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.