AofH : First Keynote : Donald Kuntze

Leslie Van Deuzer

AofH : Second Keynote : Shannon Mattern

Apparatuses Of Hiding: Veiled Narrative Devices

Motives Of Hiding: Disguised Urban Narratives

Donald Kunze

Architecture of the span

In 1769, Denis Diderot (1713-1784) wrote about the apparent opposition between two spaces of representation: the salon and the stage. Up until then, the salon was a place governed by sensitivity, where every conversation aimed at expressing the cleverness and refinement of those involved, whereas the stage demanded and often amplified exaggerated performance to attain a desired dramatic effect. The Paradox of the Actor not only inverted these two modes of social interaction, it theorized a form of social acting that had become omnipresent throughout Europe.
Pretending in a theatrical performance that the audience was absent, or as in Diderot’s Le Fils naturel (1757) a sole spectator hidden in a corner of the room, this new paradigm played on the increasing importance given to the private realm and domestic architecture in the eighteenth century. Other authors such as Montesquieu (1689-1755) in his Lettres persanes (1721), Chevalier de la Morlière in Angola (1746), Laclos in Liaisons dangeureuses (1782), or even Diderot’s own boudoir novels all confirmed this social transformation taking root in France at the time.
The architectural world embraced this new social reality in the design of public theatres with all sorts of devices that allowed spectators to witness the action without being seen or recognized. It also infiltrated the private realm with peepholes and trap doors being introduced in private residences to observe without being seen the movements of one’s guests, the choreographed needs of a patron or even the secret life of a neighbor.
Nowadays, one may look at such instances as a case of intrusion, a violation of one’s private life, but has the culture of voyeurism that became even more pervasive in the century that followed ever gone away, or has it only changed form? The present essay will look at eighteenth century apparatuses for hiding in an attempt to identify what has or has not changed in our desire to dissimulate our gaze, and the role of architecture in framing it.
Keywords: theatre, fiction, peephole, spectator

Louise Pelletier

Hiding in the Wings; A Culture of the Onlooker in the Eighteen Century

It began with an empty box. Three copies of an unknown architectural project were printed, before the originals were reduced to ash. The copies, folded to A4, were sealed within layers of envelopes, then placed within the aluminium box, labelled ’SUPERSTUDIO / ‘HIDDEN ARCHITECTURE’ / 25.7.1970.’ This box was soldered shut. A witness account was made by an attending lawyer, confirming the events that had taken place—the fourteen steps taken towards an “architectural project which will remain hidden in hermetically sealed covers, for ever.”1
In the “Conceptual Architecture” issue of Design Quarterly (1970), the Italian radical architecture group Superstudio published a piece entitled “[Hidden Architecture].” Composed largely of a sequence of photographs, the piece documented their endeavour to create an architecture truly in hiding. From the sealed edges of the soldered box, we may be moved to think of thresholds (between inside and outside, between absent and present) and thereby of paratextual phenomena—that which, in literary theory, exists beside and beyond the main text. In this case, the main text can never be known, we are forever reliant on supplements—the sealed box, the signed statement, the label, the documentary photographs and publication in Design Quarterly. Nothing is original. Without the paratextual elements, this architecture of hiding would be entirely unknown: it is the remaining traces and marginal phenomena that offer us glimpses of an architecture that was carefully and intentionally hidden from view.
Architectural creation, representation, and interpretation are often seen as revelatory. In “[Hidden Architecture],” Superstudio unsettled this notion, illuminating architecture’s engagement with darkness and peripheralities. Concerned with societal and political issues, Superstudio sought to make evident the hidden in architectural production and discourse—the veiled agendas concealed within similarly insurmountable and unlocatable boxes. This paper seeks to draw upon the literary notion of paratext to explore the apparatuses and modes that Superstudio employed in their piece “[Hidden Architecture],” as well as to unveil the motives that lie behind this architecture of hiding and which led fourteen steps towards the paracontextual.
Keywords: paratext, threshold, subversion, Superstudio
1: Superstudio, “[Hidden Architecture],” Design Quarterly 78/79, Conceptual Architecture (1970), 54–58, 54.

Ashley Mason

[Hidden Architecture]: Superstudio’s Fourteen Steps Towards the Paracontextual

In the first half of the twentieth century, the American family of a disabled child was met with
two options: to care for the child at home or to place them in a state residential institution,
away from the public eye. In the 1950s, the special education school—positioned midway
between the state institution and community integration of disabled children—became an
increasingly appealing option for many parents. The special education school sprang from
political and educational policies that sought to extend essential rights to a previously ignored
population that was gaining increasing visibility. However, behind the seemingly progressive
discourse of special education lay hidden anxieties about upholding the idealized nuclear
family and protecting a coherent, healthful national body.
The Sven Lokrantz School in Los Angeles, CA, designed by Sidney Eisenshtat in 1961, was
envisioned as the crown jewel of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest
school district in the United States. Formally, the exterior of Sven Lokrantz fits inconspicuously
into the surrounding community, presenting an image of aspirational suburban development.
The architectural style of Mid-century Modernism offered the morphology through which
Eisenshtat expressed ideals of rehabilitation and happiness. The open, airy classrooms took
cues from the period’s progressive pedagogies and wellness ideologies, linking communion
with the natural world with intellectual and physical development. In contrast, the innermost
therapy room, placed at the center of the building but detached from the rest of the school,
sought to contain, study, and abolish disability in a hospital-like, institutional setting. Lokrantz
oscillated between rehabilitation and containment, care and control, merging the imperative
of universal human rights with underlying anxieties about concealing and eliminating bodies
that did not conform to convention. By joining together architecture history with disability
studies it is possible to showcase how architecture became complicit in defining and
representing disability and how, through the special education school of the postwar United
States, the cultural imaginary of disability was given material form.
Keywords: disability, mid-century modernism, California, school architecture

Dora Vanette

Happy Schools: The Sven Lokrantz School and the Architecture of Special Education

The walls of the medieval city possessed dual functions of hiding and revealing. These urban
barricades created official borders in the form of perimeter walls, revealing the city’s power
and glory to outsiders while protecting citizens and hiding their everyday life. City gates
ensured this duality when they remained open during the day and closed at night. Today, this
complicated relationship ceases to exist, and a new form of walls is erected inside the city in
direct confrontation with its citizens.
This is indeed the case of Beirut where security walls and other urban barriers suppress and
silence protestors. By concealing the oppressor, these new walls protect those in power. In
August 2015, and then again in December 2019, security walls appeared overnight in front of
the government’s headquarters in the wake of a civil movement against political corruption.
Activists appropriated the wall in response, painting their demands on their side, and turning
the urban apparatus of hiding into a canvas for political expression—a site of revelation.
Examining both Michel Foucault and George Bataille’s writings on architecture, Denis
Hollier draws an analogy between a silent architecture that controls in hiding and a colossal
architecture that spreads fear in plain sight. Both the public and the subtle manifestation
of architecture are effective as apparatuses of subjectification and control: “but one works
because it draws attention to itself and the other because it does not. One represses (imposes
silence); the other expresses (makes one talk).”1 The intertwining of the histories of wall
building with political violence in Beirut points to the theory of spatial violence.9 It asserts
that architecture harbours within itself a potential to exhibit violence. The analysis of various
forms of political violence (oppression, silence) inflicted on the city and its residents cannot be
separated from the mediation through which this harm was possible—the wall(s).
Looking at the medieval and contemporary wall building practices, the wall of Beirut is
analyzed as an architectural apparatus of both revealing and hiding in the city.
Keywords: hiding, Beirut, walls, political violence
1 Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: the Writings of Georges Bataille, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), x.
2 Andrew Herscher and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Spatial Violence,” Architectural Theory Review 19, 3 (2014):
269–277.

Jenan Ghazal

“The walls of hiding”: a tale of Beirut’s wall of shame

Anne-Marie Broudehoux

Mega-events and the invisibilization of poverty: Notes from Beijing and Rio de Janeiro

While the city of Chandigarh was being built as the new capital for the Indian state of Punjab,
the area was seeing another undertaking in the early 1960s. As the country was preparing
to celebrate the post-colonial “new” city designed by Le Corbusier, a local artist had started
creating his hidden rock garden in parallel.
An architectural wonder that encompassed 18 acres of forest land and consisted of rock
sculptures and structures, the Rock Garden was made entirely from the waste produced in the
city’s construction. Situated near the Capitol complex in Chandigarh, this “outsider-art” made
of concrete, broken ceramic tiles, glass bangles, rocks, clay pots, etc. is a haphazardly shaped,
illegally constructed juxtaposition of Chandigarh’s grid system and Le Corbusier’s monumental
governmental buildings. This space displays an array of sculptures and sculpted cascades,
waterfalls, and other artistic installations that were single-handedly carried out by Nek Chand.
The rock garden, protected by a wall made of concrete and tar drums, was kept secret for
almost ten years, despite its proximity to the Capitol Complex. In 1975, the city inspectors
recognised this illegal construction, and the Chandigarh bureaucracy wanted it eliminated
as Nek Chand’s creation occupied government land that had been set aside as green space
between the government buildings of Le Corbusier and the city proper. After much debate, the
Chandigarh Landscape Advisory Committee relented and allowed Chand to open his creation
to the public. It is now recognized as one of the most visited tourist spots in the world, after the
Taj Mahal.1
Here, his organic-planning approach appears as a political goal that seems to be fighting
against Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, which was intended as a prototype for city-planning and
architecture in post-colonial India.2 It seems as though Chand maintained a sense of local
identity, constructing an antithesis within a city built by an outsider, although ironically, the
Rock Garden has often been referred to as the “Outsider Art.”3
Through related literature and mentions in published articles after its discovery, this paper
examines Chand’s motive in building, and thereafter hiding, the parallel “village” at the same
time Le Corbusier’s “modern” city was being constructed.
Keywords: Chandigarh, Le Corbusier, Nek Chand, rock garden
1 Iain Jackson, “About Nek Chand,” Retrieved from Nek Chand Foundation: <a href="https://nekchand.com/aboutnek-chand">https://nekchand.com/aboutnek-chand</a>.
2 Bhatti, S. S., Rock Garden in Chandigarh: A Critical Evaluation of the Work of Nek Chand, (Queensland: The
University of Queensland, 1982).
3 Lucienne Peiry, John Maizels and Philippe Lespinasse, Nek Chand’s Outsider Art: The Rock Garden of
Chandigarh, (Montreal: Flammarion, 2005).

Spoorthi Satheesh

The Hidden Garden – A City Within A City

Anwar Jaber

Architecture, the State and the Capital City: Investigating the Muqata’a and Arafat’s memorial site in Ramallah, Palestine

World War II martial law in Hawai‘i was the longest institutionalization of martial law in US
history. This emergency power gave the US military unfettered access immediately following
the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 until October 27, 1944.1 Under martial law,
O‘ahu’s landscape was dramatically altered. Following landscape architects and critical
geographers, namely Sonja Dümpelmann,2 Trevor Paglen,3 Pierre Bélanger and Alexander
Arroyo,4 and Shiloh Krupar,5 I study these distinct landscapes using a critical military
and infrastructure studies perspective combined with an environmental history and legal
geography mode of analysis. I show how World War II in Hawai‘i spurred a large-scale U.S.
military modification of O‘ahu lands, waters, and coastal areas, that was part-and-parcel of
much longer prior occupation and empire building project in the Pacific.
In particular, I consider the wartime transformation of Waikīkī’, Honolulu city center, and
Honouliuli Prisoner of War Camp in three disparate areas of the island of O’ahu at surface and
subsurface levels. I argue that both the urban and rural fabric of the islands were temporarily
altered by the construction of temporary air shelters, trenches, batteries and military training
areas. I show how barbed wire, camouf|age netting, paint, plantation landscapes and
landform were tools used to disguise, conceal and fortify coastlines, major landmarks, military
equipment, internment camps, and army simulation training areas. I reveal how civilian
labour, African American military labour and prisoner-of-war labour were actively marshalled
across the islands of O’ahu to secure priority areas. I use archival methods and employ
photography as an embodied practice to reveal traces of these disguised and concealed
spaces in present-day urban centers and plantation landscapes of O’ahu.
Keywords: World War II, Martial Law in Hawai’i, camouflaged landscapes, prisoner of war camp
1 During these years, the U.S. military’s Office of Military Governance (OMG) issued over 200 General Orders. Hawai’i’s citizens were subject to strict military rule, with tribunals substituting for courts, imposed
mandatory curfews, censorship, and food and gasoline rationing. In addition, blackouts, freezing of wages,
restrictions on travel, mass fingerprinting, and the temporary suspension, closing or even military takeover
of schools. Identity badges were instituted for certain ethnic groups. Harry N. Scheiber and Jane L. Scheiber,
Bayonets in Paradise: Martial Law in Hawai’I during World War II, (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016)
and Suzanne Falgout and Linda Nishigaya, Breaking the Silence: Lessons of Democracy and Social Justice from
the World War II Honouliuli Internment and POW Camp in Hawai‘I, (Hawai‘i: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014).
2Sonja Dümpelmann, “The Art and Science of Invisible Landscapes: Camouf|age for War and Peace,” inGary Boyd and Denis Linehan editors, Ordnance: War + Architecture and Space, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).
3Trevor Paglen and Rebecca Solnitt, Invisible; Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, (Aperture, 2010).
4 Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo, Ecologies of Power: Counter-mapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
5 Shiloh Krupar, Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste, (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013).

Desirée Valadares

How to Hide an Island: The Architecture of World War II Martial Law in O‘ahu

“A building is a struggle, not a miracle.” – Louis Kahn
Architects’ names rarely appear on the buildings that they design. It is far more common for
owners than architects to attach their names to buildings. When we say that someone built
a building, the phrase is equally used of the owner, architect, and builder, though in different
causative senses. Today, architects sign their drawings, but not their buildings. Nevertheless,
there are a number of cases where architects do sign the buildings of their designs. Even in
these relatively rare instances, the architect’s name is subordinated to that of the patron and
often hidden in size, location and expression of identity – to the point of being easily overlooked.
Architectural photographs do not record architects’ signatures and they are rarely even
mentioned in the literature. The architect’s presence is often hidden in their own buildings.
Architects’ writings are replete with laments of their limitations in, among other things,
controlling their project’s design and construction. The ambiguous relationship between
architects and their buildings is illustrated by how a building is signed by its architect.
Architects obscure their signatures by concealing them in numerous ways. Although it was
unacceptable for architects to sign buildings in the ancient world and even illegal in ancient
Rome, some architects cunningly created secret signatures. Portrait signatures of architects
were widely employed in gothic architecture but can usually only be confirmed if they include
a signature. Other architects insert personal symbols into the building to assert their presence.
This general attitude continues today and some architects have been required to remove
concealed signatures after they are identified on the building. Even when present, architects’
building signatures tend to be designed to make their presence liminal. Perhaps only hidden
architects are free to be critical of dominant social and economic powers.
Keywords: signatures, names, dissociation, image

Paul Emmons

Hidden Architects in Signed Buildings

In Toward an Architecture, Le Corbusier speaks of the “illusion of the plan” which kills
architecture.1 To make a plan is to have had ideas, he states. Yet, the making of a plan often
conceals the very ideas one claims to represent. This optical illusion is common practice;
under the guise of clarity and precision, architects systematically strip plans of that which
gives a building life: its lived experience through time. Visual snapshots of “finished” buildings,
conventional plans conspire to hide from view three critical architectural processes: designing,
building, and dwelling. Must these fundamental processes be excluded to produce coherent
drawings? Is the resultant architecture impacted by these acts of concealment?
This paper argues against the concealment of time in architectural plans through the
investigation of drawings produced by Carlo Scarpa for Tomba Brion in San Vito d’Altivole.
Scarpa’s drawings illustrate the continuity of designing, building, and dwelling, and in so doing
engage directly with the embodied experience of architecture. His drawings live in a thick
present that begins even before the germ of an idea has formed. They slowly, porously, morph
into inhabited form, leaving traces through time which invite interpretation. Most notably,
Scarpa’s plans are rarely plans, but rather unique compositions at once section, plan, sketch,
and detail. Thus, this investigation explores the potential of extending the definition of “plan”
beyond simple horizontal section.
The discussion centers around drawing 15154/58 recto, which utilizes graphite and crayon to
develop the design for the pavilion on the water. The drawing simultaneously addresses the
design idea, building process, and embodied experience. This drawing, and others produced
by Scarpa for the padiglione sull’acqua, can provide unique insight into the centrality of time
in Scarpa’s drawings. Unearthing these traces embedded in Scarpa’s lines – black, white, and
otherwise – can provide vital insight for contemporary practice, shattering the illusion of plans
to reveal the experience within.
Keywords: architectural representation, embodied experience, sarlo Scarpa, time
1 Le Corbusier, Jean-Louis Cohen, and John Goodman, Toward an Architecture, (Los Angeles, California:
Getty Research Institute, 2007), 216.

Kristin Washco

Black and White Lines Conceal Multitudes

Urban theory has traditionally characterized the city as a whole that is composed of parts. In
this essay, I argue that this relationship is challenged in the context of an “Historic City” — a
relationship we understand through the concept of interdetails. This research is focused on
Barcelona and the work of Ildefons Cerdà (1815-1876) — the engineer responsible for the urban
extension known as Eixample (1859) and the first scholar who faced the challenge of defining
the Historic City in relation to a new one. Central to this discussion is the tile vault, also named
Catalan vault. While the origin of the vault can be traced to the XV century in Catalunya, it
was used extensively in the construction of Barcelona and is essential to understanding the
identity of the place. I consider the practices and processes related to construction, their
evolution, and the conservation of the Catalan vault in thirty-three of the most significant
heritage buildings in the Raval district. In 1980, Lluís Clotet proposed a renovation of this area
with the urban plan “From Liceu to Seminari,” as the final episode of Cerdà’s original proposal.
The novelty of Clotet’s design was to revitalize the area by connecting and conserving the
existing heritage buildings by introducing new uses. However, Clotet missed the opportunity
to explore the tangible and intangible dimension of traditional details in relation to the Historic
City as a whole. Rather than celebrate historic details, this intervention generated demolition
or concealment under new materials and processes like reinforced concrete. The argument
is that this transformation affected our understanding of Barcelona — not only at the scale of
architectural details like the Catalan vault — but at the scale of the Historic City as a whole.
I conclude by proposing that the “construction and construing” of the Catalan vault is an
interdetail that is integral to fully understanding the Historic City,1 and that we must reconsider
how currently historic urban conservation is understood by posing the possibility that the
Historic City may best be conceptualized as a whole contained in the part.
Keywords: historic city, urban conservation, detail·building·city, interdetails
1 Marco Frascari uses this expression to describe the tangible and intangible characteristics in the generation
of architectural details. See Marco Frascari, “The Tell-The-Tale Detail” in K. Nesbitt, editor, Theorizing a
New Agenda for Architecture, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 498.

Miquel Reina Ortiz

From City of Detail · From Liceu to Seminari · From Ceramic to Concrete

Allison Schifani & Jeffrey Kruth

Mediating Publics in the Network Access Point of the Americas

Under the theme of Architectures of Hiding, this set features installations of recording and
transcribing silenced layers of history. Today Lifta is fighting a development plan by the
occupation that decontextualizes its structures, and neglects its history.1 The plan proposes
alienated programs as a method of concealing its position of using architecture to serve
political agendas.
The experience of displacement is translated through a series of redesigned ruins and the
curation of the journey of return, which ends at the machine of transcription.
The six collages of destruction highlight the occupation by overlaying cultural artifacts with
objects of apartheid to reveal moments omitted from the city’s history.
The models are used as casts for tracing the voids and incorporating the physical landscape
of the city with narratives of the owners in exile. Based on the book Permanent Temporariness,
the three ruined houses are redesigned to highlight different cultural traditions showing the
multiplicity of one place: “Madafah,” “Mujawara,” “Hodoud.”2 The nodes are all connected in
proximity and located in The Ard,3 as part of the journey of return.
The space of return at the end of the path shows full transparency with no defined scale or
orientation, projecting the uncertain future of the Liftans in diaspora. The tower of return
becomes the repository for unregistered memories of the place and people. Following the
return is a moment between the past and the present, the memory. The space translates into
a machine for regenerating the memories. The recording of history takes place through the
process of fragmenting objects and reconstructing them into a space of recording. Within the
machine are re-imagined artifacts and devices such as the bulldozer, to be used as platforms
of narration for future generations.
Mahmoud Darwish once said, “as you set up for the next war, think of the people asking for
peace, on your way home remember the people of the camps, as you free yourself from all the
metaphors, think of those who lost their right to speak.”4 You are now part of The Ard and your
engagement will help resist the endangerment of erasure for millions displaced around the
world today.
Keywords: history transcription, void inversion, memory destruction, right of return, space of
resistance.
1Shoshan, Malkit Reconstruction of Memory - Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory: FAST, “Lifta after Zionist planning,” July 2018, <a href="http://seamlessterritory.org/reconstruction-of-memory-2/">http://seamlessterritory.org/reconstruction-of-memory-2/</a>.
2Hilal, Sandi, and Alessandro Petti, Permanent Temporariness, (Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing,
2018.)
3 The Ard, arabic translation of Land.
4 Jabbar, N., “As you return home, to your home, think of others. live in the layers,” November 2015, https://
nataliejabbar.wordpress.com/2015/11/18/as-you-return-home-to-your-home-think-of-others/.

Hala Barakat

A new approach to writing history The reconstruction of history through nodal spaces in the Ghost city of Lifta

In the Dictionary of Untranslatables, Pascal David explains that “the human activity that
falls under the category of work, at least in some of its uses, is linked to pain, to labor, and to
accomplishment.”1 For Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), work and labor are considered as “two
sides of the same coin.”2 In this sense, work is what an architect does in his/her daily life; labor
is their role in the larger economic equation. This project questions the historical and theoretical
implications of work and labor, as they pertain to the discipline and practice of architecture.
Considering “work” through the lens of modern professionalization, this project illustrates
an example of the effect of standardization on the body of the working class. The combined
objects of Pelvic-Chair, Mouse-Arm, and Bag-Back explore anatomical abnormities that are
caused and developed by the work associated with the field of architecture. Each piece depicts
the silent deterioration of an architect’s body throughout its everyday engagement with the
so-called “work.” Excess and repeated movements, or stillness and absence of almost any
movement, for prolonged periods of time, decay the productive body and result in visible
anomalies. In engagement of the human motor with the instrument of design, the organic
and the artificial turn into the temporary extensions of each other. Therefore, both the human
body and the non-human apparatus experience the counter-force that is effected in their
participatory work. The continuous friction of apparatuses of work with the physical body on
the one hand, and the gradual malleability of the body in response to these apparatuses on
the other hand, result in the weariness of both. The marks of this encounter are inscribed in
language of deterioration in the physical constitution of both.
Whether it is a computer mouse, a backpack, or a chair, the interaction of the physical body
and instruments of work lead to deterioration, deformation, and “pain”– all of which shall be
properly kept under disguise of corrective apparels, postures, and prosthetics of composure.
The friction, often times, becomes legible through the frequency of repairs and replacements of
the parts; that is both for human and non-human parts. Translation of work-induced disorders
into aesthetics of physical figures in these three objects, renders the physical impact that are
endured in achieving efficiency.
Keywords: work, body, deformation, standardization
1 Emily S. Apter, Barbara Cassin, and Steven Rendall, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1263.
2 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 134.

Samira Daneshvar

Work: Deformative, Yet Silent 

As you move throughout campus, you may notice images of a young woman awkwardly
negotiating the spaces through which you move. Attempting to avoid unwarranted
interactions, she regulates her body by making herself small, concealing her head in a book,
and hiding behind trees. Positioning keys between her fingers, or staring at her phone; she
braces herself.
Drawing on my experiences with public gender-based violence including stranger harassment,
through the Avert project I make visible the psychological, emotional, physical, and
behavioural effects of such violence, which emerge both consciously and subconsciously.
This work is situated within the public sites in which gender-based violence operates, subtly
existing alongside the day-to-day ebb and f|ow of pedestrian and vehicle traffic. Through this
positioning, the work critiques these spaces which can be designed unsafely, and which are
undoubtedly socially regulated by settler-colonial heteropatriarchal systems of oppression.
Violence against all women continues to be a significant issue globally however such violence
does not impact all communities equally. This project is limited due to its emergence from
my experiences as a white, cis-gendered, able-bodied, settler artist and I therefore consider
it to be a minor contribution to the increasing number of artists who are questioning and
problematizing power dynamics within public space. Of note is the significant, collaborative
project “Stop Telling Women to Smile” by artist and activist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, which
centres the voices of women of colour with the context of street harassment.
Ultimately, through the Avert project, I present the opportunity for viewers to come to
understand the impacts of stranger harassment with the intent that with this knowledge they
will be less likely to participate in these acts of violence and will more likely become an ally in
the fight to stop it. With less stranger harassment, more women will have the ability to move
through public spaces safely without restricting their social activities, means of transportation,
regulating their bodies and actions, or prioritizing methods of physical resistance. Further, the
Avert project aims to validate women’s experiences with stranger harassment and engages
audiences in understanding their ability to participate in the production of safer public spaces.
Keywords: installation, violence, gender, print media

Heather Leier

Avert

In this lecture-performance, I create a rewriting of history in the form of a series of speculative events that are rooted in political incidents that affected my family. Here, I go back in time to explore the link between architecture, memory, and history, focusing on the institutions—school, hospital, and prison—through which the state imprints power on or actually destroys bodies to eradicate memory and control the writing of History. Likening the institutionalized hiding and suppression of history with the internalized process of memory repression, I use the power of my own writing on the historical events and the power of photographs to invoke memory.
Beginning with a discussion on Berlin’s 1942 Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the narrative then moves to the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, a reference to the government psychological experiments conducted on citizens during the Cold War period in the 1950’s. The story concludes in Tehran’s Towhid Prison, where my father was interrogated and tortured as a political prisoner in 1979.
Here, text, images, videos, and photographs are layered and interwoven to create an unstable narrative to be deciphered by the viewer and elaborated upon during a performance by myself. Influenced by states of crisis and ‘split-identities,’ the time and space constantly move back and forward between past and present/here and there.
Keywords: body, power, architecture of forgetting

Anahita Norouzi

A Space In-Between

Drawn by hand and composed with Adobe Illustrator, the images on display are part of the artist/writer’s creative practice of orthographic drawing and creative writing. Whether writing prose or poetry, Padios grapples with Asian American experience, especially the violence, mental illness, and trauma that pervaded her early family life in Florida. If These Walls: An Orthographic Memoir translates the silence and detachment of these experiences into the visual and design language of architecture. Part family photo album, part design textbook, and part instructional manual, the work demonstrates how orthographic points of view—which rely on separation, hovering, disassembly, and cuts through objects—can speak to and about emotional life. In showing not what is hidden, but the shape and organization of the hiding itself, this presentation offers viewers a new way of sensing and rendering memory, trauma, and untold family histories.
As part of Jan’s creative practice, the drawings have aided in the development of If These Walls: A Novel. A literary thriller, the story centers around Gil Santos and Lena Wynter, adult sisters whose father murders their mother and kills himself in their home in Temple Terrace, Florida. Gil’s recounting of the family history in the wake of her father’s homicide-suicide reveals the racism, trauma, violence, and mental illness underwriting this Filipino immigrant family. If These Walls: A Novel grapples with the Asian American model minority myth; histories of U.S. colonization and white supremacy; and race, gender, and sexuality in Filipino American experience. The novel meditates on Yudell, Moore, and Bloomer’s claim, in Body, Memory, Architecture (1977), that “the action and judgments of an individual may be impaired by a damaged or distorted body boundary” and thus “the activities of a household may also be impaired by the jamming of its doors and windows.”
Keywords: Creative nonfiction, graphic novels, domestic architecture, trauma

Jan Padios

If These Walls: An Orthographic Memoir

Verdures is part of an ongoing investigation of the relationship between landscape and
camouf|age. Mimicry camouf|age is a particular kind of concealment pattern that has become
widely used by hunters. It achieves visual dissimulation by combining photorealistic images
of plants that can be found in a particular ecosystem during a specific season. Mimicry
camouf|age is an image with multiple roles: at once a synthetic representation of a landscape
at a distinct moment, it is also, with its concealment of hunters through clothing or shelters, a
device for the manipulation of an environment.
Verdures is a camouf|age for the green spaces of Paris during mid-fall. The pattern is composed
of the city’s dominant tree species: London planes, horse chestnuts, little leaf lindens, and field
maples. However, only some of the source images were captured in Paris. Many specimens
were collected in Oslo and Montréal, tracing the historical flows of species across urban
ecosystems, such as the exportation of horse chestnuts and field maples to North American
cities and the importation of American Sycamores to Europe. Working like the professional
camouf|age makers, who in turn proceed a bit like botanists, we assembled a herbarium of
bark, fruit, and leaves. These were then arranged into a continuous pattern that incorporates
painterly techniques like sfumato and chiaroscuro to feign depth and break up forms.
Like other mimicry camouf|age patterns, ours plays multiple roles. Printed on clothing or
textile, it may “naturalize” the built environment, obscure activities, and enable new modes of
negotiating the city landscape. The pattern is printed onto ponchos designed to be worn by a
single person, buttoned together to form large shelters, or fixed to a wall as a tapestry.
At the Architecture of Hiding symposium, Verdures takes the shape of a hung shelter,
assembled from multiple ponchos. Taken out of its ecological context, the pattern gains an
ornamental quality reminiscent of medieval mille-f|eurs tapestries.
Keywords: concealment, camouflage, hunting, pattern

François Sabourin & Bertrand Rougier

Verdures

Relics of a secret design were found hidden inside a wall of a building: two lavishly illustrated
empty match-boxes, a holy picture with a prayer, a king of cups briscola card, a wooden
spoon.
What can we infer from these relics? Endless stories. They were hidden for all the ghosts to
come and for all our possible accidents of the real. They were given to me as a gift, because I
am an architect, and the person (builder or rather un-builder) who handed them down to my
donor has already joined the f|ock of the un-knowns. Even more unknown are now the hider(s)
of the relics and all their “reasons”! I fathom, for a moment, their spontaneity and a naiveness
that might alone be the most powerful deterrent against (our?) evil eyes. But maybe it was
malice. Maybe it was apotropaic, or a curse, or a desperate search for accomplices - as we
must be. Who knows!? This is what got hidden and found: all the infinitely secret “who-knows”.
The architecture of this secret lies in its meticulous secrecy. And the necessity of this secrecy is
the essence of architecture. These relics were buried in a wall and so we have retrieved them.
They were buried without any sign of their burial. The retrieval was unintentional. Was it? They
were found as a surprise. Was this a mistake? Or a trick? Was the wake of this finding planned?
Imagine that you are demolishing a wall to open a door. Suddenly you find a cavity and in that
cavity you find some remains, curios, strange relics. Someone must have buried them there.
“This is architecture” (A. Loos). There is always something to hide in order to build. There
is always something to build in order to hide. This is why to build you shall hide something,
whether you like it or not. But you arrogantly say: “I have nothing to hide!”. This negation that
you want to hide is the full expression of your hubris.
We, nilly-willy, conspirators of these secrets, are now even thinking again and again about how
to accomplish the truth of the destiny for these relics – traveling vast distances, joining strange
unpredictable situations into an empty school of architecture. Who-knows.
Keywords: secret, hidden, relics

Claudio Sgarbi, in collaboration with David Bastien-Allard, Rubin de Jonge and Fabio Elia Sgarbi Biondi

Hidden Relics

To access the dynamic material conditions of the past in its most banal, everyday forms,
artefacts and their mechanisms are visualised and played-out in theatrical space (for this
project, a stage adaptation of Georges Perec’s novella entitled The Art and Craft of Asking
Your Boss for a Raise)1 utilising constraint operations (defined by Harry Mathews as, “A strict
and clearly definable rule, method, procedure or structure that generates a [textual work],”2
expanded by Georges Perec as, “describable, definable [and] available to everyone.”)3
This process of adaptation through constraint produces a condition of differential concealment
and revelation through the process of landing narrative conditions within a dynamic field of
material-spatial mechanisms. As these simultaneous and interlocking constraints play against
each other on stage, their points of interface emerge within the circulation of characters and
distribution of action; however, the constraints themselves are concealed within the resulting
thickened material-spatial condition. The Art and Craft of the Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss
for a Raise manifests in a series of presentational modes, as sketch, drawing, image, model,
and performance. Each medium provides a differing mode of engagement with artefacts and
their mechanisms, interoperating to form a cross-referenced body of work.
Keywords: theatre, constraint, adaptation, past-making, material mechanisms
1Georges Perec, The Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, translated by David Bellos, (New York,
NY: Verso, 2014).
2 Harry Mathews et al., editors, OuLiPo Compendium, 3rd edition (London, UK: Atlas Press, 2011).
3 George Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited by John Sturrock, 3rd edition, (London, UK:
Penguin Books Ltd., 2008).

Josh Silver

The Art and Craft of the Art and Craft of Asking your Boss for a Raise

In an era where architecture is more and more absorbed by atmospheres and spectacles, it
is timely to think through these terms less from the lens of new gadgets and technologies, and
more from the lens of the physicality of structures. For these physical operations that produce
either optical illusions or transformations of matter, this ongoing research employs the term
architectural apparatus: It can be either an individual structural element with particular forms,
materials, textures, and perforations, or an opening and a threshold, or a design of particular
scales, geometries, proportions, and dimensions, or a strategically positioning of a building or
monument to produce an effect in the eyes of the beholders. The architectural apparatuses
intervene in particular buildings or conditions to either transmit light, or recreate an image to
interrupt the daily routine in a building through the production of ever-changing phenomena,
or to produce an illusion of infinity in a small interactive futuristic model. The architectural
apparatuses become an intermediate architectural operation between two polar ends: the
increasing corporate architecture (physical) and the increasing screen experiences (virtual).
Through experiment and experience, certain ideas prevail about architectural apparatuses:
they are artifacts yet non-representational; they become portals for phantasmagoria; they
disrupt the spatial homogeneity and life-style monotony; they recalibrate the senses and
cognitive abilities of the viewer; they displace temporarily one’s image in relation to the
surroundings; they are theatrical, literal, and temporal; they become transitional objects or
communicative devices; and they become co-producers of space.
Keywords: art, architecture, installations, perception

Zenovia Toloudi

Yellow + Blue, 2021

Shannon Mattern

Compassionate Concealment: Hiding as Method in Memory Care

Marcia Feuerstein & Jodi La Coe

Camouflage: The Disappearance of Form and Shadow

This paper explores the concealed expression of costume in the architecture of the modern era.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “costume” takes its etymology from the French
word costume around mid-seventeenth century, meaning “style of the period [...] [represented
by] a piece of art or work of literature.” It shares its “specific sense development” with
“custom,” and “semantic development” with “habit.” The first (custom) takes its etymology
from “Anglo-Norman and Old French ...”costume” meaning “habitual behavior, [...] convention
or tradition.” While the second (habit) is from Latin etymology habere meaning “to have [...]
to be” and therefore, “the mode or condition in which one is, exists, or exhibits oneself”; one’s
external demeanor and appearance, or inward character and disposition.
In his Prolegomena (1886), Heinrich Wölfflin compared the costume of the Gothic period to
Gothic Architecture stating that “any architectural style reflects the attitude and movement
of people in the period concerned. How people like to move and carry themselves is expressed
above all in their costume.” He explained how the mental disposition of sharpness and
precision, and an outward appearance of wearing crackows and gable hats are characteristics
expressed in Gothic architecture. In a like manner, Adolf Loos debated the costume of the
modern era to be without the need for ornament, asserting that “modern man uses his dress
as a disguise,” because he had become more “refined [...] [and] subtle.” This is evident in his
architecture as the exterior is left bland, disguising the dramatic interior. The original meaning
of the word costume becomes a defining factor in identifying the characteristic architectural
style of a period. However, an inf|ection occurs as the Gothic era embodies the expression
externally, while the modern era conceals it. In their written study of the Villa Müller, Leslie van
Duzer and Kent Kleinman reiterated Loos’ preoccupation with the interior so that “what was
being preserved behind the mask [exterior] was a vision of conventional domesticity [the family].”
Loos focused on the internal adaptation of space to the anticipated movement, behavior
and disposition of the Müllers, and adopted an inverted dress as the basis of expression
simultaneously camouflaged by the exterior.
Keywords: costume, concealment &amp; modern Architecture

Teminioluwa Thomas

Costume Concealed in Modern Architecture

In his 1860 Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder Praktische Aesthetik
(Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetics), architect Gottfried Semper
(1803-1879) argued that architecture’s origins lie in the human need for making sense of the
world through the sensuous play of surface. Architecture, Semper claimed, is rooted in textile
art, fences’ wickerwork, and the woven fabrics that answer to a symbolic and utilitarian
need at once. What he called Prinzip der Bekleidung (Principle of Dressing), then, implied that
architecture’s sociability and politics originate in the act of dissimulation. Architecture creates
domestic and public spaces through masking construction, like an “improvised scaffolding”
that hangs the patterned fabrics and decorations that define social life.
This paper mobilizes Semper’s theory of dress to examine the early works of Thomas Schütte
and Ludger Gerdes, artists (and close friends) that studied under Gerhard Richter at the Art
Academy Düsseldorf in the late 1970s. Trained by an artist whose work mediates between
the avant-garde and bourgeois paradigm of painting, Schütte and Gerdes, like their teacher,
problematized both the idiom of critique or “unmasking” associated with avant-garde art and
the notions of semblance and “masking” connected with bourgeois painting. Reacting to the
entwined legacies of Minimal and Conceptual Art, however, Schütte and Gerdes negotiated
these paradigms in and through sculpture. Their wall installations, reliefs, and scale models
conceive of sculpture not in terms of any truth-to-materials or conceptual transparency, but as
an act of veiling, cladding, and dressing. The central role and importance of architecture in the
entwined and parallel work of these artists needs to be seen along similar lines: sculpture and
architecture, for Schütte and Gerdes, are not defined by function, space, and materiality alone;
rather, these fields have a tradition and history that, as Gerdes wrote in 1982, “root in Semper’s
principle of dressing as leading onto a ‘practical aesthetics’.”
Keywords: dressing, sculpture-architecture, scale models

Stefaan Vervoort

Principle of Dressing: Wall Paintings and Sculptures by Thomas Schütte and Ludger Gerdes, c. 1980 

Brian M. Kelly

Modes of Hiding: Leaving in Plain Site and Burying 

The progression of socioeconomic and political events in Lebanon seems to be interlinked in an endless loop of violence. Beirut, in particular, is a setting where space seems to be temporally distorted. The saying “history repeats itself” perpetually manifests, such that the urban setting and socioeconomic conditions of a certain timeframe can be easily confused with another. This is made particularly apparent when analyzing the impact of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) and the Beirut Port explosion (August 4, 2020) upon the built environment and the living conditions in the city. The site of Beirut’s famous nightclub, B018, is positioned in close proximity to the Beirut Port, and along the edge of the previous stronghold area of the Phalangist militia. This site existed as an underground bunker and torture center run by the Phalangists, and within its vicinity occurred a heinous massacre against Kurdish and Palestinian refugees. The underground structure was later on commissioned to Bernard Khoury, transforming it into what is today, one of the most famous nightclubs in Lebanon. Repurposing buildings can be a devious technique to conceal an infamous history. Information pertaining to the pre-club phase is restricted to the nightclub’s descriptions that romanticize the transformation as a “work of art.” Bernard Khoury is among the architects and artists who have used the civil war as a major source of inspiration for their work. Khoury in particular has used symbols representing cannons and dark aesthetics in his architecture, thereby having normalized scenes of destruction and war within the city. This research project will provide a critique on the work of Lebanese artists and architects of the 1990s who have creatively perpetuated the desire of the State by normalizing and validating the aesthetics of destruction, after the end of the war. B018 will be used as a case study that has witnessed history repeating itself twice, on its premises. By doing so, this research intends to unmask the crimes of the former militia men and current parliamentary members who participated in operating and running the former phase of the nightclub.
Keywords: Beirut Port, politics of erasure, representation, memory, gentrification

Ahmad Beydoun

The evidence of the erasure of evidence (series): Chapter 2: Mask/ Unmask: a city and its night club

Different modes and meanings relating to the human body’s analogy with architecture are
central to disciplinary discussions. Scholars such as Joseph Rykwert and George Hersey
argued for the body’s continuing suggestive power for temple columns, churches, and cities.
Nevertheless, similar analogies in the Sino-sphere largely elude attention. This paper fills the
lacuna by studying the Image of the Inner Landscape (Neijing Tu 内景/经图, 1886), which depicts
a human body with the landscape of mountains, rivers, forests, and shelters. As both a Taoist
self-cultivation guide and a medical illustration, it evolves from several genealogical precedents
and traces back to foundational Taoist and medical treatises. The study discusses this bodylandscape
analogy with Western body-architecture analogies in three steps.
First, this image is juxtaposed with Vesalius’s body anatomy. In Vesaliu’s image, the body’s interior is a hidden site of wonder, and the architecture is part of the ritual setting required to penetrate the body’s interior. In the Image of the Inner Landscape, the body has a different mode of hiddenness: the interior reveals the presence of nature concealed within the body. It suggests the interconnection between humans’ well-being and landscape environments. Second, the image is compared to Cesare Cesariano’s Vitruvian man. The body in Cesariano’s image is a well-articulated whole comprised of clearly defined parts. It establishes an ideal image for architecture to imitate. The body in the Image of the Inner Landscape has only a primordial oval shape, and its components imply constant latent flows. It demonstrates a different ideal, a generative force lying within the natural world’s process of change. Third, in this image, the Cowherd, Weaving Girl, and children work on the key sites of natural movements, maintain their circulations, and disappear into the latent f|ows. It means that landscape interventions shall partake in the given context, spell out its orders, and eventually withdraw their self-presences.
Keywords: landscape, body image, health, equilibrium

Vincent Yuxin Qiu

Image of the Inner Landscape: The Human Body Concealed in the Landscape’s Latent Flows

In Yorùbá landscapes of southwestern Nigeria, extraordinary power is deployed in the most
common and unassuming object, a clump of earth scooped from the ground and set down
to mark and protect property (see figure). In a gesture of thoughtful displacement, the Earth
(ilè)—omnipresent but withdrawn from perception—is set forth as a perceptible object, a sign
of itself, an image, translated in Yorùbá as àwòrán, “what we look at and remember.” Such a
transformation establishes a moment of lawful order, inhabiting a place by locating it within a
doubled temporality, historical and primordial. How does it do this? And what is the nature of
the power represented there?
All inquiries lead back to Ògbóni, the ancient secret society of honored elders, said to claim
the Earth as source and justification. Ògbóni power, we are told, is greater and older than that
of kings, nations, gods, laws, even civilization itself, and the organization is widely feared. Yet
the deeply conservative Ògbóni is largely hidden from the public eye and public participation.
Its members have long met together in shrouded precincts called ilédi, windowless “houses of
concealment” (Lawal) that were also, paradoxically, “public buildings on public lands” (Drewal)
built at the centers of Yoruba towns.
Edan Ògbóni, paired figurative staffs made of brass and iron, are emblems of membership
in the Ògbóni society. Regarded as one object, edan is “the only sacred object of the Ògbóni
seen by the public” (Adepegba); it is also “the only thing that was secret in Ògbóni” (Fadipe).
Another paradox, then: harboring secrets even in its visibility, edan is at once a staging and an
occlusion, an apparent monument that not only withdraws from vision, but performs its own
undoing. An etymology of the noun edan shows the constituent verb dan means “to forestall
or frustrate someone’s efforts, particularly through supernatural means” (1985:38). Yet there’s
no magic here, only material. In its materiality, how does edan forestall or frustrate efforts to
comprehend what it signifies?
Theory here takes the form of a simple riddle:
It’s right in front of you; you just can’t see it.
Keywords: dissemblance, secrecy, earth, africa

David Doris

Power and Dissemblance in Yorùbá Earth Works

On the evening of Friday, May 8, 1953, Robert Cutler, the National Security Advisor to President
Eisenhower, entered the White House. Accompanied by several officials, Cutler climbed up
to the mansion’s top floor and entered a room virtually unknown. There, in the White House
Solarium, the President and his “group of fine fellows,” held a meeting of grave consequences
to American policy in the Cold War. The secret gathering and the room in which it took place
gave birth to the namesake Project Solarium: a month-long war-game simulation that shaped
US policy toward the recently nuclearized Soviet Union.
This paper takes the moment of the gathering at the Solarium as an entry point for a discussion
of the cultural images cultivated during the Cold War, and the role played by architectural
space in such constructions. Both visible and hidden, the garden-like Solarium is covered
under the shadows of secrecy while basking in sunlight. An ambiguous interior, serving as the
First Family’s private retreat on one hand, and a space for undisclosed meetings on the other,
the Solarium challenges conventional imaginations of the space of decision making, and is a
spatial manifestation of Cold War politics and strategies concerned with deceit, concealment,
projection and revelation; with what one could or could not see.
Situated against the geopolitical history of Cold War policies and propaganda, this paper
presents the architecture and history of the Solarium as a physical and metaphorical
representation of the culture of images and the politics of latency characteristic of the Cold
War. On its shadowed edge one finds nuclear apocalyptic visions, hidden fallout shelters
and underground bunkers; on its lit side, the public and exposed imaginations associating
nuclear energy with the power of the sun. Behind the Solarium’s opaque glass curtain, and
as it hides watchfully on the sovereign’s roof, architecture, politics, and propaganda coalesce
in conspicuous secrecy. A space for the projection of history and its images, the Solarium’s
tale reveals architecture’s role as an instrument of vision, and its participation in the making
of grave decisions. As it hides in utter visibility, the Solarium comes forth as a unique and
ambiguous space from which future history was constructed right under the American public’s
nose.
Keywords: Cold War, architecture, politics, projection

Eliyahu Keller

Hiding in Plain Sight. The White House Solarium and The Projection of History

In exhorting his readers to “keep your odds and ends in drawers or cabinets,” Le Corbusier
(1887-1965) transmits a yearning for tidiness inherited from his predecessors.1 Architecture, it
would seem, is an endless war against disorder and decay. Nevertheless, those same forces
continue to assert their presence, penetrating buildings, images, and texts.
This paper will explore underlying tensions and conflicts that produce periodic eruptions and
reversals in architecture’s campaign to impose and preserve order. It will look to architectural
texts for evidence of such efforts: suppression of information or images, sleight of hand, or
outright censorship, as well as their thwarting.
Architectural theory’s foundational rupture is the loss of the drawings that Vitruvius claims
to have included with his manuscript. While Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), in renewing
and revising the Vitruvian project, uses only language to convey and combat lurking chaos,
many before and after him would try to reinvent the lost drawings, exposing fissures between
language and image in the process.
Marc Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture (1753) promotes a theory of architecture shorn
of excess and error. The first edition bears no images. The second features a frontispiece
by Charles Eisen that, while being among the most familiar images of architectural theory,
diverges from Laugier’s verbal construction. That edition adds a glossary of terms and eight
plates.2 Anne Fonbonne’s name appears on the last image, an assemblage of violations of
Laugier’s rules. Did she, with her transgressive composition, seek to undermine Laugier’s
efforts to convey a tidy, purified vision of architecture? Laugier himself hints at other ways at
the end of his texts in his descriptions of gardens, in which China represents the tantalizing
possibility of worlds where familiar rules might not apply. Subsequent architects such as John
Ruskin (1819-1900), and even Le Corbusier himself would find such exotic unknowns in their
imaginations, yet architecture’s desire for control would reassert itself. Through examination
of such incidents, this presentation will expose architectural propriety’s failure to stem the loss
of control that lurks in the fissures between language and image, and between thoughts and
things.
Keywords: rules, disorder, chaos, transgression
1 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, translated by Frederick Etchells, (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960), 115.
2 Neither the glossary nor the plates appear in Wolfgang and Annie Herrmann’s English translation of the 1753 first edition, for which the frontispiece of the 1755 second edition serves as cover and title page. See Marc Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, translated by Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977). In their introductory notes the translators explain their desire to preserve the impression of the first edition, arguing that the later additions tend to weaken Laugier’s case.

Rebecca Williamson

Clutter, Tidying, and Architectural Desire

In AD 3072, an archeological team discovers the remnants, human and architectural, of a
subterranean city buried in a cave deep underneath the Earth. According to the accompanying
report, the archeologists situated the subterranean dwelling in the year 2000, when the Earth’s
surface supposedly became unlivable and led humanity to hide underground. This is the bizarre
premise of Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce’s full-scale plastic bunker, The Period
of Great Contaminations (1971–1972). Far from the dreamy artificial environments of atomic
shelters—the “family vaults” that proliferated in the same period,1—Pesce’s work devises a
mysterious atmosphere. It is filled with fossilized human remains, suggesting the prehistoric
past of caves; only this cave is in plastic. If the prehistoric cave is associated with the natural
subterranean, the absolute figure of terrestrial voids and subsoils, then that of the Pescian
underground is not natural at all; it rather embodies a future ruin, a total failure of the techno-industry.
By drawing a parallel between cave and bunker, this paper focuses on the paradoxical
temporal duality of such a symbiosis. Both spaces conceal and protect the human as they
signal a time of extreme danger outside. Yet, they denote a radically different sense of time.
While the cave suggests the deep past, the bunker reaches out to the far future initiated by
the atomic age. Together they create an absurd preposterous history, a fictional prehistory of
future architecture.2 Our analysis focuses on this, military shelter—in order to raise questions
regarding the status of the human subject inhabiting it. Where is the subject situated in
that historically imprecise environment? The image of the endangered human subject,
characteristic of the atomic age, persists in Pesce’s grotto-like environment, albeit in a
dissimilar mode. Rather than a farewell to the human world above the surface, we argue that
The Period of Great Contaminations ultimately suggests the subterranean realm as crucial for
understanding contemporary underground political ecologies.3
Keywords: Gaetano Pesce, underground, cave, deep past/future
1 Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 138–140.
2 Spyros Papapetros, “Pre/post/erous Histories (or, histories and theories of the prearchitectonic
condition)”, E-flux architecture, November 19, 2018, <a href="https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/historytheory/">https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/historytheory/</a>
225184/pre-post-erous-histories/.
3Matthew Kearnes and Lauren Rickards, “Earthly graves for environmental futures: Techno-burial
practices,” Futures 92, (2017): 53.

Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou

From Caves to Bunkers: On Gaetano Pesce’s Subterranean Dwellings 

In his doctoral dissertation, the architect and theorist Andrés Jaque used the example of
the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) to make a case for a performative
conception of architecture. Just like gender for Judith Butler, architectures for Jaque are
performative inasmuch as they keep reproducing themselves over time: their appearance
as stable and unchanging entities is nothing but the result of an ongoing process that, quite
paradoxically, hides itself by repeating itself over and over again. The Pavilion’s reflecting
pool must be cleaned periodically, the iconic red curtains must be replaced over time, any
degradation agent must be kept at a distance. It might be said, somehow, that architecture
presents itself as the quintessential “art of space” by removing time from sight.
Following Jaque’s argument, also other common assumptions regarding modern architecture
come into question. “To live in a glass house – Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) wrote in 1929,
just while the original Pavilion was being built - is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is a
moral exhibitionism we badly need.” In contrast to the introverted bourgeois world, Benjamin
celebrated the inherent transparency of modern architecture, in which he saw a metaphor of
brand new ethical and political horizons: “there was nothing to hide,” as the new architectural
aesthetics seemed to express. However, modern architectures are by no means transparent,
their renowned “transparency” being the result – as already seen – of multiple and repeated
acts of concealment.
The image of “timeless Architectures” is continuously reperformed also in the field of
knowledge production, i.e. architectural theory, history and critique. Hegemonic narratives
– still deeply imbued with Western metaphysics – keep looking at buildings as ageless works
of art, programmatically excluding whatever does not fit into the picture: the spatial and
temporal framework in which they are inscribed, the many and everchanging ways in which
they are acted out by their users, the role that other actors (beside the architect) play in their
production and reproduction over time. What does it entail to visualize what is hidden behind
“Architecture”? This contribution will try to shed further light upon the aesthetic and political
potential of such acts of unfolding.
Keywords: architecture, performativity, transparency, concealment

Ramon Rispoli

Concealed behind Transparencies. A Closer Look at Architecture’s Hidden Performativity.

Throughout our work in the architecture field, we train to always be searching, and in the
endeavor, we play what could be a hide-and-seek game. We set the place, the rules, and the
players. We identify our readings and authors. We are the ones who seek, while others hide.
We set the time for re-search, and we start imagining all the possibilities ahead. We prepare
our senses to track clues, and we never stop training. It is in this way that Italian architect and
professor Marco Frascari invited us to play.
Storytelling within architecture as research has been about questioning the literature and
narrative theory and coming back with new questions to the architectural field. A 1969 book
written by Italo Calvino called Il castello dei destini incrociati offers insights about the work of
Marco Frascari, who devoted most of his work to the relationship between storytelling and
architecture.
This paper tells the story of how a teaching exercise by Frascari using a deck of tarot cards,
and Calvino’s book in which a deck of tarot cards is used to narrate twelve tales, are linked.
This book, which was as Calvino wrote, made first of pictures –– the tarot playing cards ––
and secondly of written words,1 sets the narrative to talk about Frascari’s work. Both would
have seen the visual as an opportunity to appeal to their reader’s imagination. This dialogue
between the two figures provides the chance to gain insights into what storytelling as a crafty
process within architecture could be.2
Keywords: storytelling, architecture, imagination, Italo Calvino, Marco Frascari
1 Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 123.
2 Marco Frascari, “An Architectural good Life can be built, explained and taught only through storytelling,”
in Reading Architecture and Culture: Researching Buildings, edited by Adam Sharr, (London: Routledge, 2013),
224-34, 226.

Tania Cano

Hide and seek. A tarot deck of cards among Italo Calvino and Marco Frascari

A terrible, but funny thought is that Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was never so well represented
visually as through Winsor McCay’s wondrous cartoons and Buster Keaton’s stunts. In this
essay’s dénouement, some of Keaton’s silent comedies perfectly illustrate Freud’s Interpretation
of Dreams (1899), especially when they use McCay’s comic strips as storyboards.
Our imagination is an expert at hiding things when we dream. It disguises certain images as a
way to slip them through a censor—a layer of forgetfulness—that insulates us from any memory
that threatens our ability to function from day to day. Interestingly, these same Freudian
ideas lurk in archival images of McCay’s cartoon strips from 1905 to 1911 in both Dream of
the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland. The elements of dreamwork detected by
Freud are rendered by McCay as the adventures of a dreamer who, finding himself in various
nightmarish situations, is inevitably transported⎯incognito⎯into the familiar territory of the bed
when he wakes up. Graphical play with likenesses and doubled forms makes for unexpected
substitutions. The serious topic of psychoanalysis is portrayed as wonder about cheese.
Keen to parlay his celebrity, McCay hit the vaudeville circuit with some of the world’s first
animations, some-times sharing the theater with another act called The Three Keatons. The
youngest of the Keatons⎯called “Buster,” which was slang for a bad fall, learned to tumble at
an early age as his father kicked him further and further across the stage. Of necessity, his
sense of timing was perfect.
Nickelodeons replaced vaudeville almost overnight—Keaton’s celebrity ultimately superseded
McCay’s—but his cartoons live in the moving pictures that Keaton made, translated into
specific scenes. Keaton dubbed his inventive play with stunts and the movie camera as
“impossible gags,” a resistance to reality and its demands. Later in life, he lamented the end
of impossible gags as audiences developed an appetite for stories with a plot and a satisfying
ending, “like books.”
Humorous anecdotes depend upon the skill of the storyteller. What do McCay’s cartoons about
dreaming reveal about the mechanism of disguise?
Keywords: cartoons, dreaming, storyboarding, wit

Architectures of Hiding

Friday, September 24, 2021.

Saturday, September 25, 2021

Sunday, September 26, 2021

Thursday, October 7, 2021