Disputing Douglas Darden: A Retort

 

"When are you going to do real projects?" note from project files

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.

I think that helps illustrate Darden's perception, and I appreciate Loftin's counterpoints, in many ways challenging Darden to consider the reality of the profession. And Darden does seem to be... not ambivalent... but definitely less sympathetic to the demands of the profession. I don't believe there is a conclusion to their dialogue. Darden and Loftin make a resolution, but it feels soft... maybe contrived. It is as if they were cognizant of the fact they were running out of page space and needed to wrap it up. That said, both make valid points, but as a professional, I do side more with Loftin than Darden on the reality of the architectural profession.

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.

Dis/continuous Genealogies: Revisiting Darden's Genealogies

The "discontinuous" illustrations of the Dis/continuous Genealogy of Night School

I have said it before and I will iterate it again, that Georges Bataille probably had a considerable impact on Darden, and maybe more so than the Marquis de Sade. Early in Darden's career he would be introduced to Bernard Tschumi's essay "Transgression and Architecture," which he read at least prior to his last year at Harvard GSD when he designed Saloon for Jesse James, in which Darden cites this essay in some draft descriptions of the project. Tschumi's essay was heavily inspired by Bataille's Eroticism, and it is cited and quoted several times. Darden would also meet Tschumi some time in the summer of 1986 (mentioned in a letter to Valerie Smith of Artists Space, dated 8 June 1986) while Darden was teaching at Barnard College (affiliated with Columbia University, where Tschumi would later become the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture). This may have been Darden's introduction to Bataille. Darden would go on to read Eroticism and would cite it a few times in his essay "The Architecture of Exhaustion." Vidler's The Writing of the Walls was a book that impacted Darden's work on Sex Shop, and Vidler was likewise influenced by Bataille. All this I have discussed before. That said, the most I can confirm is that Darden did read Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, but I cannot confirm he read anything more by Bataille.

I recently read Bataille's Eroticism, as well as a few other works by Bataille, and more and more I'm fully realizing the impact Bataille had on Darden. These aren't things he opening acknowledges, and maybe he even moved away from Bataille, but there were ideas that stuck and continued to bleed into Darden's writings and work. I have previously written about the Dis/continuous Genealogies, but there I focus more on the "genealogy" part and its narrative applications to his projects. I did not at the time fully expound upon the "dis/continuous" aspect of the term, as I don't think I fully comprehended why he used that term. I copped out and said that they are a part of the narrative of the project but not part of the design process. Which I guess may still be true, but I think that Bataille's theories of eroticism, death and sensuality, are more the key to this "Dis/continuous" in the Genealogies.

Very early in Eroticism, Bataille describes our lives, our being as "discontinuous." We are discontinuous beings. We solidify our discontinuousness when we have children. Our "continuation" only occurs when we die. It seems like the opposite would be true, but not for Bataille. Like Darden, Bataille views things from the unusual side of things. For instance, when he contemplates the nature of the economy, up until Bataille economists had always viewed the economy in terms of production. Bataille would look at the economy in terms of consumption, and more so than consumption, waste. For Bataille there is always waste within any system, and waste tells us more about the structures of power in economics. Human sacrifice, potlatch, launching cars into space, building an eighth mansion, et al, power is demonstrated by wasting resources; the powerful accumulate resources only to waste them to illustrate how much wealth they possess, and by wasting it on useless things they flex the power they have.

Similarly, sex for pleasure is a waste. We don't need it biologically. It does nothing for the preservation of the biological machines we are. Masturbation is an obvious waste, as that was supposed to go towards the continuation of the species, and it was flushed down the toilet. And even sex for procreation is an act of discontinuation: we split off a part of ourselves to form a new life. Bataille initially uses the single-cell organism as an example: in mitosis the cell divides to become two cells. The process of dividing the cell cause the original cell to end and begin a state of two cells. The cell did not necessarily "die," but it was discontinuous until it divided. Upon dividing, ending itself to become two, it continued. In a sense, it was discontinuous until it could continue as two cells. That might be one way of rewording Bataille's analogy.

However, the principle does not change just because we are more complex organisms that reproduce via sexual procreation. For Bataille, we are nonetheless discontinuous beings until our deaths. With our deaths, our continuation is through what we leave to our children. We would usually think of this as a legacy of inheritance, wealth that is bequeathed, pretty much anything that can go in a will. However, there is always the problems of life, our genetic deficiencies, our generational traumas, &c that we pass on to our children. Basically, any issues with wasting of resources is always going to be a problem we kick down the road for our children to inherit. In other words, our continuation is the baggage we leave to our children as discontinuous beings. It fundamentally never goes away.

These ideas of Bataille's may seem superfluous, but this may be part of what Darden is thinking when he produces his Genealogies. After all, they are called "genealogies," which implies discontinuous entities procreating and generating new discontinuous entities. In the case of Darden's Dis/continuous Genealogies, there are a few illustrations, each discontinuous, that when overlain (incubare: to lay upon, usually sexually, such as the incubus, but also incubate newborns, the result of sexual procreation) upon each other to generate (generation) the Ideogram. The Ideogram is the offspring of the original illustrations.

Sometimes the illustrations that generate the Ideogram are pairs, like male and female. For instance, in Melvilla, the Iroquois meeting hut is paired with the upside-down New England meeting house, and the Iroquois hand loom is paired with the locomotive (both industrial mechanisms of indigenous and European cultures), which is reminiscent of Ishmael and Queequeg's "marriage" as "husband and wife." Sometimes pairing/duality is imbedded into the original illustrations themselves, such as Da Vinci's teeter-totter in Saloon for Jesse James, or the Temple of Roma/Amor and the Janus coin in Temple Forgetful, and the Coliseum in Night School (an amphi-theatre or "both"-theatres), &c.

There is something sexually procreative (and consequently erotic) in Darden's Genealogies, and at the same time something continuous-discontinuous in a Bataillean sense in their generation.

Certainly there is a lot to play with under this framework, but nonetheless, it appears Bataille is useful in further exploring Darden's Dis/continuous Genealogies.

The Psychodramatic Scripts of Condemned Building

 

Early draft of the psychodramatic script of Night School

Exploring the works of Douglas Darden in Condemned Building, one will note firstly that Darden does not refer to his architectural designs as "designs," "buildings," "proposals," "projects," or any other term architects might use to denote their projects. Rather he calls them "allegories." The title image illustrates this best, whereupon the guillotine is written: "Plans, Sections, Elevations, Details, Models, Ideograms, Scriptexts, and Letters for Ten [--] Allegorical Works of Architecture." In the Forewards, Darden further states: "The buildings are an admission of rhetoric, not knowledge. Instead of solutions, they offer allegories."

So... what does that even mean?

Firstly, we should acknowledge that Darden is incredibly systematic in the creation of Condemned Building. Each allegory is treated equally, with the exception of Sex Shop. For instance, each project has a Dis/continuous Genealogy, even projects that were created prior to 1987, roughly the time when he first conceived of the idea of creating these Dis/continuous Genealogies. Saloon for Jesse James and Museum of Impostors were created prior to 1987, yet he made sure they also had a Dis/continuous Genealogy. This is because the D/cG was not a generative element to the allegory, but creating a D/cG was essential to its narrative, and ultimately the narrative of Condemned Building.

Thus, each allegory of Condemned Building has the following aspects (Museum of Impostors as an example):

• A Name (e.g. Museum of Impostors)
• A Subtitle (e.g. A Portrait of Last Identity)
• A Canon (e.g. Architecture posits the authentic)
• A Reversa (e.g. Architecture posits the fake)
• A Description (site history and aspects, project aspects)
• An Appendix (e.g. the letter from Sarah Wilson)
• A Dis/continuous Genealogy
• Plans, Sections, Elevations
• Photographs of a model with a telescopic lens
• Quotes from Hamlet
• A Psychodramatic Script (e.g. Identities and Acts)

All the projects in Condemned Building more or less have these elements, sometimes other contributing elements, such as site photos or some other sketches, but these are more the exception than the rule. All these are variously categorized as con-texts, sub-texts, pre-texts, and archi-texts.

Now, most of these aspects listed above are either self-explanatory or I have previously written about them, with the exception of the "pscyhodramatic script." What the hell is that?

Psychodrama is a form of therapy that was developed by Jacob and Zerka Moreno in the early 1900s. Effectively, it was a means for individuals to explore inner issues, relationship disputes, feelings, trauma, et al in a theatrical format, i.e. on a stage with props, character identities, role playing, &c. It is intended to be improvised, and in many ways psychodrama is the mother of improv theater.

Now, Darden does not call attention to his adoption of a "psychodramatic" narrative or script; he never calls it this openly. It is only by perusing the project files that one will find him using this term. The first time I find Darden using this term is in a letter to Kevin Lippert (publisher at Princeton Architectural Press) on 1 November 1988 concerning the materials he is preparing for Condemned Building:

"Each project is comprised of exquisite drawings and with model photographs, a dis/continuous genealogy, and a psychodramatic text script. Taken together, the projects form an architect's Kamasutra with the mock negative. Condemned Building is a treatise on the tragicomedic nature of unfulfilled desire. and of loss."

By using this term "psychodrama" is indicative of a few things. Firstly, it pays tribute to Darden's undergraduate background: he held a bachelors in literature and psychology. Second, it is a clever way for him to explain his project without giving a standard project description one expects in an architectural monograph. It is a means for Darden to render the project description as a narrative — not just a narrative, but a dramatic narrative. In a way, this is compatible with the quotes from Hamlet, a dramatic play.

One can play with the ideas that Darden is exploring by rendering the project description as a drama. The building elements are not just inert, static features in a building, but rather dynamic characters, props, stage sets, &c, and the functional uses and movement through the projects are dramatic scenes and acts, as in a play. Suddenly the architectural elements of each building is no longer just a building element, but something more alive, active, animated, like a ballet, which Darden practiced. The silos in Museum of Impostors are no longer just static building features, but characters that are part of a dramatic narrative, active participants in action with a literary purpose.

Furthermore, a psychodrama is supposed to be improvised; they are supposed to be revealing subconscious feelings and opinions — almost associative, stream-of-conscious revealing of under-conscious feelings. While it is clear that these psychodramatic scripts are edited and undergo several revisions, they give the impression of how Darden subconsciously associated his designs with certain theatrical aspects. For instance, the psychodramatic script for Confessional gives insight into Darden's subconscious perceptions of the act of confession from both the priest's and the confessor's points of view.

All this comes back to the nature of allegory. Darden is making commentary, and is inviting us to look beyond his stunning drawings and contemplate a deeper dynamic in his work. In a way, this how psychodramas work: participants act out and represent feelings and ideas within themselves, which opens up a dynamic interaction/conversation between the participants. Allegories, likewise, are a dynamic representation of deeper ideas which opens up conversation. So for Darden to call his theoretical works of architecture "allegories" is apt and fitting. Such cannot be denied. It is simply worth contemplating further how the psychodramatic scripts contribute to these allegories.

It might be worthwhile to explore one psychodramatic script. Since we used Museum of Impostors above, we will continue that here:

Identities I
Fort McHenry, formerly a pine forest
Channel Marker, buoy with painted stairs and stripes commemorating Francis Scott Key
Naval Barricade, thirteen strategically-placed sunken ships, War of 1812
Bombardment, continual artillery fire, 6 August 1814
Commemoratives, inexpensive souvenirs of local military history
Lazaretto, 19th century quarantine house for immigrants

Identities II
First Silo, encasement for two non-indigenous trees
Second Silo, encasement for windmill-powered music box, playing Key's favorite sonata
Black Rock, sheer wall with 13x4 shipping containers, exhibiting individual impostors
Hall of Stairs, lattice of fire stairs, curtain wall, and untouchable floor
Namesakes, plaster tablets at stair landings, presenting fact of impostors' lives
Wooden Raft, pick-up point from museum, built of quarantine remains

Acts
Act 1    Declaration: descent by narrow path from ravelin of fort onto stair passing under the sea
Act 2    Confirmation: two trees acknowledge central axis
Gap A   Cave diverts axis into hall of stairs
Act 3    Passage: binary travel on either side of rock wall; stair landing with tablets of facts, exhibitions of impostors' lives
Gap B  Second Cave leads underwater to second silo
Act 4    Delivery: ascent by ship's ladder to music box, descent by rope ladder to wood raft

Due to the formatting limits of this platform, I cannot show the Identities side by side, but what one is examining is history participating with architectural elements. The First Silo encases trees while Fort McHenry used to be a forest. The encased trees are non-indigenous, playing further into being impostors. These identities play out their roles in Act 1 by moving from the fort, under the water, and into the First Silo. The Second Silo sits out in the water and plays Francis Scott Key's favorite sonata on a giant music box, while out in the water is buoy painted with stars and stripes to commemorate Key himself (shown in the D/cG). These identities interact in an intermission (Gap B, though an early draft calls this an intermission) into the Second Silo. Then into Act 4, ascending a ship ladder through the music box, only to descend a rope ladder into a raft (and Identity) sitting out in the harbor, which is made from wood remains of the quarantine facility that used to be at Lazaretto Point (another Identity) across the harbor. Et cetera.

Darden makes specific use of the term "gap." The harbor itself he calls the "Water Gap." He makes extensive use of concepts of reaching and desiring (across gaps), but also being denied and falling short. The Museum of Impostors does not bridge the harbor, it does not bridge the history between Fort McHenry to Lazaretto Point. It desires to bridge the Gap, but fails to do so. These concepts, brilliantly explored here in the Museum of Impostors, are ultimately laid out in Darden's Six Aphorisms that conclude Condemned Building.

In short, the building designs of Condemned Building are allegories, and the psychodramtic scripts create a dynamic narrative to enact this. The allegories are a play of history, site, architectural elements, and concepts (such as identity, impersonation). Other designs of Darden's have very different psychodramatic scripts. For instance, Night School is just Lessons, whereas Melvilla utilizes Characters and Plot Lines. These obviously play into the narrative of his allegories, and I encourage Darden enthusiasts to explore them more.

Darden in the Age of Spatial Dissolution

Untitled, 100 Building Nights, charcoal and graphite on paper, Douglas Darden, 1985

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.

The Silo that Inspired Oxygen House

 

Silo, Liberty State Park, New Jersey, photo by Douglas Darden

On the edge of Liberty State Park in New Jersey is an industrial area of warehouses and various industrial machinery and facilities. One of these structures is a little silo that Darden was infatuated with. I believe somewhere in his various notes he called it "cute" (I'm having a hard time finding that note, and am starting to wonder if it was dream incubation revelations).

Update: I have now found where he wrote this: it was found with a photocopy of the self-portrait of Condemned Building. It might be useful to quote the whole handwritten note, which I have transcribed here:

In 1987 I took a photograph of a little industrial building cast out on an open field in the country, just north of Oxford, Mississippi. I don’t usually use the word, but I have to say that the building nearly looked “cute.” It was very appealing to me.

I started thinking about this little building and what it was that had prompted me to photograph it. I wanted to use the building; to graft it; to turn it into something which could reveal why I was attracted to it in the first place.

As I said, the building sat alone on an open field. Even so, when I began to think about going inside, I became claustrophobic. This sensation haunted me as the opposite of my initial attraction. From the outside I felt free, open, and light. Inside, I felt a deep dull pressure. The sensations were like there I imagined I might feel if I had trouble, on occasion breathing.

I began to wonder what would happen if a house no longer just only simply accomodate [sic] a person’s life, but was actually crucial for life’s sustenance. It seemed to me then that the idea of house would not only have to anticipate the longevity of a the person living there, but the house but it would without also have to accounting for the inhabitants death. The house would be a sort of contest which could literally be described literally as the capacity to hold one’s breath.

Update cont.: obviously, Darden is already thinking of Oxygen House and given the timeframe of 1987, this is around the time he was beginning to hash out some ideas for Oxygen House while he was working on Clinic for Sleep Disorders.

I was initially informed and led to believe that this silo was outside of Baton Rouge and given most of the photos Darden took of this silo, it looks like it could be in Louisiana [see update above]. However, I was recently looking at Darden's photos and noticed something I had not previously noticed. It seems obvious now — like, how could you miss this? But in one photo it is abundantly clear that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are in the background. I've looked at these photos dozens of times and never noticed them in that one photos. But alas, there they are. And in front of them is clearly a few buildings in Battery Park City, so this photo is definitely taken from the New Jersey side of the river in Liberty State Park.

I am willing to bet that this photo was taken while Darden was developing Clinic for Sleep Disorders circa 1988, as it is sited in Liberty State Park. If I recall correctly from the notes, Darden noticed the silo across a field and was drawn to it. Looking at the photo, I suppose one could notice it all the way across Liberty State Park, as there do not appear to be a lot of trees at the time, so he may have noticed it all the way across the park from the marina (Morris Canal).

It took me a minute to find it, but I did, and it is still kind of cute. Everything has grown up around it. A great deal of tall weeds surround it and mature trees separate it from the rest of the park now. I believe the powerlines and poles have been replaced, and it has been repainted with a mural, and of course the Twin Towers are now gone. But that is the silo. I actually got super excited when I found it and told my wife that we have to go to New Jersey.

Ultimately this little silo would inspire Oxygen House. One of the the most important works of visionary and theoretical architecture was inspired by this little silo, and one can still visit it today.

The silo today

Location: 40°42'12.0"N 74°03'45.4"W

The Mines of Colorado and Douglas Darden

 

Paris Mill mining structure, Colorado

I grew up in South Carolina. You don't grow up in South Carolina without having spent time hanging out in Confederate cemeteries. They're everywhere, so at some point in high school, you're going to end up loitering in a random, overgrown cemetery in the middle of the woods. Heck, right behind my house was a section of woods that had not been developed because there were numerous graves on that lot. I hung out there a lot.

Now, Douglas Darden grew up in Colorado. I imagine he liked to explore all the old mining buildings scattered throughout the Rocky Mountains. I mean, when I moved to Colorado a third of my life ago, I spent a great deal of that summer before classes traveling with my buddy Scott to various mining camps and derelicts, &c. I have a hard time imagining Darden not doing this. I think about Ben Ledbetter's blog post about being out in derelict industrial buildings and "being in heaven." I think of the way he describes the "cute" industrial building outside of Baton Rouge that he describes in his notes for Oxygen House and Condemned Building. I have a hard time imagining Darden not behaving like this amongst the abandoned mines of Colorado.

And let's be real, these abandoned mining structures are everywhere. Take a drive through the Rockies and look up into the peaks and one will see derelict structures, yellow mine dumps, &c. It is its own form of picturesque.

These must have had some impact on him, as mining and industry feature heavily into his work. Saloon for Jesse James is a bar for the miners that work at the Kennecott open-pit copper mine, and is located on the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake, the area of which is used to mine salt. Lessons learned and themes explored in Saloon for Jesse James would carry over into Museum of Impostors. For instance, "Black Rock" features in both projects, and both projects are situated starting on land and move into water and ending on an isolated feature in the water (fresh water well on an island in the Saloon and a silo in the Museum). The Museum also features mining. In some of Darden's early writings for the Museum, he speaks about Lazaretto Point being leased for strip mining for iron. Mining is just a feature of industrial themes that fascinated Darden throughout his short life, and likely started in his youth.

Beyond this alone, there is something inherent in the construction of these mining structures — industrial structures in general — that are spatially confusing, ambiguous, and even apparently contradictory. Photographing the interior of these structures can be quite odd. I have a minor collection of my own photos inside some of these structures that I take because the view and how I capture it are spatially ambiguous. Am I looking up? Down? Left? Upside-down? Did an architecture student turn the model on its side? Is this zoomed in on something small or zoomed out on something huge? Where do those beams run? It's very exciting to be inside these places, albeit incredibly dangerous.

Such spaces are highly reminiscent of Piranesi's Prisons series. Piranesi would rework his initial drawings and republish them later, in which some of the modifications, while appearing more refined, generate enhanced spatial ambiguity and even impossible geometries. The dark atmosphere, the layering of spaces, machinery, industrial elements with vernacular architecture, perilous and precarious constructions and dilapidations and heights, et al makes these 19th century Colorado mining facilities highly compatible with Piranesi's Carceri. I would go so far to say that one could almost make side-by-side comparisons of the two. Such would be a fun exercise to further illustrate how likely these old mining structures were influential to Darden, given his love and predilection for Piranesi.

Piranesi, Carcer VII, 1761

I recently came across Darden's notes for a faculty seminar on Piranesi. While I was reading these notes, I could not stop imagining these mines I have visited (let's be real, trespassed in). There is no doubt in my mind that Darden visited such places — whether as an aesthetic curiosity or a youth needing a place to trespass — and that they had an impact on him.

Douglas Darden and the Tarot

 

Sketch for Frontispiece of Condemned Building, 1988

Douglas Darden does not strike me as someone who was interested in the occult, and in reality, he likely was not. He was not a practitioner of occult arts nor one engaged in rigorous academic study of the occult ("armchair magicians," as practitioners like to call them). Yet, from time to time I come across something in Darden's work that indicates there were occult subjects that were interesting to him. 

For instance, in Temple Forgetful, there is the memory theater of Camillo. This concept of memory theaters is comparable to memory palaces, which are mnemonic devices, and were considered magical centuries ago. It is a relative of memory magic, such as those spells found in the Greek Magical Papyri, or entire magical experiments, such as in the Ars Notoria. I suspect Darden got this image of the memory theater from Francis Yates's 1966 work The Art of Memory, as I doubt Darden was reading Camillo's work in Italian (still untranslated into English to this day, except in Yates's work).

I digress.

Recently I was going through some materials I have from the project files that are currently in the Avery Archive. I found a scan of an early sketch for the frontispiece in which the tarot was influential, at least for a moment. Darden did a series of sketches for the frontispiece on 12 June 1988, and this is but one. Clearly he was just tossing around an idea. In this sketch there is a rough depiction of The Tower card and the Hanged Man card.

The Hanged Man and The Tower, Smith-Waite-Rider

A few things to note. Darden is clearly looking at the Smith-Waiter-Rider deck. Of the dozens of historical copies of the tarot decks I have looked at, nearly all illustrate the Hanged Man's right leg crossed over, as opposed to his left leg, as is illustrated in the Smith-Waiter-Rider deck. Only one historical deck I have seen has the left leg crossed, and that was a chemical copy, so the entire card was flipped. I am not a tarot expert, so I have only looked at a handful of historical decks, but regardless, the reproduction and distribution of historical decks is something that was not available to Darden at the time, but the Smith-Waite-Rider deck was.

Another thing to note is that Darden has not drawn the Tower as it is usually drawn, i.e. the top of the tower is a crown that has fallen off. We see this trope of "crown" in nearly all Tower cards. Darden simply draws a tower with a crossed gable roof. There is something about the image of the Tower that is intriguing to Darden, but not so much the symbolism, I suppose. At least the crown trope was not important.

The Tower seems to make sense in Darden's philosophy. The Tower is a condemned building — con-damnare — one that is toppling over in catastrophic destruction. Its divinatory meaning is one that is often feared. It signifies a great catastrophe (literally a "turn of events") and change, usually in a horrible or painful way. But the Hanged Man is an unusual choice. The Hanged Man may be an earlier conception of the turtle flipped over — i.e. the turtle in Blade Runner and the turtle shell in his self-portrait and in the Dweller by the Dark Stream prose poem. One may even begin to see the turtle in the self-portrait is hanged on a rope like the Hanged Man, so the hanging turtle may be alluding to this very early conception of the frontispiece.

It stands to reason that Darden is looking at the Smith-Waite-Rider deck, that much is certain. He may have also been looking at Waite's Key to the Tarot, which is pictorial guide to interpreting the cards when doing a reading. The Hanged Man and the Tower have strong divinatory meanings that are applicable to Darden's Underbelly. However, it all feels superficial. It is as if Darden was intrigued by the images, not so much the meaning, and briefly played with them.

Denver and Colorado at large is a strange place of mysticism. Only in Colorado have I met a practicing alchemist (several in fact). I have met great mystics and occult authors. I know several practicing sorcerers and world renowned astrologers here. It is a land that has always had the occult lurking under its belly. Darden must have bumped into one of numerous occultists living in this city and state. Perhaps it even happened in the very brief few months he was residing in Denver before leaving for the American Academy in Rome. One was bound to introduce Darden to the Tarot, even if it was a passing intrigue.

Now, why would Darden not further pursue the Tarot in his frontispiece or at all? The Tarot and the occult is certainly an application of the Underbelly. Magic has long been deemed taboo and forbidden. Some would even say transgressive. Darden certainly was fascinated by meaning and symbolism, even mythologization. As Joe Juhasz once said to me, "[Darden] was Post-Modern taken to the limit." And as Ishmael says repeatedly in Moby-Dick: "These things cannot be without their meaning."

But perhaps tarot was just another set of symbols and meanings that were too far afield, too different from Darden's symbols and meanings. Tarot is certainly an intense study, and maybe Darden just thought it was too much effort to learn a set of symbols that really were not that compatible with the work he had already done. In following Darden's work, seeing it mature and develop up until 1988, purely occult topics were just a bit too much to deliver Condemned Building. Perhaps one day he would have returned to it if he had not passed away, but at the time in 1988 it was a passing intrigue. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I personally find it intriguing to examine these rough drafts to see what Darden was exploring.