Dionysiac Architects - The Problematic Nature of Connecting the Dionysiacs with Freemasonry

 
Dionysiac reveries with the Maenads

One critical fault in Freemasons is the ability drawing a distinction between fact and legends, and legendry plays heavily into Freemasonry. Rather than see the pageantry of the Master Mason Degree as a symbolic drama, it is taken as a legend — or worse, as fact. Rather than seeing it as the Hiramic drama, which allows the pageant to stand on its own as a transformative experience for the candidate and as a morality play of its own merit, it is seen as the Hiramic legend, and this is the origin of much dubious speculation. As a legend, it clearly has gaps, and those gaps need to be filled in. This leads to not only spurious scholarship, but also an unlimited number of new degrees. If it were only seen as a drama, there would be no need for the Shrine, the Chapter, Council, Commandery, the twenty-nine degrees of the Scottish Rite, the vast range of invitation-only bodies, et al.

On the scholastic end of this, we get a plethora of totally unfounded and capricious claims, such as the Freemasons built the Pyramids of Giza and used to hold initiations in the King's Chamber. Other bogus claims include that Adam was the first Freemason and his fig leaf was the first apron. This one in particular bothers me, because the fig leaf is a badge of shame, whereas the Masonic apron is supposed to be badge of honor and pride. There is no end to the things from the ancient world and mythology that Masons will claim were originally Masonic. And this is an issue we must work through. Oftentimes there are curious yet legitimate things from antiquity that get misconstrued, and Masons (most especially esoteric Masons) love to take these and run with them.

These esoteric aspects of history that Masons are fond of taking out of context and running with it are almost always subject to Brandolini's Law or the "Bullshit Asymmetry Principle," in which "the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.” Ultimately, this fits within the essay by philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005), in which he posits that bullshit is more dangerous than lying. Lying implies that there is a truth, but it is being concealed, whereas bullshit has no regard for truth whatsoever. The truth is altogether irrelevant when it comes to bullshit. This is an issue that plagues esoteric writers, and most especially esoteric Masons.

Yet, Masons are in love with their plethora of degrees, as well as their claims to antiquity ("from time immemorial" literally just means "before anyone can remember"; I don't remember the last time I ate collard greens, so that is from time immemorial). As a result ancient mystery cults are construed to appear more like modern day Freemasonry in order to fit an agenda to the claims of antiquity. Esoteric Masons are not concerned with understanding these ancient mystery cults on their own merit, but rather they are interested in fitting these cults into their agenda to validate Masonry's antiquity.

Let me give an anecdote. In 2019 I gave a presentation at the Colorado Masonic Symposium on the Mithraic tauroctony (the great image of Mithras slaying the bull) and compared the symbolic essence of this image to the Masonic circumpunct (the point within a circle bounded by two parallel perpendicular lines and the Holy Scriptures). I based much of my interpretation of the tauroctony on the work of Roger Beck, one of the leading contemporary scholars of the Mithraic cults. I wanted to show that the symbolic interpretation of both the tauroctony and the circumpunct are identical, though their representation is vastly different (I will post this paper in a different post at a later time). However, I did not want anyone to think the cults of Mithras are in anyway genealogically connected or related to Freemasonry, because they are not. To illustrate how symbols can be universal and nearly identical in signification, though their signifiers are vastly different, I began my presentation with the image of Yggdrasil and a Navajo sand painting commonly known as "the healing way." The two images are very different: one is of a tree and the other of a corn stalk. Yet, they have a lot of common features, such as three roots and three upper branches (or three ears of corn); they have a rainbow bridge, and there is a bird on top. The cultures that produced these are separated by an ocean and a continent, as well as several hundred years. My point was to illustrate that just because they are similar in content and essence does not mean they are genealogically related, but rather that the image is far more powerful because two separate and distinct cultures produced such similar images. Sadly, Masons are so accustomed to claims of antiquity and Freemasonry being founded in the remote past that the Masons I was lecturing to could not grasp this. They immediately started trying to conceive of a way the Vikings who landed in North America could have transmitted their image of Yggdrasil to the indigenous peoples there, and through trade and other routes it could have made its way to the Navajo. Despite there not being a single scrap of evidence to validate any speculations they were making, they were more concerned with how there could be a genealogical connection rather than accepted that the symbols that spring from the collective unconscious are universal unto themselves, and that a genealogy is unnecessary to demonstrate the power of symbols themselves. It was frustrating to see my point being immediately disregarded, as that would taint the rest of my presentation, and it did. As would be expected, these Masons still tried to conceive of ways that the Mithraic cults could have become modern Freemasonry. This is still the problem at hand when it comes to other mystery cults, such as the cults of Dionysus.

One particular issue with trying to connect Freemasonry to the Dionysiac cults is: why? Why do Masons want to be connected to them? The cults of Dionysus were wild and their rites were revelries of drunkenness. Of course, the various cults devoted to the god Dionysus evolved and changed over time, but it is safe to generalize them as drunk and wild. Dionysus himself is usually presented as a drunken god. The Maenads, the mythological nymphs and devotees to the god, and the Bacchantes, the women devoted to the Roman equivalent Bacchus, are usually illustrated as dancing naked, revelries of song and music, sex (the term orgy, from the Greek όργή orgé is primarily associated with the mystery rites of the Dionysiacs), intoxication on wine, and ripping apart wild animals and eating them raw. In most sources, Dionysus is killed and devoured by his followers who in their inebriation mistake him for a wild animal. It is not my intention to dive too deep into the various cults devoted to Dionysus, nor really to explore too extensively their rites and practices. However, even basic generalizations about them show they were largely women engaging in what Nietzsche describes as "titanic and barbaric" (Birth of Tragedy §9). How anyone could whitewash this into a fraternity that excludes women and practices temperance and restraint is beyond me, but surprise, surprise, Masons managed to do it.

Even the Dionysiac Artists were considered immoral, or at least unenlightened, and mostly drunk. One of two ancient sources for this group is Aulus Gellius, who in his Attic Nights §20.4 gives the following tale:

"A wealthy young man, a pupil of the philosopher Taurus, was devoted to, and delighted in, the society of comic and tragic actors and musicians, as if they were freemen. Now in Greek they call artists of that kind οί περί διόνυσον τεχνιται or 'craftsmen of Dionysus.' Taurus, wishing to wean that youth from the intimacy and companionship of men connected with the stage, sent him these words extracted from the work of Aristotle entitled Universal Questions [On Interpretations], and bade him read it over every day: 'Why are the craftsmen of Dionysus for the most part worthless fellows? Is it because they are least of all familiar with reading and philosophy, since the greater part of their life is given to their essential pursuits and much of their time is spent in intemperance and sometimes in poverty too? For both of these things are incentives to wickedness.'" (trans. John C. Rolfe, 1927)

Yet Masonic authors like Lawrie, Macoy, Mackey, et al want to portray them as a society of builders with high morals. Lawrie in particular is guilty of misrepresenting this group, as he specifically cites Aulus Gellius in his The History of Free Masonry (Edinburgh, 1804), but then claims they were a moral fraternity of good ethics and charitable. He clearly has disregarded certain aspects of the source material he is looking at in favor of fitting this group into his agenda of validating the antiquity of Freemasonry.

Let us not dismiss that whitewashing is not the only crime here. Freemasons are a fraternity of men, and the cults of Dionysus were largely organized by women. Dionysus's devotees are primarily women, and that is a fact that cannot be ignored... except by Masonic authors. Peruse any legitimate authority on the cults of a Dionysus and you will only ever find mentions of priestesses, because there were no male priests. Never mind that! Writers like Mackey, Macoy, Moses, etc all claim they were run by priests (male). One finds it difficult to determine whether it is misogyny or pure stupidity.

So why would any Mason want to connect the moral fraternity of Masonry to such a wild and drunken cult of women?

Ultimately, we are dealing with a few key aspects that all weave together to create the problem at hand. Firstly, they must whitewash the negative traits of the devotees of Dionysus in order to present these ancient cults in a positive light to be congruent with modern day Freemasonry. Second, having whitewashed these cults, they must represent them as a prototype in direct lineage to modern day Freemasonry by establishing a precursor to the Roman collegia and the Medieval guilds. Third, they must present all ancient mystery cults as being more or less the same thing, if not identical cults under different names, so as to inherit the lineage of all mystery religions of antiquity.

Such a perverted Masonic agenda renders all ancient mystery cults as plastic, pliable to the whims of later Masonic "scholars," and thus any mystery cult of the ancient world can be fitted into any mold desired. The agenda is to somehow establish a direct genealogical lineage of Freemasonry back to the far distant past without any concern for the historical evidence of anything in particular.

The fact of the matter is that Freemasonry grew out of the stonemason guilds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This is a fact, and there is no way of getting around it. However, even the guilds are plastic to whimsical Masonic "scholars," because even they are plastic concepts that can be shaped to fit current Masonic concepts. There really is only one book I have ever been able to find that is a true and faithful relation of the development and system of the guilds, and that is Wage Labor & Guilds of Medieval Europe by Stephen Epstein (University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Epstein is a scholar on Medieval economics and social systems. In this text he details how the the Roman collegia developed as trade associations, and then follows their decline into tyrannical ruin. The way the collegia ended was terrible, pretty much being under the direct tyranny of the emperors to feed the hungry Roman machine. Members of certain colleges were more or less slaves. All colleges that existed at the latter end of the Empire really only existed to serve the Emperor. When the Empire collapsed, the collegia dissolved with it. Europe enters a dark age that lasts for a few centuries. Starting in the 10th and 11th centuries, we begin to see the emergence of the guilds. These were government sanctioned monopolies on any particular trade. There can be no lineage between the collegia and the guilds because there was not a sophisticated enough economy to warrant any sort of trade associations during the dark age. Even the name "guild" implies economics, as they are a part of a wage labor economy (i.e. you trade your time and body for money; just like today). Epstein traces and details the particulars of the guilds: their system of training and payment, their hierarchy, their situation within the community, the rules and regulations upon them, their development and evolution, etc. It truly is a fascinating book and one which any person interested in an intense and detailed analysis of the guilds should consider. What ultimately ended the guilds was two competing economic systems, both diametrically opposed to each other, but both equally at odds with the guilds: laissez faire capitalism and communism.

By this point though, the moral and ethical teachings within the stonemason guilds — which also had a religious function — had developed a sister organization: Speculative Freemasonry or Free and Accepted Masons. This is the result of non-operative patrons' involvement in a guild. As Epstein explains the patrons, these were usually aristocrats or other nobles who may not be, say a goldsmith, but they own a gold mine, so the use of the gold was important to them. So they were patrons of the goldsmith guild, ensuring the guild maintains the patron's expectations and will work with the local government on behalf of the guild to maintain the guild's expectations. Stonemason patrons grew exponentially for some reason not fully understood, but these patrons would later form their own "speculative" (i.e. non-operative) lodges, of which there is evidence that even operative stonemasons would join. (As a note on Epstein's book, for Masons interested in reading it to understand Freemasonry, you will be sorely disappointed. Epstein spends very little page space on the stonemason guilds, and the very little he does, addresses the bogus claims of the stonemasons having received their charter from King Athelstan to go wherever they pleased, which is contradictory to the nature of the guilds as local organizations. So your York Rite College ritual is not only spurious itself, but based on something historically spurious as well. To read Epstein's book is to understand the guilds, not Freemasonry).

— Even the whole concept of Freemasons as traveling artificers is more wishful thinking. There really is no evidence they moved about freely, and it is not pragmatic either. Up until very recently, buildings took decades, even centuries to construct. The idea that a guild would build a structure and move on to the next town is preposterous (Latin for "ass backwards"). Guilds were usually confined to a specific locale, as they were under the governance of the king or governor. Of course there is the notion that the laborers themselves were free to move about, but that was common practice anyway. You left a guild in one town and joined in another. Any guild member could do that, not just the stonemasons. With the Dionysiac Artists, writers like Lawrie latched onto the fact that they moved about and interpolated Masonic concepts onto that, rather than just accept that traveling entertainers are not a novel idea. —

Based on this, and looking back at the Dionysiac Architects, we may begin to wonder if the period of 1000 BCE to 150 BCE had a sophisticated enough economy to warrant a trade association of architects. In short, no, it did not. Certainly not in 1000 BCE to about 300 BCE. By the Hellenstic Era, there may have been, and Epstein certainly acknowledges that there were loose bands of tradesmen that could be considered trade associations, but nothing like the collegia, and certainly nothing as formal and legalistic as the guilds.

This is the issue, and probably why the Dionysiac Architects are conceived in the first place: they provide a direct lineage from King Solomon's Temple to modern day Freemasonry. However, history cannot support such. This is where the theories of the Dionysiac Architects turns into a conspiracy theory: several of the writers on this organization purport that they go underground. This is a common tactic in conspiracy theories, namely that lack of evidence is proof that they are secretly at work. We see this in the theories that the Knights Templar went underground, taken in by early stonemason guilds and concealed for centuries, and then reemerge as Freemasons (see Born in Blood by John A. Robinson, 1989). So even though there is no historical evidence of the Dionysiac Architects in antiquity, that is proof of how secretive they worked — even though they built the greatest monuments of the ancient world, but never mind that! They didn't need the credit for that back then, but suddenly in the last few centuries we miraculously discover this great secret. Then there is the gap between the collegia to the guilds, but that is because they went underground. Problem solved!

One can begin to see the issues with examining such claims of an ancient fraternity of builders: the closer one looks, the more one inquiries, the more everything tears at the seams. None of this holds up to any scrutiny beyond wishful thinking. All it does is illustrate an agenda to validate Freemasonry as more ancient than it truly is so that it may claim to be inheritors of all the great things of the ancient world. Sadly, to claim all the great things, it must whitewash all the terrible things, so as to not stain its pure white apron. Just as these authors took whiteout to the testaments of history, so too are they applying whiteout to their aprons.

If all this sounds incredibly and viciously critical of Masonic writers, it is supposed to be. The third noble tenet of Freemasonry is Truth. In the Stair Lecture of the Fellow Craft Degree it is stated concerning the liberal art of logic that we "direct our inquiries after truth." One could propose the Pyrrhonic philosophy of that which is true (αληθης alethes) versus that which is truth (αληθεια aletheia), as in the difference proposed by Sextus Empiricus in Adversus Mathematicos §7.38-42 in which truth is more important than what is true. A doctor may know there is little hope for a patient to recover, yet will tell them that they will. It is not just bedside manners, a good mental disposition is conducive to recovery. Is the doctor lying? Kind of, but they are embracing hope for the patient, which is important. Hope over facts, and that has merit. However, the etymological roots of these terms alethes and aletheia literally translate as "not concealed" or "not forgotten," and yet these Masonic writers are clearly making a deliberate attempt to conceal source information in favor of an agenda. To return to the beginning of this post, a lie acknowledges that there is a fact, there are true things, but deliberately conceals them. That has produced something more dangerous: bullshit. The subsequent writers that follow Lawrie, such as Hipolito Jose da Costa and Albert Mackey and ultimately Manly P. Hall, are taking these falsehoods, these concealments of facts and running with it, which has bred several generations of bullshit (i.e. no fact checking, no cross-referencing source materials, just accepting it and piling on more). And what good does it do any of these writers to conceal who the Dionysiac Artists truly were, and what does it serve to present them as architects? It is detrimental to any Mason's legitimate inquiries concerning the Dionysiacs, and it bolsters a false image of Freemasonry to cater to the egos of members who just really wish the Fraternity was thousands of years old, and not just a 300 year old boys' club. (I enjoy my boys' club, but let's not hype it up to anything more than that).

Now we have reached a point where the source material needs to be addressed, factual material needs to presented, and the genealogy of corruption needs to be illustrated. It is an order of magnitude larger to disprove it than it took to make it up. And I personally have hit the point that I can no longer read another Masonic "research" paper nor sit through a another Masonic presentation that discusses the Dionysiac Architects. I personally need to be able to point to this material and hope at least one person will stop before proceeding with more bullshit.

This research track was in part inspired by Sam Block's piece The Kybalion is Still Crap, No Matter Who You Think You Are, but more particularly Nicholas E. Chapel's The Kybalion's New Clothes: An Early 20th Century Text's Dubious Association With Hermeticism. At some point, someone needs to address decade's old bullshit and refute it in a critique of sound reasoning and scholarship. For me, it is the Dionysiac Architects, which needs to be dropped entirely in favor of admiring a unique band of entertainers devoted to a delightful deity and who travel around to bring people laughs and good ole fun and joy.

Dionysiac Architects - A Preamble

 
Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii, Fresco 4

Years ago sometime in 2013, I was a newly made Master Mason attending my first Masonic lecture given by Timothy Hogan. Like many Masonic presentations of an esoteric slant, the lecture was all over the place with no clear direction. One of the things Hogan mentioned was the Dionysiac Architects. I myself was finishing my Masters in Architecture, and I had a focus on classical architecture and architectural history. Having been fascinated by mystery cults of antiquity and my architectural background, I was naturally drawn to Freemasonry. However, also given that background, I immediately thought: what the hell are the Dionysiac Architects? This was a question that would plague me for years. I came across references to them online, mostly citing Manly P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages (shocker). I even tried reading that tome and got a glimpse of what he understood about them (I eventually lost patience with Hall's terrible scholarship and total confabulations, giving up about a fifth of the way through). Ultimately I presumed these Dionysiac Architects were something Hall just made up or, as is more his style, he came across something, took it out of context, and ran with it.

That is until recently while trying to decipher the ritual of Henry P. H. Bromwell's rite of Free and Accepted Architects, I found in the Royal Architect Degree a passing reference to the Dionysiac Architects, in which, like Hall, he claims Hiram Abif was a member and that they assisted in the building of King Solomon's Temple. Now, Hall published his monumental tome of scholastic nightmares in 1928, while Bromwell had composed the ritual for the Royal Architect in 1875. Naturally, I presumed there are earlier sources, and somewhere along the way something legitimate or legendary got corrupted into some bogus myth of a fraternity of ancient builders devoted to the drunken god Dionysus, and both these men bought into it.

If one does any digging beyond Hall, one will very quickly find that these Dionysiac Architects are more legitimately referred to as the Διόνυσον τεχνιτων or "Dionysiac Artists." However, because of the use of techniton in the name, they can be easily misconstrued and frequently are misrepresented as "artificers," "craftsmen," and "architects." This is the source of much of the misrepresentation of an actual ancient organization of actors, poets, musicians, and other aspects of the theater. Strabo makes mention of them in his Geography §14.1.29 (c. 44 BCE - 23 CE), as does Aulus Gellius in Attic Nights §20.4 (c. 117 CE). These two ancient sources both describe them as a traveling theater troop, similar to a circus or other itinerant performers like Annie Oakley or Buffalo Bill. They were indeed a real group that traveled about Ionia and Anatolia in the first few centuries before the common era.

We have two persons to thank for the utter misrepresentation of this group of itinerant entertainers into something like the modern Masonic conception of traveling stonemasons: Alexander Lawrie, a Scottish Freemason, and John Robison, an English Anti-Masonic polemicist. These two individuals in particular begin the whole process of corrupting this group into something else. Upon examining sources like Manly P. Hall, as well as Albert G. Mackey and even Redding Moses, there is a trail, a chain of transmission in which we may trace how these Dionysiac Artists became corrupted into a precursor or prototype for Freemasonry. Sometimes these writers are misunderstanding source texts, and other times they are explicitly and deliberately misrepresenting them.

Since we can more or less trace the lineage of corruption, it has become my intention to detail this transmission and changes. It is not my intention to peruse or detail any writers after Manly P. Hall, since these later writers, such as Graham Hancock and Timothy Hogan, are basing their information off of Hall. Hall more or less popularized the concept that is disseminated today about the Dionysiac Architects, and since it is totally unnecessary to look at anything that follows Hall's spurious and capricious assertions about this group, we will examine and detail sources up to and including Hall, but no further.

Thus, I will begin a series of posts that address the following items:

1. What are the initial issues concerning a "fraternity" of builders dedicated to the drunken god Dionysus, and why it is problematic to associate them with Freemasonry?
2. Why did these Freemasons feel compelled to associate these Dionysiac Artists with the Medieval guilds and ultimately Freemasonry?
3. What are the source texts, what information do they provide, and how does each successive writer corrupt the Dionysiac Artists into a fraternity of architects?
4. Perhaps as a bonus critique, why do Freemasons feel the need to distort information to suit their purposes (and probably critique the Theosophists while we are at it)? And ultimately, address some concerns over whitewashing and cleaning up problematic aspects of antiquity to suit an agenda. Why is so essential to distort facts to suit a symbolic agenda?

This is our research tract. At this moment I am working on a translation of portions of Edmund Chishull's Antiquitate Asiaticae, as he provides source information from fragments concerning this group in Aetolia. However, the source texts are in Dorian Greek, and the translations are in Latin, and the work has never been translated into English (or any other language as far as I am aware). I do not know any ancient Greek dialects, save some etymological background to double check a few words. Then my Latin is really rusty. So while I brush up on that and tediously verify Greek words, we will address other aspects of this research tract.

In the next post, we will begin exploring the problems of such a fraternity of ancient builders — both historical and legendary — and dive into some of the claims about them, and set those against a historical context.

It will ultimately be my aim to publish this information in a printed publication, however, publications suited for this kind of material oftentimes are niche and difficult to access, so providing this line of research on a blog has merit to reach a larger audience, as well as to track my own research. I have been considering publishing much of my past research that has been printed in the Rocky Mountain Mason here on this blog. So stay tuned for those at some point in the future.

Darden's Confession: Private Sins and Public Confession

Confessional section study from project file

Perhaps the one project that receives the least amount of attention by Douglas Darden is his Confessional. It is not the most exciting project of his, nor one that is easy to grasp why he worked on it. It almost feels shoved into his portfolio so that he can have a religious project. However, it is equally as well thought out as any of his other designs, and might best exemplify Darden's conceptions of the underbelly.

It is the only project of his that is not a new building design, but rather a renovation of an existing building. It is situated inside of the former Church of San Pancrazio in Florence, which is now a museum. For Darden, it is essential to communicate that this is a former church that was desanctified, because the theme of Confessional is the secularization of what is sacred and publicizing what is private. In this instance, the private act of confessing sins becomes public, and this is done inside of a deconsecrated building and broadcasted via radio.

San Pancrazio, now the Museum of Marino Marini, Florence, Italy, photograph and sketch by me

It is so central that Darden gives a rather lengthy — lengthy for Darden — history of the building. He tells us that the Chapel and Holy Sepulchre was designed by the famed Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti and that the chapel was accessible from the inside from the 15th to 18th centuries; then it was walled off from the inside during the Napoleonic suppression of 1808 and later deconsecrated, then used for the Grand Ducal lottery, then turned into a tanning factory, and lastly a military munitions depot. I am uncertain of what its use was in 1989 when Darden visited Florence while he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, however, today it is a museum.

Darden appears to be utterly fascinated by this inversion of the sacred and the private. It fits in perfectly with his concept of the underbelly. The main piece of literature that inspires this project is Augustine of Hippo's Confessions, which was private confessions that were made public. He even quotes an excerpt of the first chapter in Condemned Building.

What appears to be the spark of inspiration for Confessional is the following flier found in the project file, in which people can call in to hear other people give their confessions.

Flier for being able to listen to private confessions, found in project file

In Confessional, the parishioner will go into the chapel via a set of stairs from the plaza. The priest enters from inside and goes up a set of stairs to a room above the parishioner's confessional chamber. The parishioner will confess their sins into a specially designed helmet that transmits their confession to the priest via radio transmissions, which obviously others can hear as well.

Darden was not Catholic. He was raised Methodist (I have even been to his childhood church in Lakewood), though as he writes in an essay called "Confidences of a Spec-Writer" (Oz, Vol 14, Art. 11, Jan. 1992) that he is a "diluted Methodist" as well as "isn't devoutly anything." In fact, that entire essay is essential to understanding a great deal behind Darden's thought process for the project. The Spec-Writer (a play on architectural specification writers) criticizes Darden for not knowing what confession is. The Spec-Writer goes on to add:

"The unassuming church in Florence where he [Darden] has been commissioned to design the confessional (which is virtually nothing more in scale than a phone booth, a piece of hyper-rated furniture), is the sheer public nature of this seemingly private act. The violent contradiction! Imagine telling a priest your most personal secrets, your sins, those acts and thoughts which render to you your most unnatural pain — in public! Within the expanse of the open nave of a church, everyone sees the confessor bent on his knees, humble-hunched at the shoulders, a spectacle of whispers."

What Darden conceals in Condemned Building about Confessional is all but revealed in this essay. I won't reiterate everything in that essay, which also includes the Spec-Writer's comments on Hostel, so a link to the essay is provided above.

What is fascinating about Confessional is not just that it exemplifies Darden's conceptions of the underbelly, but also that is a social commentary. Confession of sins has not only always been a private act, but a sacred one. Even in looking at Medieval and Renaissance grimoires, confession has also been a part of purification rituals that the sorcerer must do before conducting any magic ritual (see the Arbatel of Magic and the Heptameron). The purpose of confession is not to instill guilt in the devotee — even though it frequently does — but is meant to release the devotee of their wrongdoings, to be purified, and be spiritually cleansed.

Obviously Darden violates this by turning this turtle on its back and examines the underbelly of confessions made public. Making public this private sacred act desanctifies confession, just like the Church of San Pancrazio. Darden was a fan of Mircea Eliade. I recall in a blog post by Darden's friend Ben Ledbetter, that Darden once remarked about Peter Eisenman: "Spoon feed Eliade to Peter!" One of the most central dichotomies established by Eliade is the distinction between the sacred and the profane. It is a distinction that pervades all his works, but is only concluded in his near final work The Sacred and the Profane. Essentially, the sacred is that which is set apart from the every day world. What is sacred must be apart, set aside from our profane lives.

In confession, we tell our priest things we may not even tell our spouse or our best friend. Sure, we may tell them secrets or private information for their ears only. But with confession, it is telling an intermediary of the Divine our deepest secrets of wrongdoings and failures.

All of that is, of course, violated in Darden's Confessional. Darden is commenting on the dissolution of the sacred, the profaning of those things that were meant to be set apart from the profane, and the nature of sacrilege.

I am almost certain Darden read Emerson. He was a veracious reader, and Emerson gets brought up from time to time in Darden's notes and publications. I will end this with a quote from Emerson I feel summarizes Confessional.

"There is at last nothing sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Six Aphorisms Envisioning Architecture: Douglas Darden's Final Thoughts

 
Random note found after Darden's death

I recently had the privilege of presenting on Douglas Darden's Condemned Building for Oxford Brookes. A question was asked by the Chair of the Post-Graduate Department, Scott Sworts, which concerned Darden's architectural theory and its impact on architecture. For almost any other architect this is a vague and open-ended question that could consume hours of discussion, but for Darden, it draws attention to a void in understanding him and his work: there is a near total lack of any formal writings from him on his theories and ideologies. I attempted to answer the question, but it is a difficult issue to address. Darden's architectural theory is embedded into his work, scribbled into the margins of sketches, scattered post-it notes and scrap paper in project files, etc. He publishes very little of his theories and ideologies, and most of that is early in his career. There is so little published of his early theory that I can list them all here:

• "Architecture in the Age of Spatial Dissolution," Oz, No. 9, 1987
• "The Architecture of Exhaustion," Pratt Journal of Architecture, No. 2, 1988
• "Confidences of a Spec-Writer," Oz, No. 14, 1992

That's actually about it. There are two book reviews, one on the Architecture of Frank Gehry and The Danteum, both published in the now defunct periodical Sites. These give us glimpses into Darden's interpretations of other people's architectural theory, but not much on his own opinions. There are a few other possible articles he may have published, but I cannot for the life of me — nor the librarians who helped me search — find these other publications, but are listed on Darden's resumes. Ultimately Darden's theories and critiques on architecture are in his designs, and most especially in his notes and the things he would scribble into the margins of his sketches.

Furthermore, and to be totally honest, his early theory isn't that great. It is pedantic and naive. His theories are more of a play on architectural discourse than actual architectural theory. He writes like a grad student who has enough knowledge and ideas to get published, but nothing with enough critical substance to be groundbreaking or to carry weight in larger arenas of architectural discourse. There is but one exception, and that is an obscure student-run publication at the University of Colorado in Denver called Installations, of which I have only found one copy in the rare books collection at the Auraria Library in Denver. In Installations 2, 1993, there is a dialogue of sorts called "In/n Conversation" between Darden, his student and assistant James Trewitt, and his colleague Keith Loftin. Here we see a much more mature and developed Darden in his ideologies and how he expresses them. Perhaps the only other example of Darden's theories that are recorded is Rob Miller's documentary on Darden called Looking After the Underbelly, 1991, of which only one copy exists in the library at Clemson University.

Ultimately, there is not an extensive corpus on Darden's theories. Even with what little of his ideas that are formally (and informally) published, there is little that can be cross-referenced and analyzed. It really is of little consequence. Thus, we really have to rely on the notes and letters found in the project files of his designs, his course syllabi, and Condemned Building. However, even his notes and comments on his sketches are not systematized, so establishing any sort of corpus would be problematic. I personally feel these notes and scribbles would need to cataloged by project, and allow them to stand on their own, rather than endeavor to systematize his thoughts across such a large spectrum of works. In reality there is only one thing Darden offers the world for further architectural discourse: the six aphorisms he gives at the end of Condemned Building.

Darden begins Condemned Building with ten projects, each representative the reversal of an architectural canon. These are what we are most familiar with in analyzing Darden's works in this book. However, this is not everything he offers. He ends the book with an excerpt from Hugo's Notre Dame of Paris, and six aphorisms for architecture. As mentioned in my previous post on Darden's increasing interest in abstraction, Darden considered that his book Condemned Building to be the book that would destroy architecture, "this will kill that." Seriously, the last words of the book are the passage from Hugo, "Architecture is dead, dead beyond recall, slain by the printed book," and a passage from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "Fall'n on the inventors' heads" (5.2.385). If we are to buy into Darden's narrative, he killed architecture. He designed ten buildings based on the inverse of the canons of architecture, demonstrating how invalid these canons are. If those canons cannot stand the test of Darden's underbelly, then they are invalid, and if they are invalid, then hundreds of years of architectural principles have been destroyed. And Darden killed them.

Of course, Darden does not abandon architecture, nor does he leave us abandoned to the ruin. He leaves us with "Six Aphorisms Envisioning Architecture," which are the following:

I. Architecture is the meditation on finitude and failure.
II. Architecture is the symbolic redistribution of desire.
III. Architecture is the execution of exquisite barriers.
IV. Architecture is the fiction of the age critiqued in space.
V. Architecture is the history of a place told in broken code.
VI. Architecture is carried out by a resistance to itself.

These are not a new set of canons. They are thoughts, brief observations on architecture that Darden can define with certainty based on his challenging the ten canons by exploring their underbelly. When we look at Darden's reversals of the canons, we see how they play into these aphorisms. For instance, the reversed canon for Sex Shop is "Architecture fulfills objectifies desire," and that for Hostel is "Architecture takes possession of a place displaces." These two reversed canons play into aphorism II. We see larger theories about architecture in these aphorisms. Architecture can't be anything and everything, hence it is finite, and to realize that architecture is finite is its own failure. Architecture aspires to great heights, but because it is finite, it resists itself. Thus we see the alpha and omega of these aphorisms: I and VI. 

Sadly, these aphorisms are published in 1993 and Darden spends the remaining years of his life promoting his book and the designs therein, focused on his health, and tying up loose ends in his life. Laughing Girls, and to some extent Sex Shop, are really the only projects that illustrate where Darden wanted architecture to go after he killed it. The abstraction and general concepts behind these projects give us glimpses into what Darden's new agenda for architecture would be, but it is not enough. Just like his formal writings on architectural theory are scant and weak, these two projects, as powerful and important as they are on their own, only give us scant and weak ideas of his new agenda.

In a way, Darden's untimely death is a part of his narrative. It is as if he understood he would die and never see his work fully realized, and these six aphorisms are the gift he leaves us. These are the final thoughts of a dead man, and he asks us to pick up the mantel to better realize a new agenda for architecture. Perhaps Darden could never realize a new agenda for architecture. Perhaps it was necessary for Darden to kill architecture, but someone else has to realize a new architecture.

We may never fully understand Darden's ideologies for architecture. Whatever clear ideologies he had, he worked into his designs and a single book. They are coded and rendered in architectural-literary "puns and reedles" (to quote Joyce's Finnegans Wake). They are haphazardly scribbled onto photocopies of renderings and post-it notes. One may even surmise Aphorism VI plays into why Darden could never fully articulate his agenda of architectural reformation: it is too lofty of a goal that is plagued by finitude, and thus resists itself.

In other words: I do not know. I have no idea where Darden wanted his reformation to go. All that is known is that he needed to kill architecture and rebirth it like Tashtego from Plato's honeyhead. It is an unknown agenda with no clear objectives or any tried and tested theorems or axioms. Darden left us with a tabula rasa, but never sets a new table; only parting thoughts of lessons learned. It is terribly pessimistic and bleak, but of course it would appear bleak if we accept Darden's narrative that architecture is dead, Darden killed it. He could have reformed it, maybe, but because of his early demise, the task to reform architecture is our bur[n]den to bear.

Sex Shop & Laughing Girls - Darden's Increasing Abstraction

Laughing Girls section, from project files

One of the more curious aspects about Douglas Darden's creative and intellectual development over the years is his increasing interest in abstraction. Even in Condemned Building we see him moving toward a near anti-architecture, as his designs drift away from a function building and into more architectural statements, and in his final years we will find that he becomes almost totally abstract.

If we look at a timeline of his works, we find that his early projects of note, such as the Ford House, is a very real house for habitation, albeit it was never built. As he begins his career working in the field of visionary architecture, we see unusual structures, but understandably habitable nonetheless, such as his final studio project under Stanley Tigerman, Saloon for Jesse James, as well as Museum of Impostors and Night School. Once we get to some of the later projects in the Condemned Building collection, we see Darden drifting away from buildings per se, and more into the realm of conception. Hostel is a good example of a near non-building, and Confessional, the last project he develops for Condemned Building (Sex Shop had not been developed yet), it is more a conception of privacy becoming public than it is an actual architectural renovation.

Sex Shop model

Darden would largely be concerned with teaching, publishing Condemned Building, and his health between 1990 and 1993, and he would produce no new architecture designs until his final year of life. Starting in mid-1995 he would return to finish Sex Shop, which is curiously absent in Condemned Building, though it has a spread in the book. He states that the work was too controversial to be built and the drawings and model were confiscated. In reality, he never did any work on it apart from the Dis/continuous Genealogy. Nothing survives of Sex Shop except for the Dis/continuous Genealogy, three sheets of yellow trace paper with a significant array of conceptual drawings, collages, and notes, and a simple diagrammatic model. Given that Darden would die within a year of his return to Sex Shop, it feels almost as if he knew he was not going to survive his leukemia — it feels as if he knew his days were numbered and he wanted to wrap up Condemned Building by finishing Sex Shop. It almost feels like he just wanted to get it over with. He never communicated to anyone, as far as I am aware, that he was working on Sex Shop. Even Peter Schneider seems astonished when he writes about Sex Shop, especially when he was helping pack up all of Darden's materials following his dead. Further, the lack of any any research articles, inspirational imagery, or any other sketches indicate that the project had been maturating in his head for over three years, but ultimately he wanted to get it over with.

I have seen the trace paper drawings first hand, and I must admit, they are curiously abstract. It is difficult to discern the scale of the building apart from a simple infill site plan and some cut-outs of Adam and Eve curiously worked into the sections. Looking at Sex Shop is difficult to wrap one's head around. There is no clear sense of entry, habitation, movement through the building, or even an element of human scale. It becomes increasingly clear while looking at the drawings and model that Darden had become more interested in the idea of an immodest proposal and its conception than producing anything we can conceive as habitable. Plans, elevations, and sections feel more like one is looking at one of Lebbeus Woods's parasitic designs than anything seen out of Darden at this point. 

Laughing Place sketch

All of this becomes more clear when Darden begins work on Laughing Girls. The earliest ideas for Laughing Girls appears in 1992 with a series of sketches Darden called Laughing Place, and these sketches are still fairly abstract. Whatever interest he had in this project ceases within a year, probably due to finalizing the publication of Condemned Building. Shortly after completing Sex Shop, Darden picks back up on Laughing Place, but this time calls it Laughing Girls, which appears to have been inspired by the laughing epidemic among the girls of the village Kashasha in Tanzania, Africa. A xeroxed article on this epidemic was found in the project file.

Given Laughing Girl's overwhelming abstraction, it is difficult to determine what direction Darden intended to take with it. Laughing Place had enough "architecture" to it to sense the direction he was going with it, but when he revives the project, he starts from scratch. He seems even more aware of what little time he has left, as in his sketchbook for Laughing Girls he includes a tumorous mass on a throat-like drawing of some kind of structure and adds the note: "The Cancer growing within us our doubts and all that is below this surface." Like Sex Shop, perhaps Darden did not want to leave Laughing Place unfinished.

Darden along with his assistant, James Trewitt, create a series of spectrograms of laughter. Based on a single photo in the project files of a woman, I presume one of the people being recorded was Allison Jo, Darden's wife. These spectrograms are then used to create a series of abstract forms, which Darden then overlays on profile outlines of female forms. These in turn were used to create extremely abstract models.

Spectrogram and form for Polly (left) and form and body of Cass (right)

Model (presumably Cass)

All of this culminates in an architectural comic (twenty years before Bjarke Ingles would have the idea to do Yes! Is More). The comic follows three girls named Helen, Cass, and Polly, who are travelling from Troy to Ithaca, New York. The comic loosely follows various Greek myths, and plays on Greek names, places, and archetypes. Darden even revisits his Dis/continuous Genealogy, not with ideograms, but with names and places. For instance, in the project files he indicates that Polly is Polyxena and Cass is Cassandra, yet he also indicates that they are twins. Polyxena and Cassandra are not twins, though both live during the time of the Trojan War (Polyxena is not mentioned by Homer). Yet, true to Darden's fascination with transgenderism, there are another set of twins closely connected to Helen: Castor and Pollux, the twin brothers of Helen, and are the Dioscuri that make up the constellation Gemini. The Dioscuri have many mythological connections with the Dardanelles, a strait between Turkey and Greece that connects the Black Sea with the Aegean Sea. The Dardanelles were fascinating to Darden, as they are similar to his name. In two postcards to his mother, Darden writes as Polly and addresses the postcards to the Dardans and the Dardanelles.

Postcard to Dardan[elle]s from Polly

Darden appears to be creating his own narrative. Rather than relying on existing narratives, such as Faulkner's As I Lay Dying or Melville's Moby Dick, he is creating his own narrative. It is almost as if he wants to explore things in the other direction, i.e. architecture informs narrative. At the same time, it appears Darden is creating a narrative to use for an architectural project, perhaps to revisit Laughing Place, but that is all conjecture. There are several drafts of Laughing Girls in the project files, and it appears that the sixth iteration was a near final draft. However, his blast crisis began and six months later he passed away. He intended to publish it in Chora 2, but this did not come to fruition. In 2016 Marc Neveu was able to get the final or near final draft of Laughing Girls published in Chora 7 as well as in Confabulations. 

We should not conclude that Darden had grown more interested in abstraction, but rather that Darden was becoming almost anti-architecture. If we are to believe the narrative Darden had built for himself, Condemned Building was the book that killed architecture, this will destroy that, then architecture is dead. Darden appears to have moved into the realm of abstraction out of necessity. If architecture was dead, then it became necessary for Darden to explore abstraction. For Darden, the architect could no longer rely on the old conventional forms of design. Architecture as a design profession relied on human habitation as the primary focus of design and expression. In both Sex Shop and Laughing Girls we see Darden relying on expression of the human body as the basis of architecture. 

Expressions of the body are significant to Darden. This appears to have been a fascination for him from his days of dance and ballet. Darden speaks with great emphasis on drawing as an expression of the body in space when Rob Miller interviews him in the documentary Douglas Darden: Looking After the Underbelly. Sex and laughing are both very positive and intense expressions of the body in space, and as such become the primary motives behind their respective projects. Sex Shop appears to fall short of what Darden was exploring with Laughing Girls, probably due to the constraints of Condemned Building in completing the project. Darden had to work with the Dis/continuous Genealogy and other constraints he built for himself years earlier. But Laughing Girls could more purely be explored and realized without any previous design constraints imposed by previous work. This is probably why Sex Shop still has some discernible aspects of habitability, whereas these aspects are almost totally lost or too abstract in Laughing Girls.

Helen's Water Tower, from project sketchbook

Darden does proceed to produce some architectural drawings, mostly sketches with a handful of more refined technical drawings (see image at the top of this post). Few of his sketches are comprehensively "architectural," such as Helen's Water Tower above. They still are amorphic and abstract. The rest of his sketches are largely topographic. It appears Darden intended to do three separate structures, each representative of the three girls and each on its own hill in what appears to be Ithaca. The project files for Laughing Girls are immense; something like eight or nine bankers' boxes filled with photocopies and sketches and letters, et al. Without any sort of "finished product," it is difficult to reverse engineer his designs the way we can with his other projects. One can only follow the sketches, letters, and notes. Perhaps one day I will get James Trewitt to sit down and discuss Darden with me.

Darden was ultimately taking a completely new direction. Many things about Darden change direction in the period between 1990 and 1996. He tries to work at David Tryba's office, but this apparently became difficult for him. He sought to work on a physical architectural project, but this never yields anything. His designs take new levels of abstraction, and his approach radically changes. A great shift occurred in his approach to architecture, and this is most certainly reflected in Sex Shop and Laughing Girls. The publication of Condemned Building seems to be the turning point for Darden. Even simple designs he would do before giving his students a studio project, such as Killing Mountain, take on some levels of abstraction, becoming more amorphic and mechanical.

Whatever Darden's intended direction was in the event he did not die of leukemia, what is clear is that Darden was drifting away from architecture as we know it, and approached building design after the death of architecture.

Douglas Darden's Dis/Continuous Genealogies

Dis/continuous Genealogy for Confessional, from project file

When looking at the ten projects in Condemned Building, each of them comes with a design idea that Darden called "Dis/continuous Genealogy." This is where he takes four to six images that he finds embody the ideas and mechanisms that are inspirational to him, and he overlays them all into an ideogram. Above we see the four images he selects for Confessional, and below is the ideogram created from them.

Confessional ideogram, from project file

For some projects it seems rather contrived. Other projects it seems very legitimate. Others are a toss-up. In reality, these Dis/continuous Genealogies were made after the project was completed, with the exception of Sex Shop and possibly Oxygen House. Some were made years after the project was complete, such as Saloon for Jesse James and Museum of Impostors. Sex Shop's ideogram was created for the publication of Condemned Building, even though he had done no work on the project, hence its absence from the book. Oxygen House, as best as I can determine, may have actually been created while Darden was working on the design. The earliest sketch I find for Oxygen House is in March 1988, almost two years before he completed it, indicated the idea for Oxygen House was maturating in his head long before producing it. He would create three other projects in the interim of producing Oxygen House. However, there are early sketches and notes for the idea of Condemned Building that date to mid-1988, indicating that he had the idea to produce the book five years before publication. This also appears to be around the time when he develops the idea of doing his Dis/continuous Genealogies.

Darden appears to have gotten the idea of the Dis/continuous Genealogies from his friend Ben Ledbetter. Ledbetter describes in his blog of a time when he and Darden were discussing the basic principle of doing these ideograms, in which Ledbetter wanted to call them "archaeologies," whereas Darden preferred "genealogies," and later "discontinuous genealogies." This is probably around the time that Darden gives a lecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology called "Genealogy/Ideology" delivered in April 1987 (I have looked extensively through the project files and have not been able to find a copy of the lecture, but the timeline seems appropriate). The whole idea of Dis/continuous Genealogy is reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp's idea of "archaeology of knowledge," in which the sources of inspiration are concealed by the artist. Philippe Duboy speaks of Marcel's "archaeology of knowledge" in his work LeQueu: An Architectural Enigma, published in 1987, and may have been the starting point for this whole concept, as Darden was very fond of this book.

Let us break this down. The term "archaeology" implies that historical things, human evidence got covered up and need to be uncovered to understand where things are today. That is a bit oversimplified, but it fits our understanding of Duchamp, Ledbetter, and Darden. For Duchamp, it means he covered up his inspirations and ideas, and through archaeology we can find the original evidence of his works. In a way, for Duchamp, it is not "archaeology of knowledge," but "burying of knowledge," and it is the viewer that will be the archaeologist. For Ledbetter and Darden, it is the use of inspiring images composited to produce an ideogram that becomes the process of "burying knowledge," and through intense analysis of the project, and even the prestigious position of being able to view the project files, that the archaeology can begin. However, Darden recognizes that design is a process with iterations of ideas and forms, much like evolution, or more appropriately "genealogy." So these inspiring images are family members on a family tree that yield the ideogram. By adding "dis/continuous" to this term, Darden is implying that there is a continuity, but also a discontinuity; that it is a part of the design process and narrative, but irrelevant of the active design process that produces the final product.

However, we should not dismiss the Dis/continuous Genealogies as mere afterthoughts. Just because they were created after the project was completed does not mean they do not hold value. It is always dangerous to tell people that the Dis/continuous Genealogies were developed after the project, because then they are seen as being a lie, a cover-up, a total contrivance that should be dismissed. This could not be further from the truth.

The Dis/continuous Genealogies are equally a part of a the narrative Darden builds around his projects as the letter from the client in Oxygen House, the doctor-patient conversation in Clinic for Sleep Disorders, et cetera. When Darden provides additional materials for his projects, they contribute to a narrative he is building. The drawings and photographs of the models (photographed at a great distance with a telescopic lens to make them appear as orthographic as possible) are the direct representations of the design. The texts, letters, descriptions, and diagrams, even the Dis/continuous Genealogies, contribute to the narrative he is building for the project. So even though most of them were created post facto, they still give us insight into Darden's thought process and add color to the project.

There are some curious selections for the Dis/continuous Genealogies, some that even seem literally discontinuous. For instance, in Temple Forgetful, the Colosseum seems to have had an impact, especially given that the site plan is enlarged to include it (see my previous post on this), yet it is not included as one of the images, but it is for Night School's Dis/continuous Genealogy. None of these images are inappropriate, as they embody ideas in the design or in the literary sources that inspire the design. For instance, Melvilla includes an Iroquois meeting hut and an Iroquois hand loom, both of which are appropriate for Queequeg, the indigenous islander Ishmael becomes best friends with in Moby-Dick.

As I have stated before, it is important to interpret Darden's sources of inspiration through the project and narratives he builds, not the other way around. The Dis/continuous Genealogies are no different. For instance, let us look back at Melvilla, in which he includes the Iroquois meeting hut and an upside-down New England meeting house. He is making a play on Ishmael and Queequeg's friendship, and perhaps may be a homage to something Ishmael says: "Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian." It could also be a reference to Darden's rejection of his Presbyterian upbringing (something he alludes to in his writing "Confidences of a Spec-Writer"). Obviously, we can keep playing with this.

Needless to say, the Dis/continuous Genealogies are important. Most people do not know they were usually created after the project was finished, but even in knowing this, they cannot be dismissed. They need to be understood as important aspects of the narratives Darden builds.

Questions and Concerns About Douglas Darden

 

Darden with one of his pieces from 100 Drawing Nights

Years ago, sometime between the late 1990s and the early 2000s there was talk that Ben Ledbetter was going to produce a book on Douglas Darden. Ledbetter never seems to have indicated such, but it just seemed to be the word around the sewing circle. Ledbetter had been Darden's closest friend at Harvard GSD and continued to be his best friend, but it appears Ledbetter would rather relish the memories he had with his friend than produce a book. I also came across rumors that Barbara Ambach was going to produce a book, but such was bogus. There was a legitimate talk that Peter Schneider was going to produce a book, seeing as he was Darden's closest colleague, having hired Darden at CU Denver, and even giving a few of Darden's lectures for him when he was too sick to deliver them himself. Indeed, Schneider was working on a book entitled Beginning from the Underbelly: A History of Douglas Darden's Condemned Building. But Schneider abandoned this project, probably for similar reasons as Ledbetter, but there is also a great deal of politics behind researching, and especially publishing on Darden. I believe there were rumors James Trewitt, Darden's closest student and assistant on Laughing Girls, was going to publish a book, but Trewitt does not corroborates this.

Darden is a relatively niche subject to research. In reality, two or three people would be a sufficient team to rummage through everything Darden produced and make a book that would more or less be the definitive text on Darden. I myself tried to work with others on producing something on Darden, yet everyone appears to think of it as a solo task, and it might as well be. Had Darden lived longer, it could have been a larger task, but I suppose one person is enough. Had he lived longer, he may have had more impact, but he is really only remembered for his intriguing drawings and unorthodox ideas. All this leads to academic territorialism. Academics who have worked or continue to work on Darden want to be the definitive Darden authority. But again, he's a niche topic. Darden research does not yield much or have many implications on other subjects. Darden is a means to an end. It is research on Darden for the sake of Darden research. It can inspire drawing techniques, design approaches, and ideas for narrative architecture, but that is about it: Darden is inspiration, not a means to further exploration of other things. As a result, publications on Darden are also relatively niche, and they tend to be found in obscure, hard to find publications, or worse, in the transactions of academic conferences. Thus Darden remains relatively obscure, while simultaneously being heavily fought over. 

I myself encountered these politics, some which are delicate aspects of his biography that need to be navigated around (he has only been dead for twenty-five years, after all), but also because Darden is such a specific subject, and no one wants to share the credit. It is part of the reason I abandoned further research on Darden for a couple of years after I published the Wikipedia article on the man and his work. It was very disillusioning and, to be frank, absolutely annoying. There really are better things to do with one's time than fight with other academics. So for two years I did nothing. I set Darden aside and focused on other subjects. Then I began to revisit Darden. Slowly at first, but steadily built up extensive piles of notes, diagrams, interviews, and a great collection of sketches, drawings, and photographs. Only recently have I decided to start publishing these things here. Why? Two reasons: firstly, research on Darden needs to be more readily available; secondly, I am not totally sure a book on Darden is appropriate.

Marc Neveu has announced that he intends to publish a book that will "unpack" the ten works in Condemned Building. I am curious to see what Neveu produces. He appears to have access to all the same material I have. After Darden passed away in 1996, Schneider was tasked with gathering all his materials to archive, and they are currently in the Avery Archive at Columbia University, with the exception of a handful of his graduate material at Harvard, and a few pieces in private collections. Schneider did not simply pack everything into boxes, but rather photographed and scanned nearly everything as they were being packed away. In 2015, Schneider passed these digitized files on to me. Thus, following Neveu's work up until 2016 was fairly easy, but he has fallen silent on the matter since, apart from an announcement around two years ago of his intentions to produce the book.

Over the last three or four years I have let Darden's work and ideas marinate in my head. There are a few questions and concerns that are necessary to be asked when it comes to producing a book on Darden.

Firstly, will this book destroy that? Darden worked in narrative. He studied psychology and literature at CU Boulder before going into architecture. Literature was his patron, his client, and he produces literature when he designs. There are several layers of narrative in his works. There is also narrative in his life. As mentioned, there are delicate matters about Darden's life one must tip-toe around, or censor entirely, yet these play an integral part in his work and development. Shall these be ignored? Or shall they be worked into the narrative he built for himself?

Should one expose these narratives? Or should one maintain the narratives he created? Shortly after Darden's death, Schneider gave a few lectures on some of Darden's work, and still maintained the narrative Darden created, then as the years go on, Schneider is more revealing about Darden's inspiration and ideas. To dig into Darden's narratives and expose them creates the dilemma: will this research destroy that narrative? Will the magic and majesty of Darden's narratives be dissolved in favor of exposing him? Obviously, the same goes for amateur academics on blog posts, because I am guilty of this as well.

I personally do not think there is anything wrong with uncovering Darden's ideas and inspirations that in-form his designs. The question concerns "unpacking" his narratives and exposing them, revealing the truth over the myths he carefully constructed. Darden's drawings are alluring and stunning, and that is usually what draws people to his work. But truly the most compelling part of his work is the narratives. It is important that the narratives do not dissolve, or else there is no magic in his work.

Personally, I believe that in order to maintain his narratives one must interpret the sources of his inspiration through his work, and not the other way around. When Antonin Artaud praises The Chimeras by Gerard de Nerval, he writes: "far from seeing Gerard de Nerval explained through Mythology and alchemy, I would like to see alchemy and its Myths explained through the poems of Gerard de Nerval." For Artaud, de Nerval was such an original, so inimitable, so novel and unique that one cannot rely on myth and mysticism to explain him and his work. Rather, one must understand de Nerval and interpret myth and mysticism through him. The same is applicable for Darden. He took literature, myths, scientific articles, philosophical ideas, et al and reenvisioned them through himself, through his own ideas and personal symbolism. When we look at Clinic for Sleep Disorders, we should not interpret it through Rimbaud's poem "Drunken Little Boat," but rather reinterpret Rimbaud through Clinic for Sleep Disorders. When we look at the plan for Oxygen House, we should not try to interpret it through Faulkner's map of Yoknapatawpha County, but rather reinterpret that map and the entire geography of Faulkner's stories through Oxygen House. When we look at Laughing Girls, we should interpret Greek myth and geography, as well as interpret Darden's life and history through Laughing Girls; not the other way around. In treating Darden's approach to his sources of inspiration, it is important to do as Darden did: let the inspiration in-form his designs, but interpret the inspiration through his work. Such is the only way to maintain Darden's narratives without destroying the magic of his work.

If one were to totally expose Darden's life and narratives, totally reveal every aspect of the man and his work, that work should be prepared for publication, sent to the publisher, and then let it sit on a shelf for 100 years — just as Mark Twain did with his autobiography. This will ensure that people who were close to Darden are dead and their children are dead. This will create a significant separation in chronology to allow others to wonder and admire, without being too invested in the exposure of Darden. It will become an impersonal intrigue. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote his own biography, as did Mark Twain, and this allowed both to maintain the narratives they built around their lives and work. Now, decades after their deaths, we can revisit the truth about their lives and work with impersonal intrigue.

We see this in Jean-Jacques LeQueu, whom Darden admired. For hundreds of years he was obscure. Only a handful of people were aware of his work, of which, according to Philippe Duboy, one artist was Marcel Duchamp. LeQueu was brilliant and talented, but due to personal adversities due to the French Revolution, his career never took off. He spiraled into madness and eccentricity, dying with no money and living in a brothel. He produced absolutely stunning drawings and ink wash renderings, but also intense studies on phrenology and facial character, as well as extensive amounts of pornography. Little was known about him personally or his life, save the little that survived in archives. It is next to impossible to uncover and expose the life, inspiration, and ideas of LeQueu, and so he remains an "architectural enigma." We can really only comprehend him through others, such as Duchamp. Had anyone taken a personal interest in unveiling LeQueu shortly after his death, the intrigue would have been personal and controversial in its time. Had such occurred, we would understand him better today, but the intrigue would be impersonal for us, but not in its time.

But we are not dealing within someone who died two and half centuries ago. We are dealing with artist who died twenty-five years ago. His widow is still alive. His best friend is still alive. His closest colleagues are still alive. Many of his students, both the ones who loved him and the ones who hated him, are all still alive. His projects are still a puzzle waiting to be explored and understood. Thus, we must either preserve his narratives for the time being and keep the revealing details hidden, or create an exposure and lock it in a vault for a long time.

This is antithetical to academia. But in order to be honest to academia is also antithetical to Darden. Such is the dilemma with researching and publishing on Darden.