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 resistence to itself.
Has anyone read this book? Condemned Building? I came across these in my notes today and dug it back up. Fucking genius! Theres something about witnessing the soul of our profession undermined that I find rapturous. The mask is removed and exposed for the absurd bauble it is. A halloween costume of Howard Roark reading dada at a cocktail party. I find it sublime. So often we posit to be the saviours of civilization, perhaps it is a great fortune that the only thing we have ever successfully done is to demonstrate its absurdity with such fury and grandure.
I like the phrase "...demonstrate its absurdity with such fury and grandeur" better than any of the aphorisms. I like to think of committing every act with intense passion.
Never heard of the book, but it sounds intriguing.
The aphorisms come just at the end as sort of a summary. Its a book of 10 "allegorical works of architecture" built out of fears and dreams and mental relics from the site and program laid out in 'composite ideograms'. Each project is forms sort of an anti-thesis for architectural assumptions; 'a house for living' becomes 'a house for dying', [oxygen house], 'a monument for remembering' becomes 'a monument for forgetting' [temple forgetful]. Mostly though, the drawing are astounding. Even if you hated everything esle about the book the sections alone will blow your hair back. Everything though, from the neurotic little notes in the margins and descriptions, to the brilliantly psychotic projects, Museum for Imposters, Clinic for Sleep Disorders, Night School, just give you that devilish little grin inside.
Here is the Oxygen house, not even the best project but the only one I could find images of...
dis/continuous geneology:
pre-mortem section:
post mortem section:
wish I could find better images, but yea. worth checking out!
Ah yes: Oxygen House - I do remember those drawings from grad school. Incerdibly beautiful.
This might tie in well with the cemeteries/death architecture thread - wasn't Oxygen House something like a huge iron lung that actually keeps the inhabitant alive?
it's a great book, its been a while since i've seen it. too bad he died. if i recall correctly his drawings were confiscated by the Canadians because they were perceived as perverse/pornographic.
another guy you should check out is Walter Pichler. fantastic work.
funny, i just read through condemned building last night.
oxygen house was designed for a former railworker who suffered a collapsed lung in a job related accident. when the rail company sold the land where the accident occured, he bought the parcel intending to live his remaining years there, die there, and be entombed there. unfortunately, he passed not long after the footings had been poured so the house was never finished.
the beauty to me is the story behind it...that this man felt so attached to this singular moment and its physical result that effectively committed the rest of his life (and afterlife) to embracing it.
the drawings are equally amazing and provocative, but much like lebbeus woods' onefivefour, i have trouble seeing a point that extends beyond their intrinsic beauty. i'm with j and cf in that his theoretical musings don't resonate for me.
We mentioned the 'meat' in a thread not too long ago. Architecture has lost its meat. It has become hollow. vacuous. inert. It is like dry skin and bones, polished and hermetically preserved. It is lenin in his glass box wearing a Dolce Gabanna dress. All that glam, all that gloss and sex, and when you look behind the screen, theres nothing there. There is no warmth, no presence, no soul.
Materialism. We treat our materials as if they are inert, as if they have no life at all. They are at best commodities, symbols of status. We treat glass as if it were 'just glass', concrete as if it were 'just concrete', without any acknowledgement that these materials have very real, nuanced, cultural and symbolic effects and consequences. Form too! The psychological effect of a box or a curve or a gable is bound with 10,000 years of the most intense emotional social development. All the stories of human history are written in them, and yet we, the very people who should recognize those intense characters, toss them around as if they mean nothing.
At the core of it, beneath the facetiousness and mimicry, I think doug darden was trying to communicate this. Every site, every program, every empty lot and abandoned factory is brimming with life, marvelous, absurd, fictitious life. We come at things with dead eyes. We say, 'this site is empty' or 'this site is broken' and presume 'I will finish it' and 'I will fix it.' But it is pretense, hollow pretense. Our very attitude deprives our work of life. The allegorical method is a tool, a way of bearing the character of a site, a client, from words to images and finally into built space. If post-modernism failed, it is because it did not truly value or respect the images it was manipulating. It was sarcastic and self-mocking. It also did not understand how meanings change as they move from 2 to 3 and 4 dimensions. A boot on a page or even in real life has a very different meaning from a boot that is 30 feet tall and you can walk inside, and to pretend the two are equivalent misses the very purpose of the technique.
In the end it is no more arbitrary than to constrain ones self to boxes or blobs or anything else. We hide behind this stylistic mask, and then seem baffled when our magnificently empty spaces are passed off by the general public as ‘lifeless’. We run to fashion, newness, the cheapest of thrills to keep our audience entertained, and seem surprised when our fickle tastes are abandoned just a few years down the road. Now Im not saying doug darden is the savior of architecture. I just take it as a very sharp look in the mirror.
I'm not sure what you mean by soul "no soul". Isn't that soul still there whether one intentionally tries to destroy, remove, invert, or any other technique on the "philosophical" tool belt of the last 60+ years.
Architects flatter themselves when they say thier designs have no presence, no soul, no warmth, because are you not then saying there are no other people?
interesting and eloquent take oe. i'm still having trouble connecting how the allegorical method imbues architecture with soul. to provide a little more insight into my comment above...
at this point in my limited architectural education (both formal and informal), guys like darden and woods both amaze and confuse me. as i stated above, their drawings are stunning...it's their rationale that i have trouble grasping, be it words stated on paper or artistic flourishes on canvas.
how does one discern between the intentional and the arbitrary? j did a good job of describing my thoughts as i read through condemned building. darden obviously seeks to shake up the establishment by inverting a set of architectural assumptions. but to what end? i have a tough time differentiating between what is rational method and what is merely food for thought?
it seems many architectural books thrive on selling the illusion of pattern and rationale out of semi-calculated randomness. it instills in the reader the feeling that "if i can't make any sense of it, it must be genius." a.k.a. if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
an example: lebbeus woods uses pages of number patterns as transitions between his art in onefivefour. the numbers are arranged in ways that, via lines and scribbles drawn between and around them, are intended to imply logical connections, physical calculations, or cryptography a la John Nash. i want to drink the kool-aid, but i have a hard time believing they are anything other than artistically arranged numbers and are merely intended to give the illusion of scientific rigor being applied to the formation of his art.
i don't doubt woods' genius as an artist, i'm just using it as an example to explain why the "theory" of guys like woods, darden, et al is sometimes a little hard for me to digest.
perhaps i should be doing more feeling and less thinking.
If "architecture" is "art", where does scientific rigour fit into the equation.
What do you mean by scientific- an air tight method that reduces the variables for greater control of the output - people will know exactly what your buildings mean?
that's exactly what i'm trying to get my brain around, cf.
if and when is architecture art? that's the million dollar question that has no answer other than "it depends".
i guess by scientific rigor i mean, unless there is a foundation of fact or empirical observation behind a theory-based architecture, what is the point of trying to call it theory-based?
it's fine if the rationale behind a design is "because i thought it looked cool", but i wouldn't exactly call that a theory.
perhaps my interpretation of what qualifies as theory is too stiff.
broccolijet, i believe that you might have defined theory too stiffly.
here's my take on this...and i have to admit to being complete brought to my knees by darden's book back in undergrad (way back these days). the beauty of the aphorisms that are quoted at the beginning of this thread and the projects in the book becomes relevant at a theoretical level in that they reveal a condition based on "truth-iness" and expound on it to question conventions of architecture...whether techtonic, representational, or conceptual.
the aphorism: Architecture is the execution of exquisite barriers.
is amazing in that the line forms the basis of architecture...it is inherently a political act. to define a barrier is to claim ownership...this very neatly segways into another aphorism: Architecture is the symbolic redistribution of desire. in that to define and quantify space and then transform it is to reorganize it via economic, political, cultural, or technological vectors.
back to the stiffness of the definition of theory....
the concept of truth-iness (and here i'm taking a bit of a bow to mr. michael speaks) is that whether something is fully true or approximated is less important than the overall argument being made and its relationship to a truth (i.e. truth does not actually exist and all causality is approximated...truth is a creation of our particular cultural history and disposition)...so what does this mean. is it a false goal to strive for truth or causality...no, but one must understand that logic is even at its most scientific formed by the illogical. otherwise no-one would make groundbreaking leaps, paradigm shifts would not occur because the illogical (the world is not flat, the earth is not at the center of the universe) would never be posited and then through investigation and experimentation proven as a new truth-iness.
(btw back in undergrad i asked woods about those pages of numbers and the lines connecting them hoping to have him reveal some incredible insight...his response "they just looked good" but it did then inform his research into patterns...although in subsequent studies it emerged as a field of forces)
and back to darden's projects each is based on a mythical circumstance and uses the myth vs. reality to explore our collective culture and architecture's collective culture. so it isn't inherently scientific, but there is an inherent logical rigour to the exploration
thanks for a helpful response futureboy. i understand the "truth-iness" concept and where it comes from. i guess i need to digest some of these works a little more deeply before truly forming an opinion on the validity of the concepts...in other words be a little more open-minded.
regardless, the artwork alone is well worth the price of the books.
btw - thanks for passing along your very cool interaction with woods...nice to have my questions answered straight from the source.
Dang, that was one of my books that got lost bringing it into studio for teaching
- saw Darden lecture on the work therein back in the day. Haven't heard about him or the book in a while.
His 'ideograms' offered an amazingly simple way into the super-dense nature of that work (for him and us I guess), more so than words (which is typical with architects). in this 'post-theoretical' / 'post-critical' era one wonders whether he couldn't get by fine without the wordiness or words at all...
I just had a close look at Condemned Building, and found it entirely not to my taste. A bit jokey, but not very funny. Theorised only shallowly (unless he writes about them somewhere else).
the sad thing about darden's work is that he died so young...just 42 only a few years after condemned buildings was published.
it is funny that i hadn't heard about him for quite some time (really since his death while i was still an undergrad)....i wonder why the renewed interest...although i can definitely speculate.
my interest is purely circumstantial...i never would've heard of the guy if my teacher hadn't brought his copy of condemned building to class last week along with a handful of other monographs. ah, serendipity...
he died in '96 right? i've seen articles that talk around his 'troubles', but does anyone know how he passed or what his troubles entailed?
I think one finds the meaning in architecture just exactly in that zone of discomfort between art and engineering (or between right brain and left brain, or between theory and practice, or between...pick your poision.) if you find one side, or the other, too comfortable, that means you better push yourself to the other end of the scale.
He was my "Master Studio" professor in 1994, just two years before he passed. He was the most intense individual I ever met...driven to create to his very last breath. A couple of times I found him semi-conscious on the floor of the men's room in intense pain, gasping for air. He never gave up...on me, on the profession, on life. He was the first genius I met that really scared the shit out of me in many many ways!
Thanks shamrock! O2 House and sexton are now in the possession of the MoMA, thanks to Ben Ledbetter and Marc Neveu...Marc is currently publishing a book with Darden's work included.
Douglas Darden's Six Aphorisms
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 resistence to itself.
Has anyone read this book? Condemned Building? I came across these in my notes today and dug it back up. Fucking genius! Theres something about witnessing the soul of our profession undermined that I find rapturous. The mask is removed and exposed for the absurd bauble it is. A halloween costume of Howard Roark reading dada at a cocktail party. I find it sublime. So often we posit to be the saviours of civilization, perhaps it is a great fortune that the only thing we have ever successfully done is to demonstrate its absurdity with such fury and grandure.
the gf has it on the shelf, although i've never opened it.
I like the phrase "...demonstrate its absurdity with such fury and grandeur" better than any of the aphorisms. I like to think of committing every act with intense passion.
Never heard of the book, but it sounds intriguing.
The aphorisms come just at the end as sort of a summary. Its a book of 10 "allegorical works of architecture" built out of fears and dreams and mental relics from the site and program laid out in 'composite ideograms'. Each project is forms sort of an anti-thesis for architectural assumptions; 'a house for living' becomes 'a house for dying', [oxygen house], 'a monument for remembering' becomes 'a monument for forgetting' [temple forgetful]. Mostly though, the drawing are astounding. Even if you hated everything esle about the book the sections alone will blow your hair back. Everything though, from the neurotic little notes in the margins and descriptions, to the brilliantly psychotic projects, Museum for Imposters, Clinic for Sleep Disorders, Night School, just give you that devilish little grin inside.
Here is the Oxygen house, not even the best project but the only one I could find images of...
dis/continuous geneology:
pre-mortem section:
post mortem section:
wish I could find better images, but yea. worth checking out!
Ah yes: Oxygen House - I do remember those drawings from grad school. Incerdibly beautiful.
This might tie in well with the cemeteries/death architecture thread - wasn't Oxygen House something like a huge iron lung that actually keeps the inhabitant alive?
beautiful. that's actually why the book is on the shelf - a studio professor required it to be used as a reference for representation techniques.
it's a great book, its been a while since i've seen it. too bad he died. if i recall correctly his drawings were confiscated by the Canadians because they were perceived as perverse/pornographic.
another guy you should check out is Walter Pichler. fantastic work.
His book is a fiction of this or some age.
the drawings are beautiful, but hard-core pomo allegory doesn't ever really get you anywhere in the end.
funny, i just read through condemned building last night.
oxygen house was designed for a former railworker who suffered a collapsed lung in a job related accident. when the rail company sold the land where the accident occured, he bought the parcel intending to live his remaining years there, die there, and be entombed there. unfortunately, he passed not long after the footings had been poured so the house was never finished.
the beauty to me is the story behind it...that this man felt so attached to this singular moment and its physical result that effectively committed the rest of his life (and afterlife) to embracing it.
the drawings are equally amazing and provocative, but much like lebbeus woods' onefivefour, i have trouble seeing a point that extends beyond their intrinsic beauty. i'm with j and cf in that his theoretical musings don't resonate for me.
How to say this...
We mentioned the 'meat' in a thread not too long ago. Architecture has lost its meat. It has become hollow. vacuous. inert. It is like dry skin and bones, polished and hermetically preserved. It is lenin in his glass box wearing a Dolce Gabanna dress. All that glam, all that gloss and sex, and when you look behind the screen, theres nothing there. There is no warmth, no presence, no soul.
Materialism. We treat our materials as if they are inert, as if they have no life at all. They are at best commodities, symbols of status. We treat glass as if it were 'just glass', concrete as if it were 'just concrete', without any acknowledgement that these materials have very real, nuanced, cultural and symbolic effects and consequences. Form too! The psychological effect of a box or a curve or a gable is bound with 10,000 years of the most intense emotional social development. All the stories of human history are written in them, and yet we, the very people who should recognize those intense characters, toss them around as if they mean nothing.
At the core of it, beneath the facetiousness and mimicry, I think doug darden was trying to communicate this. Every site, every program, every empty lot and abandoned factory is brimming with life, marvelous, absurd, fictitious life. We come at things with dead eyes. We say, 'this site is empty' or 'this site is broken' and presume 'I will finish it' and 'I will fix it.' But it is pretense, hollow pretense. Our very attitude deprives our work of life. The allegorical method is a tool, a way of bearing the character of a site, a client, from words to images and finally into built space. If post-modernism failed, it is because it did not truly value or respect the images it was manipulating. It was sarcastic and self-mocking. It also did not understand how meanings change as they move from 2 to 3 and 4 dimensions. A boot on a page or even in real life has a very different meaning from a boot that is 30 feet tall and you can walk inside, and to pretend the two are equivalent misses the very purpose of the technique.
In the end it is no more arbitrary than to constrain ones self to boxes or blobs or anything else. We hide behind this stylistic mask, and then seem baffled when our magnificently empty spaces are passed off by the general public as ‘lifeless’. We run to fashion, newness, the cheapest of thrills to keep our audience entertained, and seem surprised when our fickle tastes are abandoned just a few years down the road. Now Im not saying doug darden is the savior of architecture. I just take it as a very sharp look in the mirror.
I'm not sure what you mean by soul "no soul". Isn't that soul still there whether one intentionally tries to destroy, remove, invert, or any other technique on the "philosophical" tool belt of the last 60+ years.
Architects flatter themselves when they say thier designs have no presence, no soul, no warmth, because are you not then saying there are no other people?
From what should architecture be saved?
interesting and eloquent take oe. i'm still having trouble connecting how the allegorical method imbues architecture with soul. to provide a little more insight into my comment above...
at this point in my limited architectural education (both formal and informal), guys like darden and woods both amaze and confuse me. as i stated above, their drawings are stunning...it's their rationale that i have trouble grasping, be it words stated on paper or artistic flourishes on canvas.
how does one discern between the intentional and the arbitrary? j did a good job of describing my thoughts as i read through condemned building. darden obviously seeks to shake up the establishment by inverting a set of architectural assumptions. but to what end? i have a tough time differentiating between what is rational method and what is merely food for thought?
it seems many architectural books thrive on selling the illusion of pattern and rationale out of semi-calculated randomness. it instills in the reader the feeling that "if i can't make any sense of it, it must be genius." a.k.a. if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
an example: lebbeus woods uses pages of number patterns as transitions between his art in onefivefour. the numbers are arranged in ways that, via lines and scribbles drawn between and around them, are intended to imply logical connections, physical calculations, or cryptography a la John Nash. i want to drink the kool-aid, but i have a hard time believing they are anything other than artistically arranged numbers and are merely intended to give the illusion of scientific rigor being applied to the formation of his art.
i don't doubt woods' genius as an artist, i'm just using it as an example to explain why the "theory" of guys like woods, darden, et al is sometimes a little hard for me to digest.
perhaps i should be doing more feeling and less thinking.
If "architecture" is "art", where does scientific rigour fit into the equation.
What do you mean by scientific- an air tight method that reduces the variables for greater control of the output - people will know exactly what your buildings mean?
that's exactly what i'm trying to get my brain around, cf.
if and when is architecture art? that's the million dollar question that has no answer other than "it depends".
i guess by scientific rigor i mean, unless there is a foundation of fact or empirical observation behind a theory-based architecture, what is the point of trying to call it theory-based?
it's fine if the rationale behind a design is "because i thought it looked cool", but i wouldn't exactly call that a theory.
perhaps my interpretation of what qualifies as theory is too stiff.
broccolijet, i believe that you might have defined theory too stiffly.
here's my take on this...and i have to admit to being complete brought to my knees by darden's book back in undergrad (way back these days). the beauty of the aphorisms that are quoted at the beginning of this thread and the projects in the book becomes relevant at a theoretical level in that they reveal a condition based on "truth-iness" and expound on it to question conventions of architecture...whether techtonic, representational, or conceptual.
the aphorism: Architecture is the execution of exquisite barriers.
is amazing in that the line forms the basis of architecture...it is inherently a political act. to define a barrier is to claim ownership...this very neatly segways into another aphorism: Architecture is the symbolic redistribution of desire. in that to define and quantify space and then transform it is to reorganize it via economic, political, cultural, or technological vectors.
back to the stiffness of the definition of theory....
the concept of truth-iness (and here i'm taking a bit of a bow to mr. michael speaks) is that whether something is fully true or approximated is less important than the overall argument being made and its relationship to a truth (i.e. truth does not actually exist and all causality is approximated...truth is a creation of our particular cultural history and disposition)...so what does this mean. is it a false goal to strive for truth or causality...no, but one must understand that logic is even at its most scientific formed by the illogical. otherwise no-one would make groundbreaking leaps, paradigm shifts would not occur because the illogical (the world is not flat, the earth is not at the center of the universe) would never be posited and then through investigation and experimentation proven as a new truth-iness.
(btw back in undergrad i asked woods about those pages of numbers and the lines connecting them hoping to have him reveal some incredible insight...his response "they just looked good" but it did then inform his research into patterns...although in subsequent studies it emerged as a field of forces)
and back to darden's projects each is based on a mythical circumstance and uses the myth vs. reality to explore our collective culture and architecture's collective culture. so it isn't inherently scientific, but there is an inherent logical rigour to the exploration
thanks for a helpful response futureboy. i understand the "truth-iness" concept and where it comes from. i guess i need to digest some of these works a little more deeply before truly forming an opinion on the validity of the concepts...in other words be a little more open-minded.
regardless, the artwork alone is well worth the price of the books.
btw - thanks for passing along your very cool interaction with woods...nice to have my questions answered straight from the source.
Dang, that was one of my books that got lost bringing it into studio for teaching
- saw Darden lecture on the work therein back in the day. Haven't heard about him or the book in a while.
His 'ideograms' offered an amazingly simple way into the super-dense nature of that work (for him and us I guess), more so than words (which is typical with architects). in this 'post-theoretical' / 'post-critical' era one wonders whether he couldn't get by fine without the wordiness or words at all...
I just had a close look at Condemned Building, and found it entirely not to my taste. A bit jokey, but not very funny. Theorised only shallowly (unless he writes about them somewhere else).
I liked the ideograms, though.
the sad thing about darden's work is that he died so young...just 42 only a few years after condemned buildings was published.
it is funny that i hadn't heard about him for quite some time (really since his death while i was still an undergrad)....i wonder why the renewed interest...although i can definitely speculate.
my interest is purely circumstantial...i never would've heard of the guy if my teacher hadn't brought his copy of condemned building to class last week along with a handful of other monographs. ah, serendipity...
he died in '96 right? i've seen articles that talk around his 'troubles', but does anyone know how he passed or what his troubles entailed?
he died of leukemia......
I think one finds the meaning in architecture just exactly in that zone of discomfort between art and engineering (or between right brain and left brain, or between theory and practice, or between...pick your poision.) if you find one side, or the other, too comfortable, that means you better push yourself to the other end of the scale.
the balance point never stays balanced for long.
He was my "Master Studio" professor in 1994, just two years before he passed. He was the most intense individual I ever met...driven to create to his very last breath. A couple of times I found him semi-conscious on the floor of the men's room in intense pain, gasping for air. He never gave up...on me, on the profession, on life. He was the first genius I met that really scared the shit out of me in many many ways!
Thanks shamrock! O2 House and sexton are now in the possession of the MoMA, thanks to Ben Ledbetter and Marc Neveu...Marc is currently publishing a book with Darden's work included.
broccolijet - Darden was "troubled" after being diagnosed with terminal cancer at 42 years old.
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