For some time I noticed that Darden barely does site plans. As I have previously noted, Temple Forgetful is the only one with a very large site plan with a north arrow. Actually there are a lot of things architects usually put in their drawings that Darden omits. He only does a north arrow for Temple Forgetful and Oxygen House. He never provides a scale of any sort, except for a human figure. I have even tried to scale Oxygen House based on the size of the people and either these were arbitrary or he does not use standard CMU blocks for the house; in fact, they are very weird sizes. Sometimes Darden does not even draw the plan north-south, such as Saloon for Jesse James, which is completely flipped around: the site is along the western shore of the Great Salt Lake along the Great Salt Flats. However, Darden rotates the orientation, and even moves a little island closer to the peninsula.
Temple Forgetful is a great example. If you overlay the site plan on a real map of the Roman Forum, it becomes clear that he has distorted the plan, probably to set Temple Forgetful at the center, making it the hinge everything else. Buildings are made more orthogonal in the Forum in Temple Forgetful than they really are. The wall that Temple Forgetful hinges about is not laid exactly as Darden draws it. As I have previously noted, the Danteum was never built, but it is shown on the Temple Forgetful site plan. Direction is distorted, scale is relative, space and history are distorted.
These things are characteristic with Darden in his drawings: they have a scale, but not scalable — of course there is a scale, but you the viewer are not privy to that. They have an orientation, but you have to take Darden's word for which direction is which based on him calling an elevation the "east elevation" or "north elevations." The history of the site is a composite or possibly a palimpsest, but never accurate in our reality.
The history of a site is an interesting distortion in Darden's projects. He obviously is fascinated by the history of a place. Do you think he picked the McMillan Water Filtration Plant for Night School for absolutely no reason? Do you think Fort McHenry for Museum of Impostors was selected regardless of its history? Confessional is placed in a deconsecrated church and had several secular uses, and this is not without meaning. History is of immense interest in the selection of a site for a building, but Darden is always distorting the history as much as the scale and orientation.
For instance, did you ever notice that Mevilla is sited right where a post office is? His history of the site focuses on Melville living there, but never mind any history after that. It isn't essential to the narrative Darden is building. And this is part of the essence of Darden's distortions of space and history: it must serve the narrative he is creating for the project; the project is not subservient to reality, but rather to Darden's imagination.
Museum of Impostors is an interesting example: the letter from Sarah Wilson is a total contrivance. Of all the appendices (architexts) of any of his projects, Museum of Impostors might be one of the most refined, having undergone several iterations and drafts. In reality (according to one biography), Sarah stole a dress, but Darden will describe lace gloves and various other lace garments in his drafts, but he finally lands back on the historical dress. Likely it was meant to justify why he uses lace-like patterns on the exterior of the Museum, but it illustrates his willingness to distort history to serve his narrative and design.
Oxygen House might have the most distorted and contrived space and history: it is fictional. Frenchman's Bend is not a real place, but rather the fictional setting of Faulkner's The Hamlet. The entire site is made up, or at least is derived from a fictional site: Faulkner's map of Yoknapatawpha County. And even here, not only is space and history a fiction, but its scale is distorted, because Darden takes the map of an entire county and scales it down to lay out the site of a little industrial structure to die in: Oxygen House is a microcosm/simulacrum of Yoknapatawpha County.
Night School is interesting here as well, namely in how one enters the theater: from the middle of a field. He doesn't even sketch a path to the center of the field, like the paths of Temple Forgetful. [Update: in reexamining the final drawings for Night School, there is something of path, though it is more like a drainage ditch than a path... which might be more appropriate, seeing how water plays into this project. The visitor/student drains into Night School.] Darden actually made a few sketches of converting the eastern field into a parking lot, but opted to remove the parking lot and just show where one begins their journey into the school. Never mind how one gets to the tail of the trilobite; that is not important to the narrative. The rest of the outside world is not a consequence here in Darden's imagination.
I believe this trend of spatial and historical distortion are early symptoms of Darden's later fascination with abstraction, such as in Sex Shop and Laughing Girls.
All this I believe is Darden's execution of Baudrillard's theories on spatial dissolution and the breakdown of reality. From early on, Baudrillard was impactful on Darden, especially in the strangeness of our constructed reality. Baudrillard's theories of simulacra and simulations, his theories of losing sense of reality, what is real, what is fake. To quote Darden (and Darden quoting Baudrillard) in his essay "Architecture in the Age of Spatial Dissolution":
Jean Baudrillard has observed that our countryside appears to be an 'immense deserted body whose expanse and dimensions seem arbitrary': both time and space collapse under the 'ecstasy of communication.'
This is kind of the point with Baudrillard's theories of simulation: what is reality anymore? All too often Baudrillard's theories are described using The Matrix as an analogy, though Baudrillard hated it, because there is always a clear distinction between the Matrix and the real world; one is never confused when you are in the Matrix or not. Unlike, say Mulholland Drive, in which one is unsure where the dream begins and ends and transitions between, or if one even realizes they are in a dream. Similarly, Inception, in which one gets lost in the levels of dreamscapes, to the point that one of the biggest debates around the film is whether they were still in a dream at the end. This is Baudrillard's concepts of dissolving reality and uncertainty of reality altogether.
Darden is embracing this totally by removing traditional elements of architectural drawing that ground the building in reality: north arrow, graphic scale, accurate history, field verified measurements, &c. Darden wants us to feel a little uncertain about the project's reality. Darden wants us to be a little lost spatially and historically. Darden wants us to explore his projects (or rather analogies) through his narrative. His narrative is "based on a true story" but obviously distorted to fit his agenda. There is no other reality outside of his narrative.
You can imagine being in Darden's buildings, but you can't quite make it real. It's kind of ironic: as real as these projects feel, they can never be built. Darden is not an architect. He is an architext.
