1989 Chicago Institute for Architecture & Urbanism (CIAU)
Tabbles of Bower

Bloomer was in residence as a CIAU fellow at the Charnley House and the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism in the autumn of 1988, and sporadically thereafter. The title of her CIAU Fellowship project is “Tabbles of Bower.” It is impossible to overstate the importance of the support, and the extended support, of the CIAU and the SOM Foundation, as well as its bringing together a group of scholars whose input and criticism were substantial, and helped make possible the consequent experiment in materiality and language that was the focus of Bloomer’s graduate studio teaching and written production for the following fourteen years.

Bloomer was also supported by the generosity of The University of Florida (UF) and Iowa State University. At UF, Dean Anthony Catanese granted her access to working space, a materials lab, and the estimable partnership of graduate research assistant, Adeline (Nina) Hofer (now Associate Professor of Architecture at UF). UF students Mikesch Muecke (Ph.D., Princeton), Bob Heilmann, Dave Karpook, and Jimmy Harrison also played significant parts in the production. At Iowa State, Dean Thomas Galloway supported the move of the large, hefty project-in-progress from Florida to Iowa, and provided a spacious seed barn as a work space for its completion. Dr. Muecke, then a graduate student, and now an Associate Professor at Iowa State, became her research assistant and indispensable partner during the 1991–92 academic year.

Tabbles of Bower

“Tabbles of Bower” is a body of work addressing conditions of homelessness and the history and theory of “the minor” (via Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattar, Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure, Les éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1975) and exploring a notion of Minor Architecture in the City of Chicago. Implicitly addressing architecture’s long history of “the problem of the corner,” it proposes a collection of “corner condition” objects designed to be attached to the corners of prominent Chicago buildings. The primary purpose of these objects is to serve as indexical signs of the problem of the unhoused in a major city of the world’s wealthiest nation, but also to offer elaborated spaces of corners for those who might need them to sleep protected from the elements.

Simultaneous to the SOM Foundation fellowship, “Tabbles of Bower” was offered as the préçis for a graduate design studio conducted by Bloomer at the University of Florida. Each student developed the design for, and built, a full-scale “corner condition” object which could be occupied by a human being. The enthusiasm of the students for their projects, and the student projects themselves, made for an impressive body of work.

The “Tabbles of Bower” project is an extension of prior and contemporaneous work, conducted by Bloomer as a doctoral student, investigating relations among architecture, language, and signification. The development of the project relied on the use of facts and iconography from the history of Chicago, either borrowed wholesale or translated into architecture. Bloomer’s doctoral work on relations of architecture and written text, featuring comparative examinations of drawings of Giambattista Piranesi and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—work which became her book, Architecture and (the) Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (Yale University Press, 1993 and 1995)—significantly informed the process of the project, just as the process behind “Tabbles of Bower” contributed to the construction of the book.

The ultimate project was a full-scale, “laboratory condition” that examines relations of historiography and language in architecture, across various possibilities of materiality and detail. This quite large and cumbersome object, initiated at The University of Florida, was transferred—thanks to the generosity of then Dean of the Iowa State University College of Design, the late Thomas Galloway—to a depleted seed barn near the Iowa State campus, in which the “laboratory condition“ object which itself came to be known as “Tabbles of Bower” was completed in the autumn of 1991. The project was the subject of an essay, with photographs, titled “Abodes the Theory and Flesh: Tabbles of Bower” and published in Assemblage 17 (April, 1992). “Tabbles of Bower” was also featured in Bloomer’s 1992 Annual Discourse before the Royal Institute of British Architects in London.

“Abodes of Theory and Flesh: Tabbles of Bower” from Assemblage 17 (1992)

Style is an indispensable adjunct to architectural knowledge, and ... the cultivation of a sense of appropriate detail is immensely more significant than any pursuit of pure' proportion' or 'form.'... Only certain approaches to form and detail answer to the demands of the aesthetic sense, and these approaches all lead away from prevailing fashions to some more settled 'classical' style.
—Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture [1]

A true understanding of the self led us to uphold, not only the primacy of aesthetic values, but also the objectivity which they implicitly claim. It became possible to arrive at a conception of critical reasoning, reasoning which is at once aesthetic and moral but which remains, for all that, free from the taint of moralism. We were drawn tentatively to conclude that some ways of building are right, and others (including many that are currently practised) wrong.
—Scruton, final paragraph of The Aesthetics of Architecture

To not be probative is to be trivial.
—Jeffrey Kipnis, from a conversation recorded in Chicago

Preface: To bring forth allegory as a construct for theory is to point to a deconstruction of theory itself and, particularly, to a disacknowledgment of the separability of theory and practice. Theory and practice are suspended in the construction; theory is embedded, or disseminated, in it. Uncircumscribed by such concepts as foundation, regulation, or validation, theory becomes a potentiality, a possible pattern; it is dynamic, tracing a fragmentary process of object making. This essay and the project it attends are about such a tracing; they are, as well, objects resulting from the process.

One of the moments when it becomes abundantly clear what a peculiar construct time is occurs during the so-called nine months in which one holds a tiny, developing project within one’s own body. Toward the end, time, which yesterday flew like a hurricane, full of the debris of everyday life, flows like the proverbial molasses in January. And this restructuring of time does not go without its concomitant reconfiguration of space. By this I mean something beyond the very present fact that one can no longer reach the triangle on the far side of the drafting table or the normal-permanent-press-delicate button on the now distant horizon of the clothes drier. It is more metaphysical than that; it is how the space takes on an anticipatory otherness. I tell you (many of you I do not need to tell, for you know well already), the furniture waits. Stark, empty, ticking. Waiting, waiting, waiting for "something that is about to happen." [2]

In the room where my husband and I slept and waited, there is a particularly compelling piece of furniture on either side of our bed. On his side (the right, nearest the door), there is a small bench, which, when it is not festooned with cast-off underwear and socks, is recognizable as the handicraft of Gustav Stickley: a simple, unornamented dark-stained oak frame with recessed pad, cased in a rather overly sat-upon, tanned and oiled hide of a cow. On my side (the left, nearest the gapingly empty, nagging space of the bassinet), there is an ancient wicker rocker. Festooned with the elaborate twisting and interlacing lines and swollen rolled edges of its own structure, and not recognizable as the work of any proper name, it is known simply as "Miss Eleanor's Rocker." The fact of the matter is that both of these pieces belonged to Miss Eleanor in another place in time. Miss Eleanor, you see, was our child's great-grandmother's closest and dearest friend. In the Athens, Georgia, before REM and the B-52s were born, before their parents and even their grandparents were born.

A photograph of Miss Eleanor presents the very image of turn-of-the-century Southern femininity: young, demurely posed, eyes downcast, dressed in white, layers of fabric so fine it could float, edged with gossamer lace, lace that also encrusts her prettily held fan. Beneath the airiness and lightness of the fabric and facial expression, her body is deformed in the fashion of the time. Confined in a post-tensioned construction of bone, metal, and fabric, her chest is thrust upward and outward from a waist so tiny it is no wonder Mr. Bishop's son fell in love with and married her. An entirely artificial construction, she, so beautiful and horrible it is hard to take your eyes away.

Miss Eleanor was given by her father (in marriage) to Mr. Bishop's son. Mr. Bishop had once owned the house on Milledge Avenue in Athens in which my child's great-grandfather and grandmother and father lived and grew up, the house that now hosts the Phi Mu sorority at the University of Georgia. Family legend has it that Mr. Bishop, having moved to Athens from Chicago on the advice of his physician, detested the un-Chicago-like summer browning of the grass on his lawn and ordered a railroad car of evergreen nutgrass shipped from Africa. The windborn seeds of the nutgrass carried it all over the South, where it is currently viewed as a great regional pest.

Before becoming an importer of deleterious plants, Mr. Bishop had been a Chicago merchant, the proprietor of A. Bishop and Company, purveyors of fine furs. Mr. Bishops old habitable and ornamental constructions made from the hides of animals. And this is where the nine-months-plus "project," which I, my feet propped for leverage on the Stickley bench, now on many evenings soothe to sleep in Miss Eleanor's rocker, meets another project that has been inhabiting the same space in time. [3]

This other enterprise, the subject of this essay, is a project for and about Chicago and is an effect of the Great Fire of October 1871. Mr. Bishop provides a joint between the two. For Mr. Bishop and his hides survived the Great Fire. The story goes that Mr. Bishop, minding his store when the fire came whipping down the way, realized that he hadn't enough time to procure a conveyance to rescue his merchandise. In desperation, he offered one of the fleeing throng in the street outside a very large sum of money to dump the contents of his wagon, his own domestic treasures, and take on the furs. Keepsakes, heirlooms, and necessities went out; sable, mink, and chinchilla skins went in. Mr. Bishop and his furs set up shop in another part of Chicago before the smoke had cleared. [4]

I shall return to the fire and address a certain unconscionable domestic animal, the responsibility of a certain blame-worthy housewife, that started it all. But first let us recall those two pieces of restive furniture, which, after all, were never presented as benign objects merely decorating this manuscript. You will remember that the one is solid, rectilinear, and sturdy, while the other is airy, curvaceous, and lacy. Thus you will begin to perceive, had you not already, a certain dichotomy in the works, a duo that might be construed as some sort of metaphor, were one so disposed to do.

The ornament/structure pair has intrigued architects for many centuries and has certainly been a great architectural bugaboo of this one; and so I am by no means the first, nor will I be the last, to consider these, for some reason, uneasy bedfellows. I am not concerned with making yet another argument for the privileging of one over the other. What interests me is the why and how of the urge to privilege and the possibilities for architecture when this urge is absent. I am interested in how the work of Louis Sullivan that had more to do with structure (for example, the articulation of the basic structures of classical orders in the stacking of tall buildings or the development of the Chicago window and its freeing up of the structural frame to expose itself) has given greater weight to his reputation as the "dean of American architects" than has his prodigious body of work on ornament - for which the former has served more or less as an excuse to forgive. I am interested in how the pair ornament/structure has throughout the history of Western culture had an acritical relationship with the pair feminine/masculine and in the ramifications of this for architecture as cultural production. As Naomi Schor points out, neoclassical aesthetics and its successors are bound up in the conventions of classical rhetoric, in which the ornamental and the idea of feminine duplicity are practically synonymous:

This imaginary femininity weighs heavily on the fate of the detail as well as of the ornament in aesthetics, burdening them with the negative connotations of the feminine: the decorative, the natural, the impure, and the monstrous. [5]

A brief excursion into the work on ornament of two canonical architectural writers will suggest the particular territory. But I would like to suggest from the beginning that what is construed as "feminine" can also be read as a much broader category. For the duplicity and degeneracy of the feminine is a metaphor for many forms of alterity to the dominant. Throughout our project, this convention is mined and exploited. And so, in the Joycean (Wakean) mode, the not male, the not Caucasian, the not heterosexual, the not homeowner/head of house, the not Christian slide into identity under this metaphor.

In reading Alberti's De re aedificatoria, four of whose ten books are devoted to the subject of ornament, it is easy to construe ornament as a supplément to beauty. (I am using the French word supplément in the sense in which it is exploited by Jacques Derrida: an entity that is added to another entity, which is both in excess of that to which it is added, that is, is excessive, and which by nature of being added points to, by supplying, a lack in the original entity.) In the Sixth Book, Alberti defines beauty as "that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse." [6] But he then goes on to state that:

ornament may be defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty. From this it follows, I believe, that beauty is some inherent property, to be found suffused all through the body of that which maybe called beautiful; whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional. [7]

Thus if the "inherent property" is a sufficient condition for beauty, ornament, as an addition that is for Alberti a positive one ("Who would not claim to dwell more comfortably between walls that are ornate ... ?"), [8] at once is in excess of the conditions for beauty and points to a lack in the essentially beautiful (unornamented) object. A temporal condition is also suggested here: the beautiful object is beautiful prior to ornament. When ornament is added after the establishment of the beautiful object, there must logically be a slipping away of beauty, since, for the object to possess beauty in the first place, "nothing may be added ... but for the worse." So when something (ornament) is added, the beautiful object becomes both worse (no longer its pure self) and better ("more delightful").

Our second canonical writer demonstrates great faith in the intimate connections of architecture with all aspects of cultural production, from ladies' fashion to plumbing. Adolf Loos, who as a young man visited Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, who remained in Chicago for some time thereafter, and who left an invisible mark on the history of the city with his entry to the Chicago Tribune Competition of 1922, is peculiarly incisive on the topic of ornament, femininity, nature, and degeneracy:

The lower the cultural level of a people, the more extravagant it is with its ornament, its decoration. The Indian covers every object, every boat, every oar, every arrow with layer upon layer of ornament. To see decoration as a sign of superiority means to stand at the level of the Indians. But we must overcome the Indian in us. The Indian says, 'This woman is beautiful because she wears gold rings in her nose and ears.' The man of high culture says, 'This woman is beautiful because she does not wear rings in her nose and ears.' To seek beauty only in form and not in ornament is the goal toward which all humanity is striving. [9]

Although Loos here indulges in the classical identification of the feminine and ornament, he elsewhere "excuses" woman for her barbaric degeneracy, claiming that, in turn-of-the-century European society, because of her forced economic dependency, woman must fetishistically adorn herself as a sexual object in order to "hold on to her place by the side of the big, strong man." [10] In the famous "Ornament and Crime" essay, Loos writes, "The urge to decorate one's face ... is the babbling of painting. All art is erotic." [11] He goes on to explain how the first ornament ever invented, the cross, was pornographic in its intentions: "A horizontal line: the woman. A vertical line: the man penetrating her. The man who created this felt the same creative urge as Beethoven." [12] Regardless of what this wonderful passage tells us about Loos's own peculiar psychological make up, it is of enormous import to the topic at hand because it marks a connection of the sacred/profane, writing, and ornament (alterity) in the tidy conjunction of a drawing, a hieroglyph that is also a symbol, that offers itself up, in oversignification, to florid undecidability. And this leads us directly into the territory of allegory.

Schor notes that

the detail with an allegorical vocation is distinguished by its 'oversignification' (Baudrillard); this is not a matter of realism, but of surrealism, if not hyperrealism. Finally, the allegorical detail is a disproportionately enlarged ornamental detail; bearing the seal of transcendence, it testifies to the loss of all transcendental signifieds in the modern period. In short, the modern allegorical detail is a parody of the traditional theological detail. It is the detail deserted by God [an un-Miesian detail, certainly]. ... The allegorical detail is a disembodied and destabilized detail. [13]

Roger Scruton underscores this observation, from another viewpoint: "Certainly, there is nothing more meaningless or repulsive in architecture than detail used ... outside the control of any governing conception or design." [14] What happens when we assemble such Nietzschean details into construction? [15] The mode of such assembly must, to preserve the destabilized aspect of the detail, be something akin to collage. In writing of collage and allegory, the realm of both Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Gregory Ulmer cites Derrida on the resulting undecidability of reading the assembly that is a collage. Each heterogeneous element, or detail, of the collage, because of its position both as a fragment that can be connected to its original context and as a part of a new whole, shuttles between "presence and absence" and thus disallows a linear or univocal reading of the whole. [16]

The phenomenon cited by Schor and labeled "oversignification" by Baudrillard is one of the mechanisms of the gram, that which is to grammatology as the sign is to semiology. One of the corollaries of the gram as Derrida approaches it is the notion of the supplément. Ulmer notes that Craig Owens, in a definitive article linking the allegorical mode to postmodern art, identified allegory with the supplément and thus with writing, in its supplementarity to speech. [17] Of course, Benjamin had already made this correspondence when he identified baroque allegory with hieroglyphs and other forms of script.

In addressing objections to the possibility of sustaining the distinction that Owens draws—and that Derrida's work suggests—between the self-referential (through metaphor) image of modernism and the problematized reference of postmodernism, Ulmer rescues grammatology and, more important for present purposes, allegory as articulated and used by Benjamin and Derrida from the realm of formalism:

Grammatology has emerged on the far side of the formalist crisis and developed a discourse which is fully referential, but referential on the manner of 'narrative allegory' rather than of 'allegoresis'. 'Allegoresis,' the mode of commentary long practiced by traditional critics, 'suspends' the surface of the text, applying a terminology of 'verticalness, levels, hidden meaning, the hieratic difficulty of interpretation,' whereas 'narrative allegory' (practiced by post-critics) explores the literal—letteral—level of the language itself, in a horizontal investigation of the polysemous meanings simultaneously available in the words themselves—in etymologies and puns—and in the things the words name.. .. In short, narrative allegory favors the material of the signifier over the meanings of the signifieds. [18]

In tracking these possibilities in architecture, with its grand I and enduring, however limited, canon of symbolic materiality, we are once again shuttling between: maintaining the veiled/layered possibilities of allegoresis while playing over them at the level of the detail with the tools of narrative allegory. This movement maintains the fetish: something, an absence, is being hidden here, but revealed at the same time that it is being covered up. The fetish apparatus is excessive to its object, and yet, in its addition, points to a lack in the object. This mechanism of simultaneous concealment and revelation is the mechanism of both fetishism and allegory, and it will be the connection through which to pursue a positive fetishism in architecture. [19] Benjamin likens baroque allegory to texts written in intertwined Egyptian, Greek, and Christian pictorial languages. In addition to "a refuge for many ideas which people were reluctant to voice openly before princes," this kind of writing could provide a place for theology to preserve the power of sacred things by embedding them in the profane. [20] Benjamin quotes Martin Opitz:

Because the earliest rude world was too crude and uncivilised and people could not therefore correctly grasp and understand the teachings of wisdom and heavenly things, wise men had to conceal and bury what they had discovered for the cultivation of the fear of God, morality, and good conduct, in rhymes and fables, to which the common people are disposed to listen. [21]

What lies hidden in the allegorical is theological, the sacred buried in the profane. But this aspect of the sacred, the spiritual, has been carved away properly from religion—now a cagey structure of domination. Mark Taylor observes,

Bataille maintains that art now provides a more effective access to the uncanny time-space of the sacred.... In Lascaux, or the Birth of Art, he argues that art 'begins' in the bowels of mother earth. ... From the beginning (if indeed there is a beginning), there is something grotto-esque and dirty about art. Bataille is convinced that the dirt of art's grotesque, subterranean 'origin' can never be wiped away. Art [we might add architecture, "mother of the arts"], like religion, emerges from the filth of the sacred. [22]

Allegory for Benjamin, like the Dionysian orgy for Bataille, is a "harsh disturbance of the peace and a disruption of law and order" that occurs where the sacred and the profane are indistinguishable. [23] And this place can be allegorized (or emblematized) as allegory itself. Because in allegory "any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else," the profane world—the material world—is rendered a world in which each person, object, or relationship is of no particular significance. [24] At the same time, these "things" that are used to signify acquire a power that locates them on a "higher plane," in the realm of the sacred. As Benjamin puts it, "Considered in allegorical terms, the profane world is both elevated and devalued." [25] This apparent paradox (which is, of course, not unrelated to supplementarity) is one of the processes at work in our project. The things of the conventionally constituted profane world of the other, in being foregrounded into signification, are brought out of convention into expression; that is, they are simultaneously elevated and devalued, shuttled between the sacred and the profane.

This phenomenon of foregrounding the profane world into signification in the domain of the sacred is also at work in George Hersey's The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture. Hersey's thesis is that the elements of classical temples derive from the residual constructions of pagan sacrificial rites; more precisely, that the remains of the sacrificial victims and the accoutrements of the ritual as they were arranged about the sacred place constitute the origins of the structure and arrangement of ornamental parts of the Greek temple. Hersey carries out this work by way of rhetorical operations on the words for the various elements and their accepted as well as some creative (Viconian) etymologies. As in Vico's philosophy of history, words become the historical documents that provide evidence of the thesis. One example will remain germane to the larger topic at hand: In writing of the caryatid as woman punished for sexual misconduct, Hersey notes what he calls the trope between caryatid and Corinthian, which contains the phoneme cor, meaning both "heart" and "horn," body parts of a sacrificed animal. [26] Here language is a switching mechanism, a time machine. Regardless of how such creative scholarship and the ends to which it is applied might be judged, the fact remains that these kinds of moves, which treat words almost as material constructions themselves, suggest a methodology for assembling architectural material.

For an inhabitant of the Hellenistic world, the words 'Doric,' 'echinus,' or 'Ionic fascia,' in Greek, did not have the purely workaday associations they have for us. They suggested bound and decorated victims, ribboned exuviae set on high, gods, cults, ancestors, colonies. Temples were read as concretions of sacrificial matter, of the things that were put into graves and laid on walls and stelai [written]. This sense of architectural ornament is very different from the urge to beauty. But indeed the word ornament, in origin, has little to do with beauty. It means something or someone that has been equipped or prepared, like a hunter, soldier, or priest [or a woman, through fashion, make up, jewelry, manners]. [27]

Classical ornaments, for Hersey, are thus trophies/tropes of sacrifice. The assemblage of details in our project mimes this operation, but indulges in tropes of the tropes, letting them slide from their origins in classicism to become allegorical and richly undecidable (for instance, elements here both do and do not adhere to the ideas of the classical temple in Hersey's terms).

This exploration of and play in the territory between the sacred and the profane, sanctity and sensuality, links the project to baroque art and architecture. [28] A historical assemblage of the use of the word baroque serves as an approximate description of the aesthetic milieu in which it is situated:

The word baroque appeared in current speech in France at the end of the sixteenth century, to designate something unusual, bizarre, even badly made. Montaigne uses it in this sense in his Essais. It is still used by jewellers to describe those irregular pearls known. .. in Portuguese as barroco; in the mannerist and baroque periods these odd shapes were used . .. in precious settings to form figures of sirens, centaurs and other fabulous creatures. [29]

The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt characterized the baroque as "wild" and "barbarous" (think of Loos) when compared to the ideal beauty of the Renaissance. Quatremère de Quincy called it "bizarre to a degree," a definition that Francesco Milizia repeated. In the Dictionnaire de la Musique, Jean-Jacques Rousseau used it to suggest a "confused harmony." In the twentieth century, Benedetto Croce called it "the art of bad taste." [30] But it is the project's generative tie to baroque tragic drama, the Trauerspiel, the subject of Walter Benjamin's Habilitationsschrift, that is most profound:

The Trauerspiel... is not rooted in myth but in history. Historicity, with every implication of political-social texture and reference, generates both content and style.... The baroque dramatist clings fervently to the world. The Trauerspiel is countertranscendental; it celebrates the immanence of existence even where this existence is passed in torment. It is emphatically 'mundane,' earth-bound, corporeal. [31]

The Project

The project encompasses a constellation of barnacle like corner structures—sites for an exploration of the ornament/ structure pair. This investigation enters into two significant territories. First, these structures are constituted as parasitical and habitable and are therefore, by conventional definition, both ornamental and structural; they exist in a realm of blurred boundaries. Second, they are constituted as structures of significance; that is, they convey messages. They serve dual functions: as places for people who might otherwise be out on the street to rest or take shelter from bad weather and as signs of the condition of rampant homelessness in the city (at the most general level, they signify the presence of alterity to the status quo).

This project is figured as Louis Sullivan's revenge, a Louis Sullivan who serves as trope of the alter. Sullivan and "Dora," both of whose "unconscious" homosexual tendencies were treated—Dora's by Freud, Sullivan's by a herd of architectural historians—become tropes for each other. [32] They are connected as well through their given names, both of which allude to gold. The project of joyous revenge is also a twisted delivery of Adolf Loos's promise to the world, given when his entry to the Chicago Tribune Competition, an enormous black Doric column, failed to win: "The great, Greek Doric column will one day be built. If not in Chicago, then in another city. If not for the Chicago Tribune, then for someone else. If not by me, then by another architect." [33] This Greek gift, this (now) disseminated rage of Louis/Dora, this other Doric colon, by other architects, appears, mapped onto Chicago as a great mantle of Tabbles of Bower. The center of this maelstrom is the site of the Chicago Tribune Building.

The Structure of the Project

The generating structure of this collection of proposed constructions is a web with five major interconnecting nodes: colon, fire, cow, temple, and Dora. In this temporally perceived text it is impossible to denote sufficiently the flows among the nodes of the nonlinear structure. These flows are suggested below by lists of generative facts and ideas that adhere to each node and begin to build conduits among them—a process by which the (disordered) metaphoric is projected onto the metonymic structure of the project.

Colon

Colon, French for "column" or "order," is the surname of Cristobal Colon, or Cristoforo Columbo, or Christopher Columbus, who "discovered" "America" in 1492. The colonization of the North American continent by Europeans, with its corollary displacement and murder of the human communities that occupied it, was the result of this "discovery," which was commemorated in 1893 by the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The root of the word columba is suggestive of color: kel, "blackness" or "grayness," and umbra, "shade"; thus the columba, the dove, is named by its color. Color is an omnipresent coding device of difference in this culture. Blondes. Blacks. Mulattoes. Pink is for girls; blue is for boys.

The first thing a person who is not an architect notices about a building is what color it is.
—Craig Saper, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

Chicago was first settled (in 1779) by Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a, black man from Jamaica, who married a Native American woman after his arrival. At the World's Columbian Exposition, no reference was made to the contributions of African-Americans to the history of this country. Black women were not represented at the Women's Congresses. In reaction to this slight, Ida B. Wells founded the first Black Women's Club in Chicago in 1894,

The root kel also branches into words suggestive of "hill" or "prominence" (to stick out or project), producing "column," and" excel." George Hersey notes that the Greek coria connotes "hill, mound, blood clot, or altar." [34]

In Hersey's terms, we might also note that the caryatid both is and represents the colonization, or ordering, of the female.

Colony and bucolic share the same Indo-European root, -kwel, which suggests circling (of humans, on the one hand, of cows, on the other). Thus the Greek -kolos, "herd," and the Latin colere, "to cultivate" or "to inhabit." The Latin colonus is a farmer, for which the German word is Bauer. Bau, in the same language, is a building or construction.

In 1900, a full two decades before Loos conceived his Doric column, a monument commemorating the bicentenary of the founding of Detroit was in the works: a "proper" expression of Detroit, an erection", the largest in the world," of a gigantic Doric column, from the top of which would spew a "great flame of natural gas, so characteristic of the West, and impossible elsewhere." "As though," Sullivan adds with derisive scatological humor," there were not 'natural gas' enough in this Doric column itself." [35]

Dora died from cancer of the colon.

Fire

The balloon frame is one of two construction techniques to bracket the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871. To whom the credit for the invention of the balloon frame belongs seems open to question, but there is no doubt that it originated in Chicago. Called "Chicago construction" before the fire, it was praised as a significant technological event, allowing for the mass production of parts that unskilled labor could assemble into inexpensive housing. In this context, Siegfried Giedion deduces its invention in 1832 by one George W. Snow, a building contractor educated in civil engineering who owned the local lumber yard as well as a real estate business. [36] But the balloon frame, being light timber construction surrounded by lots of oxygen, is highly ignitable, as the Great Fire proved. In this context, its invention has been credited to a Mrs. Albertine Taylor in 1837, the year of Chicago's official founding. [37]

A second, more infamous woman is faulted with the fire's destruction: Mrs. Patrick O'Leary left a burning lantern in the shed that housed Mr. O'Leary's other dull-witted, and clumsy, domestic animal.

In the multitude of etchings that document the horror of the fire, it is virtually impossible to find a black face among the fleeing crowds, although this was the decade following the mass exodus of former slaves from the South to Chicago.

After the fire, a hundred thousand people were living on the streets. Wooden shanties were quickly thrown up in the corners of what had been cellars (providing two ready-made walls). In 1871 in Chicago, homelessness was an impetus to build.

Grotesquely shaped pieces of glass and iron, relics of the fire, were sold by children as a means of livelihood.

"Whether or not a cow did indeed kick over a lantern in the barn is impossible to say, but there were a cow and a lantern in the shed where the blaze started." [38]

Cow

All history looks pretty much the same to cows.
John Irving [39]

The cow represents a crucial joint, a turning of the corner, between the two American construction methods that originated in Chicago: balloon-frame construction and skeleton construction.

The Indo-European root of corner is ker, "horn," with derivatives that refer to horned animals, horn-shaped objects, and projecting parts. From ker come "cervix," "carrot," "rhinoceros," and "cerebrum." The corner, then, has intimate associations with grotesque body parts.

Cow O'Leary is but one among the many bovines important to Chicago's history: the millions that have populated the stockyards and made the transmogrifying journey through the slaughterhouses.

The Greek bous is an ox or cow. A trinity of bovinity underlies the Chicago Tribune and its site, smack in the middle of the black zone of the Great Fire.

The cow is a domesticated animal, used as a form of currency, an object of exchange. The cow is a gift, source, of milk or meat.

The verb cow comes from an Old Norse word meaning "to oppress." The verb is active, the noun the passive recipient. Through punning, the metonymic figure of the cow, her "udderness," oscillates to metaphor.

Everyone knows that cows are stupid, placid, contented, but sometimes stubborn.

The American Heritage Dictionary tells us that a cow is "a fat and slovenly woman." Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes,

The wild cow is a female. She has healthy calves, and milk enough for them. And that is all the femininity she needs. Otherwise than that she is bovine rather than feminine. She is a light, strong, swift, sinewy creature, able to run, jump, and fight, if necessary. We, for economic uses, have artificially developed the cow's capacity for producing milk. She has become a walking milk-machine, bred and tended to that express end, her value measured in quarts. [40]

Louis Sullivan himself offers a final insult to cows, when he uses them as metaphors for architects:

The Roman temple can no more exist in fact on Monroe Street, Chicago, U.S.A., than can Roman civilization exist there. Such a structure must of necessity be a simulacrum, a ghost. Of course you andI know well enough that the reason why the bank building is an imitation Roman temple is because it is easy and cheap to make that sort of thing—but the people at large do not know it. They do not know how easy it is for the architect to turn to a book of plates, pick out what he wants, and pass it on to a draughtsman who will chew this particular architectural cud for a stipend. [41]

In a declaration that underlines his personal penchant for simplicity without self-denial, Adolf Loos juxtaposed himself to those who would opt for decorated gourmet concoctions: "I eat roast beef." [42]

Temple

Temple comes from the Latin templum, which comes from a root meaning "to cut." Templum suggests both a place cut out (a special, sacred place) and a small piece of wood cut out from a larger one. Thus the manifestations of the English word temple as a container of the sacred and as the mundane device in a loom that keeps the cloth stretched to a consistent width are related.

My body is the temple of the Lord.
Shirley Cothran, former Miss America

The metaphor of the body has persisted as a ruling paradigm throughout the history of Western architecture, but generally this has involved the image or figure of the (male) body, not an analogue of the body as a messy assemblage of flows, both material and immaterial. [43]

Consider the balloon frame of Mrs. Albertine Taylor. How easy it might be to see the economical beauty of the balloon frame as a construction while cleaning and gutting a chicken for Sunday dinner. Balloon-frame construction is a metonymy of the body: not the image of the body, but the stuff of the body. The economy, the oikos, of the body. This is neither the Renaissance body nor the Corbusian body.

In Moby Dick, Melville described a temple, "a Bower in the Arsacides," presided over by "my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all matters of barbaric virtue." This temple was formed of the skeleton of a great sperm whale

all woven over with the vines,. .. with his head against a cocoanut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet.... The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with Arsacidean annals in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent forth its vapory spout; while, suspended for a bough, the terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung sword that so affrighted Damocles... . Life folded Death; Death trellised Life. [44]

Sullivan wrote of the Roman temple," And so the temple was created by its own people; blood of their blood, flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone, and gold of their gold." [45]

The chrysalis, a body enclosure formed from the body's own secretions, receives its name from the Greek khrusos, "gold."

Interlude: Helen of Troy

One day, when this project was beginning, we chanced to find a very fat caterpillar in our herb garden. My husband thought it would be a fine lesson for nine-year-old Sarah to watch the caterpillar do what comes naturally and put it in a large glass jar in our kitchen window. The skin of the caterpillar was so beautifully variegated with subtle spots of color that we named her Helen of Troy. Over the next few weeks, Helen of Troy consumed all of our garden's dill (her herb of choice), generously placed bit by bit in the jar by her human servants, and she grew even more enormous. One afternoon, I returned home from an out-of-town trip to discover Helen missing from the jar; in a distressed state,I called my husband to report this wretched fact. "Look more closely," he advised. I returned to the kitchen window and, after puzzling over the clearly caterpillarless jar for a moment, discovered, eight inches above, just on the comer of the window frame, adhering to the intricacies of the wooden molding, a magnificent construction: a symmetrical, grotesque golden-grey figure, the head piece bowing out vertiginously from the frame, but held in place by a gossamer cable suspended from above. The chrysalis of Helen of Troy. A barnaclelike corner construction with a body inside. And two weeks later, the wet, messy emergence of the imago.

Dora/Doric/D'or

Dora, like the original Helen of Troy, was treated by her father as an object of exchange, as a gift, as gold. [46] In 1900 Freud was treating her hysterical symptoms, including respiratory problems and "unconscious lesbian tendencies":

The hysterical symptom arises as a compromise between two opposing affects or instinctual trends, of which one is attempting to express a partial impulse or component of the sexual constitution, while the other tries to suppress it. [47]

"Dora" was the pseudonym for a young woman whose real name was Ida Bauer. The Middle English bour means a "dwelling" or "inner apartment." A bower is an inner chamber, locked up, where family secrets are encrypted. When the chamber gets too full, it moves around; this is the classical cause of hysteria, or "wandering womb." A bower is also "a shaded, leafy recess, an arbor," and "a private chamber, a boudoir." [48]

Dora's mother suffered from what Freud termed "housewife's psychosis," an obsession with keeping things clean so absolute that she ignored the "needs" and behavior of her husband and the plight of her daughter. (It was her fault.)

Doric is the adjectival form of Dora. Loos's great Doric column, now readable as Dora's missing phallus, becomes Sullivan's return of the repressed. This project takes up Louis's beef with classicism and, through Hersey, meets it on its own terms in a doubling, reversing move.

As Dora's death returns us to colon. Hersey notes the positions of women's arms in the caryatis dance: "The women raised their arms during the dance, just as women at sacrifices raised theirs when the god came into their presence." [49] He goes on to show the connection between the raised arms of the dancers and the body motion of supporting weight.(In another story, the origin of the caryatid lies in the depiction of the punishment inflicted by the Caryan men on the Caryan women, who took rape over death when given the choice by invading troops: they were pilloried and forced to hold heavy weights over their heads for extended periods of time in the public gathering place). In this context, it is intriguing to note Freud's interpretation of one of the symptoms of the "hysterical attack":

For instance, in an hysterical attack an embrace may be represented by the arms being drawn back convulsively until the hands meet above the spinal column. Possibly the well-known arc de cercle of major hysterical attacks is nothing but an energetic disavowal of this kind, by antagonistic innervation of the position suitable for sexual intercourse."

Parts of the Project

Amulets

The stone is the conventional emblem of the allegorist; its ponderous inertia is associated with melancholy, the allegorist's temperamental attribute. [51] With its grand tradition of stone piling, architecture is thus always already an allegorical enterprise. In the generation of this project, stones (bits of material from which architecture is made) take the form of amulets called fascini. The fascinus is defined as an amulet made in the shape of a phallus, whose power is directed toward holding motionless (like a stone) under a spell. (This is the root of the word fascinate. Fascination is traditionally held as the province of a woman—or other beautiful object—and often associated with evil: bewitchment. A fascinator is a woman's head covering made of net or lace.)

The fascini serve as tiny generative models for the project, bits of three-dimensional research that explore the possibilities of barnacle construction that emerge from Sullivan's work. These amulets are shaped with thought not to form, but technique. The techniques derive from Sullivan: symmetrical placement of parts, interweaving, swirling, overlay, repetitious alternation, use of organic material. The materials come from the everyday domestic sphere, much having to do with ornamenting the body: copper and brass wire, buttons, beads, baubles, hooks, eyes, straps, false fingernails, makeup, hair, ribbons, lace, thread, shells, feathers, and bones. [52] The amulets are fetishes, beautiful ornamental objects, and they are connected to the fetishism of architectural representation.

Drawings

Three kinds of drawings are at work in the project. Two are tools: sketchbook drawings, which examine and document construction techniques, signification of material, and form; and "shop" drawings, from which a full-scale construction was built. The third, "dirty" drawings, document the project ex post facto. The dirty drawing aims both to exploit the power of the pornographic image and to mark the connection between it and the conventions of architectural representation. It occupies the territory between a working drawing and a pornographic photograph (I have in mind that famous, lush image of the flesh of Marilyn Monroe dished up on red satin). Thus it is both technically correct and "improperly" ornamental. In its oscillation between poles that might be considered those of sanctity and sensuality, and in its bizarre and emphatic mundaneness, the dirty drawing is baroque. The dirty drawing addresses architectural representation by colliding the rendering with the working drawing (the sacredwith the profane), while at the same time pointing to the fetishistic role of the image in architecture. It comments as well on the contemporary phenomenon of the architectural drawing as art commodity.

Full-Scale Construction

The full-scale demonstrative construction is an assemblage of thirteen allegorical details that together form a laboratory condition of the project as a whole. The thirteen parts are the residual of an exploration of techniques of blurring the ornament/structure boundary that would be used in building the corner barnacles. In their assemblage, they serve as an exhibitional armature for models and drawings, as well as an allegorical emblem of the Tabbles of Bower.

Publication

Bloomer, Jennifer. “Abodes of Theory and Flesh: Tabbles of Bower.” Assemblage 17 (1992): 6–29.