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]