine Comedy. The exposition was canceled at the beginning of World War II, and the Danteum, as it was called, was never built. However, through the architect's drawings, model, and texts, the Danteum stands as one of the most compelling architectural projects of this century.

In 1988, fifty years after the conception of the Danteum, I set about without a commission to design a theoretical architectural project which would honor Herman Melville and his great masterpiece, Moby-Dick. At the outset, I wished to accomplish two things. Firstly, I sought to design a building which would be the American equivalent in scope and stature to Terragni's project based on The Divine Comedy. This notion of equivalence was not grounded in an estimation of my work relative to Terragni's, but my belief that Moby-Dick is America's greatest novel. Secondly, I wished to demonstrate that a work of literature could not only be a source of inspiration for an architectural project, but that a novel could more directly in-form architecture; that is, a novel could be the veritable client for a building design. In this manner the project was to be a corresponding, parallel work to Moby-Dick defined in architectural terms, not a set of subservient illustrations. The result was a project entitled Melvilla. (Darden, "Melvilla: An Architect on Moby-Dick," Melville Society Extracts, Vol. 91, 1992, p. 1)

While, yes, he began work on Melvilla in 1988, he actually had been conceiving of an American Danteum since 1986. During this time Darden endeavored to present an exhibition called "2 x 4" which would display eight architectural projects, two projects by four architects. Another note in the file calls it "Architecture and Tragedy," but that is beside the point. The exhibition never occurred, though he exhibited Museum of Impostors and Clinic for Sleep Disorders in several showings in New York City in 1986, where he was residing at the time. In an initial proposition for 2 x 4, Darden indicates that he wishes to exhibit Night School and Clemens Court. The description for Clemens Court is as follows: 

William Gass reminds us that "we should never forget that from the very beginning the word has been one of the important OBJECTS in human experience." We are born into language as into perception and a place. Such a reminder has architectural ramifications.

In 1938 the architect Giuseppe Terragni received a commission under the Fascist regime of Mussolini to design a building that would honor the greatest of Italian poets, Dante Alighieri. The Danteum, as it was called, was never built; however, through the architect's drawings and his text, the Danteum stands — like the DIVINE COMEDY — as a compelling, imaginative work.

To date, no similar work has been designed by an architect in the United States to honor the greatest American writer. Perhaps this is because our country is young, or because our citizens would not agree on who is the greatest writer, but if we can allow a leniency with these matters, we can imagine designing "An American Danteum" that would honor Samuel Langhorne Clemens, otherwise know as Mark Twain."

One will notice a lot of crossover of language between the Melvilla statement and that of Clemens Court. One important thing to note is that Darden views the Danteum as a standing monument. Sure, the physical structure was never built, but through the drawings, model, and texts about the Danteum, it is a real work of architecture that stands, not physically in reality, but in the reality of Architecture itself. This may be why Darden adds the Danteum into the site plan of Temple Forgetful; he believes it is real — it is real. He is not imagining a parallel dimension where the Danteum was constructed, but rather that it already is real.

One will note that in the text of Melvilla, Darden calls the Danteum an "allegory." He doesn't say this about the Danteum in the text of Clemens Court, indicating that Darden had not quite developed his belief, or at least had not yet begun to articulate his perception of his building designs as allegories. I believe this reinforces the perception that the Danteum is real, it stands, it exists. The allegory makes it real, because allegories are reality, or at least a reality. We use metaphors, we use allegories. This is part of our linguistic reality. Like the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the larger the vocabular, the more augmented the reality of perceiving the world. However, I think George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By better captures the concept: that our language, the way we speak is almost always a metaphor; we speak in metaphors almost constantly. By extension, metaphors become our reality; allegories are reality. Really diving into this probably deserves its own post, as I believe there is a great deal of influence from Peter Eisenman, and by extension, Noam Chomsky and other linguistic theories of semantics.

There is something Darden writes in a letter concerning the 2 x 4 exhibition that I think begins to capture what Darden was truly in-visioning: "Words can be very important in the architectonics of perception and the viewer's expecta-shuns."

However, Darden is much more certain in his declaration of Melville being the greatest American author, whereas Mark Twain feels like a placeholder. He is less certain as to whether or not Twain is the greatest. He is more nominating Twain for the title of "Greatest American Author" to the general public, rather than declaring it. He didn't even have a particular work of Twain's in mind to base his design upon, like the Danteum was based on the Divine Comedy, Dante's magnum opus. Did Twain even have a magnum opus? What is Twain's greatest novel? And if that is his greatest work, is it the greatest work of American literature? One can really see why Darden was hesitant to follow through on Clemens Court.

In a letter to his friend Ben Ledbetter, Darden writes the following:

Typewritten statement by Darden to Ledbetter

Darden proceeds to make some commentary on this term and function of Ifadeum in a series of postscripts. He conceives that each architect will form there own program based on "what each of us has learned from designing our Night School." He notes that "deum" is not a real word but is similar to "diem" (day) and "deus" (god). Then notes that "eum" makes him think of institutions (e.g. museum) and "glorification" — "I think from childhood hymns that had the sound 'deum.'"

Basically, Darden didn't know who the Greatest American Author is, nor does he imagine there could be a consensus. It is one big IF. If it is Hemingway, then what about Plath? If it is Woolf, then what about Lovecraft? What if the greatest American author has not even been born yet? Like Nietzsche's Ubermensch, the one who has yet to come. What if the greatest American author is not of the United States, but rather Mexico, or Canada or any number of South American countries? What is meant by "American"?

Further writings on the 2 x 4 exhibition are letters to students at Carleton University, Ben Ledbetter, and a guy named Neil (not sure who he is yet). Darden tosses around ideas, concepts, working theories, &c. It seems the objective to design an American Danteum was something Darden really wanted to do, but in 1986 he just could not formulate the right direction. It would take him two years to finally create Melvilla. Obviously, Mark Twain just wasn't the right client for Darden, nor was any of his work a veritable magnum opus for either Twain or America. 

The fact he was so adamant on doing an American Danteum is telling about Darden's ambitions, but also how incredibly influential the Danteum was on him. One might consider Darden's admiration of Faulkner and the creation of Oxygen House another kind of Danteum. In many ways, Oxygen House and Melvilla compete with each other as being a sort of Danteum, even if conceived differently.

This is not meant to provide any sort of answer to Darden's opinions on "the greatest American author," perceptions, allegories, figuration, &c, but rather to give a glimpse into Darden's process and thoughts. We tend to look at Condemned Building as something that sprang from nothing, ex nihilo, but this is because it is so finalized, and all the work behind the scenes are completely denied to us. As strong and compelling as Darden's process is, he denies us access to any of it via Condemned Building. Process denied.

A little moment like Clemens Court and the Ifadeum gives some insight into that process.

Douglas Darden's Self-Portrait - An Examination of an Early Sketch

 

Early sketch for self-portrait of Condemned Building, c. 1988, & study photo for self-portrait

As thoroughly as Darden's self-portrait has been examined (see my first post on Darden ever), it's inspiration and symbolism, I believe it is important to look at an earlier version of this self-portrait. The earliest indications I can find for Condemned Building being a book Darden intended to published was in July 1985 with an early outline. It was originally called Condemned Buildings (plural), and intended to be divided into six parts and would only include four architectural designs (likely Saloon for Jesse James, Museum of Imposters, Clinic for Sleep Disorders, and Night School, as these were the only designs Darden had completed at this time), plus a few essays and other drawings (likely the 100 Drawing Nights), &c. This is very early stuff, and obviously premature. But over the course of the next few years he would further refine and redefine this concept of a book. In fact, tracing and exploring the development of Condemned Building itself is quite fascinating, and maybe I'll make a post about this one day. But for now, seeing as the self-portrait is the very first image we see when we open Condemned Building, an examination of the earliest sketch for this self-portrait seems to be in order.

Firstly, I have no idea what Darden is holding. A mop? Above on the right is the study photo for this image, and he appears to be holding some sort of... rod? Hanging from it is a cloth. This is an homage to a self-portrait of Jean-Jacques LeQueu in which he is sitting in a window, pensively looking up from his drawings, and hanging from the window is a stylized cloth with his name, title, and info. Darden clearly is working from this image, which was found the in archival box with the yellow trace paper sketch above. This would morph into the draped cloth with bears the words: Douglas Darden Architext.

Self-portraits: Jean-Jacques LeQueu and Douglas Darden

Closer examination of the draped cloth in Condemned Building, there is a crease, a very distinct crease right through the letter C in Architect, making it appear almost like an X. When we look back at Darden's original sketch, it is very clear that this was his intention, as Darden does not even make a crease, he simply writes Architext. Architext is a fun portmanteau coined by Darden to express his love of literature, that literature informs his designs, that he makes literature and narratives, that he is producing a work of literature through images, &c. It was a term he used to describe writings that give a project substance and depth, like the letter from Abraham Burnden to Darden for Oxygen House. One could spend immeasurable time unpacking this word and all its nuanced complexities as contrived by Darden. The term was so central, that when I wrote the Wikipedia page for Darden, I deliberately used the term "Architext" in the image caption in the information bar — which it looks like someone named Infrogmation changed in October 2021, not understanding that Darden would have appreciated the use of the Architext. Whatever. Maybe one day I will change it back.

Architext, right: 1988 sketch, left: Condemned Building

When we look at the original sketch, we will notice a number of notes, some of which are intelligible in their early stages, and others... not so much. For instance, I have no idea what Piranesi's Parrot is, or what Boullee's Shadow is. Darden's sketches are something like listening Hunter S. Thompson speak: his mind is faster than his instrument (Darden's hand and Thompson's mouth). Thompson frequently sounds confused and mumbled, even when very lucid, but it is like his mind is going at far greater speeds than his mouth can keep up, so it comes out confused and mumbled. Darden sometimes is like this. His hand cannot keep pace with his mind, so the notes come out confused and maybe even mumbled.

I think he intends Piranesi's Shadow for the background, which indeed becomes the background for the Title Image of Condemned Building. Whatever the parrot is, I am totally unsure. One finds these sorts of obscure, uncertain things in early sketches and outlines of Darden's work. For instance, the client for Oxygen House was not originally called Abraham Burnden, but rather Mark Veritan, who lives in Oxford according to a letter to "Yubie" (I presume Yubie was a clever rendering of U.B., short for Uncle Ben, a cute nickname Darden had Ben Ledbetter). Faulkner lived in Oxford, Mississippi, but I have haven't the faintest clue why the name Mark Veritan was initially used. Maybe I should ask Ben and see if he's still willing to talk to me.

Like the LeQueu self-portrait Il Est Libre, Darden makes use of disembodied heads, namely the head of a woman from one of Amedeo Modigliani (improperly spelled "Mondigliani" in the sketch). Modigliani was an Italian painter, who, like many painters, was ignored all his life and celebrated posthumously. Modigliani was heavily inspired by Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Lautreamont... a man after Darden's own heart (and mine). One of these women's heads by Modigliani would be replicated for one of the women's heads in LeQueu's rendering. The other three "heads" are sketched as some sort of mechanical pieces, with the top one being a "male sex connector." This male sex connector would become the mechanical pieces that hold up a turtle shell in Condemned Building. Sex and machination are somewhat prominent in the original sketch, as there is a note for "Display Sex Machine Here (4)(?)." I am uncertain what this sex machine is, but Darden originally conceived of it and it would become something like a guillotine in the final product of Condemned Building.

Sex and death. Very Freudian. Very Sad(istic). Very much in the spirit of Bataille. Sometimes I wonder how much Bataille was an influence on Darden.

Next, a curious detail is the inversion of LeQueu's painting Il Est Libre, namely that Darden turns the phrase sideways and then inverts the statement into a question: Is he free? An earlier version of this is actually found on an sketch for the title image, which was a set of books with artists that have inspired him, not a guillotine as we see in Condemned Building. This early title image sketch has an arched element that is secured into the right side frame of the sketch, and the component that secures this arched element has a question on it: Why not sneeze?

Left: frontispiece detail of Condemned Building, right: title image detail sketch

Whatever that means.

This may be a gestural thing. Darden may not have known entirely what he wanted to say, so he wrote in whatever phrase came streaming to him from his subconscious. Maybe he sneezed at that moment. Unsure. On the other hand, he may have known he wanted to overturn LeQueu's phrase into a question, "Is he free?" but thought he could make a joke on his early sketches. Such things give us insight into Darden's thoughts, process, and personality.

I believe another curious element of the original sketch that is much more subtle is that this self-portrait is a freestanding object, like Duchamp's Glider. The original not only calls out "Duchamp's Glider," but the fact that there is a leg holding up the whole window frame indicates that this is a freestanding object. In the version published in Condemned Building, this was executed in a much more subtle manner with a simple steel angle or sill at the bottom. This sill gives this whole window frame containing Darden the "feel" of being freestanding without screaming at the viewer that this is a freestanding object.

This makes the whole thing feel flat, almost two-dimensional, like Duchamp's Glider, as opposed to LeQueu's archway in Il Est Libre. It is a bit unnerving. The whole thing is perceived as if it should have depth, that there is a room behind Darden, a room beyond the window, yet the leg or the sill make the whole thing feels flat, a drawing, an applique onto a flat object, like the Water Mill image onto the Glider, as Duchamp had done.

This is not exactly the most complete assessment of the this sketch for the self-portrait of Condemned Building, but it is a start. This and many other sketches are in the Avery Archive at Columbia University. I believe a more thorough and intense study on Darden could be made if everything in the archive was digitized and readily available to access. Sadly, it is not. I just have scans of a portion of the material from the files that are now at Columbia. It is likely I should not be making these public, but whatever, it's not like I have this blog monetized. I literally share all this for free. As I have previously expressed, in depth and authoritative research into Darden is limited and buried inside of expensive and/or inaccessible academic tomes or lost in the presentations of obscure scholastic conferences. I just hope that as I dig through the materials I have and keep exploring Darden and his work in greater depths that this proves informative to someone somewhere at sometime.

The Southern Underbelly - Douglas Darden's Fascination with William Faulkner

 

Map of Yoknapatawpha, 1936, from Faulkner's Absolom! Absolom!

Somewhere, and for the life of me I cannot find the original source in my massive collection of Darden materials, Douglas Darden once said something to the effect of: I wish to be for architecture what Faulkner was for literature. Even if he never said anything remotely close to that, it feels like something that could be said about him: he was the William Faulkner of Architecture. Now, I am not specifically referring to Oxygen House, which is based largely on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, but just the entire essence of Faulkner's writings resonate deeply with Darden's approach to architecture, namely, the Underbelly.

If you are not familiar with Faulkner's work, I highly recommend it. Life is too short to read bullshit, and Darden lived a very short life, thus I doubt he wasted his time reading bullshit, much less designing buildings around shitty literature. The classic works of Faulkner are more than sufficient to understanding why Darden admired him, as well as sought to emulate his approach to literature — or rather the approach to the subject of his literature — in his architectural designs. It might take a week to read The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absolom! Absolom! to fully comprehend what Darden saw in Faulkner, but it will be a well-spent week.

Faulkner was the Underbelly of literature, and more particularly of the American South. When it comes to physical locations, we rarely use the term "underbelly" outside of cities — e.g. the seedy underbelly of Gotham, or New York's underbelly. We rarely, if ever speak of rural America as possessing any sort of underbelly. We think of rural life as charming, quiet, pious, hardworking, but also one of leisure and ease, where people take their time getting places, &c, all supposed core American values. Yet, films like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks (television series and movie) by David Lynch illustrate the dark side of small towns. Or again, the recent surge in folk horror, such as the first season of True Detective, &c illustrate that we do in fact know that transgression and wickedness lies in the deep rural areas of this nation. We know incest is an issue on isolated homesteads. We know alcohol, drug abuse, and domestic violence is a massive problem in rural areas. We know the ideal of a quiet life on a farm is as much a wishful fabrication as the country bumpkin moving to the big city in hopes of making it big.

This is what Faulkner explores: the underbelly of the American South post-Civil War, what many literary critics and scholars call American Gothic, and that is certainly a great way of describing Faulkner's work. Most of his novels I believe could be classified as anti-Gone with the Wind. If Gone with the Wind is a banned book — which I personally find weird given how much it tries to whitewash slavery and the reasons for the War itself — then a work like The Sound and the Fury ought to be burned.

It has probably been a while since many of us have actually read Faulkner, or perhaps we were never properly introduced to Faulkner. So we should probably briefly graze over some of Faulkner's writings, especially those that pertain to Darden, Oxygen House, and the Underbelly. I believe the most influential Faulkner novels were As I Lay Dying (of course), The Hamlet, and The Sound and the Fury. I believe some other novels were influential in some ways, maybe to just personal development, but seem to have less direct impact on his work, or at least little to no direct manifestation in his work. Absolom! Absolom!, which might be in my opinion one of the few examples of what I would consider a perfect novel, likely had influence, especially given that the plan of Oxygen House is based on the map of Yoknapatawpha County as found in Absolom! Absolom! However, this really deserves its own separate post.

Let us start with As I Lay Dying, since that might be the work of Faulkner's that impacted Darden's work the most. The Bundren family appears to be a typical, small, simple family in rural Mississippi, yet they are quite dysfunctional and in many ways they are terrible people. The novel begins with Addie dying and then shortly thereafter she dies. While she was dying, her son Cash was building her coffin. She requested to be buried, not on the homestead, but in Jefferson where Addie is from. She wants to be buried with her family, not with her family, if you understand the nuance of what she believed was her family — the one she was born into, not the one she made and raised. Addie in many ways is a terrible woman. She is an adulterer, having had an affair with the local pastor, Whitfield. The pastor himself gets a narration, and in it explains away his own sin, that he is not guilty, but that Addie is still a sinner... in other words, he's a horrible Christian. One of Addie's children, Jewel, is the illegitimate child of Pastor Whitfield, and is Addie's most beloved child. Addie seems to hate, truly hate and despise most of her other children, except for perhaps Cash.

Anse Bundren, the patriarch, is not a great fella either. Their only daughter, Dewey Dell, was impregnated by Lafe, a nearby farmer; likely an older man, and Dewey Dell is about sixteen or seventeen years of age, so this was definitely an illicit affair. Lafe gives her $10 to get an abortion, which is why Dewey Dell agrees to go to Jefferson, as she could not get an abortion at the local pharmacy. However, when Anse finds out about the $10, he steals it, buys himself a set of dentures and gets himself a new young wife. Anse also takes Jewel's beloved horse and sells it. Jewel believes his family is dishonest and dysfunction and seeks to run away, especially since he no longer has his mother's love.

I mean, As I Lay Dying is a messed up story about a messed up family. This is not the quaint, charming country life we imagine. Far from it. And certainly if you have only ever heard of Faulkner, but never bothered to read him, you would not expect such a messed up family to exist. This is the foundation of Oxygen House. This really dysfunctional family and disgusting tale of familial betrayal and dishonor is the central piece to Oxygen House. It is so central that Darden repeatedly quotes portions of the first chapter of the novel in the letter to the architect from Burnden Abraham as published in Condemned Building.

Abraham is the name of the client of Oxygen House. This name comes from The Hamlet, a work I have not read, though I should, but even a Spark Notes briefing is sufficient to illustrate that other inspirations for Oxygen House are of a subversive and even criminal quality. The novel was originally an unfinished work called Father Abraham, though Faulkner would later use pieces of it to form The Hamlet. The novel takes place in Frenchman's Bend, the same site of Oxygen House. Frenchman's Bend was known for a haven of outlaws, lawlessness, and people of lesser socio-economic background. One of the main characters, Ab Snopes — presumably short for Abraham — it is learned, via gossip, to have been a barnburner. The Snopes family goes from being outcasts and disliked to being regarded as dangerous villains throughout the course of the novel. Thus, even the client of Oxygen House is based on a very unsavory scoundrel and the site of Oxygen House based on a den of lawlessness. Perfect Underbelly sort of stuff right there. As mentioned earlier, though cities tend to have underbellies, Frenchman's Bend is an underbelly unto itself.

The Sound and the Fury is not, per se, a direct inspiration on Darden, yet the novel has a few characteristics that resonate with Darden, namely overturning, upheaving, exposing the underbelly. The novel focuses on the Compson family, who were once a Southern aristocratic family in Antebellum Mississippi. Following the Civil War, they have lost everything. They live in a decaying homestead, a life of poverty, and trying desperately to hold on to the last vestiges of decency they once enjoyed. That which was once beautiful and stood proud is now overturned and downtrodden. There is transgression, or at least very questionable things. For one, the son Quentin has an unhealthy relationship with his sister Caddy. He believes he is being chivalrous in protecting her virginity, but when she gets impregnated by another boy, Quentin tries to protect her honor by telling his father that they had incestuous relations. He later commits suicide over the state of total disgrace his sister falls into. Caddy names the child after Quentin, though it is a girl, and they are kept out of sight in disgrace. Their brother Jason is a particular heinous individual, stealing Caddy's support money for the child; their mother Caroline is a hypochondriac... one of the children, Benjy, is mentally ill and attacks a little girl, so Jason has him castrated. (These are all greatly oversimplified for a very nuanced and complex book, but we're not examining the book, we are examining the Underbelly of the book). The entire narrative of The Sound and the Fury illustrates generations of decay within a noble Southern family, which in many ways is symbolic of generations of decay in the South itself. The old world has fallen and given birth to new and terrible things. It breeds generation after generation of rot and dilapidation.

Darden actually comments something to this effect concerning the film Blade Runner in the 1992 interview with Rob Miller, Looking After the Underbelly. He says: "the opening scene, once you pan through the industrial landscape that has been raised to a power of ten; it is the industrial landscape that has bred the industrial landscape so many generations that the thing is consummated as fire. It is the Promethean landscape. Prometheus, it is important to recognize, Prometheus is a god that carries with him the fundament anxiety that we have about change, which is that we are afraid of it."

This notion of an inbred industrial landscape is one of interest to Darden, as I have found references to the industrial landscape in course descriptions of classes he taught, though I am uncertain the full extent of the classes themselves. That said, when Darden looks at the industrial landscape, he sees the same degradation as Faulkner sees in the Post-War South: inbred degradation, a violation, a violence. The Underbelly here is not the incest taboo, which is a societal construct of the forbidden, but incest as a violation of the family unit.

And for Darden, the industrial landscape is this same Underbelly, this same violation of the urban fabric, the built environment, and the natural landscape. The industrial landscape is violence, violated, and degraded. And Oxygen House is this same violation. It is an industrial building. It looks like a silo, the very same silo in the image below.

 

Silo, outside of New Orleans, Louisiana, photo by Douglas Darden, c. 1986, form project files

taken on the edge of Liberty State Park, New Jersey

Oxygen House is the exemplification of the inbred industrial landscape imposed onto rural Mississippi in a fictional place that was a lawless outpost, to house a man based on a scoundrel who is condemned to die there.

Darden emulated Faulkner by exploring the overturning of family, overturning place, overturning morality, overturning norms, overturning habitation, overturning built environment... Both men are exploring the underside of what we don't like to look at. When we think of the American South, we like to think of Gone with the Wind or Song of the South, &c, but Faulkner knows this is not real. He knows these are fictions, so his fiction is to overturn that pretty picture of quaint Southern life before the North came in and ruined it all, to flip over that stone and see the bugs wiggling underneath, expose it for what it is. Darden is doing the same thing with architecture, yet inspired by literature. Darden is looking under the pretty façade of Southern plantations to see the rot within the walls and mildew in the closets and the corpses buried in the cellar.

The pretty veneer of architecture is that "a house is for living," but for Darden, this is to be overturned to see the "house for dying."

There truly is no other author more informative on Darden, or more worthwhile to read than William Faulkner when exploring Darden. To read and sit with Faulkner is like being given one giant key to understand Darden's concept of the Underbelly. Faulkner's work is Underbelly.

Douglas Darden and Transgenderism

 

Douglas Darden, Self-Portrait Frontispiece of Condemned Building

One of the most infamous images of Douglas Darden is his self-portrait at the front of his book Condemned Building, on which I have previous written upon — actually this was the first piece on which I ever wrote on Darden so many years ago. This image is so central to the rest of the book that it is the very first image we see. It depicts Darden wearing a nun's habit and lifting it up to reveal a very large, spherical set of tits, based on a drawing by Jean-Jacques LeQueu.

Darden's fascination with gender and transgenderism is not political. He was exploring gender before transgenderism became heavily politicized in recent years of social and civic unrest. His fascination with transgenderism appears to come from LeQueu, in particular Philippe Duboy's LeQueu: An Architectural Enigma. In this tome, Duboy explores several drawings executed by LeQueu which explore transgenderism, namely gender swapping, transvestitism, hermaphroditism, &c. Obviously LeQueu is exploring genderism long before it was even remotely a political issue. LeQueu's explorations of gender was likely an extension of his studies on character, namely the physical expression of certain parts of the body yield certain qualities in personality and preferences, e.g. phrenology. LeQueu does an extensive set of drawings that geometrical map the physical manifestations of the human body to create an "ideal" human, and deviations from that "ideal" give insight into deviations in the personality. So when he draws himself with a huge rack, he is exploring his own personality but with huge tits.

Jean-Jacques LeQueu with tits

Ultimately LeQueu is not doing anything political, but rather social transgressions, like the divine Marquis de Sade. LeQueu is transgressing when he draws himself with huge tits or wearing a dress; LeQueu is transgressing by drawing pornography. Duboy believes Marcel Duchamp is making an homage to LeQueu, or at least it is easier to understand LeQueu's pornography and transgenderism through the lens of Duchamp, namely in the alter ego Rrose Selavy.

Darden, of course, was familiar with Duboy's book, and clearly is making an homage to LeQueu and Duchamp by drawing himself with huge tits.

But this is not a mere matter of transgenderism and the exploration thereof. It is an exploration in identity and social values. Darden was obviously fascinated by the obscene and transgressive, but he was also an artist. So in looking at Darden's explorations of transgenderism, we must ask some questions.

Firstly, is this pornography? Is this erotic-artistic or is it created for sexual arousal or a sick joke? The first has artistic merit, while the latter two we might define as pornography. To quote Justice Stewart in Jacobellis vs. Ohio concerning obscenity: "I  shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of materials I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."

Obviously Darden is being an artist. Yet, if we take Facebook's algorithm for censorship as any indication, you can see nipples. It is a nip slip. When LeQueu drew his Et Nous Aussi Nous Serons Meres, Car........! he was being obscene; he was also being blasphemous. He is illustrating a nun lifting her habit and revealing, not just tits, but nipples as well. Today we might see this as art, but in the 18th century, LeQueu knew he was creating pornography. Of course, LeQueu is doing this two centuries ago. Our perceptions of pornography and smut changes over time. I believe it was Bataille who argued that the more pornography we make, the less filthy the world is: that is, to increase transgression, we need less porn. In economic terms, albeit not in terms of the Accursed Share, transgression is the value system, and the more scarce the pornography the more valuable/transgressive pornography will be.

If we see big titted skinny bitches in bikinis on billboards making out with half-clad buff dudes, if we see camel-toes and crotch-taco lines on every woman advertised, if we can see the impressions of the mushroom cap of a male sock through Calvin Klein underwear on television... these things make pornography less transgressive. We have become desensitized to these things. The transgression is much less valuable than in LeQueu's day. Thus, while LeQueu was making porn, Darden is making art. The perception of transgression has diminished since LeQueu. Yet, still, Darden is making an homage to porn.

Next, is this a positive representation of transgenderism? Consider for a moment the books and films of Cliver Barker's Hellraiser franchise, which might be one of the greatest queer and kink films and books. However, this is not a positive representation of the queer and kink community, so it is usually not celebrated and sometimes totally ignored. Bernard Tschumi recognizes that architectural theorists are prudes and their discourse is exceedingly tame, and sought to discuss transgression in architecture ("Architecture and Transgression," Architecture and Disjunction). Bataille influenced both Hellraiser and Tschumi. So what is the purpose of transgression in architecture if we are not going to actually transgression or give true expression to sin and horror? Even Tschumi's paper is relatively tame. Some of his Advertisements for Architecture are raw and fucked up, like this one below, but most are still not that transgressive — e.g. the advertisement that suggests that Le Corbusier's Villa Savoy was more Architecture (with a Capital A) when it was abandoned and dilapidated.

Advertisement for Architecture, Bernard Tschumi

Ultimately we have a conflict of perceptions. In recognizing Darden's expressions of transgenderism, we might perceive him as positively representing and expressing transgenderism, or giving artistic expression to gender non-conformity. Yet, at the same time, we have to recognize that Darden is also exploring transgression and depravity. We are in that strange and uncertain area of life and expression that Darden called "the Underbelly."

The Underbelly: that which is underneath, under the clothes, beneath, &c. Everything Darden is exploring in Condemned Building is an exploration of the Underbelly. It is the unconventional, the obscene, the dark, the unexpected, the taboo, the horror. So in a way, Darden has flipped over pornography and found artistic expression within it. Not like what Justice Stewart said, but that it is pornography and it is art. It is obscene and it has cultural merit.

Ultimately, we can see this. We can look at his self-portrait, we can look at Sex Shop, and acknowledge that they are transgressive and artistic, but also an expression of transgenderism (in a political way).

I think the following commentary from Darden in Rob Miller's 1992 interview with Darden, Looking After the Underbelly, best exemplifies his philosophies of transgenderism and gender as a spectrum:

"If I was to truly engage the aspect of the Underbelly through the notion of gender, I think it would probably not be so much a woman per se as to deal with the overlap, to deal with androgyny, its to deal with what is common and in being common it is idiosyncratic that cannot be fit so nicely into the categories of being male or a female. What is most threatening, in other words, for the Underbelly is not the diametric opposite, of saying if you're yin then do yang, or if you're male then be a female. What is truly part of the Underbelly is the threatening relationship we have to our way of thinking about things, that if it broke down would not be able to be only a male or a female, organic or inorganic... 

Although I am not a woman, I think [Gustave] Flaubert did something, achieved something that many men and women, human beings at large understood, which was to be a woman. And I started to do a project called Night School from the standpoint of being a woman. Because what I think is important is to be a human being, and as a man, I don't think its so easy to be a woman. And I don't mean to caricature a woman, I don't mean to dress like a woman, or something like that, I mean to be a woman. And I don't think, from just a hormonal standpoint, that is a domain that is, as a man, a different domain than what it means to be a man. From a hormonal standpoint, men have estrogen and progesterone. They don't have as much as women, proportionally, but they have it. And women have testosterone. They don't have as much testosterone as men, but they have it. So you see... the world isn't divide by men and women, it's just a continuity of a spectrum, of which, that probably at any given moment or any given day you might have more estrogen than another day, a woman might have more testosterone. Because the hormones don't work as quantities, fixed quantities within every person. They're sliding all the time. So if you take it from just the pure hormonal standpoint, we have some women in us as men and we have some men within us as women." (Transcribed by myself)

In other words, Darden views gender as a spectrum, like many queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming individuals believe today. He uses hormone balances as one piece of evidence. Today transgender advocates point to expressions of the chromosomes themselves, or use examples like the multitude of genders in mushrooms, &c. Regardless, Darden probably had a positive and fair perception of transgenderism and expressions of gender long before it became political hot button.

And let us remember that he double majored in literature and psychology at CU Boulder in undergrad. He had a psychology background and probably understood gender on other levels as well, not just a hormonal or physical aspect, but also mental, neurological, and abstract identity expressions.

[Edit: it occurs to me now, later, that there is another example of transgenderism in Darden's work... well, unfinished work: Laughing Girls. Darden writes in his drawings that Poly is Polyxena and Cass is Cassandra, and Helen is simply Helen of Troy. However, the relation of Cass and Poly as twins in Laughing Girls with a girl named Helen leads me to believe that they are feminizations of Castor and Pollux, the celestial twins (Gemini, Dioscuri) and brothers of Helen of Troy. I believe Darden is covering his tracks, misdirecting — what Duchamp called Archaeology of Knowledge. I think Darden is gender-swapping Castor and Pollux, and this is reinforced with their association with the Dardanelles.]

I suppose one question to ask would be: was Douglas Darden transgender? No, I don't think so. I think he was really fucking weird and I wish I was born two decades earlier so I could study under him, but I don't think he was transgender.

[Edit: I was recently revisiting the essay by Chapman and Ostwald in which they explore the concept of Darden needing a female body: "It implies a dissatisfaction with his own diseased body and a philosophical yearning for a new one." They explore how it is the female nurse in Oxygen House that mediates life and death, disease and health for Burden Abraham and then link this to the self-portrait of Darden taking on a female body. Something worth exploring more.]

I think he was a master storyteller, a master narrator. I think he was perfectly capable of getting into someone else's head or working under the guise of someone else. Like an actor getting into their role through immersion, effectively always being that character, this is what I think Darden was doing when he says he designed Night School as a woman. He didn't start wearing dressing or adopting feminine mannerism, but rather endeavored to think and calculate like a woman while designing. I imagine he did these sort of mental exercises a lot. Oxygen House must have been designed from the standpoint of knowing that you are dying, and he was dying; he just didn't know it yet. I can only imagine what other projects were designed as.

I believe Darden accepted a part of himself that was feminine, in a Jungian way, but perhaps also in a hormonal way, and chose to express it in Condemned Building. I think he admired Duchamp and LeQueu in a way that compelled himself to emulate them in his art. I think there was no limit to the kind of personalities and characters Darden could be, and I think therefore that the interpretations of his conceptions and expressions of transgenderism are limitless.

Douglas Darden's Sex Shop - Sadism, Depravity, Fucking

 

Douglas Darden, Sex Shop

There is something inherent twisted and disturbing about Sex Shop that always seems to be glossed over — it is sadistic and depraved. I believe it was Georges Bataille who said something along the lines of "If you clean up Sade, you have removed Sade." It was indispensable that the writings of the Marquis be kept dirty and fucked up. I once heard it said, though I forget where, that to appropriate the Marquis into any moral agenda will fail and anyone who tries can go fuck themselves. It is necessary to keep things dirty and filthy. For Bataille, this was a form of sacredness. And in a way, the taboo, sexual, degenerated, is usually separated, kept a part, and that is in part a definition of the sacred.

Consider this in the kink community. While they are open about their kinks and fetishes, it is still kept separate from public. They do not publicize their fetishes on network television, nor do swingers parties and orgies occur during the Super Bowl Halftime Show. These things and so much more is kept separate from the general public, thus maintaining to some degree a merit of sacredness. Bataille certainly felt that the more pornography and transgression is made public, the less sacred it becomes. Hence why de Sade must remain dirty.

I think this is in many ways exemplified in a precedent of Sex Shop: C. N. Ledoux's Oikema or "House of Pleasures," or more plainly, a whore house. The plan is pretty much a set of cock and balls, while the elevations appear more like a temple. Not only is the Oikema part of the ideal city according to Ledoux, but it is its own temple, a sacred edifice set apart from everything else for the purpose of fucking and sucking.

Claude Nicholas Ledoux, Oikema

Thus, let us be perfectly clear, I think it time to start discussing the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, William S. Burroughs... and ultimately Sex Shop in the same way they present themselves: depraved, transgressive, explicit, degenerate. All commentary and writings on Sex Shop are so... sooooo... tame. They're academic and proper. It exemplifies par excellence that transgression and taboo is okay to talk about, but don't you ever do it. Or as Foucault puts it: we liberate sexuality from the bedrooms, from behind closed doors, and enslave them into discourse (History of Sexuality, Vol. 1). Sexuality is still not free. Even with the end of obscenity laws in the US, we can freely read Burrough's disgusting and filthy work of Naked Lunch or Nin's Delta of Venus, but don't ever do any of that.

Again, obscenities are fine, just not in our language. The writings of the Marquis were found in French in England, Germany, Spain, and even America, but nowhere to be found in France. Yet German translations were found in France but not in Germany, and English translations were found in France but not England or America. This exemplifies that obscenities are okay, just not in our language. Another example, in The Testament of Solomon, the demon Pterodrakon says that he "coitum habens per nates," or literally "I have anal sex with her" or "I fuck her in the ass." In the Conybeare translation of the Testament (Jewish Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1, Oct. 1898) this passage is translated from Greek into Latin, while the rest of the Greek is translated into English. This further illustrates that obscenities and filth are okay to publish, just not in our language.

Thus, one will note that I will not be dancing around terms here. I think in discussing sex shop we ought to be explicit. We need to say fuck and tits and cunt and cock... We cannot be like Roland Barthes discussing de Sade's writings in proper and polite philosophical language. One need only look at Schneider and Barbara Ambach's paper "Douglas Darden's Sex Shop: Digital Reconstructions of the Situation of Architecture's Dreams." I have studied under both these individuals at CU Denver, and I must say, it is a very tame and polite paper for such a depraved building design. I kind of expect Peter to dive more into the depravity, but Barbara I am a bit surprised she was involved in this at all.

While I wish to discuss Sex Shop in less academic terms and be more on par with the depravity of it, I also believe that Sex Shop is not as depraved as Darden wanted it to be or he thinks it is. It is known that he Darden had not done any work on Sex Shop when he published Condemned Building, except for a brief narrative of how the drawings were confiscated and a Dis/continuous Genealogy. In nearly the last year of his life, he set to do three drawings for Sex Shop, which as I have previously discussed is exceedingly abstract than all previous works.

Peter Schneider is more certain than I that Darden had worked out Sex Shop in his head between the publication of Condemned Building and 1995, thus the total lack of anything found in the project file except a photocopy of a fann(e)y coupler and the three yellow trace paper sketches and a model are, for Peter, an indication that he completed it in his mind and executed it suddenly one day. That was all. Whereas all his other projects had copious photocopies of images, articles, notes, sketches, letters, postcards, name it. I am not as convinced as Peter.

I personally think Darden just wanted to get it over with. I think by July and August of 1995, just one month before his CML blast crisis began, he must have felt terrible and knew he did not have long. I think he had long departed from his approach and drawing theory he developed for the projects of Condemned Building that he decided to implement his new ideas he was already exploring in Laughing Girls, hence why both projects are exceedingly abstract. He did not have time to build up a proper project, or do proper drawings, or even try to become the person he was five years prior while drawing Oxygen House. I think he just was getting his house in order and decided to finish Sex Shop. That is of course my opinion. I digress.

The language Darden uses on his Sex Shop drawings are probably more childish than degenerate. For instance, the Dis/continuous Genealogy is of a fann(e)y coupler for a train, a male and female glass blow-ers, a sex-tant, and a sketch of the Ins-tit-ute of Debauchery or "Theater of Lubricity" by the Marquis de Sade (as found in Anthony Vidler's The Writing of the Walls, which is the only source I have for this image). He emphasizes dirty words like tit and sex and fanny; he dates the drawings as the "Twenty-Sex of June." These and more are probably childish things he giggled at as he executed them, but really are not depraved.

Ultimately Sex Shop itself is not depraved and taboo; it is merely a stage for depravity to occur upon. 

Yet there is actual porn in the drawings of Sex Shop. He reuses a lot of images in the collage that makes up the Sex Shop sketches, in particular the female glass blow-er and nudes of Adam and Eve. Yet on the third sheet, the building section has an actual nude woman on all fours, looking back at us with desirous eyes, and getting fucked by a sex-tant-like machine. This image in particular is rather graphic, though it does not actually show any devices going into her cunt, but the curved device that rotates on a sex-tant implies movement, which is indeed aimed right at her cunt. Further, in this same building section there is a "Viewing Couch" on the stage, under a pair of spread disembodied legs, with a man reclining and appears to be jerking off. Further, on the first sheet in the sketch of the Theater of Lubricity, there are disembodied legs that are cut from what is presumed photos or porno mag images of an actual nude woman. Thus, Darden works actual pornography into his sketches and collages for Sex Shop.

In a way, Darden's process for designing Sex Shop is still kind of fucked up. The model, being little more than abstract grid of blue and red, is partly constructed with legs cut off a Barbie doll. Even the drawings-collages incorporate cut ups of nude human images. Darden includes notes like in the building section of "De Sade (pulled apart)." Vivisection, dissection, cutting up... disembodied legs and limbs, cut-up people... these are all violent and sadistic things to be doing to another person, though they are really an artistic process here.

Detail of legs, Sex Shop model

Let us not forget that Darden is following much of the violent principles he laid out for Condemned Building in the design and execution of Sex Shop. Darden is decapitating, overturning, cutting up, imprisoning (e.g. the "Inescapable Garden (Trapped)," &c. The very first image seen in Condemned Building is a self-portrait of Darden flashing a very hefty set of tits. He is still being obscene. He is obscene.

And let's not forget that many sources of inspiration for the projects in Condemned Building are controversial, even obscene individuals. Clinic For Sleep Disorders is inspired by Arthur Rimbaud's "Drunken Little Boat," and Darden makes sure everyone knows that he and Rimbaud share a birthday. Augustine of Hippo's Confessions is inspirational to Confessional, and Confessions can be explicit and illicit. Oxygen House embraces dying and living to "stay dead for a very long time" (As I Lay Dying). Saloon For Jesse James focuses on an American outlaw, a thief, murderer, and all around not a great guy. Temple Forgetful focuses on an artifact of fratricide (Romulus and Remus) as well as the destruction of all architecture. Melvilla focuses around Moby-Dick, a novel about an obsessed man, hellbent on destroying an animal at all cost, even his ship and crew. These are the sources of inspiration to Darden. These are not positive role models, yet Darden embraces them completely.

Apart from LeQueu and Ledoux, there are very few architects that have explored sexuality and perversion in architecture. There is also Alberto Perez-Gomez in his work Polyphilo, or, The Dark Forest Revisited: An Erotic Ephiphany of Architecture (1992) and probably Anthony Vidler in some of his early writings. But then again, as stated before, architecture nor architectural theory can be fully depraved; construction and creating is not an immoral act; rather it is the stage for depravity.

Consider Vidler's discussions on de Sade in Writing of the Walls, a work that was influential. In his analysis of Justine, about as architectural as anything gets is comparing the movement through the hall in which Justine witnesses an erotic initiation into a secret society to the movements through the subterranean temple in Abbe Terrason's Life of Sethos. This latter novel would be the source of inspiration for LeQueu's Gothic House as well as Mozart's Magic Flute. Thus, as we can gather from Vidler that, while transgression, fucking, sucking, butt fucking, incest, murder, &c occur within architecture, architecture is not itself obscene; it can only be a house encasing obscenity, a stage for depravity.

Thus, while Darden aims for vice and sin and debauchery, it is exceedingly difficult for him to truly execute transgression in the design of a building. Depravity becomes an inside joke for the architect, a symbolic system of illicit significations in the development of constructed signs: a stage for debauchery. Yet, I must admit, in examining any sort of sexual architecture, Darden might be the one who pulled it off the most. I don't think he succeeded, because architecture is too limiting of a medium to execute depravity, yet, I think Darden's Sex Shop is the best execution of depraved architecture.

Guides to the Rosicrucian Manifestos - Damcar

 

Map of the Arabian Peninsula, Giacomo Gastaldi, 1561

In the Fama Fraternitatis as well as the Confessio Fraternitatis there is a mysterious Arabic city called Damcar that Frater C.R. travels to. In the Vaughan translation (1652) the names Damascus (sometimes written "Damasco") and Damcar get confused, but this confusion appears to be due to the close proximity and similarity of the names of the two cities, and the reader ought to be able to sort out the intended city. Obviously this confusion is properly designated in the McIntosh translation (2016).

So what is this mysterious City of Damcar? Frater C.R. is reported in the Fama to have learned of this city while he was recovering from an illness in Damascus. He learns of it from some Turkish physicians, whom he has impressed with his own knowledge of medicine. It should be noted that the use of the terms "Turk" and "Arab" were more or less synonymous in the 16th and 17th centuries, though today they have different designations of the peoples who speak dialects of Turkish and Arabic. From reports, Frater C.R. learns that it is a city of wise men who study nature directly — a Paracelsian approach — and he wishes to learn from them. Thus, he pays them a handsome sum of money to get him to Damcar, arriving there at the age of sixteen. When he arrives they already know who he is and his name. He learns Arabic while there, furthers is knowledge in physics and mathematics, copies their Book M. and translates it into Latin. He would remain in Damcar for three years.

In the Confessio, the city is called Damar. This may bring us closer to actual name of the city, at least in pronunciation. While perusing the footnotes of the McIntosh translation of the Fama, no guesses are made as to what this city could be, but in the Confessio (note 3), Damar is said to be in Yemen. Likely this is the modern-day city of Dhamar in Yemen. Dhamar was indeed an important cultural center in the Islamicate world, notably in the 7th and 8th centuries.

The Confessio gives a similar description of the city as given in the Fama, namely as a city where wise men congregate, and the city became an inspiration to Father Christian. In Damar, the king permits the wise men to establish laws in addition to the king's. Father Christian decided this same legislative system should be implemented in Europe (Chapter 5, Reason 14).

If it is true that Damar is indeed Dhamar, Yemen, then where did the name Damcar come from?

Likely it is an older European name for the same city. Two 16th century maps illustrate this. In 1561 Giacomo Gastaldi publishes an illustrated map of the Arabian Peninsula in which the name Damcar is clearly seen in the approximate location of Dhamar. In 1570 Abraham Ortelius publishes his map of the Arabian Peninsula, more or less copying Gastaldi, in which he also shows the name Damcar in the approximate location of Dhamar. Thus, we have two maps that were less than fifty years old when the Fama was published. Gastaldi's map was likely not circulated widely in Germany, but Ortelius's map certainly was — Gastaldi being Italian and Ortelius being Brabantian (Belgian). Original prints of Ortelius's map can still be purchased today by collectors.

Map of the Arabian Peninsula, Abraham Ortelius, 1570

Two possibilities exist for why Dhamar was selected as the city of wisdom in the Fama and Confessio. First possibility is the writers of the manifestos knew of its history as an Islamicate cultural center and selected it for its obscurity amongst the 17th century German populace. The second possibility, and the theory I lean toward, is the Rosicrucian authors had a copy of Ortelius's map and threw a dart at it, landing on Damcar.

Besold: "I got Damcar."
Hess: "It sounds kind of close to Damascus, don't you think?"
Andraea: "Eh, who cares. Use it."

Perhaps this is the reason for the name change in the manifestos. In 1614 the Fama calls it Damcar and a year later in the Confessio it becomes Damar. Certainly the authors were looking at map, not a history book. Perhaps over the succeeding year they found the map they used to throw a dart at was inaccurate, and thus used the more contemporary name for the City of Dhamar.

The history of Dhamar is a bit obscure. Certainly we know a lot of scientific developments were made there, as may be gathered by the number of Arab scientists reportedly born there, as well its massive dam, a fine work of ancient engineering. However, the fact that I have trouble finding much on the cultural and scientific history of Dhamar with Google at my fingertips, I must wonder what a few Germans in their twenties could find on the city in their library. I suspect Dhamar was selected at random, probably just to illustrate that Frater C.R. traveled very far to gain wisdom.