What does Darden mean by "Underbelly"?

Detail of self-portrait in Condemned Building.

An iconic term used by Darden to express his interest and fascination with taboo, transgression, the unusual, the obscene, the unorthodox, the inverted, the weird, et al is "Underbelly." He derives this term from the film Blade Runner, in which the replicant Leon is asked an emotionally provocative hypothetical question, namely a scenario where Leon has flipped a turtle over on its back, it's belly facing up and cannot turn itself back over. Darden analyzes this scene in the 1992 interview with Rob Miller, Looking After the Underbelly. He is alluding to this turtle in his self-portrait of Condemned Building, and further alludes to this turtle in the prose piece at the front of the book:

I am inclined while watching the
turtle to turn it over and study its
underbelly. From this unnatural
position I see how this platonically
solid creature makes its way
through the world.

Dweller by the Dark Stream

As fascinating at all this is — i.e. exploring the source of the term and allusions to that source — it is never entirely clear what Darden means by "Underbelly." Darden certain did not want to define the term, nor did he feel it could be defined. As he states in Looking After the Underbelly:

Rob Miller: Can you define the Underbelly?

Douglas Darden: No and if I could, I’d be ashamed of myself and I’d be ashamed of it [the Underbelly]. Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees and if you name the Underbelly, you have not given yourself the opportunity to explore the substratum of unnamed emotions in a pit of our stomach that force us to seek shelter in the first place.

I think we have a greater need to identify the Underbelly, which may be the source of this whole symposium [referring to Miller’s film project], than we do [with] what we would consider “that other stuff,” the good stuff, the stuff that promotes the way that we want to see ourselves. And because the Underbelly is not the way we want to see ourselves, then what we go about doing is naming it, is giving it characteristics so that we can be done with it, so that it will ostensibly go away, we’ve taken care of it.

In many ways, Darden's concept of Underbelly is the opposite, or at least is the dark twin of Christopher Alexander's concept of Quality Without A Name (Timeless Way of Building, 1979). Where Alexander expresses something numinous and sublime, Darden is expressing something subversive. Alexander cannot name his Quality Without A Name in the same way we cannot name the Divine, much less measure it (Shi'ur Qomah excepted). Similarly, Darden cannot define this Underbelly, which is less a name as it is a cute nickname. The Underbelly is as much a name for Darden's concept as "Tetragrammaton" and "Eloy" and "Olam" and "Adonai" and "AGLA" are names of God. These are names of God, but they are not the Name of God. They still possess power, hence their abundant use in old grimoires, but they are not the Name of God, if God even has a name. Similarly, the term Underbelly is evocative and certainly possesses a power to get our imaginations going the moment we hear it, yet it is no more the name of Darden's concept for the Underbelly than The Quality Without A Name was the actual name of Alexander's concept.

Darden actually had an early working title for this concept, which first appears in his essay "The Architecture of Exhaustion" (Pratt Journal of Architecture, Vol. 2, 1988, p. 88-94). The Architecture of Exhaustion appears to be an early working nickname for the Underbelly. He uses similar language and even phrases to describe his notion of the Architecture of Exhaustion as he does the Underbelly. For instance, one readily available based on Darden's words quoted above in 1992, we find him using a similar phrase in 1988: "Comfort is appreciated only insofar as the architecture objectifies the fear that sits in our stomachs and prompts us to struggle for shelter."

These words are essential later, especially in the canons and reversa of Condemned Building. For instance, Sex Shop's reversa is "Architecture objectifies desire" and Clinic For Sleep Disorders is "Architecture locates our fears." These reversa are essential in understanding how Darden formulates, not just his building designs, but also how he formulates his Six Aphorisms for Envisioning Architecture at the end of Condemned Building.

Think of Darden's Underbelly as something akin to RNA: it a virus's DNA that merged into our own DNA eons ago; an ancient plague that now resides within ourselves, is a part of ourselves. The Underbelly is to the Quality Without A Name as RNA is to DNA. They move together, replicate together, they need each other. They are separate, but not separable. They are distinct, but merged and inherently reliant of each other for propagation.

Alexander describes his Quality Without A Name as that sublime something, some quality that is replicated in architecture and anything good. An example he gives is a barn: someone builds a barn and their neighbor sees this barn and decides they want their own barn, then copies those conditions that suit their liking and needs. Next, another neighbor sees these barns and builds their own barn, barrowing those qualities they like and suit their needs in their own barn. And so on. These replication of features can be pointed to as distinct architectural elements, but there is something inherent in them, something nameless, formless, some numinous quality that is being propagated, and that is what Alexander is describing. (Such is elaborated upon in Pattern Language, which is kind of the practical side to Timeless Way). This is in line with what Leon Alberti says about beauty: it cannot be defined, but we know it when we see it.

Darden is similar, but the underside of this Quality Without A Name. If Alexander's concept is like beauty (I know it when I see it), then Darden is like pornography, to quote Chief Justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it." The different between smut and art, eroticism and porn, beauty and the obscene, is thin and wiggly and strange, but we seem to know the difference when shown examples. Yet Darden is not pornography. Nor is Alexander divine. This is just an analogies to understand the concept.

Just as Darden describes in his prose of the turtle as a Platonic solid, the Underbelly is a part of everything. All things have an underbelly, just as the turtle does. I have an underbelly. I have sins, fetishes, faults, failures, scars, immoralities, prejudices, et al. So do you, and so does your pet fish, and so does your car, and the US government (no shit), and your preacher, and Buddhism, and... name it. If it exists, it has an underbelly. Darden was interested in this Underbelly and sought to flip everything over, but more particularly architecture in general.

Thus, when we examine the canons and reversa of Condemned Building, we are not looking at Darden simply taking a canon and inverting it. No, it is not like doing the opposite of the Ten Commandments (e.g. thou shall commit adultery; thou shall have other gods before me, &c). Rather, it is looking at the existing underside of something. If a house is to live in, then by consequence of living, we must also die, so Darden examines and designs a house to die in (Oxygen House). If architecture gives us a place for shelter, then by the very fact there are refugees and world events that result in migrations, Darden becomes interested in architecture's role as something that displaces us (Hostel). Et cetera. Thus, the reversa are not inversions of Commandments, unchangeable laws, but rather it is the natural underside of principles in architecture that are already existent. Darden did not create the reversa. They were already there. Darden just flipped over the turtle to reveal the reversa.

And Darden recognizes that this act of flipping over is obscene. We are not used to looking at the underside of something. That's where all the private parts are. That's where pissing and shitting and fucking comes from. We're not suppose to look at that. We're suppose to see the pretty side, the top side, the side that usually is shown to the world, and the underside, well that's for whatever goes on behind closed doors and call them by Latin names for the sake of politeness (urination, defecation, and sexuality). Hence why Darden says, "from this unnatural position."

From a very early time in his career, Darden is looking at the Underbelly, long before he gave it that cute nickname. He is concerned with that which we do not like to look at or examine, because it is rude or makes us uncomfortable, yet, as he describes above, it is part of the reason we sought to build shelter in the first. Initially he calls this drive, this impetus to building "fear," but later broadly calls it "that substratum of emotions." Regardless, he says they come from our stomachs. This may be some form of humoral theory, such as the belief that ennui came from the spleen, or madness from the uterus (hysteria), etc. Whatever the case, Darden clearly believes it is not some grand and noble ideal or concept for why we began to build in the first place, but rather something that we would like to ignore, not discuss at all. That's because the drive to build comes from the Underbelly. Hence his motive to uncover and explore the Underbelly in Architecture or the Architecture of Exhaustion.

It is curious to see how Darden's ideas evolve over a few years from this utterly pompous and unreadable essay to something more digestible.