I recently was rereading the dialogue between Darden and Keith Loftin III (whom I casually knew while doing my Masters at CU Denver), which was published in Installations Two (Fall 1993), a student run journal of architecture, of which only 500 copies were printed, and the only one I can find is in the special collections at the Auraria Library. This was a three "track" piece, in which the first "track" was Darden talking to himself, the second track a dialogue between Darden and his student James Trewitt on Laughing Girls, and the third a dialogue between Darden and Loftin about the reality of architect (more or less). These three tracks are presented interlinearly (kind of), so we have to read chunks of each track along side the others.
I really appreciate the Darden-Loftin conversation, especially their discussion of the client and the architect. Too often, when it comes to Darden, we are looking at a man who views architecture as a high ideal, something that works far abstractly than is really practical, and that the client is some byproduct — or worse, some Randian subservient entity that finances the architect's ambitions. And really, Darden's clients are all fictions. He invents clients, they are fictions, and strangely subservient to his whims. In reality, the client in Darden's allegories (designs) are afterthoughts, something invented to add substance to his work, and aren't necessarily an agent that was driving the design at any one time. It is literature, ideas, other things that drive his designs, and a client is later invented to corroborate the work. Darden has specifically stated: "literature has thus been my inspiration and, effectively, my sponsor," and again, "a novel could be the veritable client for a building design."
And this all tracks with Darden, namely that the reality of the profession does not entirely concern him, or at least he had no actual experience in the professional field of architecture to full appreciate the reality of making buildings. He even wrote late in his life while travelling in Japan giving lectures, on a little piece of writing paper: "When are you going to do real projects?" And this is something he struggled with near the end. In an interview I had with Peter Schneider in 2015, Darden regretted near the end of his life that he had never done a real building. According to Schneider, Darden actually tried to work for David Tryba, but his illness had so far progressed that it became difficult to meet the demands of professional architectural practice, and nothing became of it.
Darden only ever had one real client. I know next to nothing about this project or the client, except having seen the final presentation drawings and that it was for the "Fords." The Ford House is... amateur. I remember Schneider calling it "pedantic." It looks like a postmodern house par excellent. But there is nothing "real" about this house. As usual, Darden does not provide scale, north, site... just plans and a couple of elevations and sections. Nothing tells us how it is to be built, and there aren't even labels that tell us what the rooms are for, or any data or anything meaningful to the architectural profession. And it certainly was never built. One might as well count the Ford House as another theoretical design.
The only other "real" project Darden had was called "The Construction of Demolition" in collaboration with Bob Curtis. This was an installation project for Nature Morte Gallery in New York City (204 East Tenth Street), of which the only drawing is dated 15 January 1987. The only other "real" project was also an installation project for I-Club in Fuku-oku, Japan, of which some Polaroids of the model and a single drawing dated 19 January 1991 survive. That is about as "real" as Darden ever got.
Too often, Darden's view on the client and the reality of the architecture profession as a whole is restricted to his time in academia. I think his dialogue with Loftin is worth quoting at length:
DD: ... As the architect, if you bring to the table a higher sense of what is possible through engaging the Work, you might begin to have the client yield, in turn, to a deeper substratum of feelings which would engender a more satisfying architecture.
K3: Why yield? Why not compassion? Why not empathy?
DD: Why yield? Because the client must yield to a whole different level of understanding, of existence, than square footages or profit margins suggest. I believe it was e.e. cummings [sic] who said that to be fully human within our society is the most difficult vocation we face.
K3: Of course, but I think of building as an event. As you well know, ‘building’ is actually a verb used as a noun. So, it is fundamentally an action, a play whose curtain never comes down. I remember reading that Christo [and Jeanne-Claude] spoke of his “running Fence” project, during one of the many hearings before it was constructed, as if the work of art was right then and there, in the process of negotiation, that everybody was part of the art. For him the political, social, legal process was part of the work. From this perspective, a building is merely the physical product of a complex and never ending conversation, one with many speakers. The (seldom used) adjectival cliché for this interchange is civility.
As Loftin points out, sometimes things like the client's restrictions and the building department and neighborhood meetings can be excellent driving factors to good design. I have seen these things degrade my lovely designs, but I've also see these things become challenges that created some clever resolutions and elegant design decisions. The Pullman in Denver is a project I worked on that we came up with some clever and elegant decisions that were actually driven by the client, the building department, etc, and I think it came out nicely. But I do recognize Darden's point that the profession can really destroy an architect's love of the profession. Here is a quote by Darden from Looking After the Underbelly:
I got into architecture because of my dreams. And from friends of mine, as architects, that would not design so much as a doorknob for themselves, now that have been so extraverted in their concerns had to be of the building department, the client, the budget, dealing with the contractor; they don’t even have any dreams anymore. And what I mean by having dreams as an architect is making something from your dreams or making a dream out of architecture. And, you know, again, dreams — when I mean dreams, I don’t mean aspirations, like Martin Luther King saying, “I have a dream.” I mean what happens to us when we go to sleep.
Darden iterates this same idea about dreams in his conversation with Loftin. But I will agree, the reality and demands of the profession can be a dream-killer. I remember recently I was sketching some details on my notepad, because sometimes it's easier and quicker to work things out by hand than to spend forever trying to do it in the computer. One of the senior architects saw what I was doing and told me that I need to get with the times and do that stuff in the computer, no one does that stuff by hand anymore, and I told her: "I'm sorry architecture is dead to you." And really, doing things by hand sometimes helps maintain my dreams in the professional field, and for this coworker, architecture was dead, and only the reality of construction and bureaucracy of building departments remain. When at a party or something and I tell people I work in architecture, they tend to ask if I get to do "creative stuff." I tell them that the "creative" is a very small part of the job, and most of my time is spent trying to ensure we keep the creative stuff, not lose the valuable parts of the design to "value engineering" or letting the reality of construction destroy its aesthetics. Hand sketching details is a part of that effort to keep the "archi" (chief, principal, high) in architecture.
And I've used Darden's words before in the office. There was a time when our office was split. We were in an old brick warehouse building, which had thick brick demising walls and one opening between the sides. One side of the wall was the planning and conceptual personnel, and on the other was the construction documents and production personnel. If you were me going over to the CD side of the wall, they would start shouting, "Hey! Stay over there in imagination land! Over here is the real world! Over here you can't take 7 and 7 and get 13." And when they would come over to the planning side, I would say, "Do you have a passport? Because this isn't the real world anymore. Over here I expect you to design a doorknob for yourself without first checking with fucking building department and the code book!"
On the one hand, I agree with Darden: maintain your dreams; never stop dreaming architecture. My studies on Darden, as well as Lequeu are one means to not stop dreaming architecture. I also like to do reconstructions of the architectural descriptions from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. And there is my side project of designing the Tomb for God. I understand that the demands of the architectural profession can be a dream-killer, and I have to find ways of maintaining those dreams. However, I also agree with Loftin. I recognize the fact that architecture is meant to be built; it is meant to become real, to be inhabited, to be used, to be personalized by its inhabitants. Architecture must also be safe and accessible: you can't design a tinderbox with no means of escape, nor can you design something that a person in a wheelchair can't use. There is a consequence of architecture becoming real: it must follow the rules.
I think Darden understood that architecture should become real. I'm thinking of Ken Burns's documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright, the part where (Vincent Scully?) says that a painter can sit in their attic producing paintings and convince themselves that the outside world doesn't understand, but an architect needs a client, needs a commission; it is just the reality of being an architect. I believe Darden understood this deficit in his portfolio, and there was a desire to produce a real project, so see something he drew become real.
I recently was on the construction site of the Academy on Mapleton Hill. I have been on this project for almost eight years, and the first four years were spent getting the project approved by the City of Boulder. There was much heartache, late nights, rushing to meet deadlines, a lot of compromises, but also a lot of clever arguments to get the City and neighborhood to buy-into the design... it has been a journey. But the other day, standing on site, the gloomy autumn clouds erasing the tops of the mountains, watching the earthmovers dance around each other, seeing the concrete poured onto the rocks, hearing the hammers banging, witnessing the guts being piped and wired into the buildings... I understood what that yearning for one's architecture to become real. There is nothing like seeing one's designs come alive. It is almost like watching an autopsy in reverse. To see the world you designed become inhabitable, walkable... too walk through the spaces that you already know in your head, to see the rough forms the workers are building and knowing what the final product will be. For years I have longed to see this project become real. I even have swallowed my pride and sucked some stuff up that I might have quit over, but I really wanted to see this project built with me on the team. I sympathize with Darden's desire to build something real. I really do.
At the same time, I'm not sure Darden would bend to the professional world of architecture. I'm sure he could handle it, and if he were programmed differently he may have thrived, as he was a very intense individual. But what the profession expects of an architect is very different from his general nature. Perhaps he could have succeeded as Thom Mayne or Frank Gehry did, but there would have been a period where he would have needed to bend to the demands of the profession before he could do what he really wanted. Or maybe he would have been more like Lebbeus Woods, who worked for some notable starchitects and did a few built works, but mostly remained theoretical.
One wonders if Darden would have done any built works had he not developed cancer. Perhaps he only began to desire to do a built project because he knew his time was short, but if he had another few decades to keep working, he would keep doing theoretical work. At the same time, one wonders what he may have done if he were given the opportunity to a real project.
All this is to say, I am uncertain how Darden would have been as a practicing architect, but from his academic background, he does not express anything that would have made him compatible with the profession as it functions, except maybe as a strange rebel figure doing very little real built works. Still, his desire to do a real project is a little heartbreaking when one reads his note to himself so late in his short life. Yet, the value Darden brings to the profession is a stern and harsh reminder to never let the profession destroy your dreams of architecture.
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