Douglas Darden's Sex Shop: Literary Lenses and the Objects of Architectural Desire "The text is an object of pleasure." Roland Barthes "Vice is virtue, virtue vice." Marquis de Sade "Architecture fulfills objectifies desire." Douglas Darden In his book Condemned Building, Douglas Darden apologizes for the almost total absence of the design studies for his project Sex Shop. He notes in his apologia that the studies for the project were confiscated by the local council because of the explicit sexuality of the project, and the obscenity of its imagery. The agenda for Sex Shop, in his own words, was to show that architecture does not fulfill desire as the accepted Vitruvian canon posits. Instead, for Darden, architecture objectifies desire: makes it real, present and immediate. And in Sex Shop, his admittedly 'immodest proposal,' desire was explicitly rendered as a yearning for the forbidden; as an encounter with the very nature of transgression and the aberrant. The texts he chose to use to explore the idea of cultural and architectural contradiction/contravention were the Book of Genesis, and the Collected works of the Marquis de Sade. In Darden's work, the tensions between text and building, between the literary and the architectural, exist as the fundamental forces that inform his architectural production. Darden wrote: I have an ongoing concern with architecture and its broader relationship to narrative space. Although I was "formally trained" as an architect, I have produced over the past ten years a number of theoretical projects which have been grounded in a text: in a work of literature. Literature and its texts continue to create an agenda for representation which I deem to be pertinently as large as life. I want architecture to have that same agenda. And so literature has been my inspiration, and effectively the sponsor for my work. I continue to believe that a work of literature can not only be a source of inspiration for an architectural project, but that a literary work can more directly in-form architecture. That is, a novel can become the actual client for a building's design: that a project can be derived directly from literature: from its text. A series of documents relating to the Sex Shop project were discovered - or perhaps uncovered is a better term - during the process of cataloging Darden's work after his death from leukemia in 1996. These documents - books with annotations in the margins, letters, postcards, notes, sketches, models, photographs, and pre-final presentation drawings - are the only fragments which remain to shed light on his intentions and insights for this 'absent' project. As one examines these fragments, one quickly understands that Sex Shop's reopresentational absence was deliberate, intentional, and actually quite willful. Darden had clearly thought the whole project through carefully and coherently, and begun exploring its resolution in literary, architectural and formal terms. He clearly recognized that the way it was evolving represented a significant departure from his previous work, and that he needed more time, more thought, and more work to fully understand the implications of this methodological shift. While he still followed his general process of relying heavily on the tensions created between a careful selection of texts to generate the 'story' and program for the building, the particular way he used text and subtext in this project was very different from his use of literature to create the program in his earlier work. And so the 'authorities' helpfully confiscated the project, and gave him time to ponder. In Sex Shop Darden used the tension between texts - and between our notions of vice and virtue, right and wrong, ordinary and aberrant, moral and immoral/amoral that those texts held and instanced - to construct a fictive and literary lens through which the intellectual, imaginative and architectural potentials of the project beneath the project - the program behind the program - could be observed, magnified and clarified. That lens allowed him to see 'architecture's underbelly' just a little more precisely and in a little more detail than he had been able to in his earlier work. It allowed him to pursue alternative readings of the program - to explore and develop positions on issues of gender, sexuality, sensuality and convention within the framework of this extraordinary project. This paper presents Darden's unpublished project for Sex Shop. It talks about his unique method of .approaching architecture through the literary frame, articulate that process, explore the project's 'texts' and fictions, and explores the unique and idiosyncratic way in which Darden's constructed the literary lenses that allowed him to embody and instance the tensions of the texts in the work so that this building could indeed, in a Barthian sense, become an object of pleasure and delight. |