Architecture-Decline, Dystopia, and Death

Architecture Post Mortem
Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series

series editor: eamonn canniffe, manchester school of architecture,
manchester metropolitan university, uk
The discipline of Architecture is undergoing subtle transformation as design

awareness permeates our visually dominated culture. Technological change,
the search for sustainability and debates around the value of place and meaning
of the architectural gesture are aspects which will affect the cities we inhabit. This
series seeks to address such topics, both theoretically and in practice, through
the publication of high quality original research, written and visual.
Other titles in this series
The Funerary Architecture of Atatürk

The Construction and Maintenance of National Memory
Christopher S. Wilson
ISBN 978 1 4094 2977 7
Architecture as a Performing Art

Marcia Feuerstein and Gray Read
ISBN 978 1 4094 4235 6
Forthcoming titles in this series
The Architecture of Pleasure

British Amusement Parks 1900–1939
Josephine Kane
ISBN 978 1 4094 1074 4
Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital Project

An Investigation into its Structural Formulation
Mahnaz Shah
ISBN 978 1 4094 4277 6
Architecture Post Mortem
The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia, and
Death
Edited by
Donald Kunze
Penn State University, USA
David Bertolin
Louisiana State University, USA
Simone Brott
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
© Donald Kunze, David Bertolini and Simone Brott 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Donald Kunze, David Bertolini and Simone Brott have asserted their rights under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-4094-6221-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4094-6222-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-4094-6223-1 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN: 978-1-4724-0724-5 (ebk – ePUB)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Architecture post mortem : the diastolic architecture of decline, dystopia, and death /
[edited] by Donald Kunze, David Bertolini and Simone Brott.
pages cm. -- (Ashgate studies in architecture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-6221-7 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-6222-4 (pbk) -- ISBN 978-1-
4094-6223-1 (ebook)
1. Architecture--Philosophy. 2. Death. I. Kunze, Donald, 1947- editor of compilation. II.
Bertolini, Charles, editor of compilation. III. Brott, Simone, editor of compilation.
NA2543.D43A73 2013
724’.7--dc23
2013002706
IV
for Marco Frascari
1945–2013
architect, educator, theorist
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Contents
List of Figures ix
Authors’ Biographies xiii
Introduction: The Way Things Are 1

Donald Kunze
1 Driven into the Public: The Psychic Constitution of Space 15

Todd McGowan
2 Dead or Alive in Joburg 31

Simone Brott
3 Building In-Between the Two Deaths: A Post Mortem Manifesto 51

Nadir Lahiji
4 Kant, Sade, Ethics and Architecture 63

David Bertolini
5 Post Mortem: Building Destruction 81

Kazi K. Ashraf
6 The Slow-Fast Architecture of Love in the Ruins 99

Donald Kunze
7 Progress: Re-Building the Ruins of Architecture 121

Gevork Hartoonian
8 Adrian Stokes: Surface Suicide 139

Peggy Deamer
9 A Window to the Soul: Depth in Early Modern Section Drawing 153

Paul Emmons
viii Architecture Post Mortem
10 Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico 179

Erika Naginski
11 Architectural Asceticism and Austerity 205

Didem Ekici
12 900 Miles to Paradise, and Other Afterlives of Architecture 219

Dennis Maher
Index241
List of Figures
5.1 Photocollage, Stanley Maenads of Dionysos.

Tigerman (1978). The Douris (painter), Greek
drowning of the Titanic. (active c. 500–460 BCE).
Image: courtesy of Stanley Red-Figure Cup Showing
Tigerman the Death of Pentheus
(exterior) and a Maenad
5.2 Scene of the burning (interior), c. 480 BCE,
house from Andrei Greek (Athens), Late
Tarkovsky’s Offret (1986). Archaic period (500–480
Photo: Lars-Olof Löthwall, BCE). Terracotta 5 h. x
©Löthwall/The Swedish 11½ in. diameter (12.7 h.
Film Institute, 1986, 2012 x 29.2 cm diameter), AP
2000.02. Image: Kimbell
5.3 Kinkakuji, The Temple Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
of the Golden Pavilion.
Photo by Keith Pomakis, 5.6 Vastupurusa in the
September 21, 2004, mandala. Drawing by author
Wikimedia Commons
5.7 Barcelona Pavilion,
5.4 The Buddha under a Reconstruction, 1983–
distended lintel. Image 1986. Photo: Donald
from Albert Foucher, Kunze, May 2012
L’art gréco-bouddhique
du Gandhâra: étude sur 5.8 Statue, “Alba,” by Georg
les origines de l’influence Kolbe, Barcelona Pavilion,
classique dans l’art Reconstruction, 1983–
bouddhique de l’Inde et 1986. Photo: Donald
de l’Extrême-Orient (Paris: Kunze, May 2012
Imprimerie Nationale,
1905), Fig. 77. Photo by author 6.1 The ruin as the traumatic
end of architecture, TR,
5.5 King Pentheus torn apart echoes the symmetry
at his sparagmos (ritual (and cosmic gestures)
dismemberment) by the of architecture’s
emergence from the Real
x Architecture Post Mortem
of nature revealed by 3. *63-349 F, Houghton

trauma, RT. In between, Library, Harvard College Library
Festarchitektur simulates
both beginnings and ends 10.2 Johann Heinrich Füssli,
through an acceleration The Artist in Despair over
of building toward a the Grandeur of Antique
crystalline state. The Ruins, 1778–1780.
“glue” holding together Kunsthaus, Zurich,
the forward flows of both Switzerland. Photo:
nature and then culture, Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art
φ, are “stretched” into sites Resource, N.Y.
of exception. Graphic by author
10.3 Plate XXIX, from Giovanni
6.2 Architecture’s Battista Piranesi, Le
synchronization of its Antichità Romane, Rome,
resources with demands 1784 edition, volume
binds utilitas and firmitas 2. *63–349 F, Houghton
within an “ideological” Library, Harvard College Library
norm. Clinamen (in
Rebecca, Maxim’s 10.4 Plate XLIII, from Giovanni
attempted suicide), plays Battista Piranesi, Le
out venustas in terms of Antichità Romane, Rome,
the motility, scale, and 1784 edition, volume
identity dysfunctions 2. *63–349 F, Houghton
generated as subjectivity Library, Harvard College Library
attempts to escape from
synchronism. Fast-slow 10.5 Plate XI, from Giovanni
phenomena are reflected Battista Piranesi,
in the steps of the “forced Della Magnificenza ed
choices” offered by fate/ Architettura de’ Romani,
tuchē, culminating in the Rome, 1761. Typ
destruction of Manderley 725.61.696 PF, Houghton
by fire. Graphic by author Library, Harvard College Library
9.1 “Sincerity,” allegorical 10.6 Plate XX, from Giovanni

garden statue at the Battista Piranesi,
Teatro Olimpico (Andrea Giovanni Battista Piranesi,
Palladio, architect), Della Magnificenza ed
Vicenza, Italy. A vertical Architettura de’ Romani,
mandorla-shaped wound Rome, 1761. Typ
opens a window to the 725.61.696 PF, Houghton
heart. Photo by author Library, Harvard College Library
10.1 Plate XLII, from Giovanni 10.7 Plate IX, from Giovanni
Battista Piranesi, Le Battista Piranesi,
Antichità Romane, Rome, Osservazioni di Gio. Battista
1784 edition, volume Piranesi sopra la Lettre
List of figures xi
de M. Mariette … Rome: Installation at the Farrar

Per Generoso Salomoni, Mansion, Buffalo, NY,
1765. Typ 725.61.696 2004–2009. Photo by author
PF, Houghton Library,
Harvard College Library 12.4 Dennis Maher. “Mantis.”
Demolition debris, house
11.1 Goethe’s garden house paint and hardware.
in Weimar, renovated in Installation at the Farrar
1776. Goethe’s house Mansion, Buffalo, NY,
was an oft-mentioned 2004–2009. Photo by author
precedent for the
Biedermeier middle-class 12.5 Installation view of Farrar
dwelling. From Vesper, Mansion Project, Buffalo,
Will, and Paul Fechter, Lob NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
der Armut (Berlin: Furche-
Verlag, 1921) 12.6 Dennis Maher. “Vessel.”
11.2 A middle-class living paint and hardware.
room before and after Installation at the Farrar
simplification process. Mansion, Buffalo, NY,
From Bruno Taut, Die 2004–2009. Photo by author
neue Wohnung: Die Frau
als Schöpferin (Leipzig: 12.7 Dennis Maher. “Crest.”
Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1924) Demolition debris, house
paint and hardware.
12.1 St. Gerard’s Church, Installation at the Farrar
Buffalo, New York (left), Mansion, Buffalo, NY,
source: Dennis Maher, and 2004–2009. Photo by author
Norcross, Georgia (right).
Source: Mary Our Queen Parish 12.8 Dennis Maher. “Feather.”
12.2 Farrar Mansion paint and hardware.
Restoration, 2004–2009. Installation at the Farrar
Photos by author Mansion, Buffalo, NY,
2004–2009. Photo by author
12.3 Dennis Maher. “Bloom.”
paint and hardware.
Authors’ Biographies
Kazi Ashraf teaches at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and writes on architecture
and asceticism, phenomenology of architecture and landscape, Asian urbanism,
and architecture in South Asia. He was guest editor of the Architectural Design
special issue Made in India (November/December 2007), which received the Pierre
Vago Journalism Award from the International Committee of Architectural Critics
(CICA). His most recent books include The Hermit’s Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in
India (University of Hawaii Press, 2013) and Designing Dhaka: Manifesto for a Better
City (Loka, 2012). Forthcoming books include creating an urban design framework
for a hydrological city, and tracing the ascetic ideology of modern architecture.
David Bertolini is an associate professor at Louisiana State University School of

Architecture. He has an interdisciplinary background of education and research
with a Ph.D. from Temple University in English and a Masters Degree in architecture
from Virginia Tech. His research is interdisciplinary and focuses on the intersection
of theories concerning how ideology constructs subjectivity and is expressed in
architecture, literature, and film. His recent publications include, “The Architecture
of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Nazi Fantasy” in Holocaust Studies: A Journal of
Culture and History; “Bloom’s Death in ‘Ithaca’ or the END of Ulysses” in The Journal
of Modern Literature; “The Postmortem Image: Peter Greenaway’s Documentary
Death in the Seine: Writing the History of a Corpse” in Studies in Documentary Film;
and “Architecture and the Cinematic Window: Hitchcock’s Rear Window and the
Fantasy Frame.”
Simone Brott is Coordinator of History and Theory of Architecture at Queensland

University of Technology, Australia. She obtained a Masters from Yale School of
Architecture, in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Urbanism, in
2003, whereupon she was premiated the Everett Victor Meeks Graduate Fellowship
for academic excellence. Her Ph.D. in Architecture, examined by Anthony Vidler
and John Rajchman, was awarded by The University of Melbourne, Australia,
in 2007. Her first book Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari
at the Horizon of the Real, was published in 2011. Her recent essays are: “Esprit
Futur,” Log 23 (Fall 2011); “Collective Equipments of Power: The Road and the City,”
Thresholds 40 (Cambridge: MIT, 2012); “Modernity’s Opiate, or the Crisis of Iconic
xiv Architecture Post Mortem
Architecture,” Log 26 (Fall 2012); and “Architecture et Révolution: Le Corbusier and

the Fascist Revolution,” Thresholds 42 (Winter 2013). She is currently the recipient of
a fellowship to undertake a study at the Fondation Le Corbusier archive in 2013 for
her project on French modernity, fascism, and enlightenment.
Peggy Deamer is Assistant Dean and Professor of Architecture at Yale University.

She is a principal in the firm of Deamer, Architects. She received a B.Arch. from The
Cooper Union and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her dissertation on Adrian
Stokes emphasized the relationship he explored between vision, the body, and
craft. In 2003, she organized the “Architecture and Psychoanalysis” symposium at
Yale School of Architecture. Articles by Ms. Deamer have appeared in Assemblage,
Praxis, Perspecta, Architecture and Psychoanalysis: The Annuals of Psychoanalysis
and Harvard Design Magazine, amongst others journals and anthologies. The
work of her firm has appeared in Dwell, the New York Times; Architectural Record
and House and Garden, amongst others. She is the editor of The Millennium
House and co-editor of Building in the Future: Recasting Architectural Labor, BIM in
Academia, Re-Reading Perspecta, and the forthcoming Architecture and Capitalism:
1845 to the Present. Recent articles include “The Changing Nature of Architectural
Work,” in Design Practices Now Vol II, The Harvard Design Magazine no. 33; “Detail
Deliberation,” in Building (in) the Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture; “Practicing
Practice,” in Perspecta 44; and “Design and Contemporary Practice” in Architecture
from the Outside In, Dana Cuff, John Wriedt, eds.
Didem Ekici is a Lecturer at the University of Nottingham. She received her Ph.D.
at the University of Michigan and was a 2005–2006 Mary Fair Croushore Graduate
Student Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. Ekici’s research has explored the
relationship between the healthy body and modern dwelling, housing reform, and
mass culture with an emphasis on German architecture culture in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Her scholarly work has appeared in such publications as
Journal of Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education, and International Studies
in Philosophy.
Paul Emmons is a registered architect and an Associate Professor at the

Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech, where he coordinates
the Ph.D. program in Architecture and Design. He earned a Masters Degree
in Architecture from the University of Minnesota in 1986 and a Ph.D. from the
University of Pennsylvania in 2003. His research focuses upon the theory of
architectural drawing practices.
Gevork Hartoonian is Professor of Architecture and the Deputy Head of Design,

Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra, Australia. His research is focused
on a critical archaeology of modern architecture’s appropriation of nineteenth-
century architectural discourses, the tectonic in particular. He is the author of
numerous books and book chapters. His most recent book is titled, Architecture
and Spectacle: A Critique (Ashgate, 2012).
Authors’ Biographies xv
Donald Kunze has taught architecture theory and general arts criticism at Penn
State University since 1984. His articles and lectures on architecture theory,
geography, film, literature, and philosophy have engaged a range of topics dealing
with the poetic dimensionalizing of experience. His recent project, an “atlas of the
obverse,” investigates horizontal space-time. He is devising a methodology for
personalizing strategies of the architectural studio for non-vocational uses.
Nadir Lahiji is the editor of the recent book, The Political Unconscious of Architecture:
Re-opening Jameson’s Narrative. An architect, educator and radical critic, he writes
on architecture theory at the intersection of critical theory, philosophy and
psychoanalytical theory.
Dennis Maher is an artist and architect whose work explores material, social
and psychological reverberations between house and city. For the past 10 years,
his projects have engaged processes of disassembly and reconstitution through
drawing, photography, collage and constructions. In his ongoing Undone-Redone
City project, Maher has continually reformulated the structural and substructural
remains of houses, conjuring a new urban core from assembled city fragments.
In 2009, Maher established the Fargo House, a center for the urban imaginary in
Buffalo, NY. Exhibitions by Maher have been presented at such venues as Black
and White Gallery and Project Space in Brooklyn, NY, Pulse Miami Art Fair, Galeria
Antoni Pinyol in Reus, Spain, Superfront in Los Angeles, CA, The Carnegie Center
in Covington, KY, and Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY. Maher has been
selected as the 2012 Artist In Residence at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.
He is also a recipient of the Real Art Ways STEP UP Award (2011), the Black and
White Project Space Prize (2010), a NYSCA Independent Projects Grant (2010), and
a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2008). He has been identified by the John R. Oishei
Foundation as one of the emerging leaders of the city of Buffalo. His work has been
featured in Architect Magazine and on the national radio program Smart City Radio.
Published writings by Maher include “Towards Un-building”, in 306090 Sustain
and Develop and “The Nightworks” in Unplanned, Research and Experiments at the
Urban Scale. Maher is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of
Architecture at SUNY, University at Buffalo, where he has taught since 2004.
Todd McGowan is the author of Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project
of Psychoanalysis, Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (with Paul Eisenstein),
Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema, and other works. He teaches theory and
film at the University of Vermont.
Erika Naginski is Professor of Architectural History at the Harvard Graduate School

of Design. A historian of 17th and 18th century art and architecture, her research
interests encompass early modern aesthetic philosophy and the critical traditions of
architectural history. Her publications include Sculpture and Enlightenment (2009), a
study of commemoration in an age of secular rationalism and revolutionary politics;
Polemical Objects (2004), a special issue of Res co-edited with Philip Armstrong and
xvi Architecture Post Mortem
Stephen Melville, which explores the philosophy of medium in Hegel, Heidegger

and others; and Writing on Drawing (2000) for the journal Representations, with
essays on the collision of semiotics and mimesis in drawing practices. In 2007, she
was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for a
book project on the intersections of architecture, archaeology and conceptions of
history in the 18th century.
Introduction: The Way Things Are
Donald Kunze
There are two competing diagnoses of the recession of 2008 and its effects
on architecture. The more optimistic view is set within the historically derived
periodicities of what has been called Late Capitalism. Allowing for the after-
shocks generated by unanticipated externalities, markets will regain stability and
continue a general upward trend that has, since the mid-1940s, driven the U. S. and
most other western economies. Thanks to a few disciplinary political adjustments,
the status quo will gradually return in the forms of privatization and concentration
of wealth, globalization of trade and labor, and increased disenfranchisement of
marginal populations. Along with an unprecedented concentration of wealth held
by the Already Very Rich (AVR), “the 1%,” new capital investments will be made in
strategic locations. New versions of credit default swaps will allow ever riskier shifts
of capital. Investment will focus on zones, such as the Maquiladoras of Mexico and
cultural heritage districts capable of optimizing tourist revenue.
The upshot of this “optimistic” view is that it’s optimistic only in terms of the
AVR and those who, early on, realized the advantages of branding in the context of
evolving patterns of global investment. Branding, in fact, has created the perfect
storm for architects up-scaling to the role of inscrutable super-artists. Architectural
practices have themselves been transformed by globalization. Outsourced
digitized drawings and specifications, connected in a continuous arc to custom
manufacture, couple with an identifiable graphic style (a “look” that can identify
the super-artist personality as continuous and tradable commodity). Architects
must now protect their brand the same way car manufacturers struggle to keep
BMWs from looking like Fords. New clients want to “get a Gehry”—the agalma
that defines this architect’s œuvre—while at the same time benefiting from a
“distinguishing feature” and its unconscious manna.
Theory is called to provide support for this optimistic take on economic disaster.
On one side, humanistic theory is drawn into an indecisive debate (because no
common agreement on the definitions of key terms can be found) about the “ethics
of digital representation.” This stalling action replaces the dialogue that, through
writers such as Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, and Jacques Ellul, has called into
question the role of technique in the formation of ideology and political repression.
2 Architecture Post Mortem
Surprisingly little reference is made to such anti-technology positions, because

digital representation–fabrication has taken theory hostage in its conversion of
schools to training centers. It has become “ethically imperative” that new workers
be given the skills that will allow them to be employable in new labor markets.
Theory becomes whatever can “add value” to streamlined representation and
production techniques, but theorists are advised not to address the ideology of
the mode of production. Through digitalization of architectural representation and
marginalization of theory and history, schools have aspired to become ideology
transfer stations.1
Discourse in the “theory-free zones” of digital fabrication has evolved around
enigma of the new entrepreneurial architect, a crafty capitalist able to decipher
complex political, cultural, and economic conditions. The one question left out of
the discussion is: what were the antecedent conditions that led to 9/11? Rolling
through the four Aristotelian causes, formal, final, efficient, and material, gives
little satisfaction. Even if final cause can be attributed to Osama bin Laden’s desire
to wreak havoc on Western economic infrastructure, and even if material and
efficient cause can be covered by the hijacking plot to divert flights, there are small
remainders that resist explanation. Why, for example, was the video clip of the
planes’ penetration of the buildings, traumatic in the extreme, replayed so often
that Karlheinz Stockhausen made the audacious connection to pure aesthetics?
The two Aristotelian “chance causes”—tuchē (human affordance) and automaton
(natural accident)—played a significant role, to the extent that any long view is left
to choose between Oswald Spengler or Zen. Once the long view is compressed
into the shorthand of ideology and victims have been identified, the process of
beatification begins its framing process, and framing is key, not just to the memory
park idea but to the walled Maquilodoro, the Cultural Heritage Site, Disneyworld,
the gated community—wherever ideology needs to deploy the languages of
landscape and the built environment, i.e. where the frame will mean ideology.
Theory has not adequately confronted these issues, and in this failure it has been
a silent partner in the general move to provide theory-free zones within architecture
schools and offices. The evidence for this can be found in the remarkable elevation
of architecture to the status of “museum-ready” products, many of which are
museums to begin with. The museum idea is the notion that consumer-culture
adoration requires special sites of exception hallowed by the idea of “the archive.”
Here, the new mode of architectural conception is candidly exposed.2 Projects
are cleansed and re-presented, shown in reconstructed conceptual stages,
choreographed by explanatory captions. My point is that the museum idea has
infected architecture at every level, down to its pedagogical sites of instruction
(or, especially at sites of instruction, where critiques demand products that look
as if they are made for the museum), to the extent that the representation–and–
caption modality, architecture made to fit on the page of the glossy journal so to
speak, has become theory’s uncontested new paradigm.3
Theory has been diverted, in sum, by the seeming need to defend itself
against a-historical, pro-production, digitally-coordinated technology. Theory has
retreated to an “Alamo” of history, a final desert outpost where history itself has
been asked to be “more itself than itself.” The forced choice is no longer between
(1) history–and–theory and (2) theory–different–from–history but (3) between
theory–as–history or nothing at all. In these circumstances, historians and theorists
forget their differences and take positions behind common barricades. The
simplification results in a blurring of the distinctions between history and theory,
the suppression of the idea of the political, and the even more unfortunate loss
of the original sympathies binding theory–as–discourse to practices of the studio.
If the recession of 2008 has taught any one thing, it is that the disenfranchisement
of the middle class and the ascendency of elites within a global market are not
a part of any “economic cycles.” It is gradually becoming clear that we are living
out Naomi Klein’s worst nightmare, that there will be no successful recovery, only
anomalous incidents of immunity or wealth concentration.4 As in the comparison
of the disruption of the jet-stream by global warming to an open refrigerator door,
hot winds and cold winds now mix unpredictably. The fiction of “cycles” that once
guaranteed a general homeostasis can no longer be supported.
This “second diagnosis,” the refusal to accept contraction as a passing symptom,
constitutes a mandate. Theory must recognize and investigate capitalism’s collapse,
the denials of this collapse, and the architectural consequences and complicities
of collapse. Contraction was planned from the start, and was always “a part of the
design.” The diversity of liberal economic and cultural activities was intentionally
reduced to a minimum through such ploys as the personhood of corporations.
Weirdly, “the political” per se is now the forbidden topic, as if the turmoil of the
1960s can be revisited under the condition that no one take seriously the lessons it
offers. The trend has been to study reactions and causes without straying beyond
standard economic models. Architecture commentary has domesticated the
2007–2008 recession through case–by–case studies of impacts.
For a useful allegory, consider the trial of the Los Angeles policemen accused
of beating Rodney King in 1991. While the video made by the by-stander George
Holliday seemed clearly to show a defenseless man being brutally beaten, the legal
defense team used a frame–by–frame analysis to reveal that, “technically speaking,”
no law or regulation was being violated in any one static frame. In other words,
the ideology of the circumstances that attached King’s prior criminal record to his
later encounter with police was justifiable once the “phi-phenomenon” (φ), which
gave life to the sequence of still frames, was subtracted. In architecture’s own
reduction to single frames, production excesses and shortfalls remain within the
acceptable range established by Western late neoliberal economies. The dynamic
φ of history–in–motion is ignored, replaced by the fixed frame, in order not to see
what is happening.
The captions that neutralize the political connections, the φ stuff in between,
are themselves the essence of ideology. Thus, we have the vocabulary of “creative
re-use,” “gentrification,” “restoration,” and so on, a kind of McDonald’s Happy Meals®
package. These scenarios of architecture’s brief suffering are taken up within the
larger therapeutic scheme that brings down the curtain on traditional modes
of life in order to create “new opportunities.” In reality, the sequence that leads
from lower-income renting to unstable home ownership to bankruptcy and
homelessness is not “natural evolution” or even a “negative externality” of normal

market fluctuations. It was and is a plan whose dimensions would be evident if
architecture theory could manage to plug into Fredric Jameson’s idea of the
“political unconscious,” an idea that calls out ideology in all its historical dynamics.5
The key here is “the unconscious,” another term that, like the political, has
been alternatively (1) sullied by mainstream architecture’s general preference
for cognitive psychology or (2) leveraged at points by New Age spiritualism and
phenomenology—neither of which are officially fond of the psychoanalytical
unconscious. The unconscious of architecture does not confer the power of
thought to mute objects. Rather, this is architecture’s involvement in our own—
and, I would argue, specifically public and collective—unconscious.
This unconscious is not located within a guarded interior of the human subject.
It is the primordially portable “vanishing point” that, within ordinary experience,
imposes a topsy-turvy inversion of our experiences of architecture and places.
To convey the idea of a subjective interiority planted inside exteriority, which
becomes a construction within the dynamics of the everyday scene, requires visual
aids as well as new ways of writing. A first step might be to understand ideology
as a kind of “lock mechanism” placed on subjectivity, established not through
conscious choices but rather through spins and twists on things that are taken to
be normal. This logic, which moves in two directions at once, is illustrated by a
joke Slavoj Žižek enjoys telling. A man decides to take a job in Siberia but wishes
to stay in touch with his friend back home. Knowing that censors will strike out
any negative statements, he arranges to use red ink to indicate politically required
falsehoods. In his first letter, he writes: “Things are very nice here, the housing is
more than adequate, the officials are perfectly polite, the work is not difficult. The
only problem is that none of the shops carry red ink!” In other words, the emigrant,
limited by the censors’ penetration of any device employed to tell the truth, is
forced to “signalize” the situation by referring to the system of resistance itself.
This is my justification for using the word “system” in a way that goes past its more
typical role in describing comprehensive determinative networks (e.g. “systems
theory”). System is that which is always “one step ahead” of subjectivity, that which
employs, always on behalf of ideology, the three-tiered negation that mocks not
only its own operation but the communicative context of that operation.6 In this
way, Alenka Zupančič has argued, comedy becomes the primary literary–dramatic
form by which subjects align themselves with ideology.7 This involves a means of
cynical acceptance that says, “I know very well that thus–and–such is absurd, but
nonetheless I must go along with it.” Although comedy is typically portrayed as
anti-establishment, a means of undermining the oppression of political power, its
effect is to legitimize the absurdity of the red ink problem. Ironically, those who
oppose ideology’s power end up endorsing the negational logic that makes power
particularly effective.
Critical theory of the past twenty years, beginning with Fredric Jameson and
continuing with Slavoj Žižek, Eric Santner, Mladen Dolar, and others, has offered
us the means of thinking both about the relation of architecture to ideology and
the means of re-evaluating the multiple “contractions” that return buildings to a
ruinous state. In the case of ideology, the process of negation never quite returns
to zero. The remainder is “the uncanny part,” which can sometimes be converted
into black comedy: the pure-absurd ideological element able to function as a
master signifier, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath
it. Within this ordering, the ideological subject is the unwilling/unwitting sufferer
of an efficient cause that works with or without anyone’s conscious knowledge or
approval.
Is there any escape from the position of an architecture grounded in an
ideological subject, who is damned in taking either path? Is this not an occasion
to bring the two over-exposed, idiot twins, theory and practice, back into play?
The separation of these terms usually has the disastrous effect of precluding any
intelligent discussion of alternatives. The act of distinction and questioned relation
sets up the theory–practice paradigm as an ideological mandate. But, isn’t it the
case that practice is able to illuminate a highly theoretical conundrum?8 The key is
to take up practice not through its successive pretentions to mastery—the mastery
of buildings over nature, the mastery of the practitioner over the problems of
building, the mastery of materials in terms of their “product performance,” etc.—
but through failures of mastery.
Practice in these terms takes notice of the unary trait of system: its ability to always
be “one step ahead.” The Catch-22 of system is its resistance to revisionary critique.
With the φ of experiential and performative dynamics converted to captioned
frames, ideology conceals the position from which it speaks. Descartes’ famous “I
think therefore I am” conceals the platform of its enunciation, the “place from which
it speaks,” in order to stage scenes that appear to be perfectly rational. Ideology’s
statements are versions of the shout— “Bomb!”—that has the effect of clearing
the room. It is the distinction between enunciating and the enunciated, what is
framed and the act of framing. When practice is taken in both of its modes—in
both its fantasy of mastery as well as a “negative fantasy” of excessive accumulation
of wealth—we see enunciation/enunciated as two spaces, two forms of spaces,
and two forms of time. In one single space–time, ideology is able to “run ahead”
of subjectivity, continually outdistancing it with hilarious-obscene negations of
negations. The situation is Zenonian. The tortoise can defeat the hare through its
persistence, its ability to occupy a separate space from the self-assured epitome of
speed. In the other space–time, the subject faces the array of opportunities pre-
limited by ideology. Like the Thesean labyrinth, these opportunities seem to offer
choice but are in fact a single meandering pathway.
If there is any hope for subjectivity at this point, it is to find a crack or gap in this
system of pre-determined forced choices. This is the basis of the quest, the trial, the
gesture—an effort that, like the vox clamantis in deserto, is spoken into the present
ideological void. If we imagine that the required reading of architectural schools
could be condensed into a two-volume set, Volume One’s account of practice as
mastery would be ethically obliged to supply a Volume Two about the failure of
mastery, wherein architecture accepts the enigma of the ruin in place of ideology’s
Janus-faced system. This book is a prolegomenon to Volume Two.
The Architecture Post Mortem Project
It is the nature of the matter at hand, which cannot avoid being caught between
ideology and pedagogy, that has brought these works together and established
new rules of order. Each successively read essay is intended to have a retroactive
revisionary effect on those previously read. The idea is to begin with a point of view
and expand it, as a key to architecture that is, in the words of Robert Harbison, built,
unbuilt, and unbuildable.9
I would like to use Todd McGowan’s “Driven into the Public: The Psychic Constitution
of Space” as a guide and contract for this expansion. The classic text of McGowan’s
theme, “The Tragedy of the Commons” by ecologist Ross Hardin (1968), was broadly
inspirational but fundamentally flawed. The division between the benefits of the
individual who, in a sharing arrangement, over-reaches his/her allotment, versus
the damage, which is shared by the entire group, geometricizes the situation in
terms of system dynamics. Resolve the conflict between private benefit and public
liability, legally or culturally, and the problem is solved—or not, depending on how
this latter project is framed. Hardin did not recognize the ideological forced-choice
aspect of the problem. For the private abuse to be effective, for it to in fact exist at
all, there must be from the beginning a system that makes this abuse worthwhile.
Pleasure must be a concrete, zero-sum commodity: what one subject gains, some
other subject must lose. There can be no topology by which the pleasure of one is
the pleasure of the many and vice versa. Endorsing the fixed-pleasure model, Hardin
has no alternative but to offer the “dilemma” of unavoidable tragedy, avertable only
if actions are taken from outside the system.
Theory in its right mind should pull out the referee’s yellow card for this
infraction. “The commons” already implies a topology of desire, which defines
pleasure in terms of dissatisfaction shared by everyone as a necessary prelude
to enable subjects to move beyond the restrictions of ideology toward … what?
The word here can only be misunderstood without the proper “psychoanalytical”
explanation: love.
McGowan’s earlier work, The End of Dissatisfaction? (2004), compares the drive
to a gapped circle whose path returns continually to an empty location: the object
of desire. Because desire is “written” in two modes, the symbolic-communicative
and the imaginary language of fantasy, its status as Real is obscured. In capitalism,
we fantasize about accumulating objects that will satisfy our desire; our fantasies
are built into everyday discourse about our happiness or lack thereof. Yet, because
the joint ties the imaginary and the symbolic together without stabilizing them as
customs or laws, the reality can never meet the expectation. Consumption aims
at a satisfaction that does not, cannot, exist. New desire is generated with every
attempt at satisfaction, and hence the cycle is self-perpetuating. The Real of desire
is invisible. It drives the cycle; it leaves us empty. “Coke is it!” but the “it” is never
possessed. It is the ideological component. The salty-sweet drink leaves us thirstier
than ever. In the case of McDonald’s Happy Meals®, the consumer certainly is less
aware of the nutritional benefits than of the imposed mandate: to be happy in
the act of consuming. Happiness is required. The tragedy of the tragedy of the
commons is that we must cry and laugh at the same time. The chorus, as hired
mourners, will weep for us while we (hysterically) enjoy our paradox.
Architecture, McGowan argues, has abandoned the commons and its
obligations to dissatisfaction in favor of a consumerist model that requires
subjectivity to privatize itself. McGowan corrects the Tragedy of the Commons
paradox by pointing out that it is happiness that ideology mandates, in the context
of shared dissatisfaction. Happiness has become “racicized”—converted into the
personal, the biopolitical. (Simone Brott takes this up in her analysis of the science-
fiction film, District 9, “Dead or Alive in Joburg.”) Even if you don’t know how to find
the “it” of Coke in order to see what the fuss is all about, you must communicate
your happiness, your willingness to be happy in terms defined from without, by
others—increasingly by corporate others. Here, McGowan gives an unusual turn to
his up–to–now standard Lacanian critique. He cites Freud’s attempt at self-analysis,
what Lacan called “psychoanalysis’s original sin,” as a central and maximal self-
deception—one is compelled to substitute fantasy (the Imaginary) for the Real.
Wasn’t Freud’s confession–analysis consistent with the rule about psychoanalysis
taking place, by definition, in public space? Wasn’t Freud simply “going public”?
The “public” of analysis is not the kind of public where one’s inner secrets are put
on stage for all to see, in the mode of reality television. It is the extroversion of
what the analysand would prefer to keep private—even when the analysand
tries to expose it. It is secrecy itself that defines the function of psychoanalysis. As
Alenka Zupančič has pointed out, there is no difference between this secrecy and
the path of desire. And what is this Big Secret of Secrecy Itself? It is nothing less
than the fact that desire (which we can communicate to others as demand, identify
with symbolically, and work into our fantasies) and the causality of desire are two
different things. The Coke we drink is limited by the can or plastic bottle containing
it. But, because we can’t have all the Coke we want, we desire it. The limit returns
desire–as–cause for our desire as behavioral–symbolic demand.
So, when McGowan says “the public world depends on the drive,” he qualifies:
“desire hides the closure that drive avows”; and “desire is nothing but the failure to
recognize drive.” These qualifications are important. They suggest how theory can
re-constitute itself around the two-stage psychoanalytic truth of ideology. Ideology
(1) conceals (1a) the pain of repetition (the re-runs of the 9/11 collisions) and (1b) the
empty goal (“Coke is it!”); then, (2) it reports only pleasure (subjective happiness as
an ideological mandate); this exchange of pleasure for pain constitutes ideology’s
hysteria. The tragedy of the commons involves duplicity, which is to be expected,
but more importantly, hysteria, the Secret that is Secrecy Itself. The enjoyment/
dissatisfaction of the commons has been left out of the equation. This is the ruin
of the commons and the correlated common place of ruin in all architecture.
Each attempt at satisfaction results in dissatisfaction. The iterative nature of each
successive attempt constructs a feedback loop, a self-sustaining consumerist
model driven by a non-existent object of desire, made public through an ideology
increasingly controlled by marketing, journalism, popular culture, and academia.
Marcel Duchamp as well as Karl Marx realized that Capitalism, too, is involved
in this iteration, seeking greater efficiencies that will generate greater immunity to
the benefits of efficiency. Like the antibiotics that generate ever more destructive
bacteria, Capitalism as a mode of enjoyment generates increasingly impossible
desires. This is both the cause of (architectural) ruin and the context by which
ruins yield their curiously hysterical algorithm of pleasure and pain. The solution for
McGowan, adopting the “logic of the drive” rather than the logic of desire, speaks
directly to the choice open for theory. Theory, too, must see how, in the drive,
there is an option to resist, to refuse. Only by doing this can theory—through the
“paradigm exemplar” of architectural ruin—escape appropriation by the ideology
it is duty-bound to expose. McGowan: “The drive thrusts the subject outside of
itself; it involves the subject’s self-transcendence through its failure to achieve self-
identity.” In this inside–out case of Lacanian extimité, Tragedy and Comedy merge.
Following the master of such a merger, Charlie Chaplin, we arrive at truly Modern
Times. The ruin, the failure of architecture to achieve the goals of desire, are this
merger’s temple and labyrinth, one superimposed on the other. In a scene near
the end of the film, Chaplin gets a job as a singing waiter but loses the cuff on
which he has written the lyrics to his song. He improvises by inventing a language
that, miraculously, everyone understands. It is another miracle that this film was
“silent.” Chaplin had access to film sound technology but limited it to the creation
of a musical sound track. His one exception was to give Charlie a voice at last, but
only a singing voice, and only with a song with macaronic lyrics that returned
meaning to a “zero degree.” In this ruin of language we find a paradigm for the ruin
of architecture: it all becomes clear. Long live the Tramp!
The Now Here of Nowhere
Each author in this collection has contributed an original means of conceiving the
theme of post mortem, but none has ignored the implicit mandate stemming from
architecture’s historic and ontological involvements with death. Coincidentally,
more than a few authors drew lessons about architecture from examples found in
contemporary film. Simone Brott’s “Dead or Alive in Joburg” reads Neill Blomkamp’s
2009 film, District 9, to reveal ideology as the State method of control of life and
death via biological weaponry, technology, and other “equipments of power”:
those live arrangements for producing inhuman subjectivity, subjectivization—in
a word, architecture. In her portrayal of “violent urbanism,” the weaponized alien
arm is the Lacanian “Real” or objet petit a around which all the drives circulate, given
by the militarization of the city and the residuum of modernity depicted in the film
as “science fiction.”
Nadir Lahiji cites another dystopian film, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1983), to
make the point that buildings in ruins have become the Real of building itself—a
state of “ruins on ruins.” Architecture, like opera in the nineteenth century, was “born
dead.” What we celebrate is the “sublime object” brought about by architecture’s
“second death,” a symbolic end that is the inheritance of our modern subjectivity.
Theory must face, and face up to, this modernity.
The utopia that avoids precisely this mandate demands an architecture that
is increasingly delusional. In David Bertolini’s “Kant, Sade, Ethics and Architecture,”
Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film, Inception, provides the key concept of shared
dreaming. The hero–architect turned corporate–spy, Dominick Cobb, does not
see that his hoped-for utopia involves an apocalypse. While our truth lies in our
dreaming, it is the reality of our attempts to deny truth by pretending it is “just
a dream” that accepts ideology as unavoidable. Bertolini recommends that we
should distinguish architecture as an exception to the Kant/Sade dialectic whose
primary result is “building–as–(symbolic)–reality.”
Donald Kunze’s analogy of a slow-fast architecture employs a Lucretian model
of time travel to do much the same thing out of the dream–ruins of Manderley, the
mansion–labyrinth of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 thriller, Rebecca. Like Lahiji, Kunze
finds that the way out of the contemporary theoretical impasse lies in Lacan’s key
concept of extimacy (extimité).
Gevork Hartoonian revisits Walter Benjamin’s essay on the Angelus Novus
to map the architectonic implications of the idea of ruin and ruination in late
capitalism. Hartoonian emphasizes that the ruin is not just the effect of time. Rather,
architecture has become the paragon supplementing the wreckage of capitalism,
foreclosing the Humanist totalizing discourse on monument, ruin, and ornament.
Although Todd McGowan himself mentions no specific films, authors and
readers alike have benefited from his books on films and film theory: The Real
Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (2006), The Impossible David Lynch (2006), Out of
Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema (2011), and Lacan and Contemporary Film (2004).
Film has not only shown how ruins and pleasure intermix; film theory has given
architecture theory direct access to the political dimensions of experience. Films
themselves may offer architecture a means of diving more deeply into philosophy
and psychoanalysis; but film theory has, more subtly, provided the intellectual
means of integrating time considerations into formal aspects of space and afforded
architectural theory “horizontal” access to the primarily temporal realms of politics,
professional practice, ethnography, cultural history, and popular culture. The “now
here” contemporaneity of film examples opens the way to the “nowhere” ruin-status
of the architectural ruin, already a place invested with the specific temporality of
negation.
Seemingly echoing Lahiji’s point about architecture’s necessary “two deaths,”
Peggy Deamer (“Adrian Stokes: Surface Suicide”) asks why are architects are dead
before they complete their work; why they struggle to be a relevant profession,
suffer from low economic compensation, lack cultural relevance in the wake of
9/11, and drop the ball on a global discourse on ecology. Could it be that, as Deamer
puts it, “there is a ‘deathdrive’ imbedded not just in architecture’s practitioners, but
in architecture’s formal structure, something unavoidably present (or absent) that
makes its irrelevance understandable”? The British painter and critic Adrian Stokes
provides a means of re-framing these questions within the works of Jacques Lacan
and Gilles Deleuze. The answer to Deamer’s question may dig up some unexpected
antiquities, identifiable through our experience with popular culture. The film and
the painting share, with “the lips, ‘the enclosure of the teeth’, the rim of the anus,
the penile groove, the vagina, and the slit formed by the eyelids, not to mention the
hollow of the ear” a logic by which the frame offers not just a distinction between
one kind of space to another but a passage between life and death itself. Like Lacan’s
sublime objects, becoming takes the place of being, but not without preserving
remainders of the experience of passage. Like the vampire whose image cannot
be caught by any mirror, the “objects of alterity” cannot be represented (reflected)
because they are reflection itself. Architecture, the art that “singularly produces
fantasy,” ties its fortunes to the nature of this alterity, this physics of the Real.
Paul Emmons’ focus on the section drawing as a kind of spatial wound (“A
Window to the Soul: Depth in Early Modern Section Drawing”) extends this physics
to a biology of architectural representation and construction. I can do no better
than to quote from his essay: “The semantic field of the originary dreams of sections
includes: geometry, profile, shadow, ruin, wound and dissection; all of which play
key roles in this intriguing puzzle not only as possible sources but also as animators
of the section’s associated meanings of silence, secrecy, solidity and the uncanny.”
The wound (trauma) returns Freud, as Freud himself often attempted to
return, to the depths of history. There we do not find any simple answers. Rather,
as Naginski argues, the key to human origins is concealed within the nature of
ruins. In her reconstruction of arguments linking the Neapolitan philosopher of
culture Giambattista Vico and the Venetian architecture theorist (and father of
functionalism), Carlo Lodoli, to the artist–architect Giovanni Battisti Piranesi, the
“wound” that is architecture is also the “section” of time created by ruin.
Human origins are not, in the view of Piranesi or Vico, simplistically restricted to
the mists of remote time but are present in the imminence of “eternal returns,” as
the philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade put it. Both traditional and contemporary
cultures maintain “sites of exception” (Eric Santner’s term) where the ruin renews its
ancient argument from nowhere. Kazi K. Ashraf constructs the universal narrative of
“ritualized destruction, how various practices and performances of de-construction
convey a significance contrary to the immediate or literal phenomenon of
destruction.” These include rituals as localized as the ephemeral architecture of
sand mandalas, as predictable as the regularly reconstructed Buddhist shrine at
Ise, Japan, and as paradoxically self-deconstructing as the reflections of Mies’s
Barcelona Pavilion.
If Ashraf has convinced us that exception is the most portable of cultural
constructs, Didem Ekici (“Architectural Asceticism and Austerity”) demonstrates
the paradoxical point that this perennial motif can turn out to be what makes
any age distinctive. In Modernism, it is the desire to find, within an imposed
diet stripping domestic space down to its bare components, an essence. Will
architecture ever free itself from the boom–and–bust cycles of capitalism? Or,
will asceticism not continue to provide symbolic cover for architecture’s desire to
produce, in secret surpluses, what it publically claims to deplore? One thinks of the
medieval monasteries in their function as “treasuries,” not just of material wealth,
but of the ultimately more important “obscene wealth” of signifiers. The question
can be reworded: What makes, out of time’s restrictive and privational imminence,
a universal impulse, always written, it seems, in secret code of excess?
Dennis Maher (“900 Miles to Paradise, and Other Afterlives of Architecture”)

demonstrates the essence of contemporary modernism in the radical “out-
of-placeness” of St. Gerard’s Church in Buffalo, New York, and in his own art
installations done while employed as a demolition worker at the Farrar Mansion
in that same city. Maher’s contrast of these two radically different forms of salvage
nonetheless finds a common thread of ironic transcendence, one based on a
material metempsychosis attempted by a well-meaning church congregation in
Georgia, the other secretly assembled from the spare parts of antiseptic restoration.
Maher’s graphic statements recall the ancient logic of the “trophy,” related to words
for poetic metaphor and magical encirclement, a partnership of verse and curse.
Acknowledgements
If ever an idea had a literal inventor, the palm goes to Howard Davis, Professor of
Architecture at the University of Oregon. Almost immediately after the first events
of the 2007–2008 recession, Davis proposed such a collection as this has turned
out to be, but later declined to take part as a contributing author. This was an
understandable refusal: Davis’s book, The Culture of Building (2006), had already
anticipated much of what the present authors have thought and written. The
idea of a book began with Davis’s initial suggestion, but the full dimensionality of
architecture’s debt to ruin developed through the reviews of the many responses
to a call for papers for the 99th Annual Meetings of the Association of the Collegiate
Schools of Architecture in Montréal, Québec, in 2011. Thanks to those who provided
aspiring authors with cogent evaluations and advice: David Cronrath, Howard
Davis, Thomas Han, Amy Kulper, Mark Linder, Grace Ong-Yan, Marcus Shaffer,
Chris Taylor, and Tracey Winton. Chris Taylor, Curt Dilger, and King Sophophone
contributed artworks to proposals and early versions of the text that were nothing
less than inspirational flags flown at dawn’s early light.
Participants in that conference session (Paul Emmons, Didem Ekici, Kazi Ashraf,
Dennis Maher) ambitiously pursued all angles of the topic of decline; independent
contributions from Simone Brott, Nadir Lahiji, and Todd McGowan gave this
expedition its home base, however, and from these beginnings came the idea of
a comprehensive new theoretical statement. Encouragement from Valerie Rose of
Ashgate has sustained this ambition and given it the necessary editorial discipline.
Erika Naginski agreed to have her article, originally published in Res, to re-appear
in this collection. Gevork Hartoonian generously wrote his essay in response to a
summation of our ideas.
The editor of RES, Francesco Pellizzi, granted permission to re-publish Erika
Naginski’s essay; thanks to him and to Denise Waddington of the Peabody Museum
Press, Harvard University, for assisting with the use of materials in Prof. Naginski’s
essay. Thanks, too, to Cécile Brunner, Department of Rights and Reproductions,
Kunsthaus, Zürich, who facilitated our permission to use the Johann Heinrich Füssli
drawing in that essay.
Thanks to Patricia Virasin Tainter, Assistant Registrar of the Kimbell Art Museum,
for her assistance with the use of the image of the death of Pentius, to the office of
Stanley Tigerman for the use of a photocollàge, and to Lars-Olof Löthwall for the
still photo from Tarkovsky’s Offret in Kazi Ashraf’s essay.
Thanks, finally, to Alison Bertolini for her generous assistance and advice.
Bibliography
Davis, Howard, The Culture of Building (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Harbison, Robert, The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural
Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan
Books/Henry Holt, 2007).
Naginski, Erika, “Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico,” RES: Anthropology and
Aesthetics 53/54 (Spring/Fall, 2008): 152–167.
Mitchell, W. J. T., What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1994).
Alberto Perez-Gomez, Anne Comier, and Annie Pedret, Where Do You Stand? Proceedings of
the 2011 99th ACSA Annual Meeting in Montreal, QC (Washington, DC: Association of
Collegiate Schools of Architecture, 2011).
Santner, Eric L., On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001).
Notes
1 Proponents of the globalization of practice, such as Michael Speaks, Dean of the

College of Design at the University of Kentucky, have been clear in their advice:
“The assertion is very bald, very clear: architecture should no longer recoil from
the degraded world of business and corporate thinking; on the contrary, it should
aggressively seek to transform itself into a research-based business. Though not
recognized as adherents of such a research-based business approach to architecture,
I think it is fair to say that this managerial approach provides the intellectual
infrastructure necessary for the fleet-footed generation of architects and urbanists
who have emerged to meet the challenges presented by globalization: namely, the
challenge presented by quantity and commercialization to develop softer design
strategies flexible enough to deal with the challenges of the market. The tools of
these new managerialists are no longer those of the traditional architect or planner
but those of the scenario planner and animation specialist. Animation softwares such
as those used by Greg Lynn or Datascapes employed by MVRDV are means of testing
architecture’s ability to interact with and transform hidden or embedded shaping
forces.” Michael Speaks, “Two Stories for the Avant-garde,” http://www.archilab.org/
public/2000/catalog/speaksen.htm, accessed December 15, 2012.
2 In a few notable exceptions, museums can escape ideology by referring to the irony
of the archive in relation to the Real (Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, is
a prime example). A self-referential Real constitutes an almost algorithmic answer to
how architecture should behave in a hyper-ideological, doubly-inscribed situation.
3 Philip Johnson was named director of the Department of Architecture of the Museum
of Modern Art in 1932. Even in the last decades of his life he attended personally
to exhibitions of new works of architecture. The Glass House (1949) embodies the
museum idea perfectly: a “museum display case” where the viewers are on the inside,
looking out at a “museumed” landscape.
4 The reference is to Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New
York, 2007).
5 See, as a fulfillment of this suggestion, Nadir Lahiji, The Political Unconscious of
Architecture: Reopening Jameson’s Narrative (Farnham, Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT,
2011).
6 Not to give away too much of the conclusion, but system is related to the
procedures by which individuals are conscripted by ideology through the process of
“interpellation,” the process defined by Louis Althusser as the voluntary anticipation of
the imaginary Other’s demands.
7 Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: on Comedy (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
8 Donald Kunze, “Commentary on Architectural Education,” Journal of Architectural
Education, Jubilee Edition 40 (1987): 36–37.
9 Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural
Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1991).
1
Driven into the Public: The Psychic Constitution of Space
Todd McGowan
Concerns about capitalism’s tendency to discourage the constitution of a public

world and simultaneously to encourage a retreat into privacy emerge almost as
soon as capitalism becomes the dominant socioeconomic system in the world. In
The Social Contract (which he wrote in 1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau laments the
destructive effect of the turn away from public service. Though he doesn’t associate
this effect directly with capitalism, he does lay out the alternative to participation
in the public world in pecuniary terms. He notes, “As soon as public service ceases
to be the Citizens’ principal business, and they prefer to serve with their purse
rather than with their person, the State is already close to ruin.”1 As capitalism
has developed since Rousseau’s epoch, this tendency toward privatization has
grown exponentially and today threatens the very existence of public space or of
a commons.
The absence of public space is not simply a problem for the lower classes that
cannot afford entry into parks where their children can play or gated neighborhoods
where they take a stroll without worrying about violence. The privatization of the
commons also represents a retreat from what psychoanalysis calls the drive. The
drive provides the path through which the subject satisfies itself. Freud insists that
the drive doesn’t aim at an object, as we might imagine, but just at satisfaction.
What Freud doesn’t say, but what is explicit in throughout his work, is that the drive
is the only source of satisfaction for the subject, and the satisfaction of the drive
requires that the subject leave its private world and enter into public space.2 As the
aversion to public spaces grows more pronounced, we distance ourselves from the
possibility for the very satisfaction that we seek in our private realms. We ensconce
ourselves in privacy in order to ensure that others can’t disturb our self-satisfaction
and thereby fail to recognize how our satisfaction depends on this disturbance. The
contemporary turn away from public space is simultaneously a turn away from the
drive and from the disturbing satisfaction that the drive provides. Privacy promises
security not just from physical threats but also from the threat of our own drive, but
the price of this security is the very possibility of our enjoyment.
In order to understand the division between public and private space, Rousseau
distinguishes between two forms of subjectivity—homme and citoyen. An homme
is a figure of the private world who pursues self-interest and neglects wider
concerns, while a citoyen is devoted to the public world and interacts in that world.
Though Rousseau has fears about the homme completely eclipsing the citoyen,
it is not until the twentieth century that the threat to the public world becomes
dire and seemingly irreversible. The first philosopher to pay attention to this threat
was Hannah Arendt, who, in The Human Condition, chronicles what she calls the
evanescence of action and work at the expense of labor.3 For Arendt, labor occurs
exclusively in the private realm and concerns only the reproduction of life. Because
it confines itself to private reproduction, labor has no creative power.4 Work, in
contrast, creates a public world, and action represents political engagement in this
world. When labor becomes our privileged or even sole mode of being, we lose
these creative possibilities.
The critique of the disappearance of the citoyen becomes even more pronounced
in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière.5 Both Agamben and
Rancière notice an evanescence of politics in the contemporary world. The
protection and reproduction of life—what Arendt calls labor—has invaded and
subsumed the realm of politics. As Agamben points out in numerous works, a
zone of indistinction between life and politics has arisen. He claims, “our private
biological body has become indistinguishable from our body politic, experiences
that once used to be called political suddenly were confined to our biological
body, and private experiences present themselves all of a sudden outside us as
body politic.”6 The transformation of politics into private concerns about life and
the body is the elimination of politics proper. The homme comes to replace the
citoyen completely, and with the disappearance of the citoyen, we enter into a
world dominated by privacy and bereft of public space.
An impulsion toward the private world has always accompanied capitalism
as a socioeconomic system. Even when capitalism requires that subjects interact
with each other in relations of production, distribution, and consumption, it
demands that they do so as private beings. The philosophical proponents of
capitalism inevitably tout this as the genius of the system. Rather than relying on
a concern for the public world, it produces a society that succeeds solely on the
basis of individuals pursuing their private interest. Even Adam Smith, perhaps the
first theorist of capitalism, makes this point. In the Wealth of Nations, he famously
notes, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that
we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address
ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of
our own necessities, but of their advantages.”7 Smith envisions the development
of social interaction, but this interaction remains just an extension of private self-
interest. There is no public world—and no public space—in the capitalist world
that Smith theorizes.8
The contemporary impulse to privatize public areas is widespread: it manifests
itself in the call to sell federally owned land, to create privately owned and
maintained roads, to build private prisons, to construct gated communities, and,
in the most general terms, to privilege “austerity” in public finances. The worldwide
response to the financial crisis of 2008 reveals cogently the extent of today’s
Driven into the Public: The Psychic Constitution of Space 17
obsession with privacy, especially when we contrast it with Franklin Roosevelt’s

reaction to the Great Depression. Though there were attempts to use government
money to stimulate economic growth and rescue the economy, these efforts were
often inadequate and reflected a clear bias against public investment. Rather than
committing substantial resources to the development of a national rail system or
alternative energy plants, President Obama’s stimulus package of 2009 had no
broad public aims and included large expenses for tax cuts, a private rather than a
public stimulus focused on increasing consumption.
But even this minimal gesture toward public investment met with severe
criticism and occasioned an exaggerated concern with budget deficits. This same
concern prompted the austerity movement in European countries as well, where
leaders cut spending on public projects. The ostensible line of thought behind
these cuts was that public debt was responsible for the economic crisis, when in
fact, it was clear that the turn to privacy and away from public oversight was the
culprit. The fact that private speculation, not government spending, occasioned
the crisis disappeared beneath the apotheosis of privacy that followed the crisis. It
was as if privacy, so self-evidently a good, couldn’t possibly be to blame. As a result,
the cause of the financial crisis—less investment in the public world—becomes
the solution to it. Such Bizarro World thinking reveals not that people are easily
manipulated but the extent to which the apotheosis of privacy dominates our
thinking today. We can’t imagine that privacy might be the problem, nor can we
imagine that a greater commitment to the public world might be the solution.
But this degree of investment in privacy has not always been the case within the
capitalist system.
Despite capitalism’s inherent tendency toward privacy, the emergence of
capitalism coincided with an unprecedented creation of public space and an
explosion of the public sphere of political contestation. Though such space existed
in classical Greece and other societies, it is only in capitalist modernity that public
space and the public sphere loses the restrictiveness that characterizes it in its past
manifestations. That is, the bourgeois public sphere is open, at least theoretically,
to anyone who desires to enter into it. This is what Jürgen Habermas celebrates—
and then laments its decline—in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.9
Though Habermas is not an apologist for capitalism like Adam Smith, he does see
its initial benefit for the development of a public. He claims, “Bourgeois culture
was not mere ideology. The rational-critical debate of private people in the salons,
clubs, and reading societies was not directly subject to the cycle of production and
consumption, that is, to the dictates of life’s necessities. Even in its merely literary
form (of self-elucidation of the novel experiences of subjectivity) it possessed
instead a ‘political’ character in the Greek sense of being emancipated from the
constraints of survival requirements.”10 The emergence of public sites for political
discussion did not simply haphazardly coincide with capitalism’s rise to dominance.
The two are intricately related. Capitalism leads to the development of a public
world because it necessitates interaction in the form of exchange.
Though capitalism and its defenders constitute exchange as a private matter
between individuals, the process of exchange tends, at least initially, to produce
a public world in which exchange can occur.11 This public world brings subjects
into contact with each other and creates the political debate that Habermas
celebrates. But the public world of nascent capitalist society remains only a side
effect of capitalist relations of production rather than an intrinsic necessity. That is
to say, the structure of capitalist exchange leads to the formation of public space
but doesn’t necessitate that space. If exchange could occur uninterrupted without
any public world, then this world would not form.
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas laments the
disintegration of this sphere, but he doesn’t try to explain this transformation
in terms of changes within capitalism itself. Nonetheless, capitalism itself does
change during the time of the disintegration of the public sphere. The most
significant shift in the nature of capitalism occurs gradually but most dramatically
at the end of the nineteenth century. Whereas early capitalism focuses on the act
of production and the creation of dedicated laborers, twentieth century capitalism
creates consumers. Twentieth century subjects of capitalism don’t consume in
order to work like their forbearers but rather work in order to consume. When
consumption—an ostensibly private activity—becomes one’s end, public space
and public discussion ceases to be a primary concern. The subject can consume in
private, and as consumption becomes the only social preoccupation, public space
becomes increasingly rare. Private spaces that provide arenas for consumption, like
shopping malls, come to function as ersatz public spaces. The problem with these
ersatz public spaces is that the rules of privacy apply there, in contrast to genuine
public spaces. The private security forces of a mall can police political discussion,
squelch dissent, and prohibit collective association without any repercussions
whatsoever. The public police force cannot act in this way in public space.
Many of the cultural theorists who lament the recent decline of a public space
link this decline either directly or indirectly to the predominance of consumerism.
Sociologist Robert Putnam, for instance, views the turn away from the public world
as a consequence of a specific form of consumption—television watching. In his
celebrated account of rampant privatization in Bowling Alone, he claims, “More
television watching means less of virtually every form of civic participation and
social involvement.”12 The consumption of television and video images appeals to
contemporary subjects in a way that “civic participation” cannot. It allows subjects
to bypass the possibility of trauma that arises from public encounters and to
live within the safety of the private world. This is what Christopher Lasch labels
the “culture of narcissism,” a culture in which public life becomes anathema and
“consumption promises to fill the aching void.”13 For theorists such as Putnam and
Lasch, consumption carries with it an automatic identification with privacy.
But to lay the blame on consumption for the decline of the public world
would be to proceed too quickly. Certainly capitalism depends on consumption,
and consumption occurs in private transactions. With the advent of the internet,
consumption can become even more private: one need not leave one’s home in
order to consume as much as one wants, and one need not even rely on the public
mail system to receive one’s new commodities. Nonetheless, consumption retains
a public dimension insofar as one consumes in order to make an impression on
the Other. Though there are commodities that subjects buy for completely private
consumption, most have a clear public effect. A designer dress, an iPhone, a BMW,
even a cup of Starbucks coffee—these popular objects owe their popularity to the
effects that they have on the public. We consume in order to be thought of in a
certain way. I am the kind of person who drives a BMW, while you are the kind that
drinks Starbucks coffee. The private purchase of the commodity redounds on the
public that it ostensibly avoids.
The evanescence of the public world and of public space is not directly
attributable to the turn from a production-oriented to a consumption-oriented
capitalism, but it nonetheless related to the essential structure of the capitalist
economy. As capitalism has developed, it has not only emphasized consumption
as an economic motor over production, but it has also ensconced subjects more
and more in the logic of desire, a logic essential to its functioning. As the drive
disappears beneath the logic of desire, the possibility of a public disappears as well.
The public world depends on the drive, and in order to understand this relation,
we must turn now to psychoanalysis, which has much to say about the relation
between desire and drive.
From its inception, psychoanalysis has taken the side of the individual subject
in this subject’s struggle against the demands of civilization. In this sense, it
seems to be a certified opponent of the public world. Neurosis, as understood
by psychoanalysis, is nothing other than the price that the subject pays for its
submission to the demands that the social order makes. The neurotic symptom
emerges out of the subject’s refusal to submit completely.14 In Civilization and
Its Discontents, Freud goes so far as to wonder if entrance into society as such
represents a good deal for the individual. He sees that the pleasure principle might
be easier to fulfill without social restrictions. Freud notes, “In the developmental
process of the individual, the programme of the pleasure principle, which consists
in finding the satisfaction of happiness, is retained as the main aim. Integration in,
or adaptation to, a human community appears as a scarcely avoidable condition
that must be fulfilled before this aim of happiness can be achieved. If it could be
done without that condition, it would perhaps be preferable.”15 In the end, Freud
does not believe it is possible to do without social restrictions altogether, even if,
from some perspective, that might be “preferable.”
If psychoanalysis emerges out of the suffering that integration into the social
order causes, it also reveals how the subject’s satisfaction depends on the public
world that appears to thwart this satisfaction. This idea, as much as any other,
forms the basis for psychoanalytic practice. Unlike philosophers like Descartes or
Kant, Freud doesn’t believe that one can arrive at the truth of one’s being through
private introspection. It is only when one is in public and talking to others that
one reveals this truth. This is why others know us better than we know ourselves.
As Freud points out in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, “It can in fact be
said quite generally that everyone is continually practising psychical analysis on
his neighbours and consequently learns to know them better than they know
themselves.”16 No amount of introspection can replace public interaction for the
revelation of truth.
Psychoanalysis eschews the possibility of self-analysis for precisely this reason.

Even though Freud claims to have performed a self-analysis and even published
the results, he doesn’t develop this as a general practice or possibility. In fact,
Jacques Lacan often calls Freud’s self-analysis the “original sin” of psychoanalysis.
Self-analysis is impossible because it remains within the domain of privacy, a
domain predominated by narcissistic illusion and imaginary ideals. In our private
worlds, we count the value of our conscious intentions far too highly, and we
simultaneously fail to grasp our unconscious motivations. We pay attention to our
conscious intentions rather than to the signifiers that we employ unconsciously.
To psychoanalyze oneself is to fall further into one’s private self-deception.
Psychoanalysis requires the analyst to act as the point of connection to the public
world. This association of psychoanalysis with the public world places it at odds
with the demands of capitalism.
The psychoanalytic session—and this distinguishes it, more than anything else,
from other forms of therapy—occurs in a public space. Even though psychoanalysts
don’t typically go on television and give public accounts of their analysands private
lives, the act of analysis itself is public in the sense that it publicizes what the
analysand would prefer to have remain private. In the act of analysis, the analysand
confronts a public and articulates its desire through this confrontation. The analyst
stands in for the desire of the public, and the subject discovers its desire through
the encounter with this desire of the Other.17 By assisting the subject in discovering
and naming its own desire, psychoanalysis hopes to lead the subject from desire to
drive. As theorist Alenka Zupančič sees it, analysis leads the subject from desire to
drive by leading the subject further down the path of its desire. She notes, “In order
to arrive at the drive, one must pass through desire and insist on it until the very
end.”18 Subjects come to psychoanalysis without knowing the truth of their desire,
and they leave—hopefully—with a commitment of fidelity to their desire that
places them in the drive, which involves a different sort of relation to the object.
Though there have been many different psychoanalytically inflected critiques
of capitalism, the most cogent, in my view, rests on the fundamental distinction
between desire and drive as theorized by Lacan and his followers. As Lacan sees
it, desire and drive follow the same basic structure, but desire hides the closure
that drive avows. That is to say, desire is nothing but the failure to recognize drive.
Desire moves metonymically from object to object without ever successfully
obtaining satisfaction in the object that it seeks. Each time that I obtain an object
of desire, I quickly find this object dissatisfying and move on to another object. This
is because of the key distinction between the object of desire and the object-cause
of desire (or what makes the object of desire desirable). The object that arouses
my desire is not the object of desire itself but what prevents me from obtaining
this object, the barrier to an experience of the object’s complete abundance. It is
the difference between the Coke that I drink and the can that limits the amount
of Coke that I have. This limit constitutes the Coke as desirable, and as a barrier, it
functions as the object-cause of my desire. When I have the object of desire without
the object-cause, without the limit that prevents me from fully having it, I cease to
desire the object of desire, and it becomes a normal empirical object. If I could
drink an unlimited amount of Coke at any time, I would simply cease to desire it.
It is not only the can, but also concerns about health, caloric intake, and propriety
that serves as obstacles to this unbridled consumption. The object-cause of desire
or the obstacle to the object of desire renders the latter sublime and thus desirable.
Drive, in contrast, is the satisfaction that derives from the repetition of the
failure to obtain the object. As Jodi Dean explains, the failure of desire becomes
the success of drive. She notes, “the very failure to satisfy desire can become itself
a source of enjoyment. The circular movement of drive is enjoyable; enjoyment,
in other words, is the pleasure provided by the painful experience of repeatedly
missing one’s goal. With respect to drive, then, the nugget of enjoyment is not
what one is trying to reach but cannot; rather, it is that little extra that adheres to
the process of trying. To this extent, the inescapability of enjoyment equals drive.
Enjoyment results when focus shifts from the end to the means, when processes
and procedures themselves provide libidinal satisfaction.”19 The idea of obtaining
the object of desire no longer plays the role in the drive that it plays in desire, which
is why drive produces an enjoyment while desire inevitably leads to dissatisfaction.
Drive moves around the loss of the object without concerning itself with
overcoming a limit. In Seminar XI, Lacan emphasizes the absence of any role for the
object in the drive, which we might contrast with desire, where the object is both
what motivates desire and what promises to satisfy it. He notes, “As far as the object
in the drive is concerned, let it be clear that it is, strictly speaking, of no importance. It is a
matter of total indifference.”20 The subject of the drive recognizes that no object will
provide it the promised total satisfaction, and hence it finds a partial satisfaction in
its own repeated movement. Desire depends on the illusion of a total satisfaction
that drive abandons, but drive does not, for all that, represent a compromise
position relative to desire, like the reality principle relative to the pleasure principle.
Drive is instead the truth of desire. Whereas loss motivates desire’s movement
toward the object, drive takes loss itself as its object, which is why it has nothing to
obtain.21 Though the subject of desire sees itself as avoiding repetition by moving
from object to object, this subject repeats the same trajectory without knowing it.
This is why desire is nothing but unrecognized drive. But this misrecognition can
have dramatic effects on the structure of the social order.
Capitalism functions according to the logic of desire. This is most evident in
the case of the consumption of the commodity: consumers purchase each new
commodity with the hope that this object will be the object that will provide the
ultimate satisfaction. But they inevitably find, after some initial pleasure, only more
dissatisfaction, which inspires them to purchase another new commodity holding
the same illusory promise. Many people buy new cars not so much because the old
one no longer works but because they work to find an enjoyment in the new one
that the old one failed to provide. If the old commodity did provide this enjoyment,
capitalism would not function. Consumers would not feel obliged to seek out new
commodities that they didn’t need. What Marx calls capitalism’s production of
needs treats consumers as desiring subjects and reveals an implicit understanding
of how desire functions.22 Capitalism leads the consumer from one commodity to
the next according to the metonymy of desire.
The problem is that the closer that the subject comes to the object, the more
the object loses what makes it desirable and becomes just an image that cannot
provide the promised satisfaction. Lacan makes this point in his Seminar X on
anxiety, where he notes, “the more man approaches, circumscribes, caresses what
he believes to be the object of his desire, the more he is in fact turned away and
diverted from it. Everything that he does on this path in order to come closer to it
always gives more body to what represents the specular image in the object of his
desire.”23 Here, Lacan opposes the image of the object to some other dimension
of the object—the object as a remainder that doesn’t fit within the world of
representation or what he would call the real dimension of the object. Proximity
has a deleterious effect on both the subject’s desire and the object’s desirability.
The same problem infects capitalist production as well. Capitalists want to
increase the productivity of the production process in order to realize greater and
greater profits, but increased productivity has the effect of lowering the rate of profit.
In short, the very effort to maximize profit becomes a barrier to profit. Marx notices
this irony in his perspicacious analysis of capitalism’s contradictory processes. He
says, “The profit rate does not fall because labour becomes less productive but
rather because it becomes more productive. The rise in the rate of surplus-value
and the fall in the rate of profit are similarly particular forms that express the
growing productivity of labour in capitalist terms.”24 Capitalists demand increasing
productivity in search of the object of their desire—ever growing profit—and they
end losing what they sought. Similarly, crises develop within capitalism not, as one
would expect, from a lack of production, but from a surplus. The capitalist crisis is
a crisis of too much production or of too many objects, which parallels the crisis
that perpetually haunts desire. In the arenas of both consumption and production,
capitalism remains within the logic and limitations of desire. It adheres to desire
and attempts to distance itself at all times from the drive.
Capitalism’s adherence to desire at the expense of drive is essential to its
functioning. Subjects of the drive who are not continually seeking new objects of
desire are not good consumers or producers and inevitably put a wrench in the
functioning of the capitalist system. An exemplary figure of the drive is Herman
Melville’s Bartleby, who refuses to continue in his work as a legal copyist with the
simple credo, “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby stops producing and consuming
because he recognizes that no object will satisfy him, and he no longer wants to
continue within a system of structurally necessary dissatisfaction. His rejection of
his role in the incessant reproduction of the capitalist system suggests a rejection
of the logic of desire as well. Capitalism induces subject into investing themselves
in the system’s reproduction by capturing them at the level of their desire, but this
is precisely the level at which Bartleby abandons the system. He doesn’t mount a
sustained critique of capitalist alienation or dehumanization. He simply adopts the
logic of the drive, a logic incompatible with capitalism.25
The logic of the drive doesn’t escape the obstacles that end up producing
the dissatisfaction of desire. Instead, the drive takes up a different relation to the
obstacle than desire does. Desire is dissatisfied because it attempts to overcome
obstacles, but drive finds satisfaction in the obstacle. According to Joan Copjec
in Imagine There’s No Woman, “Some inherent obstacle—the object of the drive—

simultaneously brakes the drive and breaks it up, curbs it, thus preventing it from
reaching its aim, and divides it into partial drives. Rather than pursuing the Nothing
of annihilating dissatisfaction, the now partial drives content themselves with
these small nothings, these objects that satisfy them.”26 The drive overcomes the
“annihilating dissatisfaction” that capitalism requires by transforming the relation
to the obstacle. The subject that finds satisfaction in the obstacle doesn’t fit well
into the role of the capitalist producer or consumer.
The drive’s self-satisfaction derails capitalism’s need for perpetually dissatisfied
subjects. The difficulty within the capitalist system lies with recognizing this
self-satisfaction, since capitalist ideology constantly works to create a sense of
dissatisfaction in subjects. The creation of dissatisfaction is almost the sole aim
of the advertisement, which shows images of apparently delicious pizza in order
to convince viewers that whatever they already have will not provide the same
enjoyment as the pizza or which plays the sounds of a new song that promises to
outstrip the enjoyment delivered by any older ones. The self-satisfied consumer
is no longer a consumer, which is why the very term “costumer satisfaction” is
inherently misleading. Companies may want some degree of costumer satisfaction,
but their goal is ultimately enough dissatisfaction to keep costumers returning for
a new commodity. Such dissatisfaction is what the subject of the drive avoids. The
production strategy of planned obsolescence, which is integral to the constant
expansion of capitalism, depends on the existence of subjects of desire who
believe in the promise of the new commodity.
The drive opposes the structure of capitalism and capitalist ideology, but it also
opposes capitalism’s tendency toward privatization. The more the subject desires,
the more it ensconces itself within its private world. But the subject of the drive
doesn’t simply interact with the public world; it is the drive that constitutes the
public world. Through the drive, the subject opens itself and exposes itself to the
Other. Though the drive concerns only the subject’s satisfaction and is indifferent
about the recognition of the Other, it nonetheless opens the subject to the Other
because it produces a gap within the subject itself. As Lacan points out in Seminar
XI, “I suggest that there is a radical distinction between loving oneself through the
other—which, in the narcissistic field of the object, allows no transcendence to the
object included—and the circularity of the drive, in which the heterogeneity of the
movement out and back shows a gap in its interval.”27 Here, Lacan distinguishes
between narcissism and the drive. The narcissist appears to interact with others but
only really affirms itself as an object, while the subject of the drive concerns itself
with its own satisfaction and yet necessarily encounters the Other.
The drive thrusts the subject outside of itself; it involves the subject’s self-
transcendence through its failure to achieve self-identity. As Paul Verhaeghe notes,
“Drive drives the subject beyond his own boundaries. As long as it is merely a
matter of desire, life is a bed of roses, there is laughter and tears and, above all,
talk. This is the safe side of the road!”28 Desire, in other words, allows the subject
to remain in a private world and not to recognize its essential opening to the
public. The desiring subject moves from object to object without encountering
any fundamental stumbling block that would arrest its movement. Desire allows
the subject to remain unaware of the foreign element that lies at the heart of
subjectivity. The subject of the drive, in contrast, depends on the stumbling block
in order to achieve its satisfaction, which is why this subject necessarily turns
toward the public.
The encounter with the internal foreign element that the drive necessitates
helps to create a public world and public space. The development of a public space
depends on the subject’s experience of the gap within subjectivity.29 The drive
reveals the subject’s internal fissure and produces satisfaction on the basis of that
fissure. The drive often manifests itself in self-destruction because this is a way for
the subject to affirm its internal division. Self-destruction provides the satisfaction
that comes from the repetition of failure. As the structure of the drive makes
evident, there is a foreign element within subjectivity itself, and public space is
nothing but the manifestation of this foreign element. When we come together to
create public spaces, the obstacle through which the drive satisfies itself becomes
apparent, and subjects must confront the extimate part of themselves—what is in
themselves but also exceeds themselves.
When an act emanates from the drive, it ceases to concern just the private subject
and becomes a matter of public concern. Sophocles’ Antigone holds a central
place within the psychoanalytic universe due to its capacity for illustrating this
often hidden connection.30 The link between drive and the public world becomes
apparent when Antigone buries her brother Polynices despite Creon’s interdiction
of his burial. From the beginning of the play by Sophocles, we see that Antigone’s
commitment to her brother and his proper burial has the status of the drive. She
doesn’t simply desire to bury him but will brook no opposition in doing so, even if
performing the burial leads to her death. In the play’s opening scene, she tells her
sister Ismene that she will pursue this act regardless of her chances for success and
regardless of the lack of assistance from Iseme or anyone else. Isemene rejects her
sister’s entreaty and responds, “I shall obey those in authority; for there is no sense
in actions that exceed our powers.”31 Ismene’s rebuke to Antigone illustrates both
her own abandonment of the drive and suggests Antigone’s commitment to it.
The drive always leads to actions that “exceed our powers” and thus are doomed to
failure, but it finds its satisfaction in the repetition of this failure rather than in the
promise of future success. The necessary failure of the drive creates its relation to
the public world, which functions as the obstacle that the drive requires.
On the one hand, the drive takes place without regard for the restrictions that
the Other would place on it, but on the other hand, the drive exposes the subject
to the Other. As Lacan notes, “what is involved in the drive is making oneself seen.”32
The subject of the drive doesn’t perform its act shamefully in private but in full
view of the Other. Through the drive, one makes one’s self-division public for
anyone to see. This is evident in the case of Antigone. She acts as she does despite
Creon’s prohibition and despite the sensible warning of her sister Ismene, but her
act involves her in a public dispute over who should be excluded from the city.
Antigone buries her brother for what appear to be private reasons: she wants to
preserve the singularity of a dead family member. But because she acts from the
drive, her act does not remain in the private realm. Though Antigone doesn’t intend
to take a public stand, her drive thrusts her into the public and forces everyone to
take a stand—either for her or for Creon.
Antigone reveals how the drive manifesting itself in a single subject has the
effect of creating a public space for everyone. She herself recognizes this when
she proclaims that everyone would be on her side if they didn’t fear Creon. She
professes, “I would say that all these men would approve this, if it were not that fear
shuts their mouths.”33 Though no one comes to Antigone’s defense in time to stop
her execution, her act creates a public and political dispute, as well as the terrain
for this dispute. Her drive also renders her a public figure. Rather than retreating
into private grief over the loss of her brothers, the drive thrusts her into the public
where she must defend her act and impugn Creon’s law that would prohibit it.
Antigone’s drive ultimately leads to her own death, but even when the
consequences are not so horrible, the drive traumatizes the subject. The
satisfaction that the drive produces does not benefit the subject but necessarily
harms the subject’s self-interest. This is what Paul Verhaeghe is getting at when he
notes that “the jouissance of the drive, that other dimension at work in me, takes
place at the expense of me as a subject—will I go along with this or won’t I?”34
The trauma that one must face in the drive is the same as the trauma that occurs
in public space. In each case, I must confront a foreign element that holds the key
to my satisfaction and yet threatens to destroy me. Going into the public, just like
adhering to the drive, is always traumatic, but at the same time, it holds the key to
whatever satisfaction that the subject can obtain. Only the subject that enters into
the public world is a satisfied subject.
Capitalism is at odds with the development of public space because it operates
according to the logic of desire. Subjects within capitalism chase a series of objects
that promise the ultimate satisfaction without ever realizing that the obstacle
itself, the limit, provides their real satisfaction. Such a realization sends one into
the public, where one experiences the obstacle as such. To exist in public space is
to exist amid the obstacle and to confront the obstacle on a daily basis. This is the
path to satisfaction rather than dissatisfaction, but it is also the path to trauma.
The totalitarianisms of the twentieth century seem to bespeak the dangers
of the public world that eclipses all privacy. Under Stalinism, one could have no
private life that might not at any moment become a public crime. Stalinism’s
universal suspicion appears to be the nefarious result of its complete elimination
of privacy. Private dissent became implicitly public and treasonous dissent—and
thus punishable with the gulag. If capitalism has a tendency toward privatization,
at least it saves us from the totalitarian rule that renders everything public. One
might, in fact, interpret the contemporary turn toward privatization as a response
to a ruthless totalitarian rule that forced ever bit of privacy under public scrutiny.
But as Hannah Arendt makes clear in her famous study of Nazism and Stalinism,
these systems did not develop out of an embrace of universalized public space
but rather out of a profound commitment to privacy. This is a point in Origins
of Totalitarianism that few subsequent thinkers have noticed, but it fits within
Arendt’s critique of privacy developed in other works. As Arendt describes how
totalitarian rule emerges, she claims, “Nothing proved easier to destroy than the
privacy and private morality of people who thought of nothing but safeguarding
their private lives.”35 It is precisely the attempt to cling to one’s private world and
avoid the public that nourishes the totalitarian impulse that wipes out all privacy. A
commitment to the public world itself sustains the private world as the basis from
which the public world emerges. Through the drive, the subject comes out of its
private world and engages with the public.
In the public world, the subject is a citoyen, someone engaged in affairs that
concer everyone. But one comes to be a citoyen through one’s singular drive that
stems from one’s status as homme. In this sense, Rousseau’s distinction breaks
down when it encounters the structure of the drive. The drive develops out of
the private world but reveals this world’s self-division, and it is through this self-
division of the private subject that the public world forms. The retreat into privacy
that increasingly marks capitalist society cannot be overcome with moral calls for
engagement with the common. The only effective counter to privacy is to break
from the lure of desire and to sustain the drive in its stead. As long as we remain
desiring subjects, privacy will seem like the only site for satisfaction. In contrast, the
drive drives us into the traumatic satisfaction of the public world and constitutes
us as citoyens.
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Copjec, Joan, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002).
Dean, Jodi, Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth
Press, 1961).
———, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6 (London: Hogarth Press,
1953).
Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
Johnston, Adrian, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2005).
Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978).

———, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans.
Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 319.
———, Le Séminaire, Book X: L’angoisse, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil,
2004).
———, Le Séminaire, Book XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller
(Paris: Seuil, 2006).
Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing
Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991).
Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three, trans. David Fernbach (New
York: Penguin, 1981).
———, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York:
International Publishers, 1964).
Putnam, Robert D., Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
Rancière, Jacques, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York:
Continuum, 2010).
Rothenberg, Molly Anne, The Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Malden, MA:
Polity, 2010).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political
Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hamburg:
Management Laboratory Press, 2008).
———, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin, 2009).
Sophocles, Antigone, in Sophocles II: Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at
Colonus, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Verhaeghe, Paul, Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire, trans. Plym
Peters and Tony Langham (New York: Other Press, 1999).
Zupančič, Alenka, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000).
Notes
1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later
Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), 113.
2 Though Jacques Lacan claims that the drive represents the mythology of
psychoanalysis, he also points out that we have evidence for it through the satisfaction
that it produces. According to Lacan, “The drive is undoubtedly mythological, as Freud
himself wrote. But what isn’t is the supposition of a subject that is satisfied by it.”
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre XVI: D’un Autre à l’autre, 1968–1969, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller (Paris, 2006), 211.
3 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1998).
4 Arendt devalues the pure reproductivity of labor not out of a simple hostility to
capitalism but because her ontology grants priority to the act of creation. Giving
birth to the new represents, for Arendt, the essence of humanity, and the reduction
of humans to laborers alienates them from this essence. In her eyes, communism is as
much guilty of this reduction as capitalism.
5 Despite their joint critique of the turn away from the citoyen, there are significant
disputes between Agamben and Rancière. According to Rancière, Agamben, following
Arendt, desires a pure politics, a politics uncontaminated by any private concerns, and
this part of the evisceration of the political realm rather than part of the critique of that
evisceration. Though he only mentions Arendt in the following passage, it is clear that
Agamben is also a target: “the radical suspension of politics in the exception of bare
life is actually the ultimate consequence of Arendt’s archi-political position, that is,
of the attempt to preserve the political from contamination by the private, the social
or a-political life.” Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven
Corcoran (New York, 2010), 66.
6 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and
Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, 2000), 138–139.
7 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Hamburg,
2008), 21–22.
8 The morality that Smith develops in his other famous treatise, The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, appears initially at odds with his inability to theorize a public world in
The Wealth of Nations. In the former (and earlier) work, Smith argues for the sacrifice
of private interest for the sake of the public. He claims, “The wise and virtuous man
is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public
interest of his own particular order or society” (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral
Sentiments [New York, 2009], 277). But even here, the ruling presupposition is that
the private world and private interest come prior to the public, even if private interest
must ultimately be sacrificed. The ontological priority of the private remains the same
through Smith’s intellectual career and separates him from thinkers like Hegel and
Marx.
9 Habermas views modernity as an unfinished project because there are still those left
out of the public sphere, but the project of modernity is itself, for him, one of universal
inclusion. If the public sphere became truly universal, we would reach the point at
which communicative rationality—the basis for the ethical system that Habermas
develops in his later works—would be realized. This is the connection between the
young Habermas who theorizes the decline of the public sphere and the mature
Habermas who champions communicative rationality.
10 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge, MA, 1989), 160.
11 Marx points out that what appears to capitalists themselves as purely private acts of
exchange are always public as well because capitalists relate to their workers not as
individuals but as part of a whole. The universal relation mediates the particular one.
In the third volume of Capital, Marx notes, “each particular capital should be viewed
simply as a fragment of the total capital and each capitalist in fact as a shareholder in
the whole social enterprise, partaking in the overall profit in proportion to the size of
his share of capital” (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three,
trans. David Fernbach [New York, 1981], 312). By explaining the universal dimension of
every particular capitalist relationship with the worker, Marx hopes to show that what
passes for a private exchange is actually thoroughly involved with the public. Or, for
Marx, there is no private exchange.
12 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(New York, 2000), 228.
13 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing
Expectations (New York, 1991), 72.
14 This is why someone like Slavoj Žižek can present the idea of enjoying one’s symptom
as a radical political strategy. When one identifies with and enjoys one’s symptom, one
sides with the part of oneself that resists ideological interpellation, even though this
resistance implies suffering.
15 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London, 1961),
140.
16 Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. James Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6 (London,
1953), 211.
17 Throughout the course of his intellectual career, Lacan’s understanding of the
relationship between the analyst and the public underwent a transformation. Early on,
he believed that the analyst should identify with the public itself or the Other, but in
the late 1950s, this idea underwent a shift. He came to see identification with the objet
a or desire of the Other, not the Other itself, as the essence of psychoanalytic practice.
18 Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York, 2000), 239.
19 Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York, 2006), 6–7. To be clear, Dean associates the
structure of capitalism with drive rather than with desire and thus would be opposed
to the conclusions that I draw in what follows.
20 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1978), 168.
21 As Adrian Johnston explains the distinction, “drives come to enjoy the very failure
to reach the impossible goal, whereas desire is permanently dissatisfied with the
inaccessibility of its goal.” Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the
Splitting of the Drive (Evanston, IL, 2005), 372.
22 In the early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx first advances the idea that
capitalism works through the production of new needs, which he links to the ruin
of the subject who acquires these new needs. He notes, “every person speculates on
creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place him in
a new dependence and to seduce him into a new mode of gratification and therefore
economic ruin.” Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans.
Martin Milligan (New York, 1964), 147.
23 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre X: L’angoisse, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller
(Paris, 2004), 52–53.
24 Marx, Capital, Volume Three, 347.
25 In his discussion of Bartleby, Agamben links him to a new form of messianism. But he
is a messianic figure who doesn’t return us to a past success but to past failures. As
Agamben puts it, “if Bartleby is the new Messiah, he comes not, like Jesus, to redeem
what was, but to save what was not.” Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA, 1999), 270.
26 Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA, 2002),
34.
27 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 194.
28 Paul Verhaeghe, Love in a Time of Loneliness: Three Essays on Drive and Desire, trans.
Plym Peters and Tony Langham (New York, 1999), 168.
29 Molly Rothenberg makes clear how the internal disjunction of the subject has an
inextricable connection to the social field. She claims, “In producing the social subject,
extimate causality also leaves a remainder or indeterminacy, so that every subject
bears some unspecifiable excess within the social field.” Molly Anne Rothenberg, The
Excessive Subject: A New Theory of Social Change (Malden, MA, 2010), 10.
30 Though Lacan’s own celebrated discussion of Antigone in Seminar VII associates her
with the ethics of desire, he describes her in a way that resembles how he would
describe the drive when he begins to theorize it in subsequent years. In his account
of Antigone, he theorizes desire as a repetition that constantly follows the same path,
which would make it drive. He says, “desire keeps coming back, keeps returning, and
situates us once again in a given track, the track of something that is specifically
our business.” Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York, 1992), 319.
31 Sophocles, Antigone, in Sophocles II: Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes,
Oedipus at Colonus, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge, MA, 1994), lines 67–68.
32 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 195.
33 Sophocles, Antigone, lines 504–505.
34 Verhaeghe, Love in a Time of Loneliness, 169.
35 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1968), 338.
2
Dead or Alive in Joburg
Simone Brott
“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”
—Gilles Deleuze, “The Control Society”1
“To everyone’s surprise, the ship didn’t come to a stop … over Manhattan or Washington
or Chicago ... but instead coasted to a halt directly over the city of Johannesburg.…
[A] temporary camp was set up … just beneath the ship. We didn’t have a plan. There
was a million of them. What was a temporary holding zone … soon became fenced,
became militarized.”
—Documentary footage, District 92
District 9
Late in 2009, I attended a Melbourne screening of the South African film District
9, created by two Canadian, South African-born film makers, Neill Blomkamp and
Sharlto Copley, about an extra-terrestrial immigration camp, based on the original
short Alive in Joburg and filmed on location in Chiawelo, Soweto, during the
Soweto riots of May 2008, in Alexandra, Gauteng.3 Forty-two African émigrés from
Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were killed in the massacre by indigenous,
black South Africans.4 While the film will no doubt be read as an apologue for the
rising xenophobia in post-apartheid South Africa—and, no less, a flashback to the
1976 Soweto riots and forced migrations in District 6, Cape Town to the notorious
Cape-Flats from 1968 to 1982 under Apartheid—the filming of the science-
fiction film in an evacuated shack settlement used real immigrants as extras,
and it witnessed those same dispossessed persons being forcibly transferred to
Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) government housing during the
making of the film, leaving behind a sea of empty shacks. District 9 is not hyper-
reality or verité, it is reality.5
A Black resident bitterly tirades about the presence of aliens in his neighborhood:
“They must just go. I don’t know where, but they must just go!” in an early sequence
of constructed, documentary-style footage that is the lingua franca of the film.6 What
is not revealed is that these dialogues were cut directly from street interviews by
Blomkamp who in researching for the film asked black South Africans in downtown
Johannesburg: “[W]hat do you feel about the Nigerian[s] and Zimbabweans living
here [in Soweto]? District 9 substituted “immigrants” for “aliens,” and to “they must
just go,” it annexed: “If they were from another country, we might understand. But they
are not even from this planet at all.”7
The film takes place in the first decade of the twenty-first century. District 9
has been condemned and the South African government contracts a privatized
military company, Multi-National United, MNU, to relocate 1.8 million aliens to the
wasteland of “District 10,” AKA “Sanctuary Park,” 200 km from the city and described
late in the film as “actually more like a concentration camp.” A year before the film
was shot, the Western Cape government erected Symphony Way TRA (Temporary
Relocation Area), or Blikkiesdorp, “Tin Can Town” as it is called in Afrikaans, in Delft,
Cape Town, a corrugated-iron shack encampment 30km from the city center to
house any number of floating residents evicted from anywhere in the city.8 A
private company, Thubelisha, was outsourced to manage the construction. The
ensuing political crisis surrounding the project and protracted operationalization
of the camp is itself the subject of an epic political narrative. Since the mid-1980s,
an explosion of people living in illegal freestanding shack settlements, in urban
peripheries and city centers, imijondolo (shack dwellers), tells us that District 9 is
not science-fiction, speculation, or a “state of exception,” in South Africa today, but
that of the rule.9
Accompanied by heavily armed private security forces, a documentary film crew,
and four militant groups in the air, Wikus van de Merwe, an ingenuous Afrikaner
MNU bureaucrat is sent into the District 9 field, in order to compel each resident to
sign the eviction notice. “The legality that MNU is using to evict the aliens is simply a
whitewash.” “Rights groups have demanded that mercenaries … comply with all UIO
regulations in District 9 … many suspect … abuses might occur.”
In one attempted eviction, an alien protesting the legality of the notice flicks
the contract page for a second, causing Wikus to exclaim that a de facto signature
has thus been obtained in the trace, alien-DNA left on the page, by the alien
“scrawl.” The touch of a finger alone gives the forced removal legal imprimatur,
but more importantly it ushers in a trend, where the semiotic regime of twentieth
century law, with its basis in language, signification, and interpretation, has been
superseded by biometrics—a technique for controlling the general population
and individuals under surveillance by recording intrinsic biological traits, including
body scanning in airports and schools, such as in France, iris scanning, anticipated
in Blade Runner and now commonplace, and blood testing.10 Biometrics it could be
said is supralinguistic, and the “l-27 form” a sham.11
The problem of biometrics in South Africa attains to a certain intensity given
the historical context of apartheid whose legislation was premised on and
operationalized by the obsessive documentation and classification of its population
into thirteen “racial federations”—by identifying and attributing genetic and racial
minutiae to each citizen in order to derive his or her biological ethnicity and
concomitant legal status fixed under the Population Registration Act of 1950. Each
race was assigned to one out of ten bantustans (Black African “homelands”) under
The Group Areas Act of 1950, which was notoriously deployed toward violent
removals.12
What I call Violent Urbanism in Johannesburg today (biopolitics, corporate-
run detention centers and capitalist paramilitary violence) and enacted with utter
precision in District 9, is none other than a perpetual war, which has survived
apartheid and post-apartheid and ensues in South Africa unabatedly. Its modus
operandi, as we will see, is weaponry, technology, and “equipments of power”—
Dead or Alive in Joburg 33
those live arrangements for producing subjectivity (subjectivization)—in a word,

architecture.
District 9 is, of course, not a civilian detention center or humanitarian operation.
It is principally a warzone. “MNU, the second-largest weapons manufacturer in
the world,” has a direct interest in Violent Urbanism as it covets the advanced
extraterrestrial bio-weaponry, a Tessla style directed-energy weapon, operable only
via alien DNA. The biologically-engineered gun’s impact is devastating, everything
is violently pulled apart, “obliterated on a molecular level.”
“… Certain factions of Nigerian gangs want to extract weaponry from District
9 … and have been trying to for years.… The Nigerians have amassed a cache of
thousands of these weapons … without the ability to use them.” District 9, we learn,
is home to underground Nigerian clans who are obsessed with alien weaponry,
due to reigning mythologies of the healing nature of alien limbs—in what is now
a controversial reference to present-day biological superstitions and rites, both
attributed to, and refuted by, real Nigerians.13
“The Nigerians had various scams going. One of them was the cat-food scam …
where they sold cat food to the aliens for exorbitant prices.” The aliens are inexplicably
addicted to “cat food” (which has an iconic and perverse significance among the
poor in South Africa), and they trade their weaponry and body parts with Nigerian
factions to support their addiction (which is absolutely inelastic, and the cause
of shocking, floating rates of exchange). Cat food is like “firewater” for American
Indians who also traded their priceless technology for drugs. “You put the money
here first. You don’t get anything until you pay … [n]ot to mention interspecies
prostitution.… And they also dealt in alien weaponry.” Biological weaponry that
equals the alien arm itself is the Lacanian “Real” or objet petit a around which all
the drives circulate in District 9—everyone wants it—while the aliens themselves
remain disenfranchised, dispossessed, drug addled (the alien body is routinely
sacrificed in this arms war).
This Wildesque self-portrait of contemporary South Africa, a nation-state
eating away at itself from within, evinced in the real-time-space of the cinema, of
aesthetics, speaks to the global expansion of all violent urbanisms, given by the
militarization of the city, the dystopia of biopolitics and constant wars, and the
residuum of modernity correctly portrayed in the cinema as science fiction.14
I walked out of the cinema with the usual guilty combination of elation and
terror, an adrenalin rush that derives from the immediacy and prescience of any
reality-turning film, and the terror of proper sci-fi cinema, namely that this is not
fiction, that this is streaming reality. South Africa is not the only place in which
this could or is still happening—the reach of Violent Urbanism is worldwide.
Johannesburg is the urban nightmare of late capitalism realized in high definition.
“… Once the septicemia set in, it just spread.” The film turns on the biological
metamorphosis of Wikus who comes into contact with a canister of alien fuel
(that is also blood) which sprays into his face. In a classic science-fiction reversal,
Wikus infected with alien DNA begins to develop alien characteristics, spitting
black fluid and losing his fingernails, invoking a microgenre of science fiction films
I have always liked beginning with The Fly (1958) and David Cronenberg’s remake
in 1986.15 Only here Wikus is now rendered an enemy of the state, no longer a
bureaucrat in service to the corporation, but “the most valuable business artifact
on Earth” to be vivisected and studied. Wikus’s identity “flip” is of epic Deleuzian
proportions (like an FBI agent who becomes a drug runner or a Cold War double
agent)—his biopolitical polarity thus reversed, leads us along a giddy path to the
end of the film given as a series of electric shocks to Wikus and the spectator alike,
as Wikus shows us what he’s made of.
“This body represents hundreds of millions … maybe billions of dollars worth
of biotechnology … [b]ut his real value was that he could operate alien weaponry.”
Wikus is kidnapped to MNU Headquarters’ covert Biological Laboratory (BioLab)
four stories underground, a 1970s modernist tower, where he is forced to shoot
laboratory aliens with his fully transformed arm; he also sees alien carcasses on
stretchers in various states, eviscerated, blackened, burned, the grotesque remains
of illegal biological experiments. In what is a decidedly un-Kafkaesque turn of fate,
Wikus manages to escape the MNU Castle/Burrow—just … and becomes a fugitive
in Johannesburg.
Piet Smit, an MNU executive, lies to the press saying that Wikus is infected with
an alien STD and is highly contagious “after prolonged sexual activity with aliens in
District 9,” in a bizarre parallelism with Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange
(who, as I write, is being legally pursued for a putative sex crime, in what can only
be described as a legal non sequitur to the real crime which cannot be named).
Wikus hides in the landfill of District 9 to become imperceptible to the human-
run state, and in this brilliant Machiavellian act we will see once and for all how
District 9, and Violent Urbanism in the new millennium, functions as a smooth
space for the deterritorialization of subjectivity—contrary to the Foucauldian
disciplinary model of incarceration. (We rarely see Foucauldian “discipline” enacted
in—nor do we ever see an alien try to escape from—District 9, notwithstanding
the old signifiers put in place as mise-en-scène: barbed wire fencing, “humans only”
signage and so on ….16) In the District 9 landfill “Wikus,” as a State-constituted
subject, is dissipated, but his organs are secure. Wikus is indeed alive in Joburg.
Violent Urbanism
In the twenty-first century, the detention center is no longer a prison but a chemical
and biological weapons research facility.17 District 9 is the real laboratory, “gone
live” whereby a real-time research takes place as war—where research conducted
in the traditional spaces of scientific knowledge, MNU’s BioLab, is put into action
and tested on the ground. District 9 is an amorphous espace quelconque, an “any-
space-whatever,”18 sucking in both the skyscraper (MNU) and the slum (District 9),
and all their deterritorializing effects which circulate around the camp. The film
reveals exactly how architecture is complicit in Violent Urbanism, and it thereby
redefines the slippery contours of architecture and urbanism in the twenty-first
century.
District 9 was erected when the aliens arrived in 1982, during the heady new
liberalism of laissez faire governance and its “free” cities. To be clear, laissez faire
does not refer to leniency, but to a strategic framework of the corporation in which
to observe Violent Urbanism and fuel the camp’s blackmarket economy, which has
been allowed to flourish for 20 years under the transparent gaze of MNU.19 The
corporation’s interests, the film suggests, are directly served by the flows of sex,
drugs and bioweaponry, evaporating out of District 9 and reabsorbed back into
MNU’s laboratories as condensation.
District 9 evinces a compelling urban image that is futural just as it is firmly
rooted in the present. It depicts the shift from the gestation and free development
of District 9 in the 1980s and 1990s to the twenty-first century of biopolitics, and
its obsession with a “war on terror,” “homeland security” and “biological weapons
of mass destruction,” where the black population, previously alienated under
apartheid, will no longer tolerate the presence of the aliens, and MNU is finally
pressured into shutting District 9 down, whose parallels with the current South
African wars are astonishing.20
What is visionary about this film is its ability to see that we are now standing on
new ground. Violent urbanism, of course, was alive in Joburg long before 2008.21
Since the 1960s, South Africa has ruthlessly advanced a war economics through
armed conﬂicts, inflated security and military budgets, and controversial chemical
and biological armament programs. Violent Urbanism in fact increased at the
“1994 moment,” of the new democracy and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela,
under the ravages of state corruption and neoliberalism. The “new wars,” South
Africa in the 2000s completes the deterritorialization of “ethnicity,” “race” and
“territory” of twentieth century critique. Violent Urbanism sees only free-floating
genes, biological weapons, body parts and targets through the eyes of a hyped-up
warfare-capitalism, which is utterly mad.
The biological and genetic testing of alien bodies by MNU and the film’s vivid
references to underground State-weaponization of drugs, chemicals, and biological
substances darkly mirrors the documented, covert chemical and biological warfare
(CBW) program of the South African Defense Force (SADF), named “Project Coast.”
CBW was established in 1981 under the direction of the Prime Minister, previously
Minister of Defense, Pieter Willem Botha.22 Botha appointed the cardiologist Wouter
Basson, AKA “Dr. Death,” its principal.23 Project Coast’s secret military interventions
into both urban and pastoral areas are powerfully summonsed in the acting out
of MNU’s relationship with District 9, which, as per Project Coast, ramifies into
governmental corruption, Nigerian drug rings, prostitution, and a black market
arms economy—from which, it should now be patently obvious, South Africa to
this day has struggled to extricate itself.
While District 9 has been mostly reviewed as a tale of post-colonial or post-
apartheid politics gone wrong, the film explodes this late twentieth century
historicizing specter. Its message, in 2010, is that Post-Apartheid never happened.
Post-Apartheid was the shibboleth of the 1990s, a utopian promise inherent
in Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation,” to create a non-racial state through the
installation of a liberal democratic constitution.24 The spectacular failure of
neoliberalism in South Africa, its attempt to integrate South Africa into the global
economy through privatization and increasing leverage given to multinational
corporations, created widespread poverty,25 more and more violence, and millions
of home repossessions and evictions26 as District 9 has nakedly depicted (while
warlords profited and are still profiting from Violent Urbanism).27
The prolific violence in South Africa today absorbs in its neutral surface: random,
motiveless train shootings, assassinations, squatter camp violence, homeland
riots, routine car-jackings; and, increasingly, Afrikaner men “wiping out their own
families, shooting their wives and children ….”28 Violent Urbanism is irreducible to
post-apartheid or any afterward—the conflict has run in all directions, no longer
traceable to any of its putative original lines. We should ask not what is the cause
of violence; rather, we should grasp violence as the very nature of South Africa, a
shameless nation state that answers only to the global-wars project.
The functional virtualities of District 9 are anarchy and sedition, yet the stream of
mediatic violence and disturbing images we see here, in Australia, and throughout
the Western world eclipses another more elusive violence, described as the Third
Force, of underground, state security apparatus, including the South African Police
Service (SAP) and military apparatus, either orchestrating, or being complicit
in, wide-front political violence.29 “The Third Force is what our own people have
used to draw a line between what the government is doing openly and what it is
doing covertly.”30 It involves the United States, among other foreign governments,
and demonstrates that CBW proliferation did not cease when Project Coast was
dismantled. When a nation-state uses biological or chemical warfare clandestinely,
is it not bioterrorism?31 To be clear, there is no ghost causing the violence. The
Stanford-trained academic-activist Jonathan Jansen has argued that the Third
Force is not a paranoiac fantasy or conspiracy. Project Coast is indeed such a Third
Force institution, symptomatic of a predatory state under the thrall of liberalization.
Project Coast
The Soweto uprisings began In 1976, followed by a long period of civil unrest that
would persist until 1984 with a series of violent and deadly mass actions in the
Vaal Triangle south of Johannesburg. Far worse than in 1960 or after 1976, these
actions reverberated throughout the country and continued for the next fifteen
years. In 1978, when Defense Minister P.W. Botha became Prime Minister, power
was increasingly appropriated by the military.32 In District 9, the militarization of
everyday life is already a fait accompli—and, in Violent Urbanism, an alien, i.e. any
starving immigrant or dispossessed person, is simply a badly equipped troop.33
Project Coast was the SADF’s response to South Africa’s perceived threat of
“red” and “black” forces—the continued internal civil unrest and the external
specter of the Soviet-supporting insurgencies, such as Cuban-backed regimes,
which threatened to take over Mozambique and Angola completely.34 Project
Coast’s avowed goal was to collect and test a range of biological agents in order to
develop its defense from a Soviet CBW attack.35 In actuality, it supplied military and
police units with chemical and biological agents for counter-insurgency warfare,
assassination, and execution of war prisoners. District 9 is a transparent extension
of MNU’s underground BioLab, and it corporealizes the symbiosis and conflation of
the laboratory and the battlefield, characteristic of Violent Urbanism—even if the
Lab and District 9 are given to the aliens as two modes of juridical life. Their goals
are one and the same.
Four front companies were established by the SADF to house Project Coast’s
research and development: Delta G Scientific Company (1982), which produced
chemical warfare agents; RRL, the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (1983),
which tested Delta G’s biological agents and their effects, and was responsible
for biological warfare; and Protechnik Company (1987) which performed quality
assurance testing of chemical protective materials and equipment.36
“A virus, a selective virus. Release it near the aliens.” In the early 1980s, RRL both
acquired and produced anthrax, Plague, cholera, E. coli, staph, necrotizing fasciitis,
ricin, botulinum, gas gangrene, anti-matter bacteria, and the Ebola, Marburg,
and Rift Valley viruses.37 Fears of a “black tidal wave” led scientists to pursue the
survival of “white South Africa” by chemical and biological means. Project Coast
scientists engaged in genetic engineering research to produce a “black bomb,” an
ethnic biological weapon engineered to kill or incapacitate blacks and not whites
where an insurrection was taking place.38 Plans were devised to build a large-scale
anthrax production facility at RRL and were almost operationalized in 1985.39 The
SADF had been experimenting with anthrax as early as the late 1970s in parallel
with a controversial outbreak of the anthrax epizootic in Zimbabwe (1978–1980),
which was allegedly due to deliberate spread.40
“Don’t shoot. You’re gonna turn it into a war zone. What is that? Tear gas? Is that
tear gas? No, it’s cat food. It’s cat food. I just distract them.” In one image we see yellow
smoke issue from a drone aircraft hovering over District 9, a Clausewitzian fog of
war. A real drone was tested in 1992, which sprayed a yellow substance similar
to teargas over Mozambique.41 Under Project Coast, Delta G produced a New
Generation Tear Gas (NGT), tranquilizing drugs, and gas grenades “to counteract
rolling mass actions led by the ANC or its surrogates.”42 Basson was infamously tried
for Operation Duel in 1982, where he tranquilized 200 SWAPO prisoners and then
dumped their bodies from airplanes out to sea.43
Basson testified that Delta G manufactured large amounts of Mandrax and
Ecstasy, intended for use in crowd control in South Africa. Project Coast also worked
on the weaponization of hallucinogenic drugs and dagga (marijuana).44 The aliens
of District 9 are also narcotized. Cat food is a biological weapon, an alternative
to tear gas, which mollifies, as narcotic. The tactical advantage of ecstasy, or any
“biologic” of course, is that its scope is not limited to use in insurgencies. The
weaponization of drugs in District 9—and all violent urbanisms—is simply a part of
the culture. In biopolitics, CBW is self-administered as therapy rather than cure (a
political solution), or as an offensive issued by the enemy.
“I would like to buy some weapons. AK-47, some grenades, maybe tear-gas canisters.
I see you have limpet mines here, as well. And I also see you guys have alien weapons
there, which is great.” Wikus’s alien turn is never so palpable as when he enters into
District 9’s Nigerian territory, where he tries to procure first meat, then cat food,
and then weapons from a sociopathic Nigerian warlord (Obesandjo), biologically
inserting himself into an economy that he had previously policed. What intrigues
people about the Basson case is his bizarre involvement in clandestine arms
procurement deals with Marxist groups fighting for black liberation (from the
conservative Afrikaner movement of which Basson is the quintessence), and his
exporting and selling of psychoactive pills (LSD) on the black market to those same
anti-apartheid radical communities.45
The chain of command for Project Coast included three elite military personnel
at the top, followed by the SAP Commissioner Johan Van der Merwe, from which
Wikus appears to have derived his name.46 The real Van der Merwe was Basson’s
boss, in the chain of command, a bureaucrat or police (which are tantamount in
Violent Urbanism), who we can speculate is an alter ego of Wikus, or the Lacanian
Name of the Father that polices him.47 If Wikus represents the state police’s alien
evictions in the beginning of the film, an “ego,” by the end he starts to look decidedly
like a Wouter, a pure id on the other side of the law: inhabiting an underworld and
on the run from the state, just like “Dr Death,” as Basson was known.
But, if we are to conflate Wikus and Wouter in this way, we must accept that the
film’s premise is either Schadenfreude, for the spectator, i.e. Wikus “gets what he
deserves”; or, by extension, it is moralization—i.e. put an apartheid war criminal
inside District 9 (Violent Urbanism) and he or she will finally see through the ideology
of the state: “becoming alien” (an other) means to become human (humane).
But, the weak cries invoking human/alien, legal/illegal here simply cannot be
heard, because in Violent Urbanism everyone is an alien (a potential enemy, a
dispossessed citizen) and we—the humans—have become the enemy. Compare
the dereliction of the aliens of District 9 with the dominant subject positions of
aliens in the films Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Predator (1987), and the super-human
and artificial-intelligence machines in The Terminator (1984), and Robocop (1987).
District 9 debunks the postmodern deconstruction of aliens/alienation in 1980s
science fiction, and trades them for subjectivization and equipments of power,
which transcend any subject with fixed characteristics or constituted object.48
“MNU’s illegal experiments on the aliens are uncovered and exposed by Fundiswa
Mhlanga, Wikus’ former trainee, who is prosecuted and incarcerated. District 9 is
completely demolished.” By 1988, when, negotiations opened up between U.S.,
Cuba, Angola, and South Africa for the withdrawal of Cuban troops, President
Botha and the SADF realized that the external component of “red threat” was no
longer effective. The motivation for Project Coast rapidly faded. A year later, de
Klerk replaced President Botha and instigated his plan to dismantle apartheid. One
of his stated goals was to re-instate civilian control over the “security apparatus”
and rein in the “securocrats” and secret projects like Project Coast.49
Basson was captured in January 1997 during a sting operation and charged
with fraud and the possession of and trading of illegal substances, including one
thousand Ecstasy tablets.50 By 1998, Basson was further charged with murder and
conspiracy to commit murder, alongside new charges of fraud and drug dealing.51
He was famously acquitted of every charge.52 Nevertheless, Basson is, by all

accounts, a chemical and biological war criminal.
One of the revelations to emerge in the course of Basson’s trial was that American
scientists provided much information and materials to Project Coast.53 In Bob
Cohen’s recent documentary on Project Coast, Basson intimated: “U.S., America and
Europe helped our technology … help from UK and U.S. was ideological, [but] we
went with the sole objective to determine how we could advance our programme
with their technology.”54 The deceased American forensic investigator Stephen
Dresch suggested that “Western Nations helped in order to let South Africa to do
their dirty work for them, to test U.K. and U.S. techniques in South Africa.”55 Just as
District 9’s ground operations tested CBW technology produced in MNU’s BioLab,
South Africa, via Project Coast, was for scientists world-wide a veritable laboratory
for testing CBW weapons synthesized by the U.S., U.K. and Middle East in the
1980s—a haven where CBW proliferation and activity were unregulated.56
The rolling back of Project Coast was part and parcel of the liberalization of the
defense industry in the early 1990s, but owing to loose financial supervision and
Project Coast’s baroque economic structure, the privatization of RRL, Delta G, and
Protechnik became a veritable racket.57 Project Coast was deterritorialized from
the start, dispersed across multiple private and state-owned front companies,
offshore holding companies and international bank accounts, which Basson had
established to support myriad projects under the auspices of Project Coast. Basson
owned shares in these front companies, so when they were sold on the open
market, he and Project Coast collaborators “pocketed state assets totaling more
than R50 million ($17 million in 1990 U.S. dollars), all for an investment of as little
as R350,000 ($120,000 in 1990 U.S. dollars), attracting the attention of the Office for
Serious Economic Offences (OEO).”58 The corporation MNU similarly exploited the
unregulated economic flows of District 9 and represents the future of governance,
whereby the city, as Deleuze predicted, is “a single corporation that now has only
stock holders”—an urbanism “gone public” like an “IPO” or company in the stock
exchange.
Like Wikus, Basson had to flee the state, but for very different reasons
(economic malfeasance). While Wikus hid in an alien shack in District 9, Basson
was found hiding in his car. The shack Wikus finds himself in is filled with illegal
alien technologies of mobility, which he later uses to escape. Basson’s car was
filled with Project Coast technologies: documents, computer discs, and dangerous
CBW samples. Aside from these contents, Basson held dangerous information and
expertise accumulated via his role in Project Coast on CBW weapons, including
rare formulae and details on exotic substances. It was this secret code to unlocking
CBW—Basson’s collateral—that made him too valuable to lose, too dangerous to
be separated from the state. In the end he was rehired.59
Wikus also becomes invaluable to MNU for the code to human-alien DNA that he
holds in his arm. In Violent Urbanism the relation between the alien organism and
human is not a border war, but a DNA and code war. MNU covets this information
(equipment), whose end game is the freeing of the biological component—in other
words weaponization and operationalization of subjectivity—of partial subjects or
body parts (that is, after all, the end-goal of all violent urbanisms). Clearly, the early
interest in the aliens as objects of knowledge has given way to the insatiable desire
for biological components.
Resistance
“Something is definitely coming out of the ground. It seems to be drifting towards the
center of the territory. We’re getting reports of alien devices activating throughout the
city.” Earlier in the film, Wikus discovers an illegal, underground basement in one
alien’s shack, which turns out to be the lost alien command module thought to have
fallen out of the mothership when the aliens first arrived, thus rendering it a sheer
“will of indifference” hovering over the battlefield. This small control device is the
Lacanian objet petit a (object small a), something lost from the Real, a fallout from
the “mother” (ship) in the failed transition from the Real to the Symbolic. The micro-
ship is the “object cause of desire” which gets all the partial objects going. What
the alien resistance augurs in the film is the return to the real—not the Lacanian
Real (an impossible place to which the part objects forever circle but never arrive)
but, as per Guattari’s “ethico-aesthetics”—the social reality and realization of alien
(animal) life, in all its multiple forms and technologies, from which the aliens (we)
have become alienated.
Indeed, this is not entirely a one-sided war. The film gains momentum and
is adrenalized by the resistance front of a single alien, a reluctant collaborator
of Wikus’s, whose flight from the state we will see is enabled by technologies of
“becoming”60 and architectural “equipments of power.”61 These are, respectively,
the hybrid partial-subjectivities Wikus uses to his advantage (becoming alien,
becoming machine, becoming ship, where the fusion between two bodies is
underway), and those architectural devices, substances, and stratagems in which
such makeshift yet precise subjectivities (becomings) are corporealized to mobilize
an escape plan (which could also be used for a wider resistance, rebellion or other
schemata as is implied for the future of the aliens and a District 9 sequel yet to
come).
What are the visible technologies of Wikus’s becoming alien, or the critical
equipments of power in District 9? Wikus moves from one set of surfaces to the
next in a serial exchange of the political envelope that is equally architectural as it is
biological: he leaves the public-servant office cubicle (a lining), to inspect and later
hide in the interior of a District 9 corrugated metal shed (both around the same
internal area). Later he will hijack the command module by plunging his hand into
a gelatinous liquid; and, when the miniature craft is destroyed, he will put on his
last (battle) suit, the mechanized war machine or a transformer robot-in-disguise,
which he turns on to defeat the MNU soldier, Venter.
These formal envelopes are in and of themselves insufficient. What makes
everything run in District 9 is the precious alien blood and fuel (which are
tantamount to each other). It takes twenty years to acquire the smallest amount
of fuel from the alien body, required to awaken the ship and drive the command
module. Fuel-blood is what is required to reverse engineer Wikus’s hybrid-alien

DNA, just as it holds the key to alien DNA. Fuel-blood is surplus value or profit. It is
capital itself. It can be converted and exchanged from and between anybody to the
next body, human, technoid, machine, or weaponry. In this sense, MNU deploys
alien blood against them, it renders useless, sophisticated alien technologies.
MNU thus reterritorializes the weapon-augmented bodies of the aliens, bodies
that undergo biochemical violence of the worst kind. (The main trouble with the
aliens is that they are the misbegotten heirs of militarism and violent urbanism.)
Urbanism and Lies
“Truth is a powerful disinfectant, useful to spread around …”

—Stephen Dresch, Anthrax War
Prior to his death, Dresch moodily described the existence of an international

bioweapons mafia. “In the shadows, the Death Sciences are spreading like germs
across the globe. It’s time to disinfect.62 According to Jim Parker, a former member
of the Rhodesian Army’s covert unit, the Selous Scouts, South Africa and the U.S.
continue to make CBW deals, and America is preparing to fight a biological war.63
“The Pentagon could do it now. The troops are all inoculated. Anthrax War Planning
in the U.S. is clearly underway. They are capable of a worldwide strike of 5000 types
of biological weapons.”64 It is this global security project that is most alarming and
that District 9 brings into sudden focus. The U.S. has budgeted 50 billion dollars for
“biodefence.” The problem of “security” and the question asked by Cohen is “Could
the embers of the Cold War be reignited with the new bioweapons?”65
The answer is a resounding yes. But also no. The Ballardian international, defensive
war is already underway because CBW proliferation thrives underground, eclipsed
by the nuclear deproliferation program. CBW is not a Cold- but a Quiet-War: Clearly,
the prefix “post” has expired, just as the terms of the Cold War have past their use-
by date. We can no longer say that we are post-war, post-modern (or, more recently,
post-political or post-critical as some architect-provocateurs once put it). In the
second half of the last century, contemporary architecture situated itself in relation
to World War II and the intense examination and critique of post-war culture, in the
translation of German thought and form into the founding American modernism
of the 1950s, a platform for contemporary architectural discussion as we know it.
Yet District 9 turns inside out this twentieth century modern episteme even as
it brings us into a violent confrontation with space (notwithstanding a twenty–
year–long affair with the architectural surface and envelope). Violent Urbanism is a
war that inhabits the very air we breathe. CBW mercilessly reprograms modern and
postmodern space alike—it is no longer the ego-subject’s conquest of Giedionian
space-time, a space that serves the middle class; neither is it the dematerialization
of space via postmodern doubt and aporia. Rather, Violent Urbanism is the
reterritorialization of subjectivity by the very molecules that constitute space—
the conquest of the air we breathe. In Violent Urbanism, space is the enemy, a
nonsentient subject (entity) constituted by microscopic particles, which threaten
to invade our bodies and kill from the inside. The new war domination is molecular,
invisible, and disturbingly real.
District 9 realizes the jump cut from disciplinary society to biopolitics and
security like no other film.66 It is what Deleuze called the Control Society, and
here, Violent Urbanism. Blomkamp’s alien-verité reveals in concrete terms the total
invasion of the molecular and the biological in twenty-first century geopolitics, if
we can even call it that any more. Violent Urbanism is precisely those imperceptible
biological techniques that determine traditional geopolitical sites for the control of
cities. Under Violent Urbanism, the entire urban machine—viz. detention centers,
border control, and enforced relocation and so on—is recast as a set of bio-
techniques that violate the body to serve the security agenda of the twenty-first
century nation-state including “defensive” CBW proliferation, genetic engineering,
and bio-surveillance.67 Increasingly, biological components, genes, and chemicals
are replacing individuals, dividuals, and masses or populations in the new politics;
yet, the legal status of genes and genetic material remains unresolved.68 As such,
subjects are reduced to biological datum, and the enemy is anyone, everyone.
Osama Bin Laden said “We don’t distinguish between military and civilians.
Everyone is a target.”69
The question that remains unanswered, the question that is no longer asked,
is: What is or will be architecture’s role in Violent Urbanism? How are or will we be
culpable? Hypothetically, if an Assange-inspired “archileaks” site was constructed
to anonymously document architecture’s complicity with state violence at any
level; if architecture journals entertained theme issues on security and corruption,
what would be revealed? What is it that we dare not say under our own name?
Conversely, can we construct so-called “liberatory” spaces or free subjectivities out
of these self-same technologies on the other side of Violent Urbanism? Can we use
surveillance, biometrics or CBW techniques as an opening for social transformation
and autonomy from the militarized State? Or have these goals been spirited away?
It is precisely in architecture that forces of liberation and domination confront
each other and through this confrontation, architecture is the locus for fighting
the war of ideas (ideology), even if it cannot win the ground war. No matter what
happens, architecture as we have always known is complicit at the symbolic level
(even if no one will admit it), and for this it is all the more terrible. If architectural
critique has been perverted in the sacred academy, clearly it lives on in the
cinematic image.
Charles Jencks once said that architecture is a weak player in geopolitics—a
position that is frankly untrue. It is crashingly immoral, and District 9 tells us so.
How will architecture respond to or situate itself against the hypnotic demand for
security and for chemical and biological weaponry research and development? If
genes, body parts, architectural dwellings and aircraft are all exchangeable, where
an alien ship equals the basement of an alien dwelling and later on becomes a
vehicle of escape; if in Violent Urbanism all territorial and terrestrial borders are
flattened and dissolved, can we enter into this smooth space on the other side of
ideology? Just as the protagonist of District 9, Wikus becomes a fugitive, an enemy
of the state, so we, too, by dint of our human genes, are now the enemy. We are no
longer countering an external threat. Violent Urbanism is us.
Bibliography
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Regis, Edward, The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project
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United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on
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Notes
1 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 20.

2 Neill Blomkamp, District 9 (Film: TriStar Pictures, 2009; DVD: TriStar Pictures, 2009).
Quotes from the film will be shown in italics.
3 Neill Blomkamp, Alive in Joburg (Film: Spy Films, 2005; DVD: Spy Films, 2006).
Jo’burg is the common name for Johannesburg. Ironically, “Soweto” an acronym for
South Western Townships was the original place to which the first evictees, from
Johannesburg, were removed at the inception of Apartheid rule in 1948.
4 “South African Mob Kills Migrants,” BBC News, May 12, 2008, accessed August 7, 2012,
http://news.bbc.co.U.K./2/hi/africa/7396868.htm.
5 Apartheid, meaning separateness in Afrikaans (in English, “apart-hood”), was the
system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced under the minority rule of white
Afrikaners in 1948 till 1994 where the majority “nonwhite” citizens were deprived of
their rights.
6 Excerpts of such dialogue made by characters in the film or various narrators, in
talking-heads accounts, drawn from the script appear interspersed throughout this
essay, set in italics and in double quotation marks.
7 “Those answers—they weren’t actors, those are real answers ….” Neill Blomkamp, “5
Things You Didn’t Know About District 9: Interview with Neill Blomkamp by Meredith
Woerner,” i09: We Come from the Future, [published by] Gawker Media, August 19,
2009, accessed August 07, 2012, http://io9.com/5341120/5-things-you-didnt-know-
about-district-9.
8 David Smith, “Life in ‘Tin-Can Town’ for the South Africans Evicted Ahead of the World
Cup,” The Guardian 1 (April 2010), http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/01/
south-africa-world-cup-blikkiesdorp; Anna Majavu, “We’d Rather Die Than Move
Away,” Sowetan (October 8 2009), http://antieviction.org.za/2009/10/08/media-
we%E2%80%99d-rather-die-than-move-away/#more-3417.
9 The population of South Africa is nearly fifty million. Ten percent of the population
lives in informal shack dwellings. Source: “The Politics of Housing,” HSRC Review, Human
Sciences Research Council 8, 2 (August 2010): 18–19. In 2005, 28.7% of the urban
population in South Africa lived in slums. Source: United Nations Human Settlements
Programme, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (London,
Sterling, VA, 2003).
10 Ridley Scott, Blade Runner (Film: Warner Brothers Pictures, 1982; DVD: Warner Home
Video, 1992).
11 For what’s wrong with biometrics, see Giorgio Agamben, “Non à la biométrie” (“No
to Biometrics”), Le Monde, December 5, 2005. Agamben asks, Were the photos that
allowed the Nazi police force to locate, record, and deport the Jews to death camps
originally identity cards or professional cards? After September 11, 2001, South Africa
introduced biometric passports which some have argued will result in “biometric
apartheid” for those who refuse to be recorded.
12 Catherine Lowe Besteman, Transforming Cape Town (Berkeley, CA, 2008), 6: There were
two types of apartheid: the geographic (residential) segregation called “structural
apartheid”; and “petty apartheid” the infamous racial segregation on buses, in schools
and hospitals and so on.
13 The film was banned in Nigeria. See Bashir Adigun, “Nigerian officials: ‘District 9’ not
welcome here,” The Associated Press, September 19, 2009; “Government bans showing
of District 9 film in Nigeria,” Vanguard, September 25, 2009, accessed August 7, 2012,
http://www.vanguardngr.com/2009/09/govt-bans-showing-of-district-9-film-in-
nigeria/.
14 Biopolitics means the use of the body and life as weapons à la Antonio Negri and
Michel Foucault, the latter, in relation to his concept of “biopower.”
15 Kurt Neumann, The Fly (Film: Twentieth Century Fox, 1958; DVD: Twentieth Century
Fox Home Entertainment, 2007). David Cronenberg, The Fly (Film: Twentieth Century
Century Fox, 1986; DVD: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005).
16 In this alien city, “sovereignty” and “territory” are secondary to the logic of “security,”
which is used to justify anything in the name of weapons acquisition. See Michel
Foucault et al., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977–
1978 (Basingstoke, UK, and New York, 2007); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics:
Lectures at the Collège De France 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Arnold I.
Davidson (Basingstoke, UK, and New York, 2008).
17 The aliens are a biological milieu in the Lamarckian sense.
18 Éspace quelconque was the French filmmaker Pascal Augé’s term, used by Gilles
Deleuze—while Augé was Deleuze’s student—in Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement (Paris,
1983).
19 Violent Urbanism “responds to and regulates reality … only ever situating oneself in
this interplay of reality with itself … [which is] the general principle of liberalism—not
interfering, allowing free movement … according to the laws and mechanisms of
reality itself.” Foucault et al., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège De
France, 1977–1978, 48.
20 Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, “Dominant Capital and the New Wars,” Journal
of World-Systems Research 10, 2 (Summer, 2004): 255–327.
21 Conflict between ethnic groups in South Africa goes back to the colonial expansion of
British rule in South Africa from the beginning of the nineteenth century and first half
of the twentieth century, prior to the apartheid regime and its fall-out.
22 Pieter Willem Botha, known as “P. W.” and Die Groot Krokodil (“The Big Crocodile”), was
the prime minister of South Africa from 1978 to 1984.
23 Basson was Botha’s personal physician.
24 Johann Rossouw, “South Africa: not yet post-colonial,” Le Monde Diplomatique August
2008, accessed August 7, 2012, http://mondediplo.com/2008/08/03southafrica.
25 Adam Habib, “State-Civil Society Relations in Post Apartheid South Africa,” Social
Research 72, 3 (Fall, 2005): 681. This was due to the fact that foreign investment,
which is the first premise of liberal economic policy, did not flow into the country as
predicted; at the same time, the relaxation of foreign exchange controls, created a
massive leak of capital that flowed out of the country. The markets became and remain
volatile.
26 A. Habib, and V. Padayachee, “Economic Policy and Power Relations in South Africa’s
Transition to Democracy,” World Development 28, 2 (2000).
27 E. Wayne Nafzige, “Development, Inequality, and War in Africa,” The Economics of Peace
and Security Journal 1, 1 (2006): 17.
28 Jonathan Jansen, “Why So Much Violence in South Africa?,” Stanford University News
Service (October 11, 1992).
29 Paulus Zulu, “Political Violence and the ‘Third Force,’” Southern Africa Report 8, 2 (1992):
8–30.
30 Sipho Gcabashe, a member of the ANC, in Jansen, “Why So Much Violence in South
Africa?” http://news.stanford.edu/pr/92/921110Arc2038.html.
31 Mark Wheelis, Lajos Rózsa, and Malcolm Dando, Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons
since 1945 (Cambridge, 2006), 284–293, 301–303.
32 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare
Program (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, April 2001), 13. The original report cited
throughout this essay has since been published as a book: Helen E. Purkitt and
Stephen F. Burgess, South Africa’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (Bloomington, IN,
2005). See also Edward Regis, The Biology of Doom: The History of America’s Secret Germ
Warfare Project (New York, 1999); and Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, Plague Wars: A
True Story of Biological Warfare (New York, 1999).
33 In District 9, the aliens were first discovered on their ship in a state of starvation. In
the actual Zimbabwe, starvation was employed strategically to weaken resistance
movements. The documented weaponization of “food control” (rationing of food,
contamination of water supply, etc.) is discussed at length in M.D. Meryl Nass, “Anthrax
Epizootic in Zimbabwe, 1978–1980: Due to Deliberate Spread?,” Physicians for Social
Responsibility Quarterly 2 (1992); and in J. K. Cilliers, Counter-Insurgency in Rhodesia
(London, 1985), 67.
34 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback, 1, 14.
35 Ibid., 17. See Transcript from Television Release, Television Documentary (http://www.
pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/plague/sa/).
36 “Chemical Facilities,” NTI Working for a Safer World, , Updated March 2004, http://www.
nti.org/e_research/profiles/safrica/chemical/facilities.html; and http://www.nti.org/e_
research/profiles/SAfrica/Chemical/index.html. See also “The South African Chemical
and Biological Warfare Programme, Trial Report: Thirty-One,” in Reports pertaining to 10
October (2000), Centre for Conflict Resolution, Capetown, October 10, 2000, accessed
August 07, 2012, http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/cbw/31.html; “The South African
Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme, Trial Report: Twenty-Eight,” in Reports
pertaining to 4 September (2000)., Centre for Conflict Resolution, Capetown, September
04, 2000, accessed August 07, 2012, http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/cbw/28.html.
37 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback, 20.
38 Basson was sent to procure a peptide synthesizer outside of South Africa for genetic
research. Project Coast also worked on a contraceptive that could be applied
clandestinely to blacks, and Basson was asked by the SADF to develop a substance
that would stain the skin temporarily and thereby identify the frontrunners in the
violence. Ibid., 21.
39 Ibid.
40 M. Nass, “Anthrax Epizootic in Zimbabwe, 1978–1980: Due to Deliberate Spread,”
Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly 2 (1992): 198–209. According to scientists,
the outbreak of anthrax in six entirely separate areas is extremely unlikely. Anthrax
usually appears as a point source outbreak. Doctors further argued that “only the
African-owned cattle in the Tribal Trust Lands were affected; cattle belonging to whites
were uninvolved” (198). Regardless of the veracity of the claims, what this illustrates
is the insidiousness of CBW as technique. According to scientists, the outbreak of
anthrax in six entirely separate areas is extremely unlikely. Anthrax usually appears as
a point source outbreak. Doctors further argued that “only the African-owned cattle
in the Tribal Trust Lands were affected; cattle belonging to whites were uninvolved.”
Regardless of the veracity of the claims, what this illustrates is the insidiousness of
CBW as technique.
41 See South Africa (corporate author), Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South
Africa Report (Cape Town, 1998).
43 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback, 22. The SADF also used Napalm and phosphorous in
Angola during the 1980s.
44 Ibid., 77. “In the early 1990s, Delta-G made a cash purchase for mercury from another
former state-owned company, Thor Chemicals, an SADF front-company… The
prosecutor in the Basson trial investigated this purchase since mercury can also be
used for the production of sassafras to produce Ecstasy. Others speculate that this
purchase was related to the production of Mandrax. However, mercury produced
by Thor Chemicals has also been linked to the mysterious nuclear substance, Red
Mercury.” Stephen Burgess and Helen E. Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical
and Biological Warfare Program, 47. See also Peter Hounam and Steve McQuillen, The
Mini-Nuke Conspiracy: Mandela’s Nuclear Nightmare (London, 1995).
45 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback, 47. Basson was also a major player in an international
sales and procurement network involving the Pakistani and Libyan governments.
46 Van der Merwe is a common Afrikaans surname, in Dutch, ”from the Merwe,” river
in Holland. Colloquially, “Van der Merwe” is the subject of a running joke against
affluent Afrikaners.
48 Films which Blomkamp said were his “subconscious influences.” Bill Desowitz, “Neill
Blomkamp Talks District 9,” VFXWorld (AWN, Inc.), Friday, August 14, 2009.
49 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback, 39, 65–66. “The South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established at the end of 1995, and mandated
complete disclosure about the previous activities of government officials.
50 Ibid., 66.
51 Ibid., 70.
52 First, the court deemed the murders and crimes that took place outside of South
Africa to be outside its jurisdiction. Further, the allegations of Basson’s use of CBW
weaponry were very difficult to examine and assess. Chemical and biological weapons
use, and their harm are often undetectable as in the anthrax case, and in more recent
examples the documented bacteriological nervous disorders of Iraqi War soldiers
which only manifested months after their return to the U.S., but which scientists are
now attributing to the troops having been exposed to CBW attack.
53 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback, 58–59.

54 Bob Coen, Anthrax War, documentary (Film: Cape Town, May 2008, Distribution: SBS
Television, Australia, 2009; Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2009; Arte, 2009).
Bob Coen notes in this rare interview, Basson’s “unrepentant manner,” not unlike the
interview with Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl who said “Why should I say sorry?
What do I have to say sorry for?”
55 Stephen Dresch, quoted in Coen, Anthrax War.
56 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback, 42. In 1989 the CIA placed South Africa on a list of
countries that had created and stockpiled “offensive chemical and biological weapons,”
yet neither the U.S. nor U.K. objected to Project Coast in the late 1980s (contrary to
the demarche given by the U.S. backed by Britain and Israel in relation to South Africa’s
nuclear armament program in 1990).
57 Ibid., 34.
58 Ibid., 45.
59 Ibid., 62.
60 A term which derives from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Rhizome,” On the Line
(New York, 1983): 1–65.
61 This is Félix Guattari’s phrase from the early 1970s “équipements du pouvoir.” See Félix
Guattari et al., “Equipments of Power: Towns, Territories and Collective Equipments,” in
Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York, 1996).
62 Coen, Anthrax War.
63 The Selous Scouts was a special forces regiment of the Rhodesian Army (1973–1980),
mandated to clandestinely eliminate terrorists both inside and outside South Africa.
64 Charles D. Melson, “Top Secret War: Rhodesian Special Operations, ” Small Wars and
Insurgencies 16, 1 (August, 2006): 57–82.
65 The documentary also reveals that powdered anthrax was produced in 1998 by
scientists at the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, under a CIA project
only discovered in 2001. Can we compare South African violence and U.S. urban
violence? In the United States, “you could call out the National Guard and restore
some semblance of order. If you call out our equivalent of the National Guard you
would have another riot on your hands.” South Africa is the world laboratory for Violent
Urbanism and shows us where we might be headed in other Western Nations if we
allow CBW proliferation.
66 District 9 vindicates Michel Foucault who long ago predicted the shift from disciplinary
society to biopower.
67 As Burgess and Purkitt say, offensive and defensive CBW proliferation is almost
indistinguishable. Everything is an attack.
68 A heated debate is now being played out between biotechnology companies who
are seeking to patent human DNA sequences, and those scientists who believe that
DNA is not a commodity to be owned or sold, who have responded to such pending
gene/DNA patent applications, by anarchically duplicating the exact-same contested
sequences online with free access for all. See Rogeer Hoedemaekers, “Human Gene
Patents: Core Issues in a Multi-Layered Debate,” Medicine, Health Care And Philosophy
4, 2 (2001); and Russell Belk, “Why Not Share Rather Than Own?,” The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 611, 1 (May, 2007).
69 Peter Taylor, Age of Terror: War on the West, documentary (BBC Television, UK,
December 22, 2008). “We so far have been reactive/defensive. We react to a bombing.
What we need to do is be proactive/offensive e.g. win the war of ideas, al-Qaeda’s
ideology. Ten years after 9/11, al-Qaeda is still winning the ideological war.”
3
Building In-Between the Two Deaths:
A Post Mortem Manifesto
Nadir Lahiji
Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.
—Walter Benjamin
Preface
Memento Mori! You must remember to die! More accurately: “Do not forget to
die”! But, remember, You Must Die Twice! First time naturally, and the second time
symbolically.1
Psychoanalytically speaking, death is linked to emergence of the Symbolic
Order. This is what Jacques Lacan said and posited from the beginning of his
teaching, and it is Jacques-Alain Miller (the editor of Lacan’s Seminars) who reminds
us of the manner in which Lacan actually said it: “He says so in a Hegelian manner,
a fact important in itself: the symbol manifests itself first as the death of the
thing, between the two there is no natural sympathy or accommodation.”2 Miller
continues, “Lacan recalls that the subject prior to speech is unreachable, except
with regard to its death, to its significant mortification. The speaking subject,
having been displaced by the symbol, immediately suffers mortification that will
then make of it, for Lacan, a subject mortified by the signifier, $.”3
In this essay I am concerned with the death of building as the moment of its
negation, a negative moment without which the category of building will not be
able to enter the category of thought. Let me attempt to provide a preliminary,
partial explanation of this proposition. Strictly speaking, thought belongs to the
domain of interiority. This interiority as such does not exist, it comes from the Outside,
from the big Other. The big Other in relation to the subject in Lacanian theory,
we must remember, is equated with three interrelated elements: (1) Language as
structure, (2) the Symbolic Order as the law of human culture, and (3) the Freudian
Unconscious, reformulated by Lacan in the famous “unconscious is structured like
language,” to which I come back again below.4 I therefore analogically equate the
interiority of the Subject to the interiority of thought, or thought as interiority,
acknowledging that in both cases it comes from the Outside, from the big Other.
In this way, “building–entering–into–thought” can be taken to correspond to
“subject–entering–into–language” without a phenomenological intentionality of
the consciousness, but by mortification, the signifier $, as a result of the entering
into the Symbolic Order, which is also a process of alienation of the subject.
Thus I venture to reason that building, if it is to be thought, must suffer the same
mortification by the signifier $, in order to become “building in thought.” I will argue
that there would be no thought of building without its symbolic mortification.
(Notice that I am not using the word “architecture” here but instead I am opting
for the verbal noun “building,” because inherent in it, I argue, are the senses of
indeterminacy, incompleteness and finitude; it is always in the process of becoming,
with which I am concerned here.) I will call this mortification by the Freudian term
death drive. It is the name for the moment of negativity, the so-called not-building
as the dialectical reversal or a deadlock in building itself. The in-between-ness of
building, I claim, is the happening of this death drive.
This is an axiom that will guide me to construct a Manifesto—it is an opportune
time, I think, that we go back to the radical intellectual tradition of writing
manifestos.5 In the background of this manifesto of building, I am concerned with
the notion of past rather than the positive manifesto’s concern with the future. It
is the notion by which to take to task the prevailing anti-historical orientation in
the contemporary discourse in academy. Bringing the notion of death drive to the
discourse of “history” is directed against the historicist tendency in contemporary
theory and practice in the discipline. This tendency is in complicity with the
prevailing politico-cultural orders of late capitalism and the fashionable trends of
the post-political, the post-critical, and post-history, which aggressively advocate
the idea that the contemporary “new architecture” presents a “progress” over
modernism and modernism’s perceived “failure.” In the last three decades, we have
witnessed a discontent with modernism and abstractionism in the arts of the first
half of the twentieth century, and predilection for a garden-variety of postmodernist
relativism and proliferation of iconic figurations. As Robert Pippin in The Persistence
of Subjectivity, endorsing Michael Fried’s rejection of the naïve thinking about the
relation between modernism and postmodernism in arts, writes:
There was no failure of modernism, no exhaustion by the end of abstract

expressionism. Rather, there was (and still is) a failure to appreciate and
integrate the self-understanding reflected in such art (the same kind of failure
to appreciate modernism, or the same kind of straw-men attacks, in what we
call postmodernism). The aftermath—minimalism, “literalism,” op and pop art,
postmodernism—can be understood better as evasion and repressions than as
alternatives.6
Substitute “architecture” for “art” in Pippin’s remarks, and it will be equally

applicable. Endorsing Pippin’s remarks, Slavoj Žižek has added his voice to
Pippin’s, rejecting the perceived consecutive “stages” of historical development
between modernism and postmodernism by saying, “‘postmodernism’ is rather
the name for a regression, for a refusal to follow the consequences of the
modernist break.”7 Along the same line, I challenge the historicist-relativist break
with the “modernist break” and its attended socio-political implications in the
lack of proper understanding of “history” in the discipline. But I go further than
this, as I have a political axe to grind against the cozy place that the “left-liberal”
critics have occupied in academia.
Contemporary architecture is, in fact, in a state of regression from the modernist
project. In its obsession with iconic figurations, it has anaesthetized the sensory
experience in the name of “novel” forms marketed and sold as historical “progress”
over its recent modernist configuration by means of a clever manipulation of
Building In-Between the Two Deaths: A Post Mortem Manifesto 53
current technology. In practice and theory, it has separated building from the
kernel of history, affirmatively blocking the moment of negative thinking in the
categories of building and thought. I want here to invoke the much discussed and
widely cited Thesis IX of Walter Benjamin’s Theses, “On the Concepts of History,” the
last piece Benjamin wrote before he committed suicide in the Spanish border town
of Port Bou in 1940. Here is the Thesis:
There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems
about to move away by from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his month
is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face
is turned toward past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one
single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at
his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what
has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in
his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives
him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris
before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.8
The relevance of this thesis for today’s theory and critique should not be
underestimated. Adrian Johnston, for one, in his recent book on the thought of
Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, has cited the same thesis for a critique of the sad
state of the contemporary Left. Johnston points out that Benjamin’s evocative
description of the “angel of history” must be fitting to convey the air of the
prevailing Zeitgeist.9 He writes: “Like this angel, the consciousness of those forming
today’s radical Left when they cast a glance backward over their own history from
Marx through the present,” they see the “pile of debris,” which grows skyward.10
Benjamin cautioned against the faith in historical progress. His call has fallen on
the deaf ears of the euphoric critics in the discipline of architecture, who take
pleasure in the present “end–of–history,” jubilant of the historical defeat of radical
Left critique after the May Movement of 1968. This is a symptom of the Restoration,
to use Alain Badiou’s term, which followed 1989 collapse of Eastern Communist
systems and the ensuing triumphalism of the neo-liberal order.11 As Johnston
reminds us, Benjamin engaged in a delicate balancing act. “Although unwilling to
turn a blind utopian eye to the dismal and discouraging record of revolutionary
leftist politics, he appeals to a ‘weak messianic’ power through which the setbacks,
failure, and defeats of yesterday and today might very well be redeemed after the
fact by something unforeseen to come, something that might arrive with each new
tomorrow.”12
With this political note I end this preface. In what follows, I will try to construct
the so-called “allegory of death” in the notion of Ruins in Benjamin’s thought within
a psychoanalytical perspective in order to shed some lights on the categories of
Being in building and thought. I call this my “post mortem manifesto.”
Buildings Must Die Twice!
Buildings Must Die, But Twice! This axiom is my transposition of Žižek’s title for
Chapter 4 of his Sublime Object of Ideology: “You Only Die Twice.” Žižek establishes
a connection, or better, a confluence of ideas, between the third period of Jacques
Lacan’s teaching, the third, or so-called late period, and Walter Benjamin’s theses
“On the Concept of History.” According to Žižek, in his third period, Lacan shifted
emphasis from the Symbolic to the Real. In this period, the notion das Ding (the
Thing), which Lacan had borrowed from Freud, entered his discourse. Žižek informs
us that in the kernel or in very center of the Symbolic there resides some strange or
traumatic element that cannot be symbolized. He writes:
“This place ‘between the two deaths’, a place of sublime beauty as well as
terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real–traumatic kernel in the
midst of symbolic order. This place is opened by symbolization/historicization:
the process of historicization implies an empty place, a non-historical kernel
around which symbolic network is articulated. In other words, human history
differs from animal evolution precisely by its reference to this non-historical place,
a place which cannot be symbolized, although it is retroactively produced by the
symbolization itself ….”13
The Thing is the empty place that enables us to conceive the annihilation of
the signifier’s network. Žižek tells us: “‘The second death’, the radical annihilation of
nature’s circular movement, is conceivable only in so far as this circular movement is
already symbolized/historicized, inscribed, caught in the symbolic web—absolute
death, the ‘destruction of the universe’, is always the destruction of the symbolic
universe.”14
Žižek invokes the term “non-historical ex-timate” when he brings the notion
of history in Benjamin’s Theses to the psychoanalytical theory in his text. Lacan
invented the neologism “extimacy” to explain das Ding (the Thing). Jacques-Alain
Miller wrote a seminal essay to explain this key Lacanian term.15 He remarks that,
primarily, “extimacy” is a term that escapes the bipartition between interior and
exterior. Lacan drew a diagram to show that the exterior is present in the inner-
most part of the interior; this is how the dictionary defines the word “intimate.” In
psychoanalytical experience, this intimacy has a quality of exteriority. “Therefore,
paradoxically, the most intimate is not a point of transparency but rather a point
of opacity […] Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the
intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite.”16 Extimacy, therefore, can be
taken as equivalent to the unconscious, and in this way, “the extimacy of the
subject is the Other.”17 Further, “In a certain way, this is what Lacan is commenting
on when he speaks of the unconscious as discourse of the Other, of this Other who,
more intimate than my intimacy, stirs, me. And this intimate that is radically Other,
Lacan expressed with a single word: ‘extimacy.’”18
Now, Žižek points out that “In the whole history of Marxism, there is probably only
one point at which this non-historical “ex-timate” kernel of history was touched—at
which the reflection of history was brought to the ‘death drive’ as its degree Zero
….”19 And, that is the exact point at which Benjamin wrote his Theses on the Concept
of History. This is the point at which, for the first time, historical materialism was
touched by theology. Žižek analyzes Benjamin’s Theses at a level of detail that we
do not need to follow. Here, I just want to note that the interruption of the circular
movement of nature, its so-called “second death,” would be conceivable only when
that “nature” undergoes a transformation and turns into an artifice. At this point,
the distinction between the Outside and the Inside begins to appear.20 Building
is the fundamental “anti-nature,” an agency that inaugurates a break or separation
that constitutes the Inside, de-naturalizing of nature. Of course, there are other
agencies and other artifacts, but building is a “concrete a priori” in this break to
constitute an Inside.
I suggest that thoughts and building enter into a dialectical commonalty once
they are—thanks to the unhistorical extimate kernel of history (Žižek)—within the
death drive. At this point let me enter Benjamin’s allegorical thoughts. If I replace
“the realm of things” by “the realm of buildings” in Benjamin’s famous statement
in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama (cited in the epigraph), and I repeat here
again that “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of
things,” the resulting transposition will read as this: “Allegories are, in the realm of
thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of Buildings.” This is to say that buildings, like
thoughts, decay and undergo death when they enter the state of ruins. This is the
death drive of building, I claim. Daniel Purdy, in his interesting book On the Ruins
of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought, has put the matter in simpler
terms: “If bodies could decay and die, so, too, could buildings.”21 But, I would add
that this is only a “natural” death, because building, like body, has to die twice
in order to enter the symbolic death; otherwise it would never enter into the
historical memory. Purdy cites Filarette, the fifteenth century architect, who he says
“was surely not alone when he compared the death of building to the demise of
human body.”22 But, again, our Renaissance architect could not have foreseen that
the category of “body” would go through a radical philosophical conceptualization
after the seventeenth century, from Descartes, perhaps through Spinoza, to Lacan.
At each stage it was inscribed by signifiers with differential values, causing a surplus
or excess, which caused its mortification after its first, natural death, to attain a
“second death”—and to be immortalized by entering into the Symbolic law. Alas,
that Renaissance architect had not read Jacques Lacan! This point could only be
conceptualized with the historical “break” inaugurated with modernism I discussed
above. Only in this state can building and body (and thought, for that matter) touch
das Ding (the Thing). This is tantamount to their “second death.”
At this point, I want to suggest an analogical correlation between the two
signifiers, building and thought. It will run something like this: “Building is structured
like thought”, and conversely, “thought is structured like building”; underlying this
circular logic is Lacan’s famous thesis, “unconscious is structured like language,”
on which I model my analogy. For this logic to work, the agency of mortification,
the signifier embodied by Lacan’s matheme for the barred subject, $, must always
come from the outside, like the unconscious, from the side of the Other.
II
After speaking psychoanalytically, I want to begin speaking philosophically.

To do so, I need to call for Žižek’s help again! In his magnum opus, The Parallax
View, he makes a distinction between the “void of the transcendental subject ($)”
and the “void of transcendental object,” or the inaccessible “X” that causes our
perception, which is the void beyond phenomenal appearances. In making this
crucial distinction, Žižek brings out the Kantian “break,” which amounts to what
Kant inaugurated in modern philosophy around the notion of “inhuman.” Žižek tells
us that Kant made a key distinction between a negative judgment and an indefinite
judgment. “The positive judgment ‘the soul is mortal’ can be negated in two ways:
When a predicate is denied to the subject (‘the soul is not mortal’), and when a non-
predicate is affirmed (‘the soul is non-mortal’).”23 The difference, Žižek says, is the
same as between “he is dead” and “he is un-dead.” “The indefinite judgment opens
a third domain that undermines the underlying distinction: the undead are neither
alive nor dead, they are precisely the monstrous ‘living dead.’”24 So the same thing
goes for the “inhuman.” That is, “he is not human” is not the same as saying “he is
inhuman,” Žižek reminds us. When we say “he is not human” we mean simply that “he
is external to humanity, animal or divine.” Whereas when we say “he is inhuman,” we
say something different: “The fact he is neither human nor inhuman, but marked
by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as ‘humanity’,
is inherent to being-human.”25 The conclusion Žižek draws is an important one. It
is what the Kantian revolution changed forever: “[I]n the pre-Kantian universe,
humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excess of animal lusts
or divine madness, while only with Kant and German Idealism is the excess to be
fought absolutely immanent, the very core of objectivity itself …. while with Kant,
madness implies the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being.”26
Now, if I am allowed to make a leap and adopt this break of “Kantian revolution”
for my purpose at hand, to deploy the “indefinite judgment” (why not!), I can then
say: there is a radical difference between “this building is dead” and “this building
is undead.” If I paraphrase this difference according to the line argued above,
I could say that there is a surplus—or, rather, an excess—that exists at all stages
of a building’s life cycle. It would be that “unfathomable object ‘X’,” never given to
experience, beyond its appearances, that makes it undead, even/especially when
it is dead. Put in Benjaminian terms, in order that building become undead after
its natural death, it has to fall into the state of ruins so that we can have a glimpse
of its excess—belonging, so to speak, to its allegory of death. Building, from its
inception, coming into life, according to this logic must already be perceived as a
ruin before it falls into actual ruin. Every act of building worthy of thought, after
Kantian revolution, must come with built-in divine madness! But, how should we
subjectivize this madness? —This is a question I cannot begin to answer. It touches
on our morbid fascination with ruins and the body in decay, exemplified by the
perverse urge to stop at the scene of crime to take a “good look” at the dead body!
Or, our horror/pleasure in confronting the violence done to bodies and buildings
in the struggles between reactionary forces and the political regimes—so many
of them in the past two decades! To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre, “the bomb that
destroys building destroys my body.”
III
When we talk about the notion of ruins in modern culture, two distinct historical
periods can be discerned: First, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’
depictions of buildings as falling into a “natural” state of ruin resulting from the
erosion wrought by time; and, second, from the nineteenth century to the present,
a period of so-called consumerist society, in which buildings and objects undergo
a process of a different kind of erosion, one which causes them fall into a state of
“artificial ruins.” According to a certain contemporary interpretation of the aphorism
by Benjamin quoted above, for an object to become the object of knowledge, it
must first attain the status of a “decayed,” or ruined, object. And, to become a ruined
object, it must undergo an allegorical transformation. This requires the object to
undergo, first, a virtual ruination before it actually becomes a ruined object in
reality. We can arrive at a thesis: Under the destructive forces of capitalism every
object is always-already in the state of ruin or, better, a virtual ruin that remains to
be actualized, provided that one subjects capitalism to allegorical thinking. This
time, not Time or Nature, but Capitalist exchange value is the prime mover to bring
about the disintegration of the object even before the object can be seen in its
actual ruined state. This amounts to saying there is an Other of the object, more real
than the object itself. Allegorically, the object can only be thought in relation to
what is Other in it. Thus, this object must by definition be the object of knowledge.
I claim that, today, under the cultural logic of late capitalism, the name “building”
is the name of its own ruin, as soon as it is subjected to an allegorical system of
thought in Benjaminian sense. It is only in this thought, I claim, that it can be said
that building is the object of thought. That is, building is the name of its own ruin
in the realm of thought, before it becomes an actual ruin in the realm of things. The
“Early Modern period,” the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—without going
too much into its complicated history—might help to make a sense of the premise
and this thesis.
Very briefly, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, artists and architects
imagined buildings by depicting them in fantastic scenes of allegorical ruins. This
was the time of the Baroque and the romantic sublime. It was the time that Nature
had become the object of thought and had prominently attained the level of
thought’s Notion. It was a way to bring the artifact back to the state of Nature. Not
only was this an attempt to render building ontology within the horizon of finitude.
It was, more significantly, an act to internalize the traumatic effects of capitalism
in its initial stages. The artistic depictions of ruins provided the initial “surplus–
jouissance,” if I may use this Lacanian term, directly related to the Sublime, which
coincided with the rise of Capitalist secular modernity’s generation of surplus.
Ruins were both surplus objects as well as the surplus in the object—a surplus that
at the same time, paradoxically, indicated lack. Or, to put it differently, historical
Ruins were conceived as the interval between surplus and lack. In this interval,
ruins became objects of desire. At that stage of secular modernity, it must be noted
that the corrosive effects of capitalism on the cultural artifacts were not yet total.
That is, the object was not yet commodified. The difference between built “reality”
and its “symbolic” fiction had not yet undergone a dialectical transformation;
and capitalism had not yet gone through actual cycle of destructive forces:
“catastrophe,” “dystopia,” “death,” and other disasters. Yet, the enigma of death was
already present in the Western imagination, obsessed with the presence of the
“Egyptian mysteries,” which, Hegel famously said, were a mystery to the Egyptians
themselves!
Now, the period that extends from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into
our own time must be viewed as a time in which erosion turned the object into
ruin, in both virtual and actual terms. Buildings in ruins are not painted in the colors
of the romantic sublime; rather, their decay is now due to the destructive effects
of technology. We have ourselves witnessed natural, political, and technological
catastrophe; artists and filmmakers have portrayed dystopia and other kinds of
urban traumas. The key difference has been: the object–ruin in the late capitalism,
in stark contrast with previous times, creates the phantasm of the object-as-
commodity. Buildings are no exceptions.
Artists, film-makers and architects have portrayed the fantasy of scenes of
ruins and catastrophes “inversely.” The corrosion caused by the economics of late
capitalism has turned the city into a gigantic decayed object. The depiction of
eroded ruins, represented in films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1983), has
its counterpart in the so-called Real of “reality.” The fictional city–in–decay in Blade
Runner passes into the Real of ruins in the contemporary city. Hence, The fantasy–
frame becomes the only means of access to the “reality,” as we have learned from
Lacanian psychoanalytical theory. This is homologous to the idea that what was
only portrayed in Hollywood films in fantasmatic and monstrous destruction of
buildings, is now seen in its actual traumatic “reality.” To deduce: Fantastic buildings
in ruins have become the Real of building itself as actual ruins. Corollary to this
state, the word “architecture” has now separated from its sociality, only to turn into
its own spectral aestheticized version of an empirical reality devoid of any social
content. This is, as I have claimed, the un-historical character of uncritical thought
conditioned by a historicist understanding of history in the academic discourse of
architecture.
This state can be named as the “ruins on ruins,” conditioned by capitalist
consumerist society and technological erosion, as the second nature, not by Nature
in the eighteenth century sense of the word. In both cases, still, we need to think
about categories of buildings and thoughts touched by the element of ex-timate.
In this respect, architecture in late capitalism, may be thought in comparison
within the art of Opera, as an “impure” art, in modern culture: that is, it was dead
already when it first came into being in the seventeenth century so that we can
go on and celebrate its “second death” later, say, in the great works of Mozart and
Wagner. I propose that in aesthetic terms, this is what we can name as the “sublime
body” in the corpus of thought and building, that is to say, what is in thoughts and
buildings more than the thought and building themselves, because this is what
the notion of the “sublime object” is about, as Žižek tells us. It is in this sense that,
as I said above, one can conceive “building structured like thought” and “thought
structured like building.” It is a gift and a curse at the same time, as the inheritance
of the subjectivity that modern culture has inherited from Descartes. I contend
that all the postmodern philosophical ruminations, which do not begin with this
modern subjectivity as cogito, in the attempt to bypass this tradition of modernity,
in architecture discourse and elsewhere, are only misguided unhistorical thinking.
Bibliography
Badiou, Alain, The Communist Hypothesis (London and New York: Verso, 2010).
Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, 2 (1927–1934), ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland,
and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).
———, Selected Writings, 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA, and London: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2003).
Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes, The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
Johnston, Adrian, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, The Cadence of Change
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009).
Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977).
Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Extimité,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse, Subject, Structure and
Society, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994).
———, “Matheme: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan,” in Ellie Ragland and Dragan
Milovanovic, eds., Lacan: Topologically Speaking (New York: Other Press, 2004), 28–48.
Myers, Tony, Slavoy Žižek (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
Pippin, Robert, The Persistence of Subjectivity, on the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Purdy, Daniel, On the Ruins of Babel, Architectural Metaphor in German Thought (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2011).
Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989).
———, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New
York: Verso, 2012).
———, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
Notes
1 I am paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek in his The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York and
London, 1989).
2 See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Matheme: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan,” in Lacan:

Topologically Speaking, ed. Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milovanovic (New York, 2004), 29.
3 Miller, “Matheme,” 29.
4 For more of this see Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, A Philosophical Reading
of Lacan (Cambridge, MA, 2007).
5 We have been oblivious to the fact that the early twentieth century was the century
of manifestos. That century, in fact, was the century of programmatic declarations,
radical and avant-garde proclamations. In contrast to our era of slick postmodernism,
we must re-examine the novel and radical idea of “manifesto.” Significantly, in our time
it is only Alain Badiou who has written manifestos for philosophy. What is a manifesto?
In minimum definition, a manifesto is “the invention of future for the present.”
Manifestos were in the twentieth century a genre of concise and radical-critical writing
exposing the repressed contradictions in dominant doctrines; therefore they opened
up the present to the future by denouncing the forces of the status quo and offering
alternative programs.
6 See Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity, on the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge,
UK, 2005), n. 32, 301.
7 See Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
(London and New York, 2012).
8 Walters Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4,
1938–1940 (Cambridge and London, 2003), 390.
9 Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, The Cadence of Change
(Evanston, 2009), see the Preface: “‘Be Reasonable: Demand the Impossible!’—The
Contemporary Importance of Badiou and Žižek.”
10 Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations, xiii.
11 For more of this see Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London and New York,
2010).
12 Ibid., xv.
13 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 135.
14 Ibid., 135.
15 See Jacques -Alain Miller, “Extimité” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse, Subject, Structure
and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, et al. (New York and London, 1994).
16 Ibid., 76.
17 Ibid., 77.
18 Ibid., 77.
19 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 136.
20 In this regard but in a different relation, Žižek in a critique of “ideology of ecology”
in relation to “nature” has referred to architecture and the notion of Inside that
it constitutes. In a footnote in his recent Less Than Nothing: Hegel and Shadow of
Dialectical Materialism (London, 2012), n. 12, 373, he remarks: “The ideological aspect
of ecology should also be denounced in relation to architecture. Architecture should
be in harmony with its natural environment? But architecture is by definition anti-
nature, an act of delimitation against nature: one draws a line separating inside from
the outside, clearly stating to nature, ‘Stay out! The inside is a domain from which
you are excluded!’—the Inside is a de-naturalized space to be filled with artifacts.

The effort to harmonize architecture with the rhythms of nature is a secondary
phenomenon, an attempt to obliterate the traces of the original founding crime.”
21 See Daniel Purdy, On the Ruins of Babel, Architectural Metaphor in German Thought
(Ithaca, 2011), 65.
22 Ibid., 65.
23 See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, 2006), 21.
24 Ibid., 21–22.
25 Ibid., 22.
26 Ibid., 22.
4
Kant, Sade, Ethics and Architecture
David Bertolini
The financial crisis that took down the world’s economies and ruined countless
lives in 2008 revealed a strange codependence between capitalism, architecture,
and ethics. The crises exposed the unthinkable paradox of a modern global
capitalist society, where one’s actions appear to be simultaneously guided by
both the vital, creative, and harmonious drive of Eros and the self-destructive,
delusional, pathological drive of Thanatos. This paradox surfaces from principles
of both the American and French revolutions and free market ideology, whose
primary maxim is the right of individuals to pursue happiness while in a state of
perpetual liberty, on the condition that their actions do not adversely infringe on
others. In psychoanalysis this paradox does not initially sound paradoxical because
it first appears as the balance between the pleasure principle and the death drive.
Where the pleasure principle regulates a balance between pleasure pursuit and
pain avoidance, the death drive desires to return to a state of quintessence that
is similar to life before human subjectivity, akin to death. However, the paradox
appears to us, according to Jacques Lacan, from the fact that the pleasure derived
from being human is unfulfilling because life is mediated through the Symbolic, a
network of signifiers that stand in for actual things. Thus, there is always a terrifying
feeling that we are missing out or lacking access to a real thing or experience. In
capitalism this paradox appears as a normal state of affairs, where contradictions
are experienced as non-paradoxical. The free market system strives for enjoyment
that exceeds the limits of pleasure while it tries to access the real thing in the form
of wealth and the freedom that equity (financial and ethical value) provides. Eros/
Thanatos is a political-ethical dilemma manifested in our physical environment,
specifically architecture.
The 2008 crisis involved the invention of financial derivatives sanctioned by
Law as well as the American dream. These risky, complex instruments affected all
building practices, including the development of housing, office buildings, and
resorts. It is important to realize that the relationship between financial derivatives
(as the essence of capitalism greed) and architecture is about more than just
investment opportunities: rather, it is a symbiotic relationship validating an
ethical determination between dangerous risk-taking behavior, masquerading as
striving for pleasure, and the organization of environments that mask capitalism’s
projects. Architecture has a sublimating power that makes its products and its
activities appear to be strictly objective. The public perceives capitalism as an
ethical system, largely because it appropriates what is good and beautiful in the
world, such as food and housing, then maps such moral provisions over its own
greedy actions. Because architecture creates the environments we occupy, it is a
large part of this paramount good. It is perceived as an ethical practice that results
in aesthetic and practical structures that enrich our lives. The problem with the
symbiotic relationship between capitalism and architecture is that it allows us
to overlook the cold and calculating “other side” of capitalism’s activities, where
profits are maximized at any cost. We willfully imagine that no one is hurt from
such practices, or that the benefits of risk versus reward outweigh any collateral
damage. The myriad of signifiers emanating from architecture—from the green-
friendly Starbucks to Enron’s futuristic corporate headquarters—make it appear
that environmental concerns trump capitalist greed, to suggest that there is a kind
of ethical ground justifying free-market risk-taking. This construct of “a capitalism
personally concerned about the public good,” Slavoj Žižek argues, combines
cultural woes and capitalists’ profits into commodities that serve as the “remedy
against the consumerist excess: in the same way as you do your ecological or social
duty by buying a product (the price of a Starbucks cappuccino includes money
for organic agriculture, for helping the poor etc.).”1 The more capitalists profit,
the more social guilt is alleviated. It reflects our perception of ourselves, which is
that we are intrinsically good. Yet, possessing good will or being ethical does not
have a direct object in the world; therefore, it seems fleeting or impermanent. To
give it permanence we read such attributes through the signifiers linked to the
aesthetic attributes of architecture and our social institutions, such as perceiving
our courthouses as honorable structures, or our universities as imbued with truth.
Jacques Lacan’s reading of Immanuel Kant and Marquis de Sade together in
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis reveals a problem modern ethics typically avoids. His
observation is similar to the one raised by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
years earlier: If we are the descendants of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason,
how do we reconcile reason’s march toward freedom and progress with its
horrific outcomes, such as Auschwitz and Hiroshima.2 According to Adorno and
Horkheimer, modern ethics relies on Kant’s formalist idea of duty because it
foregoes pathological motives in making ethical judgments, thus one privileges
the sterile determinations of reason. Adorno and Horkheimer conclude that Sade
reveals the intrinsically cruel and destructive principles of modernity that Kant’s
ethics protects. Lacan claims that the unmitigated pursuit of pleasure in Sade’s
writings reveals the dark underside of Kant’s ethics in the Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals. According to Lacan, we should focus on the fictionality of
Sade, where, ironically, human desire (subjective, pathological, and self-interested)
is not grounded by pathological causes. Thus, desire in Sade fulfills Kant’s criteria
for an ethical act, which means that “following one’s desire overlaps with ‘doing
one’s duty.’”3 Problematically, for capitalists, this means that an unbounded desire
Kant, Sade, Ethics and Architecture 65
for wealth is not understood as selfish and ruthless; rather, it is nothing more than
doing one’s Kantian duty.
The Lacanian synthesis of a Kantian-Sadean ethics is the ethics of architecture
in a capitalist world. Architecture, with all of its clarity and homeostatic balance,
represents society (die Sache), but it also forecasts a radical ambiguity, what Lacan
called the Thing (das Ding). On one hand the positive attributes of culture emerge
from the building’s surfaces and the public spaces delimited by them. The message
is that we are doing the right thing in the right place, where our interactions and
desires are socially appropriate, measured, and fulfilled. On the other hand, the
mysterious and frightening aspects of culture and society are also surreptitiously
present. Uninhibited desires—power, control, and perversion—operate within the
nooks and crannies of architecture. The message is that the people who are visible
and exposed are at the mercy of those operating within the shadows. At this point
the fantasy of architecture as a universal good gives way to a sudden, obscene
substitute: architecture becomes a foreign force that imposes demands we cannot
satisfy. The issue is difficult to see in everyday life because of the nature of ideology
that prevents one from standing outside of its influence. However, the issue is clear
in films. In what follows I will demonstrate how films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939),
Children of Men (2006), and Inception (2010) expose the dangerous relationship
between architecture’s ambiguity and capitalism’s incessant growth as a pursuit of
pleasure/wealth—a relationship where capitalism conceals its illicit nature through
the intrinsic enigma of architecture’s aesthetic and practical attributes, concealed
within the general goals of prosperity, order, and harmony.
The primary role architecture plays within society vacillates between its
three principal capacities: the practical, the beautiful and the good. In this sense
architecture is always-already ethical because it exists for the single purpose of
meeting demands made by society through the provision of security, aesthetics,
and timelessness. K. Michael Hays describes two categories of architecture that
delineate how ethics operates in architecture. One category is architecture as an
“instrument of culture,” where architecture is an “epiphenomenon, dependent
on socioeconomic, political, and technological processes for its states and
transformations.”4 Here architecture expresses the culture that produces it. The
other mode, Hays writes, is “architecture as autonomous form,” where there is a
notable absence of “historical concerns in favor of attention to the autonomous
architectural object and its formal operations.” Here, architecture is seen as a
pure idea freed from the demands of culture. But, actually, all architecture is an
“instrument of culture.” So, Hays’ categories seem to be forced—which he tacitly
admits when he writes that the purely formal architectural position denies
architecture’s “special status as a cultural object with a causation, presence, and
duration of its own.”5 Further, Hays argues that architects and their architecture
must actively occupy a dynamic “cultural place—as an architectural intention with
ascertainable political and intellectual consequences.”6 His categories work as long
as we accept his premise that architecture is ethical. We need to re-contextualize
Hays’ categories to see, through architecture, how his “instrument of culture” takes
the Kantian ethical stance, while his “architecture as autonomous form” adopts the
Sadean ethical attitude. The fundamental paradox of architecture is that we are

never quite sure when it is Sade or Kant.
Kant’s and Sade’s works advocate two radically opposed positions that coalesce
around the activities and environments of our capitalist society. Kant’s “sublime
disinterested ethical attitude” and Sade’s “unrestrained indulgence in pleasurable
violence” (Žižek) summarize the two sides of the major question regarding the
economic collapse: i.e., how people can undertake dangerous strategies knowing
that they are very likely cutting down the tree in which they perch.7 The paradoxical
aspect of the crisis is that the perpetrators embody both the freedom of Eros (life/
pleasure) and the hierarchical oppression of Thanatos (death). Žižek notes that
our response to the financial collapse unfortunately avoided condemning the
capitalist system itself. Instead of asking what alternatives we have to this corrupt
system, we clamor to “return to the basics,” the “real economy.”8 The true danger
lingering after the crash is that “instead of awaking us from a dream,” our response
to the crisis “will enable us to keep dreaming.”9 This dream-state is evident in
many cultural narratives, such as the American Dream, which stipulates that hard
work will bring wealth and success. But, the reality concealed by these myths is
the exact opposite—upward mobility is rare; hard work begets harder work; and
opportunities are often available only to the upper class. Žižek asks, “Is moral
hazard inscribed in the nature of capitalism itself?” The crucial question to add is:
how is the moral hazard within capitalism inscribed in architecture? The difficulty
of answering either question revolves around the observation made by Karl
Marx, which is that the bourgeoisie (capitalists) have been able to naturalize their
actions, while other actions are labeled as artificial.10 Further, architecture’s reliance
on wealth for its existence has made it the paradigmatic expression of society’s
“natural” order. Manfredo Tafuri explained that “modern architecture, as a whole,
was able to create, even before the mechanisms and theories of Political Economy
had created the instruments for it, an ideological climate for fully integrating
design, at all levels, into a comprehensive Project aimed at the reorganization of
production, distribution and consumption within a capitalist city.”11
Architecture was an ideological tool of capitalism before architects knew it
was, in much the same way that everyone in society, as Louis Althusser and Slavoj
Žižek have shown, are products of capitalism’s ideological principles even without
knowing it. Ideology, according to Louis Althusser, is a type of fantasy that exerts
control by distancing its mandates from how things appear to us. He writes that
ideology is the “representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to
their real conditions of existence.”12 The exploitive, unstable, and unfair practices
of capitalism are masked by the appearance of prosperity, order, and freedom in
our daily lives. Buildings provide the infrastructure for economic activities, such as
research and development of commodities, leisure activities, and, most importantly,
retail. Symbolically, buildings are the loci where we project the ideological
narratives that constitute our society, such as the American dream, democracy
(life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), and conspicuous consumption (buying
commodities to project a way of life).
We trust that the ethical space architecture creates—whether the space is either
a mirror of the status quo or as an antagonism critical of social traditions—is known
through three indelible attributes: (1) stability, in the sense that the limits are
knowable and marked; (2) communality, in a way that reveals common experiences;
and (3) sovereignty, because domestic and social order are structured as part
of a community. Architecture secures these aspects because it is aesthetic and
diuturnal. Aesthetic properties require agreement, even if they are meaningless or
antagonistic. For example, classical styles are linked to spaces of power—palaces,
banks, and courthouses—because we have come to accept that classical traditions
represent a certain social echelon. The diuturnal permanence of architectural
structures is made apparent by exposure to brutal and mutable environments, so
we gauge the permanence of our culture by the durability of our buildings. Further,
Žižek argues, architecture is paradoxically schizophrenic because it affiliates with,
and expresses, two wildly different social-political ethical positions at any given
moment. He writes,
[I]t is not only that the fantasy embodied in the mute language of buildings can
articulate the utopia of justice, freedom and equality betrayed by actual social
relations; this fantasy can also articulate a LONGING FOR INEQUALITY, for clear
hierarchy and class distinctions. Does the Stalinist neo‐Gothic architecture not
enact the “return of the repressed” of the official egalitarian‐emancipatory
Socialist ideology, the weird desire for hierarchy and social distinctions? The
utopia enacted in architecture can also be a conservative utopia of regained
hierarchical order. And does the same not hold for the monumental public
buildings from the Roosevelt era, like the central post office in New York? No
wonder the NYU central building in downtown Manhattan looks like Lomonosov
University in Moscow….13
Žižek’s point is not the easy gloss, that architecture can be used for different
political positions, which the average citizen perceives as being, variously, good
or bad for society. Rather, Žižek’s point is much subtler; it centers on the idea of
the “return of the repressed”—that the very nature of architecture is to make
ethical determinations related to power, such as who is allowed to enter or who is
marginalized.7
The Ethical Oxymoron of Kant and Sade
Arguably, the bedrock of modern ethical thought is that humans have the power
to have a good will. Kant believed a good will was the only attribute that is good
without conditions, primarily because other attributes of the mind—courage,
resolution, and perseverance or temperaments such as pity, empathy, and
helpfulness—are initially desirable and good but can be converted to evil ends
intentionally or unintentionally.14 Kant defines good will as the manifestation of
a rational being’s free will to obey the moral law. A good will is not good because
of its ability to produce effects or any means to an end it, rather it is good because
“of its volition, that is, it is good in itself.”15 Building upon the notion of good will,
Kant’s ethics is a deontology, a moral theory derived from one’s obedience to duty,
a moral theory derived from one’s obedience to duty itself, not to a Supreme Being
or any inner sense of satisfaction.” Kant refutes the notion that moral judgments
are made because they “accomplish good things” or because the actions are
“inherently good.” Accomplishing good things or being inherently good, Kant
argues, focuses on the “means to an end,” which involves an external agency for
accomplishing any intended good. Because of this externality, the means are too
easily influenced by pathological interests. Kant removes the traditional notion of
a Supreme Good from his ethics and replaces it with a “pure Form bestowing on
our acts the character of universality.”16 Kant defines moral duty with his famous
idea of the “Categorical Imperative.” The Categorical Imperative is a command,
grounded in our free will and human reason, which transforms a moral issue from
a pathological dilemma immersed in the particulars of an issue into a universal
form that rises above the fray. Kant explains the principle thus: “I ought never to
act except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a
universal law.”17 On the one hand, Kant’s ethics identified with reason and free will
as humanity’s pinnacle achievements. At the same time, it removed idiosyncrasy
and emotion from the moral equation. Morality was made not just to be rational
but also to appear so.
Kant’s ethics descended from Enlightenment ideals. Adorno and Horkheimer
write, in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, that the Enlightenment agenda was to
eliminate myth, animism, and all belief-based institutions (such as religion) from
society, because in doing so this would liberate “human beings from fear and install
them as masters.”18 The Enlightenment saw reason as the abstract form freeing
humanity from false beliefs and thus ushering in a liberating and egalitarian
order. By liberating reason from the contingencies of belief and, at the same
time, unleashing the secular market economy, the Enlightenment exposed this
terrifying paradox, that capitalism is “at once the prevailing form of reason and the
power which ruined reason.”19 According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the freedom
unleashed by universal reason allowed unethical acts to be justified simply because
they were based on rational assertions interpreted as moral declarations. This led
them to see how the Marquis de Sade’s libertine ethics were the logical support
for Kant’s ethics. Lacan on the other hand sees Sade as the truth of Kant, where the
categorical imperative is nothing more than a “superego demand.” Žižek writes that
the “moral law is obscene in so far as it is form itself which functions as a motivating
force driving us to obey its command.”20 Thus, we can see the actions of speculators
and architects are “doing the right thing” in terms of capitalism’s directives. Here,
Kant’s ethics produces by-products that are universal ethical mandates disguised as
moral postulates, by-products that enable those in power, the bourgeoisie, to lead
trouble-free lives.21 Or, as Žižek explains, the “‘cold’ objective market relations and
the utilitarian logic of instrumental manipulation are supplemented by pathetic
morality and sentimental philanthropism.”22
Marc de Kesel points out that that Sade’s imperative is not a “supersensible
goodness, but a universe of absolute cruelty,” and that Kant’s formal ethics, albeit
grounded on one’s good will, is “capable of generating a sadistic universe.”23 Lacan
explains that if one removes every vestige of emotion or feeling from the ability
they possess to help guide one’s actions, then in the “final analysis the Sadean world
is conceivable.”24 The point is that Sade’s excessive enjoyment is identical, in form,
to Kant’s ethical duty. There is no adequate way to tell them apart, philosophically
or ideologically.
Sade’s ideas reveal the unconscious demands lurking in modern ethics. Kant
claimed that ethical reasoning must purge all subjective feelings, such as pleasure,
pity, euphoria, or happiness. To do so requires one to obey the categorical imperative.
Lacan claims Kant’s universal notion of law as duty-followed-by-necessity exposes
its jouissance, or obscene surplus enjoyment, which is sadistic and cruel. People
do not experience moral or ethical satisfaction from their actions; rather, they gain
satisfaction from the fantasy that they are the instruments of the “law itself,” what
Lacan calls the big Other, the agency of the power of Symbolic. The paradox is that
the more one submits to the universal demands of the moral law, the more sadistic
it becomes. Why? The universal ethical domain is continually slipping away because
there is always something that escapes its definition; something that does not fit
or cannot be symbolized. Hence, architecture takes up the role of a physical marker
that smooth things over by creating a coherent narrative.
Architecture allows us to imagine that we are immune to the grind of everyday
life. It provides us with a sanctuary in which we can realize the achievement of our
desires through access to unmitigated enjoyment. It provides the very substance
upon which we build our ethical fantasies. This is evident in the film The Wizard of
Oz (1939), where Dorothy is driven to the Land of Oz because she feels that her
boring farm life withholds access to true enjoyment that must exist elsewhere,
somewhere exotic. Here the feudal-agrarian lifestyle cannot meet Dorothy’s
desire, where its utilitarian barn and house only express her basics needs such as
food and shelter. However, the Land of Oz and its capitol, the Emerald City, are
more than mere projections of Dorothy’s dreams, they are in actuality the ethical
manifestation of her drive for individual happiness without feeling self-conscious
or guilty. The Emerald City stands for the singular drive for order and happiness that
promises to give Dorothy access to what she desires most, pure enjoyment. Here
architecture’s function is to transmit the endless signifiers showcasing the allure of
unlimited commodities while masking the totalitarian power structure overseeing
this magical environment. The crisis is that once Dorothy arrives in Oz she is unable
to fit in—or, rather, unable to pay the price. She is forced to recognize that she had
been truly happy in Kansas.
Outside of the Emerald City is the terrifying and contingent world subject to
inclement weather, wild beasts, hunger, and evil witches. But, within the Emerald
City one’s dreams are fulfilled, from exorbitant beauty to an abundance of pleasure
for all—it is the manifestation of the Kantian Good. Ethically, actions such as singing
while buffing the Tin Man or pruning flowers for the next spectacle are done out
of a sense of duty to the greater good that orders Oz. Work hard, work happy, work
singing—just work! The truth of Oz, however, is its obverse, Sadean side, where
the Wizard orders Dorothy to complete dangerous missions, tasks that put her and
her companions at risk of losing their lives. The Wizard’s demands are pointless
distractions designed to keep Dorothy from recalling her true desire to go home, in
hopes that she would simply accept the universal demand of Oz—to enjoy.
The architecture of the Wizard’s inner sanctum is devoid of human scale; it is
a large room with indeterminate boundaries that focus attention on a terrifying
stage, where floats the specter-like head of the Wizard. The architecture projects
the salient aspects of the Kant/Sade ethical deadlock, in which happiness is
regulated by a universal objective “voice of reason” coming from inside the
terrifying apparition of the all-knowing Wizard. Like Dorothy, we accept dangerous
demands, because we want to materialize our desire through a more authentic
and exciting experience. In other words, the “Kantian [ethical] Law is a superego
agency that sadistically enjoys the subject’s deadlock, in this case Dorothy’s
inability to meet its inexorable demands.”25 The problem is that, if we question the
Law and peak behind the curtain, as Dorothy does, the enchantment disintegrates;
the Emerald City and becomes just another corrupt state run by an egomaniac!
This disintegration reveals the fragile nature of the good, which Lacan correctly
identified: “The domain of the good is the birth of power.”26 The point is that
architecture promises access to our desires while continually postponing their
realization, as inexorable demands are made upon us by capitalism, in the case of
Oz represented by the (defective) Wizard. Architecture is the enchanted object—
from home ownership to the Apple Store—that commands us to “Enjoy!” because
by having such enjoyment we are “doing the right thing.” Sadly, we always feel
there is something more we cannot yet access. This is the Lacanian Thing, and our
Sadean side keeps pushing us to more extreme activities in an effort to get to this
Thing.
Children of Men: Being too Close to the Ethical Thing
Lacan marks the moment of ethical judgment based on Freud’s theory of the
terms das Ding and die Sache in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The basic principle
organizing the human world is the fact that to be human means that we mediate
the world through language. We postpone satiating our needs—for example,
having children, eating lunch, or even going to the bathroom—until we have
enough money, reach the right moment, or are given permission “under the law.”
In doing so we have sublimated our bodily instincts (or, more accurately, drives) by
postponing their satisfaction for the sake of larger (super-ego) goals that are now
articulated through the structure of language. We have a constant feeling that we
are always missing out on access to “authentic” (or immediate) enjoyment. Because
enjoyment seems to be only what is achieved by other people—who have more
money, fewer responsibilities, more freedom, etc.—our “delay” in satisfaction is
confronted by a contradiction in the construction of the Other: there are “others”
who do enjoy, who do not delay. We fantasize about a world before language,
in order to avoid confronting the Real of the mandates of the (obscene) Other.
Whether in the guise of capitalism or the Wizard, we need to neutralize the threat,
to see the Wizard as “just another Kansas man” who wants to help; to see capitalism
as “just a way of doing business to feed our families.” Where the Symbolic leads to
confrontation with the dark side of the structure enclosing us, the Imaginary allows
us to transpose the trauma into a “pre-Symbolic”—i.e. a “pre-linguistic”—paradise.
For Lacan, die Sache is the thing (contrasted with the Thing, das Ding) accessible
by language, or what Lacan called the Symbolic. It is the “product of industry
and of human action […] always on the surface, always within the range of an
explanation.”27 Das Ding, on the other hand, is the thing as it really is, located within
the domain Lacan called the Real. The Real resists our attempts of domestication:
“the Thing is characterized by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine.”28 Žižek
explains that the “symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there
is in its kernel, at its very core, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be
symbolized, [or] integrated into the symbolic order”29 The traumatic element is the
“Thing” or das Ding, anything that cannot be subsumed directly by language or
even imagination.
At the heart of the ethical experience, as well, is the feeling that there exists
something that is more real than reality; something that is independent of the
human representation, culture, and society but nonetheless gives our anxiety-
ridden contingent life consistency and meaning. This Thing provides the means
for securing moral grounding and justice as a source of unmediated enjoyment. The
irony is that this “thing in itself” does exist; it does structure our world. But, because
we never have access to it and we only experience its presence indirectly through
its impact on signifiers and images, it appears to us only as a void. We experience
this Thing as being (1) alien, because it stands against the symbolic order; and (2)
necessary, because it serves as the object of our desire. Our relationship to the
Thing, Lacan claimed, is paradoxical because it is predicated on establishing a
topographical distance from it.
In Alfonso Cuaròn’s film Children of Men (2006), das Ding emerges as the Nemesis
of society’s capitalist activities. Pollution, toxic products, engineered food, and
political imbalance have led to a dystopia where humans are infertile and are
living out the end of their life—in effect, the self-imposed end of humanity. With
the exception of Great Britain, which clings to a fragile social order, civilization
has collapsed. An ethical crisis develops when a group of political subversives,
including anarchists, radicals, eco-terrorists, and generic illegal immigrant militants
coalesce around a project to protect the only pregnant woman on earth.
The story demonstrates how the notion of supreme good, represented in the
film by Great Britain, turns into the supreme evil, where the State’s ethical decisions
lead to many horrible events, such as placing anyone suspected of not being
British into internment camps where they are treated like animals. The hero in the
story is Theo Faron (Clive Owen), a former activist turned bureaucrat, who tries to
follow the law and its extreme demands until he is bribed by a revolutionary group
to provide travel papers for a young woman named Kee. By accepting the bribe,
Faron assumes the Sadean ethical stance. Taking the money allows him to “enjoy”
the last bit of his life, but in so doing he forgoes his privileged access to society
and it protective orders. This ethical shift is the heart of the story. Although Kee is
miraculously pregnant, even her protectors seem to look past her frail subjective
human reality. They convert her into an ideological commodity, a scientific

specimen and political pawn at the mercy of ongoing power struggles. The
architectural significance is the topological metaphor—one’s relationship to the
Thing—where the mass of cells “inside” Kee’s womb are separated from the radical
global-political role “they” are about to play. People are terrified of Kee’s unborn
child. Their fear raises it to the status of the Thing (das Ding) capable, they imagine,
of restoring social order, power, and eternity for those who possess it.
In this post-ethical world, architecture never loses its ethical mandate to both
mark the void of das Ding or to provide a link, albeit imaginary/fantastic, to the
Thing. Architecture dissolves into the topological demarcation between the inside
and outside. The “inside” is the safe Kantian social order relying on science and
technology that is good, thus a women becomes pregnant and the “outside,” which
is the Sadean self-serving hedonistic drive of self-preservation, caught in the act of
trying to steal the Thing—in this case pregnancy. Additionally, the inside is divided
into hidden and present spaces. In the essay “The Architectural Parallax,” Slavoj
Žižek observes that buildings have “an intermediate space which is disavowed: we
all know it exists, but we do not really accept its existence.”30 This space is primarily
used for whatever we prefer not to see—electrical conduits, plumbing, refuse, etc.
Žižek focuses on excrement because this how we judge these spaces (they are
literally the “throwaway”). He writes that, “we, of course, know that the excrements
which disappear are somewhere in the sewage network—what is here ‘real’—is
the topological hole or torsion which ‘curves’ the space of our reality so that we
perceive/imagine excrements as disappearing into an alternative dimension which
is not part of our everyday reality.”31
Žižek’s point is that for us to have consistency and continuity in reality requires
a fundamental disavowal that a certain unpleasant yet essential Thing (das Ding) is
non-existent. However, I think the hidden spaces are more than the “horrifyingly-
sublime beyond of the primordial, pre-ontological Chaos into which things
disappear.”32 These hidden spaces actually contain the hidden voice of the Sade/
Kant tormentor, in our case, the ruling Other who controls the activities of visible
subjects. In the film, architecture is correlated to this Other because it is no longer
being designed. Nonetheless, its former mission, of projecting social signifiers
from its surfaces and hidden spaces, has been transformed into the vocabulary
of defensible positions, basic shelters, and nostalgic relics—an architecture of
“imperial ruins.”
The ethical demand created by obtaining das Ding, as the collective fantasy of
a privileged social hegemonic order over foreigners seen as parasites, is evident
in a remarkable scene that contrasts the chaotic “outside” of the remnants of
London’s streetscape to the “inside” of fortified compounds. In a series of long takes
comprised of tightly framed and densely packed shots, the camera follows Theo on
his visit to his cousin Nigel, a high-ranking government official in charge of “saving”
the world’s artistic masterpieces. His limousine drives slowly through the once
prestigious streets of London, now crowded and chaotic. In addition to people
struggling to conduct business, we see foreigners held in cages, screaming. At
street level, the remnants of English society desperately haggle over now-precious
essentials. Some burst into emotional appeals to a God who is nowhere visible.
The demarcation is clearly drawn from Theo’s claustrophobic and uncomfortable
vantage point safe inside the limo, where the terrifying events outside appear as
projections of his fears. Theo’s limo passes through a heavily guarded gate. The
scene opens up to views of a beautiful garden, where well-heeled patrons are
enjoying a leisurely day. Soldiers parade in dress uniforms, orchestras play familiar
park serenades. In a surreal moment, a zebra strolls by.
Outside, the powerful have withdrawn from the public spaces. Inside, the elite
maintain their Kantian ethics: they use the categorical imperative to keep up the
fantasy of “business as usual.” “Yes, the world is ending,” they seem to be saying,
“but we hold the secrets of social order, we are saving the artworks, preserving
the traditions, and upholding the Law. This makes sense only in the remote hope
of a return of fertility. But, we quickly realize that all this jouissance this is nothing
more than Kant’s Sadean inverse. The principle of delayed gratification key to
Kant’s paradigm is spatially and socially segregated: those outside must wait in
pain while those responsible for cultural order may enjoy full Sadean gratification.
This logic extends to the uneven distribution of discipline. Outside the gates it
must be ruthless and exacting; inside, tolerant and forgiving. All architecture is
obverted (Lacan: extimated). The interior spaces of power now appear externally
in militarized zones. The externality of the public domain must now be internalized
behind heavily defended perimeters.
The Thing, in social terms, simultaneously requires distancing and immediacy.
Architecture puts this directly, in the contrast of interior and exterior. The Battersea
plant where Nigel works and lives is a building with an interior retrofitted to appear
like the Tate Museum. It is, in the film as in real life, an art museum. But, in this
fictional Tate, the exterior is militarized, to keep people at a distance. Inside, the
horde of artworks protected from the chaos outside creates an uncanny intimacy.
Theo walks down a long hallway, where Michelangelo’s “David” stands against a
window framing the chaotic city below. Theo ponders. “You kill me. A hundred
years, there won’t be one sad fuck left to see any of this. What keeps you going?”
Nigel responds, “You know what it is? I just don’t think about it.”33 Nigel recognizes
that art is meaningless in light of the coming extinction. His unwavering allegiance
reveals its object: the implacable and inaccessible Other of the Law, whose
enigmatic desire can be satisfied only through excess imaginary enjoyment, not to
be had by any who serve it, but by those who must endure the dissatisfactions not
only of duty but irrationality.
Inception: The Ethical Cost of Reality in a Fantasy World
From time to time everyone has the feeling that the current situation and
surroundings are as mysterious and alien as if they were really projections imposed
by some external force. In Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), this unreality is
tested by architecture and the specific spaces it fashions and the events it fosters.
The primary reason one feels cheated by reality, according to Lacan, is because
the process by which humans are constituted as subjects forever separates
humanity (reality as we know it) from non-human reality; this also establishes us as
desiring beings. The non-human part is what Lacan called the Real, one-third of his
tripartite model of human subjectivity: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.
The Symbolic is the most easily understood part of his schema; it is the power to
structure the world through signs. The Imaginary is the configuration of the ego
(what one imagines him or herself to be, such as, I am a lawyer, a father, or an
international corporate thief ). The Imaginary is the realm of appearances. Together,
the Symbolic and the Imaginary seem unified and cohesive but are plagued by
the nagging feeling that something intangible is missing. The Real is the cause of
this incompleteness, through which it creates anxiety. Lacan conceptualized the
Real by following Freud, because to be human means to be forever separated from
one’s instinctual, unmediated, “natural being.” The Real is impossible to imagine,
represent, or to attain, but is always “over-present.” It constantly returns to the
Symbolic and Imaginary as a traumatic entity. These three Lacanian elements
structure Inception and the moral dilemmas it represents.
Inception is a story of the love between a gifted former architect turned industrial
spy, Dominick Cobb, and his wife Mal.34 The love story revolves around their
experimental shared dreaming, Mal’s suicide (caused by Cobb), and Cobb’s global/
corporate espionage. Cobb has learned to invade the innermost thoughts of others
by dreaming. In these invasions, he is able to plant ideas that the dreamers later
take to be their own. But, Cobb is uneasy about his illegal and certainly unethical
profession: so the film’s story focuses on three sites defined by Cobb’s attempts to
escape in pursuit of pure enjoyment (jouissance): (1) “reality,” the least important
of the three sites, where Cobb exists as a corporate raider with contractual (i.e.
Symbolic) obligations to a Japanese magnate known only as Saito; (2) Imaginary
partial architectural environments that simulate reality and where criminal
activates operate through dreaming; and (3) architectural ruins, an imaginary city
dreamed by Cobb, where Cobb and Mal are happy as long as they are able to co-
inhabit the dream. In all three zones Cobb has broken with any traditional sense of
Law; he seeks to emulate Sade’s heroes, who “give free rein to the orgy of excess
and crime that represents in their eyes the free reign of nature.”35 This free reign,
for Cobb, is the happiness he imagines he will derive from breaking through the
confines of the Symbolic world and its contractual obligations into the realm of
the Real, idealized by his dream city. The danger of course, as Lacan warned, is that
access to the Real actually means dissolving into an undifferentiated, indifferent
mass of nothingness. Cobb mistakenly substitutes his utopian city for this Real; his
desire to break away from the Symbolic will only lead to destruction.
Lacan claims that we desire access to the Real, which is in the form of das
Ding—the Thing. The danger is that if we ever obtain the Thing or access to the
Real we would disengage from the Symbolic, the suicide of psychosis. Cobb does
not realize that the price to be paid for access to unfettered creativity, or rather,
enjoyment (the Lacanian Real) is death. Just as the forced choice of the bandit’s
demand, “Your money or your life!” is not really a choice (if you want to keep
your money you will not have any life to enjoy it with), the desire for the Real
removes any basis for enjoyment, which requires the support of the Symbolic. The
pleasure principle is a “braking” mechanism that keeps us from getting too close
to the Real. Experiencing the city in distress, destruction, or ruins filters the Real
by constructing fantasies so that architecture can be used as a means of ethical
fulfillment. Although architecture is the medium by which the Other projects its
own fetishes—in the form of the Law, the symbolic order, the duty to “love thy
neighbor”—the fetish, in the form of fantasy, does not just conceal horrible truths;
rather, “at the same time it creates what it purports to conceal, its ‘repressed’ point
of reference.”36 Architecture in its mode as obscene thus plays a double game
between fantasy-fetish and the Real. No wonder, then, that Cobb does not see that
his utopia is in fact an Apocalypse.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in the film Inception architects are
portrayed as megalomaniacs obsessing over access to pure creative freedom
unencumbered by laws or the vagaries of human life. We discover the nature of this
megalomania when Cobb visits his old architecture professor and father-in-law,
Stephen Miles, in order to find another architecture student willing to work for him.
His criminal assignment would require the apprentice to design a maze-like world
that simulates reality within unconscious mind-space. The appeal, we discover, is
not about money; instead, it concerns unbridled pure happiness. Resisting this
request, Miles pleads with Cobb to return to the United States to face charges for
his wife’s murder. Miles does not approve of Cobb’s criminal lifestyle as a corporate
spy. “I never taught you to be a thief,” he complains. Cobb responds, “No, you taught
me to navigate other people’s minds. But after what happened to Mal there weren’t
a whole lot of legitimate ways for me to use that skill.” Mel displaces responsibility
for his actions to the “Symbolic” demands of family and society. Cobb argues that
if only the system would change—i.e. if reality could become Real—truth would
become self-evident. Žižek explains Cobb’s point in terms of Sade’s hero: that he
is not a lustful crazed maniac, but rather an uncaring intellectual alienated from
sensual pleasure, who substitutes pleasure derived from the logical “activity of
outstripping rational civilization by its own means.”37
Cobb persuades Mal to enter into the deep reaches of “unconstructed dream,” a
“limbo” space located in his unconscious, because here, he promises, one’s actions
will be rewarded with pure happiness. This is the pure ethical space of jouissance.
The price of visiting this space is insanity (psychosis), where we are left only with
what has resisted the Symbolic, what is in effect the irreducible remainder of the
Real. Even if this residuum could be said to mean anything, it would not mean
anything for any human subject, however constituted. It would have no language
to speak, no space to inhabit, no time to endure.
Cobb is aware of the insanity of enjoyment that result from shared dreaming,
but he also knows that, according to the rules of espionage dreaming, the only way
out is to die while in limbo: the shock will cause the dreamer to wake up in reality;
but the world he created for Mal and himself to co-inhabit is believed by her “to
be” reality. Thus, Cobb decides that he must plant an idea in Mal’s unconscious that
she will mistake for her own; this is the idea is “the current world” is not real and
the only way to return to reality is the “standard dreamer technique”: i.e. to commit
suicide. The two are awakened into the real world, but Mal continues to thinks it to
be imaginary. She is resolved to her “idea” that she and Cobb must die (again) so
that they can “wake” up in reality.
Cobb has created a situation identical to that of the Sade’s tormentor inflicted
on the beautiful young girl who, magically, woke up the next day as if nothing
ever happened. Nonetheless, she submitted to the same abuse again because the
“moral Law is the Real of unconditional imperative which takes no consideration
of the limitations imposed on us by reality—it is an impossible command.”38 In
other words, Mal chooses, at her own expense, to gratify herself in the “love of
the law, and thus of the inherent immorality of our superegos.”39 Though she will
never reach the paradise promised by Cobb, she will relish the pure pleasure of
submitting to its obscene demands!
Lacan’s theory of human subjectivity locates our true concerns and intentions in
the dream because only there are we able to access the Real of our desire. Inception
unconsciously plays out this “truth of the Freudian-Lacanian clinic.” The ability
to use dreams to navigate between Symbolic (reality), Imaginary (constructed
fantasy), and Real (destruction) is the basic premise by which Cobb is capable of
committing his criminal acts. Further, it is the place for him to attain his innermost
sadistic drives: influencing others’ innermost and personal thoughts, holding Mal
hostage, double-crossing his employers, etc. During conscious life we are limited
by the ego’s desire to keep us within the strictures of the Symbolic. It forces us to
repress our a-social inclinations and postpone pleasurable activates. The desires
articulated in the unconscious but repressed by the ego would disrupt the fragile
issue of inconsistencies and contradictions that it is the duty of the Symbolic world
to anesthetize. The dreamer waking from the “dream” of the Symbolic awakes into
the trauma of the Real.
Žižek explains that fantasy is an alternative to this kind of awakening. We can,
through fantasy’s access to the Imaginary, stitch together the disparate parts so
that the world appears to us as complete, unified, and meaningful. But, this does
not mean that “life is a dream.”40 Lacan’s notion that fantasy structures reality is
based on the fact that there is a “leftover” that “persists and cannot be reduced
to a universal play of illusory mirroring” during our waking consciousness. This
kernel remaining, untouched by the Symbolic, is the Real—the Real of our desire.
Žižek explains the ethical dilemma we face when, in a dream, we experience our
most pathological self (many times they are illegal and immoral thoughts). Upon
waking we claim that it was “just a dream”; “I am not really that way.” However, this
conclusion not so much incorrect as inverted. “It was only in the dream that we
approached the fantasy-framework which determines our [waking] activity, our
mode of acting in reality itself.”41
Thus, it is accurate to say that “our truth lies in our dreams,” and that reality is
actually our attempt to escape this truth by pretending that “it was only a dream.”
Architecture is the paradigmatic element in both reality and dreams because it
serves as the only entity capable of establishing the boundary between the Real
and the Symbolic in the physical realm; it serves as both the guarantor of the Thing
and its (necessary) separation in space. This is primarily why architecture appears to
us as always-already ethical, despite the fact that it has a dark and a light side. In the
film architecture serves in both dreams and reality as the only entity able to protect
our deepest secrets and ideas, for example Mal’s implanted idea that “reality is false.”
The dark side of architecture exploits the notion of buildings being preeminently
ethical in the sense that they appear as they truly are. Buildings seem to be either
sheltering and strong or impassive and threatening. Behind this seeming, however,
is the Truth of the either/or: architecture as the boundary between the Real and
Symbolic must maintain this hinge function. Architecture cannot appear to us as
unethical because if the boundary between the Real and the Symbolic dissolves
then our entire world disappears.
Conclusion
The architect’s job is to create architecture that manages the “kernel of the real”
that serves as the basis for fantasy. The seeming “epiphany” for architects today,
occurs in the film Inception in the scene when Cobb declares that his actions were
not done for money but for the “chance to build cathedrals, entire cities—things
that have never existed, things that couldn’t exist in the real world.” Cobb’s desire is
to go beyond the “pleasure principle,” the vehicle, Freud argued, that keeps us from
accessing enjoyment (the Real) and, by so doing, maintains our subjectivity. The
dilemma contains both the danger articulated in this paper and a possible solution
for architects.
Cobb: That’s not what you used to say. You told me that in the real world I’d
be building attic conversions and gas stations. You said that if I mastered the
dream–share I’d have a whole new way of creating and showing people my
creations. You told me I would be free.
Miles: And I am sorry I was wrong.
Cobb: No you weren’t. Your vision was a vision of pure creativity. It’s where we
took it that was wrong.42
Cobb is right; the error was in where we took it. The ethical dimension, Lacan
suggests, should be found in the person perceiving architecture as a purely
“aesthetic moment of catharsis.”43 The way to interpret this for architects and the
role of architecture as an ethical attitude society is to separate the two. First, we
would make a distinction that architecture in physical reality manifests the Sade/
Kant dialectic and its instrumental use by capitalism; thus we will call this function
by the name of “building.” Second, we would reserve the term architecture to
represent the exception—a purely aesthetic dimension—a signifier acknowledging
its dependency on articulating our ability to see our desire. By doing this we would
create what John Rajchman has described as a “constant cultural resistance to the
tyranny of the very idea of an objectively good human arrangement.”44
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Notes
1 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London and New York, 2010), 236.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York, 1973), 361.
3 Slavoj Žižek, The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Leo Wright, (Oxford,
UK, and Malden, MA, 1999), 288.
4 K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21 (1984):
16.
5 Ibid., 17.
6 Ibid., 27.
7 Žižek, Žižek Reader, 285.
8 Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London, 2009), 14.
9 Ibid., 20.
10 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York, 1963).
11 Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” Architecture Theory Since
1968, ed. K. M. Hays (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 15.
12 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York, 1971), 109.
13 Slavoj Žižek,“The Architectural Parallax,” The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-
opening Jameson’s Narrative, ed. Nadir Lahiji (Farnham Surrey, UK, England and
Burlington, VT, 2011), 255–297.
14 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary J. Gregor,
(Cambridge U.K and New York, 1998), 7.
15 Ibid., 8.
16 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London
and New York, 1991), 261.
17 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 15.
18 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA,
2002), 1.
19 Ibid., 70.
20 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York, 1989), 81.
22 Ibid., 286.
23 Marc de Kesel, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan’s Seminar VII, trans. Sigi Jottkandt
(Albany, NY, 2009), 133.
24 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (New York, 1986), 79.
25 Žižek, The Žižek Reader, 288.
26 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 229.
27 Ibid., 45.
28 Ibid., 125.
29 Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 132.

30 Slavoj Žižek, “The Architectural Parallax,” 272.
31 Ibid., 274.
32 Ibid., 274.
33 Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men (DVD: Universal City, CA, 2006).
34 Christopher Nolan, Inception (DVD: Burbank, CA, 2010).
35 de Kesel and Jottkandt, Eros and Ethics, 136.
36 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York, 1997), 6.
39 John Rajchman, “Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity,” Representations, 15 (1986): 52.
41 Ibid., 47.
42 Nolan, Inception.
43 de Kesel and Jottkandt, Eros and Ethics, 247.
44 Rajchman, “Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity,” 55.
5
Post Mortem: Building Destruction
Kazi K. Ashraf
The art of building contains the finer art of destruction.
To build is to be human may appear axiomatic, but human beings also bear an
enigmatic impulse for the destruction of their own fabrications. The incendiary
beauty of a burning building is both awful and awesome, making us beholden in
a kind of a catatonic grip to something we understand vaguely. And whatever we
seem to understand, we hardly acknowledge.
The demolition of Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia in 2004 was not only a
spectacular event but a demonstration of an intractable lure for the coming down
of a construction. Televised for two whole days, the implosion was presented as a
magnificent theater of dismantling. “It was so cool,” many spectators exclaimed,
while nearby residents bemoaned the vanishing of a familiar landmark. Perhaps
such obliteration is destined as the life cycle or utility of a building runs out. But,
buildings have been marked for an episodic downfall so that new wonders may
arise. The iconic demolition of Pruitt-Igoe Housing in St. Louis (1972) and the
patricidal drowning of Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall in Stanley Tigerman’s photo-
montage marked the passing away of a regime in anticipation of a new one. From
the sacrificial ashes and rubbles rises the unashamed rhetoric of the avant–garde.
Nietzsche is invoked.
Presented at the outset, a provisional typology of building destructions suggests
the following: nihilistic (most famously, the apocryphal scene of Nero playing the lyre
while the city burnt, or Pompeii or Fukushima ravaged by a natural disaster); tactical
(triumphal destruction of cities from Alexander to Genghis Khan, the Blitzkrieg of
the Second World War, or the communally-fuelled demolition of the mosque, the
Babri Masjid, in Ayodhya, (Uttar Pradesh) India in 1992; and transitional, one that
leads to the release of a new epoch (Pruitt-Igoe or Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium).
The tilt of this essay is neither towards the nihilistic nor the tactical mode although
one cannot completely escape either in a narrative on destruction. Transition is
perhaps an endemic condition in the phenomenon of destruction, but something
that needs to be analyzed as a thing in itself. Instead of offering a sociological or
pathological explanation for all building catastrophes, one is drawn here, like moth
to fire, to provide a risky metaphor, to meditations on a fourth type: contrived or
ritualized destructions.
Even if building ends with construction, the story is not completely over as
something begins anew from annihilation. This essay is a narrative on ritualized
destruction, how various practices and performances of de-construction convey
a significance contrary to the immediate or literal phenomenon of destruction.
If tectonics (in its original link to techne/poeisis) is about appearing and making
appear, destruction is about the presencing of an absence; it is not simply an
5.1 Photocollage, Stanley Tigerman (1978). The drowning of the Titanic. Image: courtesy of Stanley
Tigerman
5.2 Scene of the burning house from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Offret (1986). Photo: Lars-Olof Löthwall,
©Löthwall/The Swedish Film Institute, 1986, 2012
Post Mortem: Building Destruction 83
antinomy, but making an otherwise appear. A vivid example is the blowing away
of a Tibetan sand mandala after its meticulous construction, or the weaving of
baskets by Abba Paul, a Desert Father, and burning them at the end each year.
Such phenomena may be approached by a number of concept-heavy terms:
sacrifice, death, dismemberment, disappearance, “un-building,” or what Gordon
Matta-Clark called “anarchitecture.” In any of these conceptual horizons, there is a
narratival or ritual continuity to what may appear to be an abrupt end. Destruction
means a second chance, or in theological term, a resurrection, or in ascetical
sense, an alchemical transformation, leaving one body for another. There is always
something else.
Destruction is always mobilized around a figural substance, often bringing a
convergence of the anthropological and architectural body. A contrived destruction
of the building–body is one of the oldest and recurrent tropes in architecture.
Both the body constructed in the tectonic framework of a building, or building
formed in the ligaments of a body, fall victim to a homicide, or “bauicide,” as the
case may be. The body and building are bound together in a bond of violence that
re- or de-forms their relationship. The ritual destruction of buildings is found in
diverse situations: Many emblems and elements on Greek temples are lithified
versions of sacrificial objects. The Ise Shrine in Japan is taken apart and rebuilt
every twenty years. The Hindu mandala is created on the dismembered body of
a mysterious being (Vastupurusa) upon which temples or cities arise. Rituals for
gaining adulthood in certain tribal cultures were performed through breaking
down special huts. The roof is a favorite trope of destruction: Shamans or Buddhist
arhats conceived illuminative ecstasy as breaking through the roof. James Frazer
notes how Dieris of Australia tore through the roof of a special hut to initiate the
arrival of rain. There is, in short, blood on the body of architecture.
The following sections present five post mortems performed on departed
bodies of architecture. The narratives intend not only to expand the significance of
demolition, dismemberment and disappearance, but also to invoke the epistemic
question of whether destruction can be studied. If we are to pursue a theory about
building destruction, the narratives suggest both a preliminary horizon for that
mysterious event and provisional mapping of architectural violence. There are few
questions that are held in abeyance for a later analysis: Does destruction precede
construction? Or, is construction always followed by destruction? Is destruction
implicit in construction? Is destruction antithetical to construction? The following
anticipatory observations are proposed for reading the post mortem reports:
Destruction is a beginning. The enactment of destruction has a contractual
relationship with pre-established norms and practices. As with Edward Said’s
meditation on beginnings, one would suggest that there is intention and method
in such systematized mayhem. In other words, there is a method to the madness.
Every beginning is an occasion of violence, and it is embedded in the very ritual of
building.
Destruction disrupts normativity; it involves a transgression or transcendence
for which normativity is a required benchmark. Destruction triggers, as in Jacques
Derrida’s reflection on death, a “rhetoric of borders,” a conversation on border-
making and limit conditions. The sense of destruction as an end—final limit—

invites a reflection on death. “Seneca describes the absolute imminence, the
imminence of death at every instant. The imminence of a disappearance that is
by essence premature seals the union of the possible and the impossible, of fear
and desire, and of mortality and immortality, in being–to–death.”1 Thus, re-citing
Seneca via Derrida, one could say destruction is imminent in building.
Destruction is purposeful. Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Offret (The Sacrifice, 1986) ends
with a fiery destruction of a house. (In fact, the end does not begin well in the
making of the film. During the final shoot, the camera jammed while the house-set
was burning. The house had to be rebuilt so it could be burned again). In Tarkovsky’s
driven meditation on the macrocosmic scope of human annihilation (in the film,
nuclear catastrophe), and its microscopic reach into the lives of the individual, the
father figure in the film pulls together the material possessions of the family and
burns the house down as a kind of barter to save the family. Is this cataclysmic
or cathartic? Is it a sacrifice or surrender? Compared to Michelangelo Antonioni’s
nihilistic and ecstatic destruction of the consumerist house in Zabriskie Point (1970),
the burning of the dwelling in the eponymous Sacrifice is an Abrahamic gift.
As with Siva’s bipolar cosmic dance, destruction is ambiguous. Destruction is
implicated in a doubleness: it is both a silencing and an emergence, a depletion and
a regeneration. Its paradoxical kinship with creation is not only non-extractable,
but also necessary, as many artists have noted how an oscillation between
creation/constructivity and destruction is present ubiquitously in the rhythms or
proceedings of nature. The prosaic destiny of the deterioration of buildings receives
a discursive doubleness in David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi’s notion
of “weathering” when they proclaim: “Finishing ends construction, weathering
constructs finishes.”2
Destruction is performative, and as such is materially tenuous (although it
needs materiality for that very performance), making the event both unsettled and
unsettling. That is why the artworks of Matta-Clark or Andy Goldsworthy, which are
literally performed for deterioration, rely on the photographic medium for their
rhetorical reproduction. The ontology of destruction requires a human agency in
the performance and practice.
“Why Did The Monk Burn The Temple?”
The writer Yukio Mishima wondered, as did millions of people, when the news
spread that a monk at Kyoto’s wondrous temple had burnt it down: “Why did the
monk do that?” One sultry summer night in 1950, an acolyte priest Hayashi Yoken
struck a match to a bundle of dry sticks and threw it at the most beautiful edifice
on earth, Kinkakuji, or the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The building burnt to
ashes. Few things are known about Hayashi. The club-footed monk stammered,
and before proceeding to burn the temple, went on a drinking binge and visited
prostitutes. But that did not explain why he torched Kyoto’s sacred monument.3
Mishima was induced to reflect on the mystery of destruction through writing 5.3 Kinkakuji,
a fictionalized version of events that led to the climactic incendiary moment. The Temple
Mishima’s story, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), recreates the stammering of the Golden
Pavilion. Photo
priest Yoken as the fictional Mizoguchi. The book is finally an essay on the question by Keith Pomakis,
of beauty and the beautiful, and what one is to do when beholden to a thing of September 21,
beauty that not only confounds a visual apprehension but also challenges a 2004, Wikimedia
conceptual comprehension. Commons
But, if beauty is here, can its shadow be far behind? Mizoguchi was both
ugly and irresistible. He stuttered, dragged his foot, and presented himself as
a miserable creature, a kind of reincarnation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame/
Kinkakuji. Mizoguchi came to realize that deformity made him an object of people’s
attention even if it was surreptitious and unacknowledged. In a chain of actions
contemplative and concatenated, Mizoguchi homologized himself with the Golden
Pavilion. The object of veneration and the subject of revulsion became alter egos.
Such a homology was however fraught with perplexity. Mizoguchi wondered
which one was the “real” Kinkakuji, the temple that his father had described so
lovingly when he was a child, the model of the temple that he had seen in another
precinct, the Kinkakuji that he serves as an acolyte monk, or the idea of that temple
that sediments in the soul of a beholder? And, if the destination of a thing of perfect
beauty was to be annihilation, as Mizoguchi came to realize, which one was to be
destroyed? Mizoguchi is also reminded of that enigmatic Zen parable: “When you
see the Buddha, kill the Buddha.”
The golden phoenix that perched on the roof of Kinkakuji, as well as the
supposed ashes of the Buddha kept in the pavilion, were both poignant and
ironic reminders of the temple’s destiny of burning and its convulsive history of
destruction and rebuilding. Kinkakuji had been destroyed during a war in the 15th
century and rebuilt after that, and rebuilt again after Yoken/Mizoguchi destroyed
it in 1950 (all of which is not quite the same as the traditional dismantling and
reconstruction practiced with Ise Shrine).
Yukio Mishima’s own life parallels an itinerary of careful construction towards a
ritualized annihilation. Identifying his own body as the national/ist ethic, Mishima
built up his corporeal body, athletically and militaristically (and auto-erotically), to
represent a perfect vision of the nationalist destination. But, in 1970, thwarted by
the course of the body politic to give credence to his nationalist vision, or to enact
a theatrical termination of such edification, or a combination of both, Mishima
committed seppuku, a ritualized suicide. In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,
Mishima makes complex conjunctions of Buddhist ideas of the transitory with
social and nationalist ethics, all of which comes at a particular historical moment
in war-torn Japan. The ambivalence of post-war chaos of Japan and an incendiary
illumination of social pathology was reflected in Mishima’s first staged play, Kataku
(The Burning House, 1948). Drawn from a Buddhist fable in the Lotus Sutra, the
burning house becomes a metaphor for immersion in and release from a troubled
world of sufferings and defilements.
“The Rafters are Shattered”
The young man, emaciated but resolute, sits under the fig tree in a forest,
determined not to move until he has found the light. He sits cross-legged but erect,
eyes closed but focused, with only one objective: the truth. For eight years he had
roamed the forest in search of that elusive target. He had subjected his body to
various trials, if only truth would show. He had remained standing on one leg as
a form of penance. He had gone without food for weeks, his skin and bones were
indistinguishable, and yet truth remained concealed and unavailable.
Eight years earlier, he had been a prince in a palace, a lucky guy who had it all.
Yet, he left home, renounced it, as people would say, so that home, or gaha, could
be abolished forever. Home had not left him; it clung to his body like a leech after
one has come out from bathing in an ancient pond.
While young leaves twinkled like green stars at the gentle breeze, he sat under
the bo tree, determined not to stand up or open his eyes until what he sought had
been found. Then, at the end, came the brilliant moment, something that would
signify the ultimate episode in an epic journey. At a point in the meditation, a deep
realization dawned on him, and he exclaimed: “The rafters are shattered, the ridge–
pole is destroyed, and the architect will no longer erect the house (gaha) again.”4
That is when the young man known until

then as Gautama Siddhartha became the
Buddha.
This is the only statement attributed
to the Buddha in relation to the highly
enigmatic and ineffable event of
attaining nirvana. Literary and artistic
representations will struggle with
recreating the conditions Buddha
described, but the verses arrive at the
ascetic telos in cataclysmic terms, as
a dramatic destruction of the body.
And what is also significant is that the
destruction takes place in the tectonic
framework of a building.
Two notions are embedded in that
cryptic statement. First, there is the body
and building reference where the body
is conceived of as gaha, home or house.
And, second, there is the dismantling
of that structure. Two consequential
questions emerge here: Why the imagery
of building for body? And, why is the
event rendered in a cataclysmic manner?
Gaha is the villain in the description.
Gaha is home in its normative sense, implying being in the world, socially, 5.4 The Buddha
familially and phenomenally. The Buddha’s statement is the most vivid expression under a distended
of the violent destruction of gaha. And what is the consequence of this climactic lintel. Image from
Albert Foucher,
condition? The moment coincides with the final goal of asceticism, or freeing
L’art gréco-
oneself from the tethers of the world. But this is part of a series of key episodes bouddhique du
in the ascetic journey. The climactic nature of this event is premised by an ascetic Gandhâra: étude
conceptualization where the body is like a hut, whose existing lineaments and sur les origines
ligaments must be shattered before the enlightened life can begin. Clearly this de l’influence
classique dans
is a vivid body and building association where the body–building is conceived
l’art bouddhique
of particularly as a “final” hut. The house–body stands as the last bastion in what de l’Inde et de
appears to be a single-minded pursuit of the ascetic to literally de-construct the l’Extrême-Orient
existing structure of life. That is the truth the young prince was seeking. (Paris: Imprimerie
In Buddhist sense, the destruction of the “last” hut is an ideograph of nirvana, Nationale, 1905),
Fig. 77. Photo
the climax of renunciation, what in a literal sense means extinguishing the flame of
by author
desire, thus equating home-building with a fiery disposition. The cataclysm, using
the trope of the shattered hut, basically inaugurates a new life in the teleological
narrative where the old parameters of home–building are nullified. The narrative
content is based on, first, the ascetic body as homologous to a building, and
second, the body as conditioned primarily by socialization and domestication,
must now be transformed radically.
The great ascetic experiment works through a simultaneity of the occupation

and “destruction” of the body-building. It is not truly a destruction, whatever the
rhetoric may be, but a radical reconstitution or transformation, where “something”
remains, although the old measures of identity are no longer valid. The so-called
destruction of the hut is comparable to attaining a “non-conditioned” mode of
existence, akin to a “second birth,” of dying to this world and being born again in
order to create another “human,” a body more purified and superior. The Buddha
once used the example of a chick breaking out of the egg-shell as a “second birth.”
“To break the shell of the egg is equivalent,” Mircea Eliade explains “… to breaking
out of the samsara, out of the wheel of existence.”5 After the shattered gaha,
there is nothing, for it is coeval to a condition that is totally ineffable, or as one
text mentions, asamskrata, or unconstructed. The art historian Stella Kramrisch
describes that un-constructed condition as arriving at the “zero-point.”6
The Temple of Doom and Enthusiasm
The town was a luminous artifact, an ideal representation of upright citizens,

celestial gods and the institutions of man. Emblem of Apollonian Virtues, the town
was an embodiment of Laws and Principles. On the liminal side of that illustrious
town, on a site at the far outskirts where tall, green trees surrounded a dank, marshy
land, lay the temple. It was a wooden temple, with stocky columns and tiled roof
on a wooden frame held together by rope lashings. The temple lay untended and
overgrown with vines, waiting quietly for the god to come.
5.5 King The women in town, too, waited for the day when he would come. The women
Pentheus torn
were wives, mothers, and whores: dutiful wife of a senator, mother of a general,
apart at his
sparagmos (ritual chaste sister to a noble person, or just a plain prostitute from the shadier part of
dismemberment) town. They waited for the arrival of the god who comes from Elsewhere, the god
by the Maenads of who drives them mad.
Dionysos. Douris
(painter), Greek
(active c. 500–460
BCE). Red-Figure
Cup Showing the
Death of Pentheus
(exterior) and a
Maenad (interior),
c. 480 BCE, Greek
(Athens), Late
Archaic period
(500–480 BCE).
Terracotta 5 h. x
11½ in. diameter
(12.7 h. x 29.2
cm diameter),
AP 2000.02.
Image: Kimbell
Art Museum, Fort
Worth, Texas
The god arrives and the city is tense. It’s a time when regularity is suddenly
suspended and challenged. The official gods, the gods from the sky, look elsewhere,
and generals, senators, and merchants appear helpless as the women grow tenser.
It’s a time of the violence of “wellborn ladies,” as Marcel Detienne describes.
The brazen god comes riding a leopard accompanied by prancing satyrs and
maenads making music and flaunting various kinds of intoxicants. The god dances
through the streets, from one neighborhood to another, followed by his raucous
retinue. The women run to the windows for a glimpse. Some run out of their
houses, from their kitchen, and some from attending to their children in the aulae.
They run out of their houses and follow the god.
The party grows bigger and bigger. Satyrs, maenads and wellborn ladies. They
pour out into the gridded frame of the city streets, and after leaving the gates,
take to the winding path that leads to the liminal location, the site of the sad, old
temple. Wine is drunk, dresses are loosened, bodies sway and swing. A goat is
sacrificed, blood is mixed with drinks. The women shout the name of the god. The
untying begins.
In a trance, in the name of the god, Dio-Nysos the Liberator, who comes from
nowhere and elsewhere, “the stranger who brings strangeness,”7 the women
pounce on the temple. They climb and grab at the ropes tying the bundle of
wooden posts that hold the roof rafters, they shake and pull in frenzy, their palms
bruised and bloody in no time. The ropes come apart, and one by one, the purlins
fall, crashing to the ground, and soon the roof tiles, first one by one and then in the
loud rumbling bundle. There are ecstatic shouts, the roof is no more, the temple is
no more.
As soon as the temple is dismantled, it must be put together again before sunset.
The women, a little weary by now, work harder to gather up the materials again,
and climb the precarious scaffolds prepared to rebuild the temple. One woman
or another, a little dazed by the drink, the euphoria of enthusiasm, and the strain
of carrying building materials, trip from an upper level of the platform and come
tumbling down. And, in a frenzy that is as ferocious as before when they began, the
other women jump down and pounce on the poor, fallen woman, and pull and tug
at her until her limbs are severed. Thus the temple and its builders and un-builders
enter a curious and volatile relationship of building and mayhem, of death and
birthing, recalling the genealogy of the god himself, when Semele is impregnated
after drinking a potion made from the heart of Dionysos, torn apart by Titans, dying
before giving birth, whence Father Zeus sews the unborn Dionysos into his thigh
for a paternal birth.8
The whole ritual of sacrifice is structured around designed death and demolition,
and consequent reconstruction. At the root of the bacchanalian destruction of the
temple is “ecstasy” or “enthusiasm.” “The Bacchic ritual produced what was called
‘enthusiasm,’” Bertrand Russell notes, “which means etymologically having the
god enter the worshipper, who believed that he became one with the god.”9 The
intoxicating drink facilitated this union; but enthusiasm was really the effect of
rapturous oneness with the spirit of the god, who transgressed the customs of the
city and inverted the roles of citizenship and duty, ecstasy and responsibility, the
sacred and the sacrilegious.
The Origin of Architecture is Slaughter
History begins with monstrosity. Architectural narratives wrestle with it: from the
paintings at Altamira to the lithified parts of sacrificed bulls on Greek temples,
from the genetically hybrid Minotaur at Knossos to Le Corbusier’s sketches for
Chandigarh. That the space of architecture is bestowed with the carcasses of
beautiful beasts and unnamed monsters, hidden in its basement or concealed
behind its walls, is a secret story told only around a camp-fire or by a brooding Poe.
Monstrosities demonstrate, as Marco Frascari claims, or remonstrate.10
The story takes place in a geography that can no longer be located and in a
time that cannot be recalled with any precision: Unnamed and unidentified, the
thing appeared suddenly over a cerulean sky. The perturbed gods ganged up and
brought the thing down on earth. They laid him/her/it on the ground, each god
holding a limb or an organ; it had no chance. The gods slaughtered the thing. It
must have twitched or writhed, but it put up little resistance; and then it was no
more —that is, no more than what it was. The gods did not even bother to ask the
thing its name. They simply proceeded to dismember it. Only after the deed was
done, did they think of a name for it. They called it Vastupurusa, the Cosmic Man.
Those gods assigned for measurement and survey brought out their instruments,
the thread, the chalk powder, the theodolites, and the tripods. On the ground
where Vastupurusa lay slaughtered and dismembered, with each anatomical piece
strewn around, the gods drew calcified lines that caged each dismembered piece
within a fine geometric grid. For each grid, the gods gave a name, a name that
represented the property of that organ. Moreover, each god was given the task
5.6 Vastupurusa
in the mandala. of presiding over a grid. A forelimb for one god, an elbow for another, one eye for
Drawing by author one god, a foot for some other. So the thing that did not have a name, and could
not be described, now upon its demise
received not only names and locations
for its various severed parts, but also a
designated divinity.
The navel was in the central grid,
the source of things to come. It was
the point of emergence for Brahma,
the master deity of creation. The navel
connected to the origin. The navel was
the mundus, the omphalos, center of the
earth, the point of the axis mundi around
which all things come into being. Thus,
on the abject, dismembered body arose
a grid of order and measure, and on
each grid there appeared a property and
character, and upon that superimposed
system arose the mountain of finely cut
stones and porphyry that was called a
work of art, architecture—a city with a
handsome temple; or, a temple with a beautiful tower. From the murderous earth
it rose once more to touch the sky. Such is the origin of a mandala, of the making
of a worlding. The place of beginning as a site of slaughter and blood sacrifice
and eventual construction is central to many ancient practices. Marcel Detienne
describes such a cosmogonic murder scene, an infanticide from an Orphic account
of the death of Dionysus. The child Dionysus was slaughtered by the Titans, his
body was dismembered, and the parts were thrown over a fire and roasted. The
Titans were preparing to devour the victim’s flesh. They just had time to gobble
down the corporeal meal, all except for the heart, before the punishing lightning
from Zeus reduced the Titan party to smoke and ashes, out of which was born the
human species.11 Awesome monsters and un-nameable creatures were given lesser
understanding than gods, for they formed a convenient group of dissonant and
perplexing elements. But, the de-monstration of monsters was a crucial creative
act, and if creation on earth is to be considered a dwelling act, the making of a
world, it was first and foremost existential. “I call ‘monsters’ all original inexhaustible
beauty,” writes Alfred Jarry, the poet of ‘pataphysics.12 Marco Frascari traces the
designation of mostri sacri in the Etruscan-Roman tradition of divination, which
considered monsters as “extraordinary events, celestial novelties, untouchable
sacred signs of a possible future.”13 These are enigmas that can be interpreted now
only with an ambiguous understanding and apprehensive distance. But, Frascari
proposes another destination for such mysterious creatures: Architectural monsters
are the extraordinary signs of an imaginative production based on perception and
knowledge.14 The highest function of a poet, or for that matter an artist or architect,
or anybody involved in the act of production, is the invention of monsters. Frascari
cites Massimo Scolari: “An architect must subject the reality presented by nature to
a host of legitimate deformations and unnatural relationships to produce monsters
that are enigmas which express precisions.”15 There is then always the possibility
of a Minotaur in the cabinet, wild things under the bed. To paraphrase Einstein
arguing for another extraordinary being, even if there were no monsters, we had
every reason to invent one.
The Lost House
The Barcelona Pavilion was destined to be lost before it was built. It was already a
ruin before it was history. Architecture, for Mies van der Rohe, was a gradual and
relentless progression to almost nothing. Beinahe nichts. Not nothing, but almost
nothing.
The Barcelona Pavilion is/was a house, “the house of the German spirit,” an
emblem of the modern house to come. In 1929, one is already in a quandary with
the modern house. For such a modern house comes to terrorize the present, or as
Josep Quetglas ruminates, the modern is a machine that anachronises the present.16
“The modern house is the house where I don’t belong,” Quetglas continues, “which
I cannot claim as mine, where neither I nor my imagination may venture ….” The
modern house dethrones the fundamental citizen of the house, the dweller, for “…
5.7 Barcelona the modern house … excludes me, because I am radically absent from it, because it
Pavilion, is the house of the Other.”17 And, Rudolf Otto has pointed out earlier that the Other
Reconstruction,
is either a divinity or monstrosity, or some kind of bewildering phenomenon.18
1983–1986.
Photo: Donald The Barcelona Pavilion, or the Miesian house, is a house that cannot be lived
Kunze, May 2012 in, for it perpetrates a domestic violence. It is a forbidden house, un-dwellable, a
house destined to dematerialize before it can be domesticated, but not before our
domestic imagination has been terrorized forever. Designed for dematerialization,
the pavilion/house was built in stone, glass, and steel with sheer planes that
floated and stood precariously in “free” space. The unbridled space, the material
minimalism, the constructive reduction, and the polished pillars were all decisive
elements in the Miesian vanishing act. Polished many times over, the chrome-plated
columns not only concealed the joints but also perpetuated the dematerializing
effect of reflection from polished surfaces. Polishing presented an act of mutilation:
the array of reflections and transparencies hastened the disappearance of any
tectonic logic or structural order. First, the domestic universe is denied, and then
all architectural habits and conveniences are confounded. And, finally, the interior
has been emptied out. It is a house of absence where bodies have been devoured.
Mies’s house, in effect, is not made of stone, glass and steel; it is, as Quetglas
realizes, made of reflections. All that is solid is reflected back to oblivion. “The entire
pavilion is a mirror.” The whole house is a great disappearing act. Mirrors produce
5.8 Statue, “Alba,” by Georg Kolbe, Barcelona Pavilion, Reconstruction, 1983–1986.
Photo: Donald Kunze, May 2012
an aporetic desire, it reflects back an image and inverts desires by dissolving them
in the space where none can enter. Quetglas invokes Rilke: “You mirrors, who go on
emptying the empty rooms.”19 Mirrors conjure the spirit of Narcissus, suffering the
anguish of a split, and Medusa, reflecting itself back into inert form.
The house has no doors, and space flows in and out unheeded, and yet it is
a resolute labyrinth made of many reflective glass and marble surfaces that
perpetually decenter and disorient. There is a constant anxiety in the visitor, as all
movements, materials and mirroring reflections hasten a perpetual dissolution. “In
the Pavilion, Mies was to stimulate the spectator to the utmost degree. Shall we
go in then?” Where is this going? Rilke is invoked by Quetglas: “Above us there’s
a house without doors. Is it open or closed? There are two paths. Neither of them
leads anywhere.”20 This is far more perplexing than Hercules’s ambiguous bivium,
the parting of a road into two where an intelligent decision is required before
proceeding.
Representing a struggle between excess and less, the house of mirrors sits
equivocally between the ordinariness of excess and the exquisite excessiveness
of less. Is the house of absence about an infinite enrichment or systematic
impoverishment; or, more disconcertingly, is it about the horror of emptiness, a
horror vacui?
Mies has devoted a sustained contemplative and constructive energy to
a dialogical relationship between excess and less, and between appearance
and absence. He is certainly the most ascetic of all modern architects who has
articulated the theme of “nothingness” with its complex conjunctions of excess
and less, reduction and selectivity, and exquisiteness and exclusiveness. The
idea of beinahe nichts suggests two immediate readings: a reductive aesthetical
and architectural expression that could be characterized by the vogue notion of
minimalism, and a more intellectual understanding of reductivism analogous to
the ideology and practice of asceticism.
In an architectural sense, Mies’s path towards “almost nothing,” the art of
disappearance, is made possible by two procedures: the minimalization in structure
and materials, and, further, the “dematerialization” of the materials one is left to
work with. In any case, both procedures attempt to dematerialize either physically
(by reduction) or virtually (by visual effects) the very fundamental conditions of
architecture, materiality and presence.
A house such as this can only be dismantled and dispatched. The Pavilion
is dismantled, Quetglas argues, because the modern house is empty, and the
presentation of emptiness is the object of the representation. And, because the
modern house is but a mirror, inverting all that it stands for, including inverting itself.
Finally, in a great disappearing act, the house itself disappears. The actual house
was dismantled after the exhibition in 1929, placed in crates, and put on a train
to be shipped back to Germany. En route, the crates containing the dismembered
house were lost in toto. A house that begins in disappearing can only disappear in
full. No trace. And, what is left to us are apparitions and haunting images.
A facsimile was built in 1986, in Barcelona, on the same site. An original does not
exist, yet the imagination is pervaded by the ruins of the original. What exists is a
simulacrum. Or, a sarcophagus.
The essay began with anticipating a method to the madness. But, what
conclusions can we draw with the Buddha, Dionysos, Mishima, and Mies as
protagonists on the same stage? To speak of these names in one breath is a
challenge. Hastening to elaborate what we already know—that destruction is a
necessary condition for a spiritual rebirth, or material transformation, or, as Piet
Mondrian wished, “ascension away from matter”—is not enough.
All the above narratives can be considered from a metamorphic perspective.
This is fundamentally an evolutionary scheme involving change and Nietzschean
“transvaluation” where “destruction of old forms [is] a condition of higher forms”
and where dissolution is directed at the limitations posed either by matter,
conventions, or values.21 But, where actually is the location of destruction in the
metamorphic scheme? Is destruction about the violence of origin (Vastupurusa)?
Is destruction the telos of a project (Buddha/Mies)? Or, is destruction a point of
reversibility (Dionysos and Mizoguchi/Mishima)?
But, also what is revealed as a subtle strand in the narratives is a kind of domestic
violence, where domus, or dwelling, is the object of a relentless onslaught; whether
it is as obvious and literal, as in the modern house, or analogous, as in the case of
the body, or metaphorical, as in the case of the temple. As house, temple, or body,
home suggests a universe that is condensed and contained. But, the constructed
containment is not quite stable. Domus is a terrible destination: it is a primordial
and perpetual site of the need to build and frame and enclose, and an equal need
to transgress and transcend. These needs invite construction, yet we know they
are temptingly tenuous and fragile, requiring a frequent revision and reformation.
Destruction is therefore not simply a point of transition but a necessary
complement, an active and calculated counterpart. Dwelling becomes an aporia
precisely in its location between construction and destruction. Home and body
seem to be the repeated site of ritualized destruction as both require meticulous
construction, nurturing of the body and fabrication of home, being at the same
time susceptible to rupture and tremor. Andres Serrano’s photographs of bodies
with stab or burn injuries, lying in morgues, capture the tenuous nature of the
“living” body. The images convey not so much the macabre and grisly but the fragile
containment of the built body, with its fluids and organs. One could, in reference to
“weathering,” say the same thing for architectural bodies.
Dwelling as a term returns us to burning, a clearly destructive phenomenon that
lends itself to a discursive propagation. To burn is to be, as the ancient sacrificial ritual
in the Indo-European traditions conveyed. The sacrificial act around the sacred
fire is one of humanity’s most ancient existential activities. It brought humanity,
divinity, earth and sky into a precarious and precious conversation. The burning
temple, too, is a “fourfold,” as the famous philosophical reflection on the four-folding
bridge, for burning is the most ancient instrument available for dwelling. This is
conveyed as much as in the phenomenology of fire as the technology of language,
and reproduced in rituals and narratives. The names of the goddess of the hearth,
Hestia for the Greeks, Vesta for the Romans, and vastu for Vedic Indians (meaning
a “thing,” a “building”), all have roots in the word as, which literally means “to burn.”
More importantly, the root is related to such existential terms as the German wesen,
the English word was, and the Indian word that directly means existence, astitwa.
The Indian word for architecture, vastushilpa, which in its congenial connotation
means the art of architecture, or literally the art of existence, is in a more equivocal
sense, the art of burning. It is intriguing that the ascetic Buddha, in his renunciation
of home–world and its architectural plethora, considered nirvana in two ways:
literally, as the snuffing out of the flame and, ideologically, as the demolition of the
home paradigm.
Bibliography
Ashraf, Kazi K., “The Buddha’s House,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 53/54 (2008):
225–243.
———, The Hermit’s Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2013).
Blotkamp, Carel, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).
Del Caro, Adrian, Dionysian Aesthetics: The Role of Destruction in Creation as Reflected in the
Life and Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1981).
Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995).
Detienne, Marcel, Dionysos at Large, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
——— and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, trans. Paula Wissing
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Frascari, Marco, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
Kerényi, Carl, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of the Indestructible Life, trans. Ralph Manheim
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976).
Kramrisch, Stella, The Presence of Siva (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Leatherbarrow, David and Mohsen Mostafavi, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time
Mishima, Yukio, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, trans. Ivan Morris (New York: Knopf, 1959).
Quetglas, Josep, Fear of Glass: Mies van der Rohe’s Pavilion in Barcelona, trans. John Stone and
Rosa Roig (Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser, 2001).
Notes
1 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA, 1993), 3–4.
2 David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in
Time (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
3 I faced my own enigma with The Temple of the Golden Pavilion in a truly uncanny
way. The morning the Twin Towers were hit in Manhattan with an epical and tragic
destruction, on September 11, 2001, I was discussing Mishima’s book with architecture
students in my class at the University of Pennsylvania. I have yet to sort out this
unsettling coincidence.
4 The verse is from The Dhammapada (Verse 154), a collection of statements and
descriptions attributed to the Buddha.
5 Mircea Eliade discusses the yogic creation of another “man” who is more purified than
the one that was destroyed and replaced, “Cosmical Homology and Yoga,” in Journal of
the Indian Society of Oriental Art 5 (1937): 188–203.
6 Stella Kramrisch, “Notes on Usnisa,” in Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art 4
(1936): 79–83.
7 Marcel Detienne, Dionysos at Large, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, and
London, 1989), 12.
8 What is presented here is a collage of many Dionysian narratives. Marcel Detienne
discusses the ritual practice of the roof destruction and its rebuilding from an island
at the mouth of the Loire from a description by the geographer Strabo. Detienne,
Dionysos at Large, 42–43.
9 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London, 1945), 16.
10 Frascari points to Vico’s use of jurisprudential etymology of the word monster, where
monstrare is “to show.” Vico explains that in Roman Law children born to prostitutes
were called monsters as their origin points to an uncertain union. Marco Frascari,
Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage, MD, 1991),
15.
11 Marcel Detienne, Dionysos Slain, trans. Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner
(Baltimore and London, 1979), 69–70.
12 Alfred Jarry, Les Monstres, quoted by Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, 33.
13 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture, 51.
14 Ibid., 90.
15 Ibid., 86.
16 Josep Quetglas, Fear of Glass: Mies van der Rohe’s Pavilion in Barcelona, trans. John
Stone and Rosa Roig (Basel and Boston, 2001), 36.
17 Quetglas, Fear of Glass, 36.
18 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of
the Divine and its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York, 1950).
19 Quetglas, Fear of Glass, 101.
20 Ibid., 73.
21 See Carel Blotkamp, Mondrian: The Art of Destruction (New York, 1994), 15. Also, Adrian
Del Caro, Dionysian Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), 14–15, 24.
6
The Slow-Fast Architecture of Love in the Ruins
Donald Kunze
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive,
and for a while I could not enter
for the way was barred to me ….
Then, like all dreamers,
I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers
and passed like a spirit through the barrier before me.
—Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca, 1938
Time Travel
There are three instances of illogical time travel essential to architecture, three
instances of anachronism by which, specifically, the idea of cinema—which does
not officially arrive in history before the late nineteenth century—constitutes
an animating kernel within architecture, resisting and disturbing architecture’s
function as shelter and normative symbol. We first see a kind of proto-cinema at
the origins of architecture, where oral poetry, dance, costumes, and masks powered
events held within multi-media “clearings.” These did not provide shelter or other
“practical” functionalities; rather, they facilitated the universal human practices
of marriage and burial—to intervene strategically within the extensive Real of a
perceived cosmic architecture.1
The performative component of the first instances of human building was
sublimated when ritual clearings gave way to the secularized commercial polis. The
performative survives, however, in certain details as well as in the re-vivified spaces
of Festarchitektur during the compact periodicities of holy days. Such events are
themselves set “outside of time” to wire together an imperfect calendar and allow
the dead brief recovery of their voices and homes (apophrades, return of the dead
to their original abodes).2
A third time–out–of–time occurs when buildings fall out of synch with the
coordinated flows and functions of the city’s secularized space-time, or when
natural disaster, fires, wars, or other misfortunes accelerate buildings to a premature
death. In these slow-motion or fast-forward negations, the cinematic imagination
shows itself through the uncanny–horror of ruins.
In this essay I argue that architecture and cinema occupy an “expanded field”
that, like the expanded field described by Rosalind Krauss in her famous essay
about sculpture, discovers the retroactive logic of the “already–always,” whereby
novelty is found to have existed in strategically distant precursors.3 The uncanny
anachronism carries with it the same irrational paradox of the science fiction movie
about time travel. If the time-traveler violates linear temporality to “go back to fix”
some wrong step taken in history, won’t this make his/her very project—the result
of this wrong step—impossible? The answer is yes and no. If history has allowed
the exception the time traveler uses, history itself is already-always recursive. It has
“always” allowed for exception; it follows a rule of what “is, was, and forever must
be”; the true of human time (as opposed to the truths bound within human time) is
time’s continual re-entry into itself.4 Cinema and architecture have “already-always”
contaminated each other, by bringing what seems peripheral into the center, as
an essence or kernel, and by taking what is newest to what is oldest.5 The same
rule that prohibits this anachronism is the necessity to “complete” the circle, by
inserting a small gap in its circuitry.
The Motion Differential
What is the meaning of these three anachronisms? Before cinema officially arrived
on the scene with the invention of perforated film and the Lumière Brothers’
cinématographe, the idea of an audience sitting still while a world moved around it
was already a conceptual possibility, the antipode of architecture’s fixed show and
moving audience. The rule common to both cases seems to be this: between any
performance and its audience, there is a relation of motion. In cinema, viewers play
dead in a dark room to dream collectively; the screen functions as a collective eye,
circling individual glances into one vision while cooking it into narrative.
Architecture achieved this motion differential at the dawn of human culture,
within the first ritual-intensive clearings, which opened the forest to a view of the
omen-scribbled sky. These clearings were nothing less than imaginariums, able to
create what description can only approximate as “multiple circulating atoms of
performance–and–witness,” a dynamic basis for the modern theater’s separated
spaces for stage and auditorium. The motion differential, ancient or modern, allows
“the dead” to find seats and watch the show that is hidden within the show seen by
human eyes. Vico mused that the first forest clearings were eyes in two senses: (1)
as openings that allowed the passage of a new dimension, orthogonal to the flow
of nature represented by the horizontality of the forest, connecting humans to the
earth and sky; and (2) as optical organs capable of collectivizing individual human
sight—converting sight into the idea of witness (the necessary precursor to the
idea of law) and redistributing the single subject’s literal point of view to multiple
imaginary locations (metempsychosis, the ancestor of sympathy).6
The witness–performance differential, motion, invites us to re-envision
architectural space in relation to Lucretius’s famous analogy of a flow of atoms
along a void. First, there is a dynamic mélange of adjustable frames deployed in
the first performative clearings (Figure 6.1). To secularize this first architectural
invention, the frames used to visualize narratives and rituals must be, so to speak,
polarized to face a common goal and synchronized to flow toward that goal. The
space along which they move must be neutral, secular, empty—cleared of magic.
In this artificial forward flow, material shelter (Vitruvius’s firmitas) can and must
accommodate function/opportunity (Vitruvius’s utilitas).7 Exchanges are optimized
within the neutralized flow, where they now obey the rule of law, the market forces
The Slow-Fast Architecture of Love in the Ruins 101
of supply and demand, and the luck of the game. As in Lucretius’s even flow of
atoms, parodied by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake as “Eve and Adam’s,” synchrony
makes the uniform forward motion seem like stasis. The glue holding the flow
together gives rise to firmitas, created as an illusion.8
Archaic performativity survives in the form of holidays where the motion
differential of performance–and–witness dusts off its routines and reclaims its
spaces. The function of festivals is to patch up the breaks in the imperfect secular
calendar, encircling the wounds through which the space of the old architectural
Real still show. Decorations of buildings and civic spaces push them to a crystalline,
skeletal perfection. Illumination and fireworks simulate the cremation that, in
funerals, bakes mortals into gods.9
Venustas, Vitruvius himself realized, was more than a pretty face. This third
element in his group of three architectural virtues refers to the exception, the
inexplicable need to call on “cosmic” relationships in the form of ratios, angles of
view, and ideas of order that had imparadised architecture at its origins, where
minimalistic building elements intervened in an “always-already” Real of cosmic
architecture based on timings and placements. Venus, like her consort Mars, had
to be carefully restricted within the secular civic templates. Inside the city walls,
sacred and commercial prostitution was allowed only within specific districts.
Military exercises were kept to fields beyond the walls. The logic of exception was
extended geographically to boundaries, proxies for the city’s literal walls, which
armies were forbidden to cross, as in Rome’s case of the Rubicon. The Temple of
Janus embodied “the boundary itself”—its doors were open in times of war, closed
in times of peace, thus revealing the binary algorithm of love and strife, Venus and
Mars, and the spatial correlates corresponding to the idea of internal and external
exception.10
In architecture more generally, venustas was the “odd (wo)man out” in
the otherwise sympathetic union of utilitas and firmitas. Cleared of gods and
demons, space and time could support the functions, supplies, exchanges, and
accommodation of needs with only minimal nods to the religions of luck. In
Lucretius’s “even flow of atoms along a void,” parallel motion toward a utopian
a-spatial, a-temporal goal, aligned and trued the aims of these vectors. If we add an
orientation framework to this one-dimensional flow-space, we could call firmitas
the cardo (north–south); utilitas would correspond to the east-west decumanus.
The former assured obedience to the meridians of nature while the latter directed
the daily benefits as a policeman might direct traffic, with right hand extended.
The exception of Venus and her consort Mars, put into terms of binary boundary
behavior, constitutes an exception to the topography of the city that is best
understood using the logic of the Lucretian model. Inside the even flow of atoms,
turbulence occurs. We can say that exception is “voiced,” but its speech is not
any lingua franca of exchange or conventional symbol but an anomaly in relation
to accepted systems of meaning, a kind of “signalizing.” Thus, turbulence is not
simply a difference in semantic terms but a disturbance, specific to a structured
site, which constructs a new dimensionality to escape the synchronized forward
flow.
Of the three means of defining a building, ichnography and orthography

relate clearly to the legal and instrumental needs of utilitas and firmitas. Venustas,
however, relates provocatively to the casting of shadows (scenography). In
scenography’s precocious reference to cinema, it touches on the functions of the
calendar and clock: the need not just to admire but to construct beauty through
memory (anamnesis, a form of “knowing by halves”) and other qualities bound up
in the root of √MEM: member, re-member, dis-member, moment (in both senses, of
circular motion and temporal instant), memento. The Lucretian clinamen, or swerve,
is the site of exception that, like the temple of Janus, divides its space and time
according to the binary logic of the spectacle, whose stage and auditorium cannot
be dark or light at the same time. One twin of this internally-radically divided place
must sleep for the other to rule.
Architecture + Cinema in the Expanded Field
If architecture can be allowed its “expanded field” in the same way sculpture was
liberated by Rosiland Krauss, cinema would always–already be a part of architecture.
The moving audience would also have its option to remain fixed, viewing a show
in motion thanks to the devices of the collective optic, the projector and screen.
Two thousand years after De rerum natura, cinema repeats, in parallel with this
always-already option, the original Lucretian conception of utilitas and firmitas
locked in a solid reality, vectorized into an even forward flow, interrupted by a
venustas that frames exception—war, miracle, omen, prodigy, monstrum, etc. Here,
collectivized dreamers of the city take their place as a fixed audience: mortified,
seduced, immobilized while their handsome, god-like twin citizens rush past,
visible through openings of holidays, theaters, and spectacles. One need not wait
for Georges Bataille to reconstruct Scipio’s Dream in The Blue of Noon or for Walter
Benjamin to coronate the flâneur in his Passagenwerk.
Origins, Ruins, Festivals, and Critical Anachronism
There are three exceptions to the linear model of time—three occasions where a
site is based on a void and relates to that void: (1) origins, (2) festival interruptions
set in the middle to adjust the gaps in the flow, and (3) ends (ruin). Lucretius’s
flow model accommodates all three within its logic of exception—clinamen. The
evidence of archaeology confirms that such “sites of exception” are traditionally
tuned to the voices of the dead, apophrades, and ruled by dæmon, whose original
guise was invisible Eros, the son of Venus. These three terms are owed to the system
assembled by Harold Bloom in his book The Anxiety of Influence (1973). The three
remaining terms of Bloom’s critical set confirm the main Lucretian-gnostic model:
(1) askesis, the discipline of detachment and preparation, evident in the use of all
ritual sites and miniaturized for Festarchitektur as well as involuntarily imposed
by the accidents of violent destruction; (2) kenosis, openness to the epiphanies of
revelation, prophetic insight, and ecstasy—a “knowing by halves”; and (3) tesseræ,
another reference to the method of knowing, and speaking, by halves, embodied

by the ceramic tokens of friendship broken to produce two edges whose re-joining
authenticates the reunion of friends.11
Bloom’s system forms a bridge between architecture’s two terminal conditions,
origins and ruin. Because the bridge is reproduced in the architecture of festivals,
we can see in their logic of venustas the strict geometry of this relationship. At the
point of origins, building is a minimalist adjustment within the expansive Real
of nature as a totalizing architecture, RT: ‘R’ for the Real that escapes capture by
any symbolic system, ‘ T’ as the trauma-symptom strategically placed and timed
to influence this system (Figure 6.1). At the other end of time, figuratively, is TR,
the trauma of destruction to which buildings destroyed by war or the accidents
of fire, flood, or earthquake are rushed forward out of the Lucretian flow; or where
obsolescence or rust forces them to fall behind the fast pace of functional supply
and demand. As with all ruins, R is the Real inscribed at the heart.
We know from the uncanny experience of either kind of ruin that trauma has
occasioned an unexpected exception that festivals institute with the greatest care
and planning. The festival combines RT/TR. A building exploding and Festarchitektur’s
decorative conversion of buildings to jewels amount to much the same thing. The
combination of unspeakable horror and sublimity compels an involuntary return
to the Imaginary. The Lucretian model is the physics behind Bernard Tschumi’s
description of fireworks as the perfect architecture, and it forces us to reconsider, in
a more reasonable light, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s description of the collapse of the
World Trade Towers as perfect beauty.12 Venustas is indeed the “odd (wo)man out,”
no less enigmatic than The Lady of the troubadours. 6.1 The ruin as
Our time-travel paradigm accommodates Bloom’s six terms within its arc the traumatic end
of architecture,
connecting building, as an interruption of (cosmic) architecture, and ruin, which TR, echoes the
symmetry (and
cosmic gestures)
of architecture’s
emergence
from the Real of
nature revealed
by trauma, RT.
In between,
Festarchitektur
simulates both
beginnings and
ends through an
acceleration of
building toward
a crystalline state.
The “glue” holding
together the
forward flows of
both nature and
then culture, φ, are
“stretched” into
sites of exception.
Graphic by author
opens a view back to this cosmic architecture. Does venustas suggest that love is
the answer? Cinema holds the key to this question, and to the time-travel paradigm
we can annotate the architectural transition from AC to CA, cinema as implicit within
architecture, as revealed by a performative exception akin to RT/TR, a clinamen that
compacts the twinned relationship of architecture and cinema into a narrative of
love. By love, I mean not only to connect venustas to the idea of exception but
also to Bloom’s idea of kenosis: a secret that was secret because it did not even
exist before being discovered; a time-delayed retro-active kind of knowledge that,
it can be demonstrated, is the basis of all shamanistic religious practices.13 The
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan placed this secret inside the reliquary of the objet
petit a, the center of his system of subjectivity, which he refused to define in literal
terms. The closest we get is “object–cause of desire,” defined as the desire caused by
the Other, which we mistake for our own. Beyond these approximations, diagrams
are required to show how a topology of recursion, a “re-entry” of form into itself, is
needed.
Fortunately, thanks mostly to Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič, Mladen Dolar,
Eric Santner, and other critical theorists who have undertaken the project of
discovering Lacan in popular culture examples, we have an extensive landscape to
explore. In the case of film and architecture in the “expanded field,” we quickly find
counterparts to the Lacanian formulas of desire. “The subject barred by the Other
($)” is readily materialized in cinema’s darkened auditorium where the audience
plays dead, prohibited from moving or speaking until the Other has had its say.
The screen is the object of the collective gaze of the audience, but its power comes
from the invisible point at which it gazes back at the audience, a point not grasped
by either Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida in their portrayals of gaze as power. If
anything, the gaze, the –φ (castration, blur, anamorphic defect), marks the limit of
mastery and resists all symbolization. Like the Emperor’s new clothes, it is powerful
in its negativity, the key to its ability to generate fictions/fantasies to make this
over-presence of the Real bearable.
The φ we have used to designate the glue of the Lucretian flow has a more
conventional role in cinema, that of the interval between the frames whose
invisibility (dare we write –φ?) affords the perception of motion. Here we have a
litmus test that, through its left-hand and right-hand versions, shows the relation
that binds architecture and cinema. The φ for architecture is the obverse of the φ
of cinema. In architecture, the φ is dynamic; it is the firmitas that affords utilitas and
the illusion of stasis. The –φ, the exception, the clinamen, creates a wobble that
is formalized into a site with special restrictive safeguards: the rule of venustas or
restraint of Mars, the internal twin-logic evident in the open-closed doors of the
temple of Janus. Venustas comes with its own optics and dimensionalities.
Where φ must be static in cinema to support the illusion of motion, it must
be dynamic in architecture to support the illusion of stasis. Does the exception,
–φ, play equally symmetrical roles in cinema and architecture? We have hints
from Festarchitektur that it does. Festival architecture is, so to speak, a rehearsal
for the “Real Thing,” the trauma of actual ruin, so that we may not be tempted to
prematurely domesticate TR within conventional explanations of weathering,
material limitations, ecology, and the like. The masters of this moment—Andrei
Tarkovsky, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Francis Alÿs, Chris Marker—
construct defenses against this domestication and show us that we have, in the TR
of ruin, both “pure cinema” and “pure architecture.”
I’m making this point through extrapolation and deduction. I need something
more like an “abduction,” the logical procedure outlined by C. S. Peirce whereby
a truth is known in “retrospect,” at a moment where, like the objet petit a, its prior
existence comes about only through its birth in the future anterior tense.14 In
abduction we must set the stage with some precision (askesis), knowing in advance
that the dæmon whose answer we seek will come only by halves (tesseræ), but
that the setting for this meaning (clinamen) will be something we have “known all
along,” a kind of déjà vu, just as architecture has contained cinema, “all along,” as its
performative kernel. Anxiety is the key to abduction, as even the supposedly non-
Lacanian Pierce stressed. It is also the relation of the poet to her stronger precursors
(Bloom). To escape being a weak poet, who can only mimic the precursor’s genius,
the younger poet must accomplish the anachronism of making it seem that the
elder poet had been “channelling” the younger poet all along. This is the Lacanian
always–already of the future anterior; it is the Bloomian point of kenosis. Both
require the topological Möbius-band twist of form re-entering itself.15
In our abductive experiment, we are not allowed to neglect arbitrarily those
elements that, as archeology, history, and the “accidents of culture” have shown,
are permanent cards in the deck of the architectural performative (AC). Neither
are we allowed to neglect the particulars of CA that, in the shaping of the “circular
panorama of the dead” to keep the collective dreamers asleep, obey their own
internal rules. This latter methodological rule compels us to find cinema that
exemplifies a similar level of askesis in its self-disciplined adaptation of rules of
form. In this matter, Andrew Sarris’s emphasis on the auteur who, throughout a
life of artistic endeavor, is consistent, demanding, and self-correcting, points us
to Alfred Hitchcock, who rarely lost his disciplinary hold despite the variations of
producers, directors, writers, and actors in his some fifty-four years of film-making.
Nor, in maintaining the former methodological rule can we arbitrarily neglect
any star in the constellation of AC, the architectural performative. The time-travel
paradigm holds us to the standard of the “site of exception” where, through the
process of double inscription, the Real of the cosmos and the Trauma of ruin
interlace, and where the composite RT/TR of the festival can justify the “experimental
condition” of the performance of the film as well as its own relation to time-travel
termini, the ritual clearing of architectural origins and the ruin of architectural ends.
First, the Tragedy of Interpellation, Then the Farce of Falling in

Love
In “Beyond Interpellation”(1993), the Slovenian philosopher Mladen Dolar argues

that the Althusserian account of ideology is only half the story of subjectivity.16
According to Dolar, the process Althusser identified as interpellation (the subject’s
voluntary submission to authority) is a key instance of Lacanian extimacy. The

subject internalizes what he/she imagines to be the demand of the (external)
Other, even though the Other’s instructions are ambiguous. The classic example is
that of multiple pedestrians who turn around when a policeman yells “Hey, you!”
while they are crossing a street. Each pedestrian feels guilty about an unspecified
crime. Althusser claims that this inscription of exterior authority into the center of
the subject constitutes a “clean cut.” The subject falls under the power of ideology
without realizing it. The ideological “idea” comes up voluntarily, transparently. But,
Dolar demonstrates that there is a small remainder, a remainder that plays a key
role in the succession of a “psychoanalytical subject” following the “ideological
subject.”
To put it in the simplest way, there is a part of the individual that cannot
successfully pass into the subject, an element of “pre-ideological” and
“presubjective” materia prima that comes to haunt subjectivity once it is
constituted as such. Interpellation was based on a happy transition from a
pre-ideological state into ideology: successfully achieved, it wipes out the traces
of its origin and results in a belief in the autonomy and self-transparency of
the subject. The subject is experienced as a causa sui—in itself an inescapable
illusion once the operation is completed. The psychoanalytic point of departure
is the remainder produced by the operation; psychoanalysis does not deny the
cut, it only adds a remainder. The clean cut is always unclean; it cannot produce
the flawless interiority of an autonomous subject. The psychoanalytic subject is
coextensive with that very flaw in the interior.17
I would add to Dolar’s thesis that, after the inter-pel-lation of ideology, comes
a process of mapping (“inter-pol-ation”), and that we can associate this process
with the “falling in love,” the venustas of architecture that constitutes the site of
exception. The unclean cut raises the issue of (dis-)location as well as dis- and re-
membering. Interpolation is the procedure to resolve dislocation through a radical,
subjective form of location. In the mainstream Lucretian synchronous flow, the
Other remains offstage and out of sight. Ideology specifies a tight orchestration
of components, whose inner rhythms are fixed within a dynamic flow “forward”
toward a goal specified as distant and external by the Other. Blindness within the
flow is key. The invisible offstage areas function as reserves. It is from this region
that the “offstage voice,” the voix acousmatique described in its cinematic role by
Michel Chion, is the mode of kenosis and the literal embodiment of apohrades, the
“voice of the dead.”18
Interpolation puts the acousmatic voice of apophrades into a topological
medium. The triangulation required by the order of the flat map becomes a
triangulation where two visible parts are linked by an invisible, silent third, which
serves as a trope or key to meaning, and is the counterpart of Lacan’s objet petit
a. The space by which two points are linked by this “impossible-Real” third is the
twist of the Möbius band, the temporalized (future anterior) and, spatially, the
radically obverse embodied in Lacan’s idea of extimité (Englished as “extimacy”)—a
topological short-circuit connecting periphery to center.19
With extimacy, there are two kinds of virtual spaces and times created for the
imagination. In the virtuality of detachment, an organ or object may be separated
from the causal network that nourishes it literally and semantically, yet it survives.
A shadow separates from its owner yet continues to move and gesture. A reflection
in the mirror gains the upper hand over its source. Folklore and the literature of the
uncanny abound in such themes. Yet, it is no less mysterious than the influence,
in Bloom’s terms, of the strong poet over the weaker successor. The dead “do not
know how to die.” They are in the interval Lacan called “between the two deaths,”
marked in architecture by the famous labyrinth of Theseus, the meander of Hades,
the recursive path of the Freudian death drive. We must be constantly reminded
that the death drive, model of all the drives, is not a desire for death but, rather, the
sum total of resistances the subject can muster against extinction, a momentum
that carries the deceased past the moment of literal death to require a second,
symbolic death.
The second form of virtuality is that of “the virtual of attachment,” which we
have already encountered in the form of interpellation’s moral presence inside the
subject, in an innermost position where it functions as an inside frame, a forever-
alien inversion that puts the subject, even in its own interior, “on the outside looking
in.” This kind of virtuality is common in popular culture as well: the appearance, at
the center of normal human activity, of an opposite, alien essence—something
akin to the spaceship that lands on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in Robert Wise’s
film, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). The “virtuality of attachment” dresses
up Althusserian interpellation in the costumes of all-knowing aliens with ethical
mandates.
The involvement of these two forms of virtuality returns us to the bi-polar
function of the φ/–φ, the “glue” that, in its static mode supports the illusion of
motion, and in its dynamic mode, supports the illusion of stasis. The glue is nothing
less than virtuality—not the virtuality that extends logical causation past the edges
of objects and the finitude of moments but the virtuality that disrupts the causal
chain radically, magically. The virtuality of detachment begins as a clinamen that
swerves in the direction of the already-always of the future anterior. It is the –φ
of the exile, the wanderer, the initiate who must endure trials in the elsewhere
of Hades. The virtuality of attachment works in the reverse direction. Amidst the
stable flow, where the φ sustains the image of solidity, it is the –φ, the anamorphic
stain, the gaze that interpellates the subject.
The bi-polar function of φ/–φ, materialized by the fantasies of the out-of-place
wanderer and the gaze of the “dead who refuses to die,” is brought into sharp focus
by Hitchcock’s film, Rebecca (1940). We begin with ideology. The heroine of the film
is never named in the film. We must designate her by a blank: ___. She is lost in the
labyrinth of Manderley, the family manor house of her new husband, the English
nobleman Maxim de Winter. Rebecca, Maxim’s first wife, is the dead Other who “does
not know she is dead.” Maxim meets a young woman, the young paid companion
of a boring, matronly socialite, at Monte Carlo. He quickly decides to make her the
“new Mrs. de Winter.” She will help him “flee from the Other,” Rebecca, but this first
Mrs. de Winter continues to haunt the second with impossible demands.
Rebecca must wait for her second, symbolic death until Maxim is absolved from
the crime he has imagined he has committed (but has not). In the meantime, this
she-ghost demonizes the mansion of Manderley through her mortal proxy, the
housekeeper Danvers. Because Manderley plays both container and contained in
this transition from ideology to topology, interpellation to interpolation, the ruin
we encounter at the opening of the film is especially informative for the necessary
project. Manderley allows us to realize where the ruin comes from and how it works. It
demonstrates how ideology’s projective extimacy of the subject is architecturally
countered by its antipode, the topological space of falling in love. Finally, Manderley
shows us how love is always, in a critical sense, “love in the ruins.” But, first, a word
about love.
Falling in Love
Following Dolar’s insights, the psychoanalytical subject escaping ideology is

reborn into a “topology of love,” which sometimes is filled out literally by falling
in love.20 Love at first does not escape ideology. Dolar notes that Freud very
quickly understood that falling in love was like joining a group, adopting the
values of the Other—the second Mrs. de Winter tries earnestly to fit into life at
Manderley. Her efforts reveal the extent to which falling in love involves a forced
choice, actual or implied, and how “true love” emerges from the Catch-22 of the
forced choice, replacing it with a fate-based version of events. The logic of the
forced choice involves three successive “loops,” each engaging and negating its
predecessor. In Žižek’s well-publicized example (Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, 2004),
the loaner of a kettle has got it back, but in a damaged condition. The borrower,
who stands for the role of the Big Other in ideology, responds in a series of three
negations: “I never borrowed your kettle”; “I returned it to you in good condition”;
and “It was broken when I got it.” The first step is simple denial (Verneinung); the
second is a renuciation (Verleugnung); the third is a foreclosure (Verwerfung). Each
new negation negates the previous statement. Finally, the borrower “negates
negation,” leaving the kettle-owner no way out. Lacan used the Borromeo knot
(three rings lying on top of each other in such a way that any two are linked by the
third) to illustrate the relations binding the three realms of the psyche, Symbolic,
Imaginary, and Real. With the overlapping rings, there is a “knot without a knot,”
so to speak. The series is both Real and impossible. The Symbolic register involves
the exchange of contradictions and the bind of ideology; the Imaginary tries to
picture it through fantasy, where geometry confronts topology, as in the case of
the Möbius band.
First ideology ties the knot, then love reconfigures the knot as a hinge, two
vectors joined by a swivel joint, connecting the interpellation of forced choice and
fate to the interpolation of free choice. A rope, running through a hole in the middle
of the subject, later becomes the invisible tether pulling the subject up short in an
apparently open field of choices. The hole: despite the accidental circumstances
of encountering one’s beloved (“Their eyes met across a crowded room”), lovers
subsequently construct an alternative star-crossed, fate-enforced causality (the
tether) that says one thing (free choice) but confirms the opposite (fate and its
obstacles).21 Dolar notes that “[T]here has to be an autonomy of choice—indeed
one cannot speak of love if there is no freedom of choice (if the choice is made, for
instance, by parents, as was the common practice until quite recently). Yet upon a
closer, or even a very superficial look at the centuries of effusions about love, it is
obvious that love and the autonomy of the subject rule each other out.”22
Through this semi-symmetrical cancellation, which leaves a small remainder, love
reasserts the bond connecting Aristotelian automaton, (vertical) accident/fate with
a (horizontal) free choice and human affordance embodied by tuchē. Automaton
splits into two seemingly opposed functions: (1) random chance, as encountered in
nature, and (2) a machine that pulls the subject toward a preconceived end (whose
force can only be realized retroactively), while the adjacencies of tuchē constitute
the very condition of freedom that has allowed automaton to act this way. In fact,
it is tuchē that guarantees automaton’s absolute effectiveness as both chance
and necessity.23 In Rebecca, the chance encounter of Maxim and ___ automates a
set of encounters that ratchet ___ down from wife to servant. In the downward
dialectic, each choice is ___’s to make freely, but the evil Danvers has re-engineered
Manderley to create an internal ruin, “anamorphically” Real within the symbolic
appearances of the estate, so that choices that seem to be freely made will always
really be forced choices. This internal, always–already ruin connects to the final,
literal ruin through the three steps endured by ___: first a denial (getting lost, not
fitting in), then a renunciation (the inept new mistress is “not meant to be there”),
finally a foreclosure (the fire).
But, Maxim loves ___, and she him, and love saves the day. The clichéd example
of the crowded room across which lovers’ eyes meet is not just any room; it is the
destined meeting place, a topology structured by retrospective dynamics by which
its accidental quality is revealed later to have been a determinative plan.24 When
Maxim and ___ meet at the Mediterranean cliff-side, fate’s automaton configures
love from that point on. We realize in retrospect that ___ had been making
sketches of the sea-side (note bene: her dead father was a painter). Maxim, standing
on the cliff-side contemplating suicide, had literally and figuratively “stood out” (φ
in its visual-sexual incarnation) from the landscape–as–scenery. He was a stain
on the hypothetical drawing in ___’s sketchbook, an anamorphic blur like those
in Renaissance paintings, which require a special optic glass or mirror—or a hole
through which one may peep—to reveal their true shape
The tuchē of this scene magicks later events with the vertical magnetism
introduced by the anamorphic stain at the top of the cliff. Tuchē, opportunity, is
constructed through the optics and points of view required to find the true shape by
a process of triangulation and interpolation.25 The goal made external by ideology
becomes incorporated into love’s aim, as integral. Characters perceive only lucky
or unlucky coincidences. As Dolar puts it, “Falling in love means submitting to
necessity—there is always a moment when the Real, so to speak, begins to speak,
when its opacity turns into transparency; the subject has only to recognize it after
the fact.”26 This identifies the subject, up to now the pawn of ideology, with an
ominous future moment by the time of which a complex, fatal-istic “death nature”
will have transformed it.
The connective glue keeping normal events synchronized and flowing in
the same direction (φ), is ideally invisible. The falling–behind of obsolescence
or the fast-forwarding to destruction stretches out the vectors of synchronized
forward motion, and the φ is exposed; its glue function is now visible in relation
to the exceptional structure of the site. Motion, scale, and identity are radically
transformed in this situation. In comparison with the clear flow of intentional
communication within the fields set up by convention, the “voice” of the site of
exception is “acousmatic” (α) rather than acoustic. It cannot directly signal; rather,
it must “signalize” (δ). The axis of exception, δ/α, can be seen as an antenna able
to amplify weak signals simply by creating reverberation, a process that occurs in
nature under the name of stochastic resonance.27
The reader is urged to consider that: (1) love, like the psychoanalytical subject,
also accelerates past the synchrony of work, family, and the concerns of the
everyday; (2) as a result, love constructs a paradigmatic site of exception; and (3)
love assigns its cause to a “fate” that operates within a set of opportunities and
free choices made, as exceptions, within the field of affordances (tuchē). Falling in
love, like a building hastened toward premature end, pushes past the synchronized
activities of the everyday. It burns with a crystal beauty even while it is destroyed
from without or within. And, also like ruin’s whispered relationship to architecture’s
first rituals of cosmic consecration, love’s originating idea, α, speaks in whispers, δ,
from the depths of fate’s ancient archives.28
Love and Death
I am proposing a combined general model for acceleration/deceleration in both

architectural ruination and love—a model that names the working parts as they
occur in popular culture but also one that attempts to accommodate, in a rigorous
way, both the group aspects (anthropological origins and cultural functions) as
well as individual, psychoanalytical causes. Architectural ruins and the dynamics
of falling in love have in common a complex relationship to death. Ruins, love, and
death allows the idea of velocity to serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone.
Death provides a common language for both kinds of velocity variations in
the Lucretian model. In the cultural observations of the interval “between the
two deaths,” a first, literal death (a fast-forward out of normal time to fate’s pre-
determined end) is the departure point of the soul imagined to wander (more
slowly than normal time, hence the traditional representation of the meandering
labyrinth) until it reaches a final, symbolic, death. The momentum that carries life
past its biological end is not the exclusivel property of religion. “Between the two
deaths” is the mode of travel for the “psychoanalytical subject” moving beyond the
“ideological subject.” This move explains how the architectural ruin works as a “site
of exception.”
The momentum that carries life past its first, biological death is like the
suspension of cartoon characters who run past cliff-edges but do not fall until
they look down. Rebecca does not know she is dead. Her room, her house, her
proxy Danvers, her psychic hold on Maxim show off Manderley’s function as an
interpellation device—how else should we regard this “magnificent mechanism
of the Other”? And, as in the case of the cartoon characters running past a cliff,
the vertical dimension is the leitmotif. The film opens with Maxim at a cliff edge,
contemplating suicide. Whether the story from this point on is or isn’t Maxim’s
death dream is a moot point. Either way, falling and verticality call the shots. Maxim
and ___ fall in love; ___ falls over herself to fit into Manderley; the facts of Rebecca’s
death fall into place. On the other side of the screen, so to speak, the audience
figuratively falls into a dark theater, as if into sleep, where they are obliged not to
move or speak. The film fantasy carries them, as psychoanalytical subjects, through
their state by “suspending” the question of the Real. If the fantasy is really Maxim’s
death dream or a more normal diagetic story, characters on the screen undergo
this same suspension. Fantasy suspends the Real by displacing, postponing, or
encoding its unbearable over-presence. By marrying an angelic nobody, Maxim
buys time. Like Rebecca, he slowly treads the meandering track toward a second
end, a symbolic end. Indeed, it is the courtroom and its saturation in the Symbolic–
as–Law that provides Rebecca its twisty finish.
How Velocity Structures “Between the Two Deaths”
James Joyce’s parody of Lucretius as “Eve and Adam’s” emphasizes subjectivity’s

need to escape the interpellation of lock-step forward flow, and the relation of this
escape to the site of origin. Modern falling in love is no less problematic than the
terror of the Garden Eden was for its ancient lovers. Then as now, “between the two
deaths” is a matter of velocity. Vitruvius’s utilitas and firmitas create an “odd (wo)man
out” in a way that is truly Edenic. Venustas disrupts the bonds of convenience—
utility, tuchē—afforded by the (illusion of ) stability in the forward flow along the
void of time. Love interrupts what is held together with even speed by accelerating
forward or falling out of synch. In Rebecca, the issue of speed dominates. Rebecca
dies before her time. Maxim’s second marriage is unconventionally hasty, both in
timing (closely following his first wife’s death) and execution (the new couple nearly
forget to take their marriage certificate with them after their short civil ceremony).
The second Mrs. de Winter is too young; she cannot “catch up” with the pace of life
at Manderley, which maintains the efficient lockstep of firmitas and utility that was
the socio-economic function of such estates.
The fact that φ is drawn from the vocabularies of both cinema and psychology
predisposes the sites of exception, where φ is stretched and opened, to be
visually anamorphic. Created by a difference in velocity, they combine blindness
and invisibility under the aegis of truth. Courthouse statues of Justice show her
“blindfolded,” meaning that she is both blind (to the obstacles of ideology) and
invisible (from the optics of interpellation). Justice is the remainder of the Law. Thus,
the audience must await a legal judgment, established by the inquest revisiting
Rebecca’s mysterious death by drowning, to reach the film’s conclusion. The

second, symbolic death enlists ___’s unconditional love to resolve the anamorphy
that had expanded from inside Manderley to create dysfunctions of scale, motility,
and identity dysfunctions within the ideologically intact building.
Manderley, a perfectly synchronized headquarters for a large agricultural
estate, faces the prospect of slow-downs with the arrival of the second Mrs.
de Winter. The new mistress cannot synch up to her domain. This motility
dysfunction is localized by scale and identity dysfunctions. Doorknobs seem too
high, corridors become angular and impassible, Rebecca’s room is off-limits; her
monogrammed stationery still supplies the writing desk. The dimensions of the
house infantilize the second Mrs. de Winter, put her on stage to be examined by
visitors, staff, and relations. She misses cues that would adjust her to the social
interactions of the upper class. The house becomes literally uncanny, unheimlich
(un-homey). Even the library window admits unwanted invaders: Rebecca’s
former lover sneaks in to get a look at her successor. This contraction of hospitality
relates to the ambiguity of the root of the root word, hostes. It is a (g)host— both
“host” and “hostility”. The transition from the ideological subject, which has failed
to interpellate the second Mrs. de Winter, has left behind a “small remainder” that
will become the basis of the second dramatic line in the story, and this second
line establishes the clear bonds linking the model of velocity with the relation
of the death drive and the emergence of the psychoanalytical subject, out of a
6.2 Architecture’s system of interpellation to an architecture measured through interpolation.
synchronization
of its resources
with demands
binds utilitas and
firmitas within
an “ideological”
norm. Clinamen
(in Rebecca,
Maxim’s attempted
suicide), plays out
venustas in terms
of the motility,
scale, and identity
dysfunctions
generated as
subjectivity
attempts to escape
from synchronism.
Fast-slow
phenomena are
reflected in the
steps of the “forced
choices” offered
by fate/tuchē,
culminating in
the destruction of
Manderley by fire.
Graphic by author
Clinamen
Back to the beginning: Rebecca opens with the ghost-like drive toward the ruin of
Manderley. Now, we can understand better how the narrative space has opened
up through a φ that rips through the fabric of reality and how architecture and its
inhabitants speed up and slow down in relation to this φ. We can follow the pattern
of laminar flows, where each difference in velocity creates a turbulence, a Lucretian
clinamen, a swerve or internal difference that results in a material passageway.29
When, in the opening scene of the film, the narrator floats through the iron gate,
we have a literal depiction of the φ as a magic opening on to the ruin of Manderley
vivified by shifting moonlight.
The ghost-like movement of the camera down the estate driveway condenses
the between–the–two–deaths theme. The forward motion actually travels to the
past, and the ruin becomes a set for re-imagining the story: “This is how it ended,
let me tell you how it started.”30 Once the motion is re-geared, the φ is optically
diversified; its anamorphic potential expands to cover, through contrasts in the
relative velocities of components in the story, the visual as well as dramatic aspects
of the mystery. Summed up, the coupling of time-shifts with optical protocols allows
Rebecca to become the perfect cinematic atlas of sites of exception, an atlas that
nonetheless shows how such sites are made from a standard architectural palette.
This short sample is built on a Lacanian frame, but its parts belong to ancient
poetic tradition.31 The modern subject’s debt to psychoanalysis is, in turn, a debt
to the literature that has always, thanks to the ubiquity of the uncanny, preserved
itself through an architecture of inner contradiction. Here are the specifics of that
architecture.
1. The Inside Frame. When Maxim takes ___ home with him on his return to
Manderley, a humiliating rainstorm drenches her completely before Maxim
can get the top of his convertible up. The staff lines up to greet her as she
and Maxim stand on a dais. The implication of being on stage are clear:
___ is an ingénue, not ready for the kind of performances that Rebecca, the
seasoned actress, had established as her signature role.
2. The Treasury of Signifiers. Upstairs, a long corridor leads to Rebeccca’s
bedroom on the favored west wing of the house. Rebecca’s pet cocker
spaniel continues to guard it, but ___ gathers up her courage to investigate
its mysterious interior. The camera frames the doorway, with its two knobs
and key-hole. ___ enters an antechamber, her shadow cast directly onto
the portrait of Rebecca, superimposing the all-too-alive woman’s image
with a not-yet-alive woman’s silhouette. ___ opens a window and looks
out but we do not see the view of the ocean she can see. Danvers arrives,
to set ___ straight on the room’s magical functions. Its several chambers
are for Rebecca’s many riches, showered on her by her loving husband.
Her underwear is made especially for her by the nuns of the Convent of
St. Claire, whose nick-name, the “Poor Claires,” contrasts woefully with
the riches Rebecca had enjoyed. ___’s tour confirms that this is indeed a
Lacanian “treasury of signifiers”: the place where the enigmatic order of
meanings is set up purposefully to contract meaning behind multiple veils

of mystery, to conserve their effectiveness despite an intended obscurity.
3. Apophrades (Return of the Dead). Like Castor and Pollux, the twins separated
as a part of a deal that allows each brother a period of life followed by a
spell in Hades, Rebecca, who “does not yet know she is dead,” and her
antipodal ___, who lives under a spell cast by this non-death, rotate in a
circular dance, held apart by an uncanny diameter that keeps them on
opposite sides of a circumferential track. In fact, Hades’ reputation for booty
is precisely what we encounter in Rebecca’s bedroom. We are reminded of
the mythological connection between infinite wealth, wandering souls,
and impossible puzzles/tasks: the katabasis, or descent motif. What is a
palace below ground is a ruin for those who cannot find their way. The
treasury is within reach but radically forbidden. It is the essence of enigma
and for this reason Lacan placed the master signifier, S1, locked within the
treasury whose dimensionality protects riches through the anamorphosis
(ω) that combines palace and ruin, ghost and host. We have seen how
the φ of the bedroom works in Rebecca. Though ___ has believed it to be
locked, it has always-already been unlocked. Yet, when she is inside the
forbidden chamber, it remains forbidden, unknowable. It is a species of the
space of the Lady of the troubadours, a space where impossible demands
require in ingenious art. If we were required to provide a shorthand for
this architectural sequence, it would be φ>ω>φ, “the opening opens up
to itself,” or “the room contains itself. It is both container and contained”—
one of the several meanings of Lacan’s symbol for the relationships of
indeterminable scale and pied motion, the poinçon, ◊, also written < >, both
less than and greater than. The poinçon defines the relation of the subject
to the permanently inaccessible object petit a, the “object-cause of desire”
designating the function of fantasy (by which the subject is able to avoid,
disguise, or encounter the Real). It works in Rebecca to demonstrate the
radical architectural recursion of the φ function: both inside and outside,
periphery and center, high and low, heaven and hell.
4. Prosopopoiea—Ventriloquism, Prophetic Voice. Because the clinamen’s
differences in velocity open up the normally invisible φ’s, the openings are
simultaneously the entry-way and the sought-after goal that provoked the
entering.32 The treasury’s Möbius-band logic forces us to be in two places at
once, two times at once. We can neither have the cake nor eat it, we can only
imagine that we should be able to do one or the other. This is the forced
choice condition of ideology, but its interpellation is not perfect. There is
a small remainder. Between the not-entirely-dead Rebecca and the not-
entirely-alive ___, the mansion and the labyrinth–ruin, there is the rotating
diameter, the anamorphic dimension, ω. The lack–of–being that sucks out
the center of Manderley for ___, the manque d’être, echoes through the
seemingly intact mansion. It is the ruin–inside–the–mansion, the remainder
that cannot speak/signify, but only signalize. Such is the idea of haunting. In
French, the dummy, the device of ventriloquism, is le mort, the dead man.
When the dummy really starts to speak the truth through the half-speech
(Lacan: mi-dire) of this echo from beneath, “he” becomes not only a “she” but
a “She”—the Lady whose impossible/Real commands inflect the space and
time of the other signifiers beneath Her rule, making them say one thing
but require another.
5. Askesis—Discipline, Abjection, Spiritual Trial. Like Psyche in the classic tale
of Apuleus, a nobody comes into possession of love. This possession is
predicated on blindness, the transgression of this rule leads to an interval
“between two deaths,” where the transgressor must undergo a series of
trials. The nobody is tyrannized by a She (Venus, in Rebecca’s story, venustas
in ours) who she (small ‘s’) will become, and if we pay attention to the
gender of this transformation, and the relation of gender to wisdom, we
may find in ___’s accession to the role of The Lady an architectural necessity,
wherein architecture alone can explain just how it is that space itself must
slow down, ruinify, velocify, “between shift and shift ere the death he has
lived through and the life he is to die into” (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake).
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London, New York: Oxford
Chion, Michel, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
Dolar, Mladen, “Beyond Interpellation,” Qui Parle 6, 2 (Spring/Summer, 1993): 75–96.
Hitchcock, Aflred, Rebecca (Film: United Artists, 1940).
Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Extimacy,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure,
and Society, Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Corthell, and Françoise
Massardier-Kenney (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), 74–87.
Oechslin, Werner and Anja Buschow, Festarchitektur, der Architekt als Inszenierungskünstler
(Stuttgart: G. Hatje, 1984).
Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics
Santner, Eric L., On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001).
Spencer-Brown, George, Laws of Form (New York: Dutton, 1979).
Vico, Giambattista, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and
Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948).
Žižek, Slavoj, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London and New
York: Routledge, 2001).
———, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New
York: Verso, 1991).
———, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London and New
York: Verso, 2012).
———, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002).
Notes
1 This account is decidedly Vichian in its depiction of the first ritual centers as a
minimalist “building” within a generally extensive cosmic “architecture.” Vico,
Giambattista, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and
Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY, 1948). Apart from the circular temenos, the performative
dimension of such clearings resists geometric formalization. The best analogy may
be that of an imagined sphere with multiple internal perceptual frames constructed,
deployed, and continually re-positioned by the movements, gestures, costumes,
and music, directed by the acting and spectating of participants. There can be no
useful notions of object symbolism or narrative meaning without reference to this
multi-media “sound and light show.” Robert Ferris Thompson, for example, has
demonstrated that African masks are not intelligible outside the system of movements
of the dances in which they served as visual framing devices. See Flash of the Spirit:
African & African-American Art & Philosophy (New York, 1984). The idea of “atoms” of
performative “moments” (= positions, turns, tropes, scenarios) circulating within this
“spherical” clearing—including the major aula or eye framing the sky—maintains the
functionality of frames even though the locations of frames continually move, along
with the imagined point–of–view of the audience, independent of any participant’s
literal location.
2 Apophrades involves complex issues. The term indicates the legal days set aside for the
trials of homicides in Athens and the “bad luck days” when all temples were closed; in
Harold Bloom’s system of six “revisionary ratios” apophrades is generalized to mean
any return or speech of the dead. See Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, UK,
2003), 147; also, Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: Memory and Forgetting in Ancient
Athens (New York, 2002), 171–190. The fact that the unlucky days of apophrades were
used to try murder cases points the modern apophradesiac to the crime novel and
police procedural to learn more about this relation of perception to witness and death.
3 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring, 1979): 30–44. The
necessity for the expanded field is related to the critical project undertaken by Harold
Bloom in his early book, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London and New
York, 1973). Bloom’s ephebe, the new poet, must somehow convert the ventriloquism
that haunts his own work into the irrational discovery, in his revered predecessor into
his own voice. The precursor has been speaking with “[the ephebe’s] own voice all the
time.”
4 Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London
and New York, 1991), 198.
5 The logic of recursion follows the model of Louis Althusser’s concept of “interpellation.”
Where Althusser has demonstrated this topological conversion of exterior to interior
for ideology, I hope to give it a broader role, within the terms of, among others,
virtuality, falling in love (following Mladen Dolar’s analysis), and the possibility of a
new critical language based on temporality.
6 Vico, New Science, §391, §479, §733. Vico also saw the sky as a screen, not distant as
one might suppose, but near enough to touch the peaks of known high mountains.
Such tangencies were compared to their antipode, Hades (literally, “the invisible”),
which Vico claimed was no deeper than the bottom of the furrow plowed by Romulus,
the abode of the dead, whose voices could be called up by pouring into them the
blood of sacrifice.
7 A key to the relation of the first clearings to the secularized city may be found in the
need, written into law, to renew the function of the city boundary or wall. A space for
this was reserved, the pomerium (Varro, De linguis latia, 5, 143). The medievalist Alan
Knight relates the story from Medieval Lille, about a long waxed cord wound about a
spool, equal to the circumference of the city walls. The chord was gradually unwound
to a device that burned it as a candle to calibrate the duration of the annual civic
renewal ceremony. Alan E. Knight, personal communication, Spring, 1996.
8 Lucretius’s reversal of the commonplace view anticipates the fantasy of Jorge Luis
Borges, in his short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew
Hurley (New York, 1999), 68–81. A conspiracy of scholars compile a secret, alternative
encyclopedia about a fictional world where actions rather than objects are the ground
of being.
9 Richard Onians has documented the ancient belief that bones constituted the divine
core of the mortal human body, and that after the corrupting flesh had been removed
by burial, entombment, cremation, or animal consumption, the deceased joined
the ranks of the manes, the ancestral gods located by the hearth. See The Origins
of European Thought, about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate
(Cambridge, UK, 1951), 254–270.
10 The close relation of Venus and the boundary is revealed by the country cousin of
Venus, the huntress Diana, and her consort, Dianus, pronounced “Janus.” The boundary
has always been tied to the feminine-as-exception, a point made by Jenny Lemoine,
“A Reading of the Formulae of Sexuation: The Woman Does Not Exist,” trans. John
Conolly, Marc Du Ry and Lindsay Watson, Seminar given at Heraklion, February 17,
1993, accessed July 20, 2012, http://www.jcfar.org. See also Lemoine’s main source,
Nicole Loraux, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division
between the Sexes (Princeton, 1993). The complex relation of women to society
was tied up with the service of the wife and daughters of a family in maintaining
the hearth fire. See Donald Kunze, “The Missing Guest: The Twisted Topology of
Hospitality,” accessed August 17, 2012, http://www.art3idea.psu.edu/locus/missing_
guest.pdf. Originally published in Eating Architecture, ed. Paulette Singley and Jamie
Horwitz (Cambridge, 2004), 169–190.
11 The tessera embodies the logic of the password that includes a method of ciphering
used by, among others, Raymond Roussel and Edgar Allan Poe to divide texts and
create internal “anamorphic” meanings. See Donald Kunze, “Who’s on First?” in The
Humanities in Architecture, ed. Nicholas Temple, Renée Tobe, Jane Lomholt, Soumyen
Bandyopadhyay (London and New York, 2010). Jacques Lacan used this same logic in
his use and conceptualization of mi-dire, the half-speech used by kings, paranoiacs,
and the unconscious. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, On Feminine Sexuality, the
Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York, 1998).
12 It is this element of return and repetition that led Slavoj Žižek to rescue Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s remark about the collapse of the World Trade Towers as a “perfect work
of art.” Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York, 2002),
11. The fascination of ruins is a cousin of the compulsive viewing of the collapse of
the World Trade Towers. Festivals related to sites of exception intensify around the
phenomenon of apophrades, the fearsome return of the dead on specified days. This
term is attached also to the idea that the dead wish to speak to the living, and that this
voice is the basis for divination and prayer. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence:
A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1997), 139–155.
13 Alberto Pérez-Gómez has already emphasized the relation of love to knowledge in his
book, Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA,
2006). While Pérez-Gómez’s historical-philosophical account of eros, drawn from the
Socratic tradition by which it is the vehicle of philosophical wisdom, coincides with
many points of Dolar’s psychoanalytical account, Pérez-Gómez leaves room for others
to take up the relationship between demon and eros emphasized by Paul Friedländer,
Plato, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York, 1958–1969). Friedländer, without help from
Freud or Lacan, develops the uncanny idea of that which appears in the middle, which
has come from an enigmatic-complex divine exterior.
14 Lacan’s concept of the future anterior corresponds to kenosis, the kind of knowledge
Bloom argued for in his Anxiety of Influence; not coincidentally, this is revealed by
the apophrades of the prophet and the “voice of the dead” sought by those who visit
Hades.
15 Slavoj Žižek notes that this chronological time-travel illogic is also key to Hegel’s
development of dialectic, from a logical “method” used to seek Absolute Knowledge
into the Absolute Knowledge itself. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of
Dialectical Materialism (London and New York, 2012).
16 Mladen Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” Qui Parle 6, 2 (Spring/Summer, 1993): 75–96.
17 Mladen Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” 77. Note that the ideological ideal is the
subject–expected–to–be–happy, a much-discussed issue in the recent press. See
Deirdre N. McCloskey “Happyism,” The New Republic (June 28, 2012): 16–23.
18 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York, 1999).
19 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimacy,” The Symptom 9 (Fall, 2008), accessed January 20, 2011,
http://www.lacan.com/symptom.
20 One is compelled to admire Hitchcock’s use of vertical dimension to join the losses
and gains of love. In Vertigo, for example, falling marks the detective’s escape from
the ideology of crime enforcement into the psychoanalytical relationship with the
haunted heiress. Later, falling will become the signature of her death, the trick of
substituting an actress for the heiress, and the discovery of the elaborate scheme.
21 Dolar allows us to specify this moment of ideology as a turn, a twist—a case of
extimacy that moves from the vertical fall to a horizontal field. Just as the subject is
interpellated by a “vertical” fate, in the case of falling in love, he/she must struggle
against this interpellation through a process I qualify as a horizontal mapping,
interpolation. See a further comparison of love’s double nature to horizontal and
vertical vectors in Roger Duncan, “Plato’s Symposium: The Cloven Eros,” Southern
Journal of Philosophy 15, 3 (Fall, 1977): 277–291. Demon is the agency connecting
the subject’s central void to a distant divine identifier, vertically (ideologically)
interpellating it. Interpolation in Plato’s terms is also the more general use of the
dialectic of argument, where all of the evident explanations offered by the participants
of the dialogs are dissolved in a dénouement. Both interpellation and interpolation
figure as primary constituents in the German writer Franz Rosenzweig’s notion of
a “site of exception,” a true locus solus in Aldo Rossi’s civic and Raymond Roussel’s
esthetic sense. See Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago,
2001); Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, MA, 1982); Raymond Roussel,
Locus Solus, trans. Rupert Copeland Cuningham (Berkeley, CA, 1970).
22 Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” 83.
23 For a near 1:1 translation of these themes, consider Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times
(1936), the story of a factory worker fully interpellated by the ideology of industrial
efficiency, who escapes via a chance encounter with a charming gamine.
24 The ingénue happens to catch Maxim just as he appears to be about to jump off a
cliff—another Hitchcock employment of the vertical as the dimension of both love
and death. Her intervention takes place at a right angle to the drop. Its logic is just
as orthogonal (the right angle signals independence, i.e. freedom) in its ability to
work as a hinge allowing movement out of and back in to normative space–time.
An illustration of this topography can be found in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The
Shining (DVD: Warner Home Video, 2007). The chef Dick Halloran guides the Torrance
family through the resort hotel they will be caretaking over the winter. In the middle
of his tour of the kitchen, he magically “turns” 90º to project a telepathic message,
unperceived by the others, to the young son, Danny, offering him ice cream. Telepathic
ability, or “shining,” is one of the writer Stephen King’s many devices indicating the use
of a secret dimensionality of space-time to effect travel, communications, and rescue/
healing operations.
25 It would be useful to compare this interaction of vectors with Edgar Allan Poe’s
detailed account of “the Turk,” a nineteenth-century scam involving a dwarf hidden in
a lower compartment of a display mechanizing the supposed chess-playing genius
of a dummy dressed as an oriental magus. Poe does not take the easy way out of
this by simply affirming the general belief that the machine is a hoax, but goes into
the issues of visibility and their relation to a quite original model of genius. See W.
K. Wimsatt, Jr., “Poe and the Chess Automaton,” American Literature 11, 2 (May 1939):
138–151. Wimsatt misses Poe’s main point, which derives from Poe’s own employment
of the game of Morra, where one wins by deciding whether one’s opponent is stupid
or clever. Poe had used his skill with ciphers to develop this as a method of chiasmus
within many of his works. See: Richard Kopley, “Formal Considerations of the Dupin
Mysteries,” Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries (New York, 2008), 7–26.
26 Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” 83.
27 The phenomenon of stochastic resonance allows faint signals to be amplified by the
white noise of the closed system in which they occur. Without the noise, the signal is
unperceivable. For a technical description, see R. Benzi, A. Sutera and A. Vulpiani, “The
Mechanism of Stochastic Resonance,” Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General
14, 11 (November 1981): L453.
28 Again, Hitchcock has an example. In Vertigo, the heiress Madeleine takes her detective-
chaperon Scottie to Muir Woods, where she points to a ring deep inside a tree cut for
display, claiming direct ancestry to ancient times. The connection of the ruined state
created at the “end of time” is the occasion for restoring relations with the “beginnings
of time.” Vertigo (DVD: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2008).
29 Lucretius, 2, 216–224: “When atoms move straight down through the void by their own
weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places,
just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not
in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the
void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced
among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything.”
30 Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca (DVD: Criterion Collection, 2001).
31 In particular, askesis, apophrades, and clinamen may be already known to the reader
thanks to Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London, Oxford,
New York, 1973).
32 In James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, we find: “riverrun, past Eve and Adams [‘even atoms’],
from swerve [‘clinamen’] of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of
recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs.” Vico is HCE (“Here Comes Everybody,”
“Howth Castle and Environs,” “Humphrey Chimpdon Earwicker”), the force behind
the idea that the φ is subject to opening up, just as Lacan’s aim opens up a goal, that
becomes a rim through which the aim is looped.
7
Progress: Re-Building the Ruins of Architecture
Gevork Hartoonian
Past Perfect
In a letter dated February 1929, Walter Benjamin acknowledged the receipt of

Sigfried Giedion’s book, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete
(1928), praising the historian’s intellectual capacity for “uncovering the tradition
by observing the present.”1 For Benjamin, the business of criticism was a kind of
“excavation” in the sense of “mining—taking something out of the earth—but in
this case, more accurately, also ‘bringing to light’….”2 The word “uncovering” endows
Giedion with the skills of an archaeologist, a person adept at recovering what is
beneath the dirt, or at recovering times past, as is the case with the historian’s
attempt to unpack the historicity of architecture.3 According to Benjamin, “vision”
is central to the historian’s search for that which should be rescued. But what is this
vision? Is it the historian’s intellect, the breadth of knowledge and information he/
she has accumulated through observation and collection of facts and figures? Or
is it a worldview, “the philosophy of history,” a subject Benjamin took on himself
almost a decade after writing to Giedion.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to present a comprehensive reading of
Walter Benjamin’s text entitled “On the Philosophy of History.”4 However, revisiting
his seminal essay, I will attempt to map the architectonic implications of the idea
of ruin and ruination in late capitalism. Central to my discussion is the notion of
time. The temporality implied in history demands distinguishing the ruins of the
past from the wreckage left by the storm of progress. Whereas the aestheticization
of ruins of the past is part of humanity’s awareness of the concept of history,
buildings in late capitalism immediately fall into the ruins of forgetfulness. This
chapter argues that the image-oriented spectacle permeating contemporary
everyday-life does two dialectically related things. Firstly, it turns architecture
into a parergon supplementing the wreckage of capitalism. Secondly, having lost
much of its symbolic and functional purpose, contemporary architecture cuts its
umbilical cord with the Humanist totalization of themes such as monument, ruin,
and ornament.
Written in the late 1930s, Benjamin’s text is a montage of fragments, each

addressing issues central to his concept of history. It unpacks strategies that are
central to a materialist approach to historiography; relevant to my argument here
are concepts such as image, progress, and time. While these concepts are reiterated
throughout Benjamin’s text, their iconological connotation can be pursued in
fragment nine. The fragment starts with Gerhard Scholem’s poem entitled Greetings
from the Angelus, which was composed for Benjamin’s twenty-ninth birthday. The
poem was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting named Angelus Novus, a version of which
Scholem had hanging in his Munich apartment. It reads:
My wing is ready for flight,

I would like to turn back.
If I stayed everliving time,
I’d still have little luck.5
This is how Benjamin pictured the angel of history: eyes wide open and wings
spread, his face turned to the past where “we perceive a chain of events,” [my italic]
and the angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage.” Benjamin
continued: “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what
has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise.” The storm propels the
angel forward into the future, to which his back is turned. For Benjamin, “this storm
is what we call progress.”6 Benjamin’s reading of the Angelus Novus suggests that
once the storm of progress is associated with the myth of “paradise,” the task of the
historian is to de-construct the “chain of events” and to uncover the catastrophe.
It is important here to make a distinction between natural catastrophe, flood
and earthquake, and historical catastrophe. The temporality implied in history
demands distinguishing the ruins of the past from the wreckage left by the storm
of progress. The ruin is not just the effects of time, and the decay of material. There is
nothing new in saying that material decays. Paradoxically, “while the ruin confronts
us with our own mortality, it also presents the possibility of an existence beyond
our own life.”7 However, in Modernity, things become outmoded even before their
material disintegrates. Thus ruins are also a result of transitoriness, including its
ever-changing aesthetics.8 In Modernity, time is experienced in the absence of a
unity that would set the sub-text for the durability and meaningfulness assigned,
or expected, from every action, including the production of architecture. In the first
decades of the twentieth century, for example, architecture could still play a crucial
role in public housing and gathering communities that were associated with
the various institutions of modernity. By contrast, the good intentions of today’s
architects cannot escape the forces of commodification of values and techniques
that turn every edifice into a spectacular ornament. In late capitalism, one’s relation
to the past is subject to the temporality delivered by the storm of progress (logic of
capitalism) as it moves from one catastrophe to another.
These observations involve two sets of assumptions. Firstly, progress is registered
in an understanding of time that transforms one’s experience of natural time.
Progress progresses, but its flow does not suggest that history unfolds according
to a pre-planned linear path. Secondly, the juxtaposition of the natural and the
Progress: Re-Building the Ruins of Architecture 123
ruins of modernity—the piled wreckage of the past—is essential for a cognitive

mapping of the landscape of modernity where everything is short-lived and has to
be handed to history. Harry Harootunian writes: “All production immediately falls
into ruin, thereafter to be set in stone without revealing what it had once signified,
since the inscriptions are illegible or written in the dead language.” He concludes:
“Beneath the historical present, however, lie the specters, the phantoms, waiting
to reappear and upset it.”9 What does this statement, which draws from Benjamin’s
vision of history, mean for architecture today?
This question demands two considerations: firstly, to differentiate history from
historiography; and, secondly, to discuss the specificity of architecture’s relation
to history from the temporality that informs the present cycles of production and
consumption. The difference between history and historiography is obvious, but
needs to be reiterated here, mainly because of Benjamin’s unique intellectual
cause. Otto Karl Werckmeister’s essay “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the
Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian” provides a detailed account
of Benjamin’s various re-writings of what would finally be formulated as the angel
of history. As the phrase “the transfiguration of the revolutionary into the historian”
implies, Werckmeister’s essay also prefigured the tale of Benjamin’s intellectual life,
which was closely connected to the broader praxis of the Left of the 1930s.
In the four available versions of Benjamin’s text, there is a considerable
shift in attitude. The different versions reveal, among other things, Benjamin’s
disappointment with the fate of “revolution” during the 1930s. They also speak for
a process of distillation of the angel, as it is emptied of all religious connotations
except one: like a superman, the angel represents a gifted revolutionary figure
who reads more into the rubble of progress than anybody else. Dismissing the
idea of progress as the ultimate engine of political revolution, Benjamin turned
the revolutionary and constructive aspects of Karl Marx’s understanding of history
into a strategic historiography. He wrote that historicism prevails by “establishing a
casual connection between various moments in history,” perpetuating “the eternal
image of the past.” Materialistic historiography, instead, “is based on a constructive
principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.”10
What is involved in arresting this flow?
If historicism perpetuates the flow of time, then one way to halt this continuum
would be to arrest time. Walter Benjamin wrote: “The true picture of the past flits by.
The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can
be recognized and is never seen again.”11 He continued that when, as Shakespeare
said through Hamlet, “the time is out of joint,” then the present is saturated with the
rubbles of the past. In a standstill situation, the present merges with the past, and yet
the distinction between the old and the new does not disappear. The redemptive
power of the past rather shines out of the surface of the new. It is the task of the
historian to capture the image printed on the surface of historical events. This task
of the historian, I would suggest, was dismissed during the formative years of the
Enlightenment. Under the yoke of the literary debate between the ancients and
the moderns, the past was judged according to the prospects already laid out by
science. This positivistic understanding of time should be balanced with insights

that are inspired by the objective and subjective conditions of the given time.
Consider Claude Perrault’s critical reading of classical architecture, most of which
was already ruined at the time when he wrote his essay. The fragmentation and the
perceptual lightness permeating classical ruins inspired the French architect to give
certain credibility to the perceptual lightness attributed to the Gothic cathedrals.
Speaking strategically, his position dialectically conjugated the modernist image
of a trabeated structure with an enriched classical architecture all worked out
through a “better understanding of the formal and structural techniques of Gothic
buildings.”12 Furthermore, Perrault’s distinction between “positive” and “arbitrary”
beauties undermined the authority and wisdom of Classicism. The Humanist
aspiration for the “past-perfect,” nevertheless, recovered its ethos in two opposing
trends. On the one hand, we have David Le Roy’s collected drawings of the Parthenon
published under the telling title of Les Ruins de plans beaux monuments de la Grèce
(1758), where the ruinization of monuments set the stage for much of the Kantian
aesthetics of sublime and picturesque. Le Roy’s analysis of ruins conflated historical
observations with theory. He saw time, for example, “as part of a progress towards
perfection.”13 Ruins thus were approached as a measure of understanding the
grandeur, order, and the aesthetics attributed to Greek architecture. Nevertheless,
it is striking to note that, even though “ruins were immensely popular at the end
of the eighteenth century,” Kant never discussed “the aesthetic experience of ruins
in his Critique of Judgment, especially since ruins would seem obvious catalysts” for
his idea of sublime.14 On the other hand, we have Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s
historicization of Greek art as the expression of Greek culture in its totality. It was
left to Piranesi to make a bricolage of Le Roy’s vision of ruin with Winckelmann’s
tendency for totalization. Piranesi unleashed a project that would be picked up
by artists and architects whenever capitalism had to depart and leave the existing
wreckage behind. These observations are of interest to us not only in reference
to Diderot’s division of “human” knowledge into three areas, of “reason,” “memory,”
and “imagination,” but also in consideration of the problematic dialogue capitalism
would establish with ideas such as monument and ornament, both seminal themes
for the formation of the nineteenth century architectural discourse.
Whatever Happened to Monument?
To discuss the state of memorability and monument in late capitalism, we should

exert further pressure on Piranesi’s depiction of Rome. In Piranesi’s Il Campo
Marzio we see an image of Rome that did not exist. The drawing neither shows the
ruins of Rome, as if revealing the process of natural decay of material; nor does it
reconstruct the monuments in their original state, as if they had stood outside of
historical time and immune to ruination. Piranesi depicted an image, the fragments
of which allude to Rome. At the dawn of the Enlightenment, when history was
conceived in its linear progression and the most advanced form of historiography
was confined to the historian’s attempt to demonstrate the historical monuments
and events in their original state, Piranesi’s Il Campo Marzio should be interpreted
as an approximation to a Benjamin’s characterization of ruin. Having suspended
the linear view of history, and in making a distinction between history as such and
the history of the work of art, Benjamin “established the status of the work of art
as that of a remnant, relic, or ruin left in the wake of the demise of transcendent
meaning.”15 His was an arrow to the heart of the classical and neoclassical intention
to reconstruct a harmonious past. Thus emerged both a concept of history and
a historiography (reconstruction) that, following Benjamin’s notion of dialectical
image, is based on the montage of fragments. To recall Manfredo Tafuri, Piranesi
deconstructed the Humanist discourse on concinnitas and finitio.16 Piranesi’s
drawings illustrated nothing but “a systematic criticism of the concept of place,”
inaugurating a project of silence, aspects of which would be picked up by the
historical avant-garde, and by postmodernists.17 On the one hand, we have a body
of work that registers fragments without opening a space into their aura (Peter
Eisenman of the Five Architects). On the other hand, we have fragments of the
past put together harmoniously under the narcotic ether of phenomenology
(Louis I. Kahn). No wonder that monumentality should emerge in the 1950s as an
ideological paradigm to remap territories and camouflage the wreckage left by
the war although these newly plotted territories, too, would soon be destroyed in
different historical circumstances.
Much of the contemporary use and abuse of concepts such as fragment and ruin
relates to a vision of history that dismisses Benjamin’s discourse on aura and the
impact of the nihilism of technology on aesthetics. To demonstrate the invisibility
of monument and monumentality in contemporary architectural praxis, it is useful
to recall Alois Riegl’s “age value,” and how his position on the subject differs from
Benjamin’s aura, meaning, the past of the past. My intention in the rest of this
chapter is to demonstrate that in the age of digital reproduction, the tempo of
transitoriness, originally inaugurated by the process of mechanical reproduction,
is accelerated to a point where it is almost impossible to have a hold of the past. In
the present experience of time, the past seemingly has become an entity without
qualities, to recall Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities (1930).
Originally published in 1903, Riegl’s essay entitled “The Modern Cult of
Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development,” discusses various values attributed
to monuments. His discourse is centered on the difference between “age value”
and “historical value” of monuments. He writes that age value “is revealed in
imperfection, a lack of completeness, a tendency to dissolve shape and color,
characteristics that are in complete contrast with those of modern, i.e., newly
created works.”18 This disintegration and decay of objects is an expected effect of
nature; by contrast, according to Riegl historical value resides, not in the monument
itself, but its re-presentation in written or visual forms. Historical value “seeks to
preserve the past for the present, to mark and arrest time, so that the past will stand
before the beholder’s gaze as it really was.” Age value, Karen Lang adds, “comes to
the fore when time separates itself from history.”19 This alleged distinction between
the two values also alludes to differences between the way time operates in nature
and in history.
If decay is characteristic of how humanity experiences “life” in nature, the

reconstruction and repair of damage caused by natural forces is what makes
humanity capable of both surviving and of writing a historical account of that
survival. It is the task of the historian, Riegl wrote, “to use all means available to
correct the damage wrought by nature’s power throughout the course of time.”
If we do not take his words literally, as saying that the historian should remove all
symptoms of decay caused by nature, then what we have here is a concept of history
that is based on the fabrication of fragments of events, the final result of which
should disclose a comprehensive image of the past. Theodor Adorno wrote: “the
fragment is that part of the totality of the work which defies the totality.”20 Again,
Piranesi comes to mind, although this time through Kurt Forster’s pen. According
to Forster, Piranesi “began to ‘narrate’ the conflict in his images which tend to fall
into sharply distinct groups: huge ruins as they appeared in his day, and technical
representations and speculative reconstruction of ancient buildings.”21 Of further
interest is the aesthetic aspect of Riegl’s discourse. While he wrote that a heap of
stones has no value, Riegl stopped short of saying what does make the wreckage of
a building worth the name monument. Instead, we are told that the aesthetic value
of monuments is not something eternal, but “only a relative, modern one.” He then
concludes that, “the artistic value of a monument is no longer commemorative,
but a contemporary value instead.” This is the closest Riegl comes to Benjamin’s
concept of history.
The Austrian art historian also failed to notice that in the age of mechanical
reproduction (to limit my criticism to the time when a distinction between modernity
and capitalism was not yet popular), not only was it impossible to hold on to the
authenticity of experience, it was also impossible to slow down the processes of
constant perceptual transformation instigated by modern techniques, and the loss
of aura. Riegl’s essay is, however, important because it reflects on the historicity of
the nineteenth century, when there was a competition between the short-lived
industrially produced goods and the cult of historically produced monuments.
Since then, and in consideration of the failed political project of Modernity, the
idea of monument is associated with an edifice that has neither age nor historical
value. The primary purpose of monument is narrowed to evoking the memory
of an event—more often than not a catastrophic one, as capitalism moves from
one historical crisis to another. Thus, what we witness in Ruskin’s romanticization
of monument and memory, and its re-enactment in Robert Venturi’s theorization
of postmodern architecture as decorated shed, is the emergence of two things.22
On the one hand, we have the tendency to reduce the meaning of architecture
to image making and surface articulation if only to solidify what might be called
“monumentalization of kitsch.” Discussing Philip Johnson’s 1966 proposed
monument for Ellis Island, Julian Rose writes, in travesty of Riegl’s age-value,
“Johnson proposed to create what he described as ‘instant’ or ‘stabilized’ ruins” by
removing all architectonic elements. In doing so, Rose continues, Johnson’s own
design was “a travesty of both the idea of monumental scale and the neoclassical
style associated with traditional monuments.”23 On the other, we have the use of
simulated forms as a substitute for the idea of monumentality advocated by Louis
I. Kahn and Sigfried Giedion. It is this second point that I will take now; I will present
a critique of the spectacle permeating digitally reproduced architecture in the next
section of this essay.
Kahn was perhaps the foremost architect of the last century who wrote,
taught, and built projects designed to reiterate the bygone dimension of civic
architecture. This inclination won him a place within the modernist agenda of
charging architecture with political function.24 To understand Kahn’s aspiration
for civic architecture, we should recall the architect’s reflection on monumentality.
In the first place, attention should be given to Kahn’s adjective use of the word
“monumentality.”25 There is nothing new in highlighting the memorial power of
architecture. In the classic treatises, the idea of monument is mostly associated
with the memory of an event or a person. In recollection of this tradition, Ruskin
wrote, “we may live without her [architecture], and worship without her, but we
can’t remember without her.” He continued that architecture speaks for “not only
what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their
strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life.”26 In Ruskinian
tradition, Kahn used “monumentality as an adjective” to reclaim architecture’s
memorial role. Sarah Williams Goldhagen provides two additional reasons for
architects’ interest in monumentality. Firstly, it was a move to reincarnate the
idea of nation and nationhood after the damages caused by the war. Secondly,
it was in consideration of the fact that America felt left behind by the esteem for
monumentality advocated by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union—although of
course these countries monumentality to different ends.27
For a critique of monumentality, it is useful to recall that one aspect of the
traditional purpose of monument was to stir emotions, disclosing the building’s
symbolic reference to a sense of collectivity. Although architecture in the
Renaissance, for example, was deeply connected with the culture of its time, and
even though its major patrons were the church or the monarchy, architecture,
nevertheless, pursued its own language, and it was less considered a monument in
sublimation of the state apparatus. The state was not yet construed as an abstract
entity, independent of the divine forces whose ethics were also formative for the
semantic dimension of architecture. It was only after the nineteenth century and
the rise of the bourgeois concept of nation/state that monuments attained an
ideological dimension. Since then, even the ruins of the past have been charged
with a sense of heritage, establishing a different idea of civic architecture.
Monumentality in Kahn’s architecture takes the form of patrimonial inflation;
i.e., his particular use of historical typologies and tactile sensibilities that were
attributed to the authenticity of brick architecture. We are also reminded of
Kahn’s advocacy for the idea of beginning, the room, and his anthropomorphic
characterization of the plan as the society of rooms. For him, “a building is a world
within a world.” Discussing Kahn’s work alongside the dialogical relation of the
two thematic pairs “monumentality and authenticity” and “representation and
abstraction,” S. W. Goldhagen observes that, in the design of Philadelphia City
Tower, Khan and Ann Tyng “integrated the theme of authenticity and community
in a techno-organic monumentality.”28 Since Kahn, and through postmodern
eclecticism, monumentality prevailed through recollection of historic images. In

both cases, however, architecture is charged with excess, giving the building the
power to rivet the attention of the spectator. And yet, Kahn’s work is unique in its
capacity to stage a room in the abyss of history. Advocating the ethics of making
and memory, Kahn sought to return to the beginning of architecture.
Even those critics who disagree with Kahn’s aesthetic sensibilities are at pains
to avoid the fact that, since the post-war years, the association of architecture with
monumentality and the politics of public realm entail the work doing more than
simulating the classical language of architecture. In the aforementioned project for
downtown Philadelphia, Kahn presents a vision of civic architecture that combines
shopping, movement of cars and even car parks, none of which have a place in
the classical vision of monument.29 Not only does this project reconcile “size” with
meaning, Kahn’s adjective use of monument opens architecture into the realm
of “excess.”30 As I mentioned earlier, Ruskin too used the adjective “historical” to
reclaim the original essence of architecture and “its memorial role through the
quality of its workmanship and of the moral investment made in it by its human
sponsors.”31
The idea of monumentality took a different turn in the thinking of three
prominent contemporaries of Kahn, Jose Luis Sert, Fernand Leger, and Sigfried
Giedion. Their argument was based on a vision of monument that would stand
for the collective, ensuring a sense of totalization that, as far as architecture’s
symbolism is concerned, was not accessible through the idiom of early modern
functionalism, nor through Kahn’s typological language.32 Drawing conclusions
from Le Corbusier’s ill-fated 1927 design for the Palace of the League of Nations,
Giedion largely blamed politicians and bureaucrats for most architects’ distance
from what he called “the emotional life of the community,” which he took for
a lost perspective seen “from the humanist point of view.”33 As a corollary to Le
Corbusier’s project for the League of Nations, Giedion presented Picasso’s Guernica
(1937) as a work that responds to the emotional life of the community. He wrote
that architecture could follow contemporary painting, which according to him had
already announced the “rebirth of the lost sense of monumentality.”34 Although for
some scholars this appeal for monumentality was in vain, Giedion and his friends
still held functionalism responsible for architecture’s failure to connect with “the
common man,” a popular phrase in the 1950s.35 Interestingly enough, Riegl wrote
that when it comes to monuments the public appreciates age–value more than
historical–value. Things of the past seemingly always had a totemic allure for the
masses. To this end, Giedion’s vision of monumentality emphasized adornment of
the surface of building with artificial lights, a point of view that would give painters
and sculptors an important role in the design of civic architecture. His position also
resonated with the classical view that associated the singularity of a monumental
building with the embellishment of its surface.
If Kahn intended to restore the memorial function of architecture, Giedion’s
interest was in valorising building by nocturnal illumination and animation,
anticipating the spectacle of the electronic era. Giedion’s stress on transparency and
lightness was a major aesthetic shift from the traditional sense of monumentality
that was centred on the heaviness inherent to the masonry construction

system. There are two origins involved in the rapport between heaviness and
monumentality. Rosalind Krauss has established a dialogical rapport between
sculpture and architecture. For her “monumentality is the default state of sculpture,
in that sculpture is traditionally figurative, commemorative, and strongly tied to a
particular location as a maker of place.”36 Following Winckelmann’s association of
Greek architecture with Mediterranean climate, Laugier’s hut emerged as a type
with particular potentialities for the transformation of its architectonic elements
into stone architecture. According to Anthony Vidler, this undfolding had many
consequences, among which the organic analogy was essential for establishing an
analogical rapport between the column and the body. He writes: “[I]f the column
in some ways expressed the inner forces common to a body and a structural
member, then a building might stand as a sculpture, complete and resolved, yet
embodying all the stresses of its making, the inner activity of the artist, and the
sublimity of morals and public institutions: it was, finally, a monument.”37 However,
Giedion’s vision of spectacle, to express the emotional life of “people,” soon turned
into a postmodernist interest in pastiche and in billboards. Kahn, instead, pursued
the “spiritual” dimension of monumentality, which he attempted to achieve by
investing in “impressiveness, clarity of form, and logical scale.” The difference
between these two approaches to monumentality is better understood in the light
of Françoise Choay’s text The Invention of the Historic Monument, particularly her
remarks in the book’s epilogue.38 Choay pursues the development of the idea of
monument from its anthropological dimension, from pre-Renaissance time, to
Alberiti’s discourse on monument as a work of art, and to the nineteenth century
when the purpose of the Latin monumentum gave way to the historic monument.
Taking Martin Webber’s essay “The Non-place Urban Realm” (1964), Choay argues
that the architecture of the late 1950s was already charged with what she calls
“patrimonial inflation,” enticing the cultural realm with the narcissistic recollection
of historical images. Central to her observation is the fact that, despite his deep
intellectual connection with modernists, Kahn’s architectonic vocabulary was
motivated (perhaps unconsciously) by anxieties unleashed during the post-war
years and the need for reconstituting America in a new image. According to Choay,
“The historic monument has a different relationship to living memory and to
the passage of time.” She continues, “on the one hand, it is simply constituted as
an object of knowledge and integrated into a linear conception of time: in this
case its cognitive value relegates it irrevocably to the past, or … [t]o the history
of art in particular; on the other hand, as a work of art it can address itself to
our artistic sensibility, to our ‘artistic will.’”39 We are also reminded of aesthetic
sensibilities such as artificial light, sound, and music that do indeed divert one’s
attention from building to the spectator. Choay discusses these issues in the light
of the transformation of the use-value of monuments into commodities that are
packaged by culture industry. She writes, “Pushed to its limits, animation becomes
the exact inverse of the staging of monuments, which it transforms into theatre or
stage. The building enters into competition with an autonomous show or an ‘event’
that is imposed upon it.”40
However, if it is correct to say that the dawn of this new century witnesses the
decay of our competence to build, then a canonical building today should have
the capacity to articulate the architectonic of that “witnessing.” What Choay means
by the decay of competence to build is the very disappearance of the totality, the
holistic unity in reference to which architects were able to create a meaningful
rapport between architecture and place. Even the nineteenth century discourse
on monument could not dismiss the fact that mechanization and industrial
technologies were still operating at a capacity when Marx would recognize them
as tools extending the performance of the organic potentialities of the body. By
contrast, if one relies on Lyotard’s account of The Postmodern Condition, electronic
technologies are changing the balance between the natural, the body and
the built-form. Computer technologies have transformed our communication
system. Today, the idea of civic architecture can hardly escape the forces of the
commodification of values and techniques that want to turn every edifice into
a spectacular ornament. A major impact of the current digital technologies on
architecture is what I have discussed in terms of theatricalization of architecture.41
Today we are witnessing a situation where it is possible that a person might not
even have a space for self-contemplation. Privacy, the micro-space (the Kahnina
room), has been invaded, if not taken over, by the global flow of information and
goods. We eat, wear, watch, and even dream about things that have the least
relation to our immediate place. Involuntary memory of a bygone time is the only
thing left to my generation of architects. The next generation of architects might
have even less chance to imagine and contemplate a memory that would evoke
any aspects of the competence to build.
Past Collapsed
To exert further pressure on Choay’s position, we should read her text with Gianni
Vattimo’s discourse on the end of modernity. This Italian thinker sees the role of
monument not in association with national identity or the culture of a place, but as
a potentiality to relate the local to the global. The monument, according to Vattimo,
“is made to endure, but not as the full presence of the one whose memory it bears;
this, on the contrary, remains only as a memory.”42 To avoid the power of institutions
forged on the surface of monuments, Vattimo underlines the importance of the
“techniques of art,” which according to him are not “minutely institutionalized and
monumentalized.” For him, architecture “is capable of enduring not because of
its force, in other words, but because of its weakness.”43 There are two points in
Vattimo’s observation that are significant for any reconsideration of monumentality.
Firstly, like Choay, Vattimo sees architecture’s re-presentational capacity not in
making a form that conveys local values or, for that matter, the global culture of
spectacle, but in its ability to relate the region to the global. But what is involved
in this “relating”? The entire history of metaphysical discourse attempts to secure
a “purposive unity” between architecture and its social and political values. In the
postmodern era, even through deconstruction, we end up reiterating a secular
version of the same values. Thus, “purposive unity” can be attained today through
critical reconstruction of the past, of the kind Piranesi pursued.
Secondly, Vattimo’s position involves emptying architecture of all alleged truths
and grand narratives. Vattimo argues that with the passing classical wisdom and
the modernist social engineering approach to architecture, and in the face of the
current nihilism of technology, the monument ends up securing a place among the
ornamental arts, “both as a backdrop to which no attention is paid and as a surplus
which has no possible legitimation in an authentic foundation ….” Thus, absent
from Vattimo’s concept of monument are the national identity issue; Khan’s esteem
for civic architecture; and Giedion’s aspiration for spectacle. Here we might reproach
Vattimo with Mitchell Schwarzer’s suggestion that “proper” to civic architecture is
a tectonic articulation that draws one’s attention to the ontology of construction
without discarding modern subjectivity and artistic freedom—an argument that
Schwarzer makes in recollection of Gottfried Semper’s discourse on tectonics.44
For Semper, monumentality was nothing but the transfiguration of material and
form to the point that the constructed form becomes the “self-illumination” of
technique.45 What this means is that monumentality in contemporary architecture
involves rethinking the tectonic in the context of the secularization of artistic values
and aesthetics.46 As such, monumentality departs from the nineteenth century
conception of ornament as an addition to structure, or as a supplement through
which architecture communicates across the prevailing cultural norms and values.47
Ruskin, who is also famous for making the distinction between architecture and
building, suggested that building becomes architecture by surface embellishment.
Ironically, modernists like Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian reiterated Ruskin’s
view, and, like the curators of the International Style Exhibition (1932), insisted on
the lightness of volume and surface articulations independent of the constructed
form.48 This a-tectonic position prevails today among contemporary architects who
are extremely preoccupied with surface, weaving architecture into the allusive
ambiences generated by the present culture of spectacle.49
Before the Enlightenment, monuments were seen as the work of artistic genius,
and were differentiated from ordinary buildings according to the values attributed
to the artistry of monuments. Throughout the Enlightenment, and with the advent
of scientific fact-finding, there emerged a need to differentiate the historiography
of social events and natural catastrophe from that of the work of art. Winckelmann
wrote that art history “should establish the facts, as far as possible, through study
of the monuments of antiquity that remain to us.” He argued that art historians,
“not having studied their material sufficiently, have been only able to provide
us with common-places. There are a few writers who have known how to make
us understand the very essence of Art.”50 According to this view, monuments
were more than just good works of architecture; they were artworks capable of
representing the socio-political and aesthetic values of their time. Obviously, unlike
historical events that are dead and gone and can only be reactivated through play
and film, architecture in general, and monuments in particular, not only live their
time but, if not destroyed by forces such as war and natural disaster, can bear
witness the past in the time-now. Unaffected by the passage of time and the social
shifts it gives rise to, monuments often celebrate the victors of wars carried out
in the name of progress. Monuments also disclose the particular involved in the
aesthetic artistry of the work of art. Contemporary art history tends not to concern
itself with questions such as, for example, “In what ways do Palladio’s villas have
something to do with the historicity of the Italian Renaissance?” More appealing
to art history are the questions, “How does a work re-present its time?”; “How and
why does it attain its status as ‘art’, surpassing its historicity?” Again we are returned
to Riegl’s ideas on historical value of monuments, and his notion of Kunstwollen,
“artistic will”—a concept he formulated in an attempt to forge a non-formalistic
interpretation of monuments.51
Not until the reincarnation of the theme of monumentality after the post-war
era did a departure take place from the nineteenth century marriage between
monument, ornament, and style in favor of Kantian aesthetics. This, I would
posit, was a progressive turn of events considering the conservatism popularized
through postmodern simulation of historical forms behind the surface of which
lurked the Corbusian Dom-ino frame. This is not the occasion to discuss the
Semperian divide between the art-form and the core-form, which to me still
provides a critical strategy to critique contemporary architecture’s internalization
of the culture of spectacle. Instead, I recall Benjamin’s reflections on architecture,
discussed in the “Work of Art” essay, which entail a radical reconceptualization of
architecture’s relationship to history. As the storm of progress blows, architecture
maintains its companionship with the masses through Verwindung, a term coined
by Vattimo. Following Benjamin’s discourse on the loss of aura, Vattimo posits the
attainability of a tectonic dialogue between “convention” and the “excess” through
the radicalization of the process of secularization of values.52 As Beatrice Hanssen
reminds us, for Benjamin, “secularization announced the fall away from religious
historical time into an inauthentic, excessive preoccupation with space and
spatialization—a predicament for which, once again, the natural sciences were to
be held partly responsible.”53 One implication of this statement is that architecture
does not re-present ossified images of the past. History presents itself through
the doubling that takes place between the intrinsic laws of the art of building
(tectonics) and the actuality of the time-now experienced in the realms of both
technique and aesthetics. Accordingly, what must be maintained, the “laws of the
art of building,” should be construed “at the present as the present.”54 Not only does
architecture takes place in time, there is also the time involved in construing the act
of construction. While the former sense of time forces architecture to internalize the
latest available aesthetics, the latter is experienced in the drive for the technification
of architecture, and the confrontation of this process with the essentiality of the
tectonic as a strategic turn to autonomy. The tectonics endows architecture with
a look and the ability to look back as well. This perceptibility of architecture, which
also “corresponds to the data of the mémoire involontaire,” transforms architecture
into a parergon supplementing the wreckage of capitalism.55 After all, were not
ornament and monument conceived as a cover-up for the defects of construction
and the crack in the natural flow of history, respectively? Instead of resisting this
unique turn of events unfolding in late capitalism, we should interpret it as the
beginning of the end of metaphysics. Having lost much of its political and symbolic
function, contemporary architecture is on the verge of cutting its umbilical
cord with Humanist discourse, and might never regain its bygone aspiration for
monumentality. It is the task of committed architects and historians/critics to do
their rag-picking job now.
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Notes
1 The letter is published in Sokratis Georgiadis’s introduction to the English edition of

Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete, trans.
J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA, 1995), 1–78. The following discussion on time
benefits from my The Mental Life of the Architectural Historian (Newcastle, UK, 2011).
2 Kevin MacLaughlin, “Virtual Paris: Benjamin’s Arcade Project,” in Gerhard Richter, ed.,
Benjamin’s Ghosts (Stanford, CA, 2002), 212.
3 Benjamin’s intention is not to revive the eighteenth century archaeological approach
to the past, but rather to re-understand the past as a recovery—a construction
based on the memories of the past and the demands of the present. For a critique of
“archaeology” as an approach to the past, see Barry Bergdoll, Oxford Art Journal 5, 2
(1983): 3–13.
4 Michael W. Jennings, ed. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge,
MA, 2003), 389–400.
5 Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, / ich kehrte gern zurück, / denn blieb ich auch
lebendige Zeit, / ich hätte wenig Glück. Gershom Scholem, in Walter Benjamin, “Über
den Begriff der Geschichte, Thesis 9,” Gesammelte Werke, I.2 (Frankfurt, 1980), 697.
6 I am paraphrasing Walter Benjamin’s remarks mainly because Benjamin refers
to the angel as a male. For a history and a comprehensive account of Benjamin’s
“thesis on history,” see O. K. Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the
Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian,” in Critical Review (Winter,
1996): 239–267. On Benjamin’s “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” see Benjamin,
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), 253–264.
7 Erida Escobedo, “Progressive/Retrospective,” Domus 963 (November, 2012): iii.
8 On the concept of transitoriness in reference to fashion and “time” in Walter Benjamin’s
discourse on history, see Andrew Benjamin, “Being Roman Now: The Time of Fashion, a
Commentary on ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ XIV,” unpublished essay, 2003.
9 Harry Harootunian, History’s Disquiet (New York, 2000), 19.
10 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 262.
11 Ibid., 255.
12 Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968
(Cambridge, UK, 2005), 10.
13 Robin Middleton, “Introduction,” David Le Roy, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful
Monuments in Greece (Santa Monica, CA, 2004), 83.
14 Karen Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Ithaca, NY,
2006), 7.
15 Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History (Berkeley, CA, 2006), 3.
16 See M. Tafuri’s seminal text, “’The Wicked Architect’: G. B. Piranesi, Heterotopia, and the
Voyage,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 25–54.
17 Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 27.
18 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development,” in ed.,
N. Stanley Price, M. Kirby Talley, A. Melucco, A. M. Vaccarp, Historical and Philosophical
Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles, CA, 1996), 69–83.
19 Karen Lang, Chaos and Cosmos, 160.
20 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London, 1970).
21 Kurt W. Forster, “Monument/Memory and the Morality of Architecture,” Oppositions 25
(Fall, 1982): 2–19.
22 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London, 1963).
23 Julian Rose, “Objects in the Cluttered Field: Claes Oldenburg’s Projected Monuments,”
October 140 (Spring, 2012): 120. The author then turns to discussing Oldenburg’s
monumentalization of “hot dog” proposal for Ellis Island which similar to R. Venturi’s
excursion into Las Vegas, presented the building in the “form of a commodity object.”
24 I am thinking of Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s characterization of Louis Kahn as a
“situated modernist.” See S. W. Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (New
Haven, CT, 2001).
25 Louis I. Kahn, “Monumentality,” in ed., Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture 1943–1968
(New York, 1993), 48–53. This and the next article cited were originally published in
Paul Zucker, New Architecture and City Planning (New York, 1944).
26 John Ruskin, “The Lamp of Memory,” 182. For the differences between Ruskin’s
approach to historic monument and those of French architects see Françoise Choay,
The Invention of the Historic Monument, 102–111.
27 Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism, 25–26.
28 Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism, 77.
29 See Louis Kahn’s description of this project in Perspecta 4 (1957): 60–65.
30 In “The Lamp of Power,” John Ruskin ponders the importance of mass, wall, and
shadow to discuss a “size” that is akin to sublimity. John Ruskin “The Lamp of Power,”
69–99.
31 Françoise Choay The Invention of the Historic Monument, 93.
32 See J. L. Sert, F. Leger, S. Giedion, “Nine Points on Monumentality,” in ed., Joan Ockman,
Architecture Culture 1943–1968, 29–30.
33 Sigfried Giedion, “The Need for a New Monumentality,” in Paul Zucker, New Architecture
and City Planning, 547–604.
34 On monumentality in art and architecture with a specific focus on Claes Oldenburg’s
sculptures, see Julian Rose, “Objects in the Cluttered Field: Claes Oldenburg’s Projected
Monuments,” October 140 (Spring, 2012): 113–138.
35 The word “collective” acquired special meaning in the context of the “new empiricism”
that prevailed in the 1950s. J. M. Richards, the editor of Architectural Review, for one,
gave a new twist to the idea of collectivity and drew his readers’ attention to modern
architecture’s lack of appeal to what he called the “Man in the Street.” The collective
also acquired a new meaning through what many scholars have discussed in terms
of mass-society or mass culture. Hanna Arendt, for example, sees / aligns? the rise
of society with the decline of the family, a process of annihilation that many groups
have gone through as part of the formation of mass society. See Arendt, The Human
Condition (New York, 1959), 37–38.
36 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Originality of Avant-Garde
and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, 1985). Here I am paraphrasing Julian Rose,
who takes the work of Oldenburg to demonstrate the appeal to monumentality in
Minimalist and post-Minimalist sculpture and architecture. See Rose, October, 2012.
37 Anthony Vidler, “The ‘Art’ of History: Monumental Aesthetics from Winckelmann to
Quatremère de Quincy,” Oppositions 25 (Fall, 1982): 65.
38 Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, 12.
41 Gevork Hartoonian, Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique (London, 2012).
42 Gianni Vattimo, “Ornament/Monument,” in The End of Modernity (Baltimore, 1985), 86.
43 Gianni Vattimo, “Ornament/Monument,” 86.
44 Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity
45 Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry F.
Malgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge, 1989), 255.
46 On this subject, see my Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique.
47 For a comprehensive study of the role of ornament in architectural history see Alina
Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention,
Ornament, and Literary Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1999).
48 “The effects of mass, of static solidity, hitherto the prime quality of architecture, has
all but disappeared; in its place there is an effect of volume, or more accurately, of
plane surface bounding a volume.” Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The
International Style (New York, 1966), 41.
49 Part of the current obsession with the theme of surface has to do with the
continuation of the philosophical debates started at the end of eighteenth century.
While Hegel and others emphasized surface as the artistic representation of the spirit
of the time, architects like Carl Botticher took advantage of the distinction between
mechanical and fine arts suggested by the advocates of Enlightenment and argued
that the aesthetic dimension of architecture is conditioned by static and material.
On the architectonic implications of romanticist Counter-Enlightenment debate
see Mitchell Schwarzer, “Ontology and Representation in Karl Botticher’s Theory of
Tectonics,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52 (September, 1993): 274.
According to Hal Foster, the current interest in “surface” takes nineteenth century
sculpture as its model. Foster sees two problematic effects of Frank Gehry’s approach
to surface. First, “it can lead to strained spaces that are mistaken for a new kind of
architectural sublime. Second, it can abet a further disconnection between building
and site.” Foster, “The ABCs of Contemporary Design,” October 100 (Spring, 2002): 197.
50 Quoted in Anthony Vidler, Oppositions 25, 53. See also Alex Potts’ introduction to John
Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity (Los Angeles, CA, 2006), 1–53.
51 Among other references, see Margaret Iverson, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory
(Cambridge, MA, 1993).
52 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, 79–89.
53 Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History, 54.
54 I am benefiting from Andrew Benjamin’s reflections on “Time and Task,” in Walter
Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter
Osborne (London, 1994), 212–245.
55 The phrase belongs to Walter Benjamin and is quoted in Karen Lang, Chaos and
Cosmos, 170.
8
Adrian Stokes: Surface Suicide1
Peggy Deamer
Architecture and death: Why indeed does architecture keep shooting itself in the
… well, not just the foot? Its inability to be a relevant profession, its incapacity
to compensate its practitioners fairly, its refusal to come to the table of cultural
relevance after 9/11, its being DOA in the global discourse of ecology—all of these
absences indicate that it is time to put architecture on the couch. Could it be that
there is a “death drive” imbedded, not just in its practitioners but in its formal
structure, something unavoidably present (or absent) that makes its irrelevance
understandable?
Slavoj Žižek, the analyst who most quickly comes to mind for this job, does
excellent work in diagnosing the manner in which our desires, exceeding our
ability for codification, come back in the form of the paradox. His analysis of 9/11,
of Hitchcock films, and of fables demonstrates that the cultural objects we put out
there bear witness to self-inflicted wounds: Beware what you wish for. But, for a
more probing look at architecture itself, there is an even more provocative guide—
the British painter and critic, Adrian Stokes (1902–1972). Stokes’ contribution to
architectural analysis is not just the psychoanalytic framework he brought to
architectural criticism, but the application of psychoanalysis to a theory of form.
Moreover, he broadens the notion of architectural form to go beyond proportion,
geometry, shape and spatial sequence to include a re-reading of the architectural
surface, one that sees the visual plane of architecture as unleashing another type
of spatiality—one that is metaphorical, symbolic, and animated by our projected
psyche. Going beyond aesthetic, neo-Kantian “empathy theory” circulating at
the beginning of the twentieth century, which explores the identification of the
viewing subject with the viewed object, Stokes’ intense reading of buildings
collapses their surfaces with his own vision and allows this over-determined plane
to be one of mutual identification. And, what he experiences there is a full gamut
of aggressive, death-driven motivated part-objects of his inner world. In Smooth
and Rough (1951), he writes:
We partake of an inexhaustible feeding mother (a fine building announces),

though we have bitten, torn, dirtied and pinched her, though we thought we
have lost her utterly, to have destroyed her utterly in fantasy and act. We are
grateful to stone buildings for their stubborn material, hacked and hewed but
put together carefully, restored in better shape than those pieces that the infant
imagined he had chewed or scattered, for which he searched. Much crude rock
stands rearranged; now in the form of apertures, of suffusion at the sides of the
apertures, the bites, the tears, the pinches are miraculously identified with the
recipient passages of the body, with the sense organs, with features; as well with
the good mother which we would eat more mercifully for preservation and safety
within, and for our own.2
Stokes is operating in a psychoanalytic context that explicitly draws on Melanie

Klein, but is also consistent with the work of others engaged in psychoanalytic
thought—in particular, Lacan but also Lacan’s legacy in the work of Gilles
Deleuze—whose theories of self-representation, image formation, and visuality are
prefigured by Stokes and indebted to Klein. They, too, subsume the death instinct
in the context of an epistemology of image flatness and surface effects. They,
likewise, endow the surface with a psychic depth that makes it highly unstable in
its wavering between representational thinness and conceptual thickness and link
that instability, albeit in different if not opposing ways, with the death instinct. It is
Stokes, however, who links this analysis to architecture.
The reflections (of Quattrocento buildings) in the mirror not only contrast with
the face of the stone in terms of their mobility and light and shade. I would
say that they belong to the architectural impression since they evince further
the already-existing parable of the stone. Such strong art collects surrounding
phenomena within its own terms: the visual dogma becomes entirely satisfying.
When objects of the senses compel in the percipient the profoundest emotions
of the contemplative state, the soul is at peace. We then have the sense that
what we are looking at has rolled up the long succession of the mind in spatial,
instantaneous form: and that the relationship between the objects seen,
exemplify [sic] a perfect harmony of inner and outer things.3
Klein
Melanie Klein was one of the few immediate successors of Freud to defend and
elaborate his theory of the death instinct; indeed, she suggests that the super-ego,
as avatar of the death drive, is evident much earlier than Freud’s Oedipus complex.
While children can’t relate to whole objects like the father or the mother before
the phallic stage and the Oedipus complex, they could, Klein says, relate to “part-
objects” well before this. These part-objects, powerful, threatening entities, aren’t
merely aspects of the internalized father, but an entire world of both paternal and
maternal attributes—breasts, nipples, tongues, penises, etc.—that aggressively
attack the child. The mechanisms of defense required to control these domineering
figures are equally violent. For Freud, the main mechanism of defense is reparation,
but for Klein, there are four: introjection, projection, identification, and splitting.
Introjection, based on the earliest oral impulses to eat the object, occurs as the
ego wants to gather into itself everything that is good; projection, characteristic of
Adrian Stokes: Surface Suicide 141
paranoia, occurs as the ego disowns its own impulses and attributes them to the
exterior world. Identification in one direction takes the object as its model and thus
defends against its loss (or its rivalry with it) and, in the other direction, takes the
subject as its model and recreates the object in its image, resulting in narcissism.
The splitting of the ego, associated with fetishism, involves the bifurcation of the
ego into the normal part that attends to reality and the other libidinal part that
detaches itself from reality and plays its fantasy out.
Klein replaced Freud’s three phases of the id with her structure of two positions,
the paranoid-schizophrenic and the depressive. In the first, the child cannot take in
whole objects extended in time and space but only the part-objects of immediate
sensory experience. These objects are either satisfying (as in the good breast that
provides the milk) or frustrating (as in the bad breast that is denied). This position
is characterized by the ego splitting into its good and bad parts or by confusion
with the object in projective identification. This is schizophrenic because the child
ricochets between bliss and anger, paranoia and euphoria as the same object is
rewarding and frustrating. The second position assumes a child who can recognize
whole objects, especially the mother, as complete and enduring, as possessor of
both the good and the bad breast. This is depressing to the child not only because
it learns about the nonpurity of what it considered to be “good,” but because it
apprehends its own destructive desires in attacking the (bad) mother or the
breast. This is the onslaught of guilt, but also of a healthy, realistic approach to
the exterior world, in which the ego is integrated and exposed to the conflict of
the contradictory impulses. While the depressive position is seen as more “mature,”
both operate and fluctuate in the life of the psyche.
The implication of Klein’s work on child psychology for visual theory is not
spelled out by her, but she exploits those observations of Freud regarding ego
and perception that point to visual organization and the logic of the surface as a
contested territory of meaning. One of Freud’s observations is that the ego is the
perceptual organ in both the direction of the inner world and the direction of the
outer world; i.e., the ego’s essential role is the perceptual (not merely intellectual)
mediation between what the person thinks to be outside itself and inside itself. In
this, the ego is depicted as the layer dividing inside and out; later, Freud writes that
the ego is the outer crust of the id. Likewise, implicit in Klein’s work is Freud’s idea
that sexual drive cannot be distinguished from its representation; lust does not
exist prior to and independent of its object; it is of and on the object. And finally and
most importantly, she develops Freud’s notion of fantasy. Fantasy was a peripheral
concept in Freud’s cosmology but underlies many of his assumptions regarding the
ego’s ability to synthesize the pleasure principle and the reality principle. He writes,
“With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was
splitoff; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the
pleasure principle alone. This activity is phantasying.”4 In Freud’s view, instinct can
only be perceived by its mental representation, the fantasy.
But Klein goes farther than Freud, depicting an ego that is almost entirely
described by its image management. The floating, swarming bodily parts that are
the objects of the child’s inner world are in constant representational exchange
as they are projected and introjected, split and identified in fantasy. Moreover,
because the young child has no real sense of itself as an integrated ego, the
vagaries of these fantasies don’t just project from the child, they are the child. Thus,
both what the child perceives of the outer world and experiences of itself in the
inner world are fully fleshed, in/on the layer of the image.
Lacan (and Deleuze)
Before elaborating on the manner in which Stokes “architecturalizes” these ideas,

it is worth exploring what Jacques Lacan does with them, with an aside regarding
Deleuze’s uptake. Both famously rejected much of Klein’s work for its dogmatic
analytical prescriptions, but less well known is their indebtedness to her work on
part-objects and fantasy, and the complex manner they enact the death instinct.
Lacan, as we know, was also one of the few figures to embrace the death instinct
and Deleuze, both before and after his work with Félix Guattari, accepts but
redirects this concept, making it part of the web of his monism.
Klein’s influence on Lacan is most evident in his depiction of the Imaginary, the
pre-verbal register whose spatial logic is organized around the same disembodied,
part-objects depicted by Klein. His contribution to a schema of surface engagement,
however, rests equally on what he accepts and rejects of this work. The agreement
rests on his elaboration of how part-objects operate in the earliest stage of infant
development, the Imaginary.5 In this period, a child who does not yet have an
ego or imago to locate or originate images of itself experiences a world of bodies
and organs, Kleinian part-objects, which lack a privileged point of view. As Lacan
describes, “[These objects] have one common feature in my elaboration of them—
they have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity. It is what enables them
to be ‘stuff’, or rather the lining …. It is to this object that cannot be grasped in the
mirror that the specular image lends its clothes.”6 Their image is neither in the child
(who has no concept of self ) nor outside itself (which is undifferentiated from the
image), but it is “imaged” nevertheless. It then “surfacizes” in his depiction of the
“mirror stage,” associated with the Imaginary. When the child recognizes its image
in the mirror and experiences the fundamental gap between this image (whole)
and the experience of self (unformed), the fundamental condition of narcissism
and aggression gets placed on an ever–so–brittle, infinitely thin (and, ultimately,
still placeless) surface. In this, Lacan offers a more explicit rendering of image–as–
surface than had Klein.
The disagreement with Klein rests, then, on the status of fantasy. For her,
fantasy is the particularly imaginative, creative way the child “sees,” interprets, and
determines reality. For Lacan, fantasy is a problematic escape from reality, and the
part-objects that make it up are essentially a system of “absence,” where fantasy
stands in for the missing, real object. Fantasies, as “imaginary identifications,”
block the chain of free association and resist the unfolding of speech; they give
a false appearance of coherence. Lacan sees fantasy as “never anything more
than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinate
in the function of repetition,” something that blocks access to the individual’s

unconscious.7 Because fantasies organize around a singular, dominating theme,
the goal of therapy becomes “la traversée du fantasme,” the crossing over of the
fundamental fantasy allowing the subject access to language and the Other as
desire.8 But, fantasy is still central. As Žižek describes Lacan’s position:
[F]antasy designates the subject’s “impossible” relation to (object) a, to the

object–cause of its desire. Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes
the subject’s desire. This elementary definition is quite adequate, on condition
that we take it literally: what the fantasy stages is not a scene in which desire
is fulfulled [sic], fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages,
the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not
something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed—and it
is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to
specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through
fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn
how to desire.9 [all emphasis the author’s]
Deleuze is interesting as an extension of the Freud–Klein–Lacan line of death

instinct–surface–fantasy lineage, although he has a much looser connection to what
Stokes offers this debate. For Deleuze, the pressure is put on the surface changes,
becoming less visual and more abstract. In his The Logic of Sense, he adopts a view of
part-objects that he inherits from Klein but breaks with her when he insists that the
child never outgrows the chaos of the part-object position. Rather, part-objects are
folded into one another such that they never fully converge or separate with clear
boundaries. This seamless manifold, this “simulacra,” has no representation attached
to it; it is neither an image nor a fantasy; rather, it is a “fantasm,” or, as Deleuze likes
to brand it, “a neutral infinitive” (to drive, to kill, etc.). The neutral infinitive, setting
in motion real and imagined causes, is only registered in effects, and the effects are
only registered on/as a “surface phenomena.” Deleuze writes, “The phantasm is a
surface phenomenon and, moreover, a phenomenon which is formed at a certain
moment in the development of surfaces.” Likewise, the death instinct, registered
as fantasm, moves between real and imagined, erogenous and desexualized
registers as “a metaphysical surface … on which the devouring-devoured objects
of the depth are projected.”10 It is this surface that reemerges, in his later work with
Guattari, as the plan(e) of immanence. As he writes in A Thousand Plateaus, “There
are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective
assemblages .... We call this plane, which knows only longitudes and latitudes,
speeds and haecceities, the plane of consistency or composition (as opposed to a
plan(e) of organization or development).”11 As abstracted, eventized, and nonvisual
as this is, the surface is still the location of the net catching the thick “ideational
material.”
Stokes
Adrian Stokes cannot be seen as Lacanian (or Deleuzian). He was a contemporary

of Lacan, but he was Klein’s patient, aesthetic heir, and advocate. Unlike Stokes,
who saw fantasy as beneficial and reparatory, Lacan saw it as a blockage.
Nevertheless, Stokes’ belief in architecture’s definitive surfaces marking inside off
from outside unleashes the full play of fantasy and produces a remarkable array
of connections that are not Kleinian-specific in their unfurling of thick vision and
thin surface. Moreover, despite his overt espousal of Klein, his enactment of his/
her thoughts in his trance-like writings offer monologues with which any analyst
could have a field day. Motivated by a particular Kleinian ideology, they are sui
generis and representative of a class of fantasy explorations that go beyond him.
His assessments, as he positions himself in front of a building, can be very positive,
but it is a positive of having the death instinct, the “Other,” made formally manifest.
His assessments, as he positions himself in front of a building, can be enthusiastic,
even ecstatic, but it is ecstasy for seeing the truth of the death-driven fantasies
made manifest. In Smooth and Rough (1951), one book, along with Venice: An
Aspect of Art (1944) and Inside Out (1947),12 of a trilogy that is Stokes’ psychoanalytic
“coming out” in the very traditional world of art history, he offers this passage:
The building, which provokes by its beauty a positive response, resuscitates

an early hunger or greed in the disposition of morsels that are smooth with
morsels that are rough, or of wall spaces with the apertures; an impression, I
have said, composed as well from other architectural sensations. To repeat: it is
as if those apertures had been torn in that body by our revengeful teeth so that
we experience as a beautiful form, and indeed as indispensable shelter also, the
outcome of sadistic attacks, fierce yet smoothed, healed into a source of health
which we would take inside us and preserve there unharmed for the source of
our goodness: as if also … the smooth body of the wall-face, or the smooth
vacancy within the apertures, were the shining breast, while the mouldings, the
projections, the rustications, the tiles, were the head, the feeding nipple of that
breast.13
Another Stokes passage from Venice: An Aspect of Art is also illuminating. Venice
is of particular interest because, writing during the war, he worked wholly from
photographs he had previously taken of buildings in Venice. Besides the fact that
his attraction to Venice rests on its being a city of façades and decay, he doesn’t hide
the fact that he is talking about the buildings’ two-dimensional, black and white
flat representations; indeed, he is liberated by their transformed abstraction. The
photo’s surface denies a “natural” hierarchy of the depicted objects’ meanings. And
for the most part, his photos as well as his general interest are of ordinary buildings;
he is unmoved by architectural icons. He writes of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, “Much
more is brought upon the surface. Pilasters, with their arch moldings lying upon
the bright marble wall-space, are the inner dark ferment in architectural form on
the marble. The darkness of the windows is like a residue both of the inside of the
church and of the dark canal. The base of stone is entirely conjoined with the canal
as a bank is formed by the stream.” Or, describing “A Venetian House of the 17th
Century,” he writes:
The monolith Isterian jambs to the door give added density to the layer upon
layer of thin transverse bricks and even to the worn horizontal planks of canal
door. Yet brick and wood seem to partake of the stone from their intercourse.
These static things appear teeming things arrested and ordered for the eye. In
terms of distinctness, we have the sense of things fused.14
Stokes was an eccentric. He got to his aesthetic ideals before his analysis with
Klein through his own need to “get out of himself” (his fear of his homosexuality)
and to have the external world reflect his inner world (himself as other). He speaks
of his aesthetic awakening when he first arrived in Italy through the Mont Cenis
tunnel, where everything, unlike the gray morass of London, was clear, distinct,
other, and the proper manifold for self-discovery/projection. This tendency is
evident in Stokes’ article of 1945, “Concerning Art and Metapsychology,” in which
he argues that Freud’s pleasure principle should be expanded to include greater
emphasis on the role the external world plays in our fantasies. As he stated, “It
is perhaps astonishing that no general concept derived from the omnipresence
of the external world as such, other than the reality principle, figures in psycho-
analytic metapsychology.”15 The dialectic between Stokes’ inner world and his outer
world was active and needy. His work, then, while it gains intellectual rigor and
psychoanalytic credits as it gets filtered through Klein is far too singular to represent
a definite analysis of architecture, self, or culture. Rather, his struggle, perhaps
because it was so personal, leads to such obsessive analyses of engagements with
the architectural object that they reveal the primary nature of architectural affects.
Stokes’ paradigm in all of the arts was work whose spatial essence was presented
flatly and immediately for the eye, whether it be the stone of a sculpture or building
façade or the pigment and color of a painting. His hope for objects was that they
would demonstrate and make us experience their otherness; only in its otherness
would we both lose ourselves and, ironically, find ourselves.
The newborn baby soon becomes aware that neither his mother nor the
surrounding world is an extension of himself. Henceforth, to his dying day,
there remains the huge division between himself and objects, people or
things. Throughout life, we seek to rival the externality of things. The world as
we perceive it, our animal habitat, is the language of every passing mood or
contemplative state. Indeed, without this canvas on which to apply ourselves, by
which we project and transmute as well as satisfy more direct biological needs,
we cannot conceive the flow of the mind any more than the activity of the body.
The body is obviously meaningless without a further external world: but so, too,
is the mind. Mental as well as physical life is a laying out of strength within, in
rivalry, as it were, with the laidout instantaneous world of space.16
And, vision was the sense par excellence for negotiating/providing this
otherness. Only the eye allowed an immediate (whole, unsplit, unsequential) grasp
of the object, and only in this grasping of and on to the object could the subject
find the mirror, the essence of his/her inner world, his/her psyche. Vision was also
appreciated as a physical phenomenon. The body he noted was literally present
in the physical housing of the eye in the torso. All of the ocular muscles, mucous
and nerve-endings were experienced in the act of seeing and prevented sight
from merely “floating” around ambivalently. But ironically, or, again, dialectically,
vision, as he liked to point out, is the one sense whose effects are not experienced
as belonging to our bodies. “I sometimes have the feeling that what I see out
of my eyes is a projection of the pictures in my head as if I were a cinema reel
and the outside world a screen on which the film is projected, put in movement
and enlarged.”17 Likewise, the supposed flatness of vision was pivotal. Using but
transforming the British empirical tradition of George Berkeley and John Locke—in
which vision’s two-dimensionality made it inferior to and dependent on touch—
Stokes, like John Ruskin, valorized the flatness as an essential condition for its
ability to symbolize and promote fantasy. It allowed what was looked at to be not
itself, but something other. Likewise, vision comes to us immediately. As such, it is
not mediated by our (internal, psychologically suspect) thoughts, but comes to us
purely. At the same time, however, all sensations were lodged in the eye. This was
part of his kinaesthetic insistence that vision was superior to touch—it absorbed
the other four senses into itself. This is his fascination with rough and smooth. As
he writes in the book of this name, “In employing smooth and rough as generic
terms of architectural dichotomy, I am better able to preserve both the oral and the
tactile notions that underlie the visual.”18
Certain formal preferences result from Stokes’ notion of vision, objective
identification, and surface preference. Paintings should never be about their
composition or their perspectival depiction of deep space; rather, they should
register their layering. That is, the important relationships aren’t those that operate
across the lateral surface of the painting, but those that imply a layered relationship
from front (the eye of the viewer) to back (an implicit space in/on/behind the
canvas in which actual, literal surface always dominates). Color should be “surface”
color, not “film” color, where the former is understood to be “out there,” located on
the object and not, like film color, experienced as floating aspatially in our mind’s
eye.19 In sculpture, “carving” was better than “modeling,” where the former, carving,
fights back (in layers and depth) and challenges the ego while the latter, modeling,
allows the ego to willfully shove things around.
His love of stone was the origin of his love of carving, although both stone and
carving transcend this literal start. Limestone, itself “the link between the organic
and inorganic worlds,” exemplified the essence of otherness, capable of being
presented instantaneously, via its surface. “The compactness of [the] grain causes
the purer limestone’s to be not only robust as we have seen, but also to posses
in many cases this fleshlike glow.”20 A proper, Quattrocento appreciation of stone
comes with “adulation of the plain smooth, but tense surface” … it “reflects light
preeminently.”21 Thus his love of the sculptor Agostino di Duccio, whose bas-reliefs
ensured that not the figure, but the stone through the medium of the figure, was the
content of the work. Carving was an admiration of the tough, durable “otherness”
of an object, whether words, landscapes or buildings. This was his affinity with Ezra
Pound, whom he met in Rimini; they both wanted words as well as images to be
hard, physical and “cut like stone.”
In architecture, space is denigrated; inside and outside must collapse on a
surface; all must proceed from the vertical plane, pressing from it or on it. Stokes
dismissed modernism’s interest in plasticity and space, associated by him with
“modeling.” In architecture, as well as sculpture, the textures are paramount; the
juxtaposition of rough and smooth is particularly meaningful for its evocation
of the breast and the nipple. Apertures in a façade, as the moment of exchange
between the inside and outside of a building, are of significance not because we
want to see the inside but because it symbolizes the psychic interior on a flat,
objective surface.22 The rough and smooth textures around apertures—always
a moment of excitement for Stokes—resonate as a bodily orifice with particular
psychoanalytic, part-object meaning.
Again, in Smooth and Rough, Stokes writes:
Colours, textures, smooth and rough planes, apertures, symbolize reciprocity,

a thriving in a thorough partnership. The landscape’s center is fashioned by
plain houses in a cobbled street, by the dichotomy of wall-face and opening.
Dichotomy is the unavoidable means of architectural effect. It has, of course,
many embodiments, a sense of growth and a sense of thrust, for instance,
heaviness and lightness, sheerness and recession or projection, rectangularity
and rotundity, lit surface and shadowed surfaces, a thematic contrast between
two principal textures, that is to say, between smooth and rough. I take this last
to symbolize all, because it best marks the “bite” of architectural pleasure upon
the memory: the dichotomy that permeates our final impression.23
And finally, what we know already—that architecture is the epitome of all the
arts for its operating in all of these aesthetic registers. In Three Essays on the Painting
of Our Time (1961), Stokes writes, “We will agree that the work of art is a construction.
Inasmuch as man both physically and psychologically is a structure carefully
amassed, a coalescence and a pattern, a balance imposed upon opposite drives,
building is likely to be not only the most common but the most general symbol of
our living and breathing.”24 This “living and breathing” is part of an interchange that
starts with the projection of the death instinct in the form of aggressiveness.
Žižek and the Sublime Object of Ideology
As Stokes “positions” himself (in the Kleinian and physical sense), he is proving
the Lacanian dictum that “it is the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the
subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes
in it.”25 Standing before architecture, Stokes allows his fantasy to visually attach
himself to the building surface. The death drive is instantiated thrice: first by the
aggressive part-objects that fill this fantasy, making it thick; second by the nature
of that surface that can’t, given its brittleness and thinness, be “anything more
than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinate
in the function of repetition.”26 Third, the death drive is present in the nature of
fantasy itself, which stages “a scene that realizes the desire as such, and desire is, of
course, the death drive.”27 “We could say that … desire structured through fantasy
is a defense against the desire of the Other, against this ‘pure’, transfantasmic desire
(i.e. the death drive in its pure form).”28
On the other hand, Stokes-cum-Lacan reintroduces the displaced figure of
Slavoj Žižek whose voice has surreptitiously intervened as Lacan’s spokesperson
(see quotes above, endnotes 25, 27, and 28). Indeed, Stokes’ language becomes
very Lacanian. Stokes’ “[T]he work of art is a construction. Inasmuch as a man both
physically and psychologically is a structure carefully amassed … building is likely
to be … the most general symbol of our living and breathing”29 meets “Before we
intervene in reality by means of the particular act, we must accomplish the purely
formal act of converting reality as something which is objectively given into reality
as ‘effective’, as something produced, ‘posited’ by the subject.”30
But the “Lacanian” quotes above are not actually Lacan’s, although they properly
explain him; they are Žižek’s paraphrase of Hegel, as Lacan’s “silent partner,” used
to explain a Lacanian idea. Žižek makes Lacan accessible, but he also sets Lacan
up for his own use, and hence in these “quotes,” we have a hinge linking Žižek-
speaking-Lacan to Žižek himself, via Hegel, a hinge helpful in letting Žižek into this
conversation on his own terms. Žižek, for all his admiration for and his reliance on
Lacan and his Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad, takes fantasy to a slightly different
place—one that is useful for us as we circle back to the initial, culturally oriented
architectural suicides (DOA in the economy; DOA at social vision; DOA at historical
critique). For Žižek, fantasy, for all its misrepresentations, is, more or less, all there
is. Yes, fantasy is a screen that needs to be stepped through to access the linguistic
register and the “Other,” but since the other side of this screen is the big Void (the
Other, the death drive, the objet petit a), it is, for Žižek, the only representation of
self that we have.
So “we” (who have already “gone through the fantasy”) can see that there
is nothing where the consciousness thought that it saw something, but our
knowledge is already mediated by this “illusion” in so far as it aims at the empty
space which makes the illusion possible. In other words, if we subtract from the
illusion the illusion itself (its positive content) what remains is not simply nothing
but a determinate nothing, the void in the structure which opened the space for
the “illusion.”31
As Žižek says, in the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the
side of reality. “We can rephrase here the old ‘hippy’ motto of the 1960s: reality is
for those who cannot support the dream. ‘Reality’ is a fantasy-construction which
enables us to mask the Real of our desire.”32 Because it is the only place that we
can see/stage ourselves, it is worth our, and Žižek’s, full attention; this is his work
on popular culture. This screen—in being more than psycho-biological; in being
cultural—is, in Žižek’s hands, the work of ideology; or, rather, it is ideology.33 The
screen is capitalism’s “coordinating apparatus.”
It is now clear how we use this notion of fantasy in the domain of ideology
proper: here also “there is no class relationship,” society is always traversed by an
antagonistic split which cannot be integrated into symbolic order. And the stake
of social-ideological fantasy is to construct a vision of society which does exist,
a society in which the relation between its parts is organic, complementary. The
clearest case is, of course, the corporatist vision of Society as an organic Whole,
a social Body in which the different classes are like extremities, members each
contribution to the Whole according to its function—we may say the “Society as
a corporate Body” is the fundamental ideological fantasy.34
As Žižek points out, the surplus of the Real is identical with Marx’s notion of surplus
value.
So what then of architecture? Žižek asks: “[H]ow does an empirical, positively
given object become an object of desire; how does it begin to contain some X, some
unknown quality, something which is ‘in it more than it’ and makes it worthy of our
desire?”35 Does architecture answer this by presenting us with its multilayered but
compressed self? Stokes, after all, isn’t just fantasizing in any old place. Architecture
was—this is his big claim—the art that singularly produced fantasy. His books are
his heartfelt desire to convince us of this, and his case is convincing: we do stare at
façades; we do search rather desperately for meaning there. And, we do, as we are
meant to, given that the structure is about the denial of desire, feel guilty about
this. It becomes almost impossible, reading Stokes, to not believe that architecture
is Žižek’s sublime object of ideology, as described in the book of that name: “an
ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place
of … das Ding, the impossible–real object of desire.”36 And, it has this place because
we want it to. As he continues the above quote: “It is its structural place—the fact
that it occupies the sacred/forbidden place of jouissance—and not its intrinsic
qualities that confer on it its sublimity.”37
To go back to our original question: Is there something intrinsic to architecture
in its form that inscribes its own death-wish?” The answer, following Žižek, is “no.”
But, we certainly take pleasure in watching it do its Ding.
Bibliography
Deamer, Peggy, “Adrian Stokes: The Architecture of Phantasy and the Phantasy of
Architecture,” Architecture and Psychoanalysis, The Annuals of Psychoanalysis, 33, ed.
Jerome A. Winer, James William Anderson, and Elizabeth Danze (Chicago: Chicago
Institute for Psychoanalysis, 2005).
———, “Inside Out: Adrian Stokes and Corporeal Criticism,” Architecture and Body (New
York: Rizzoli, 1988).
Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
———, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1987).
Fink, Bruce, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997).
Klein, Melanie, The Writings of Melanie Klein, in four volumes: “Love, Guilt and Reparation:
And Other Works 1921–1945,” “The Psycho-Analysis of Children,” “Envy and Gratitude
and Other Works,” and “Narrative of a Child Analysis” (London: Hogarth Press, 1984).
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and
London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006).
———, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.
W. Norton & Co., 1998).
Stokes, Adrian, “Concerning Art and Metapsychology,” The International Journal of Psycho-
Analysis, 26, 3/4 (1945): 177–179.
———, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978).
Žižek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
———, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso: London, 1989).
Notes
1 Portions of this article have appeared in “Adrian Stokes: The Architecture of Phantasy
and the Phantasy of Architecture,” in Architecture and Psychoanalysis: The Annuals of
Psychoanalysis, 33, ed. Jerome A. Winer, James William Anderson, and Elizabeth Danze
(Chicago, 2005).
2 Adrian Stokes, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, 2, Venice: An Aspect of Art (London,
1978), 241–242. This is an anthology in three volumes of most of Stokes’ writings.
(The name of the original books authored by Stokes will be identified in the text or
footnotes, but volumes and pages in subsequent notes refer to the anthology and its
particular volume.)
3 Ibid., 2, 111.
4 Sigmund Freud, 1911, Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning, 12
(1911–1913), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
(London, 1953–1974), 222.
5 Lacan’s language is very similar to Klein’s when he says: “The very delimitation of the
‘erogenous zone’ that the drive isolates from the function’s metabolism … is the result
of a cut that takes advantage of the anatomical characteristic of a margin or border:
the lips, ‘the enclosure of the teeth’, the rim of the anus, the penile groove, the vagina,
and the slit formed by the eyelids, not to mention the hollow of the ear (I am avoiding
going into embryological detail here).” Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject
and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Ecrits: The First Complete
Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London, 2006), 692. I am indebted to
Simone Brott for much of the attention focused on Lacan’s “surface” epistemology.
6 Ibid., 315–316.
7 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1998), 60.
8 Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ,
1997) 61–62, 72.
9 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
10 Stokes, Critical Writings, 2, 240.

11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN, 1987), 266.
12 These three texts, in the middle of Stokes’ writing career, were a transition from his
purely aesthetic work—in which he slowly incorporated Klein’s unacknowledged
influence on top of his own earlier views shaped mostly by his reading of Francis
Herbert Bradley, the idealist philosopher—to these where he no longer hid
his indebtedness to Klein nor the fact that he was promoting the benefits of
psychoanalytic work. Herbert Read and E. H. Gombrich, leading art historians at that
time, were interested in psychology but not psychoanalysis. Stokes’ up-until-then
rising star stalled with this overt referencing.
14 Ibid., 104–105.
15 Adrian Stokes, “Concerning Art and Metapsychology,” The International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 26, 3/4 (1945), 178.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 2, 243.
19 This is related to his appreciation of Italy over London. London’s buildings and
environment floated in his mind’s eye; it was the (negative) paradigm of film colour.
21 Ibid., 2, 53.
22 Later Stokes seemingly saw that this good/bad polarity was itself “unhealthy” (split)
and advocated that a psychoanalytically successful work of art would allow one to
experience both sides of the equation, experience the fluctuation from paranoid-
schizophrenic to the depressive. With this late aesthetic formulation, he became more
interested in art that can envelope you, not just land you visually on a plane. Stokes
changed his attitude about how absolutely other and distinct from you the work
appeared (he was less paranoid of losing himself ) but he didn’t give up on an aesthetic
that praises the allover over clear figure-ground distinctions and the hierarchically
composed.
23 Ibid., 2, 241–242.
24 Ibid., 3, 149.
25 Žižek, Looking Awry, 6.
26 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 60.
27 Žižek, Looking Awry, 6.
28 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), 118.
30 Žižek, Sublime Object, 217.
31 Ibid., 195.
32 Ibid., 45, referencing Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London,
1979), Chapters 5 and 6.
33 Here, the term is used in the Marxist sense: ideology does the work of capitalism and is
always negative.
34 Žižek, Sublime Object, 126. In another remarkable passage, Žižek says: “Lacan pointed
out that it was Marx who invented the symptom: Marx’s great achievement was to
demonstrate how all phenomena which appear to everyday bourgeois consciousness
as simple deviations, contingent deformation and degenerations of the ’normal’
functioning of society (economic crisis, wars, and so on), and as such abolishable
through amelioration of the system, are necessary products of the system itself—the
points at which the ‘truth’, the immanent antagonistic character of the system, erupts.”
Sublime Object, 128.
35 Ibid., 119.
36 Ibid., 194.
37 Ibid., 194.
9
A Window to the Soul: Depth in Early Modern Section
Drawing
Paul Emmons
If only human beings had a window opening onto their hearts, said Vitruvius citing
Socrates, then one’s soul could not be hidden and would be open to direct visual
inspection.1 This vital Vitruvian image inspired many Renaissance elaborations
in emblem books as well as in texts on physiognomy, gestures, and even Giulio
Camillo’s description of his memory theater: “Our artificial mind, this construction
of ours … is so endowed with windows that Socrates himself could have not
desired it to be more open.”2 Apparently, the paradox of using allegory to illustrate
“naked truth” was not a concern.
The desire for direct access to unmediated knowledge expressed by Vitruvius
as core to his project of rationalizing the mythology of architecture also opens
questions of signification, of the possibility of meaning without metaphor. Daniele
Barbaro’s commentary on the passage specifically related it to signs, Claude
Perrault’s translation added an explicit reference to drawings and others compared
the window into the heart with the holy shroud, the unmediated, divinely derived
acheiropoietos (“made without hands”) image of Christ.3 Too often today, as if
there is a window in the heart of architects, it is assumed that drawings can be the
direct transcription of inner ideas and similarly that the building can be entirely
predetermined by design drawings.
Tellingly, Vitruvius misattributed this statement to “the wisdom of Socrates”
which was actually from a fable about the trickster Momus (god of satire and
mockery), who had criticized Zeus’s design of human beings.4 Even though Aesop’s
Fables were widely known in the Renaissance, Vitruvius’s attribution to Socrates
was consistently accepted as more “true,” revealing the mythic within the rational.
The implications of striving for ontological transparency will be explored through
examining the originating ideas and practices associated with the architectural
section drawing. This view into the interior developed in the Renaissance with the
beginnings of modern architectural drawing that was fueled by the widespread
availability of paper and the departure of the architect as a presence on the
construction site.5 Tracing the section’s origins will allow us to reconsider its true
depth as a window into the heart that relates how interior and exterior, visible and
invisible are translated into each other.
The Trio of Drawings: Plan, Section and Elevation
Today we understand the “orthographic drawing set” as plan, section and elevation,
where each drawing occurs along one plane of the X, Y and Z Cartesian spatial
axes.6 The order in which the three drawings are inevitably listed is not accidental;
it reflects the prevailing idea of their role in design and explains why they are so
consistently recited in the same sequence. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834),
who began the rationalization of architectural drawing by applying Cartesian
principles of descriptive geometry to architecture, introduced the current modern
order of the three drawings as central to his notion of architecture as “utility
plus economy.”7 Durand’s prescribed ordering of all three drawings on the same
sheet remains the preferred stacking of presentation drawings to this day and
corresponds with what he called the “natural order” of the three drawings as the
modern triad of “plan, section and elevation.” After the plan, section is second since
its purpose is to “convey [the design’s] vertical arrangement or its construction” and
elevation is last because it is “no more than the result of the first two.”8 This narrow
idea of the section as a technical explanation of a building’s structural assembly is
still dominant today. Curiously, while the section precedes the elevation in modern
design, conceptually it follows it as a “cut” of the whole.
Prior to Durand, the sequence was just as certain, although different: plan,
elevation, and section. This order followed Vitruvius—ichnographia, orthographia
and scaenographia—and continued to be dominant through the eighteenth
century.9 Authors of Renaissance architectural treatises consistently used this
sequence while experimenting with the nature of the drawings themselves. So
ingrained is the modern understanding of the drawing types, that it is sometimes
unknowingly imposed upon our idea of the past, overwhelming the quite different
historical significance of these drawings.
The centuries-long continuity of the Vitruvian drawing sequence was due
to its conformance with the actual process of composition and construction as
revealed by applied geometry.10 First, the plan, like a geometrical plane, set out
the horizontal dimensions of length and width, while, second, the elevation
established the vertical dimension. This was long made clear in treatises such as
Practica geometriae, a manuscript from about 1120 attributed to Hugh of St. Victor,
which describes the measures of planimetry as a planar extension across the earth
in length and width and altimetry as vertical extension.11 The same approach is
described by many others including Thomas Digges in England, 1571, where
planimetra, the measurement of planes, is for “disposing all manner Ground Plattes
of Cities, Townes, Fortes, Castles, Pallaces or other Edifices.”12 The same pattern
is echoed in Renaissance architectural treatises, including Alberti from his close
study of Euclid and Francesco di Giorgio from practical geometry.13 Scamozzi’s
architectural treatise published in 1615 makes clear this relationship of plan to
A Window to the Soul: Depth in Early Modern Section Drawing 155
length and breadth and the orthographic view to the upright in this anonymous
English translation from about 1680.14
The parts which are to be sett forth (to use Vitruvius his owne order, but more
plainely) are three, which the Grecians terme Ideas: viz. Ichnographie, which
we call the plant, which containes the designe of laterall and like wayes circular
things, whereby is comprehended ye description of ye forms of buildings, ye
descriptions of the lengths, and breadths, and all their parts which are to be set
downe in a plane.
The second is Orthographie, viz. ye representation of ye front erected, which

we call the upright of ye buildings, which must be punctuallie designed both in
its whole, and in its parts correspondent to ye plant, with its so altitudes, and
distances just in that manner, as the worke is to be done.
Earlier ideas of the architectural drawings, very different from Descartes, were
built upon the Aristotelian bodily spatial dimensions of front/back, left/right,
and up/down. Including longitude and latitude within the plan is not only more
consistent with architectural and building practices, it also describes the spatial
order that is integral with human experience in the gravitational world, unlike the
far more abstract Cartesian coordinates. For centuries prior to Durand, the first
two drawings alone provided a comprehensive three-dimensional explanation of
a building. Thus, with only plan and elevation drawings, all three dimensions are
taken into account by traditional practice. What, then, was the place of the third
drawing, Vitruvius’s scænographia?
This quandary was sometimes resolved by treating elevation and section as
essentially a shared drawing type, since they are both representations of altitude.
Sebastiano Serlio, in listing the drawings he used to represent ancient buildings,
describes section (profilo) as another word for elevation (diritto).15 Palladio in
the Four Books also uses the drawing names alzato and diritto for elevations and
sections interchangeably to describe both exterior elevations and sections in the
same project.16 This overlapping terminology for elevation and section may be in
part because prior to modern construction technology where buildings are now
constructed in horizontal layers, buildings were then constructed, foundation to
roof, sequentially in vertical bays, and that the elevational visibility of a “section”
would be more present in the mind of the architect not as an imaginary cut so
much as a view of the continuing process of construction, which could extend over
decades or more.17 The absence of a clear linguistic distinction between section
and elevation suggests the absence of a clear intellectual distinction between
them.
Conceiving of section and elevation as a shared kind of drawing through the
interior elevation is also related to the common Renaissance practice of dividing
the upright drawing along its central axis into a front elevation and a section. Here,
the viewer is reading the building from left to right by imaginatively moving more
deeply into it, in some cases through numerous planes.18 This practice is not for
efficiency, rather for a comparative understanding based on the simultaneous
presence of multiple building layers. The problem of looking from outside to inside,
returning to the Vitruvian windowed soul, does not impart pure knowledge, but
provides a partial object, requiring the engaged imagination of the viewer. While
conceived today as two separate drawings, elevation and section are experientially
conjoined twins sharing some body parts. Related to the problem of the overlap
is the well-known letter to Leo X (c. 1519), almost certainly written by Raphael
and Baldassare Castiglione, which proposes a procedure for creating drawings
of ancient Rome from its ruins.19 It explains that architectural drawing is divided
into three parts, first the plan (pianta), then the elevation or exterior wall (parete di
fuora), and finally, the interior wall (parete di dentro). This third part of drawing is to
be coordinated with the exterior elevation but shows the “inside of the building—
half, that is, as if cut [divided] down the middle” (come se fosse diviso per mezzo)
in order to show “the courtyard, with the correspondence of the heights of the
exterior cornices with those inside, and the height of the windows, doors, arches
and vaults.”20 While numerous commentators today associate the third drawing
with the modern section, divisio probably refers not to the modern transverse
section cut, but rather to the cleaving between halves of exterior and interior
elevations.21 The description suggests an immediate comparison between the
two elevation drawings through their “correspondence of heights.” Furthermore,
this interpretation is consistent with the similarity of the letter’s names for the last
two drawings. Indeed, the courtyard is another façade. By naming both types of
drawings parete, it emphasizes not any unique material sectioning of the third
drawing, but the similarity of the last two drawings as upright surfaces with their
ornaments. Parete has more specific connotations of “surface” rather than wall as
muro, which would include thickness. Since an early meaning of parete was a net to
catch birds, a more literal translation of parete di dentro might be “interior surfaces”
or in the modern sense an “interior view” that “catches” your eye.22 With the interior
elevation, its supporting sheet of paper does not become an imaginary cut like the
modern idea of section, but the physical surface of the wall itself. In these drawings,
the exterior and interior are not describing Cartesian planes at right angles to each
other; they are instead parallel constructions that suggest the complex interrelation
of surfaces between inside and out. Rather than two half-complete drawings, it
might be more useful to consider these two aspects of a single drawing like the
modern breakaway section with a break line between outside and inside, showing
the sagittal depth of the building facing the viewer. All this suggests that, well into
the Renaissance, the section drawing remained largely uncodified.
A Multiplicity of Sections
Of the three sorts of modern orthographic drawings only the section is described
as a “cut.” This “cutaway view,” according to a typical modern handbook, is made
in imaginary material “by slicing … much as one would cut through an apple or
a melon.” The conceptual sectioning is explained as a knife becoming a vertical
geometrical plane. The “cutting plane is assumed to be passed through the … design.
Then the cutting plane is removed and the two halves drawn apart, exposing the
interior construction. …[F]or the purposes of the section the other half is mentally
discarded.”23 Thus, the design on paper is imagined as a real material thing already
existing in three dimensions so that it can be dissected and examined.
There is a lack of specificity regarding histories of the section and some studies
focusing on the interior elevation have been misunderstood as examining section.24
While interior elevations are closely related to sections, the idea of section need
not precede the interior elevation since the interior elevation lacks any cut. This
study focuses on the cut of the section itself: not how the section enables seeing
the interior as if it is an exterior, but how the cut itself reveals deep truth. The single
name “section” occludes the drawing type’s multiplicity, both as many kinds of
sections as well as many originary ideas of sections. There has been little effort to
distinguish and theorize the different cuts and viewing practices that constitute
the many sorts of sections that have been and are still being crafted.25 The semantic
field of the originary dreams of sections includes: geometry, profile, shadow, ruin,
wound and dissection; all of which play key roles in this intriguing puzzle, not only
as possible sources but also as animators of the section’s overlap with the meanings
of silence, secrecy, solidity and the uncanny.
The broad importance of geometry to Renaissance architectural design included
sections of volumes. Alberti, who did not identify an architectural section drawing,
did intriguingly describe the importance of understanding “how we observe the
outlines of the body by sections [sectionibus corporis]. For, if someone cuts an
upright cylinder [i.e. a column] so that the part you can see is divided from the part
you cannot see, two bodies are made out of this cylinder …. If that outline were
drawn properly on a wall, it would produce a figure exactly like the one a shadow
would make.” However, he concluded that “observing sections and outlines” is
more a matter for the painter.26 Daniele Barbaro copied Dürer’s drawings of conic
sections to describe a cut through a cone (sectione, schnit). But, these cases were
not directly transferred to architectural drawing terminology.27 Instead, Barbaro
used the word profilo to describe the third drawing. Barbaro also uses sciografia
to name Vitruvius’s third drawing because scio (or scia, shadow) draws upon the
idea of the side of the face casting its shadow in profile.28 Profile portraiture was
especially popular in the fifteenth century and may have been made following
the technique described in Pliny’s story of the origin of drawing when Dibutades’
daughter traces her lover’s shadow on a wall.29 Alternatively, as a continuous rend
in a building’s fabric, a ruin provides a sort of naturally occurring section, though
without a distinct cutting plane.30 Many buildings drawn as ruins are fantasies,
ambiguously under construction and/or in ruin. The ruin is the origin of the
modern drafting convention of a section break line. Perhaps most key to ideas of
architectural section is anatomical dissection. Leonardo, famous for his studies of
the human body, drew architectural sections much like his anatomical sections,
even on the same sheets of paper.31 When Barbaro describes the profile drawing,
he writes that the architect should demonstrate all the interior and exterior parts
of the proposed building just as anatomical drawings demonstrate all the parts of
a body.32 The explicit idea of the section as a cut and its modern name, however,
appear only later in the seventeenth century with the great anatomist–architects,
Claude Perrault and Sir Christopher Wren. At least some of Wren’s section drawings
are labeled “dissection.”33 Again, there are different sorts of anatomical cuts that
result in different representations. To strip off layers by flaying, like Vesalius’s muscle-
men, does not result in the standard spatial architectural section.34 Anatomizing,
on the other hand, shows the position, structure, and relation of various parts but
rarely with a continuous cut. Skull dissection drawings, like those by Leonardo or
Vesalius, tend to be the most architectural because a saw makes a continuous cut
through the enclosing skull to reveal the interior contents.35
The family of words related to section briefly outlined above implies different
sorts of section drawings. For example, the geometrical shadow is closely related to
the modern cross section where interiors are represented while the sectioned area
that is cut is a single continuous tone, often dark. The profile is an outline section
like that of moulding profiles. The flayed section is more like brick wall elevations
without their stone cladding or Rusconi’s peeled layers of walls. The anatomical
section is much closer to sections that illustrate the materials and construction
within the areas that are cut. For example, Perrault’s section drawing reconstructing
the basilica by Vitruvius shows the materials themselves, where wood trusses are
splintered off, stones show their stepped stacking in courses, and a stone column is
hanging in the air as if an organ that is being removed from its body.36 Rather than
a geometrical planar slice, the building is anatomized. The close proximity between
problems of knowledge and sectional representation can be highlighted through
considering in more detail the cutaway section, which is a wound into the heart of
the building.
The Wound Section
Standing in the courtyard of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza is a late Renaissance

statue that has been identified with the Vitruvian tradition of the open breast as
“Sincerity” from Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia. The heart appears through an open
wound in the statue’s chest.37 The laceration, though closely related both to the
ruin and the dissection as a source of section drawing, is unique in its relation
to the viewer since the interior is revealed through the building exterior. The
wound follows the overarching metaphor between body and building but in
this case it is the grotesque, Rabelaisian body with orifices subject to penetration
and leakage.38 While dissection is doubtlessly important to the development of
the section, architectural section drawings had already begun to appear before
public dissections of human corpses were first allowed and before Vesalius’s first
publication of his De humani corporis fabrica in 1543.
Prior to widespread human dissection, due to official restrictions and the
morbid dread of cutting open a human corpse, direct medical knowledge of the
body’s interior was largely derived from inspecting people suffering from wounds.
The son of a distinguished Roman architect, Galen, whose late antique medical
writings were dominant well into the Renaissance, frequently treated wounds of
gladiators and combatants, while his dissections were limited to animals.39 Galen
9.1 “Sincerity,” allegorical garden statue at the Teatro Olimpico (Andrea Palladio, architect), Vicenza, Italy.
A vertical mandorla-shaped wound opens a window to the heart. Photo by author
noted that some claim “enough [anatomy] can be learned from the ‘observation of
wounds’ that occur from time to time.” Although Vesalius later criticized Galen for
a lack of human dissections, Galen himself strongly advocated the value of human
dissection and was highly critical of the “occasional” anatomy of the “exploration
of wounds” as “utterly futile.”40 Observing through wounds thus yields only partial
understanding.
Especially important to the Renaissance understanding of wounds is the
religious significance of Christ’s five crucifixion wounds (four from nails in each
hand and foot, and one from a Roman soldier’s lance in the side).41 Masses and
prayers devoted to Christ’s wounds began in the thirteenth century and by 1507
were widespread, particularly in Italy.42 The side wound became a pre-eminent
object of veneration and led to devotion of the sacred heart.43 Bleeding for all
Christians was considered redemptive; the Church was born of the side wound.44
Christ’s wound was explicitly conceived as a doorway, a mystical threshold in which
believers were instructed to “dwell.” The wound was also associated with a cave in
a rocky outcropping or a ruinous hole in a wall.45 Doors of the Temple of Solomon
and Noah’s Ark were often equated with Christ’s side wound. Religious scholars
emphasized that Longinus did not puncture Christ, but “opened [aperuit] the side
of Christ … truly just as a door or window is opened.”46 This sempiternally open
door is singularly an entryway without egress.
Beginning in the late Middle Ages, the side wound was represented in images
as an isolated object. One broadside print (c. 1490) shows the side wound
turned upright with Christ’s head, hands and feet attached, making the wound
a synecdoche, as absence becomes the presence of the body and part—here, a
negative part—serving as the whole.47 In this image and many others, the wound
is in the shape of an almond or mandorla, which iconographically is a radiance
surrounding a theophany by framing an island of the sacred within the profane
world.48 Geometrically constructed of the intersection of two overlapping circles,
the mandorla is the bringing together of two worlds. Similarly, the woundy sort of
section brings together exterior with interior. The devotional imagery of Christ’s
wounds was used to heighten the union between symbolic and real space.49
Probably associated with apotropaic powers, wound veneration was granted
indulgences if the faithful attached a wound image to their dwelling and kissed
it with devotion.50 This effort to remove unwanted spirits was located where the
wound was “naturally” related to the threshold function. By physically placing
one’s lips on the image, which when horizontal is a mouth, one unites with the
represented divine opening in a corporeal meditation.51 Some fifteenth-century
prints of Christ’s wound have an actual cut in the support, creating a physical
opening that may have been made by what was believed to be the “true” spear
that pierced Christ—combining relic and representation.52 The slit in the wounded
paper is a physical opening to the verso of the paper, which also moves one to
another realm. As St. Thomas, doubting the Resurrection, was said to have
inserted his fingers into Christ’s wound, physically touching the space of the divine
interior, so might some worshipers have done with the printed wounds. In this
transgressive practice, touch is a simulacrum of the vision. These same concepts,
though intensified with the sacred wound, also appear in the architectural wound
section.53
Beyond the breakaway drawings discussed above that cleave interior and
exterior elevations with a break line, some early Renaissance sections “tear” an
opening in the exterior to show part of the interior, a punctured version of the
Vitruvian window in the breast.54 We have an example of an early wound section
in a drawing by Giuliano da Sangallo (c. 1443–1516), in a portfolio of drawings
of Roman ruins assembled over several decades, from about 1465 to 1500.55 This
sheet has ink and wash drawings of two circular Roman temples side by side, both
with a plan below and section above.56 Despite the sheet layout, suggesting they
were conceived together, the two sections are executed in very different modes.
The drawing has an exterior view with the center of a temple cut away ruinously
to reveal the interior. Since neither section shows the actual state of the buildings,
the wound-like opening must have been the invention of the draftsman. And since
the edifice was already in ruins, Giuliano first envisaged it fully reconstructed in
plan and elevation and then gashed it with a wound to open the interior view.
The admittedly “peculiar” opening, not at all imitating the way a building might
collapse, is reminiscent of the vertical mandorla—recalling the side wound of
Christ.57 Sangallo’s drawing was executed before public dissections in Rome and
seemingly draws upon the wound as a mode of viewing interiors.
The wound defines the interior as a (Lacanian) partial object, heightening one’s
desire to know it, but occluding the rest with the veil of the exterior, suggesting
an interior completeness that does not actually exist in the drawing. The ruinous
edge of the woundy section does not show materials, and its thickness is uniform,
like a continuous skin (no matter the material reality) that suffers a gash, creating
an infra-thin gap between exterior and interior. The edge thus becomes an aura,
cleaving two worlds with a radical separation of distance and quality. The wound
as a breach of the body offers a glimpse rather than a panorama, its secretive
otherness making the viewer a witness. By locating the viewer outside the object
facing its exterior, it joins two worlds in a double framing; first between viewer and
exterior and then through the cut to the interior, as if on two sides of the paper
support.58 One imagines passing beyond the two-dimensional exterior image
through a rupture or cut in the surface to visually enter the interior. Like Vitruvius’s
windowed breast, the gap is heightened by a veiled absence.59 The wound section,
rather than absolute transparency, demands a reconstructive effort on the part of
the curious viewer.
The wound section continues in modern practice as a “cutaway view” and is
often used to illustrate the secret workings of an inner mechanism.60 Even the
cutaway section has many variations; a “cutout” is a true wound with only a portion
of the interior opened while a “breakaway” shows the entire interior as a ruin.61
The wound becomes an important type of section because it illuminates the
issues of the cut and articulates the relationship between inside and outside, by
emphasizing the depth between them through the “ruinous” break line. With the
wound section, the hidden side is not only the back of the object; it is also in front,
where it is not open to view.
Depth
Vitruvius’s third drawing type, scaenographia, was variously understood in the

Renaissance as a perspective or a section. Some, relating scaeno- to theatrical
scenery, found its identity in perspective; while others related it to scia- as shadow
and identified it with profile and section.62 Today these two sorts of drawings seem
mostly unrelated and the assumption is it must have meant one or the other. This
confusion is itself indicative of the vast difference separating Renaissance drawing
ideas from modern ones. For Renaissance readers, scaenographia was understood
as both a perspectival view and an orthogonal section.63 What is commonly shared
is their representation of depth as a natural mode of perception.64
What, then, is the role of the third drawing, whether section or perspective, since
the three primary dimensions are already established by the first two drawings?
The third drawing was to show depth—not the Cartesian notion of depth as a
measurable dimension, as length turned sideways—but depth as the experience
of facing into the mysterious world. We do not see into a living world but into the
world of the “undead”—the partial object that survives “apart from” the body and,
hence, has the ability to be both interior and exterior. This also explains section and
perspective intermingling, for they share the representing of depth as a complex
presence. Confronting the lived world, we encounter the depth that Merleau-Ponty
calls the “primordial dimension.”65 This idea of depth as a fourth dimension was
invoked by Paul to describe Christ to the Ephesians, probably as a reference to their
temple, which was one of the seven wonders: “to comprehend … [his] breadth and
length and height and depth (profundum).”66 In a parallel everyday sense, when
perceiving objects, like the wound section, primordial, fourth-dimensional depth
concerns what remains invisible from one’s particular viewpoint: partial objects
as blind spots. Whether mundane or sacred, this notion of depth is, from its Latin
origin, profound.
Cesare Cesariano, a student of Bramante, drew a section through the Milan
Cathedral to illustrate Vitruvian scenographia. The most dominant elements in
his drawing were, however, the overlapping, multiple proportional triangles and
circles. In discussing scenography, Cesariano explained skia as shadow and invoked
the Tabernacle as a presence indicated by the superimposed geometric figures.
The earthly Tabernacle was understood as a microcosmic copy or shadow of the
heavenly Temple, imparting a manifestation of spirit to shadow.67 Thus, Cesariano’s
section was an adumbration of the hidden divine geometrical order; a profound
depth. Similarly, Barbaro’s discussion of sciographia followed Cesariano. His image
of the circular tempietto drawn by Palladio integrated all three drawing types and
included a triangle in the dome as a sectional foreshadowing of the invisible.68 In
text adjacent to the image of the profile, Barbaro discussed human cognition, both
of sense and soul, at first confused at a distance, but at closer view, visible in every
part.69 Perceptual depth correlates with meaningful depth.
Solidity and the Extimate
A section cut indicates the secret life within the wall itself. Like the anatomical
“secrecies of the passages” of nerves and arteries, so the apparently solid walls of
a building contain circulations.70 A drawing in the thirteenth century sketchbook
of Villard de Honnecourt shows the elevation of a buttress at the Cathedral of
Notre-Dame, Reims, that includes both exterior and interior elements and so has
been called an early section.71 Lacking clear section cuts, parallel waving lines
seem to indicate solid stone wall. The darkest marks on the drawing, however,
unexpectedly indicate open slots in the large masonry piers as shadowy spaces
for humans to stand amidst them, as if within the stone. Renaissance architects
referred to “secret” corridors and stairways that were conceived as tunnels carved
within the thickness of masonry walls.72 Interior staircases, like chimney flues, were
deemed “vertical openings in the wall.” Alberti also recommended secret listening
tubes embedded in walls for eavesdropping, which Athanasius Kircher illustrated
in cutaway sections.73 Corridors excavated within walls later allowed servants to
appear only where needed and the master of the house to secretly observe the
household.74
While not a place for physical occupation, the section cut into solid mass
invites a deeper imaginative inhabitation. When Merleau-Ponty wrote that “to
look at a thing is to inhabit it,” he described this primordial projecting of self into
objects in the world. The mosaic of the Apparitio in San Marco (Venice) is an early
building section from the mid-twelfth century. When St. Mark’s remains were
stolen from Alexandria and translated to Venice in the ninth century, they were
concealed within the church that still bears his name.75 Their exact location was
kept secret. Two centuries later, after a devastating fire leaving the church in ruins,
everyone feared the relics had been lost. The citizens of Venice prayed, fasted,
and processed around the city, when, on the third day, a pillar “opened up” in the
original undamaged part of San Marco to reveal the relic’s hiding place. The mosaic
recounting the miraculous event is located beside the “pilastro del miracolo” itself.76
The solid column contains the saintly body, upright as if a literal demonstration
of the Vitruvian idea of the body as column. The Saint’s rent column is contained
within the building section that holds the congregation. The five domes shown in
section in Byzantine architecture represent the five holy wounds.
A primary feature of a mass element such as a column or wall is its solidity. Solidity
is, according to John Locke, drawing upon Aristotle, resolutely impenetrable.77
Solidity is an idea that is received primarily from touch—present not so much to
the eye as through a solid pushing back against one’s hand. A solid body touches
us as we touch it. The psychological import of solidity, then, is the awareness of
the other while at the same time the empathetic projection of a self, an other,
within the solid. Locke distinguishes solidity from hardness because solidity has
repleteness. A surface can be hard, but only a body can be solid. Thus, firmitas,
first in the Vitruvian triad, is translated as “firmness” but never “hardness.”78 When
today firmitas is narrowly conceived of as “structure” it reduces the concept to mere
quantitative calculations that lack the psychological dimension of the powerful

tactile presence of solidity.
The often-discussed body/building metaphor shows how one imagines oneself
with the living presence of the building. The body is not like a column, it is within the
column, related through solidity, as a self against an other. Renaissance architect
and author Francesco di Giorgio Martini emphasized the primary importance of
drawing “which above all deals with the visible as well as the invisible.”79 For him,
the relationship of interior and exterior was a key issue that revealed the richness
of architecture and implied levels of meaning exceeding physical appearance. He
wrote that the greatest challenge is to “demonstrate the extrinsic, intrinsic and the
occult things all at the same time.”80 Di Giorgio’s treatise was studied in detail by
Leonardo as well as Giuliano da Sangallo, other architects that we have seen were
key in developing section drawings.81 In di Giorgio’s translation of Vitruvius’s story
of the origin of the Corinthian column, the maiden from Corinth is buried within
the shaft of a column.82 He illustrates the origin story with the young woman visible
inside the column as if it were transparent. Since he illustrates other columns
similarly, it is not so much a misreading as a point of theory.83 As di Giorgio writes:
“columns contain hidden human bodies.”84 The anthropomorphic transparent
section view is related to the cutaway because both show the inside through
the outside. The transparent view necessarily reduces the exterior to a ghostly
outline, while the cutaway allows the exterior to be expressed as a material thing.
In this context, di Giorgio’s description of holes in walls as “wounds” makes perfect
sense: the wound is the uncanny transaction between exterior visuality and the
“prohibited/un-dead” interior.
This perception of the solidity of a building simultaneously as the self and other
resonates generally with Freud’s concept of the unheimlich, when the familiar
becomes frightening. Freud asserts that “the most uncanny thing of all” is “to some
people the idea of being buried alive”—neither dead nor alive but “undead”—
relating this to the original intra-uterine existence. Freud’s discussion of the
uncanny noted its close relationship to the double, such as shadows, spirits and
reflections (including the soul as double for the living body), or in the present case,
body and building.85 The double, which is both a twin of self to overcome death
and a confrontation with an Other, is the solidity of the building in relation to the
individual. The sense of solidity is the Absolute Other, but it is also empathetically the
place where we dwell through a secret at-homeness with an “eerie unfamiliarity”—
unfamiliar but at the same time a part of ourselves. The French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan extended the uncanny to a theory of the “extimate” (extimité) as a
blurring of interior and exterior where the most intimate interiority coincides with
the exterior.86 With Lacan’s observation that the unconscious resides outside the
self, the realm of architectural solidity can also be our most intimate core.
Immuration
Sir Thomas Browne’s 1642 description of the soul as “immured in the wals of flesh”
suggests that as the soul is to the body, so the body is to building.87 To immure
is to enclose within a wall; not in a room, but where body literally becomes wall.
Immurement is concretized in numerous traditions. Some ancient Chinese burial
stones are inscribed in reverse so they can be read from inside the stone by spirits
of the dead.88 Ancient Greeks used funeral stones to pin down the spirit of the dead
to keep them within the earth.89 Foundation legends tell of the life of a structure
deriving from human life immured within.90 This petrifying reverie is the unspoken
foundation of the body–building analogy.91 Immurement captures a psychological
reality that is also at the core of the apparitio of San Marco and the drawings of
Francesco di Giorgio. This is the profound depth comprehended through the
section.
Section cuts of Palladio’s buildings drawn by Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi have
a consistent poché of closely spaced diagonal hachure at forty-five degrees from
upper left to lower right, still a common practice today.92 These lines are the
projection of shadow from above to below into the solid wall where it is cut. The
repetitive drafting of evenly spaced section lining is the architect’s experience of
ritual immurement. Bertotti Scamozzi’s detail column sections, however, are most
often shown as a roughly broken line, as di Giorgio had rendered them much
earlier. Sometimes Bertotti Scamozzi’s wandering pen invented plants growing
in the ruinous ends of the columns. As Marco Frascari has pointed out, through
this undergrowth, the plants open into another world, at times erupting into fully
rendered fantasies of worlds within worlds in a sectional reverie. The unquestioned
values of transparency and openness, deny dwelling when uncritically applied to
architecture. Contemporary architecture obsessively multiplies thin planes in an
attempt to reconcile transparency with the need for depth; but, like Zeno’s arrow,
these planes never arrive at their goal. Purely transparent buildings are meant to
have no shadow, but in achieving this they have lost their soul. The section, as it
was understood by di Giorgio and Scamozzi, can reveal the other as unconscious
self, the body–building, dwelling in a chthonic realm of solidity and in the profound
depths of immurement.
Like the movement in anatomical study from wounds to dissections, the partial
view of the interior through a wound has largely been supplanted by the technical
section. By this, the section cut has been promoted into second-place among the
classic drawings of architectural design. The “invasion of objectifying knowledge”
has made the modern Cartesian section an exoteric description of construction; an
“external knowing” of interiority.93 Lost, in this “delirium of absolute translucidity,”
is the troubling, uncanny presence of profound depth, where resides the
extimate unconscious.94 This woundy paradigm shows up the purely transparent
structure without solidity as a sham incapable of psychological inhabitation.
Laurence Sterne’s parody of Momus’s window into the soul reminds us that the
desire for absolute transparency is always inevitably postponed.95 The popularity
of Vitruvius’s windowed image of certain knowledge in Renaissance allegory
ironically demonstrates the importance of accepting partial understanding. The

uninhabitable solidity of the section can help us to remember this mysterious
vision of depth. Ficino explained Socrates’ approach as “to hide divine mysteries
everywhere behind the mask of figuration and language, to conceal wisdom
discreetly, to jest in seriousness and play in earnest.”96 The section cut, more than
the ability to see an unobstructed interior, can reveal the site of such traumatic
truth.
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locus/intimate_of_world.pdf.
Laven, Peter, Daniele Barbaro, Patriarch Elect of Aquileia with Special Reference to His Circle of
Scholars and to His Literary Achievement, Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 1957.
Le Camus de Mézières, Nicolas, The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of that art with our
Sensations, trans. David Britt (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1992).
Levine, Neil, “The architecture of the unfinished and the example of Louis Kahn,” Fragments:
Architecture and the Unfinished; Essays Presented to Robin Middleton, ed. Barry Bergdoll
and Werner Oechslin (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006323–342.
Lewis, Flora, “The Wound in Christ’s Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered
Experience and Response,” Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley
Smith and Jane Taylor (London: British Library Studies in Medieval Culture, 1996),
204–229.
Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Dover, 1959).
Lotz, Wolfgang, Studies in Italian Renaissance Architecture, ed. James Ackerman (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1977).
Majno, Guido, The Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA:
Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare (Milan: Polifilo,
1967).
———, Il “Vitruvio magliabechiano,” ed. Gustina Scaglia (Firenze: Gonnelli, 1985).
Massalin, Paola and Branko Mitrović, “Alberti and Euclid,” Albertiana 11/12 (2008–2009):
165–249.
Massey, Lyle, ed., The Treatise on Perspective, Published and Unpublished (Washington, DC:
National Gallery of Art, 2003).
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London:
Routledge, 1962).
Onians, John, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the
Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Palladio, Andrea, The Four Books on Architecture, trans. Robert Tavernor and Richard
Schofield (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
———, Palladio’s Rome, trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven, CT: Yale
Parshall, Peter and Rainer Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century
Woodcuts and Their Public (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005).
Payne, Alina, The Architectural Treatise in Italian Renaissance, Architectural Invention,
Ornament and Literary Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Pedretti, Carlo, A Chronology of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Architectural Studies after 1500 (Genève:
Droz, 1962).
Pelletier, Louise, Architecture in Words: Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of
Architecture (London: Routledge, 2006).
Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1983).
——— and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge
Perrault, Claude, Vitruve, Les dix libres d’architecture (Paris: J. B. Coignard, 1673).
Pincus, D., “Christian Relics and the Body Politic: A Thirteenth-Century Relief Plaque in
the Church of San Marco,” Interpretazioni veneziane, Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di
Michelangelo Muraro, ed. David Rosand (Venice: Arsenale editrice, 1984), 39–57.
Rigoni, Mario Andrea, “Una finestra aperta sul cuore (Note sulla metafora della ‘Sinceritas’
nella tradizione occidentale),” Lettere italiane 4 (1974): 434–458.
Rowland, Ingrid, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders,” The
Art Bulletin 76, 1 (March, 1994): 81–104.
Rykwert, Joseph, “On an (Egyptian?) Misreading of Francesco di Giorgio’s,” RES: Anthropology
and Aesthetics 1 (1981): 78–83.
Sangallo, Giuliano da, Codice Vaticano Barberiniano Latino 4424, ed. Cristiano Huelsen
(Vatican: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1984).
Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned, Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance
Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).
Saxl, Fritz, “Pagan Sacrifice in the Italian Renaissance,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2, 4
(April, 1939): 346–367.
Scamozzi, Vincenzo, L’Idea della Architettura Universale (Verona: Centro Internazionale di
Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, 1997).
———, L’Idea della Architettura Universale, anonymous translation (London: Sir John Soane’s
Museum Library, c. 1680).
Serenus d’Antinoë, Le livre de la section du cylindre et le livre de la section du cône, trans. Paul
Ver Eecke (Paris: Blanchard, 1969).
Serlio, Sebastiano, On Architecture, trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale
Simpson, W. Sparrow, “On the Measure of the Wound in the Side of the Redeemer,” Journal
of the British Archaeological Association 30 (1874): 357–374.
Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (Oxford: Oxford
Tavernor, Robert, “’Brevity without obscurity:’ text and image in the architectural treatises of
Daniele Barbaro and Andrea Palladio,” The Rise of the Image: Essays on the History of the
Illustrated Art Book, ed. Rodney Palmer and Thomas Frangenberg (Aldershot, Hants., UK,
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 105–134.
Teodoro, Francesco di, “Vitruvio, Piero della Francesca, Raffaello: note sulla teoria del
disegno di architettura nel Rinascimento,” Annali di architettura, Rivista del Centro
Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio di Vicenza 14 (2002): 35–54.
Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Myth and Thought among the Greeks (New York: Zone Books, 2006).
Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus, De architectura; ed. and trans. Frank Granger, On Architecture 1
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).
Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus, De architectura, trans. Bono Mauro da Bergamo and Benedetto
Jovio da Comasco, commentary by Cesare Cesariano (Bronx: Benjamin Blom, 1968).
Facsimile of edition published in 1521, Como, Italy (G. da Ponte).
Wilkinson, Catherine, “The New Professionalism in the Renaissance,” The Architect: Chapters
in the History of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977),
124–160.
Willis, Robert, Fac-simile of the Sketch Book of Wilars de Honecort (London: Oxford, 1859).
Notes
1 Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura III, “Preface,” 1, trans. Frank Granger, On

Architecture I (Cambridge, MA: 1931), 153.
2 Giulio Camillo, Pro suo de eloquentia theatro ad Gallos oratio (Venice, 1587), 40, quoted
in Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the
Printing Press, trans. Jeremy Parzen (Toronto, 2001), 151f.
3 Mario Andrea Rigoni, “Una finestra aperta sul cuore (Note sulla metafora della
“Sinceritas” nella tradizione occidentale),” Lettere italiane 4 (1974): 434–458, 456.
Daniele Barbaro, Vitruvio, I Dieci Libri Dell’Architettura, tradotti e Commentati da Daniele
Barbaro, 1567 (Milano, 1997), Bk. III, “Preface,” §1, 96–97. “Nos pensees & nos dessins,”
Claude Perrault, Vitruve, Les dix libres d’architecture (Paris, 1673), Bk. III, “Preface,” §1, 55.
4 “Momus and the Gods,” Aesop’s Fables, A New Translation by Laura Gibbs (Oxford, 2002),
518.
5 Marco Frascari, “A Reflection on Paper and Its Virtues within the Material and Invisible
Factures of Architecture,” From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in
Architecture, ed. Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale, and Bradley Starkey (London, 2007),
23–33.
6 Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman, eds., Architecture and its Image: Four Centuries of
Architectural Representation, Works form the Collection of the Canadian Centre for
Architecture (Montreal, 1989), 158.
7 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA,
1983).
8 J. N. L. Durand, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles,
2000), 121, 188. Partie graphique des cours d’architecture faits a l’École royale
polytechnique, (Paris, 1821). Sommaire de la partie orale des leçons. Première Leçon,
Planche I, Figure A, 5–6.
9 Vitruvius, De architectura I, 2, 2; Granger, On Architecture 1, 25. For example: Colen
Campbell, Vitruvius Britannicus, or the British Architect, Containing the Plans, Elevations,
and Sections of Regular Building (London, 1715–1771). Germain Boffrand, Livre
d’architecture: contenant les principles généraux de cet art, et les plans, elevations et profils
de quelques-uns bâtimens faits en France & dans les pays etrangers (Paris, 1745). Sir John
Soane, Designs in Architecture; consisting in plans, elevations and sections (London,
1778/1790).
10 Desmond Hui, “Ichnographia, Orthographia, Scaenographia: an analysis of Cesare
Cesariano’s illustrations of Milan Cathedral in his commentary of Vitruvius, 1521,”
Knowledge and/or/of Experience: The Theory of Space in Art and Archtitecture
(Queensland, 1993), 77–97, 83. M.T. Bartoli, “Orthographia, Ichnographia,
Scaenographia” in Due Mila anni de Vitruvio, Studi e Documenti di Architettura 8 (1978):
197–208, 205–206. Cesare Cesariano, commentary, Vitruvius, De architectura (Como,
1521), xv.
11 Hugh of St. Victor (attr.), Practical Geometry, trans. Frederick Homann (Milwaukee,
1991), 34.
12 Thomas Digges, A Geometricall practical treatise named Pantometria, divided into

three Bookes, Longimetra, Planimetra and Stereometria, Containing rules manifold for
mensuration of all Lines, Superficies and Solides (London, 1591 [1571]), Preface to the
Reader, n.p.
13 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books II, 1, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil
Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 33. Paola Massalin and Branko
Mitrović, “Alberti and Euclid,” Albertiana XI–XII (2008–2009): 165–249, 169. Francesco di
Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura ingegneria e arte militare (Milan, 1967), 117f.
14 Sir John Soane Museum Library, Anonymous manuscript English translation (c. 1680)
of Vicenzo Scamozzi, L’Idea della Architettura Universale (Venezia, 1615), 46.
15 Sebastiano Serlio, On Architecture, trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven,
1996), 50v, 100.
16 Alzato (lit. raised), diritto (upright). Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture,
trans. Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 11, 64, 187, 202,
221, 241, 276, 379f.
17 This is visible in Palladio’s buildings where only some vertical bays are completed even
to this day. A notable example is the Palazzo Porto-Breganze (c.1570) in Vicenza.
18 In the case of temple buildings, this order may include a column portico elevation
on left, then front wall with door elevation, then interior section and back wall to the
right. See for example: Palladio, Four Books, 32–33.
19 Ingrid Rowland, “Raphael, Angelo Colocci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders,”
The Art Bulletin 76, 1 (March, 1994): 81–104. “The Letter to Leo X by Raphael and
Baldassare Castiglione (c.1519),” Palladio’s Rome, trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks
(New Haven, 2006), 177–192. “A Letter to Pope Leo X on the Architecture of Ancient
Rome” in Carlo Pedretti, A Chronology of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Architectural Studies after
1500 (Genève, 1962), 157–171.
20 Amended translation from “The Letter to Leo X” in Palladio’s Rome, 189–190. I disagree
with their use of “section” for “parete di dentro.”
21 But, see “orthographic projection of the interior” in Rowland, “Raphael,” 97; and “the
interior wall,” James Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the
Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 50.
22 This interpretation was elaborated through generous contributions by Marco Frascari
and Jonathan Foote.
23 Frank Bourne and H. V. von Holst, Architectural Drawing and Lettering (Chicago, 1920),
10.
24 Lotz’s seminal essay is referenced today as a study in the origin of section, but as
its title states, its focus is primarily on the interior elevation. Wolfgang Lotz, “The
Rendering of the Interior in Architectural Drawings of the Renaissance,” Studies in
Italian Renaissance Architecture, ed. James Ackerman (Cambridge, MA, 1977 [1956]),
1–65.
25 Francesco P. di Teodoro, “Vitruvio, Piero della Francesca, Raffaello: note sulla teoria
del disegno di architettura nel Rinascimento,” Annali di architettura, Rivista del Centro
Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio di Vicenza, 14 (2002): 35–54.
26 “Sectionis et limbi.” Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, The Latin texts
of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), 139. This discussion
may have been derived from Peithon or Serenus of Antinoe, ancient Greek geometers.
Serenus d’Antinoë, Le Livre de la Section du Cylindre et le Livre de la Section du Cône,

French trans. Paul Ver Eecke (Paris, 1969), 58, 63.
27 Albrecht Dürer, The Painter’s Manual: A Manual of Measurement of Lines, Areas and Solids
by Means of Compass and Ruler, trans. Walter Strauss (New York, 1977), 95. Barbaro,
Vitruvio, 399.
28 Barbaro, Vitruvio, 30f. Donald Kunze, “Skiagraphy and the Ipsum of Architecture,” Via,
Architecture and Shadow 11 (1990): 62–75.
29 Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, “The Perspective of Shadows: The History of the Theory
of Shadow Projection,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975):
258–287. Keith Christiansen and Stefan Weppelmann, eds., The Renaissance Portrait
from Donatello to Bellini (New York, 2011), 106.
30 Jacques Guillerme and Hélène Vérin, “The Archaeology of Section” Perspecta 25 (1989):
226–256, 230.
31 Carlo Pedretti, A Chronology of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Architectural Studies after 1500
(Geneve, 1962), 68, Windsor 19077v.
32 Peter Laven, Daniele Barbaro, Patriarch elect of Aquileia with special reference to his circle
of scholars and to his literary achievement (University of London: PhD Dissertation,
1957), 475. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and
the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, 1997). Marco Frascari, “Professional Use of Signs in
Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 36, 2 (Winter, 1982): 16–23.
33 Anthony Geraghty, The Architectural Drawings of Sir Christopher Wren at All Souls
College, Oxford: A Complete Catalogue (Burlington, VT, 2007), 117.
34 Manuela Antoniu, “Fugitives in Sight: Section and Horizon in Andreas Vesalius’s De
Humani Corporis Fabrica,” Chora: Intervals in thePhilosophy of Architecture, ed. Alberto
Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell, 5 (2007): 1–21.
35 Martin Kemp, “Il Concetto Dell’Anima in Leonardo’s early skull studies,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 115–134.
36 “Basilique de Vitruve à Fano,” Perrault, Vitruve, Bk. III, Ch. 1, 154. The significance of this
drawing is demonstrated by its being included in the headpiece of the entire treatise.
37 Rigoni, “Una finestra aperta,” 446.
38 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984
[1965]).
39 Galen, On Anatomical Procedures: De Anatomicis Administrationibus, trans. Charles
Singer (London, 1956), Bk. I, 220–223; 225; Bk. III, 5, 76–77, 385–386. Guido Majno, The
Healing Hand: Man and Wound in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 398, 405.
40 Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans.
John and Anne Tedeschi (Chicago, 1999), 143, quoting Galen, de compositione
medicamentorum, Bk. XIII, 604–605.
41 Vladimir Gurewich, “Observations on the Iconography of the Wound in Christ’s Side,
with Special Reference to its Position,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
20, 3/4 (July–December, 1957): 358–362.
42 Louis Gougaud, Devotional and Ascetic Practices in the Middle Ages, trans. G. C. Bateman
(London, 1927), 82. Fritz Saxl, “Pagan Sacrifice in the Italian Renaissance,” Journal of the
Warburg Institute 2, 4 (April, 1939): 346–367, 348.
43 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval

Europe (New York, 2011), 196. Gougaud, Devotional and Ascetic Practices, 93, 99.
44 Peter Parshall and Rainer Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking: Fifteenth-Century
Woodcuts and Their Public (Washington DC, 2005), 258–260. The Church was
represented as a woman emerging from the side of Christ in a miniature.
45 Gougaud, Devotional and Ascetic Practices, 98, 105.
46 Commentary by Dionysius the Carthusian, c. 1500–1510, translated in Caroline W.
Bynum, “Violence Occluded: The Wound in Christ’s Side in Late Medieval Devotion,”
Freud, Violence and Practice: Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White
(Farnham, Surrey, and London, 2009), 95–116, quote on 99.
47 Parshall and Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking, 258–260. Caroline Walker
Bynum, “Material Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body:
A Scholastic Discussion in its Medieval and Modern Contexts,” Fragmentation and
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York,
1992), 239–298, 280.
48 Otto Brendel, “Origin and Meaning of the Mandorla” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 25 (1944):
5–24.
49 John Friedman, Northern English Books, Owners, and Makers in the Late Middle Ages
(New York, 1995), 149.
50 Pope Innocent VIII (1484–1492), in Gougaud, Devotional and Ascetic Practices, 101.
51 The edges of skin around a wound were called “lips.” Majno, Healing Hand, 93. David
Areford, “The Passion Measured: A Late-Medieval Diagram of the Body of Christ” in The
Broken Body: Passion and Devotion in Late-Medieval Culture (1998), 211–238. Bynum,
Christian Materiality, 201. As another sort of door, images of the side wound were also
bound onto pregnant women to aid their delivery. Flora Lewis, “The Wound in Christ’s
Side and the Instruments of the Passion: Gendered Experience and Response,” Women
and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane Taylor (London,
1996), 204–229.
52 Parshall and Schoch, Origins of European Printmaking, 61f.; Martha Easton, “The Wound
of Christ, the Mouth of Hell: Appropriations and Inversions of Female Anatomy in the
Later Middle Ages” in Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander; The Making and Meaning of
Illuminated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art & Architecture, ed. Susan L’Engle
and Gerald Guest (London, 2006), 395–414, 406.
53 Representations of the wound were even drawn to scale because by the 15th century,
the exact size of the wound was determined. W. Sparrow Simpson, “On the Measure
of the Wound in the Side of the Redeemer,” Journal of the British Archaeological
Association 30 (1874): 357–374.
54 Jacopo Bertoia, “Construction of a Rotunda,” study for decoration of the Farnese
Villa at Caprarola. An architect holds an elevation drawing while in the background
the building is under construction with a wound running up its side. The image is
reproduced in Catherine Wilkinson, “The New Professionalism in the Renaissance,” The
Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (New York, 1977),
124–160.
55 Giuliano da Sangallo, Codice Vaticano Barberiniano Latino 4424, ed. Cristiano Huelsen
(Vatican, 1984), fol. 37r. The image is also reproduced in Ackerman, Origins, 51.
56 The two circular Roman buildings are identified as the “Tempio a porto di la da Ostia”
(Temple of Portunus) and the “Tempio de la Vergine dirinpetto sequola grecha” (Temple
of Vesta al Foro Boario). That the single sheet of Sangallo’s two sections of circular
temples use such different approaches to representing their sections suggest that he
was experimenting with different ways of seeing interiors.
57 Lotz, “The Rendering of the Interior,” 19.
58 Donald Kunze, The Intimate of the World, accessed August 20, 2012, http://art3idea.psu.
edu/locus/intimate_of_world.pdf, 11.
59 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Bk. 4, La Relation d’objet (Paris, 1994), 155, quoted in
Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero Della Francesca, trans. John Goodman
(Stanford, 2007), 81.
60 J. Diepstraten, D.l Weiskopf and T. Ertl, “Interactive Cutaway Illustrations” 22.3
Eurographics, ed. P. Brunet and D. Fellner, (Blackwell, 2003). Agricola (Georg Bauer),
in De re metallica (1556), shows a water pump in a mine with a cutaway view “as
if through a hole torn in the earth.” Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Heritage of Giotto’s
Geometry: Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, 1991), 183.
61 Perhaps the most famous architectural example of the later is Joseph Gandy’s
rendering of Sir John Soane’s bank of England as a ruin/construction. Neil Levine, “The
architecture of the unfinished and the example of Louis Kahn,” Fragments: Architecture
and the Unfinished; essays presented to Robin Middleton, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Werner
Oechslin (London, 2006), 323–342, 327–329.
62 Robert Tavernor, “‘Brevity without obscurity’: Text and Image in the Architectural
Treatises of Daniele Barbaro and Andrea Palladio,” The Rise of the Image: Essays on
the History of the Illustrated Art Book, ed. Rodney Palmer and Thomas Frangenberg
(Aldershot, 2003), 105–134, 112f.
63 Myra Nan Rosenfeld, “From Bologna to Venice and Paris: The Evolution and Publication
of Sebastiano Serlio’s Books I and II, On Geometry and On Perspective, for Architects,”
The Treatise on Perspective, Published and Unpublished, ed. Lyle Massey (Washington,
DC, 2003), 292.
64 Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation, 105–106.
65 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London,
1962), 68.
66 St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians 3.18 cited in Areford, 228, 238.
67 Hebrews 8:5. Cesare Cesariano, Vitrivius, De Architectura (London, 1968 [Como, 1521])
XXIIII.v; James Davila, “The Macrocosmic Temple, Scriptural Exegesis, and the Songs of
the Sabbath Sacrifice,” Dead Sea Discoveries 9, 1 (2002): 1–19.
68 Barbaro, Vitruvio, 198. Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation, 48.
69 Barbaro, Vitruvio, 124.
70 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 113 in Jonathan Sawday, The Body
Emblazoned, Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London, 1995), 94.
Numerous Renaissance architects compare nerves and arteries with buildings.
71 Carl Barnes, The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt; A New Critical Edition and Color
Facsimile (Farnham, Surrey, and London, 2009), 209, Fol. 31v. Robert Willis, Fac-simile of
the Sketch Book of Wilars de Honecort (London, 1859), 236.
72 Serlio, Architecture, Bk. III, 100; Bk. VII, 51.
73 Alberti, Art of Building, 122. Athanasius Kircher, Phonurgia Nova sive, Coniugium
Mechanico-physicum artis et naturae Paranympha Phonosophia concinnatum
(Campidonae, 1673), 69, 100, 143, 158, 162.
74 Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of That Art
with Our Sensations, trans. David Britt (Santa Monica, 1992), 108. See also: Louise
Pelletier, Architecture in Words: Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture
(London, 2006), 75.
75 Thomas Dale, “Inventing a Sacred Past: Pictorial Narratives of St. Mark the Evangelist in
Aquileia and Venice, ca. 1000–1300,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994): 53–104. Debra
Pincus, “Christian Relics and the Body Politic: A Thirteenth-Century Relief Plaque in
the Church of San Marco,” Interpretazioni veneziane, Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di
Michelangelo Muraro, ed. David Rosand (Venice, 1984), 39–57. Fabio Barry, “Disiecta
membra: Ranieri Zeno, the Imitation of Constantinople, the Spolia Style, and Justice at
San Marco,” in San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice, ed. Henry Maguire and
Robert Nelson, (Washington, DC, 2010), 7–62, 57f.
76 Otto Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, II: The Thirteenth Century, Vol. I: Text
(Washington, DC, 1984), 186.
77 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York, 1959), Bk. II, Ch. IV,
124f.
78 Vitruvius, De Architectura, Bk.1, Ch. 3, §2.
79 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati, Maltese, II, 399, trans. in John Onians, Bearers
of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
(Princeton, 1988), 173.
80 Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in Italian Renaissance, Architectural Invention,
Ornament and Literary Culture (Cambridge, 1999), 93. Edgerton, Heritage of Giotto’s
Geometry, 136.
81 Edgerton, Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry, 139.
82 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Il “Vitruvio Magliabechiano” ed. Gustina Scaglia (Firenza,
1985), 114–115, 268. Joseph Rykwert, “On an (Egyptian?) Misreading of Francesco di
Giorgio’s,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 1 (1981): 78–83.
83 Payne, Architectural Treatise, 102.
84 George Hersey, The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 125.
85 Freud explored the unheimlich with one of his own dreams that included the fear of
being buried alive in a house/coffin.
86 Mladen Dolar, “’I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,”
October, Rendering the Real 58 (Autumn, 1991): 5–23.
87 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1642) quoted in Sawday, Body Emblazoned, 24.
“Immure” from the late Latin murare “to wall,” Oxford English Dictionary online edition
accessed August 20, 2012.
88 Wu Hung, “The Transparent Stone: Inverted Vision and Binary Imagery in Medieval
Chinese Art,” Representations 46 (Spring, 1994): 58–86.
89 Jean-Pierre Vernant, “The Figuration of the Invisible and the Psychological Category
of the Double: The Kolossos,” Myth and Thought among the Greeks (New York, 2006),
321–332.
90 Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, Vol. Three (New York, 1966 [1883]), 1143. This
version of the famous Romanian foundation legend includes another doubling: the
forecaster called for “two born brothers (or sisters) of the same name to be put into the
foundation.”
91 Kunze, “Skiagraphia.”
92 Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi, Le fabbriche e i disegni di Andrea Palladio (New York, 1968
[1796]).
93 David Hillman, “Visceral Knowledge: Shakespeare, Skepticism, and the Interior of the
Early Modern Body,” The Body in Parts, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (London,
1997), 80–105.
94 Georges Didi-Huberman and Thomas Repensek, “The Index of the Absent Wound
(Monograph on a Stain),” October 29 (Summer, 1984): 63–81, 67.
95 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Oxford, 2003
[1759–1767]), Bk. I, Ch. 23.
96 Marsilio Ficino, Opera Omnia, 1137, quoted in Michael Allen, “Ficino’s Lecture on the
Good?,” Renaissance Quarterly 30, 2 (Summer, 1977): 160–171.
10
Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico1
Erika Naginski
I will not repeat to you what you are observing close at hand: the exact
perfection of the architectonic parts of buildings; the rarity; the immeasurable
quantity of marble that one encounters on all sides; the immensity of space
that the Circuses, Fora, or Imperial Palaces once occupied. I will tell you
only that these speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images…
—Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Prima Parte di Architetture, e Prospettive… (1743)2
“What is it,” asks Leonard Barkan in Unearthing the Past, “about a fragment?”3 To
respond with Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s poetic account of the monumental vestiges
of ancient Rome is not only to offer a set of defining formal terms (architectonic
perfection, aesthetic uniqueness, material quantity, spatial immensity) but also
to tie the “speaking ruin” specifically to the activity of image making. Ruins make
for pictures. Compare, for a start, plate XLII, depicting sculptural and architectural
fragments from the third volume of Piranesi’s Le Antichità Romane (1756) with
one of Johann Heinrich Füssli’s best-known sepia wash drawings, the so-called
Artist In Despair Over the Grandeur of Antique Ruins (1778–1780) (Figures 10.1 and
10.2).4 Füssli’s drawing answers Barkan’s question by evoking the mourning of lost
origins. Two gargantuan extremities from the acrolithic Colossus of Constantine
(ca. 313 C.E.)—the right hand, the left foot—are displayed on pedestals set against
a wall whose stone grid leaves breadth and height hinting at infinity, not limits.5
Whatever the original orientation of parts had been, what the vision of hand and
foot collapsed together most powerfully conjures is the absence of a corporal
totality; we are left with the traces of the hero’s body whose incomplete state
renders reconstitution impossible. Awareness of this fact presumably underlies the
reaction of the seated figure, head in hand, sorrowfully draping an arm over the
massive curve of the arch.
Piranesi also exploits a sense of threatening incompleteness, but his treatment
of similar fragments is intellectualized and, ultimately, more constructive. On the
one hand, there is the way a looming, indefinable shadow in the foreground nearly
grazes a precariously staged still life of a foot and an arm, and so calls attention
to jagged cuts (into the arch, ankle, forearm, and biceps). The visual contrast
of black and white, inside and outside, elicits the idea of corporal violence so
strongly that it intensifies the simulacrum effect of the sculpted human form. On
the other hand, Piranesi’s plate functions as a list—an inventory through which
image and accompanying caption stake their claims in concert. To summarize that
inventory as described in the caption: A) one of two marble pedestals from the
Capitoline Museum; B) fragments from a colossal bronze statue; C) the disposition
of Travertine blocks in the base of the pyramid of Cestius; D) fragments of a
column; E) two identical capitals oriented to be seen from different vantages; F)
the column recreated from the parts strewn in the foreground; G) oblique view of
10.1 Plate XLII, from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Antichità Romane, Rome, 1784 edition, volume 3. *63-
349 F, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library
10.2 Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Artist in Despair over the Grandeur of Antique Ruins, 1778–1780.
Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland. Photo: Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, N.Y.
the façade of the pyramid; H) the wall surrounding Rome. The plate, then, refers
to an archaeological find: Piranesi depicts one of the two matching statue bases
discovered at the foot of the pyramid of Gaius Cestius.6 If Piranesi renders prominent
the pedestal inscription in the right center foreground, it is partly because the
mention it contains of the Roman consul and general Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s
famed advisor, provides epigraphic evidence with which to date the erection of the
relatively small Egyptian style tomb to no later than 12 B.C.7 The latter structure,
erected during the Augustan period near the Porta Ostiensis along the Aurelian
wall (now adjoining the Protestant cemetery), was restored in the early 1660s
under order of Pope Alexander VII and prompted renewed archaeological interest
(especially in the frescoes of the burial chamber).8
The alphabetized list by means of which Piranesi integrates the fragments in the
foreground with the site in the background sets up for the viewer a carefully arranged
epistemological journey through the composition—a way to mark the erudition of
its author along with the ostensive use value or truth claims of the image. Just as
the order of things leads from part to whole to the perimeter of ancient Rome, so,
too, is irretrievable ruination (of the body in sculpture) supplanted by potential
reconstruction (of the city in architecture). This oscillation between destruction
and construction is so recurrent as to be one of Piranesi’s pictorial mainstays. There
is, for instance, the way he juxtaposes the plan of what he took to be a sepulchral
structure at Torre degli Schiavi, the villa complex of the Gordian emperors along the
Via Praenestina whose impressive dimensions are described in the Historia Augusta,
over and against the actual gutted ruin of the octagonal structure, scenically lit and
set off from the filmy clouds behind it (Figure 10.3).9 The abstract expression of plan
ends up placing the visual codes for structural knowledge and empirically based
conjecture on par with the picture drama of decaying form. The same can be said
of the plan, section, and elevation of a tomb chamber depicted in plate XLIII of
the second volume of Le Antichità Romane, but with the added pretense made by
the representation of the scale based on forty palmi (the measure based on the
width of a man’s hand) (Figure 10.4). Here, the gauge of architectural dimension
hovers in the center of the composition between section and plan in the guise
of a fragmented Classical epigraph. In each of the images, codified illustrations
and mimetic impressions are interwoven. The concurrence of visual languages
suggests that however tempting it might be to detect a proto-romantic streak
in the Piranesian imaginary, it is critical to stress the interaction of archaeology,
architecture, and picture-making as well as the multifaceted aspects of a message
about ruins that has, in truth, little to do with Füssli’s despondent figure and the
impotence suggested by tragic retrospection.
All to the contrary, Piranesi’s construal of the ruin posited the fragments of the
past as means by which architecture might be reinvented as opposed to mourned.10
This reinvention is linked to the fact that Piranesi’s “speaking ruins” drew in vital
ways on Enlightenment debates over the origins of culture—and, in particular, ran
parallel to the views of Giambattista Vico who championed the accomplishments
of ancient Roman civilization. It is unlikely that Piranesi had direct knowledge and
access to the successive editions of Vico’s New Science, particularly given the work’s
10.3 Plate XXIX, from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Antichità Romane, Rome, 1784 edition, volume 2.
*63–349 F, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library
10.4 Plate XLIII, from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Antichità Romane, Rome, 1784 edition, volume 2.
*63–349 F, Houghton Library, Harvard College Library
Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico 185
relative obscurity in the eighteenth century.11 Yet it has been well established that
Vichian ideas circulated in the influential architectural circle of the Franciscan friar
Carlo Lodoli, who, as Joseph Rykwert has emphasized, not only sought to have the
New Science published in Venice but, more importantly, whose teaching “points to
the way in which Vico’s ideas, not fully appreciated throughout Europe until half
a century after his death, passed … into architectural theory.”12 Rykwert is among
those who have underscored how Enlightenment debates over the multiple
origins of culture stood as a pointed rebuttal to the rise of Hellenocentrism in art
and architectural criticism; as is well known, Piranesi’s was a vital contribution to
this rebuttal in the so-called Graeco-Roman controversy. The aim here will be to
move beyond the influence, on Piranesi and others, of Lodoli’s prizing of Etruscan
and Roman construction in order to speculate more broadly on the network of
ideas shaped by antiquarians, architects, and philosophers. How did a Vichian
understanding of cultural origins offer philosophical grounds for the eclectic
formalism Piranesi came to champion? And how was this conception, which was
extrapolated from the image of the ruin and manifested itself as a form of pictorial
intelligence, meant to revitalize architecture?
That Piranesi was an architect who built essentially nothing complicates such
a claim. His only significant commission was the remodeling of Santa Maria del
Priorato in Rome in the mid-1760s.13 This was the priory church of the Order of
the Knights of Malta whose grand prior, Cardinal Giambattista Battista Rezzonico,
was one of Piranesi’s chief sponsors. What we need to set against the isolated
nature of a project like this one, along with the never completed papal commission
to redesign the interior of San Giovanni in Laterano in accordance with the
interventions made by Francesco Borromini under Pope Innocent X, is what Rudolf
Wittkower called, in his classic essay, Piranesi’s “architectural creed.”14 That creed
was polemical. It emerged not in practice, not in things built, but in caustic writings
and an unprecedented graphic vividness that moored black and white and gray to
the urban endurance and terribilità of ancient Rome and that worked to revitalize,
or so Piranesi was determined to demonstrate, the architecture of his own century.
Piranesi’s belief in the restorative powers of the two-dimensional image appeared
in his first independent publication of 1743.15 The Prima Parte di Architetture, e
Prospettive served as a demonstration piece for a young architect aiming, on
the one hand, to publish “these inventions of mine,” and, on the other, to exhibit
knowledge of and mastery over perspectival systems, scenographic effects, and
the classical orders. Hence his depictions of an imaginary antique Roman forum,
a royal courtyard space, or a magnificent bridge with loggias search out difficulty
and serve as platforms for virtuosity. Stylishly angled perspectives—the scena per
angolo inherited from a Baroque scenographic tradition elaborated by Filippo
Juvarra and the Galli-Bibiena dynasty—that characterize many of the plates is, in
the case of the Roman forum, set off by the sunken, proscenium-like piazza in the
left central foreground around which everything rises. Such a plate is all about the
pleasure of witnessing architecture’s visual effects from appropriate distances and
vantages: the alternating rhythms and recessions of arched porticos seen from an
angle; the labyrinthine network delineated by the sharp corners of grand staircases
with different tread sizes; and the sheer accumulation of sculptural elements such
as circular fountains, rearing horses, decorative garlands, pedimental reliefs, and
crowning figures denoting a triumphalist public space.
The triumphalism expressed in images was justified by Piranesi in the Prima
Parte’s dedicatory letter of July 18, 1743, to the builder Nicola Giobbe to whom he
famously voiced his discontent about the state of architecture.16 The parochialism
of patrons, he maintained, had effectively silenced the architects of his century:
Therefore, having the idea of presenting to the world some of these images, but
not hoping for an architect of these times who could effectively execute some of
them—whether for fault of architecture itself, fallen from the highest perfection
to which it had risen in the period of the greatest splendor of the Roman Republic
and in the times of the all-powerful Emperors who succeeded it; or whether the
fault of those who should have been patrons of this most noble art. The fact is
that in our own time we have not seen buildings equaling the cost of a Forum
of Nerva, of an amphitheatre of Vespasian [Colosseum] or of a Palace of Nero;
therefore, there seems to be no recourse than for me or some other modern
architect to explain his ideas through his drawings...17
In the battle of the ancients and the moderns, Piranesi sided with the former. The
pictorial complexity resulting from this taking of sides not only served to bolster
his controversial championing of Roman over Greek models, but also placed
significant pressure on eighteenth-century interpretations of ancient history.
The explanation offered here of the Piranesian image does not entertain a
modernist or even postmodernist dimension. Suffice it to acknowledge that
there exists a venerable body of literature that sees in that image not simply a
manifestation of Counter-Enlightenment—of imagination trumping reason—but
also a forecasting of modernity as dystopia. The imaginary prisons, especially, have
secured a privileged place in an exegetical tradition leading from Aldous Huxley to
Marguerite Yourcenar and Manfredo Tafuri.18 In this tradition, the critical function
extrapolated from Piranesi’s carceral vision, for which the poetic reaction of English
and French Romantics paved the way, is comparable to the theoretical role played
by Walter Benjamin’s oft-cited formulation of allegory in German Trauerspiel as
“a petrified primordial landscape.”19 This same landscape came to characterize,
according to Susan Buck-Morss and others, “the decaying fragments of nineteenth-
century culture.”20 Piranesi’s Carceri and German Trauerspiel are works that have
been instrumentalized to anticipate a grim modernity.
Where Piranesi is concerned, this emphasis on a proleptic capacity is perhaps the
result of a tendency to view Tafuri’s “wicked architect” as anomalous in architectural
history in no small part because of his flat rejection of the Hellenocentrism that
came to dominate his century.21 Yet one wonders how the picture drama we search
out in Piranesi’s prisons might also have made its way into the vision of ancient
Rome, and, by extension, might have corresponded to a set of interests belonging
less to proto-modernist melancholia than to the eighteenth century proper. This
is the historical context that bore witness to the meeting of architecture and
antiquarianism, the rise of the architectural image in the cultural economy of the
Grand Tour, and the championing of ancient Roman engineering. Of particular

significance are the connections between the architecture of the remote past
and competing interpretations of history, which are found in the works of
philosophers such as Vico, whose New Science offered arguments about the
multiple origins of culture: of historians such as Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon,
whose interpretations of the Roman Empire relied on an evolutionary scheme; and
antiquarians such as Antonio Francesco Gori, whose study of Etruscan artifacts
stressed the importance of archaeological and linguistic evidence for formulating
historical explanations. Thus if Etruscan alternatives to Greece emerged with
Piranesi as Lola Kantor-Kazovsky has emphasized in her important monograph,
this was due both to biographical circumstances and venerable debate.22 Piranesi’s
early education in Venice, John Wilton-Ely and Lionello Puppi remind us, was
marked by his uncle Matteo Lucchesi, an architect involved in the official oversight
of harbor works; he introduced Piranesi to Lodoli’s intellectual circle and “to the
debate regarding the Etruscan roots of Italic culture as well as to the achievements
of ancient Roman technology.”23 And as the classical historiographer Arnaldo
Momigliano established, the interaction between antiquarians and historians in
the late seventeenth century paved the way for discussion about the historical
project more generally: its ostensive duty to record, serve as moral arbiter, have
a predictive function, uncover the unfolding of human progress, and construct
connections between past, present, and future.24
Given a potential engagement with this kind of thinking, how do we decipher
the compositional complexities of the Piranesian image? To begin with, there
is archaeology. Take the four volumes of Le Antichità Romane, which secured
Piranesi’s international reputation as an antiquarian (he was invited, one year
after its publication to become honorary fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of
London). Piranesi’s volumes were the result of nearly a decade of archaeological
excavation and study, and in order to convey the relevance of his discoveries, he
outlined in his preface a set of guiding principles. Wilton-Ely has summarized them
as follows: that recording external features was not enough; that what survived
only partially or had entirely disappeared needed to be reconstructed by means
of conjectural plans; and that the sources of antiquity needed to be consulted.25
Hence visual information appears in a wide range of images, including ruins,
fragments, plans, sections, diagrams, and maps. Indeed, as Wilton-Ely has pointed
out, the work’s structuring device—the second plate of the first volume, which
offers a plan surrounded by fragments of the Severan Marble Plan of Rome—“relies
directly on antique sources.”26 The image thus acquires the capacity to function
as a topographical index for the whole project, an image-clé in which medieval
and modern Rome have been elided to make way for the ruins of ancient Rome
and their relation to the Tiber river and the seven hills. The truth claim of Piranesi’s
topography rests on its association with what surrounds it; his map is made to look
like a substantial fragment at the center of other “real” and “venerable” fragments,
and therefore is itself “real” and “venerable.”
Many of the plates of Le Antichità Romane are technical in aspect all the while
relying on the fundamental pictoriality of inventive presentation. For example,
the reconstructions in plate LIII of the third volume, which shows how wedges,
grappling irons, heavy rope, and pulleys were used to move huge stone blocks,
relies on both an explanatory caption and the trompe l’oeil effect provided by three
scrolled etchings illustrating the process of construction of the circular drum of
the Augustan Mausoleum of Cecilia Metella or so-called Capo di Bove (ie. oxhead, a
reference to the bucranes decorating the festoons of its frieze) on the Appian Way.
Other plates, such as the depiction of the foundations of the Theatre of Marcellus,
combine observation with sound guesswork as Nicholas Penny has emphasized:
the “L” at the top of the plate indicates an extant pilaster marking the ground floor
of the structure; whether Piranesi actually excavated far enough down to discover
the drain marked “F” is up for discussion; as for the tight mass of piles supporting
the solid blocks or peperini marked “B,” this is pure speculation although “presented,”
as Penny wryly observed, “with absolute conviction.”27
Then, there is architecture. Piranesi’s knowledge of form acquired through
examinations of ruins and fragments eventually yielded a radically eclectic
approach to architectural design in which a wide range of building types and
an accumulation of ornament selected from a diverse set of sources (Egyptian,
Etruscan, Greek, and Roman) are combined to articulate imaginary structures and
monumental urban fantasies. The study of Piranesi’s works remains marked by the
broader problem of how this eclecticism relates more generally to Enlightenment
debates over the historical origins of culture. There is no definitive answer to such
an open-ended question, but some preliminary responses can be formulated. The
responses stem from the pictures themselves and the way they conflate radically
opposed epistemological tendencies: the purported objectivity of archaeology is
signposted just as prominently as the exaggerations of an invented architecture;
faithful observation and an evocation of what exists share page space with
imagination and complete fabrication; truth and myth stand side by side, and even,
one might propose, crucially depend on each other’s formal mechanisms.
The responses also stem from one of the more compelling and still as yet least
explored avenues of enquiry: the various links to be made with Vico’s philosophy of
history. To begin with, the connections to be drawn between the world-historical
views presented by Piranesi and Vico, respectively, are located principally in the
shared conviction that Rome’s development was the result of an autonomous
evolution that attested to its greatness. As Momigliano explained, Vico was “anxious
to sever” ties that “seemed to connect early Rome with distant Greece.”28 The
autonomy of Rome, for Vico, meant construing the Twelve Tables, the foundation
of Roman law, as the epic achievement of archaic society; as he stated in the third
and last edition of the New Science (1744), “all Roman law was a serious poem,
represented by the Romans in the Forum, and ancient jurisprudence was a severe
poetry.”29 The autonomy of Rome, for Vico, also offered the means for stressing the
parallel development of nations over and against the migration of primitive peoples
and the cross-fertilization of cultures, and hence for demonstrating the universal
nature of historical development. What “is essential to his argument,” as Momigliano
proposed, “is that Rome developed its early system of law independently of the
Greeks and that this system was mainly directed toward a progressive assimilation
of the plebeians—the ‘bestioni’—into the city of the patricians—the ‘eroi’.”30
If signs of class conflict in Vico’s interpretation of ancient Roman history came

to be understood as a precocious expression of Hegelian or Marxist dialectics,
it might be argued that similar signs can be detected in Piranesi’s plates. Vico’s
plebeians, as some have commented, were perhaps not so far removed from the
lazzaroni of his native Naples.31 Likewise, they bear resemblance to the unsavory
thespian characters inhabiting Piranesi’s ruins: those scavengers lurking on the
fringes of deep, dark, and mysterious places like the Emissarium of Lake Albano.
Pursuing this line of argumentation (and I won’t be) would mean grappling with
an odd coincidence: that in 1744, the year the final edition of the New Science was
published, Piranesi traveled to Naples where he completed a series of painted
studies of street figures.32 Of course, what prompted the trip in the first place
were the discoveries being made at Herculaneum, the point being that any vested
interest in class struggle ultimately remains a matter of debate as much in Vichian
scholarship as in art historical interpretations of Piranesi. Arguably far more relevant
is that the autonomy of Rome postulated by Vico extended, for Piranesi, from
civil liberties and legal codes to the metropolis itself. This was what Romans had
accomplished on their own and not inherited, in the manner of inferior copyists,
from the vanquished Greeks.
A second shared conviction stemmed from the first and had a more direct
impact on Piranesi’s understanding of the development of architectural forms
and structural typologies: that the proof of autonomy resided in the Etruscan
origins of Roman antiquity. As Piranesi proposed in the introductory essay to his
last polemical work, a 1769 treatise on decoration published in Italian, French,
and English entitled Divers Manners of Ornamenting Chimneys and All Other Parts
of Houses Taken from the Egyptian, Tuscan, and Grecian Architecture: “The Roman
and Tuscan were at first one and the same, the Romans learned architecture from
the Tuscans and made use of no other for many ages; … Must the Genius of our
artists be so basely enslaved to the Grecian manners, as not to dare to look to
take what is beautiful elsewhere, if it be not of Grecian origin?”33 The implications
of proposing Etruscan—that is to say, non-Greek—sources for Roman art and
architecture are not negligible. Renaissance antiquarian and aesthetic interest in
Etruscan civilization corresponded to early proto-nationalistic conceptualizations
of Italian culture, while the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the debate
over non-Greek cultural origins intensify as the result of major contributions. These
included Thomas Dempster’s multi-volume De Etruri Regali (a text dating from 1616
to 1619, published for the first time between 1723 and 1726 thanks to Thomas
Coke the Earl of Leicester): Anton Francesco Gori’s Museum Etruscum (1737–1743):
Giovanni Battista Passeri’s Dell’Etruria Omerica (1768); and Mario Guarnacci’s Origini
Italiche… (1767–1772).34
As for links between Piranesi’s aesthetics and Vico’s thinking, Maurizio Calvesi
drew connections between the prison etchings and a Vichian mythopoetic
interpretation of ancient history so as to underscore a shared exploration of
the “obscure sublime.”35 More recently, and still in the context of the exegetical
tradition of the philosophy of the sublime, Didier Laroque has set Piranesi’s
heroic conception of etching and architectural practice against the heroic spirit
of antiquity celebrated by Vico.36 Likewise, Gian Paolo Consoli has followed up

on studies by Rykwert, Emil Kaufmann, and others proposing that any Vichian
influence to be detected in Piranesi’s writings was linked to exposure, during his
youth in Venice, to the theories of Lodoli who integrated Vico’s views into an analysis
of architecture.37 Consoli has pushed the limits of previous scholarship by stressing
what he perceptively calls the “precocious historicism” shared by Vico, Lodoli, and
Piranesi. Relying on claims made by Vico, such as “the fact that the architecture of
the Etruscans is simpler than that of any other people affords weighty proof that
they had knowledge of geometry before the Greeks,” the rationalist Lodoli disputed
some of the fundamental assumptions of antiquarian thought by challenging
the classical principles of architectural design based on the orders.38 Lodoli, as
paraphrased by Francesco Algarotti, went so far as to insist that architecture should
conform to function and the very “essence … of the material,” a reneging on form
that led him to extol Etruscan stone construction, its functionality, its starkness, its
simplicity and weight.39
These are the qualities that continuously appear, by virtue of Piranesi’s own
obsession with the Roman technology of stone, in plates from Le Antichità Romane,
depicting, for example, the foundations of Hadrian’s Mausoleum or the remains of
bridge piers. There is evidence for thinking, in other words, that Piranesi may have
been familiar through Lodoli and his circle with the parallel linguistic arguments
presented in On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins
of the Latin Language (1710) in which Vico established the survival of Etruscan
words in Latin. Yet the linguistic search for sources seemed less convincing to those
who believed the evidence lay elsewhere, namely in monuments not words. Listen
to the way one interlocutor—this was likely the Cartesian Bernardino Trevisano
who held a chair in philosophy at the University of Venice—reprimanded Vico for
tracking down the wrong kind of evidence in a series of reviews appearing in the
Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia in 1711–12:
Finally, we beg that the erudite gentleman will, of his kindness, give us leave
to express our own feeling on the problem—which is that if he wanted to
investigate what the most ancient philosophy of Italy was, he should not have
tried to trace it in the origin and meaning of Latin words. This path is very
uncertain and beset with a thousand problems. He ought to have hunted it out by
unearthing and disinterring as far as possible the oldest monuments of ancient
Etruria, from which the Romans received the first laws respecting both the civil
government of their republic and the sacred rites of their religion.40
However, to suggest that monuments, not words, offered the correct interpretive
route was perhaps to miss the broader philosophical significance of a text in which
Vico fully elaborated his famous verum factum principle in ways that went beyond
its appearance in the works of seventeenth-century political philosophers such as
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and others. Verum et factum convertuntur, meaning
that the true and the made are interchangeable and that people know only what
they make. This became, Benedetto Croce reminds us, the guiding principle of the
New Science.41 If something is the result of human craft, then humans can know
it, and hence while the beginnings of civilization remain deeply obscure to us
moderns, we must analyze what archaic culture produced in order to understand
it. In this way, as Philippe Raynaud has remarked, Vico’s achievement “consists in
postulating the entire intelligibility of human history, considered as a work of the
spirit that the spirit can understand.”42
The repercussions of this thesis for architecture are, needless to say, potentially
enormous. Architecture was arguably the single most enduring, pervasive, and
visible sign of ancient Roman civilization by virtue of its material ubiquity, which
Piranesi purposefully sought to make as impressive as possible in any number
of plates (from the over-scaled interior of the Pantheon portico to the distended
ruined concavity of Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli). While Vico’s own approach was
linguistically based—in that it sought to reunite philology and philosophy—he
nonetheless likened the power of revelation contained in the language of Greek
epic poetry and Roman legislative decree to the power of revelation contained
in monumental vestiges. All of these were made, and, therefore, made to be
understood: “The great fragments of antiquity, hitherto useless to science because
they lay begrimed, broken, and scattered, shed great light when cleaned, pieced
together, and restored.”43
So it is hardly surprising that cleaning, piecing together, and restoring
gave rise to arguments over the truth or fiction of Etruscan sources for Roman
architecture. How was it made? And what did understanding structure say about
origins? Questions like these lay at the core of the Graeco-Roman controversy,
which set Piranesi as a rival to Philhellenes like Anne-Claude Philippe Comte de
Caylus whose seven-volume Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques
et romaines (1752–1767) outlined the evolution of art as a seamless sequence of
empires with Greece as apogee and Rome as downfall; theorists like Marc-Antoine
Laugier whose Essai sur l’architecture (1753) set Greek originality against Roman
artifice and trivialization; painters like Allan Ramsay whose “Dialogue on Taste”
(1755) saw decadence in things Roman; and, most pointedly, architects like Julien
David Le Roy whose Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758) posited
architecture as a Greek invention, meaning that anything Roman was derivative
and therefore second-rate. The various positions of the controversy have been well
studied, so there is no need to reiterate them here.44 Suffice it to say that Piranesi
emerged as the leading voice of opposition to any notion of Greek classicism’s
“noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” and that it was Le Roy’s work especially
that prompted the publication, in 1761, of Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’
Romani—a two-hundred-page polemical tract with some 38 plates steeped in
pictorial sarcasm.
Consider plate XI in which Piranesi surrounds a single Greek example depicted
by Le Roy—the ostensive archetype provided by column bases of the Erechtheion
at the Acropolis—with a multitude of counter-examples from Roman monuments
(Figure 10.5). The picture-in-a-picture effect, a sort of mise en abyme, is a dualistic
means of introducing two contradictory views of architectural form, Piranesi’s and
Le Roy’s, all the while undermining the latter. Piranesi selects out three column bases
from the middle section of plate XXXI from the first volume of Le Roy’s Ruines…
10.5 Plate XI, from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani, Rome, 1761. Typ 725.61.696 PF, Houghton Library, Harvard College
Library
(engraved by Jean-François de Neufforge). With part of the title made legible at the
top, Piranesi pins, as it were, the sheet on which the bases are shown up against
his own much larger sheet as a reminder that the illustrated example given by
the French architect is only paper-thin and so nothing much to look at. Even the
fictional, because depicted, two-dimensional support is given more substance than
the image on it. Striations, a curling border, and tacks casting shadows all suggest a
spatial presence that Piranesi’s deliberately minimalized version of Le Roy’s already
pared down outlines clearly do not have; the compositional logic of suspending
capitals above bases, the suggestion of three-dimensionality and shadow as well
as the careful notation of measurements in Le Roy’s original plate are simply edited
out. Set against and drowning out Le Roy’s linear and diminutive simplification of
form into mere outline is the whole of Piranesi’s illusionistic wrath, which leaps off
the page as substance, variety, graphic intensity, and ornamental inventiveness.
The strategy recurs throughout: in plate XVII, for instance, where the central
Le Roy example is drowned out by what surrounds it. Piranesi’s is an impressively
large fold-out sheet in which Roman decorative motifs showcase how carved stone
conjures up leaves, flowers, and fruit in a way that makes the Greek attempt at
naturalism seem weak and entirely rudimentary. Or, again, in plate XX, which is
a visual retort in the form of a conspicuously haphazard pastiche of details taken
from Le Roy’s explanation of the Ionic order as it is laid out between plates XVII and
XXI in Ruines… (Figure 10.6). Here, Piranesi’s cleverness lies in the way he iterates,
literally, Le Roy’s system of demonstration and at the same time subverts it. Note
Le Roy’s title, which appears yet again, and the citation in the center left looming
as epigraph above the capital from the Erechtheion portico: “Ionic capital of which
we have had until now no conception and that is superior to the most beautiful
examples of this order” [“Chapiteau ionique dont on n’a eu jusqu’ici aucune idée
et superieur à plusieurs égards aux plus beaux chapiteaux de cet ordre”]. The “most
beautiful examples,” so we surmise, are those Piranesi catalogues on either side.
They function in complete visual defiance of a second Le Roy citation that looms in
script above them: “The Ionic Capitals that one sees in Rome seem impoverished
and defective” [“Les chapiteaux Ioniques que l’on voit à Rome, paroissent pauvres et
defectueux”]. Piranesi’s response is to let image vanquish words. The composition of
the page is accordingly complex, with an illusionistic rendering of not one but two
sheets adapted from Le Roy—the smaller rolling up from its bottom edge in the
middle of the composition, the larger from the sides. The edges are meant to curl in
just like the volutes of the Ionic capital they exemplify only to suggest, figuratively
of course, the eventual disappearance and meaninglessness of Le Roy’s privileged
model. It is Piranesi’s order that is in order; showcasing the three-dimensionality
and decorative integrity of its items, the neat grid of ten examples—five to either
side—functions like parentheses blocking off the compositional and conceptual
muddle in the central zone.
The Graeco-Roman controversy escalated. The French retort to Piranesi was
a letter sent in November 1764 by the connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette in the
Gazette littéraire de l’Europe, which asserted that Roman art had been made by
Greek slaves. It was inevitable, in his view, that decline should have been signaled
10.6 Plate XX, from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani, Rome, 1761. Typ 725.61.696 PF, Houghton Library, Harvard College
Library
by subjugated hands and in productions overrun “by superfluous ornament. All

is sacrificed to luxury, and the result is a manner that rapidly becomes ridiculous
and barbaric.”45 Piranesi immediately replied, publishing in 1765 his three-part
Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette … with the first page half taken up,
as Wilton-Ely and others have noted, by a highly original Roman capital combining
sirens and dolphins ostensibly found in the courtyard of the Palazzo Gabrielli. The
next section of the tract, Parere su l‘Architettura, prompted Wittkower’s identification
of Piranesi’s “architectural creed,” champions innovation over tradition, and
includes plates, added after 1767, of the facades of monumental structures
(Figure 10.7). Those structures, complete make-believe, signpost a dramatic shift
in Piranesi’s own approach to design in which he abandons interest in the planar
brutalism of Etruscan and Roman stone work and instead gives himself over to
extravagant ornament, composite form, architectural fantasy and, ultimately, anti-
classicism. Gone are maps, plans, real buildings, hypothetical reconstructions, and
archaeological fragments. Gone too, as Wittkower pointed out, are entablatures
and cornices.46 There is not a single comprehensible sequence of elements in place.
Instead, we are confronted with orderless buildings, an architectural free-for-all,
and the total transgression of medium. Sculpture is entirely indistinguishable from
architecture, covering facades and celebrating the composite by combining motifs
from Greek and Etruscan vases, Egyptian sarcophagi, and Roman monuments.
The buildings, which are unidentifiable, unreadable, and absolutely original, are
meant to be that way. Hence the last defiant notes famously struck in the middle
of it all by the citations. In plate VIII, Le Roy: “So as not to make of this sublime
art form a vile occupation in which one does nothing but copy without choice”
[“Pour ne pas faire de cet art sublime un vil métier ou l’on ne fera que copier sans
choix”]. In plate IX, a citation from the Roman historian Sallust’s account of the
Jugurthine war, Bellum Jugurthinum: “They despise my novelty, I, their timidity”
10.7 Plate IX,

from Giovanni
Battista Piranesi,
Osservazioni di Gio.
Battista Piranesi
sopra la Lettre de M.
Mariette … Rome:
Per Generoso
Salomoni, 1765.
Typ 725.61.696 PF,
Houghton Library,
Harvard College
Library
[“Novitatem meam contemnunt, ego illorum ignaviam”]. Combining a polemicized

erudition with illusionistic prowess, Piranesi turns his knowledge of the art of the
past into a radically imaginative eclecticism. That such an approach was also that
of the ancient Romans is underscored in Jean-Joseph Rive’s Histoire critique de
la pyramide de Caïus Cestius (1787) in which Piranesi figures prominently as one
of the antiquarian authorities. “Art,” wrote Rive, “never prescribes anything but
the true and the beautiful: but artists with an exalted imagination often throw
themselves headlong by means of a giant step beyond the boundaries at which
perfection ceases to exist. The freneticism of invention prompts them to produce
monstrous works.”47 Rive, in other words, was suggesting that the “freneticism”
of the imagination might be the root cause of bad Roman art as opposed to
enslavement to a hallowed (Greek) origin. The distinction is important, for while
Piranesi embraced as the sign of genius the “monstrous works” Rive derided, the
latter’s comments provide an antiquarian setting for understanding eighteenth-
century valuations of inventive eclecticism in art.
What all this conveys is some sense of what it means for an artistic evolution
to take place through a polemically charged understanding of ancient history.
It is tempting to characterize Piranesi’s designs, on the one hand, as brokering
an exchange between memory (of observed ruins) and imagining (of fantastic
architecture), and, on the other hand, as ultimately opting for an art of the
composite. There are two passages in Vico’s On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the
Italians… that strike as deeply relevant to such a characterization of Piranesi’s
approach. The first has to do with his assertion in a section entitled “Memory and
Imagination” that
The Latins called the faculty that stores sense perceptions “memory”; when it
recalls perceptions they called it “reminiscence.” But memory also signified the
faculty that fashions images (which the Greeks call phantasy and the Italians
call immaginativa). For in ordinary Italian, Immaginare is equivalent to the
memorare of the Latins. Is this because we feign only what we remember and can
remember only what we perceive through the senses? Certainly, no painter has
ever painted any kind of plant or animal that nature has not produced.48
As Vico later concluded in the third edition of the New Science: “Imagination,
however, is nothing but the springing up again of reminiscences, and ingenuity
or invention is nothing but the working over of what remembered.”49 It is
precisely this idea of memory as an imaginative task that runs through Piranesi’s
understanding of what he is doing with ruins, and of what ruins are doing to him.
It is interesting, in this regard, that the artistic sequence of events Vico described is
quite literally spelled out in Piranesi’s 1769 treatise on ornament, which, as we saw
earlier, publicized the Etruscan roots of Roman form. Plate II from the treatise, for
instance, demonstrates the importance of small-scale, observed nature for formal
evolutions. The morphology of shells selected from the collection owned by the
malacologist and physician Niccolò Gualtieri ends up as the source for what Piranesi
called the ”knowledge of architecture, as well with respect to the whole, as to each
of the members and parts” exemplified in the stylized profiles and patterns found
in several ostensive Etruscan vases owned by Sir William Hamilton.50 The point is
neither to give credence to a tendentious relationship between shells and vases,
nor to argue for the organic metamorphosis of form. Rather, it is to stress that such
a plate stems from a way of thinking that, pushed a little, shifts our understanding
of the ruin’s mnemonic function. Vico and Piranesi are not nostalgic about remote
pasts or lost origins. They take the things we remember to be fundamentally
constructive and hinged in some essential way to making—making form, making
sense of history. Ruins thus emerge as doubly coded things, that is, as mechanisms
for remembering as well as for imagining.
A second relevant passage in Vico speaks forcefully to the philosophical value
of the composite, which, in the case of the Piranesian imaginary at least, means a
unique brand of radical eclecticism. “The mode of a composite object,” Vico writes,
is of necessity composite. For if the mode is the thing itself disposed in such and
such a way and if an extended thing has parts, then the mode of the extended
thing comprises the many parts arranged in this way. And in truth, a figure is a
composite mode because it consists of at least three lines. Place is a composite
mode because it consists of three dimensions. A position (situs) is a composite
mode because it is the relation (ratio) of two or more places. Time is a composite
mode because it involves two places, one of which stands still while the other is in
motion.51
The composite thus construed is as much a definition of art as it is a definition

of being and becoming. Things, figures, places, and times are all “composite,” and
one way to think about the peculiarity of art—of Piranesi’s art—is that it precisely
addresses the state of affairs in which the composite work evokes temporal and
spatial instabilities. That the ruin and the transmutation of form it implies might
emerge as a dynamic element whose composite aspect performs for its viewer the
very nature of things seems to be central to Piranesi’s sense of what ruins do. At
least that is what his pictures seem to propose. As Vico goes on to explain, “what
form is (i.e. could be) the property of each natural thing when something may be
added or subtracted at any moment? Therefore, a physical form is nothing but
the continuous change of the thing. Therefore, [the notion of ] perfect rest must
be entirely eliminated …”52 Therefore, one feels compelled to add, the ruin can
materialize as the very thing that eliminates that very notion.
There is much more we could extrapolate from this, and what is proposed
here in preliminary fashion is that any discussion of Vico and Piranesi needs to go
well beyond the mere fact of a focus on ancient Rome, a regurgitation of Lodoli’s
rationalism, or a widespread war of words over origins that left an indelible mark on
eighteenth-century antiquarianism. I have been trying to initiate an interpretation
that considers how Vichian thought might have some bearing on image-making
itself—or at least on the kind of image-making that brings together ruins,
histories, and formal ingenuity. If, as Donald Verene has claimed, “Vico’s thought
teaches the art of memory, the art of recovery; it recalls a capacity of mind that has
been left behind in Western philosophy,” then the same might be said Piranesi’s
images.53 One can, in fact, interestingly trace Piranesi’s unique combination of
archaeological reconstruction and composite invention back to a passage from

Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses:
It is a well-established fact that the life of all mundane things is of finite duration.
But things which complete a whole of the course appointed them by heaven
are in general those whose bodies do not disintegrate, but maintain themselves
in orderly fashion so that if there is no change; or if there be change, it tends
rather to their conservation than to their destruction. Here I am concerned with
composite bodies, such as are states and religious institutions, and in their
regard I affirm that those changes make for their conservation which lead them
back to their origins [le riducano inverso i principii loro]. Hence those are better
constituted and have a longer life whose institutions make frequent renovations
possible, or which are brought to such renovation by some event which has
nothing to do with their constitution, for it is clearer than daylight that, without
renovation, those bodies do not last.54
To claim some similarity between the Machiavellian view of the life of institutions
and the Piranesian construal of the vestiges of the past may seem far-fetched, but
the idea is to set the stage for an early modern histoire des mentalités that promotes
a composite understanding of bodies whose longevity rests on renovation, and
so is altogether different from Benjamin’s traumatized modern melancholia.
What we need to address is the way the Piranesian ruin prompts an imaginative,
because composite, renovation of things. And if ruins have anything to do with the
genesis of thought and culture, as Piranesi clearly thought they did, then let us
finish by returning to the beginning, to Füssli and to Piranesi, in the hopes that the
differences are clear.
Bibliography
Consoli, Gian Paolo, “Architecture and History: Vico, Lodoli, Piranesi,” in Mario Bevilacqua,
Heather Hyde Minor, Fabio Barry, eds., The Serpent and the Stylus: Essays on G.B. Piranesi
(Ann Arbor: Published for the American Academy in Rome by the University of
Michigan Press, 2006), 195–210.
Kantor-Kazovsky, Lola, Piranesi as Interpreter of Roman Architecture and the Origins of His
Intellectual World (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2006).
Kunze, Donald, Thought and Place: The Architecture of Eternal Place in the Philosophy of
Giambattista Vico (New York: Peter Lang, 1987).
Le Roy, Julien David, Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (Paris: H.-L. Guerin et
L.-F. Delatour, 1758), 2 vols.
Momigliano, Arnaldo, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315.
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani (Rome, 1761)
Tafuri, Manfredo, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to
the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
Vico, Giambattista, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Unabridged Translation of the Third
Edition (1744), trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell
Vico, Giambattista, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed From the Origins of
the Latin Language Including the Disputation with the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia, trans.
L. M. Palmer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
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Notes
1 This essay was originally published in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53/54 (Spring/
Fall, 2008): 152–165, and the editors of the present volume would like to thank
Francesco Pellizzi and the RES editorial board for permission to reprint it. The essay was
first given as a lecture at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan
in January 2005 and in the Daniel H. Silberberg lecture series at the Institute of Fine
Arts at NYU in October 2007. The author would like to thank Daniel Herwitz, Mark
Jarzombek, and Marvin Trachtenberg for their generous comments.
2 Translation cited in Dorothea Nyberg, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Drawings and Etchings
at Columbia University, exhibition catalog (New York, 1972), 117.
3 Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of
Renaissance Culture (New Haven, 1999), 119.
4 The title, Der Künstler, verzweifelnd vor der Grösse der antiken Trümmer, was given by
Gert Schiff, Johann Heinrich Füssli 1741–1825 (Zurich, 1973), 1, 665.
5 See Serena Ensoli, “I colossi di bronzo a Roma in età tardoantica: Dal Colosso di Nerone
al Colosso di Costantino. A proposito dei tre frammenti bronzei dei Musei Capitolini,” in
Serena Ensoli, Eugenio La Rocca, eds., Aurea Roma: Dalla città pagana alla città cristiana
(Rome, 2000), 66–90. Suzanne G. Lindsay, “Emblematic Aspects of Fuseli’s Artist in
Despair,” The Art Bulletin 68, 3 (September, 1986): 483–484, interprets the drawing as “a
symbolic self-portrait.”
6 Capitoline Museum, Rome, inv. NCE2385.
7 The inscription states that Cestius’s five heirs along with his brother, to whom Agrippa
had given his share of the inheritance, financed the statues and pedestals by selling
the luxurious fabrics they were not allowed to place in the tomb by virtue of an
aedile’s edict and in accordance with Cestius’s last will and testament: “M. VALERIUS.
MESSALLA. CORVINUS. P. RUTILIUS. LUPUS. L. JUNIUS. SILANUS. L. PONTIUS. MELA. D.
MARIUS. NIGER. HEREDES. C. CESTI. ET. L. CESTIUS. QUAE. EX PARTE. AD EUM. FRATIS.
HEREDITAS. M. AGRIPPAE. MUNERE. PER. VENIT. EX EA. PECUNIA QUAM PRO. SUIS.
PARTIBUS. RECEPER. EX VENDITIONE. ATTALICOR. QUAE. EIS. PER EDICTUM AEDILIS.
IN SEPULCRUM. C. CESTI. EX TESTAMENTO. EIUS. INFERRE. NON. LICUIT.” (Corpus
Inscriptionum Latinarum VI/1, no. 1375). The inscription on the second pedestal gives
the same information in a slightly different order. See A. E. Gordon, “Seven Latin
Inscriptions in Rome,” Greece & Rome 20, 59 (June, 1951): 79–80.
8 Important here is the “Discorso d’Ottavio Falconieri intorno alla piramide di C. Cestio
(1665),” in Famiano Nardini, Roma antica (Rome, 1666), 559–583. See Massimo
Pomponi, “Il restauro seicentesco della Piramide Cestia: Ricerche antiquarie e fortuna
delle pitture,” Xenia antiqua 2 (1993): 149–174; and Hetty Joyce, “Grasping at Shadows:
Ancient Paintings in Renaissance and Baroque Rome,” The Art Bulletin 74, 2 (June,
1992): 219–246.
9 As the Historia Augusta, trans. David Magie (Cambridge, MA, 1967–1968), 2, 442–443,
describes it: “There is also a villa of theirs on the Praenestine Way, with two hundred
columns in the inner court, fifty of them of Carystian marble, fifty of Claudian, fifty of
Phrygian, and fifty of Numidian—all of equal size. In this same house there were three
basilicas one hundred feet long and other things suitable to such a building, and there
were baths that could be equaled nowhere in the world save in the city as it was at
that time.” That the octagonal structure was perhaps the thermal bath is pointed out
by Charles C. Eldredge, “Torre dei Schiavi: Monument and Metaphor,” Smithsonian
Studies in American Art 1, 2 (Autumn, 1987): 20. See also Jocelyn M. C. Toynbee, Death
and Burial in the Roman World (Baltimore and London, 1996), 159–160.
10 See, in this regard, Lola Kantor-Kazovsky, “Displeasure of Ruins: Piranesi and the
Monuments of Ancient Rome,” Apollo 546 (September, 2007): 47–53, who has set
Piranesi’s images against the rise of neoclassical historicism and the eighteenth
century sentimental poetics of the ruin as defined by Denis Diderot, Jacques-Henri
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and Charles-Louis Clérisseau among others. Kantor-
Kazovsky’s Piranesi as Interpreter of Roman Architecture and the Origins of his Intellectual
World (Florence, 2006), is a remarkable study of Piranesi’s archaeological views and his
attacks on ancient Greece as the requisite frame of aesthetic reference expounded by
his contemporaries. See also Susan M. Dixon, “The Image and Historical Knowledge
in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Italy: A Cultural Context for Piranesi’s Archaeological
Publications,” Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, New York, 1991.
11 On the nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet’s “discovery” of Vico, see Edmund
Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940;
New York, 2003), 5–8. See also Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern
Historiography (Chicago, 2003), 36–90; Antonio Verri, Vico e Herder nella Francia della
Restaurazione (Ravenna, 1984); and Benvenuto Donati, Notes sur Vico. Souvenirs
d’une lecture dans les archives de Jules Michelet (Rome, 1922). Directly in the wake of
the French revolution, Vico’s views were instrumentalized in the name of political
conservatism by such traditionalists as Joseph de Maistre; see Elio Gianturco, “Joseph
de Maistre and Giambattista Vico,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1937.
12 Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge,
MA, 1983), 282. As John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi
(London, 1978), 45, has observed: “Vico’s seminal treatise Scienza Nuova (1725), while
obscure for the greater part and of delayed impact in its time, is indicative of new
preoccupations with cultural history.” On the Venetian reception of Vico’s ideas, see
Cesare de Michelis, Gilberto Pizzamiglio, eds., Vico e Venezia (Florence, 1982).
13 On the Aventine commission, see Barbara Jatta, ed., Piranesi e l’Aventino (Milan, 1998);
Manfredo Tafuri, “Il complesso di Santa Maria del Priorato sull’Aventino,” in Alessandro
Bettagno, ed., Piranesi: Incisioni, Rami, Legature, Architetture, exhibition catalogue
(Vicenza, 1978), 78–87; John Wilton-Ely, “Piranesian Symbols on the Aventine,” Apollo
103 (March, 1976): 214–227; Carlo Bertelli, “Visita a Santa Maria del Priorato,” Paragone
27, 317–319 (July/September, 1976): 180–188; Rudolf Wittkower, “Piranesi as Architect,”
in Robert O. Parks, Piranesi, exhibition catalogue (Northampton, MA, 1961), 99–109,
republished in Rudolf Wittkower, Studies in the Italian Baroque (London, 1975),
247–258; Heinrich Brauer, “Gio. Batt. Piranesi verwirklicht einen Traum: Eine Zeichnung
zum St. Basilius-Altar in Sta. Maria del Priorato,” in Miscellanea Bibliothecae Hertzianae
(Munich, 1961), 474–477; Giulio Pediconi, “Un particolare piranesiano: L’altare
maggiore di Santa Maria del Priorato,” Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura
15 (1956): 15–16; Gustavo Brigante Colonna, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi e la chiesa del
Priorato sull’Aventino,” Rivista illustrata del Sovrano Militare Ordine di Malta VI (1942):
8–11; Werner Körte, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi als praktischer Architekt,” Zeitschrift für
Kunstgeschichte 2, 1 (1933): 16–33.
14 Rudolf Wittkower, “Piranesi’s ‘Parere su l’architettura’,” Journal of the Warburg Institute
2 (1938–1939): 147–158, republished as “Piranesi’s Architectural Creed,” in Wittkower,
Studies, 235–246. See also Lorenza Cochetti, “L’opera teorica di Piranesi,” Commentari 6,
1 (1955): 35–49. On the Lateran commission, see especially Nyberg, Piranesi: Drawings
and Etchings, 13–67. See also Bent Sørensen, “Two Overlooked Drawings by Piranesi
for S. Giovanni in Laterano in Rome,” The Burlington Magazine 143, 1180 (July, 2001):
430–433; Fabio Barry, “San Giovanni che non c’è: La strategia piranesiana per il coro
di San Giovanni in Laterano,” in Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Elisabeth Sladek, eds.,
Francesco Borromini (Milan, 2000), 458–463; John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi as Architect and
Designer (New Haven, CT, 1993), 63–85; Joseph Connors, John Wilton-Ely, Piranesi
Architetto, exhibition catalog (Rome, 1992); and Manfred F. Fischer, “Die Umbaupläne
des Giovanni Battista Piranesi für den Chor von S. Giovanni in Laterano,” Münchner
Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 19 (1968): 207–228.
15 See Andrew Robison, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Prolegomena to the Princeton
Collection,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 31, 3 (Spring, 1970): 165–206;
Johannes Erichsen, “Eine Zeichnung zu Piranesis ‘Prima Parte’,” Pantheon 34, 3 (1976):
212–216; Jörg Garms, “Considérations sur la Prima parte,” in Georges Brunel, ed.,
Piranèse et les Français (Rome, 1978), 265–280. See also Andrew Robison, Piranesi, Early
Architectural Fantasies: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Etchings (Washington, DC, 1986),
12–25.
16 See Georges Brunel, “Recherches sur les débuts de Piranèse à Rome: Les frères
Pagliarini et Nicola Giobbe,” in Brunel, Piranèse et les Français, 77–146; and Carlo
Bertelli, “Le parlanti rovine: Lettera di Piranesi a Nicola Giobbe,” Grafica grafica 2, 2
(1976), 90–116.
17 Nyberg, Piranesi: Drawings and Etchings, 117.
18 Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from
Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Conolly (Cambridge,
MA, 1987), 25–64; Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays,
trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1984), 88–128; and Aldous Huxley, Prisons: With
the “Carceri” Etchings by G. B. Piranesi (London, 1949). As this essay does not treat the
prison etchings and their voluminous bibliography, I refer the reader to Norbert Miller,
Archäologie des Traums: Versuch über Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Munich and Vienna,
1978); and Ulya Vogt-Göknil, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Carceri (Zürich, 1958).
19 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London,
1998), 166. On the early nineteenth-century canonization of the prison etchings, see
Erika Naginski, “Romanticism’s Piranesi,” in Christy Anderson, ed., The Built Surface,
Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, 1 (London, 2002),
237–259.
20 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
21 Robin Middleton’s review essay, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778),” Journal
of the Society of Architectural Historians 41, 4 (December, 1982): 333–344, remains
indispensable.
22 Kantor-Kazovsky, Piranesi as Interpreter, 143–192.
23 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette with Opinions
on Architecture, and a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and Progress of
the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times, int. John Wilton-Ely, trans. Caroline Beamish
and David Britt (Los Angeles, 2002), 2. See Lionello Puppi, “Appunti sulla educazione
veneziana di Giambattista Piranesi,” in Alessandro Bettagno, ed., Piranesi tra Venezia e
l’Europa (Florence, 1983), 217–264.
24 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950): 285–315. See also Francis Haskell, “The Dialogue
Between Antiquarians and Historians,” History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation
of the Past (New Haven, 1993), 159–200; and Hanns Gross, “Antiquarianism and
Neoclassicism,” in Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and
the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, UK, 1990), 310–330.
25 Wilton-Ely, Mind and Art, 48.
26 On the marble plan, see Gianfilippo Carettoni et al., La pianta marmorea di Roma antica:
Forma urbis Romae (Rome, 1960).
27 Nicholas Penny, Piranesi (London, 1978), 69.
28 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Vico’s Scienza nuova: Roman ‘Bestioni’ and Roman ‘Eroi’,” History
and Theory 5, 1 (1966): 18.
29 The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744),
trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY, 1984), 390.
30 Momigliano, “Vico’s Scienza nuova,” 18.
31 Melissa Calaresu, “Images of Ancient Rome in Late Eighteenth-Century Neapolitan
Historiography,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58, 4 (October, 1997): 641–661, has
examined Vico’s reception in the late Neapolitan Enlightenment as well as the
interpretation of ancient Rome history in the writings of Gaetano Filangieri, Giuseppe
Maria Galanti, and Francesco Mario Pagano.
32 Henri Focillon, Giovanni-Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) (Paris, 1918), 46–48, was one of
the first to stress the importance of this trip, which was recorded in the biography by
the eighteenth century architect Jacques-Guillaume Legrand, “Notice sur la vie et les
ouvrages de J.B. Piranesi …,” reprinted in Nouvelles de l’estampe 5 (1969): 195.
33 John Wilton-Ely, ed., Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The Polemical Works. Rome 1757, 1761,
1765, 1769 (Farnborough, Hampshire, 1972), 15, 33.
34 On Dempster, see especially Robert Leighton, Celine Castelino, “Thomas Dempster
and Ancient Etruria: A Review of the Autobiography and De Etruria Regali,” Papers
of the British School at Rome 58 (1990): 337–352; Mauro Cristofani, “Sugli inizi
dell’“Etruscheria.” La pubblicazione del De Etruria Regali di Thomas Dempster,”
Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 90 (1978): 577–625; and A. M. Crìno, “Inediti su
alcuni contatti Tosco-Britannici nel Seicento,” English Miscellany 12 (1961): 147–209.
The assessment of the history of Etruscology from the Renaissance onwards makes up
a major portion of Massimo Pallottino, Les Etrusques et l’Europe, exhibition catalogue
(Paris, 1992). See also Maria Giovanna Rak et al., Bibliotheca etrusca: Fonti letterarie e
figurative tra XVIII e XIX secolo nella Biblioteca dell’Istituto nazionale di archeologia e storia
dell’arte, exhibition catalogue (Rome, 1986). The influence of Etruscan architecture
on the classical tradition is studied in Gabriele Morolli, “Vetus Etruria”: Il mito degli
Etruschi nella letteratura architettonica nell’arte e nella cultura da Vitruvio a Winckelmann
(Florence, 1985).
35 As Maurizio Calvesi, Giovanni Battista e Francesco Piranesi, exhibition catalog (Rome,

1968), 19, put it: “… l’analogia con lo stile del Vico maturo, oscuro e volutamente
confuso, torbidamente balenante, rapito, teso al recupero del mito e di una barbarica
fantasia è abbastanza … si può pensare ad una influenza su Piranesi della poetica del
Vico scrittore, ad una sua incidenza nella formazione del sublime piranesiano. … Al
sublime ‘chiaro’ del Winckelmann, basato sulla Grazia, si contrappone decisamente
il sublime oscuro del Piranesi e del Vico.” See also his introduction to Henri Focillon,
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, trans. Giuseppe Guglielmi (French ed. 1963; Bologna, 1967),
v–xlii. The iconographic resonance of Vichian thought has likewise been explored
by Susan M. Dixon, “Piranesi and Francesco Bianchini: Capricci in the Service of
Pre-scientific Archaeology,” Art History 22, 2 (1999): 184–213. See also Robert James
Aitken, “Piranesi-Vico-Il Campo Marzio: Foundations and the Eternal City,” M. Arch.
thesis, McGill University, Montreal, 1995; and Donald Kunze, Thought and Place: The
Architecture of Eternal Place in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (New York, 1987).
36 Didier Laroque, Le discours de Piranèse: L’ornement sublime et le suspens de l’architecture
(Paris, 1998), 32–34.
37 Gian Paolo Consoli, “Architecture and History: Vico, Lodoli, Piranesi,” in Mario
Bevilacqua, Heather Hyde Minor, Fabio Barry, eds., The Serpent and the Stylus: Essays on
G.B. Piranesi (Ann Arbor, MI, 2006), 195–210; Diana Bitz, “Architettura Lodoliana: Topical
Mathematics as Architecture,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1992; Joseph
Rykwert, “Lodoli on Function and Representation,” Architectural Review 160 (July, 1976):
21–26; Edgar Kaufmann Jr., “Memmo’s Lodoli,” The Art Bulletin 46 (1964): 159–175; Emil
Kaufmann, “Piranesi, Algarotti, and Lodoli (A Controversy in XVIII. Century Venice),”
Gazette des beaux arts 97 (July, 1955): 21–28; and Emil Kaufmann, “At an Eighteenth-
Century Crossroads: Algarotti vs. Lodoli,” The Journal of the American Society of
Architectural Historians 4, 2 (April, 1944): 23–29.
38 Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed From the
Origins of the Latin Language Including the Disputation with the Giornale de’ letterati
d’Italia, trans. L. M. Palmer (Ithaca, 1988), 39.
39 Francesco Algarotti, “Saggio soppra l’Archittetura (1756),” in Opere del Conto Algarotti, 2
(Livorno, 1764–1765), 66.
40 Vico, Ancient Wisdom, 149.
41 As Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood
(Italian ed., 1911; New Brunswick and London, 2002), 5, explained: “… the universal
principal of his theory of knowledge, that the condition under which a thing can
be known is that the knower should have made it, that the true is identical with the
created: verum ipsum factum.” See also Peter Burke, Vico (New York, 1985), 79.
42 Giambattista Vico, La science nouvelle (1725), trans. Christina Trivulzio (1844; Paris:
Gallimard, 1993), 14: “…consiste à postuler l’entière intelligibilité de l’histoire humaine,
considérée comme une oeuvre de l’esprit que l’esprit peut comprendre.”
43 Vico, New Science, 106.
44 See especially Wittkower, Studies. See also John Wilton-Ely, “The Art of Polemic:
Piranesi and the Graeco-Roman Controversy,” in Philippe Boutry et al., eds., La Grecia
antica: Mito e simbolo per l’età della grande rivoluzione (Milan, 1991), 121–130; Nikolaus
Pevsner, Susan Lang, “The Doric Revival,” in Nikolaus Pevsner, Studies in Art, Architecture
and Design (London, 1968), 1, 197–211.
45 Pierre-Jean Mariette, “Lettre de M. Mariette aux auteurs de la Gazette littéraire de
l’Europe,” Gazette littéraire de l’Europe, Supplément (November 4, 1764), 239, cited in
Piranesi, Observations, 35, 71, n. 65: “… d’ornements superflus et absolument hors

d’oeuvre. On sacrifie tout au luxe, et l’on se rend à la fin partisan d’une manière qui ne
tarde pas à devenir ridicule et barbare.”
46 Wittkower, Studies, 242.
47 Jean-Joseph Rive, Histoire critique de la pyramide de Caïus Cestius (Paris: Didot, 1787),
3: “L’art ne prescrit jamais que le vrai et le beau: mais des artistes d’une imagination
exaltée s’élancent souvent par un saut de géant au-delà des bornes où la perfection
s’arrête. La frénésie de l’invention leur fait produire des ouvrages monstrueux.”
48 Vico, Ancient Wisdom, 95–96.
49 Vico, New Science, 264.
50 Piranesi, Polemical Works, 20.
53 Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s Science of the Imagination (Ithaca, 1981), 33. Laroque,
Le discours de Piranèse, 61–64, has likewise stressed this idea of remembrance as
invention by invoking Kantian philosophy, Freudian psychoanalysis, and the writings
of the contemporary French author Pascal Quignard.
54 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. L. J. Walker and Brian
Richardson (London, 1983), 385.
11
Architectural Asceticism and Austerity
Didem Ekici
As to the problems of architecture, it is more interesting to note

cycles—series of things—rather than individual works of architects.
The historic cycle tells us more than stylistic taxonomies.
—Manfredo Tafuri, “There Is No Criticism, Only History”1
Throughout its history, the capitalist development has been prone to cyclical
crises. Architectural production, which is inextricably bound up with capitalism,
has followed its cycles of growth and contraction. Moreover, since the 1970s,
architecture has been increasingly instrumental in the development of many
financial crises. Several of these crises, including the current one, have been caused
by the speculative financing of property and urban development.2 Hence in the
wake of the current crisis, critics were quick to blame the profligacy of architecture
in recent decades.
The economic boom that started in the 1990s led to debt-financed urbanization
projects all over the world. The speculative urban development was fuelled by the
“iconic” architecture which branded neighborhoods, cities, and regions; a process
dubbed as the “Bilbao Effect” after Frank Gehry’s famous Guggenheim museum
opened in Bilbao in 1997. Since the construction bubble burst in 2008, the Bilbao
Effect has served as an uncanny reminder of Spain’s regional governments’ lavish
spending on grand projects, which has brought the economy to the brink.3 In
Spain and elsewhere, such iconic buildings were trusted to celebrity architects,
or “starchitects” as they came to be known. They included architects like Zaha
Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Meier, Norman Foster, Jacques Herzog, and Pierre
de Meuron.
As one critic put it, in these projects, the mantra of zealous modern architects
of the 1930s, “form follows function,” gave way to a new mantra, “form follows
fancy.”4 In the context of advanced capitalism, the sheer quantity of production
and waste has increased constantly. The consumerist excess has been translated
into architecture in the luxury residential high-rises, shiny office towers, high-end
hotels, and sprawling shopping malls. It is not only the formal excesses of these
buildings that have been criticized, but also their lack of a social agenda. In the
words of New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, as luxury residential
high-rises, high-end boutiques, and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo,
and Dubai multiplied, “more socially-conscious projects rarely materialized. Public
housing, a staple of twentieth century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda.
Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure.”5 This has been an ongoing
trend since the mid-1970s. The global property market crash in Spring 1973 and the
following oil crisis spelled the end of the public-sector architecture. As architectural
historian Jonathan Charley has shown, the advent of neo-liberalism in the US and
UK gave rise to speculative building developments by the private sector.6
Today, critics argue that after having been dizzied by the economic boom,
the architectural discipline will be once again sober during the recession. Their
reference to twentieth-century Modernism is significant because like many others,
in their call for a new modesty, they tap into a discourse of architectural asceticism
that runs throughout the twentieth century, as epitomized in Mies van der Rohe’s
famous dictum “less is more.”
This essay examines the emergence of architectural asceticism in the capitalist
economy by focusing on the musings of architectural ascetics in early twentieth-
century Germany. Architectural asceticism first emerged as a reaction to the
commodification of architecture in the late nineteenth century.7 Reform-minded
architects and critics called for eliminating the formal excesses of historicist
architecture. The economic breakdown in the aftermath of the First World War
not only strengthened the desire to simplify architecture, but also revealed the
contradictions within ascetic discourse. The debates in the early twentieth century
have taken on a new resonance amidst the contemporary criticism of iconic
architecture.
Asceticism as a Reaction to Industrial Capitalism
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber traces the origins
of modern capitalism to the ascetic work ethic of Protestantism. Weber observes
that Protestant Reformation triggered a new concept of Christian asceticism,
which was carried out of monastic cells into urban life. In the seventeenth century,
Puritans combined a new appreciation of worldly profit with a religiously inspired
asceticism.8 As the Protestant ethic spread over several countries, the accumulation
of wealth gradually led to a capitalist economy that was anti-ascetic. Yet according
to historians Evert Peeters, Leen Van Molle, and Kaat Wils, the rise of capitalism did
not render asceticism obsolete, but stimulated it.9
The nineteenth century was characterized by new forms of impoverishment
and wealth brought about by industrialization and the accumulation of capital.
Germany underwent an economic boom period in the so-called Gründerjahre
during the late 1860s and early 1870s. The general expansion of industry and
rapid urbanization resulted in the formation of new wealthy middle-classes and
impoverished working classes. Conspicuous consumption and luxury became
evident in wealthier middle-class households.
From the 1880s onwards, reform-minded members of the educated middle
class, the Bildungsbürgertum, advocated simplification in design under the banner
of realism and later Sachlichkeit.10 By about 1890, reformers in applied arts and
domestic spheres were gathered in the loosely formed Kunstgewerbe reform,
which was inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement. Wilhelmine reformers
believed that aesthetics would play a key role in modernizing the nation. The
middle-class dwelling was at the center of design reform. Reformist artists and
Architectural Asceticism and Austerity 207
architects looked back to the early nineteenth century, an era known as Biedermeier,
for the ideal simple burgher house. The Biedermeier era was seen as the time when
the very notion of bourgeois emerged in Germany.11
Reformers argued that an ascetic house would improve the physical and moral
well-being of its inhabitants. In a 1901 article, Hermann Muthesius, a leading
architect in the Kunstgewerbe reform, called for clearing out the clutter of the
nineteenth-century bourgeois homes: “We need bright and clean rooms without
clutter or dust catchers, with smooth and simple furniture that is easy to clean and
move, a room that is airy and openly arranged.”12 The advantages of plain interiors
were expressed in terms of new design criteria including hygiene, health, comfort,
and functionality.
Removing the clutter from the middle-class house was at the same time a moral
act. As historian Warren Breckman has shown, luxury was a widely debated topic
at the time. Bourgeois authors often warned against the corrupting effects of
luxury consumption on middle-class identity. They criticized what they called the
“parvenu style” and waged a war against surrogates. Brazen shows of wealth were
contrasted with the essential qualities of the educated middle-class: self-restraint
and Bildung, or personal cultivation.13
Historicist buildings were also identified with the parvenu style. Dutch architect
Hendrik Petrus Berlage assigned what he dubbed sham architecture to the
commercialization of architecture brought on by capitalism. He wrote in 1905:
“In the long list of sins resulting from the domination of finance capital, one sin is
preeminent: the attachment of value to appearance rather than reality.”14 Unlike
aristocracy, one’s status within the middle-class was not based on blood ties, but
on appearances. The parvenu style compensated for the insecurity felt by the
middle class.15
Asceticism, Economic Crisis, and Austerity
The tendency toward simplicity in domestic spaces strengthened after the First
World War. The catastrophe of war radically altered the conditions of architectural
practice. Due to the unprecedented inflation, construction costs dramatically
increased and housing shortages became acute. In 1923, inflation escalated to
hyperinflation, eventually leading to the collapse of the German currency. This
process resulted in the impoverishment of large segments of the population as
well as a massive redistribution of wealth. Lower-income groups suffered less than
higher-ranking professionals and civil servants because the wages of the latter
sank considerably more in value.16
In the midst of the economic breakdown, reformers and architects from both
ends of the political spectrum called for embracing post-war poverty to advance
simplification in design. In 1921, Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz (The German League
for the Protection of the Homeland) published a book entitled Lob der Armut (In
Praise of Poverty), which included texts by critics Will Vesper and Paul Fechter. The
league emerged in 1904 as a moderate bourgeois reform movement dedicated to
the preservation of Germany’s architectural heritage and environment. It, however,

became increasingly conservative in the politically polarized years of Weimar.17
In the introduction, the league’s director, architect Werner Lindner declared that
poverty, carried with a quiet pride, would be the basis of the post-war rebuilding
process. He argued that poverty of Germany could be transformed into “an
architectonic virtue.”
In the following pages, Fechter claimed that the new poverty would force
architects to Sachlichkeit and sobriety, “Who can build something at all, will be
happy to build a basic simple house with four walls.”18 He continued, “The much
lamented poverty liberates us all at once from the search of façade decoration.
It forces builders to objectivity and sobriety and encourages the use of modest
and cheaper materials instead of surface ornament.”19 The prospective tenants will
be drawn to dwellings not because of their extensive decoration, but because of
their spatial qualities, clean lines, and the comfort they provide. For Fechter, those
were the qualities that would free the country from generations of bombardment
of ornament.
While Fechter praised architect Adolf Loos as a pioneer of the pre-war era who
argued in vain for a voluntary renunciation of excessive decoration and ornament,
he played down the role of the Kunstgewerbe reform in pushing toward Sachlichkeit.
He rejected the idea that the war simply accelerated a process that was already
underway. Despite the intentions of the Kunstgewerbe reform, Fechter wrote, a
visitor who had been to the 1914 Werkbund Cologne exhibition and Darmstadt
exhibition would see how the movement was seized by capitalist forces and
had become materialist. He viewed these exhibitions as showcases of luxurious
materials such as high-quality wood, fine leather, expensive fabrics, and bronze.
Although the Kunstgewerbe reform promoted sachlich form, it was obscured by the
effects created by expensive materials. The war, however, changed this situation
by turning wealth into poverty. One could no longer use luxurious materials
recklessly, but had to use what was at hand in an economic and intelligent manner.
The pretentious material effects of the pre-war years could finally be replaced by
sensible sachlich form.20
The idea of poverty as a form of moral restraint in the capitalist economy can be
traced back to French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Responding to the instability of
capitalism, Durkheim argued in Suicide (1897) that economic fluctuations caused
a lack of moral guidance in society, a condition which Durkheim called anomie.
He claimed that wealth, by stimulating human desires, carries with it dangers of
anomic conditions, while poverty protects against anomie because it is a restraint
in itself.21 “The less one has,” Durkheim wrote, “the less he is tempted to extend
the range of his needs indefinitely.”22 In capitalist society, according to Durkheim,
poverty kept the potentially infinite spiral of human desire under control.
Similarly, Vesper declared wealth a disease that spread not only to the body of
the nation, but to all occidental people. As Germany became poor, he claimed, it can
perhaps heal itself from that sickness.23 In the aftermath of the war, the animosity
toward the excessive wealth industrial capitalism had created became more visible.
Throughout the 1920s, the most widely read book was Oswald Spengler’s Decline
of the West (1918), which claimed that money played a central role in the decline of
cultures. Spengler argued that in modern civilizations, the increasing importance
of money led to rationalization, which marked the last stage in a culture’s decline.
Fechter also claimed that culture declined in a materialist society. He wrote that
it was a common mistake to believe that the flourishing of culture always overlaps
with the increase in prosperity. To prove his point, he compared the Roman Empire
to Biedermeier Germany: the Roman Empire allegedly left an embarrassing cultural
heritage despite its splendour, whereas the modest Biedermeier era produced
important cultural figures such as Goethe, Beethoven, Schiller, and Kant. Fechter
concluded, “Geld and Geist seem to repel each other.”24 Bernd Widdig has argued
that the perceived attack of Geld on Geist, that is, the attack of the material world on
the world of ideas, was an essential aspect of German culture during the inflation
period.25 The Geld versus Geist dichotomy was also central to the Wilhelmine
reformers’ criticism of the parvenu style in the pre-war era. The devaluation of Geld
in the wake of war destroyed the economic status of the educated middle classes.
They become increasingly insecure and started to question their role in society.
The discussions about the role of the educated middle classes point to a
broader political and cultural break with the past. As Widdig has shown, the post-
war inflationary period invalidated many traditional values resulting in the final
breakdown of nineteenth century culture. The cultural dominance of the educated
bourgeoisie came to an end, and a new economically driven modern mass culture
began to emerge.26 Fechter acknowledged the transformation in his comparison of
the Biedermeier era with his own times: “All the exemplary buildings built around
1800 are designed by individuals for individuals, whereas the problem today is that
there is a colossal mass waiting at the gates for its share of life and beauty despite
the poverty of the nation.” Wilhelmine reformers regarded the Biedermeier house
as the epitome of middle-class culture and a model for domestic reform (Figure
11.1). Yet after the war, it lost its relevance as the challenge was, in Fechter’s words,
“no longer to build individual houses, but thousands of dwellings with modest
means and materials.”27 The masses became the subject and object of modern
architecture.
The German economy stabilized in 1924 with the American government’s
injection of money through the Dawes Plan and later by the introduction of
a new Reichsmark. The economy, however, remained fragile because of high
unemployment and slow economic growth. The new Weimar Republic undertook
rationalization programs that focused on efficiency and austerity. The government
initiated low-cost public housing programs to tackle the housing shortages. High-
density units had to be built with minimum cost and time of construction.
From 1924 to 1929, state-subsidized public housing estates flourished in the
outskirts of major German cities. The industrial management techniques such as
Taylorism and motion studies were used to design small efficient domestic spaces.28
The housing built outside Frankfurt under the direction of Ernst May featured such
Taylorized apartments. Time-motion studies were employed in the design of type
floor plans. The apartments were fitted with mass-produced kitchen units that had
labor- and space-saving features.
11.1 Goethe’s
garden house in
Weimar, renovated
in 1776. Goethe’s
house was an
oft-mentioned
precedent for
the Biedermeier
middle-class
dwelling. From
Vesper, Will, and
Paul Fechter,
Lob der Armut
(Berlin: Furche-
Verlag, 1921)
Architectural asceticism, which emerged as a criticism that railed against the

excesses of capitalism, ended up facilitating the emerging regime of rationalized
capitalism in the 1920s.29 In the pursuit of rationalization, Swiss architect Hans
Schmidt, a CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture) member,
demanded that architecture must be based on economics and efficiency. Schmidt
was a member of the radical ABC group based in Basel. In a provocative 1927
article, “Bauen ist nicht Architektur” (“Building is not Architecture”), he rejected the
formalism of the architectural discipline. Instead, he argued for creating universal
neutral building types that would adapt to the ever-changing needs of cities.30 It
was not only the individual that was becoming anonymous, but also architecture.
In Architecture and Utopia (1973), architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri describes
this process as the destruction of the single building as an “object.” The prime
example is architect Ludwig Hilberseimer’s urban proposal of 1927, which
dissolves the architectural object in an abstract elementary assemblage.31 Tafuri
extends his argument to the avant-garde housing projects of the 1920s, claiming
that they reproduced the abstraction of the social system of exchange and the
rationalization of the society.
On October 24, 1929, the second CIAM congress opened in Frankfurt. Its
theme was Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum (The Minimum-Subsistence
Dwelling). The architects involved at the congress advocated reducing domestic
life to essential functions. To cut costs to the absolute minimum, houses would be
designed as standardized units featuring minuscule spaces sufficient to perform
functions efficiently.
On the opening day of the congress, the Wall Street stock market crashed. As the
conference ended on October 26, 1929, the economic turmoil was spreading from
New York, unleashing an unprecedented worldwide economic crisis. The global
Great Depression, which would last for a decade, caused further impoverishment
in Germany. In 1930–1931, the government changed its housing policy by cutting
its subsidies for public housing. The volume of housing construction exhibited a
sharp decline. Due to the lack of financing, the few housing projects built in urban
peripheries mostly lacked standard facilities such as indoor toilets, fitted kitchens,
and bathrooms.32
The encompassing crisis revealed the fault lines within Neues Bauen (New
Building). There was a growing backlash against the extreme reduction of space
and the rationalization in minimum apartments. In his 1930 article “Gegen
den Strom” (“Against the Trend”), Bruno Taut criticized the minimum dwelling
advocated by the members of CIAM, Le Corbusier, and Ernst May. He observed
a “progressive psychosis” that promoted the shrinking of the small dwelling to
the smallest possible dwelling.33 He argued that the extraordinary conditions of
the economic crisis should not be taken as a norm when designing housing that
would outlast the crisis. He also mocked scientific approaches, which dictated
how residents should move, eat, and sleep in their houses. The influential critic
Adolf Behne criticized the Dammerstock housing in Karlsruhe in a similar manner.
To make man healthy, Behne wrote, “a diet of habitation is prescribed for him in
precise detail.” He claimed that in Dammerstock, human beings were reduced to
abstract figures, where architects determined in precise detail how residents were
supposed to live.34
While the minimum dwelling increasingly came under attack, Berlin Building
Exhibition of 1931 failed to offer any viable alternative. Its section, “The Dwelling
of Our Time,” under the direction of Mies van der Rohe, was criticized for its failure
to respond to the economic crisis with convincing housing schemes. Such critics as
Bruno Taut complained that the exhibition excluded the working-class dwelling.
The exhibition houses by Mies and Lili Reich were at the center of criticism because
of their excessive use of space and elegant materials. A critic wrote, “At a time
during which, in many countries, every third or fifth person is unemployed, pure
aesthetic interest in the ostentatious dwelling of the future necessarily loses in
popularity.”35 Wilhelm Lotz, the editor of the Werkbund magazine Die Form, fought
back against the criticism by asking whether the poverty of the era should be
responded with poverty. He acknowledged that the units designed by Mies and
Reich had nothing to do with the problems raised by the small dwelling, however
they did display the requirements for living in a spiritual sense.36 Lotz argued that
the intended client for these units was not representative of a particular class, but
he was simply the “New Man.” The New Man was the celebrated inhabitant of the
modern house. Neues Bauen architects envisioned the New Man as being devoid
of gender and class.
Despite Lotz’s claim, the asceticism promoted by the Neues Bauen architects did
not transcend class in capitalist society. In his book, Das Buch vom Bauen (The Book
about Building, 1930), Alexander Schwab, writing under the pseudonym Albert
Sigrist, addressed the underlying tensions in Neues Bauen. He argued that Neues
Bauen had a Janus-face: it was both haute bourgeois and proletarian, both capitalist
and socialist, both autocratic and democratic.37 While the aesthetics of austerity
in the public housing estates reflected an acute lack of resources, the austere
aesthetics of private villas in wealthy suburbs had a much different meaning. It
represented a voluntary asceticism, hence a refined taste as a social distinction
(Figure 11.2).38
Asceticism had a double meaning in modern architecture: on the one hand,
it represented a levelling of the social differences in line with the ideals of an
egalitarian mass society. It was announced in the simple formal language of public
housing estates. On the other hand, it became a means of social distinction. It found
its purest expression in the sphere of upper-class wealth as seen in the canonical
modern houses such as Tugendhat House by Mies van der Rohe and Villa Savoye
by Le Corbusier.
11.2 A middle-
class living room
before and after
simplification
process. From
Bruno Taut, Die
neue Wohnung: Die
Frau als Schöpferin
(Leipzig: Klinkhardt
& Biermann, 1924)
Conclusion
The ascetic discourse has continued to resonate in the afterlife of modern

architecture. In 1961, the Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler recalled his days of
poverty in the aftermath of the First World War. Echoing Fechter, he explained
functionalist architecture as a mandatory outcome of that poverty:
We had nothing to eat. I recall very well my own situation: after the war I lived
on the dole for many years; I got about seven Kronen a week, which would
be the equivalent of seven dollars per week now. But one could live on that
monastically; I had rice, chiefly, and mushrooms. I remember only too well the
mushrooms, which I dried and reheated again just as I did with tea leaves. As in
our living habits, we started to clean off everything that was surplus in design-
ornamentation, certain luxurious materials, moldings, this and that. Everything
became, over the years, simpler, cleaner, whiter, and ... you know, what we call
functionalism was on its natural way. So functionalism was really a reaction to
the overstuffing of the Victorian age. Architecture had to be put on a diet. And the
rectangular style did it.39
Kiesler portrayed modernist architecture both as an inevitable outcome of the

post-war austerity and as a reaction to the excesses of the nineteenth-century
industrialization and ensuing economic boom. Witnessing the end of post-World
War II austerity and the rise of consumer culture at the time, he continued with a
warning: “Now the period of diet is over and we can eat normally again. However,
that does not mean that we should overeat, stuff ourselves with whipped cream,
ice cream—or with architecture either.”40
Since the 1970s, a building boom has accompanied each economic boom
followed by a downturn or a financial crisis. In David Harvey’s words, “Capitalism
is a class form of society given over to the perpetual production of surpluses.” 41
Urban development has been one of the key ways to absorb the surplus capital.
In other words, surplus capital generates surplus in architecture. The surplus in
the nineteenth-century design was a result of new technologies that separated
structure from surface, turning the latter into commodified form. Contemporary
iconic architecture has also been marked by a surplus in design, which is an
outcome of indulging in new technologies, such as computational design that
breaks architecture free from old building principles. The belief that almost
anything can be designed and built has resulted in amorphous blobs by Frank
Gehry and like-minded architects. Nevertheless, architect Reinhold Martin argues
that the commodification of architecture reached a new intensity in the era of
global finance: “The so-called developer architecture” has attained a higher level
of abstraction, because its tangible existence as a useful object is superseded by
its conditions of circulation and speculative future value.42 This level of abstraction
means that, when the construction bubble bursts, developers are left with surplus
houses, surplus offices, surplus art centers, and shopping malls as seen in places
like Spain and Dubai today.
Today there are once again calls for putting architecture on a diet, and there
is no doubt that there will be such calls each time the capitalist machine breaks
down. Critics have given different names to this latest recession-fueled diet: the
New Modesty, the New Puritanism, Radical Traditionalism, Slow Architecture, etc.
The last name, dubbed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, is a word-play on the
phrase “slow food,” conspicuously referring to a healthy diet. Zumthor explained
it as “tradition, but with a modern twist,” more like “Paul Smith, not Jean Paul
Gaultier.”43 Zumthor’s remark resonates not only with Kiesler’s statement, but also
with Loos’s praise of the discrete clothing of the English gentleman as opposed to
that of the dandy a century ago.44
As Tafuri has observed, the crisis of modern architecture stems from an attempt
“to resolve, on the always more outdated level of ideology, the imbalances,
contradictions, and retardations characteristic of capitalist reorganization of
the world market and productive development.”45 In this regard, architectural
asceticism can be seen as a superficial, knee-jerk reaction to the economic crises
inherent in the capitalist system. In the face of the excesses of capitalism, asceticism
slips into a formalism that represents moral restraint and social distinction. Yet
today the problem is not only a surplus in design generated by economic boom,
but surplus urban development that eventually brings the boom to an end. Hence,
the question remains: How to decouple architecture from the boom and bust cycle
of capitalism?
Bibliography
Behne, Adolf, “Dammerstock,” Die Form 5, 6 (1930): 163–170.

Berlage, Hendrik Petrus, Thoughts on Style, 1886–1909, trans. Iain Boyd Whyte and Wim de
Wit (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996).
Breckman, Warren G., “Disciplining Consumption: The Debate about Luxury in Wilhelmine
Germany, 1890–1914,” Journal of Social History 24, 3 (1991): 485–505.
Charley, Jonathan, “The Shadow of Economic History: the Architecture of Boom, Slump and
Crisis,” Architectural Research Quarterly 14, 4 (2010): 363–372.
Creighton, Thomas, “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” Progressive Architecture 42, 7 (July 1961):
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Durkheim, Emile, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, (New York: The Free Press, 1997).
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accessed November 13, 2010. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_
entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article6914829.ece.
Ghenoiu, Erik Martin. “‘Tradition’ as Modernism in German Architecture and Urban Design,
1888–1918,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2008.
Glancey, Jonathan, “The Architecture of Recession,” The Guardian, March 6, 2009, accessed
April 2, 2010.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/06/architecture-rogers-foster-
recession.
Greaney, Patrick, Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Hake, Sabine, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
Harter, Pascale, “The White Elephants that Dragged Spain into the Red,” BBC News, July 26,
2012, accessed July 26, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18855961.
Harvey, David, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile, 2010).
Ingersoll, Richard, “There is No Criticism, Only History, an Interview with Manfredo Tafuri,”
Design Book Review 9 (Spring, 1986): 8–11.
Kuhn, Gerd, “Aufbruch und Ernüchterung: Architektur und Städtebau um 1929,” in Die
Welt spielt Roulette: Zur Kultur der Moderne in der Krise 1927 bis 1932, ed. Werner Möller
(Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 2002), 111–122.
Loos, Adolf, “Men’s Fashion,” in Spoken Into the Void: Collected Essays 1898–1900, trans. Jane
O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1982).
Lotz, Wilhelm, “Die Halle II auf der Bauausstelung,” Die Form 6, 7 (1931): 247.
Mallgrave, Harry Francis, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Martin, Reinhold, “Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Grey Room 42
(Winter, 2011): 60–79.
Miller, Wallis Jo, “Tangible Ideas: Architecture and the Public at the 1931 German Building
Exhibition in Berlin,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1999.
Ouroussoff, Nicolai, “Architecture; It was Fun Till the Money Ran Out,” New York Times,
December 21, 2008. Accessed June 20, 2010. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.ht
ml?res=9504E4DD153BF932A15751C1A96E9C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.
Peeters, Evert, Leen Van Molle, and Kaat Wils, “Modern Asceticism: A Historical Exploration,”
in Beyond Pleasure: Cultures of Modern Asceticism, ed. Evert Peeters, Leen Van Molle, and
Kaat Wils (Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 2011).
Riley, Charles A., The Saints of Modern Art: the Ascetic Ideal in Contemporary Painting,
Sculpture, Architecture, Music, Dance, Literature, and Philosophy (Hanover, NH: University
Press of New England, 1998).
Rollins, William H., A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in
the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1997).
Schmidt, Hans, “Bauen ist nicht Architektur,” Das Werk 5 (1927): 139.
Sigrist, Albert, Das Buch vom Bauen: Wohnungsnot, neue Technik, neue Baukunst, Städtebau
(Berlin: Verlag der Bücherkreis GMBH, 1930).
Taut, Bruno, “Gegen den Strom,” Wohnungwirtschaft 17 (1930): 315–324.
———, Die Neue Wohnung: Die Frau Als Schöpferin (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1924);
reprinted in translation as “The New Dwelling: The Women as Creator,” in The Weimar
Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 461–462.
Tafuri, Manfredo, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara
Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976).
Vesper, Will, and Paul Fechter, Lob der Armut (Berlin: Furche Verlag, 1921).
Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford
Widdig, Bernd, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Ewing, NJ: University of California
Press, 2001).
Notes
1 Richard Ingersoll, “There is No Criticism, Only History, an Interview with Manfredo

Tafuri,” Design Book Review 9 (Spring, 1986): 8.
2 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (London, 2010), 9.
3 Pascale Harter, “The White Elephants that Dragged Spain into the Red,” BBC News, July
26, 2012, accessed July 26, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18855961.
4 Jonathan Glancey, “The Architecture of Recession,” The Guardian, March 6, 2009,
accessed April 2, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/06/
architecture-rogers-foster-recession.
5 Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Architecture: It was Fun Till the Money Ran Out,” New York Times,
December 21, 2008, accessed June 20, 2010, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.
html?res=9504E4DD153BF932A15751.C1A96E9C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.
6 Jonathan Charley, “The Shadow of Economic History: the Architecture of Boom, Slump
and Crisis,” Architectural Research Quarterly 14, 4 (2010): 363–372.
7 The modern interest in asceticism was not confined to architecture, but became part
of a wider discourse in philosophy, literature, and arts. It was, in fact, a cultural criticism
that targeted the pretentious world of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie. Recent
scholarship has analyzed the broad range of meanings of asceticism and poverty in
relation to modernism. See Charles A. Riley, The Saints of Modern Art: the Ascetic Ideal in
Contemporary Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, Dance, Literature, and Philosophy
(Hanover, NH, 1998); Patrick Greaney, Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from
Baudelaire to Benjamin (Minneapolis and London, 2008).
8 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York and Oxford,
2011).
9 Evert Peeters, Leen Van Molle, and Kaat Wils, “Modern Asceticism: A Historical
Exploration,” in Beyond Pleasure: Cultures of Modern Asceticism, ed. Evert Peeters, Leen
Van Molle, and Kaat Wils (Oxford, 2011), 7.
10 On architectural realism in Germany see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural
Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968 (Cambridge, UK, 2005), 207–211. On Sachlichkeit,
see also Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory, 209.
11 Warren G. Breckman, “Disciplining Consumption: The Debate about Luxury in
Wilhelmine Germany, 1890–1914,” Journal of Social History 24, 3 (1991): 488.
12 Hermann Muthesius, cited in Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory, 228.
13 Breckman, “Disciplining Consumption,” 489.
14 Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Thoughts on Style, 1886–1909, trans. Iain Boyd Whyte and Wim
de Wit (Santa Monica, CA, 1996), 126.
15 Erik Martin Ghenoiu, “‘Tradition’ as Modernism in German Architecture and Urban
Design, 1888–1918,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2008, 138.
16 Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Ewing, NJ, 2001), 51.
17 On Heimatschutz movement, see William H. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural

Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918
(Ann Arbor, MI, 1997).
18 Will Vesper and Paul Fechter, Lob der Armut (Berlin, 1921), 53.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 56.
21 Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York, 1997), 254.
22 Ibid.
23 Vesper and Fechter, Lob der Armut, 14.
24 Ibid., 57.
25 Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany, 169.
26 Ibid.
27 Vesper and Fechter, Lob der Armut, 99.
28 Motion studies in the domestic space were featured in architect Bruno Taut’s
influential book Die neue Wohnung; Die Frau als Schöpferin (Leipzig, 1924).
29 On the history of “the crisis of modern architecture,” see Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia:
Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA,
1976).
30 Hans Schmidt, “Bauen ist nicht Architektur,” Das Werk 5 (1927): 140.
31 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 104–107.
32 Gerd Kuhn, “Aufbruch und Ernüchterung: Architektur und Städtebau um 1929,” in Die
Welt spielt Roulette: Zur Kultur der Moderne in der Krise 1927 bis 1932, ed. Werner Möller
(Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2002), 115.
33 Bruno Taut, “Gegen den Strom,” Wohnungwirtschaft 17 (1930): 317.
34 Adolf Behne, “Dammerstock,” Die Form 5, 6 (1930): 170.
35 Cited in Wallis Jo Miller, “Tangible Ideas: Architecture and the Public at the 1931
German Building Exhibition in Berlin,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1999,
207.
36 Wilhelm Lotz, “Die Halle II auf der Bauausstelung,” Die Form 6, 7 (1931): 247.
37 Albert Sigrist, Das Buch vom Bauen: Wohnungsnot, neue Technik, neue Baukunst,
Städtebau (Berlin, 1930), 65.
38 Sabine Hake, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar
Berlin (Ann Arbor, MI, 2008), 106. Taut described the new direction in the dwelling in
such terms: “Previously, and to some extent today, people turned up their noses at any
dwelling that was not overflowing with all kinds of odds and ends. A sparse household
was disdained by society and its inhabitants shunned…. But that will change entirely
in no more than a decade … everything in the way of knick-knacks, unnecessary
items, and little pictures lying, standing, hanging around the dwelling will be the
reason for upturned noses and counsel against incautious contact with the peculiar
inhabitants.” Bruno Taut, “The New Dwelling: The Women as Creator,” in The Weimar
Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1994), 461–462.
39 Thomas Creighton, “Kiesler’s Pursuit of an Idea,” Progressive Architecture 42, 7 (July

1961): 106.
40 Ibid.
41 Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, 166.
42 Reinhold Martin, “Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Grey Room 42
(Winter, 2011): 73.
43 Tom Dyckhoff, “Architecture: Hail the New Puritanism,” The Times, November 14, 2009,
accessed November 13, 2010, http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_
entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article6914829.ece.
44 Adolf Loos, “Men’s Fashion” in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1898–1900, trans.
Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA and London, 1982), 11.
45 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 178.
12
900 Miles to Paradise, and Other Afterlives of Architecture
Dennis Maher
The body which thou hast now is called the thought–body of propensities. Since thou
hast not a material body of flesh and blood, whatever may come—sounds, lights,
or rays—are, all three, unable to harm thee: thou art incapable of dying. It is quite
sufficient for thee to know that these apparitions are thine own thought–forms.
—Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead)
From 2004–2009, I earned a significant portion of my living by working part-time as

a demolition laborer in the city of Buffalo, New York. Within this city of 20,000 vacant
properties, where the mayor has aimed to demolish 5,000 buildings in five years,
demolition has, ironically, been considered an industry of growth. Here, shifting
relationships between expansion and contraction and creation and destruction
saturate the urban landscape with material, social, as well as psychological effects.
In an environment of intense unmaking, the movements of matter can splinter the
mind’s perceptions. While working on sites of demolition, I came to know a strange,
even perverse, sense of freedom. As materials were indiscriminately pushed and
pulled, the world acquired an elastic quality. There was a lightness implicit in
destroying that which we ordinarily regard to be solid and stable, in setting change
in motion, and in sensing irreversibility. When rigid organizations of material were
released, ensuing new orders beheld a fresh looseness. Moments of revelation
occurred when objects, hidden within the walls, became suddenly revealed. I
found liberation in opening up space beyond previously perceptible limits. Most of
all, there was a thrilling, precarious tension between my body and the instabilities
of walls, floors, and ceilings.
During the time that I worked on demolition sites, I never thought about
demolition as an instrument of death. For me, it was a creative catalyst. Death,
after all, has many currents, and the forces of change have malleable, sometimes
grotesque, physical guises. In Buffalo, and in other comparable post-industrial
cities, the territories of urban life and death are our most maligned masks. Beneath
artifices of the body, hidden layers of the built and unbuilt are continuously
reformulated. But when the city outwardly presents itself as a constellation of
deaths and rebirths, it is rare that its movements, as well as its monuments, do not
take one side or the other.
Within contemporary public discourses, vivacity and mortality are frequently
projected upon buildings to legitimize underlying agendas. When contested
sites are at stake, the terms life and death are used by preservationists, architects,
developers, concerned citizens, and others as political fulcrums. Preservation
advocates, groups of whom are very active in Buffalo, have perhaps by necessity
become prone to adopting this nomenclature. Their views are often pitted against
proponents of development, or “progress,”who, by a similar turn, see few alternatives
for a building that has lost its use and, therefore, its life. Failed space—marked by
decay, vacancy, structural failure, or collapse—is cast as deathly territory. And so,
“mothball,” “ruin,” “wasteland,” and “eyesore” have come to embody the death drive
of the post-industrial city.
This language of life and death, in spite of its implied physical immediacy,
has two more subtle effects: it underscores a general disciplinary aversion to the
inherent temporality of buildings, and it eschews the generative possibilities of
failed spaces as urban and architectural catalysts. During those instances when
the disciplines of architecture and preservation have been able to operate within
frameworks mediated by time and change, they have often become trapped in
discourses of prediction. Similarly, our collective imagination for failed space seems
to act principally through resistance, rather than embrace. In this essay, I confront
the subject of post mortem architecture in search of new models for architecture
and preservation after life. I follow the bizarre story of St. Gerard’s church in Buffalo,
a building that is now vacant and has, for all intents and purposes, been declared
deceased. While journeying with St. Gerard’s into the afterlife, I draw upon three
examples to uncover relationships between the body, the building, and the
threshold of death.
The case studies, which include the visible boundary of absolute death, the
treatments of bodies during funerary rites, and the United States Federal Witness
Security Program (WITSEC), are not instances of true finality, but moments of
transition. They address the post mortem condition from points of view that
oscillate between the physical, the social, and the psychological. While filtering
St. Gerard’s through these respective lenses, I speculate how each example might
support an alternative future for the building’s stones. Finally, I present a project
that I executed while working on the demolition and restoration of Buffalo’s Farrar
Mansion from 2004–2009, a post mortem proposition for a building—and a city—
that recalibrated temporal, spatial, and material discontinuities. The collected
examples begin to identify a trajectory for an architecture that questions the
efficacy of building livingness and that reveals the interrelated physical, social, and
psychological processes by which we inhabit less–than–visible worlds. To willingly
enter death’s arena may contradict the vitality that preservation is charged with
protecting, however; this is precisely the challenge. By shifting architecture to the
other side of its vital threshold, perhaps architects, urbanists, preservationists, and
concerned citizens might expand their capacities to steward failed spaces in and
out of time.
In Search of the Living City
The idea of the city as an organism imbued with life and susceptible to death gained
widespread popular appeal among urbanists, as well as the general public, with the
publication of Jane Jacobs’s seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(1961). Jacobs’ treatise established metaphoric relationships between the qualities
of cities and the actions and dramas of living beings.1 Recently, the discussion of
900 Miles to Paradise, and Other Afterlives of Architecture 221
cities as complex living organisms has shifted from a metaphoric reading to a more
performance-based analysis with research by a group of physicists and economists
led by Geoffrey West.2 West and his colleagues have been analyzing urban data
from a metabolic point of view, using fractal geometry and scaling relationships
to speculate about the laws by which cities function. That this research involves an
interdisciplinary group of practitioners far removed from urban studies indicates
that the idea of the city as a living thing stretches across the spectrum of human
knowledge and imagination. Indeed, material on the subject of living cities
abounds within the realm of popular culture, and, at times, fascination with urban
death has precluded that of life.
An article published in Forbes Magazine in 2008, entitled “America’s Fastest Dying
Cities,” expounds on the death cycles of select American cities, many located in the
former manufacturing centers of the Rust Belt, with a list of ten near-casualties.3
This list considers the statistical categories of population loss, unemployment, and
economic prospects as barometers of urban life or death. In 2010, urban activists
who objected to the article responded by formulating an alternative symposium
event, entitled Ten Living Cities, which took place in the so-labeled dying city of
Dayton, Ohio. This event to celebrate urban vivacity was ceremonially opened in
Dayton by Joshua Zumbrun, author of the Forbes article. As if to re-enact an ancient
motif, the harbinger of death returned to the stage to confer new life. Skeptics,
meanwhile, mockingly referred to the gathering as “Deathfest.”4 Clearly, the Forbes
list and the resulting symposium organized in protest demonstrate that, for many
contemporary cities, life and death are meaningful, albeit contested, concepts.
The contested nature of urban life and death was made poignantly evident
in Buffalo, site of a feud spanning two cities and 900 miles for the ownership of
St. Gerard’s church, a one hundred year-old work of neo-classical architecture. St.
Gerard’s, constructed of limestone, travertine marble and granite, is a one-third
scale replica of the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome. It has been vacant
since 2008, when the Archdiocese of Buffalo sanctioned the shuttering of thirty of
the city’s less-attended churches. Vying for ownership of St. Gerard’s is Mary Our
Queen Parish in Norcross, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. The group is lobbying
to disassemble the existing stone edifice block by block, transport the remains
southward, and re-erect the structure for a growing congregation of southern
Catholics.5 To do so would cost one quarter of the price of a new building of similar
stature. The scale of the effort would make this the largest building moved from
one place to another within the United States.
Grave robbing is, of course, nothing new. Neither is the appropriation of
architectural fragments from a devastated or conquered territory for the purposes
of rebuilding elsewhere. The piecemeal relocation of buildings also has due
precedence, as evidenced, for example, by the London Bridge, rebuilt in Lake
Havasu City, Arizona, in 1971. However, the case of St. Gerard’s is particularly
noteworthy for the way that the proposed transposition has been publicly framed
in terms of life and death of place, and for the associated consequences for the
afterlives of architecture. Through public statements, propaganda, and staged
events, Mary Our Queen Parish in Norcross has exploited the popular mythology
of the dying city to craft a new mythology of a rejuvenated corpus, positioning the
Atlanta suburb as the preferred site for receiving the journeying body of the church.
The revivifying story of St. Gerard’s must confirm the death of Buffalo to restore the
decaying building’s livingness. Rather than sanctioning this rite of passage from
the realm of the dead to that of the living, I propose a close examination of after-
death relationships between the body and the building, and the projection of
correspondences toward a stewardship of architecture’s afterlives.
The Living Church and the Dead City
Reactions to the proposed relocation of St. Gerard’s by some Buffalo-based

preservationists are as unmoving as the Atlanta camp has been iterant. “Build your
own church. We have enough vacant lots,” was the response of David Franczyk,
president of the Buffalo City Council.6 Tim Tielman, director of the Campaign for
Buffalo History, Architecture and Culture, is more explicit about the deadening
effects of the proposal: “They want to harvest our architectural heritage and put
it in a box.”7 The proposed moving of the church raises intriguing questions about
the fate of historic architecture in the economically impoverished Rust Belt and
intensifies debates of public versus private stewardship of culture. Supporters
of the plan point to the progressive nature of “preservation by relocation,” a
provocative moniker considering that the attempt to preserve architecture usually
signals the stilling of place, rather than an embrace of displacement. Detractors
condemn the proposed move with premonitory attention, citing the potential
flood of historically significant buildings outside of their local contexts, leaving
stressed communities unhinged and void-stricken in the aftermath. The resulting
feud over the fate of St. Gerard’s effectively places Buffalo on the front line in the
battle over the spoils of America’s Fastest Dying Cities.
In constructing their argument to acquire and move St. Gerard’s, the Norcross-
based Parish of Mary Our Queen is particularly effective in crafting messages that
emphasize Buffalo’s decline and its inability to effectively deal with a significant
relic for which no current use exists. Simultaneously, these messages de-emphasize
any interpretation of the church as a spoil, and of its transportation as cultural
looting. This has been accomplished through consistently referring to the church
not as a relic or ruin, or even as an edifice, but instead as a body. A visit to the
website of Mary Our Queen highlights a particularly animating statement about
the proposed transposition of the house of worship: “… [I]t is more than a journey.
It is a pilgrimage. On this pilgrimage, it is the church itself that is moving.”8 That the
parish bills the dismantlement and reassembly of the forlorn church as a spiritual
event is not, in and of itself, surprising. But, by recasting the edifice as a mobile body
whose fate is to enact a ritual journey, a new story is brought into being. The journey
from deathbed to renewed life would not be lacking in appropriate preparations.
The parish in Norcross promises that an enlivening armature, in the form of a new
steel skeleton, will receive the transported fragments. “The structure is ready for
disassembly, transfer, and re-establishment on a new, stronger superstructure 900
miles away in Atlanta. By itself, this new skeleton will add centuries to the building’s
life.”9 Note that the emphasis is not on the structural importance of a new steel
frame, but rather on extending the building’s lifespan. The parish is adamant about
the vivifying dimension of their project. “Disassembling, moving and reassembling
the church will ensure its life continues as originally intended,” the church website
asserts, suggesting that the so-called ritual passage is part of a natural course of
events.10 In a recent newspaper interview, Father David Dye of the Norcross Parish
is even more direct as he emphasizes the sickliness of the body. “It’s like an organ
transplant,” he states. “You don’t want someone to die but if they are dying, it would
be nice if their organs were reused and they lived again.”11
The new narrative has been strengthened by the parish’s underscoring of
contrasts between the cities of Buffalo and Atlanta. “Today, Atlanta’s suburbs are
the fastest-growing in the country, perhaps in the history of the world, according
to some scholars,” boasts the Parish of Mary Our Queen.12 That characterization
contrasts with the depiction of Buffalo as a city–in–decline: “The church’s almost
certain fate there [in Buffalo], amid the harsh elements, is deterioration, decline
and, eventually, destruction.”13 In making the matter an issue of life or death, Mary
Our Queen has suggested that the transposition would involve a temporal, as well
as geographic shift: “A priest and his parish are seeking to move one of America’s
great churches 900 miles into the future,” reads another of the parish’s promotional
statements, advertising unsubstantiated claims of social and cultural progress.14
The media have been captivated by the associations. “Old Buffalo church to be
reborn in Atlanta suburb,” reads an Associated Press headline.15 The strategy of
Mary Our Queen has been to leverage the livingness of Atlanta against the death
of Buffalo, proposing that a ritual journey southward, as a funerary event leading
from the land of the dead to that of the living, is the future of the mortal edifice.
This mythology is even clearer upon close examination of both the existing Buffalo 12.1 St. Gerard’s
site and the proposed site of relocation. Oppositions resound between the two Church, Buffalo,
contexts. The current site of St. Gerard’s is a corner plot of an urban intersection, New York
one where the visibility of surrounding dereliction is a reminder of the forces of (left), source:
urban change. By contrast, the proposed site of relocation in Norcross is a fifteen- Dennis Maher,
and Norcross,
acre plot of grass and trees. Architectural renderings of the church relocated in Georgia (right).
the affluent Atlanta suburb depict a bucolic, country-like setting, fully cleansed of Source: Mary Our
any urban trace. These drawings convey a temple–on–a–hill image, devoid even Queen Parish
of the parking lot, which would necessarily accompany the structure. Erasure of
any other architectural or urban features effectively severs the church from its rust-
laden past. The body passes from the city of the dead to garden paradise.
With a strategy predicated upon renewed life, Mary Our Queen Parish in
Norcross has positioned the contested church in ambiguous territory: en
route from decaying architectural relic to rejuvenated corpus. Meanwhile,
Preservation Buffalo Niagara, the region’s strongest preservation organization,
has acknowledged the complexities of the situation, but has acquiesced to
dismantlement and transposition in the face of more difficult urban stewardship.
“This proposal illustrates Buffalo’s dilemma,” the group states. “It highlights the city’s
architectural richness while also underscoring our economic distress and shrinking
population.”16 Architectural richness and economic distress are thus positioned
as mutually negating attributes. The irony is that by embracing Norfolk’s strategy
of revivification, the Buffalo group is only really sanctioning another, more severe
form of loss—the death of death’s potential. Architectural critic Herbert Muschamp,
writing of the often-ignored qualities of the void, remarked, “Postindustrial cities
that are seeking to remake themselves as cultural centers might also benefit from
pondering the success of failure: the glamour of their own collapse.”17 According
to Muschamp, “Emptiness, obscurity, failure, bleakness, pallor—such noir terms
are not found in the vocabulary of civic success with which urban revitalization
programs are typically promoted. But, these terms should be permissible wherever
culture comes up.”18 So, too, should these terms be permissible whenever culture
comes down, and most certainly when it is transported and re-erected elsewhere.
Preservation theorist Jorge Otero-Pailos suggests that remaining open to external,
incomplete forces is of critical importance for dealing with historic structures today.
“How we retain that unfinished openness of the past, while critiquing the idea that
the new is ever outside of history, is an important challenge that lies ahead for the
field of historic preservation,” he writes.19 The statements of Muschamp and Otero-
Pailos are suggestive for post-industrial cities such as Buffalo, where an abundance
of significant architecture and a lack of monetary resources necessitate creative
propositions for the management of constructed cultural heritage. Following
these observations, I believe that the disciplines of architecture and preservation
must look beyond life for new models of building stewardship. In the sections that
follow, I examine three post mortem case studies alongside the body of St. Gerard’s,
to expose parallel physical, social, and psychological undercurrents. In so doing, I
aim to catalyze the urban imagination for failed spaces, while positioning building
temporality as a creative frontier in architecture.
The Limits of Death’s Visibility
When the scientific vision looked at death, it became bound up in a preservation

project from which it has yet to escape. In his research on the medical gaze,
Michel Foucault describes how Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) observed pathological
phenomena with precision, and fostered a new conception of death that was
“multiple, and dispersed in time.”20 Bichat recast disease as the inner function of
living processes, away from the idea of death as an exteriorized unknown threat.
He observed that individuals possessed living and dead tissue simultaneously.
Within the terms of Bichat’s decentralized vitality, death was chronologically
successive as well as spatially interactive, not absolute or fixed. Foucault notes that
“With Bichat, knowledge of life finds its origin in the destruction of life and in its
extreme opposite; it is at death that disease and life speak their truth: a specific,
irreducible truth, protected from all assimilations to the inorganic by the circle of
death that designates them for what they are.”21 By reframing the failure of the
body in relation to living processes, Bichat lifted the veil of dark mystery that had
previously shrouded death.
Bichat’s observations of physical death accompanied psychological
consequences, many of which are noted by George Behlmer in “Grave Doubts:
Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of Death.” Behlmer recounts that
the entirety of nineteenth century culture, not only the science, was saturated
by ambiguous bodily conditions. Terminologies such as “trance, coma, syncope,
catalepsy, insensibility, suspended animation, human hibernation, and anesthesia
were only the most common labels for what appeared to be corporal frontiers.”22
This ambiguity reveals a deep confusion within the time period about the nature of
human physiology, a confusion that legitimized and encouraged Gothic fantasies
by such authors as Edgar Allan Poe. In his masterfully orchestrated short story, “The
Premature Burial,” Poe captivates the paranoid imaginations of those for whom the
final end was anything but final. The narrator of the story, who suffers from the
condition of catalepsy, goes to extreme measures to ensure survival in the face
of premature entombment. Precautions taken by Poe’s protagonist, in the form of
highly specific modifications to the family vault, transform the subterranean box
into a veritable room:
Among other things, I had the family vault so remodeled as to admit of being
readily opened from within. The slightest pressure upon a long lever that
extended far into the tomb would cause the iron portal to fly back. There were
arrangements also for the free admission of air and light, and convenient
receptacles for food and water, within immediate reach of the coffin intended for
my reception. This coffin was warmly and softly padded, and was provided with
a lid, fashioned upon the principle of the vault–door, with the addition of springs
so contrived that the feeblest movement of the body would be sufficient to set
it at liberty. Besides all this, there was suspended from the roof of the tomb, a
large bell, the rope of which, it was designed, should extend through a hole in the
coffin, and so be fastened to one of the hands of the corpse.23
Light, air, openness, nourishment, warmth, comfort, touch, sound—in short,

an entire range of bodily needs and sensorial experiences are accounted for. The
mechanisms of Poe’s narrator are designed to accommodate vitality in the face
of death’s illusory appearance—to sustain the body beyond the limits of visual
determinacy. The nineteenth century popularity of safety coffins, mortuaries,
and humane societies are all such manifestations. In a curious inversion, present-
day medical knowledge and technology have made death’s boundaries equally
uncertain, as debates on the subject now focus on the use of life-prolonging

technology with respect to bio-ethics. The realization of organ transplants, for
example, often depends upon establishing a relationship between the dead brain
and the dead person, with associated moral implications. Marc Alexander, in his
historical analysis of signs of death, observes that:
the contemporary problem is less one of “false negatives” resulting from

insufficient knowledge of the predictors of death, than one of “false positives”
resulting from a surfeit of medical technology. Life prolonging technology creates
the danger that an overbroad test for life signs will cause the physician to treat
a corpse as a living person, thereby morally affronting the individual person or
his memory, and wasting scarce resources. Consequently, attention has focused
on the need to choose among the indicators of death, as well as on the more
traditional need to develop refined indicators of death.24
The persistently liminal boundaries of death, from the origins of modern science
through to the present day, demand a more nuanced analysis of the indicators of
St. Gerard’s morbidity, and a discussion of the place of death in relation to the life of
the church. In each of the previous examples, the ambiguous definition of death’s
determinacy is conceived, either physically, psychologically, or ethically, beyond
the world of immediate appearances and in precise relation to living processes.
While Bichat’s gaze was focused on zooming into what his eyes could methodically
record, Poe’s was turned inward, away from what his distrustful eyes failed to behold.
Bichat, fixing his vision on observable evidence, transformed death into complex,
vital interrelations of spatial and temporal phenomena. Poe, by contrast, motivated
by inner doubt and anxiety, projected an entire environment for an existence
beyond apparent death. Both of these approaches tested the imagination of
death’s vitality, resulting in post mortem representations—scientific and artistic—
that unfolded in space and time. In the case of Alexander, however, the faculty of
vision is superseded by that of moral choice—one must decide what indicators
to follow according to ethical, not visual, concerns. These projections beyond the
realm of apparent death hint at how the body of St. Gerard’s might be re-imagined,
even as outward appearances fail to indicate a vital presence. Just as in Bichat’s
analyses, “the medical gaze pivots on itself and demands of death an account of life
and disease, or its definitive immobility of their time and movements,” so too the
stakeholders of St. Gerard’s might pivot on their own pathological predispositions
to confront, with the scrutiny of their eyes, the “definitive immobility” of St. Gerard’s
failure. “If we work to stop this move, we are likely to see accelerating damage,”
reads another statement issued by Preservation Buffalo Niagara, asserting that,
against what our eyes would have us believe, disassembly of the building is a
non-damaging act and—in a forceful castigation of the visual frame—impending
damage must be removed from sight.25 Clearly, time and failure have yet to be
recognized as integral components of architecture’s own clinical boundaries—
the story of St. Gerard’s revivification is preservation’s pathological substitute.
What are the precise signs of St. Gerard’s death or vitality? Who is the physician
charged with this diagnosis? Is it the preservation community, and if so, what is
the relationship between the physician and the patient/building? What risks are
involved in the diagnosis? What is the role of popular opinion with respect to issues
of choice? Such questions extend the discussion beyond simplistic assumptions
of finality or livingness. For architects and preservationists, new possibilities for
stewardship might emerge if building failure is cast against our visual threshold,
in relation to living processes. The environmental mechanisms designed by Poe’s
narrator, subterranean mirrors of contemporary forms of life support, hint at
ensuing architectural implications. What this might mean for St. Gerard’s can only
be imagined in the absence of movement, in its most absolute sense.
Funerary Rites: Social and Physical Discorporations
If the moving of St. Gerard’s constitutes a funerary event—a rite of passage

from the dead city to renewed life—then an analysis of the social dimensions
of funerary practices can allow us to understand the proposed transposition
within an alternative framework. Anthropologist Seth Richardson, in his writings
on death, dismemberment, and discorporation, has contested the emphasis
traditionally given to funerary rites within his field, instead focusing his attention
upon the port mortem treatment of bodies.26 Richardson argues that our fears of
not performing rites upon the corpse in accordance with socially and culturally
accepted standards are an under-recognized aspect of funerary practice. He writes
that “the proper treatment of the dead body in burial must be uncovered as a form
which (like other cultural practices) derives its meaning and force not only through
ideal observance, but also through social knowledge and fear of non-performance,
denial, or inversion.”27 In pointing out the fears associated with acting in a socially
and culturally unacceptable manner upon the corpse, Richardson emphasizes
that “violation of normal funerary practice, like proper burial, is an ambivalent and
changeable symbol, with a range of emphasis and importance within the rhetorical
systems which construct them.”28 What would such violation mean for St. Gerard’s?
What other symbols might be brought forward from animate or immobilized
stones? Could the field of preservation shift from its ritualized confirmations of
renewal, toward the issue of how the remains are treated? By denying the possibility
of restored life, architects, urbanists, and preservationists might expand the
social and cultural mechanisms by which preservation now operates. Richardson
elaborates on a range of alternative ways of regarding the corpse, with respect to
burial as the norm:
Our texts about burial already do not so much document practice as they project
idealizing and normative precepts, and the exceptions are those instances in
which they deal with deviations from the norm. This being the case, we are
obligated to do more than look at burial as an “ideal type” purely upholding
social inclusion, but also investigate instances in which the treatment of the body
was intended to discorporate social elements through violations of burial: the
display or exposure of the dead body, head, or (more rarely) other pars pro toto,
without burial; corpse abuse and dismemberment; corpse abandonment; burial–
as–trophy; disinterment ….29
Discorporation of the body, then, is intricately bound to discorporation of

social structures. Along these lines, there are numerous precedents for sculptures,
monuments, and buildings that have been proposed or constructed from post
mortem remnants to critically respond to social conflicts. In the wake of the French
Revolution, Jacques-Louis David proposed a monument made of the rubble of
vandalized royal statuary. Elaborating upon the symbolism of his proposal, he
wrote, “… let disorderly piles of the truncated debris of their statues form a lasting
monument to the glory of the people and their debasement, so that he who travels
through this new land with a didactic purpose, will say; ‘I once saw kings in Paris,
the objects of a humiliating idolatry; I went there again, and they were there no
more.’”30
In the 1960s, artists in Los Angeles united under the curatorship of the sculptor
Noah Purifoy to create “66 Signs of Neon,” three tons of smoldering rubble from
the Watts riots re-formed as collective assemblages. The traveling exhibition
constituted a powerful response to the destruction of the rioting, and introduced
an activist practice into the discourse of the art world.
Since the end of the Soviet Empire, there has been much discussion about how
to deal with Soviet monuments scattered throughout Russia and Eastern Europe.
In 1992, the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid issued an open call to
artists, asking for proposals on saving and transforming the monuments, as an
alternative to their destruction. They argue, “Soviet monuments loomed over our
childhood, we fear we may vanish with them. That is why we are trying to prolong
their existence.”31
Le Corbusier likely had quite a different, but not unrelated, view in mind when
the much revered thick walls of his chapel at Ronchamp, Notre Dame du Haut,
were constructed from the remains of the previous church on the site, a structure
that had been destroyed during World War II. In each of these propositions, French
Revolutionary, American, Russian, and French post-war, operations upon post
mortem remains become a means of engaging the social conflicts that the remains
signified. This is not simply a matter of reassembling or re-valuing ruins. Rather, the
aforementioned examples point toward the calibration of materials, environment,
and collective memory in formulating a post mortem proposition for place.
How could the afterlife of St. Gerard’s intensify the memory of social conflict?
What consequences would such an approach have for the stones? The crisis that
has beset Buffalo and the Rust Belt in general since the 1970s has been one of
suppressed, non-corporal violence. Thomas Sugrue argues that this ongoing
conflict consists of “[t]he convergence of the disparate forces of deindustrialization,
racial transformation, and political and ideological conformity.”32 And now, the
church of St. Gerard’s is poised to become the first saved body of this non-corporal
contest. The persistent mythologizing of the church is ultimately a foil for the
social, political, and economic aspects of St. Gerard’s abandonment. According to
philosopher Paul Ricoeur, “Mythical history is itself in the service of the struggle of
structure against events and represents an effort of societies to annul the disturbing
action of historical factors; it represents a tactic of annulling history, of deadening
the effect of events.”33 The living St. Gerard’s, a substitute for the dead city, obscures
the very crisis that has rendered the building a casualty. How might the memory of
failure—the physical failure of the building and the social and economic failure of
the city—be preserved as a structured proposition? In 1995, cultural critic Camilo
José Vergara incited controversy for his “skyscraper ruins park,” a proposal to set
aside twelve square blocks of downtown Detroit as a center for the preservation
of urban deterioration and emptiness. Vergara’s project refocused the danger of
doing nothing in the face of large-scale urban failure, channeling ambivalence
into a gesture of suspended uncertainty. In so doing, he returned the will to act to
the ground of its cultural premise. Violation of burial became its own recalcitrant
symbol.
Returning to the realm of funerary practices, an exemplary case, and one with
direct consequences for St. Gerard’s, is the Tibetan “sky burial” practiced on the
Himalayan plateau. Accounts of sky burial refer to the act of carving up the body of
the dead, sometimes even mixing the remains with barley flour, and exposing the
pieces to carrion birds. The relationships between socio-cultural and environmental
dimensions of this practice are relevant to this study. Anthropologists such as
Daniel Preston Martin argue that a shortage of arable land (limiting sites available
for burial), a shortage of fuel resources (making cremation expensive), and a
growing population upon the Tibetan plateau encourage sky burial as much as if
not more than any socio-cultural forces.34 Hence, the natural ecology of the region
likely exerts profound influence upon the formation of this aberrant practice. The
alignment between treatment of the dead body and environmental considerations,
especially in conditions of scarcity, resounds with the St. Gerard’s case. In sky burial,
the dead body, physical discorporation, social and cultural tradition, and resource
scarcity collectively constitute an ecology of the post mortem. It is within just such
a system that architectural richness and economic distress should also find shared
ground.
Witness Protection and Constructed Identity
Ironically, the United States Federal Witness Security Program (WITSEC) originated
in Buffalo. In the late 1960s, Buffalo gangster Pasquale “Paddy” Calabrese testified
against fellow members of the Mafia after he was arrested for a heist at Buffalo City
Hall. Calabrese was relocated to a secret location and provided with a new identity
to safeguard him against retaliation. This pioneering system of protection was later
formalized as the Witness Security Program with the introduction of the Organized
Crime Control Act of 1970. The early stages of the program were highly criticized; an
unintended victim of the Calabrese case was Tom Leonhard, whose children were
relocated along with their informer step-father. Leonhard’s frustrating attempts to
find his displaced children was chronicled in Leslie Waller’s Hide in Plain Sight (1976),
and later fictionalized in James Caan’s 1980 film of the same title.35 Fred Montanino,
who has thoroughly studied such social and psychological consequences of
WITSEC, equates the identity transformations of program participants to social
death and rebirth.36 According to Montanino,
It would not be unreasonable to use the word “extreme” in describing the

transition that protected witnesses and their family members undergo. They
find themselves in a position where their past social identities are obliterated
as completely as possible. Their personal past biographies cannot be shared
with others. They face a future of social relations with others that is dominated
by concealment concerning who they have been and pretenses as to who they
are. They are plucked from the communities in which they reside and secretly
relocated great distances, to other communities where they can, for a substantial
period of time, remain social strangers, “hidden in plain sight.”37
The protective measures amount to a fracturing of the relationships between

biological and social life cycles. “In order to maintain biological existence, protected
witnesses and their immediate (nuclear) family members must end social existence
in the context in which they have known it.”38 Montanino goes on to propose two
categories of distress, social and personal, that result from relocation and the loss
of past identity.
At this point, it is relevant to reintroduce the St. Gerard’s case, to examine the
parallels associated with the church’s proposed new place and identity. In August
2010, twenty members from the former Parish of St. Gerard made the 900-mile
journey to Norcross, presenting to their southern counterparts candles, a crucifix
from the Buffalo building, and the key that had been used to seal St. Gerard’s after
the final mass. The parishioners from Buffalo participated in a “Passing of the Key”
ceremony in Norcross, before and after which recordings of St. Gerard’s bells were
broadcast throughout the Norcross church.39 “We were taking them not only the
spirit of the original builders of the church, but the spirit of the people who last
used the church,” said St. Gerard’s parishioner Richard Ciezki, organizer of the
trip.40 The visit by the Buffalo-based pilgrims was clearly an attempt to maintain
the relationship between the biological life and the social life of the building.
Through the transportation of the key, crucifix, and candle, a host of symbols
began to establish the viability of the new site, in advance of the building’s move.
In describing the significance of these actions, parishioner Ciezki, with echoes of
previously noted WITSEC problems, remarked, “You want to know where the child
will be residing in the future.”41 Ciezki unknowingly confirmed what Montanino
analyzed, namely, that the breaks induced by such social forms of death as the
witness protection system necessitate appropriate countermeasures.
Delivery of the symbolic effects followed the transport of a 1,900 pound statue
of St. Gerard and a paschal candle, both of which were introduced at Easter mass
in Norcross. Uncannily, the statue’s head was accidently severed during the move,
an event that has been alternately cast as a willing second martyrdom, or an act of
resistance on the part of the saint, the contrasting views reflecting either support
or protest of the church’s migration. It should by now be clear that the stakeholders
of St. Gerard’s have been re-enacting the identity transformations associated with
WITSEC, with one all-important distinction: their actions have been coordinated so
as to counter the onset of social death. For the church to live in a new setting, with
a new identity, the physical transportation must be accompanied by a set of social
continuities. Montanino, in his analysis of witness protection, warns that social
divorce, when identity transfer is at stake, amounts to a form of amputation:
The protected witness experience teaches us further that the process of social
legitimacy is not monolithic, that there are many “gatekeepers,” and that, in
fact, we all may be counted upon to act in contributing integrity to the process
whenever we interact with one another. We cannot escape responsibility for own
past performance, nor can we easily assume a rightful place in collective social
life without some recognition of it. We cannot totally divorce ourselves from
others who have been part of our social life without losing that part from which
we seek to divorce them.42
Even St. Gerard’s proposed new name, Mary Our Queen, has been related to its
former life. Father Dye describes that his encounter with a large fresco featuring the
Virgin Mary in the apse of St. Gerard’s indicated that the church is willing to make
the proposed identity transformation.43
While social identity has been stressed through the actions of St. Gerard’s former
parishioners, as well as by the aspiring new congregants in Georgia, identity of
place has been ignored throughout the entire process. Under the terms of Mary Our
Queen’s “preservation by relocation” strategy, physical context is inconsequential
when the building’s life is at stake. The actual site of St. Gerard’s—the earth upon
which the church rests—has been physically, conceptually, and even economically
divorced from the building’s stones. Future plans indicate that the resulting 19,000
square foot vacant lot in Buffalo will be sold separately, and will host a plaque
or other such marker. This separation of building from context is not without its
own form of distressed familial associations. The likely buyer of the lot is Gerard
Place, a transitional shelter for homeless single-parent families located in the old
convent next door.44 The stakeholders, in an attempt “to know where the child will
be residing,” will leave the site behind to be adopted into another form of parental
estrangement. The relocated body of St. Gerard’s, necessarily accompanied by
social continuities, equates to a sacrifice of site for the livingness of program.
Under the guise of life, preservation here divorces itself from its own context and
asserts the primacy of that which is most variable and transient about a building:
its use and function. But what does this mean for the identity of place? Identity
is a complex set of interrelations between environment, groups, and individuals.
In Buffalo, where the stability of place is challenged by the disappearance of
matter, inhabitants, and memories, the city’s identity—and that of its citizens—
is perceived against an ever-shifting background. When context is so willfully
sacrificed, what are the psychological ramifications? Could we re-frame St. Gerard’s
failure as an opportunity to intensify, not undermine, a place’s identity? Can the site
be protected from its own self-divorce? How can the witness confront the trauma
of remaining in place?
Toward an Ethics of Time and Failure
Liminal boundaries of absolute death, physical and social dimensions of funerary

practices, witness protection and constructed identity—each of these post
mortem case studies has exposed analogical relationships between the death of
the body and the stones of St. Gerard’s. Beneath the mask of death’s domain we
have discovered a network of physical, social, and psychological reformulations
that might instigate new possibilities for failed buildings and spaces. If architecture
and preservation can be dislodged from their perfunctory attachments to life
and death, perhaps we can find synchronous relationships to the afterlives of
architecture’s vital currents. The ethical imperatives that I advance in this article
seek to return architecture to the exigency of time and to embrace the potential of
failure as catalyst of the urban imagination. It is fitting, then, that the post mortem
case studies collectively point to an ever-present tension between death, time,
and ethics. It is in the very malleability of the city—not in its false solidity—that
inhabitants of places such as Buffalo can feel, as never before, connected to the
mutable processes of transformation, in which they play an indisputable part. The
shifting indeterminacies of vision, of the remnants of memory, and of place’s identity
might be formulated as the fluid armature of a city’s emergent post mortem core.
This exposes a paradox that the communities and preservation advocates who are
divided on the issue of St. Gerard’s must be prepared to address: while preservation
is traditionally regarded to be an issue of life, the range of ethical issues associated
with St. Gerard’s transposition are deeply buried in death’s time-worn arena. It is
not a matter of choosing between life or death. It is a matter of recognizing the
ethics at stake when the boundary is crossed.
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a funerary text that reads as a navigator’s
guide to the afterlife, the confrontation with death is framed as preparation for
an alternative form of non-corporal circulation. The living subject must anticipate
post mortem movements to successfully negotiate the afterlife—its passages and
thresholds, openings and closings, entries and departures. The ethics, in this case,
have to do with preparedness for movement through an ethereal time space. How
the stewards of St. Gerard’s confront such an ethical challenge—in material, social,
and psychological terms—is the subject of this essay.
Death and the Double: The Farrar Mansion Project
In conclusion, I would like to introduce a post mortem project that I undertook from
2004–2009 in Buffalo. Off and on over that six year time-span, I was employed as
a laborer at the site of the Farrar Mansion, a long-vacant, historically significant
structure located in the center of the city. A relic of Buffalo’s prosperous, industrial
past, the mansion was undergoing a restoration of its original 1870s core and a
gutting of its early to mid-twentieth century additions. I worked on the restoration
effort from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. for the going hourly rate. My work was primarily surface-
oriented, directed toward protecting and highlighting the mansion’s hand-carved
woodwork, repairing plaster, and restoring windows. Each day, I sanded, patched,
primed, sealed, and coated. During the nights, I returned to the site to work within
the back half of the building, where I had secured permission to construct a series of
installations with demolition debris. Therein, I collected and reassembled discarded
building materials gathered from demolitions and renovations from other sites
around the city. A range of sprawling, aggregated environments thus took shape
within the building’s gutted insides. In contrast with the surface operations of
the mansion’s front half, the residual accumulations were spatial propositions.
Materials were cut and re-cut, layered and re-layered, assembled and reassembled.
While constructing each assemblage, I pushed and pulled components, initiated
breaks and collisions, and opened up gaps and fissures. Meanwhile, during the
days, the original restoration effort continued intermittently within the building’s
street-facing front half. There, the surface reparations eradicated all differences.
Gaps were filled. Rough edges were made smooth. Cracks were covered over. This
work—uniform, precious, and finite—was the precise opposite of that undertaken
at night.
As the front half became more homogenous, the back of the mansion grew more
dense and diverse. During the nights, I shifted material from wall to wall, ceiling to
floor, and back. During the days, material disturbances—broken glass, or chipped
paint and plaster—were removed and replaced. In the front of the mansion, I
walked on newspapers to avoid scuffing the refinished floor. Lighting was provided
by period fixtures. In the back half, which was illuminated by construction lamps,
a plywood subfloor registered innumerable violations. Over the course of six
years, the Farrar Mansion was opened to the public on multiple occasions—once
in collaboration with a local gallery—for the viewing of the two contrasting post
mortem operations (Figures 12.2–12.8). The public presentations were formulated
as a response to the city’s aggressive yet random demolition efforts and to the
restoration projects ongoing in the city. In 2010, having filled the back half of the
mansion to near-capacity with debris, the realtor informed me that “potential
tenants could not discern the difference between the building’s interior and the
surrounding installations.” I was instructed to clear the property of all detritus and
to vacate the premises.
The Farrar Mansion Project challenged a unilateral view of preservation and
restoration by constructing a post mortem dialectic. On one side of the mansion,
synergies were developed between residual matter and residual space, and
between acts of un-building and re-building. Erasure was recast as efflorescence,
waste as vital resource, and dismantlement as catalyst for reassembly. With urban
detritus, I sought to rebuild the city from the inside. On the other side of the
structure, change over time was steadfastly resisted. Walls were treated as rigid
boundaries—as solid and enduring impediments to temporal legibility. The city’s
perceptible image, a transitional vision that encompassed acts of construction,
demolition, and restoration, came into view between visible and invisible iterations.
Arrested decay became not a visible phenomena, but an absent dividing line, lying
somewhere between the pristine, protected surfaces of the mansion’s front half
and the rough, continuously reassembled fragments of prior urban destructions.
It is my hope that the Farrar Mansion Project might hint at new possibilities for
architecture and preservation within our culturally embodied attitudes toward
material ends.
12.2 Farrar Mansion Restoration, 2004–2009. Photos by author
12.3 Dennis Maher. “Bloom.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar
Mansion, Buffalo, NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
12.4 Dennis Maher. “Mantis.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar
12.5 Installation view of Farrar Mansion Project, Buffalo, NY, 2004–2009. Photo by author
12.6 Dennis Maher. “Vessel.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar
12.7 Dennis Maher. “Crest.” Demolition debris, house paint and hardware. Installation at the Farrar
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Notes
1 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1992).
2 Jonah Lehrer, “A Physicist Solves the City,” New York Times Magazine (Dec 17, 2010).
3 Joshua Zumbrun, “America’s Fastest Dying Cities,” Forbes Magazine (August 5, 2008).
4 “Fastest Dying Cities Meet for a Lively Talk,” Wall Street Journal Online, accessed June,
2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125011106498326993.html.
5 Rick Hampson, “NY Church’s Move to Georgia. Preservation by Relocation?” USA Today
(February 4, 2010): 1A.
6 Ibid., 1A
7 Ibid., 1A.
8 “Moved by Grace,” The Parish of Mary Our Queen, accessed June 2011, http://www.
movedbygrace.com.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Carolyn Thompson, “Old Buffalo church to be reborn in Atlanta suburb,” Associated
Press (May 29, 2010).
12 “Moved by Grace.”
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Thompson, Associated Press (May 29, 2010).
16 “Moving St. Gerard’s,” Preservation Buffalo Niagara, accessed June 2011, http://www.
preservationbuffaloniagara.org/page/deconstructing-and-moving-st-gerards-church.
17 Herbert Muschamp, “Public Space or Private, a Compulsion to Fill It,” New York Times
(August 27, 2000).
18 Ibid.
19 Jorge Otero-Pailos, “The Contemporary Stamp of Incompleteness,” Future Anterior (New
York, 2004), viii.
20 Michel Foucault. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York, 1994), 174.
21 Ibid, 179.
22 George K. Behlmer, “Grave Doubts: Victorian Medicine, Moral Panic, and the Signs of
Death.” The Journal of British Studies 42, 2 (April, 2003): 206–235.
23 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial,” The Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper 2, 28 (July
31, 1844): 1.
24 Marc Alexander, “‘The Rigid Embrace of the Narrow House’: Premature Burial & The
Signs of Death,” The Hastings Center Report 10, 3 (June, 1980): 31.
25 “Moving St. Gerard’s.”
26 Seth Richardson, “Death and Dismemberment in Mesopotamia: Discorporation
Between the Body and Body Politic,” in Performing Death, ed. Nicola Laneri (Chicago,
2007): 189–208.
27 Ibid., 190.
28 Ibid., 191.
29 Ibid., 192.
30 J. L. Jules David, Le Peintre Louis David 1748–1825, trans. Akane Kawakami (Paris, 1880).
31 Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, “We Remember, or So It Seems,” Monumental

Propaganda (New York, 1994).
32 Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-war Detroit
(Princeton, 1995), 11.
33 Paul Ricoeur, “Structure and Hermeneutics,” in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in
Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin. (Evanston, 1974), 41.
34 Daniel Preston Martin, “On the Cultural Ecology of Sky Burial on the Himalayan
Plateau,” East and West 46, 3/4 (1996): 353–370.
35 See Leslie Waller, Hide in Plain Sight (New York, 1976).
36 Fred Montanino, “Protecting the Federal Witness: Burying Past Life and Biography,”
American Behavioral Scientist 27, 4 (March/April, 1984): 501–529.
37 Ibid., 503.
38 Ibid., 504.
39 Joseph Pronechen, “On the Move,” National Catholic Register (Oct. 3, 2010).
40 Ibid.
41 Shelia M. Poole, “Former St. Gerard’s parishioners to visit new site,” The Atlanta Journal–
Constitution (August 12, 2010).
42 Montanino, American Behavioral Scientist 27, 4 (March/April, 1984): 523.
43 Pronechan, National Catholic Register (Oct. 3, 2010).
44 Ibid.
Index
abduction 105 anti-apartheid 38

acousmatic voice (voix acousmatique) post-apartheid 31, 32, 35, 36
106–107, 110 apocalypse 9, 75
Adorno, Theodor W. 64, 68, 78, 79, 126, apophrades (return of the dead) 99, 102,
134, 135 106, 114, 116ff
Aesop 153, 166, 171 arms 33, 35, 38
aesthetic(s), aestheticization xiii, 2, 12, Artist In Despair … (drawing, 1778–1780,
27, 28, 33, 40, 58, 59, 64, 65, 67, 77, Johann Heinrich Füssli) x, 12, 179,
94, 96, 97, 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 181, 182, 198, 199
125, 126, 128, 129, 131–132, 133, asceticism, ascetical xiii, 10, 83, 87, 94, 96,
134, 135, 139, 144–145, 147, 151, 168, 173, 174, 205ff
170, 176, 179, 189, 199, 200, 206, Ashraf, Kazi K. xiii, 10, 11, 12, 96
211–212 askesis (withdrawal, contraction) 102,
Afrikaner 32, 36, 38, 44, 47 105, 115, 119
Agrippa, Marcus 182, 199 astitwa (existence) 96
Alberti, Leon Battista 154, 157, 163, 166, Association of Collegiate Schools of
169, 172, 176 Architecture 11, 12
Alexander VII, Pope (Fabio Chigi) 182 Augustus, Emperor (Octavian Augustus
Alexander, Marc 226, 238 Caesar) 182
Algarotti, Francesco 190, 203 Aurelian Wall, Rome 182
Alien (film, 1979) 38 austerity 10, 16, 17, 205ff
Aliens (film, 1986) 38 automaton 2, 109, 119
Alive in Joburg (film, 2006) 31, 43, 44 The Turk (nineteenth-century
Althusser, Louis Pierre 13, 66, 78, 79, automaton) 119
105–107, 116
Alÿs, Francis 105 Babri Masjid (Mosque of Babur, Ayodhya,
anamorphosis, anamorphic 104, 107, Uttar Pradesh, India) 81
109, 111ff, 114, 117 bantustans 32
ancients and moderns, battle of 123, 186 Barbaro, Daniele 153, 157, 162, 166, 169,
Angelus Novus (copperplate etching with 170, 171, 173, 175
watercolor, 1920, Paul Klee) 9, 53, Barcelona Pavilion, Catalonia ix, 10, 91,
122 92, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97
anthropomorphic, anthropomorphism Bataille, Georges 102
96, 97, 127, 147, 164 beauty, the beautiful 54, 64, 65, 69, 73,
Le Antichità Romane (engravings, 76, 81, 84, 85, 90–91, 102, 103, 110,
Giovanni Battisti Piranesi) x, 179, 124, 133, 134, 144, 189, 193, 196, 209
180, 182, 183, 184, 187, 190 becoming (becoming alien, etc.) 38, 40,
apartheid 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 43, 44, 45 52
Benjamin, Walter 9, 51ff, 59, 60, 102, Late Capitalism 1, 9, 29, 33, 52, 121
121ff, 125, 126, 132, 135, 137, 186, Capitoline Museum, Rome 179
198, 201, 214, 216 Castor and Pollux 144
Angel of History (Angelus Novus, print CBW (Chemical and Biological Warfare)
with watercolor, Paul Klee) 9, 53, 35ff, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 48
122ff, 133, 134 Cesariano, Cesare di Lorenzo 162, 168,
history, concept of 51, 53ff, 56–57, 60, 171, 175
121, 122, 125, 126, 133, 134, 137 Chaplin, Sir Charles Spencer (“Charlie”)
Passagenwerk (“the Arcades Project”) 8, 119
102, 201 Modern Times (film, 1936) 8, 119
Berkeley, George 146 Children of Men (film, 2006) 65, 70ff, 78,
Bertolini, David xiii, 9 80
Bertotti Scamozzi, Ottavio 165, 166, 177 Chion, Michel 106, 115, 118
Bichat, Xavier 224ff Choay, Françoise 129ff, 133, 134, 135, 136
Biedermeier, Era 207, 209 CIAM (Congrès internationaux
Germany 209 d’architecture moderne) 210–211
house xi, 209, 210 cities, dying 221, 222, 237, 238
middle-class dwelling xi, 210 Classicism 124, 191
Bitz, Diana 203 anticlassicism 195
bioweaponry (biological weaponry) 8, Neoclassicism 202
33ff, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48 clinamen (swerve) x, 102, 104ff, 107, 112,
biochemical weaponry 41 133ff, 119, 120
biological aspect 16, 32, 33, 35, 36ff, 45 commodification 122, 130, 206, 213
biometrics 32, 42, 43, 44, 45 Consoli, Gian Paolo 190, 198, 203
biopolitics, biopolitical 7, 32, 33ff, 37, Copley, Sharlto 31
42, 43, 45 corruption 35, 42
Blade Runner (film, 1982) 8, 32, 44, 58 crowd control 37
Blomkamp, Neill 8, 31, 42, 43, 44, 47 Crown Hall, Chicago 5
Bloom, Harold 102ff, 107, 115, 116, 117, Cultural Heritage Site(s), United Nations
118, 119 1, 2, 135
Borges, Jorge Luis 117 culture, -al ii, x, xiii, xiv, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 11,
Botha, P(ieter) W(illem) 35, 36, 38, 45 12, 18, 27, 37, 44, 46, 51, 52, 57, 58,
Brott, Simone xiii, 7, 8, 11, 150 64, 65, 67, 71, 73, 77, 78, 79, 83, 100,
Buck-Morss, Susan 186, 201 103, 105, 127, 129, 131, 133, 134, 135,
Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama) ix, 86ff, 139, 145, 148, 188, 198, 200, 202,
87, 95, 96, 97 209, 215, 216, 217, 222ff
Buffalo, New York xi, xv, 11, 219ff, 229ff, archaic 191
223, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238 bourgeois 17
burial 24, 99, 117, 165, 182, 200, 227, 229 consumer 2, 213
premature 225, 238 criticism 216, 229
sky 229, 239 decline of 209
Buschow Oechslin, Anja 115 ecology 239
Bynum, Caroline Walker 167, 174 economy 186
German 209, 215, 216, 217
(Caius) Cestius, Pyramid of 179, 182, 196, Greek 124
199, 204 history 9, 200
Calvesi, Maurizio 189, 203 Italic, -ian 187, 189
Camillo, Giulio 153, 171 Late-Medieval 166, 174
Capitalism xiv, 1, 3, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 13, literary 136, 169, 176
15ff, 25, 28, 29, 35, 57ff, 63ff, 68, 70, mass 136, 209
77, 121, 122, 124, 126, 132, 148, 152, Medieval 169
205, 206ff, 213ff, 215, 216 middle-class 209
index 243
modern 59 effects, architectural 1, 57, 92, 94, 136,

of narcissism 18, 29 140, 143, 147, 185, 205, 208, 220
narratives 66 Eisenman, Peter 125
nineteenth-century 186, 209, 225 Ekici, Didem xiv, 10, 11
origins of 182, 185, 187, 188, 189 Eliade, Mircea 10, 88, 97
philosophy of 10 Ellul, Jacques 1
of place 130 Emmons, Paul xiv, 10, 11
popular 7, 104, 107, 110, 148, 150, 221 empathy theory 67, 139
postwar 41 The End of Dissatisfaction? (book, Todd
Renaissance 170, 175, 199 McGowan) 6
of spectacle 130, 131, 132 enjoyment (de Sade) 63ff, 69–71, 73, 78,
79, 115, 116
The Day the Earth Stood Still (film, 1951) Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment
107 xv, 64, 68, 78, 79, 123, 124, 131, 135,
Deamer, Peggy xiv, 9, 149 136, 182, 185, 186, 188, 201, 202
death, signs of 225, 226, 238 enthusiasm, temple of doom and 88ff
Deleuze, Gilles xiii, 9, 31, 39, 42, 43, 44, equipments of power xiii, 8, 32, 38, 40, 48
45, 48, 140, 142ff, 149, 151 Erechtheion (Acropolis, Athens) 191, 193
democracy 35, 43, 46, 66 Eros (Greek god of love) 63, 66, 78, 79, 80
demolition xi, 11, 81, 83, 89, 96, 219ff, as demon 102, 118
232ff, 234, 235, 236, 237 ethics, ethical 1, 2, 5, 9, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30,
demon, dæmon 101, 102, 105, 108, 118 40, 63ff, 78, 79, 80, 86, 115, 118, 127,
Dempster, Thomas 189, 202 128, 206, 215, 216, 226, 232
Derrida, Jacques 83, 84, 96, 104 ethnicity 32, 35
desire (Jacques Lacan) xv, 6ff, 9, 19ff, exception, site(s) of 102, 105, 106, 110,
27, 28, 29, 30, 40, 58, 63, 67, 71, 73, 118
74–75, 76, 77, 104, 114, 139, 143, expanded field 99, 102, 104, 116, 133,
147ff, 150 136
detention center(s) 32, 33, 34, 42 extimacy, extimity, extimité (Jacques
Detienne, Marcel 89, 91, 96, 97 Lacan) 8, 9, 24, 30, 54, 55, 59, 60, 73,
Diana, Djana (Roman goddess of the 106–107, 108, 115, 118, 163ff
hunt and the moon) 117 extra-terrestrial 31
Digges, Thomas 154, 167, 172
Dionysius the Carthusian 174 failed space 220, 224
Dionysos, Dionysus ix, 88, 89, 91, 95, 96, fantasy, phantasy xiii, 5, 6, 7, 10, 36,
97 58, 65, 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77,
District 9 (film, 2009) 7, 8, 31ff, 43, 44, 45, 108, 111, 114, 117, 139, 141ff, 146,
46, 47, 48 147–149, 150, 195, 196
Dolar, Mladen 4, 104, 105–106, 108, 109, Farrar Mansion Project xi, 11, 220, 232,
115, 116, 118, 119, 167, 176 233, 234–237
drugs 33, 35, 37 Fechter, Paul xi, 207ff, 210, 213, 215, 217
du Maurier, Daphne 99 Festarchitektur (festival architecture) x,
Duchamp, Marcel 7 99, 102, 103, 103, 104. 115
Duncan, Roger 118 Ficino, Marsilio 166, 177
Durand, Jean-Nicolas-Louis 154–155, Finnegans Wake (novel, James Joyce)
167, 171 101, 115, 120
duty (Immanuel Kant) 64ff, 68–69, 73, 75, firmitas (cf. “solidity,” Vitruvius) x, 100,
76, 89 101, 102, 104, 111, 112, 163
flâneur (Walter Benjamin) 102
economic crisis 16, 17, 22, 63, 66, 152, Forster, Kurt 126, 133, 135
205, 207ff, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, Foster, Norman 205
228–229 Foucauldian 34
Foucault, Michel 43, 45, 48, 104, 224, 225, Hestia (Greek goddess of the hearth) 96
237, 238 historiography 122, 123, 124, 125, 131,
Frascari, Marco v, 90, 91, 96, 97, 165, 168, 200, 202
171, 172, 173 materialist 122, 123, 208, 209
Frazer, Sir James 83 Hitchcock, Alfred xiii, 9, 105, 107, 115,
Freud, Sigmund 7, 10, 15, 19, 20, 26, 27, 118, 119, 139
29, 38, 51, 52, 54, 70, 74, 76, 77, 107, films xi, 119, 139
108, 118, 140, 141, 143, 145, 150, Manderley x, 9, 99, 107, 108, 109, 111,
164, 167, 174, 176, 204 112, 112, 113, 114
drive 6, 7, 8, 9, 15, 19ff, 26, 27, 29, 30, Rebecca (film, 1940) x, 9, 107ff, 112,
33, 63, 70, 107, 141, 150 113, 114, 115, 119
death drive 9, 52, 55, 63, 107, 112, 139, Vertigo (film, 1958) 118, 119
140, 144, 147, 148, 220 Holliday, George 3
part-object, partial object 40, 139ff, Horkheimer, Max 64, 68, 78, 79
147, 156, 161, 162 hostes (ancestral spirits) 112
Friedländer, Paul 118 Hugh of St. Victor 154, 168
funerary rites ii, 220, 223, 227ff, 229, 231, human, -ity 2, 16, 28, 34, 38, 39, 41, 43,
232, 237 48, 56, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 75, 77,
Füssli, Johann Heinrich x, 12, 179, 181, 81, 88, 95, 99, 126, 128
182, 198, 199 action, activity 71, 107
affordance 2, 109
gaha (house, home) 86–88 agency 84
Galen (Aelius Galenus) 158, 160, 168, 173 annihilation 84
Galli-Bibiena, Giuseppe 185 awareness 121
genes 35, 42, 43 body, -ies 55, 117, 157, 164, 167, 170,
genetic attributes, testing, engineering 173, 174, 175
32, 35, 37, 42, 46 building 99
Gibbon, Edward 187 cognition 162
Giedion, Sigfried 1, 41, 121, 127, 128, community 19
129, 131, 134, 135 condition 16, 26, 27, 136
Goldhagen, S. W. 127, 133 corpse(s) 158, 166
Good, the 65, 70, 166, 177 craft 190
Gori, Antonio Francesco 187, 189 culture 51, 100
government 17, 31, 32, 35, 36, 45, 47, 72, dehumanization 22
190, 205, 209, 211 desire(s) 64, 208
Group Areas Act 32 dissection 158, 160
Gualtieri, Niccolò 196 DNA 48
Guarnacci, Mario 189 eyes, vision, sight 100
Guattari, Félix xiii, 40, 43, 48, 142, 143, experience 155
149, 151 form 179
genes 43, 48
Habermas, Jürgin 17, 18, 26, 28 hibernation 225
Hadrian’s Mausoleum (Castel history 54, 191
Sant’Angelo), Rome 190 humans, human beings 27, 34, 38, 67,
Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli 191 68, 74, 81, 100, 153, 163, 190, 211
Hamilton, Sir William 197 human–alien 39
Hanssen, Beatrice 132, 133, 135, 137 humane, humanitarian 33, 38, 225
Harbison, Robert 6, 12, 13 humanist, -ic 1, 9, 121, 124, 125, 128,
Hardin, Ross 6 133
Harootunian, Harry 123, 133, 134 humanitarian 33
Hartoonian, Gevork xiv, 9, 11, 133, 136 humanities xiv, 117, 126, 199, 214
Hays, K. Michael 65, 78, 79 imagination 221
index 245
inhuman, non-human 8, 56, 74 Joyce, James 101, 111, 115, 120

knowledge 124, 221 Juvarra, Filippo 185
life 75, 165
marriage and burial 99 Kahn, Louis 125, 127ff, 133, 135, 169, 175
origins 10 on monumentality 127, 128, 129, 133
physiology 225 Kant, Emmanuel 9, 19, 27, 29, 56, 59, 60,
practices 99 63ff, 77, 78, 79, 124, 132, 139, 204,
progress 187 209
reality 72 Kantor-Kazovsky, Lola 187, 198, 200, 201
reason 68 katabasis (descent) 114
representation 71 Kataku (The Burning House, play, 1948,
scale 70 Yukio Mishima) 86
sciences, research 44 kenosis (emptiness, receptiveness) 102,
settlements 44 104, 105, 106, 118
society 225 Kiesler, Frederick 213, 214, 218
species 91 King, Rodney 3
state 34 Kinkakuji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion),
subject, -ivity 4, 63, 74, 75, 76 Kyoto, Japan ix, 84, 85, 85, 86
super-human 38, 88 Kinkakuji (novel, Yukio Mishima) 85
time 100 Kircher, Athanasius 163, 168, 176
understanding 169, 176 Klee, Paul 53, 122
world 70 Klein, Melanie 140ff, 147, 150, 151
Huxley, Aldous 186, 201 Klein, Naomi 3, 12, 13
Knight, Alan E. 117
ideology, ical x, xiii, 1–9, 13, 17, 23, 29, Kopley, Richard 119
38, 39, 42, 43, 49, 54, 59, 59, 60, 63, Kramrisch, Stella 88, 96, 97
65, 66, 67, 69, 72, 78, 79, 80, 94, 96, Krauss, Rosalind 99, 102, 116, 129, 133,
105–111, 112, 114, 116, 118, 119, 136
125, 127, 144, 147ff, 150, 151, 152, Kubrick, Stanley 119
214, 228 Kunstgewerbe (applied arts) 206, 207, 208
Imaginary, the (Jacques Lacan) 6, 7, 71, Kunze, Donald ix, xv, 9, 13, 92, 93, 117,
74, 76, 103, 108, 142 168, 173, 175, 177, 198, 203
Imijondolo 32 Kyoto, Japan 84
immigrants 31
Inception (film, 2010) 9, 65, 73ff, 77, 78, 80 Lacan, Jacques 7, 9, 10, 20, 21, 22, 23,
insurgency, counter-insurgency 37, 43, 46 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 51, 54ff, 59, 60,
interpellation 13, 29, 105, 106, 107, 108, 63ff, 68ff, 78, 79, 80, 104ff, 114ff, 140,
111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119 142ff, 148, 150ff, 164, 167, 175, 176
interpolation 106, 108, 109, 112, 118 Lacanian critique (concepts, etc.) 7, 8,
introjection 140 33, 38, 40, 51, 54, 57, 58, 65, 70, 74,
Ise Shrine, Ise, Mie Prefecture, Japan 83, 76, 104, 105, 106, 107, 113, 115, 118,
86 142, 144, 143, 147, 148, 149, 150,
161, 164
Jameson, Fredric xv, 4, 13, 78, 79 bin Laden, Osama 2, 42
Janus, Djanus (Roman god of boundaries) Lahiji, Nadir xv, 8, 9, 11, 13, 78, 79
5, 101, 102, 104, 117, 211 Lang, Karen 125, 135, 137
Johannesburg, South Africa 31, 32, 33, Laroque, Didier 189, 203, 204
34, 36, 44 Laugier, Marc-Antoine 129, 191
Johnson, Philip 13, 126, 136 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-
Johnston, Adrian 26, 29, 53, 59, 60 Gris) ii, xiv, 90, 128, 211, 212, 228
jouissance (cf. “surplus pleasure”; Jacques Le Roy, Julien David 124, 133, 134, 191,
Lacan) 25, 57, 69, 73, 74, 75, 149, 150 193, 195, 198
Leatherbarrow, David 84, 96 Matta-Clark, Gordon (Gordon Roberto

Lemoine, Jenny 117 Echaurren Matta) 83, 84, 105
Leonardo da Vinci 157, 158, 164, 168, 169, McGowan, Todd xv, 6ff, 11
172, 173 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 162, 163, 169, 175
liberalization 36, 39 metempsychosis 11, 100
Libeskind, Daniel 13 Michelet, Jules 200
Locke, John 146, 163, 169, 176, 190 mi-dire (half-speech) 115, 117
Lodoli, Carlo 10, 185, 187, 190, 197, 198, Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 10, 81, 91, 92,
203 94, 95, 96, 97, 206, 211, 212
Loraux, Nicole 116, 117 militarization, militarism 8, 31, 33, 36, 41,
Lotus Sutra 86 73, 86
love, 115, 117 military, paramilitary 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 42,
as acceleration 110 101, 169, 172, 201
falling in love 105ff, 108ff, 111, 116, 118 Miller, Jacques-Alain 27, 29, 51, 54, 59, 60,
love of knowledge 118 78, 115, 118
love of law 76 Mishima, Yukio 84, 85, 86, 95, 96, 97
narratives of love 104 Mitchell, W. J. T. 12
neighborly 75 Mizoguchi, Kenji 85–86, 95
psychoanalysis of love 27, 30, 99ff Möbius band 105, 106, 108, 114
self-love 16 modernity xiii, xiv, 8, 17, 28, 33, 57, 58, 59,
shadow 157 64, 78, 80, 122, 123, 126, 130, 134,
speaks in whispers 110 136, 137, 186
as topology 6, 99ff, 104, 105ff, 108ff, Momigliano, Arnaldo 187, 188, 198, 202
112, 115, 116, 118, 119 Momus (Greek god of mockery) 153, 165,
Venus, venustas 101, 104 171
Lucchesi, Matteo 187 Mondrian, Piet 95, 96, 97, 131
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 100, 101, Montanino, Fred 229, 230, 239
102, 111, 117, 119 Montesquieu, Baron de 187
Lumière Brothers (August and Louis monumentality 125ff, 133, 135, 136
Lumière) 100 Mostafavi, Mohsen 84, 96
Lyotard, François 130 Mumford, Lewis 1
Muschamp, Herbert 224, 238
Maher, Dennis xi, xv, 11, 223, 234, 235, Musil, Robert 125
236, 237 Muthesius, Hermann 207, 216
mandala ix, 83, 90, 91
sand mandala 10, 83 Naginski, Erika xv, 10, 11, 12, 201
Manderley x, 9, 99, 107, 108, 109, 111, nation-state 33, 36, 42
112, 112, 113, 114 neoliberalism, neoliberal 3, 35, 36
maquilodoro (Free Trade Zone Neues Bauen 211
manufacturing facility) 2 The New Science (book, Giambattista Vico)
Marcellus, Theatre of 188 115, 116, 182, 185, 187, 188, 189,
Mariette, Pierre-Jean xi, 193, 195, 195, 190, 196, 199, 202, 203, 204
202, 203 New Wars, South Africa 31, 35, 43, 45
Marker, Chris 105 Nietzsche, Friedrich 81, 96
Mars (Roman planetary god) 101, 104 Nietzschean 95
Martini, Francesco di Giorgio 164, 169, Nigeria, Nigerian 31, 33, 35, 38, 45
172, 176 nirvāna (“blown out,” profound peace)
Marx, Karl 7, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29, 53, 66, 78, 87, 96
79, 123, 130, 149, 152
Marxism, Marxist 38, 55, 152, 189 objet petit a (cf. “object–cause of desire”)
Mary Our Queen Parish, Norcross, 8, 20, 21, 33, 40, 104, 105, 106, 114,
Georgia xi, 221ff, 223, 224, 231, 238 143, 148
index 247
Oechslin, Werner 115, 169, 175 Project Coast, South Africa 35, 36ff, 46, 48
On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians projection, psychological 69, 73, 140,
(book, Giambattista Vico) 190, 196, 145, 147, 163
199, 203 prosopopoiea (animating voice) 114
ornament 9, 121, 122, 124, 130, 131, 132, Pruitt-Igoe (urban housing project), Saint
136, 156, 169, 176, 188, 189, 193, Louis, Missouri 81
195, 196, 208, 213 psychoanalysis, -tical xiv, xv, 4, 6, 7, 9, 15,
Otero-Pailos, Jorge 224, 238 19, 20, 24, 27, 29, 30, 51ff, 59, 63, 64,
Otto, Rudolf 92, 97 70, 78, 79, 104, 106, 108, 110ff, 118,
139ff, 149, 150, 151, 164, 204
Palazzo Gabrielli 195 Puppi, Lionello 187, 202
Porto-Breganze 172
Palladio, Andrea x, 132, 155, 159, 162, Quetglas Riusech, Josep 91, 92, 94, 96, 97
165, 166, 169, 170, 172, 175, 177
Passeri, Giambattista 189 race 32, 35, 239
Paul, Abba 83 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 156,
Peirce, C(harles) S(anders) 105 170, 172
Penny, Nicholas 188, 202 Raynaud, Philippe 191
Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 12, 115, 118, 166, Real, the ix, xiii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 27, 29,
169, 171, 173, 175 33, 40, 54, 58, 70ff, 99, 101, 103, 103,
performance 5, 10, 81, 84, 100, 101, 104, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 111, 114,
105, 113, 116, 130, 221 115, 116, 117, 148, 149, 167, 176
the architectural performative 5, 84, Rebecca (film, 1940) x, 9, 107ff, 112, 113,
99, 100, 104, 105, 116 114, 115, 119
Perrault, Claude 124, 153, 158, 170, 171, Rebecca (novel, Daphne du Maurier) 99
173 reterritorialization 41
phi phenomenon (φ) x, 3, 5, 103, 104, Rezzonico, Giambattista, Cardinal 185
107, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 120 Richardson, Seth 227, 237, 238
castration, anamorphic defect (–φ) Riegl, Alois 125, 126, 128, 132, 137
104, 107 age-value 125, 126, 128
Philippe Comte de Caylus, Anne-Claude historical-value 128
191 Kunstwollen (cf. “will to art”) 132
Picasso, Pablo 128 Rilke, Rainer Maria 94
Piranesi, Giovanni Battisti x, 10, 12, 124, Rimini, Italy 147
125, 126, 131, 135, 179ff, 180, 183, Ripa, Cesare 158
184, 192, 194, 195, 198, 199–204 Rive, Jean-Joseph, Abbot 196, 204
Poe, Edgar Allan 117, 119, 225 Robocop (film, 1987) 38
poinçon (punch-mark, ◊, <>) 114 Rohe, Ludwig Mies van der 10, 81, 91, 92,
pomerium (sacred boundary) 117 94, 95, 96, 97, 206, 211, 212
Porta Ostiensis, Rome 182 Rome, Italy 101, 124, 156, 161, 169, 172,
Pound, Ezra 146–147 179ff, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 221
poverty 36, 78, 79, 207, 208, 209, 211, Rose, Julian 126, 135, 136
213, 214, 216 Rosenzweig, Franz 118
Predator (film, 1987) 38 Rossi, Aldo 118
preservation, preservationists 208, 219ff, Roussel, Raymond 117, 118
238 Ruskin, John 126, 127, 128, 131, 133, 135,
Buffalo, Niagara, New York 224, 226, 146
238 Russell, Bertrand 89, 97
by relocation 221, 222, 231, 238 Rykwert, Joseph 166, 170, 172, 176, 185,
Farrar Mansion restoration xi, 11, 220, 190, 200, 203
232, 233, 234–237
privatization 1, 15, 18, 23, 25, 36, 39 Sache, die 65, 70, 71
The Sacrifice (film, 1986) ix, 12, 82, 84 Symbolic, the (Jacques Lacan) 6ff, 40,
Sade, Marquis de (Donatien Alphonse 51, 54, 55, 63, 69, 71, 74ff, 103, 107ff,
François) 9, 63ff, 67ff, 78 148, 149
SADF (South African Defence Force) 35ff, Symphony Way, Temporary Relocation
46, 47 Area, Delft, South Africa 32
Said, Edward 83
St. Gerard’s Catholic Church, Buffalo, New Tafuri, Manfredo 66, 78, 79, 125, 134, 135,
York xi, 11, 220ff, 230ff, 238 186, 198, 200, 201, 205, 210, 214,
Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus) 195 215, 216, 217
Sangallo, Giuliano da 161, 164, 170, 172, Tarkovsky, Andrei ix, 12, 82, 84, 105
174, 175 Taut, Bruno xi, 211, 212, 215, 217
Santner, Eric L. 4, 10, 12, 104, 115, 118 Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoto,
Sarris, Andrew 105 Japan ix, 84, 85, 85, 86, 96
Scamozzi, Ottavio Bertotti 165, 166, 177 Temple of the Golden Pavilion (novel,
Scamozzi, Vincenzo 154, 170, 172 Yukio Mishima) 85
Scholem, Gerschem (Gerhard Scholem) The Terminator (film, 1984) 38
122, 134 territory, -ies, -ial 35, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 48,
Schwarzer, Mitchell 131, 136 125, 141, 219, 220, 221, 224
Scipio’s Dream (book, Macrobius deterritorialization 34, 35, 39
Ambrosius Theodosius) 102 reterritorialization 41
security 15, 18, 32, 35, 36, 38, 41, 42, 43, tessera, -æ (memory token) 102, 105, 117
45, 46, 65, 220, 229 Thing, the (das Ding, Sigmund Freud) 54,
Semper, Gottfried 131, 134, 136 55, 65, 70, 71ff
Semperian 132 monstrous thing 104
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (the Younger) 84 Thompson, Robert Ferris 116
Serlio, Sebastiano 155, 170, 172, 175 time xv, 5, 9, 10, 11, 26, 29, 33, 41, 57ff,
Serrano, Andres 95 89, 90, 96, 99ff, 124ff, 116, 117, 118,
The Shining (film, 1980) 119 119, 122ff, 134, 136, 137, 189, 197,
Smithson, Robert 105 220, 226, 231ff
Socrates 153, 166 temporality, a-temporality,
South Africa, -an 31ff, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48 temporalized xv, 9, 99, 101, 102, 106,
Soweto (“South Western Townships”), 116, 121, 122, 123, 197, 220, 224, 226
Johannesburg, South Africa 31, 36, 44 time-now 131, 132
Speaks, Michael 12 Torre degli Schiavi, Campagna Romana,
spectacle xiv, 69, 102, 121, 127ff, 133, 136 Italy 182
Spengler, Oswald 2, 208, 209 Trauerspiel (Walter Benjamin) 186
Sterne, Laurence 165, 170, 177 treasury of signifiers (Jacques Lacan)
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 2, 103, 117 113, 114
Stokes, Adrian xiv, 9, 139ff, 149, 150, 151 Trevisano, Bernardino 190
subject, -ivity (also see under “human”) x, triumphalism, -ist 53, 186
xiii, 4, 5–8, 15ff, 27, 29, 30, 32ff, 38ff, triumphal 81
47, 51ff, 54, 56, 59, 60, 63, 64, 69, 70, Tschumi, Bernard 103
71, 74ff, 85, 100, 104ff, 112, 113, 114, tuchē, “human affordance” (Aristotle,
115, 118, 120, 125, 131, 135, 136, Jacques Lacan) x, 2, 109ff
139ff, 149, 150, 232
psychoanalytical 106, 108, 110, 111, unary trait (Sigmund Freud: einziger Zug;
112 Jacques Lacan: trait unaire) 5
subjectivization 8, 33, 38 uncanny (das Unheimlich) 5, 10, 73, 97,
transcendental 56 99, 103, 107, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118,
sublime 8, 10, 21, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 66, 157, 164, 165, 167, 176, 205
72, 78, 79, 80, 124, 136, 147, 149, 150, urbanism xiii, 8, 34, 39, 41ff
151, 152, 189, 194, 203 imagination, -ary xv, 224, 232
index 249
urban death, failure 221, 224, 229, 239 violent urbanism 32ff, 41ff, 45, 48, 221
urban design and planning xiii, 214, virtuality, virtual space 36, 57, 58, 94,
216, 220, 221, 224 107, 116
urban development, urbanization xv, Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus 100, 101, 111,
205ff, 224 153ff, 170, 171, 176
urban landscape 219
urban life 206, 219, 221 war, warfare 32ff, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48,
urbanists 219, 220, 227 81, 86, 99, 101, 102, 103, 103, 125,
violent urbanism 32ff, 41ff, 45, 48, 221 127, 128, 129, 131, 132, 144, 152,
utilitas (cf. “utility,” Vitruvius) x, 100, 101, 195, 206ff, 213, 228
102, 104, 111, 112 chemical and biological warfare 34ff
utopia, utopian 9, 35, 53, 67, 74, 75, 101, post-war 41, 86, 129, 132, 207, 208,
210, 215, 217, 218 209, 213, 228, 239
pre-war 208, 209
Vattimo, Gianni 130, 131, 132, 134, 136, warzone 33
137 Werckmeister, Otto Karl 123, 134
Venice ii, 144, 150, 163, 166, 167, 171, “wicked architect” (Manfredo Tafuri) 135,
175, 176, 185, 187, 190, 203 186
ventriloquism 114, 116 Wilton-Ely, John 187, 195, 200, 201, 202,
Venturi, Robert 126, 135 203
venustas (cf. “beauty,” Vitruvius) x, 101, Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 124, 129,
102, 103, 104, 106, 111, 112, 115 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 202, 203
Venus (Roman planetary goddess of Wise, Robert 107
love) 101, 102, 115, 117 Witness Security Program, U. S. Federal
Vertigo (film, 1958) 118, 119 (WITSEC) 220, 229–230
Verum et factum convertuntur, or verum Wittkower, Rudolf 185, 195, 199, 200,
ipsum factum (Giambattista Vico) 201, 203, 204
190, 203 The Wizard of Oz (film, 1939) 65, 69
Verwindung (overcoming) 132 Wren, Sir Christopher 158, 168, 173
Vesalius, Andreas 158, 160, 166, 173
Via Praenestina (road, central Italy) 182 Yourcenar, Marguerite 186, 201
Vico, Giambattista 10, 12, 97, 100, 115,
116, 120, 179ff, 198, 199, 200, 202, Zimbabwe 31, 37, 46, 47
203, 204 Žižek, Slavoj 4, 26, 29, 52ff, 59, 60, 61, 64,
Vidler, Anthony xiii, 129, 134, 136, 137 66ff, 71ff, 75ff, 78, 79, 80, 104, 108,
Villard de Honnecourt 163, 166, 175 115, 116, 117, 118, 139, 143, 147ff,
violence 15, 32, 33, 36, 41, 42, 44, 46, 48, 150, 151, 152
57, 66, 83, 87, 89, 92, 95, 102, 140, Zupančič, Alenka 4, 7, 13, 20, 27, 29, 104
167, 174, 179, 228

Architecture-Decline, Dystopia, and Death

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Architecture-Decline, Dystopia, and Death

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Architecture Post Mortem

Ashgate Studies in Architecture Series

The discipline of Architecture is undergoing subtle transformation as design

Other titles in this series

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Architecture as a Performing Art

Forthcoming titles in this series

The Architecture of Pleasure

Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital Project

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-4094-6221-7 (hbk)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Introduction: The Way Things Are  1

1 Driven into the Public: The Psychic Constitution of Space  15

2 Dead or Alive in Joburg  31

3 Building In-Between the Two Deaths: A Post Mortem Manifesto  51

4 Kant, Sade, Ethics and Architecture  63

5 Post Mortem: Building Destruction  81

6 The Slow-Fast Architecture of Love in the Ruins  99

7 Progress: Re-Building the Ruins of Architecture  121

8 Adrian Stokes: Surface Suicide  139

9 A Window to the Soul: Depth in Early Modern Section Drawing  153

10 Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico  179

11 Architectural Asceticism and Austerity  205

12 900 Miles to Paradise, and Other Afterlives of Architecture  219

5.1 Photocollage, Stanley Maenads of Dionysos.

of nature revealed by 3. *63-349 F, Houghton

9.1 “Sincerity,” allegorical 10.6 Plate XX, from Giovanni

de M. Mariette … Rome: Installation at the Farrar

David Bertolini is an associate professor at Louisiana State University School of

Simone Brott is Coordinator of History and Theory of Architecture at Queensland

Architecture,” Log 26 (Fall 2012); and “Architecture et Révolution: Le Corbusier and

Peggy Deamer is Assistant Dean and Professor of Architecture at Yale University.

Paul Emmons is a registered architect and an Associate Professor at the

Gevork Hartoonian is Professor of Architecture and the Deputy Head of Design,

Erika Naginski is Professor of Architectural History at the Harvard Graduate School

Stephen Melville, which explores the philosophy of medium in Hegel, Heidegger

Surprisingly little reference is made to such anti-technology positions, because

homelessness is not “natural evolution” or even a “negative externality” of normal

The Architecture Post Mortem Project

The Now Here of Nowhere

Dennis Maher (“900 Miles to Paradise, and Other Afterlives of Architecture”)

1 Proponents of the globalization of practice, such as Michael Speaks, Dean of the

Concerns about capitalism’s tendency to discourage the constitution of a public

obsession with privacy, especially when we contrast it with Franklin Roosevelt’s

Psychoanalysis eschews the possibility of self-analysis for precisely this reason.

in Imagine There’s No Woman, “Some inherent obstacle—the object of the drive—

Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978).

those live arrangements for producing subjectivity (subjectivization)—in a word,

He was famously acquitted of every charge.52 Nevertheless, Basson is, by all

module. Fuel-blood is what is required to reverse engineer Wikus’s hybrid-alien

Urbanism and Lies

“Truth is a powerful disinfectant, useful to spread around …”

Prior to his death, Dresch moodily described the existence of an international

Agamben, Giorgio, “Non à la biométrie” (“No to Biometrics”), Le Monde, December 5, 2005,

1 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 20.

53 Burgess and Purkitt, The Rollback, 58–59.

There was no failure of modernism, no exhaustion by the end of abstract

Substitute “architecture” for “art” in Pippin’s remarks, and it will be equally

Buildings Must Die Twice!

After speaking psychoanalytically, I want to begin speaking philosophically.

2 See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Matheme: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan,” in Lacan:

you are excluded!’—the Inside is a de-naturalized space to be filled with artifacts.

Introduction: The Way Things Are 1

1 Driven into the Public: The Psychic Constitution of Space 15

2 Dead or Alive in Joburg 31

3 Building In-Between the Two Deaths: A Post Mortem Manifesto 51

4 Kant, Sade, Ethics and Architecture 63

5 Post Mortem: Building Destruction 81

6 The Slow-Fast Architecture of Love in the Ruins 99

7 Progress: Re-Building the Ruins of Architecture 121

8 Adrian Stokes: Surface Suicide 139

9 A Window to the Soul: Depth in Early Modern Section Drawing 153

10 Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico 179

11 Architectural Asceticism and Austerity 205

12 900 Miles to Paradise, and Other Afterlives of Architecture 219