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N0RR0RIN
ARCHITECTURE
Joshua Comaroff
& Ong Ker-Shing
HORROR IN ARCHITECTURE

Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing

"When abstraction sets about killing you,
you had better get busy."

Albert Camus, The Plague

"There is no exquisite beauty without

some strangeness in the proportions."

E.A. Poe, Ligeia

CONTENTS

Introduction

Sublime Horror 7
Deviance Anatomy 24
Horror in Architecture 31
The Redemption of Horror 44

Typologies Of Horror

Doubles & Clones 49

Exquisite Corpse & Ungrammatical Body 72
Partially and Mostly Dead 94
Reiteration and Reflexivity 106
Incontinent Object 122
Trojan Horse 142
Homunculism & Gigantism 160
Solidity & Stereotomy 176
Distortion and Disproportion 192

Postscript 208

Notes 217
Introduction
 7

Sublime Horror

"Does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so?"

William Blake 2

Why spend time on horrifying things? Isn't life

difficult enough? Antonio Rocco, as early as 1635, argued
that we should look at problematic subjects because they
are instructive. And because their opposite, anodyne beauty,
contains a dangerous surfeit of sweetness. 3 Deviance
teaches; charm will make you sick. Rocco claimed that
horrors in particular-putrefaction, decay, distortion and
dissymmetry among others-are sites of fertility, change,
and invention.
In the case of architecture, horror appears
particularly urgent. Firstly, because its experience is
immanent in the project of the modern-it closely
shadows the disconcerting scalar and typological growth
of our built environment. Second, because its unique
character is increasingly relevant in what we might call
an "age of affect," in an emergent politics of the sublime
where the ecstatic and the shocking pose as alternatives
to older Enlightenment values. Thirdly-and not least-
because horror is terribly effective in queering the
assumptions of contemporary design practice. It deserves
to be rehabilitated, because its violence is useful. It is a kind
of Nietszchean operation. Its gleeful dismemberments, its
deviant physicality, oppose the creep of reification and the
comfort of well-tempered surfaces. To put it another way:
horror is the truth about abstraction.
8

Certainly, horror prods the bounds of the

thinkable. The horrible, like the mad, presents the world
as it might be. It is utopianism without utopia, planning
without plans. It speaks of the present in the future tense,
and through a kind of inversion-like the words of a fool, it
is that which can not be said under normal circumstances.
This is due, in part, to a unique historical
ambivalence. Horror is an aesthetic category that has
traditionally been home to profound skepticism about the
merits of the aesthetic itself. From Roman times through
the early nineteenth century, it was posited as a category
distinct from either beauty or ugliness. 4 For Immanuel
Kant, and the Romantics, it was an element of the sublime,
experienced for spiritual and didactic benefit-a mode of
feeling that would skirt rationality and speak directly to
our inner nature. The terriblewas one form of sublimity,
alongside the noble and the splendid.Into the former camp
goes objects that "arouse enjoyment but with horror."
The gravity of this is opposed to the sense of
beauty, which was for Kant a much more superficial thing.
In its simplicity and its greatness, by contrast, the sublime
"moves." 5 This distinction recalls Longinus, originator of
the concept, for whom the sublime tears up facts "like a
thunderbolt." 6 Sublimity is superior precisely because it
need not engage the faculties of persuasion. It is a sensation;
when the sublime strikes, like pain or mortal fear, we simply
know it to be true. 7 In the eighteenth century, Thomas
Reid noted that this mode of communication "carries the
hearer along with it involuntarily, and by a kind of violence
than by cool conviction." 8 Indeed, this impressive horror is
uncool. It is a site of swooning, of spiritual overpowering,
of renewed commitments.
 9

It is also a slippery fish; the great works on the

subject continually remind one of its illuminating moral
power, the value of clarified affect. In its wake, we will
feel and know. But know what? For Kant, the "rigid"
and "astonished" sensation revealed nothing less than the
dignity of humanity itself. Sensing the sublime is an ethical
operation-recognition of this dignity would spur one
toward noble actions. This was not an unheard-of idea
at the time. The British writers of moral sensitivity and
improvement, such as the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and
Lord Karnes, also proposed that there were objects in the
world capable of bettering their observers. For others, the
sublime clearly invoked the religious. Erich Auerbach, for
example, thought that Dante's description of the striding
god who "passes the Stygian ferry with soles unwet" 9
succeeded in viscerally conjuring the power of divinity.
Among contemporary evangelicals, for whom the sublime
is alive and well as an affective discourse of faith and "spirit
movement," it is the popular belief in the "evidence of
things unseen." Horror is the shadow of the metaphysical,
moving across the waters. In a word, it is God.
Well, a form of Him. But a rarefied and somewhat
perverse one, occupying a moment in which the tidy
beauty of nature begins to wear at the seams, and the unruly
side-divine excess-expresses itself. This announces its
presence in the impenetrable dark tangle of the valley
floor, in split and sundered trees, in mountains "unjust"
and "hook-shouldered," and in the nimbus pregnancies
of stormy skies. In the two centuries following Nicolas
Despreaux-Boileau's 1674 translation of Longinus, godly
surplus was seen in the appreciation of "a wild element,
something different from regularity." 10 This was famously
 11

true for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, hence his heroic standing

among French Romantics. But it was more conunonly
the taste of the English writers, such as John Dennis, and
Thomas Burnet-who caught glimmers of this ferocious
power in art more generally.
This nature was not the charming pastorals of the
previous century, but something more appalling. In 1753,
for example, Dr. John Brown wrote of Keswick in the
English Lake District that:

[its] perfection consists of three circumstances:

Beauty, Horror and Immensity united ... But
to give you a complete idea of these three
perfections, as they are joined in Keswick,
would require the united powers of Claude,
Salvator, and Poussin. The first should throw
his delicate sunshine over the cultivated vales.
The second should dash out the horror of
the rugged cliffs, the steeps, the hanging
woods, and foaming waterfalls; while the
grand pencil of Poussin should crown the
whole with the n1ajesty of the impending
mountains. 11

Sinularly, Thomas Gray wrote about a 1739 visit

to a "monstrous precipice, aln1ost perpendicular," which
contained within itself "religion and poetry." 12 Joseph
Addison had famously remarked that the Alps overtook
him with an "agreeable type ofhorror," as he absorbed "one
of the most irregular misshapen scenes of the world." 13
Burnet likewise praised those natural vistas "ill-figur'd" and
"confused." 14

Enrico Baj, Ultracorpo in Svizzera, 1959

12

Again, the emphasis here is not on the aesthetic,

so much as the sensational: the eye becomes, in a very real
sense, the window to the soul. In his influential article on
the picturesque, Edmund Burke further clarified the effects
of"sublime horrors."The arch conservative noted that the
latter led to a condition of astonishment, that "state of
the soul in which all emotions are suspended, with some
degree of horror." 15 In contrast to beauty, the sensation
of the sublime involves physical pain; it is aesthetics made
anatonucal. Sheer ugliness, by contrast, is more closely
related to beauty. As Burke was quick to point out, these
may share formal characteristics, such as proper proportion.
By contrast, the sublime emerges from an unrelated matrix
of sense, and can not be meaningfully compared.
For Burke, the painful fear inherent in the sublime
is quickly converted to pleasure, as we realize that we are
not in actual danger. It is sublimated in relief. In this sense,
the phenomenal arc of the sublime resembles Kant's. The
ache of fear, for the German Idealist, is dispelled via the
dignity of the nund, which in this moment recognizes
its own power. At the same time, this formulation oddly
shadows Freud's explanation of laughter: it is "cathexic"
energy that builds up anxiously, only to be released in a
sort of exhalation. Such an effect was already theorized
in Aristotle's Poetics,in a sinular picture of catharsis. Fear
(eleos) is one of the emotions thought to be provoked by
literary art, and also ritually dispelled in a moment of social
pleasure. Such an idea nught help to explain some oddities
we will encounter later: for example, the compound genre
of comedy-horror in early American films, such as The Cat
and the Canary (1927), The Last Warning (1929) and later in
the Scream franchise.
 13

But how the mighty have fallen. Since the

late 19th century, horror has largely been exiled to the
titillations of low culture, and to certain strains of art where
it resonates unnamed. It has become that most mediocre of
things, a "genre:" an area of production below the threshold
of serious culture. 16 This divestment takes place against a
backdrop of desacralization, and the creep of the banal into
charismatic experience. Or, at least, the eviction of myth
to new quarters. Theodor Adorno, for example, denied
the continued existence of fear in art. Such terror was
totemistic, the hallmark of a lost, enchanted age. It survived
only as a feeling of discomfort, inherent in the repulsion
of ugliness. The Frankfurt School theorist even went so
far as to reject the kitsch character of that popular art-
such as Vietnam protest songs-which attempted to "take
the horrendous and make it somehow consumable." 17 For
Adorno, horror was something" out there," in the world of
imperialism, of Auschwitz, and the irrational.
Regardless, the ache of a de-spiritualized world
has haunted this discourse, doggedly, for centuries. It was
certainly felt in the age of the Romantics. In the work of
Burke, as well as Lord Byron and Caspar David Friedrich,
we are already aware of a groping for intensity of experience.
Like the famous Claude Glass that was used to make
picturesque landscapes more picturesque, this aspiration
was ridiculed in its own time as dangerously over-ripe, an
attempt to stage artificial emotive experiences. Sublime
horror was understood as a mad grasp at something visceral,
a kind of" emo" gesture toward unmediated feeling.
The Romantic courtship of sensation was likewise
powerful in a society less overstimulated than our own. In
contemporary culture, horror becomes merely one source,
 /1,

among many, of "cheap thrills." Its effects are perhaps

blunted alongside cable news, video games simulating
mass killing, pornography, Venti coffees, and militarized
foods like "Krunchers," which can deliver a payload of 100
decibels directly into the inner ear for an "extreme" eating
experience. 18 Such titillation is understood by theorists
(and deplorers) of the modern condition as a means to
prod individuals within the stupor of their "blase attitude."
This phrase is Georg Simmel's, referring to a condition that
arises from the constant jostling of the urban experience. 19
It is a sickness in which the over-stimulated seek further
stimulation. Shock becomes, in the words of the theorist
Homer Simpson, "the cause of and solution to" our
predicament. 20 In Parrotand Olivier in America, Peter Carey
captures beautifully the rituals of these "agitated" moderns,
in his narrator's mock horror of a rocking chair. Razzed
by the social and financial mobilities of democracy, they
can not sit still. Instead, they must calm themselves via
neurotic repetition: motion that simulates movement. 21
For its critics, this society produces a strain of traumatic
automatism that recalls Adorno's distaste for "pop" records
on endless repeat.
Perhaps for this reason, contemporary forms
of horror remain fated to a state of adolescence. They
appear evacuated of meaningful content, and can only
be rehabilitated through the admission of their triviality.
When employed for "serious" art, or for credible culture-
as in the films of Andy Warhol, Lars von Trier and Quentin
Tarantino, or in Francis Ford Coppola's remake of Dracula-
horror is reborn as camp. This is understandable. In its
realism, its need to communicate, horror necessarily flirts
with the literalness of kitsch. This is less a concern of more
 15

abstract arts, if we believe Gilio Dorfles' clain1 that bad taste

grows from representation. 22 Perhaps this vulgar tendency
leads to the exile of horror into the spheres of''freak chic,"
either in dodgy cinemas or in n1useums. It ren1ains with
us, a bnd of fellow traveler. But horror appears here not
as its own, theorized entity. Instead it is a kind of spectral
eminence, enn1eshed in the strategies of contemporary
art. This occurs in the operations of Kurt Schwitters,
alongside other Modernists who attempted to e>..'Pressthe
jolting nature of their historical moment. The sublime goes
"underground," only to reappear as Vito Acconci, audibly
masturbating beneath the floor of a gallery. 23
In this role, horror dramatizes the failure of
abstraction. It involves "graphic" violence, and gruesome
effects. There is a physicality in these, an insistence on
the bodily. While the uncanny may be highly abstract-a
vaporous or creeping unease-modern horror is more
commonly awfully literal. There are ghosts and specters,
in Rudyard Kipling's stories for example, which instill in
their victims a bnd of purified melancholic sensation. This
is absolutely uncanny, but it does not evoke true horror. 24
The ghost is a "floating signifier;" it usually denotes a
horror, a "murther most foul." The uncanny signals that
something unnatural has occurred. Horror shows it to you,
in gory detail. 25
The artist Paul Thek often exploited this juxta-
position, staging contrasts between the abstractions of art
and latex casts resembling pieces of meat and bone. Thek
famously "re-re-appropriated" the icons of Warhol, and
combined them with his simulated butcher-shop cuttings.
In the most sly example, a Brillo box is shown upturned,
with a kind of spinal flap in its hollow underbelly. 26 Thek
I (i

.\-.,l-rtni till" very t:xplicit, litcrll fkshlincss lurking

in the
body oft Wl'e works of 111ini111alisn1 and Pop. His gruesome
cont.nne1 forces together two violently opposed n1.odes of
1 cp1esl'nt.ttion. Il n1akes use of a bogus realism-gore as
1l vvould be n1odded by a special effects studio-which
intrudes into the rarefied atmosphere of corrunercial
iconography and its seizure by sophisticated art.
The staging of horror, its social scandal, frequently
operates through this type of assertion. Think, for example,
of the Sex Pistols: their threatening and incomprehensible
physicality, which was ritualized through sputum, vomit,
blood, piercings, and "senseless" acts of violence. Again,
the mounting abstraction of the pop product, its fetishistic
resolution into a "thing," was resisted through a kind of
tactical incontinence. 27 This failure of abstraction was
likewise a horrifying effect of 9 / 11, in which the envelope
of multi-national capital was peeled to disgorge its contents.
The aerie of finance was opened, and what fell out were
not equations but a cascade of paper, dust, metal, plastic,
and other. Although ideologically opposed, the aesthetic
strategies of Lydon and Laden were, at root, perhaps not so
different.
Thek's horrors echo in the output of some
contemporary British artists, who also fill the interior of
abstract containers with blood and guts. This is clearly the
case in Damien Hirst's installations of rotting or cross-
sectioned creatures, which occupy technical chambers that
look like Mies van der Robe's Farnsworth House. These
are flooded with formaldehyde or fetid air, providing a life-
support system that also clearly plays a rhetorical role as foil
to the gore--as with Marc Quinn's famous bust crafted of
his own blood, preserved in a glass fridge. But even here,

1. Paul Thek, Meat Piece with WarholBriAoBox, 1965 from the

series TechnologicalReliquaries,wax, painted wood and Plexiglas,
35.6 x 43.2 x 43.2 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art
 1

2
3

2. John Isaacs, Let The Golden Age Begin, 2004, wax, polyester, paint,
70 x 70 x 70 cm 3. John Isaacs, Everyone S Talking About Jesus, 2005,
wax, epoxy resin, polystyrene, 200 x 150 x 150 cm
/8

questions re1nain as to whether the atn1osphere of horror

devalues the work. The products of the "YBAs" have often
been disn1issed as expensive shock-tricks,juvenilia lacking
a n1ore subtle imagination. Even Hirst himself claimed,
probably disingenuously, that the shark in the tank was
unnecessary to its sublime effect; the forn1aldehyde should
have been enough. 28
Despite their passage through the "correct"
channels-such as Goldsmith's-these celebrated objects
quite closely resemble others which are obviously in
questionable taste. It did not go unnoticed when their ur-
patron, Charles Saatchi, purchased the defunct Hammer
horror film studio in 1997. Hirst's work, certainly, often
appears as a conceptually over-freighted (and rather more
technically crude) analogue of Gunther von Hagens' Body
Worldsexpositions. In son1e instances, the methods of the
two are closely resembling. The German anatomist, for
example, also cuts his "plastinated" remains into thin layers.
Von Hagens' sections are delicate, but the atmosphere of
horror is perhaps even more powerfully felt.
This has to do, in part, with the way that von
Hagens handles his subject matter. Body Worldsis not just
slightly literal. It is crushingly, pornographically literal.-
closely resembling the way that "adult" media approaches
the irreducibility of its object. 29 In porn, technical means
appear to bring the viewer ever closer to sexual pleasure.
This fails, of course, resulting in a danse macabreof Adornian
repetition: the venereal equivalent of the rocking chair. It
is reproduction in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Body Worldsmaintains a similarly problematic relationship
to its own object: life. The eye penetrates ever further, but
ultimately fails to understand anything about the animating
 / 'J

force of human existence.The person appears as a shocking

marionette, an exchange of hydraulic and mechanicaJ
armatures for n1ovement, and little else.
Sublime horror is alive and well, here. Von Hagens
does not surrender his claim upon didactic objectives,
despite his being criticized for pandering to prurient
interest. In Romantic tradition, the shock encounter
with death is intended to be instructive, to speak to the
question of what is human. This is attempted through the
literal, in the presentation of the material itself as a form
of horrifying evidence. Again this mirrors pornography.
There is no meaningful information, just an efflorescence
of circumstantial detail. What you get in both cases is
meat, a sort of corporeal poverty. "Bare life." Due to the
taxidermist's brio, the meat can be chopped, sliced, unfolded,
and flayed. But it cannot be abstracted; the presentation
is utterly literal, comprising nothing but the artifact itself.
While some "plastid" installations show their objects in
isolation-they are removed from system or context and
thus take on the false semblance of generality-no other
medium is employed in the service of explanation. Von
Hagen's work grows more from the cultural obsession with
forensics as a mode of representation, in which the gore,
itself, is made to speak.
So, where does this leave us? The final stop in this
historical trajectory, from the sublin1e to the ridiculous,
is the so-called "horror film." But even here, in its most
apparently debased guise, there remains an unsettling power.
This power is diametrically opposed to that claimed for the
horrible by Kant or von Hagens: the affective shortcut to
truth. By contrast, the ultimate message of the "fright flick"
seems to be a profound conunitinent to indeterminacy. We
can see this clearly in the contrast with detective fihns. As
literary critic Franco Moretti tells us, the gumshoe-and-
cop shows are all about restoration. The world is disordered
and then put to rights. Despite their carnivalesque
atmosphere of social transgression, these works are driven
by a conservative impulse. The message of such fiction is
that there is a force, amoral or peri-criminal though its
motivations may be, which does the work of knowledge:
killers are found, reasons are unearthed. We, the moral
public, find out whodunit and whydoit. If Moretti is to be
believed, these works are modernist and epistemological: in
short, they assertthe possibilityof knowing.30
Horror films brook no such positivism. Their
outcon1e tends to be morally ambiguous and inconclusive
at best. After all, the great cliche of the genre is the killer
or monster rising from the grave for one last tweak before
the credits roll. The message is: this will all begin again,
see you soon. The import of modern horror is perpetual
derangement, and this is why-in addition to their
performance as commodities-a "franchise" always seems
to produce endless sequels. There is no search for truth
through shock, and no will to our moral restitution. The
",ve" of horror is a sort of lunatic fringe, the trench coat
crowd, who identify with violence as a way of letting their

The typical shock ending of the horror film

 21

freak flag fly. This may be a kind of directionless, dystopic

n1elancholy, as with the teenage goths and Black Metal
fans. It may be genuine sociopathology of one forn1 or
another. Or, more co1nmonly, it could be a kind of tourism
which allows normal folks to slum it on the dark side for a
couple of hours.
The truth is probably a combination of these,
and also likely depends on the product itself. The sinister
fringe (and teenagers) are probably served by the genre of
"torture porn:" films such as Hostel (2005), the Saw series
(2004-present), or The Human Centipede (2010). However,
box office receipts would attest to the popularity of films
that adapt this seedy repertoire to more complex ends, such
as David Fincher's Seven (1995), Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003-
4), or the Stieg Larssen novels and their adaptations. In this
context, at least, horror has thus become something of a
"kick," not serious social inquiry or aesthetic investigation.
This would be the case even with respect to films such
as the Day Of The Dead (1985), which smuggle arch
commentary beneath the splatter. These are interesting, but
they hardly support the high-flown claims made for horror
in past centuries.
Is horror still relevant, then? More than ever. If
we believe Naomi Klein, it has emerged, in the guise of
"shock," as the central force in a new economic, political,
and cultural order. In this forn1, a sounding of the soul
functions in the service of intimidation and pacification.
It becomes, in effct, a weapon of social control. I ts use
gives rise to a collectively sanctioned state of emergency
or sovereign "exception," in which centralized authority
can be expanded in the name of order. The continual
threat of de-stabilization, of chaos and anarchy, justifies the
111cn:1n<:ntal\eizurc, of the public sphere by capita] and
It\ official facilitator,. 11 The excesses of the second Bush
pre,idency arc, perhaps, the most convincing evidence put
forward for thi..,theory.
In this politics of the sublime, horror has been
n1atchcd by Terror. In 1nany ways, the in1agery of 9/11
represented the absolute apex of the picturesque-
condensing the sublin1ity of height and speed with the
epochal in1agery of fal1en civilizations, the hubris of Babel,
Oriental siege, I~ome burning, acts of god, birds alighting
n1oments before the i1npact, and so forth. Cameras showed
Turner clouds, like a new Krakatoa, rising vortiform to
block out the sun. The photographs of Ground Zero,
showing fraginents of the towers' facades, looked like a
hypertrophied Tintern Abbey. Terror is not art, but it is
certainly an aesthetic proposition. It transmits a Burkean
experience, a messianic and transformative violence, but its
charisn1a is qu.ick.Jyinstitutionalized. True to Burke's ideas,
this i'i a sonda~ewith a strongly conservative backdraft. The
powers that be quickly converted the post-9/11 moment
into a \tate of heightened social quiescence, a fearful
consensus.
There is, also, a n1ore general "rediscovery"
of affect underway. This asserts itself through a
variety of 1nanifcstations: from charismatic religion, to
acaden1ic theory appealing to en1otion, to "experiential
environ111ents" and 111aterial effects that would add
scnsauoual optics to the productc; of the architect. Such
cinpha~c\ suggest the extent to which the Enlightenment
project of knowing has fallen into a n1on1ent of crisis. 32
At the least, Jt 1s losing iuflucnce to a neo-R.on1anticis1n
10 which feclitt)! is belie11in~.
 Against this backdrop, the historical attraction
of horrors is their assumed purchase on the soul. After
all, their sublimity has long been thought to congeal, co
realize, those things out of reach: the spirit, natural la\, s
and essences, authentic divinity and human cligniry, a111ong
others.
But this is not the whole story. As we \v1ll see,
horror also reorients one to the notion that \vhat ex1s~ 1s
not necessarily all that n1ight be. It is a very vulgar forn1 of
materialism, to be sure, but-like those slasher filn1s-one
with counterintuitive consquences. As in Paul Thek's art,
there is a n1oment in which horror becomes the basis for a
failure in the stability of objects, in the very "thingne,s" of
things. And this is where we begin to engage the enticing
problen1 of deviance.

A videocasette slot in James Woods' abdomen, Videodrome, 1983

2 J.

Deviant Anatomy

Against this history, we will look at bodily horrors

and their analogues in the built environment. These are
instances in which normal anatomy grows deviant-extra
limbs appear, holes open where they should not, individuals
are doubled and split and copied. In such discomfiting
operations, we limn the rise of an "anti-ontology," a kind
of multi-focal, multiply-inhabited way of being.
This follows classic tropes of abomination,
monstrous forms reaching back to Rabelais and before:
mismatched limbs and morphemes; transgressions of the
line between natural and non-; elements out-of-place;
crossed borders and cultures, inappropriate intimacies. 33 In
these wretched examples, the boundary between subject
and world, self and other, does not coincide with the limits
of the body. Rather, they may include foreign objects, as in
Pantagruel's image of the drunk intersected with his barrel.
Or they are horribly incontinent, with restless pieces that
invade their neighbors in the crepuscular hours. 34 These
can appear unnatural, or ugly. But they are also creative and
exceedingly energetic.
These, too, have been imagined differently at
various moments. Curiously, aberration and "monstrous"
exception have not always implied evil or ugliness. As
Hillel Schwartz quotes Montaigne:
 25

What we call n1onsters are not

so to God, who sees in the
imn1ensity of His work the
infinity of fonns that He has
comprised ... there is nothing
that is contrary to nature. 35

There are those who have seen those things

internally heterogeneous as a sort of divine en1ergence,
the upwelling of new design-who have not nustaken
convention for beauty, and vice ver a. Schwartz, for one,
notes the changing interpretation of the n1onster fron1
a "marvel, an amazing thing under God's heaven," to the
"monster as multiplicity, a polyforn1 bci11g nursed by
extravagant Nature." 36 Likewise, the poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins wrote in "Pied Beauty" of the blessed character

Tricephalous Christ, Salisbury Cathedral

'.,Hi

of the polyglot. Like Montaigne, and later Jacques

I )errida, Hopkins credited God with "dappled things,"
for all "counter, original, spare, strange." Kant, sin1ilarly,
cLli111edthat "n1ultiplicity is beauty." 37 The unique and the
1nultifonn n1crely show the breadth of the Lord's creation.
While it has not been simply equated with
ugliness or perversity, deviant anatomy has usually signaled
the presence of the exceptional. The notion of physical
aberration has often been associated with figures of power,
with kings and deities. Horrid forms were often used to
conceptualize superhun1an sovereignty. In the Medieval
church, for example, some morphological experiments
were even applied to the godhead. Prior to the resolution
of Jesus' fa1niliar image, artists tried to tackle the problem
of the Trinity: a god that was simultaneously three and one.
This resulted in the Tricephalous Christ: a three-headed
figure, intersected at the cheek. JH This was used briefly
before being declared anathema. Celtic Christianity was
likewise subject to odd formal compromises, centuries of
secret accommodation with Druidic and "folk" religions. 39
One example was the Anglo-Saxon crucifixion: Jesus and
King Arthur, intersected with a tree. Here, brambles replace
the cross; tangled branches pierce the flesh like nails. 40
As with the superhuman, the anomalous body has
provided a n1ediun1 for pondering the boundaries of the
species, and those of the individual subject. This frequently
has to do with the horizon of humanity, blurring the
den1arcation between animals and ourselves. This is, of
course, a classic of carnival: bestial masks and behaviors,
creatures dignified with hun1an titles and honorifics, dogs
walking on their hind legs. The mythical spawn of classical
antiquity-fawns, nunotaurs, lycanthropes, nyn1phs and
sylphs-very commonly straddled this uneasy interface.
Others combined different animals into a single being, or
multiples of the san1e in a conjoined body, like Cerberus.
This last, when applied to the human, provides
another major strain ofhorror. The European folk traditions
include a large number of many-headed giants and ogres,
multiple selves forced into the unbearable intin1acy of a
single body, with shared hungers and movements, hearts
and assholes. The nightmare of the partial individual, who
must share core elen1ents of his subjectivity with others, is
a gross contravention of the territorial anatomy-at least in
those cultures where liberal hun1anism was on the ascent.
The deviant, then, might be called a type of
"experin1ental subject," a mode of being that articulates
hun1an experience under shifting circunistances.The 1nania
would be particularly acute when the pace of history, for
whatever reason, appears to us as abnorn1ally brisk. No
coincidence, perhaps, were those outbreaks of freaks in
the so-called Age of Revolutions, among the Victorians, or

The Bunker Family

n1orc recently in an era of "trans-localization," when the
geographies of wealth and connection come to seem ever
n1ore opaque and conspiratorial.
As Franco Moretti observed, the two archetypal
Modern monsters-he with the electrodes, and he with
the pointy teeth-emerge as the "horrible faces of a
single society, its extremes: the disfigured drone and the
ruthless proprietor.t' 41 That is, labor and capital in an early
n1odern moment. Frankenstein shows man penetrated
and demolished by technology, forced to perform a
kind of St. Vitus' Dance on the factory floor, cadaverous
and automated. By contrast, Dracula is the ur-exploiter
depicted by Marxian theory, a sort of deified junkie: both
the beneficiary, and victim, of capital. His amazing powers
of extraction become a form of enslavement. Both figures
embody a fear of what is to come:" [expressing] the anxiety
that the future will be monstrous." 42
In a sinular manner, the "Siamese" twins
known as Chang and Eng gave embodiment to fear and
ambivalence surrounding the threat of civil war to the
"curious institution" of the antebellum South. This was
due to the fact that the famous brothers-having taken
the surname Bunker and married two portly American
sisters--settled in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains
and accumulated a double-homestead comprising twenty-
two children and over thirty slaves. When P.T. Barnum
offered to pay for their separation in 1868, many writers
(Mark Twain among them) saw this as a ripe metaphor
for the tenuous state of the nation. Would the twins be
separated, or "would the union be preserved?" 43
In making problematic ilie boundaries of the
human actor, the aberration raises questions about the
 ....
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({~, • ' ~,-'+ \ \

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2 3

1.Charles LeBrun, Men-Hoot-Owls, 1671 2. Lucy McRae,

Pie of Sticks, 2009 3. Rabelais' Pantagruel and Gargantua
30

shifting contradictions of social context. He embodies

the Freudian uncanny: alien yet uncomfortably near,
ourselves in the form of the other. As Moretti writes, the
monster "serves to displace the antagonisn1s and horrors
evidenced within society outside society itself." 44 Here it
stands objectified, as with the case of Shelley's and Stoker's
symbols of exploitation, or in the figure of the cannibal who
frequently appears in the pop-mythology of the Chinese
Cultural Revolution and more recently in the writing of
Mo Yan. 45 But this is merely one historical theme among
many. Wherever there appears a perceived erosion of the
conventions and structures that hold the seams (and the
semes) together, monsters begin to emerge.
The horrible has thus to do, in part, with a shifting
of territorial borders. This is true of bodies; it is also true of
geographies. It moves the line of radical alterity, that which
separates ourselves and others, to an inappropriate location.
The seam or suture represents a joining of the unlike. The
migration of borders often creates a misalignment between
historically established communities and their spaces, as in
states born of imperial fiat. Such is the case, today, with the
flows of the trans-local.As with Achille Mbembe's account
of Africa, the manifold products of the entrepot and the
"global city" unfold under the sign of the horrid, their
very being demonstrating a secret history of"strange signs,"
"convulsive movments," and "monstrous couplings." 46
The abnormality thus gives imaginative form to
anxieties about being human under evolving conditions, in
a de-familiarized world. Horror is a notion that embodies
both intimacy and "blasphemous alienage," 47 figuring the
plight of modern subjects "at two with nature," with our
circumstances, and with our selves.
 31

Horror in Architecture

"You have always been afrightjul mirror, a monstrous

instn,ment of repetitions ... "
Julio Cortizar 48

This immanence of horror in the dynamisn1 of

the modern is nowhere clearer than in architecture. As
elsewhere, built horrors have an intimate connection to the
birth and death of historical forms. Many will ren1en1ber
Walter Benjamin's famous dictum that each great work
signals the arrival of a new genre. This is heroic nonsense.
New types-whether literary or architectural-are, in
fact, born long before they are recognized. These are
often greeted not as advancements but as oddities. Their
arrival appears abominable: a mother birthing the child of
a different species. This problematical nativity is often due
to an historical process, such as a shift in the dominant
"mode of production." 49 Various socio-econonuc orders
have hatched the tragedy, the comedy, the essay, and the
novel, after their own image. Each has been retroactively
hailed as an authentic expression of its time. Regardless,
their morphogenesis was initially thought freakish. Herein
the real avant-garde: awkward amalgams and provisional
gestures.
Even "canonical"works have been viewed, in their
infancy, as dubious. For this reason Michel de Montaigne,
while producing an influential mode of philosophical
writing, labeled his own essays "monstrous bodies, pieced
together of diverse men1bers, without definite shape, having
no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental." 50
."32

Likewise, we might understand Henry James' acid dismissal

of the R..ussian novel as a "loose, baggy, monster." A similar
charge has been leveled at the work of James Joyce, at
Jean Genet's autobiographical writing, and also at some of
Jacques Derrida's philosophical experiments. 51 In particular,
fonnal innovators-modern bricoleurs foremost among
them-have been cast as Frankensteinian: those who
would cobble unseemly bodies from available fragments.
In architecture, the horrible frequently appears
at the historical interface of language and type. In such
a moment, the resources of an existing vocabulary are
put under pressure by changes in scale or composition,
required by accelerated socio-economic development.
The transitional building appears ill-formed, as its devices
are maladapted to its task. The good old tricks no longer
work. The architect is forced to deploy his conventions in
ungrammatical assemblages, as a new language has not yet
arisen that is capable of solving the aesthetic problem of
the new type. That is to say: the horrid wells up when the
techniques of one historical moment are applied to the
needs of another.
So what does such a building look like? One can
see this, for example, in the architecture of the so-called
American Commercial Renaissance (approx. 1840-1929).
Many of the first great palaces of trade-mushrooming
arcades and office towers-rose during this period to meet
the practical needs of the new industrial class, as well as to
express the self-image of American financial power. 52 New
orders of retail and recreational space came to prominence
in burgeoning urban areas: department stores, auditoria,
and museums. These were of unprecedented size, sprawl
and height.
 33

The resulting aesthetic-one of "crowding," is

seen throughout much urban American architecture of
the period. But it is also seen elsewhere, in the new press
of humanity around the locus horribilus of the con1n1ercial.
As E.L. Doctorow later described it, in Ragtime, "there
seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great
53
swarms of people." In essence, the social problem of the
age was one of unprecedented numbers, sizes, and densities;
in architecture and wherever the moderns gathered.
As such, the regnant language of N eoclassicis1n collided
violently with the hyperbolic proportions of the n1odern.
The accommodation of architecture to new problen1s of
scale and scope required prolonged experimentation and
produced many rank failures; a menagerie of suggestive
creatures sprang up along the way.
Architects of the period experimented wildly with
the application of historical styles and compositional tricks
to this problem. While a stubborn conundrum, the large
and complex structure nonetheless created opportunities
for innovation. This was particularly true of the tower.
Raymond Hood, designer of many significant exan1ples,
"felt that the skyscraper problem was still a relatively
new phenomenon in American architecture, lacking any
established traditions or strict formulas." Hood, for one,
"was quite happy with the prevailing mood in which
everyone could try out whatever idea came into their
head." 54 This was likewise the case with other emergent
typologies.
Take, for example, the Grandstand of the
thoroughbred racetrack at Washington Park, Chicago
(1884). The latter illustrates precisely that moment in
which a fundamentally new challenge faces vernacular
 conventions. This question is quite straightforward: how
docs one design a very large building? The answer is far
fro1n clear. Huge surfaces and volumes test the ability of the
architect to create a coherent, harmonious composition.
Should one dispose of the great expanses of the 1nodern
building by adding n1ore elements-that is, by increasing
their nun1ber-or by making each larger?
In order to tackle the dilemma of scale, Solon S.
Beman chose to replicate the configuration of a normal
construction. He did so by scaling everything up, by
enlarging all constituent pieces proportionally. Beman
attempted to solve the problem of the large building by
applying to it the familiar composition of something much
smaller. In fact, the Grandstand is not a great edifice, so much
as it is a modest one inflated. Its massing and disposition of
parts clearly suggests a more diminutive object. Beman's
work mimics the architecture of a suburban retreat; it
recalls the Evanston Country Club and the Glen View
Club, both by Holabird and Roche, or the Shinnecock
Hills Golf Clubhouse, in Long Island, by McKim, Mead
and White. 55
In order to maintain this illusion, all the
ingredients of a pitched roof were up-sized simultaneously;
turrets, chimneys, and gables all acquired extraordinary
dimensions so as to appear visually consonant with one
another. The illusion might have worked, perhaps, if one
were to see the stands unoccupied. The image is alarming
precisely because it is inhabited; the expanse of Beman 's
super-roof is read against the crowd beneath. With visitors
on the verandas, the Grandstand looks like the product of
trick photography, some clever photo-montage in which it
has been populated by Lilliputians. The fact that one can
 1

8i
] □ □□□□
2

1. Solon S. Beman, Grandstand at Washington Park, Chicago 2. McKim,

Mead, and White, Shinnecock Hills Golf Clubhouse, Long Island, New York
86

read the massive gables against the human form contributes

to the impression of the roof as a great looming behemoth.
It looks as if Piranesi designed a country club.
The illusion of a giant roof, and the artifice
employed in its production, suggests an architectural folly. It
is a kind of "special effect" used in circumstances where the
normal rules do not apply: in whimsical garden pavilions,
pleasure palaces,Vegas and the Vatican. An example of this
is Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts, in which the
great vaults structure a mammoth scenography of ruin.
Beman's grandstand also recalls the work of Postmodernists
such as Michael Graves and Robert A.M. Stern, who
employed intentionally mis-scaled components. Likewise,
it resembles a strain of rhetorical building in which a
single over sized element is made to stand metonymically
for the whole, as in Adolf Loos' entry to the Chicago
Tribune Tower competition, or in the architecturesparlantes
of Boullee and LeDoux. True to the tradition of deviant
anatomy, the Grandstand's unique scalar expression creates
a formal instability. It appears to be two things at once: a
new typology which occupies (problematically) the skin of
its forebear.
This method is by no means an obvious choice.
Other architects of Beman 's time assayed the problem of
the large building in rather different ways. While some
likewise relied upon over scaling, others chose the path
of repetition: that is, of incorporating elements of more
conventional size, but in greater number. Others merged
both techniques into yet more complex hybrids.
Beman's odd result was not due to lack of
inventiveness or skill. The repertoire of the Neoclassical
building was simply ill-equipped to deal with the engorged
 37

bulk of the modern. The Victorian architect produced

his work within a language dedicated to the articulation
of specificity. In the lingering pre-modern vocabulary,
exceptions were the dominant object of architectural
attention. Ornamentation was used to heighten particular
conditions, exceptional moments within the tectonic of a
building: frames surrounding openings and edges, coursing
defining the line between floors, columns visualizing lines
of vertical force, etcetera.
This language combined none too easily with
a nascent architecture of repetition, system, and number.
This did not merely have to do with questions of scale. The
techniques of the pre-20 th -century designer were likewise
strained by the tendency of the modern building to move
away from the singular and the exceptional, in favour of the
aesthetics of mass quantity. In this moment of expansion,
elements such as enframed windows-those last vestiges of
the individual in architecture-continued to be used, and
were subject to a disturbing proliferation.
This effect is visible in another of Solon S.
Beman's works, the Pullman Building. This example
contrasts his Grandstand. At Pullman, the ornamentation of
the windows-their celebration as "events" in the fa~ade-
disagrees with their proliferation. The result reminds one of
a creature with too many of something; a swarm of eyes,
perhaps. The sheer number of elements seems yet more
absurd when each is "heightened" by the use of decorative
treatments. Likewise, the corona of chimneys, domes, and
turrets appears inappropriate and excessive. These are of
conventional size, and a huge building such as Pullmann
requires them to be used in far greater numbers. The result
is an expression of immoderate surplus.
Solon S. Beman, Pullman Building, Chicago
 39

The manic repetition of bits, each articulated as

a feature, makes for a particular variety of strangeness. En
masse, these contribute to an "aesthetics of crowding:" a
sort of liberal nightmare in which the individual unit
cannot be properly assimilated into the expression of a
collective. The Pullman is a n1onster after the Leviathan,
at least after the famous engraving on the title page of
Thomas Hobbes' book. 56 It appears a meld of independent
entities that have not been, or cannot be, assi1nilated
into the morphology of a greater corporate body. There
remains an unresolved tension between the whole and its
parts. Hence we might understand many of the awkward
products of late Victoriana, their tremulous density and
corseted appearance-as if they were barely restraining a
bolus of forces.
In such examples, one can oppose the disturbing
form of the early modern building \Vith the cool to\-vers of
Mies van der Rohe that were later to come to the Loop. 57
Mies' works solve the problems of size and repetition by
assimilating everything into an aesthetics of systen1. Herein,
all components of the fa<;ade are subsumed within the
expression of the grid. The Miesian building signals the
historical retreat of specificity into pattern. At Seagran1 's,
the lines of the window extend vertically and horizontally
to the edge of the fa<;ade; the window thus appears n1erely
as an interpolation of continuous horizontal and vertical
58
lines. The modernist resolution was to express the fran1e
itself as primary organizational device. 59 As opposed to the
weak classicism of Ben1an and Jenney, the Miesian systen1
is infinite. Like grids and patterns in general, the surface of
buildings such as 860-880 Lake Shore Drive could go on
indefinitely. Their linuts appear purely arbitrary.
J.0

By contrast, early high-rises had a problematic

n1ultiplicity, a kind of schizoid or doubly-inhabited form.
Still today, they present an anachronism. In scalar terms they
are n1odern, in language they are Neoclassical, "Saracenic,"
Gothic, or Romanesque.
The enlargement and involution of buildings
shadowed an analogous trend in the evolution of
con1n1erciaJ institutions more generally. The period that
gave rise to the pleasing horrors of the Chicago Loop
\Vas noted for its burgeoning n1onopolies. Businesses and
production chains-like buildings-became ever more
vertically integrated. That strange goliath, the corporation,
emerged. This same economic logic that birthed
department stores such as Marshall Field's, in which
the main street of yesteryear was internalized. As Lewis
Mumford argued in 1961, the "combination of .. expansion
and congestion, horizontal and vertical, [produce] the
maximum opportunities for profit." 60 The architectural
consequences remain profound.
Consolidation and enlargement exert their
influence in the production of a variety of horrible
architectures. As do other uniquely modern forces, which
we will discuss in what follows: mass repetition ofbuildings
and components, expansions in the structural possibilities
of their height and span, new technologies and social
practices, the restless re-valuations of urban real estate, and
the global transmission of architectural iconography.
This is not merely the quandary of a certain
mon1ent of American architectural history. Quite the
contrary. Horror is ever emergent. It reasserts itself
whenever the established language of building is overtaken
by the historical rate of change, and by the consequent
 LJLJ L

1 2
u
I ---' I I
1
I
•I
- 'I
I
I
f
-
•

I
I

- ·-
-
3 -- 4

1. Holabird and Roche, Marquette Building, Chicago 2. Jenney and

Mundie, Leiter Building, Chicago 3. Louis Sullivan, Carson Pirie Scott,
Chicago 4. Mies van der Rohe, 800-860 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago
3

1. Entries to the Chicago Tribune Tower Competition by Wilham

Eugene Drummond (left), John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood
2. Holabird and Roche, Hotel Muehlebach, Kansas City, Missouri
 43

requirements of new typologies. It is a chronic sy1npton1 of

modernity's violent and cyclical dynamism, its expan\ions
and convulsions and metamorphoses. For this reason,
unease remains endemic in the built environment.
We might see this, for example, in the case of
more recent inventions, such as the shopping mall and
the "expo center." The difficulty of these horrid objects
is well known: they are simply too big to be given any
kind of uniform identity. Many are even too large for the
expansive abstractions of modern architecture, and their
design has (by necessity) tended to favor the episodic and
the fragmented. Its contents are understood myopically, as
merely a jumble of retail environments or "experiential
spaces," each as s1nall as a single perceptible envelope.
Whereas the Miesian building attempted to
drown the horror of the modern scale in the cool liquidity
of abstraction, the gawky "transitional" building-either of
the Chicago loop or of the contemporary megastructural
economy-exposes intransigent questions of outsized
architecture. Where the Modernists surrender to the
infinite, to Kant's mathe1natical sublimity, the 19th-century
architect tried desperately to domesticate size through
the ornamental treatment of edges, levels, and openings.
Sin1ilarly, today's designer tries to refract it into a welter
of m.icro-environments. By doing so, they expose an
unsettling presence that only appeared to disappear, by
sleight of hand, in the fleeting elegance of Modernist
technique.
The Redemption of Horror

How can horror be situated in a contemporary

enterprise of reading and making architecture?
We have claimed that horror continues to stalk
our physical environment, as well as its aesthetic and artistic
theorization-that it is immanent in the modern, and
problematically so. It must be sublimated through design,
or taken up in the work of a "negative" avant-garde: a
history of post-humanist or dystopian projects that link
Hirst to Hilberseimer to Himn1elblau. 61
Horror is the leitmotif of an architecture forced
to continually transfonn; an architecture that, in this
process, appears beleagured by, and ambivalent about,
aesthetics. At least, in their traditional, "compositional"
guise. Emergent architecture, circa now, trends more
toward affect and effect, toward modes of systematized
sublinuty that include the mass movement of particles
(mobilized through parametrics), the improbable variety,
or the loonung cantilever. These are the built analogue
of a broader epistemic crisis, in which evocations of
sensation-the ecstatic, the charismatic, the pornographic
and the revolting-are the mediu1n of a new artistic and
political order. Here, again, they are matched by the politics
of "shock," and of a trend toward the affective in the arts,
in the academic, and in popular culture. The sublin1e is on
the march, again.
 45

But architectural horrors do not sit easily with

this trend, in any simple sense. They are in the moment, but
not of it. Horror is also paradoxically uneasy with respect
to contemporary architecture, with its patterns, parameters,
and diagrammatic postures. The inheritance of sublime
terror is not nearly so elating, nor so beautifully aloof.
Horror is one byproduct of the modern, and thus shares
many of characteristics of its advanced forms, evolving with
them. But at the same time, it remains a dark mirror, an
unsettling or ungrateful fellow traveler-like all reflections,
it remains opposed, while sharing many important formal
characteristics. We will see many examples of this in what
follows. These emerge from the logic of their time, but
often appear inverted and unsettling, a counter-discourse
stretching from the Romantic to the parametric. They are,
again, both intimate and alien.
For this reason, we can look at horrors to find
architectural alternatives. At them, and through them. We
do so because they reveal blind spots, cataracts-things
that we are not properly supposed to find. Openings dwell
at the limit of the thinkable, at the edge of the epistemic
spotlight, even though they are right in front of our faces. In this,
horrors offer a lens; no more, no less.
The point of architectural horrors is not that they
necessarily revolt or mortify. This would overstate their
emotive impact. They rarely harrow our souls, so much as
they present a discomfiting image of mutation and change.
Some are genuinely frightening--such as Vietnam's
Hang Na Villa. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre's
images of Detroit buildings, partially and mostly dead,
are chilling for their distorted appearance as well as their
social implications. Others, such as South China Mall, are
46

worrying and an1using at the same time. In what follows,

we present a large number of examples, past and present,
disturbing and lovely, doltish and sophisticated (or both).
In true 18th-century style, we choose to divorce these
from boring and unhelpful judgments about their beauty
or ugliness. Some of these are ugly, to be sure. Others are
achingly beautiful. But more importantly, all present the
possibilities of deviant architecture as an opening into new
worlds of form, composition, space-making, program, and
hierarchy. 62
Let's not react to this hysterically. Here, "horrors"
refers to peculiar buildings or urbanisms, that can be read
through biophysical analogues or creatures from popular
history. We divide these into general tropes, points on a
spectrum of morphological deviance. These contain varied
elements of the "horrible," such as doubling, reiteration,
disproportion, formlessness, shifts of scale, excess parts or
openings, solidity, and the like. This does not imply that
such works are necessarily appalling or negative, although
some certainly are. The buildings in this book are selected
simply because they are interesting-because they say
something important about what architecturemight be or become.
When we look specifically at architectures, a
new matrix of alterity emerges. Here, it is about artifice
and mutability: about the deviation between "naturalized"
norms and other, more rarefied, possibilities. Deviant
buildings, as one would expect, represent conditions that
reconfigure the conventions of the architectural object-
substituting deformity for conformity. These mutations
generalize quickly under pressure, staking a claim as the
genomics of a new order. For example, we consider how
the modernist assumption of the building as a single,
 47

coherent object has recently been inverted: fragmentation,

a totally opposed compositional principle, is now de rigellr,
in worlds of commercial expediency as well as elite cultural
production. Here we might claim that an exception in
architecture-what Maurice Blanchot called a "monstrous
singularity"-can very quickly become the basis for a ne,v
kind of rule. 63
Horror suggests a desire to understand and value
deviance; to be suspicious of fundamentals and appearances;
to let the norm be weirded by the exception. What follows,
then, is a provocation-or a manual, or -a guide, or an
alternative canon. What it is depends on what one would
do with it. Properly speaking, horror has no manifesto. It is
not an "ism," and it is certainly not a school, a moven1ent,
or a cell. It is only a kind of tolerance, a willingness to look.
It embodies the suspicion that official design discourses are
not telling the whole story, and that spaces for action are to
be found in an expanded aesthetic field-one that marries
the beautiful to the distorted, the a,vk"vard, the manifold
and the indeterminate.
 Typologies Of Horror

'!M
T ----,, ...
. ...
 49

Doubles and Clones

"Opposition is true Friendship."

William Blake 1

We begin with a subject that is perhaps most basic

to horror, and to the kindred subjects of the unheimlic/1and
the monstrous: the failure of the body, and the person, as a
unique or singular entity. In The Uncanny, doubling is said
to be associated with "mirror-images, shadows, guardian
spirits, the doctrine of the soul and fear of death." 2 For
Freud, the doppelgangeris repellent for invoking the animist
practice in which an effigy, a mask or statue, would be
forged as insurance against mortality. The duplicate was a
form of decoy, a hiding place for the soul. In an argument
that recalls Adorno 's theory of ugliness, Freud described
the unheimlich double as a hollowed vestige of this earlier
custom. It impels the awareness of a "primitive phase" in our
mental development when sympathetic magic-the power
of resembling objects over one another-was believed to
be effective. Certainly, the echo of these enchantments can
be heard when the doppelgangerappears in fiction, often
as a hijacking of the true self. This is the case in Nikolai
Gogol's "The Nose," when Major Kovalyov discovers that
this organ has absconded with his job and his social life.
Likewise, in Dostoyevsky's "The Double," the protagonist
can recognize his ego in an alien body, as it approaches in
a darkened street. The second self and the "nemesis" are
coextensive, as in the classic dualism of Sherlock Holmes
and Moriarty, or in Chuck Palahniuk's Tyler Durden.
 More immediately, perhaps, the human duplicate
presents an existential conundrum: it is neither one nor
many. The "individual" remains our preferred vision of the
subject, and we are comfortable with siblings who exist
within an expected range of rese1nblance. But identical
twins-alongside albinos, cripples, the blind or the
mute-have often been considered a sinister omen or a
contravention of nature's laws. The excessive identity of the
identical, applied to people, appears to violate the norn1s of
deviation within a fraternal series.
In formal ternis, twins are defined by a surplus
of symmetry. Through mirroring, their synm1etry is itself
symmetrical. As such, they embody a super-abundance
0 ~ the •_'harn1ony" valued in classical thought. This excess

gives nse. to an .odd pheno1nenon: horrible beauty. This

emer~es, in particular, when each twin is conventionally
beautiful unto hin 1 0 r h erse lf. Th • a conflict
. ere 1s . between

John Carpenter, The Thing, 1982

 1

2 3

1. Sam Raimi, Army of Darkness 1992 2. Typical

semi-detached home 3. Highlight Tower, Munich
52

an apparently "ideal" object and its duplication. Whereas

ugly twins are merely sad, lovely ones are alarming. This
is the case with the Wink.levoss brothers, both played by
Armie Hammer in David Fincher's The Social Network
(2010). In much the same way, Hugh Hefner's tendency
to repeatedly squire identical sisters (and survive) smells
like brimstone. Multiplication draws forward the threshold
at which beauty gives way to discomfort. Oscar Wilde
described such a reaction to Dorian Gray's unreal allure
(again, produced by a duplication) which suggested
inhuman artifice, and the corruption of other faculties.
Wilde's horror of portraiture, of the occult sympathy
between an object and its representation, is prescient with
respect to photography, film, and the recorded voice--
principal sites of the modern unheimlich.
Horrible beauty likewise operates in architecture,
to various degrees. It was acute, for example, in the
former towers of New York's World Trade Center. These
differed from doubles such as the World Trade Center in
Bahrain (2008), or the Cullinan in Hong Kong (2009).
In the latter cases, the individual tower is asymmetrical;
mirroring occurs at the scale of the pair. Similarly, instances
such as the Highlight Towers in Munich (2004) appear as
a single asymmetrical figure that has been bifurcated. By
contrast, each of the two Manhattan skyscrapers gave the
impression of being a perfection unto itself. Twinning-
as opposed to mirroring-lent them a powerful symbolic
aspect, as embodiments of "trade" and international
capital. Each seemed ready to proliferate; nothing about
their composition prevented the possibility of a third, or a
fourth ~ower.The WTC appeared as merely one stage in an
expansionary operation.
 '
\ -C:3 CJ-

I
y CJ:-
-, r
y
- ·y

, -t
w -
1

1. Bahrain World Trade Center 2. Cullinan, Hong Kong

3. Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss
54,

Subsequent twin-buildings have oscillated

between the Scylla and Charybdis of unhappy outcomes:
they are either boring for being repeated, or histrionic in
their atte1npt to mitigate redundancy. The former category
includes the breathtakingly unremarkable Time-Warner
Center in Manhattan (2003); the Cullinan in Hong Kong
(2009), which attempts to form a heroic gateway using the
language of glass corporatism; or the Torres de Santa Cruz
in Tenerife (2006). A contrasting anxiety is represented by
the grotesque curves of Bahrain Financial Harbour (2009)
or in the "techno sesame" aesthetic of that island kingdom's
World Trade Centre.
Successful examples, such as Rafael Moneo's
Kursaal in San Sebastian (1999) tend to avoid either tactic.
Moneo 's composition succeeds by skirting symn1etry: the
viewer feels continually on the verge of seeing the two
theaters unfolding evenly to either side. This never happens,
and the various imperfectly mirrored vistas offered by the
building "in the round" are compelling. In this regard, it
remembers Reima Pietila's proposal for a multi-purpose
center in Monte Carlo (1969), where a doubled mound
withholds a symmetry anticipated from other angles.
Such an effect can be directly contrasted, for example,
with the Gate of Europe by Philip Johnson, in Madrid
(1996). Here, the very sinister structural gimmick of the
l~an is exaggerated by crude mirroring. It is not surprising,
perhaps, that this building was i1nagined as the pied a terre
of Satan in the 1995 film The Day of the Beast.
In architecture, this problem of the double, a Jolie
a deux, is yet stranger with physical attachment. This recal1s
conjoined or "Siamese" twins, the "shared body" typology
of monsters such as Cerberus, and the tricephalous ogres
 1

l~ \ lI t \
\

I I
I
L
i \
•
I \\~ 2

1. Philip Johnson, Gate of Europe, Madrid 2. Rafael Moneo, Kursaal, San

Sebastian 3. Alejandro Aravena, Siamese Tower, Universidad Cat6hca de
Chile 4. Johnston Marklee, House House, Ordas, Inner Mongolia, PRC
 56

in whom multiple creatures are biologically superimposed.

Robert Mills, in his work on "Jesus as Monster," has
argued that it is this conjoint doubling, the eclipse of the
individual in one body, that is the most basic historical
trope of monstrous aesthetics. 3 For 1nodern humanism, this
is a fundamental source of horror: the non-conformity of
individual subject and unique body. Likewise, conjunction
begins to distort symmetry, crimping elements as they
approach the point of contact. Such anatomies commonly
incorporate a lack or an "in-folding" of vestigial limbs that
remain hidden within the body's recesses.
This discomfort reaches a kind of apex in the
semi-detached house. The interest of the semi is due to
the fact that this typology is always-already a deviant being,
born of modern compromise: the oddly forced intimacy
of the "two-family house." The dwelling looks bigger than
it is, and lends an impression of upper-class gentility to
an object defined by lower middle-class spatial possibilities.
As such, it is reminiscent of those odd accommodations
between politeness and economy to be found in the
domestic circumstances of Balzac's characters, with all of
their delicate nuances of commodity. 4 These might seem
preferable to the crass repetition of the terrace or suburban
subdivision (below). But while the latter appears uncannily
de-personalized, it nonetheless avoids the press of two
parties-dwelling instead in the modern anonymity of the
n1asses.5
The prototypical form of these den1i-houses
suggests a failure to osn1ose. "Sen1i-detached" is a funny
negative. It implies a sort of inability to achieve, co111pletely,
the status of the individual-to free oneself fron 1 social
dependencies. Houses, we would believ~. strive toward a
l
 57

moment of disengagement; semis remain trapped within

the entanglements of a socio-typical privation. By the
norms of bourgeois aspiration, they are "halfway" homes.
The clarity of juxtaposition between two halves
of a semi begs them to be compared. Their duality suggests
a dichotomy, of contrary or opposed natures. Following
Jacob and Esau, we expect to see contrasts of noble and
craven, conservative and progressive, pugnacious and
affable. As Melville put it,

Now envy and antipathy, passions

irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact
may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng
in one birth. Is Envy then such a monster? 6

It is a common assumption that twins represent alternate

poles of the human character. From Medea to Jekyll, to the
contemporary heirs of Anthony Perkin's iconic psychopath,
duality is assumed to involve a Manichean struggle between
good and evil, normality and aberration. It is unsurprising,
then, that these dualities would con1e to be projected upon
the two halves of a shared house.
In fonner British colonies such as Australia and
Singapore, the se1ni-detached house is a special site ofhorrid
interaction. In many cases, owners on either side exercise
their right to self-expression without concern for their
neighbor. The result is a kind of nurroring, albeit freakish
and inventive. Anything can be placed along the horizon
between the two halves: Classicisn1 n1eets Mediterranean,
Modernisrn encounters Asian Village Baroque.
The inherently prob1ernatica1 nature of the senli
is exacerbated in this context by a tendency to insist
upon diflerence--the "warring" nature of the conjoined
twins, in contrast to the anodyne i1nagc of the European
or Canadian prototype. The British version articulates a
desire to disappear into the larger social order, to dissolve
with dignity. Not so the Singapore se1ni-dweller, for
exan1ple, who does not retreat in such pacific fashion. He
or she creates, instead, a visual antipathy, a recoil from the
architectural ren1nants of a shared history: common floor
levels, dimensions, window positions, and the like.
Such an effect is evident at 36-38 Jalan Haji Alias,
for example. This is a pair of semis that we have christened
the "Bi-Polar House." It is a clear study in contrasts. The
manic side (opposite, at the left) appears overblown and
overbuilt, with a full compliment of grandiose gestures and
miniature luxuries: feature cladding, large-pane glazing,
and cantilevered glass swimming pool. Its depressive twin,
by contrast, is darkened with bronze windows, heavy
curtains, and a defensive arn1ature of burglar bars. One half
projects an image that is hysterical, profligate, and highly
social, while the other appears introverted, and vaguely
. . .
pess1nust1c.
The form of the houses shows that they were created
identical, palindromic, and mirrored across their party wall.
The height of the houses is the same, and the roofs n1atch
exactly. The balcony floors are coplanar, and window
openings on both levels are of similar size and proportion.
These common origins dramatize the contrast found
today. The manic house suggests a quality of excess-it has
grown irrepressible, exuberant and slightly inappropriate.
Like the manic individual, it seen1s to dilate and swell past
~ts boundaries. All of its basic components are present in
its morose double, albeit here in an engorged forn1. The
corner turret is a perfect instance. Clearly this con1poncnt
 was once the same at either side. On the depressive house,
this piece feels unambitious, an extension of its plastic
materiality, the undifferentiated surfaces and soffits of
the larger composition. The manic house re-presents this
element so as to appear quasi-independent, a doodad. As
elsewhere on the manic side, we find an over-elaboration
of surface; the turret is clad with a n1ed1ey of stones that is
itself a "feature."
The manic house appears to propose itself to the
passersby; its transparency, from the pool to the windows
of the fa~ade, borders on exhibitionism. It treats each of its
elements as singular, fragmentary and demonstrative-as an
ecstatic and dislocated experiential mon1ent. These stand
in unassimilated relationship to one another. By contrast,
the depressive house expresses its massing as a sober whole.
Where its neighbor is a ju1nble of events, the depressive
house is a self-referential totality. This is made clear in the
uncompromising plasticity of its material, which admits
not even the articulation of joints. It is 1nute and non-

36-38 Jalan Haji Alias, Singapore

 60

tectonic; slab edges run into soffits, into walls and eaves
and parapets without delineation. Even the color of the
windows conspires to minimize their contrast with the
exterior plasterwork. At the same time, its accumulation
of layers (glazing, grillwork, and curtains) downplays
transparency.
It is an1using, moreover, to note that this bi-polarity
extends into the landscape at the street. In front of an eye-
catching feature wall, the manic house offers a colorful
presentation of grass and variegated shrubs. The depressive
garden is dun-colored and stunted. It seems appropriate,
likewise, that the gray workmanlike convenience of a
public wiring box would stand just this side of the party
wall. In all senses its image is one of defeat; its neighbor,
one of triumphalism.
The irony of the "warring" double is this: as each half
strains for self-expression, it appears ever more bound by
circumstance. The breakaway semi only emphasizes the
originary bond with its conjoined twin, the albatross of its
entanglements and attachments. In fact, the most effective
dissembling done by the semi-detached house is in its
original European form, where both sides cooperate in the
illusion of a single large house. In this version, the party
wall has no expression on the outside. Much like those
London "apart-ments" that are lodged within ambiguous
envelopes, these borrow the greatness of the larger structure
while being deliberately evasive about their own extents.
The illusion of wealth is sustained, paradoxically, through
the hiding of the individual.
Some of the best English examples were clever
enou~h to present the double-home not as a mirroring, but
as a single, eccentrically disposed composition of bays and

..
setbacks, turrets and secondary masses. Although each half
is given an equal allotment of floor area, their organizations
vary to reinforce the illusion of dissymmetry. The two sides
diverge, but the effect is entirely opposite: the dissimilar
halves mask the double behind a rangy architectural
composition. This might be called a "schizoid" semi, in
which one home is quietly, internally sheared into two
discrete entities-and as such perhaps fits better in the
category of the Trojan Horse (below).
The conjoined house is not a conventional beauty;
certainly, it lacks the excessive beauty of other unheimlicl,
doubles. But it is nonetheless grist for some interesting
compositional possibilities. There may be a broken, buried
or latent reflection. Mirroring is here interesting precisely
when it becomes inexact. Elements remain recognizable
in their shared origins-but they are subject to inversions,
contradictions, inappropriate embellishments and skillful
deceptions.
The potential interest of this condition is realized in
projects such as the House House, designed by Johnston
Mark.lee for a site in Inner Mongolia. As with Moneo 's
Kursaal, the building skillfully refuses resolution: this time,
into either single or double. Its degree of integration

The semi-detached plan, after Middleton, Modem Buildings,

Their Planning, Construction, and Equipment, Volume 2, 1921
changes as one rotates around the exterior. An elegant
cut appears to momentarily resolve the two halves into a
single, stereotomic mass; elswhere, the composition seen1s
to have quite obviously been designed as a symmetrical,
conjoined pair. The House House stands alongside other
engaged twins, such as Alejandro Aravena's Siamese Tower,
which similarly destabilizes the traditional unity of the
tower, creating a new paradigm for high-rise architecture.
Rather than opting for a diagram, the architects of these
works have understood the possibilities of the type, and
have opted instead for a very productive instability.

The clone is a close relation of the double--the double

of the double, as it were. These tropes occupy a common
spectrum, one that locates problems of uniqueness and
identity, of shared anatomies and genetic codes.
But the horror of cloning raises issues of 1nass
repetition that, in both architecture and the broader
culture, deserve special consideration. As Walter Benjan1in
and others note, reproduction-of people and objects,
fake and real-is a pressing subject of late, and no less in
modern architecture. For this reason, the clone ren1ains
a touchstone of the uncanny. It was for Freud, earlier,

Asymmetrical semi-detached pair, from Middleton, ats t1bOvJS

 63

who thought the reduplication of objects and events to

be unheimlich. This included "unintended repetition," and
"ghastly multiplication." 1 Freud shivered at the notion of
endlessly re-encountering the sa1ne people and places, of
stu1nbling, after Warhol or Nietzsche, through an "eternal
recurrence of the same." 3
Cloning suggests a mode of reproduction
that is fundamentally in- or post-human, as does the
undifferentiated character of its offspring. This discomfort
has been subject to extensive treatment in 20th-century
media, with renewed interest in the wake of genomic
breakthroughs. Works such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World conjectured that the clone could never be considered
properly human, and would be fodder for exploitation-
for example, to labor for a leisure class. Others imagine the
commoclification of the cloned body itself, as a means for
the harvesting of organs. This was visualized in the 1979
cult film Parts: The Clo nus Horror, in Tiie Island (2005), and
more famously in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. In a
sense, the clone is a kind of "bare life," a body without a
soul-not a human, but pieces thereof. Artificial beings,
like the replicants in Blade Runner, are external to the
reproductive, and hence the social, order.
The clone has been a particular preoccupation of
that ur-modern product, the cinema. This is quite natural,
perhaps, as fiJn1 allows a convincing illusion of cloning
through n1ultiple exposures, a device that links Georges
Melies to the Michael Keaton con1edy Multiplicity.
But replication is also inherent in the 1nedium itself: as
recurrences of fran1es that are unified within the n1en1ory
of the eye, viewed on multiple occasions, and distributed
across geographical space.
6'-1·

Just as much, perhaps, cloning is inherent in

the productive matrix of modern architecture. 13uildings,
and their components, have come to be replicated on
a mass scale. Architects have made a virtue of necessity,
often embracing repetition with a religious fervor. The
architecture of mass production is said to have "arrived" in
Peter Behrens' A.E.G. turbine factory of 1909, famously a
temple of extrusion in which the building, and the process
it embodied, were united in their expression. Behrens' shed
comprised identical bays, simply placed side by side, to the
length required by the assembly lines within.
The placement of duplicate segments in
horizontal, vertical, or gridded arrays has remained, for years,
the basic DNA of construction. Images of Hilberseimer
fa<;ades have perhaps been over-used in representing this
vocabulary. Regardless, such buildings exist-not least, in
"public" housing everywhere: the lugubrious slab of the
Parisian banlieu, the London council estate, the Singaporean
"HDB," or the high-rise priapolis of Sao Paulo (saudade do
futuro, with balconies). Some instances have taken this to
almost sardonic lengths, as in the anthills of Hong Kong,
or Saenz de Oiza's kilometer-long "El Ruedo" complex
along Madrid's M-30 (1986).
 The architect's courtship of mass n1anufacture
reached an apex in the modularity movements, in ''prefab"
and Metabolism. Here, the "capsule''-be it a roon1, an
apartment, or a fully constructed dwelling-is delivered
from factory to site, and agglomerates as a conjoined clone.
Moishe Safdie's Habitat (1967) arrayed its units in a kind of
techno-primitive pile; likewise, the configurations of Kisho
Kurokawa's BC25 Capsule gave it life as part of high-rises,
as vacation cottages and nomadic urban caravans. In each,
the conglomerate is imagined as a hive of like elements, an
economy of scale.
In fact, repetition is not unique to "mature"
Modernism. It is seen in London's Georgian streets,
speculative developments built on land seized from the
church in Henry VIII's reforn1ation. 4 Ro,v-housing was
also a product of 18th-century Paris and Victorian England,
as well as Edwardian New York and 1920s Shanghai.
With the ''subdivisions" of the post-war An1erican
suburb can1e other landscapes of ntini1nally different houses.
Franchisc-co1111nunities such as Levittown introduced the
fa1nous "little boxes" arrayed along a circuitry of curves
and cul-de-sacs. Here, dwellings truly beca1ne industrial
con1n1odities, alongside their con1ponents. And awkward

(above) Aerial photo of Levittown, New Jersey (left) Walter

Gropius & Otto Haesler, Dammerstock Siedlung Karsruhe
problems arose.The suburb embodied uniformity, but not
unity. There existed no connective tissue to make them
whole: no reciprocity between buildings, no hierarchy of
scale or language, and no larger urban figure apart from
the neutral ladder of roads.5 These "nuclear" family houses
remain anomic, separated by the indeterminate surface of
the lawn.
The other great example of cloned housing, the
"terrace," faces a similar problem. This type is now global.
It remains a compact option for the development of low-
rise urban parcels, and strange new versions continue to
arise.The streetscapes of Chicago's Old Town and Lincoln
Park, for example, have been unhappily transformed by the
"prairie po-mo" terrace, which exhibits a forced play of
surface treatments and eccentric pediments. 6 Singapore has
also been a site of experiment in the modernization of
rowhouses, where the single row is bent into branching or
bronchial arrangements, as in the Shanghai nongtang.
These conjoined clones should be distinguished
from. the block of flats, which is in many ways a less
agonized problem. While also a repetitive composition, the
modern
. apartment b u ild.1ng frequent ly presents itself
. as a
singular, though complex, object. It represents a sublation
of the "unit" within a collective·
, 1n essence, uniformity

Walter Gropius "Honeycomb" B ·1d· S

' u1 ing ystem
 is its aesthetic problem. The block of flats resembles
the European semi or the skillfully deceptive London
accommodation. In these, the dwelling has been dissolved
into a larger object.
By contrast, the terrace must attempt to resolve
the hairy predicament of the proto-house: a gathering of
pieces, defined by adjacencies. The rowhouse (like the
semi) struggles in the limen between one and many. It is
often too narrow to be expressed as a house in its own
right. Rather, as its frontage is compressed, it appears as a
component of one. 8 This does not stop the effort to make
it appear as a "proper" domicile, and the results remain
ham-strung between the expression of the house and of
something new. This is the case in Boston's South End, for
example, where the home is a sort of contraction. The bay
window stands abreast of others, its neighbors, as houses
might be arrayed along a street.
As urbanism, the terrace attempts to collect a
busyness of house-fragments into a whole. Unification has
been attempted, and sometimes achieved, via a range of
techniques: a defining material or color, an unusual roof
form, a repeated element or iconographic theme. Such is
the case at FAT's Lindsay Road housing in Sheffield, UK,
where outsized ornament incorporates a collection of small

FAT, Lindsay Road Housing, Sheffield

68

hon1es. Through a tactical and witty deployment, these

elements turn repetition into n1eaningful urbanism, making
distinctions at corners and edges, interiors and perimeters.
Large-order massing gestures can likewise create coherence,
as in the curves of Herzog and de Meuron's Pilotengasse
housing in Vienna. These work hard to overcome an
awkwardness inherent to the type-a pull between family
and collectivity, "indivisibility [and] individuality." 10 The
worst cases present urbanism as proximity without society,
Emile Durkheim's notion of anomie in built form. 11
We can see this clearly at Corona Court in
Singapore, from 1984. It is poignant that this terrace, an
object defined by the act of living together, should be
expressed as a symphony of boundaries. Party walls stand
proud of the fa<;ade, and frontages are staggered such
that they do not align. This makes them appear to resist
incorporation within a unified block. Paradoxically, these
are intended to work as a motif, a repetition that makes the
complex read as a whole. They both join and separate.
Terraces, despite such efforts to unify them,
appear most peculiar at their ends, where repetition must
end in a pleasing urban resolution. This is not easy to
do, and requires rather muscular gestures. There remains
something eerily uncontained about these buildings.
They embody a dangerous fertility: like "triffids," or some
meristematic material that spreads ad infinitum. The size of
a row appears conditional: it could be more, or less. Perhaps
for this reason, terraces a.re often ambiguously terminated
with the blank expression of a party wall.
The interesting ambiguities of the clone may yet
be redeemed, however. They are exploited in the works of
Peter Eisenman, for example, which often employ repeated
 69

units as a compositional device and a basis for experiment.

This allows the progressive reading of formal operations
applied to similar objects. Evolving distortions are legible
in a series of bars or boxes, arrayed or conjoined in rows
or grids. Eisenman's clones are imperfect-in fact, they are
more like a hereditary sequence, subject to identity and
also to change. This can be seen in his Carnegie Mellon
Research Institute (1988), where a n1odule is created
via a "genetic" process of rotation and superimposition.
The masses appear similar, but are only superficially so:
in fact, they are differentially intersected by a framework
of structural members. 13 A more overt sequence can be
seen in block studies for the Rebstockpark Masterplan
in Frankfurt (1990), where repeated masses are subject to
subtle deformation across oblique lines of transformation. 14
This technique is less convincing in the Columbus
Convention Center (1993), in which the cloned elements,
linear bands that break the mass into stripes, simply wiggle.
Their movement creates minor variations, but is not deeply
transformative. In each case, however,Eiserunan's distortions
balance the exception against the norm, in such a way that
the former enables the reading of the latter.

ITI IEil

Victor Bourgeois, Cite Moderne, Brussels

 J

I
I
-,·-1
(/
'

1
. J.
This recalls, again, our notion of the horrible
n1ultiple as both one and many, freak and exemplar,
individual and type. As "1nonstrous singularity" and" case,"
as well as the intimation of an emergent new order. Twins
and clones challenge notions of conformity by copying too
immediately,too aggressively,
and too well; their replication and
consanguinity becon1es, itself, a potentially destabilizing
kind of deviance.

I 'I
 3

1. Typical rowhouse plans, after Middleton 2. Eisenman

Architects, Carnegie Mellon Research Institute, Pittsburgh
3. Aldine Terrace, Chicago 4. Corona Court, Singapore
 Exquisite Corpse

"Be glad thott art not... an heteroclitein nature,

with some memberdefectiveor redundant... Be glad
that thy clay-cottagehath all the necessaryrooms
theretobelonging,though the outside be not sofairly
plasteredas some others."
Thomas Fuller, "On Deforniity." 1

"Who knows... how many suffering, crippled,

fragmentary forms of life there are, such as the
artificially created life of chests and tables quickly
nailed together,crucifiedtimbers,silent martyrs to
human inventiveness.The terrible transplantation
of incompatible and hostile races of wood, their
merging into one misbegottenpersonality... "
Bruno Schulz 2

The exquisite corpse is a type of horror through

which another problem of singularity and collectivity-
the death of the unified building-is expressed.
Its name refers to a parlor game, associated with
Andre Breton and the Parisian Surrealists. A folded sheet
of paper was passed between participants, each of whom
contributed a drawing, word or phrase without knowledge
of what came before. When opened, there were surprising
combinations, fragmented figures that gleefully subverted
norms of painterly coherence. This technique raised the
liberating prospect that a single work might co1nbine
multiple authors, contents, and modes of representation. Its
results surpassed even the fragmentary aspirations of the
Cubists, who worked to capture their subjects at multiple,
 3

1. Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jacqueline Lamba, Exquisite Corpse,

c. 1938 2. Brett Murray, Africa, Cape Town, South Africa, 1998
3. Collectible figurines of Hieronymous Bosch's The Last Judgment
(above) Hans Poelzig, Lowenburg Town Hall
(below) Andreas Gursky, Copan, 2002
 75

overlapping spatio-temporal positions. These double-

exposures were complex and anxious; for the surrealists the
modern object became downright schismatic.
The rise of this sort of disjunctive aesthetics--as
well as the shock and horror associated with it-became
urgent at a certain point in the experience of modernity.
The term collage itself, from coller or "glue," is attributed
to a circle that included Picasso and Braque. Fore-tremors
were felt in the juxtaposed patterns of dandyism, or the
eclecticism of the Victorian interior. But the latter lacked
the strident disjuncture of the collage, still framed within
the ornamental equilibrium of the Neoclassical.
When applied to actual bodies, the compositional
logic of the exquisite corpse has produced striking images
of deviant anatomy. The archetypal "heteroclite" might
be Frankenstein, jerry-rigged from pilfered limbs and
organs. Stitches are the stigmata of his condition, lines of
abrupt and unholy dis-articulation. The "tatterdemalion"
is not a full being but a sum of parts: a complete body,
but an incon1plete self. He lacks a soul, as his animating
spirit is electricity. This image was timely. Mary Shelley
wrote for an age in which the electrical experiments of
Erasmus Darwin-and the theories of"animal magnetism"
first clain1ed by Franz Anton Mesmer3-were reordering
notions of the body and its operating energies. Galvanism
suggested the possibility of reanimation, a subject
fictionalized by H.P. Lovecraft and lampooned by Edgar
Allan Poe.
Shelley's golen1 emerged as a prescient nightmare
of modern medical science, a century before fragmented
paintings became an icon of modern shock. Nun1erous
living inventors-among them Rene Descartes,Jacques de

..,.
 Vaucanson and Thomas Edison-were described as a "new
Pron1echeus" for assembling automata out of cloth, feathers,
fur, and mechanical parcs.4 Public concern consumed these
objects. The French predictably focused upon Vaucanson's
replication of the duck's digestion. If peristalsis could be
produced, \vould not cogitation follow?
By later (and earlier) standards, the image of
Frankenstein looks coherent. His form is still human, his
pieces largely proportionate. In most films, his body does
not look mismatched so much as pale and cadaverous,
scarred and clunky. Others have done much worse in
pushing the limits of the singular anatomy. The bizarre
iterations of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), for
example, limns the limits of biomorphic possibility. In its
gestational phases, it is so garbled as to be non-functioning.
During a canine phase, the alien is a limping sack, a heavily
veined scrotum with vestigial limbs and arachnid legs.
Hand-like appendages and a dog's face grow out of its top.
These components clearly hail from creatures of differing
kingdoms-hairy, human, or invertebrate.
Hieronymous Bosch and Franyois Rabelais
pioneered such nightmares in the medium of carnival
grotesque, imagining a polymorphy of obscene and
bestial combinations. These built upon folk tradition, the
wild excesses described by M.M. Bakhtin. Sanctioned
transgressions included the interpolation of human and
animal anatomies, honorifics lent to fauna, and double-
images of religious personages and their wild avatars.
Here, the body is not singular, but a collective.
,I
It is a disgusting little society, one in which the members
are awkwardly or inimically related. In the most sanguine
reading, this "social body" suggests an uneasy democracy.
 It recalls Chantal Mouffe's "agonistic" demos, a kind of
unstable compact in which the constituents are unified
only through a re-staging of their difference. It likewise
echoes the rabble of Aristotle's Politics.All the limbs \Vish
to move in different directions. Here also, in dismal form, is
Bruno Latour's famous "parliament of nature."
A more recent version explores the violence of
the human-machine interface. This is the staple of Japanese
body horror, of films such as Machine Girl (2008) and
Shinya Tsukamoto's cult Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989). In
these, severed limbs are replaced with working machinery
and weapons, and bodily cavities are filled with gears,
pumps and pistons. Quentin Tarantino covered this genre
in "Death Proof," a segment of the Grindhouse film (2007).
Here, a machine gun stands in the place of a severed
leg. As in the Asian precedents, the inserted element is
not prosthetic: it does not attempt to replace a missing
anatomical member so much as to in1pose an awkward and
dangerous substitute. Here,juxtaposition of flesh and metal
creates a sort of weaponized pornography. This imagery

Raoul Haussmann, "Der Geist Unserer Zeit," c. 1920

 78

hearkens back directly to the original use of mechanical

pieces in collages by the Dada and Surrealist groups, as
icons of post-hun1an creep. The n1ost familiar is perhaps
Raoul Hausmann's "Mechanischer Kopf" (c.1920), a
freakish parody of the Hellenic (and Humanist) bust.
These works are useful when one examines
architectural experiments of late, and particularly those
that rely upon fragmentation. It is not an overstatement to
suggest that the failure of the modern monad is one of the
discipline's major preoccupations since the 1970s. Some of
the most celebrated contemporary projects appear driven
by the reintroduction of diversity into the box.
The freedom to deny the coherence of the
building opens interesting avenues for exploration. This is
an obvious source of joy in the work of Robert Venturi
and Denise Scott Brown, where contradiction offered an
opportunity to challenge the artificiality of conventions.
In the Lieb House (1969), for example, the aggressive
disjunction of bottom and top, and the rough and partial
quotation of windows and openings, suggests not a
complete" design" but a gathering of recycled components.
The Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College
(1976) likewise plays with disjuncture, but does so in the
abrupt transition of facades around corners.
A similar technique is employed at James Stirling
and Michael Wilford's Clore Wing at the Tate Gallery
(1980-87). The small courtyard created by the architects
somehow supports a riot of fa~ades, frames, and variegated
windows around its perimeter. While the main entrance
quotes the stone pediments of the original Tate, a non-
structural grid is dominant elsewhere. Like the striation of
the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (1979-84), this provides a
l
I
 79

-.

nturi Scott Brown, Lieb House (below) James Stirling

Wilford, Clore Wing, Tate Gallery, London, sketch
80

loose system against which openings are allowed to play.

The grid extends the materiality of the stone, albeit in a
playful way.
The high-analytical technique of VSB and Stirling
takes on a somewhat more poetic, although no less cerebral,
iteration in the work of Aldo Rossi. The exquisite corpse
is here a creature of mental life, a piebald social history
of architecture. Memories and quotations, embodied
in typologies and iconography, become en-tangled in
a Freudian mechanism of condensation. As in "dream-
work," a compositing and a reduction occur. Like a vision
from Bruno Schulz's tales, the Rossian object appears to
congeal wishful images, nostalgic ephemera, and cultural
reverberations. Aggregation is the principal compositional
technique, here-and Rossi's oneirics are also a kind of
magical urbanization. We begin to lose sight of what is
building and what is city. In a forecasting of Koolhaas, the
line becomes obscured. This is clear, for example, in the
Terranova Commercial Centre (1996-7); a pavilion at the
Fiera di Verona (1996); Schutzenstrasse Berlin (1992-8);
and Whitehall Ferry Terminal, New York (1992). Sadly, a
sinular approach results in a series of crudely referential
objects in the hands of others: Jeren1y Dixon's St. Mark's
Road Housing (1975), Ricardo Bofill's Palace of Abraxas
(1978-80), or Michael Graves' extension to the Whitney
Museum in NewYork (1987).
Frank Gehry likewise explores the potentials
of the exquisite corpse; but 1n doing so provides a stark
contrast to the wistful l"lossian spirit. His Norton Residence
in Venice Beach (1982-84) uses nautical fragtnents, as well
as the bric-a-brac of the Californian ho111e,to dran1atize
the chaos of Los Angeles' anti-context. ln the manner of
 81

the surrounding plots, each of Norton's pieces are treated

as distinct and independent, culn1inating in the roadside
study that echoes lifeguard stations on the beach. Gehry
deploys his pieces with a radical casualness, and varying
degrees of misappropriation and overstatement. Potentially
kitsch elements-such as blue pool tiles, or the 111ock-
monumental torii-are reframed in an original ,vay. Into
this "junkyard" quilt, the architect places a wide array of
quotations from American building: wood siding, shingles,
standing-seam roofing, etc.
Despite the retreat of such signification-in
Gehry's practice, as well as in the discipline at large-the
exquisite corpse nonetheless reached a second peak in
the Dutch architecture of the 1990s. Here, the collage
technique can1e to be thoroughly applied in plan and
section. Rem Koolhaas and his peers have tended to
subdivide the total building: its diverse contents-progra1ns,
111aterials,and structures-are placed in novel distributions
and co1nbinations. These create a rich interior life. As in
the best \-vorks ofVenturi and Scott Brovvn or Stirling and
Wilford, the surprising potentials of the exquisite corpse
are exhaustively explored.
In n1any projects, fragmentation is ordered by
n1eans of a graphical device, a kind of"built diagran1." This
\Vas the case with a landscape of stripes in the Pare de la
Villette competition (1982), and in an array of projects in
the subsequent decade that en1ployed similar progra1nmatic
collages. However, this device was used with such skill
that a diverse repertoire flourished. Breton's n1agical anti-
systen1 allowed a freedon1 to pursue the local: once a
con1positional n1ethod was developed, the building could
e2(ult in the production of event, accident, singularity, and
 ..

(above) Frank Gehry, Lewis Residence, Lyndhurst, Ohio

(below) Frank Gehry, Norton House, Venice, California
 83

character. The building is effectively urbanized. Such as

strategy is evident, for example, in the McCormick Tribune
Campus Center at IIT (2003), which resen1bles certain of
Mies' own abstract collages of volumes and their contents. 7
The imposition of variety is even n1ore strident
in the work of MVRDV The buildings of Winy Maas
follow a similar tactical trajectory those of Koolhaas.
Some of these-such as the headquarters for VPRO in
Hilversum, in the Netherlands (1998)-do not utilize
fragmentation so much as they pursue the variability of
a conunon element, such as the warped floor. In other
examples, the exquisite corpse comes dramatically to the
fore. Such was Maas's Netherlands Pavilion for the 2000
Hanover Expo. A collection of landscapes were stacked
vertically, each level a marked disjuncture from that above
or below. A key gesture was the lack of a unifying element
in the composition. Rather, the casual stacking functions ,
itself, as a kind of plastic collage.
The Netherlands Pavilion, perhaps more than
any other building, approaches a purified analogue of
the exquisite corpse. Stacking is pursued quite brutally,
and each level is independent. This differs from Koolhaas'
Kunsthal, in which synthetic compositional gestures
remain. In the latter, a structural grid provides a kind of
unifying veil, a light or "gay" systematization. 8 The grid
is subject to the specific gravity of elements, and columns
drift and transform. By contrast, the Pavilion opens into a
vortex, a final abandonment of the last gestures of totality.
It embodies pure "negative freedom," the right of the
architect to be constrained by nothing apart from the
technical or the budgetary.
,.
r

1. Arby's breakfast sandwich 2.MVRDV, Netherlands Pavilion,

Hannover Expo 2000 3. Kris Kuksi, Church Tank Type 8. 2007
 85

"Long live the new flesh!"

James Woods, Videodrome

The exquisite corpse is characterized by an

unmediated adjacency: its varied parts are casually placed
side-by-side. Their meeting, at lines of transformation, is
nigh-magical. The compositional language of collage is,
itself, the organizing factor. It provides a visible coherence,
while appearing to grant its constituent pieces total
freedom to be what they will.
In some cases, however, the hybrid composition
betrays an attempt at synthesis. Some common substance
embraces the riot of parts. This may be a skin; a material
such as brick or concrete; a contiguity or logic of shape or
geometry; an iconographic enclosure, or the invocation of
a genetic process. It may also occur through an attempt to
temper the alienation of the fragments, by creating an echo
of resemblance among them. The haircut known as the
"mullet" is a good example. This object clearly combines
two incompatible aesthetics: "business in the front" and
"party in the back." However, the mullet is precisely not an
exquisite corpse. Hair itself provides a common medium-
short and long are part of the same surface.
Ungrammatical anatomies are very old. Authors
such as Dante, Rabelais, and Nikolai Gogol' have left
lasting images. The gruesome possibilities have been most
graphically exploited, perhaps, in the film genre of "body
horror," wherein the normal physique undergoes rapid
and shocking transformations. David Cronenberg's The Fly
(1986), for example, lingers graphically over the unstable
genetic meld of scientist Seth Brunelle Oeff Goldblum) and
an insect. Films such as Shivers (1975), The Brood (1979) and
 • I

1. Mullet 2. Hans Scharoun, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper, 1921 3. Grizzly

bear chair for Andrew Johnson, 1865 4. Lucy McRae, Grow on You, 2010
Henrique Olivera, Tapumes - Casa dos Leoes, 2009
88

The H11,-nanCentipede (2010) explored a similar eclipse of

the singular, bounded human.
This has been n1ore poetically (but no less
acutely) imagined in certain works by contemporary
artists, in which the body or the building become the site
of interplay for two different anatomical modes: a "norm"
and an aberration. This is the case in the work of Lucy
McRae and Bart Hess, for example, where the face and
torso become colonized by wool, wood, and plantings
in a virus-like emergence. It is perhaps most arresting in
the installations of Henrique Oliveira, where the familiar
appearance of architectural environments-the gallery, and
also the "traditional" urban fragment-are counterposed
with large-scale biomorphic elements. Works such as
Tapumes - Casa dos Leoes (2009) are, since those of Paul
Thek, the most sublime in their juxtaposition of different
media and bodily logics.
Such assemblies are unnerving, in part, because
they contravene norms of body-making. Due to the rigors
of the evolutionary process, anatomy usually appears to us
as having a certain formal coherence, or logic. In terms
of aesthetics, we follow Darwin in his belief that natura
non facit saltum: the genetic doesn't make awkward leaps or
jarring transitions.
We find this forn1 of horror in architectures fi-0111
transitional moments, at thresholds in the evolution of
design languages. Or, during phases in which social and
geopolitical transformation, such as colonial expansion,
created a fashion for the acquisitive. In Georgian Britain
and Renaissance Italy, for example, the inclusion of foreign
elements took place in the creation of follies urban set-
pieces, and other exceptional architectures. The stylistic
 89

imperiu1n of New York at the turn of the last century

absorbed a hodgepodge of ornamental styles-Moorish,
Sumerian, Gothic, and many others-and stuffed then1
into the composition of the skyscraper and retail block.
Early modern exan1ples of this are striking.
Michael de Klerk's brilliant housing block and post office
for the Eigen Haard Association in Amsterdan1 (1917-
21 ), exploits to full advantage the potentials of heterodox
anatomy. The intersection of Dutch conventions with a
wildly in1aginative early modern style allows for a sort of
satisfying mannerism rarely seen since. Here, the jumbled
accretions of the medieval block intersect with a kind of
lzeimlich organicism. An overall architectural expression
establishes links with a vernacular European language
of construction: brickwork, tile roofs, and a perimeter
block of normative fenestration. However, this is merely
a loose framework, and into this permissive structure
de Klerk inserts a cadenza of unusual elements. Bulging
bay projections; nautical ligatures that recall keels, prows
and hulls, and rhetorical roofs that appear to hail from
different eras. De Klerk's brick surface undergoes multiple
transformations in order to enclose these divergent
geon1etries-distributions alternate in a tour de force of
articulation. The surface is lively and serpentine, its bonds
stretching to accommodate bulbous turrets and cylindrical
chimney stacks. The tension between character elements
and the larger con1position-as well as between housing,
post office and public areas-is the source of much poetic
richness.
The Chilehaus (1920-24) by Fritz Hoger is
likewise a transitional object, one that plays a vestigial
classicism against radical abstraction. Here we find a casual
2

1 and 2., Housing block and post office for the Eigen Haard
Association, Amsterdam 3. Fritz Hoger, Chilehaus, Hamburg
 91

use of traditional elements, such as cornices and sash

windows, but these are deployed within a curvilinear Brick
Expressionism. The airfoil massing appears to accelerate
toward an acute corner. Within it are situated, surprisingly,
the stolid windows of the Germanic perimeter block,
arrayed in an unrelenting grid. The walls flanking the
razor-sharp prow are only one bay wide, and the topmost
window has a semi-circular top--seen in isolation, this
fragment could be Georgian, or perhaps borrowed from a
Shanghainese Art Deco compound such as Huai Hai Fang
(c. 1920). These strategies lend the total form a reading
that appears to contradict the facades-the static and
abstract character of the latter sits strangely against what is,
elsewhere, a celebration of speed. 2
More recently, Frank Gehry has provided many
of the most notable examples of a return to synthesis, as
opposed to the purer language of fragmentation in his
work of the 1970s and early 1980s. Where projects such
as the Gehry House (1978), Norton House (1984), Loyola
Law School (1984) and Winton Guest House (1987) play
up their contrasts of form and material, the Schnabel
House (1989), Weisman Museum (1993), and Vitra Design
Museum (1989) immerse the fragmented shapes in a
con1IDon n1edium.
In some cases, the impression of the ungrammatical
body can approach that of the conjoined twin. This is most
clear when it includes only two elements. The "warring"
semi-detached house, for example, might appear as a
form of ungrarmnatical body. 3 In fact, the conjoined twin
presents the unnatural bonding of two individuals who are
substantially the same. The emphasis of the ungrammatical
body remains the singular being, oddly composed.
92

Ungrammar as doubling appears, for example, in

the Santuario De Nuestra Senora De Las Lajas in Ipiales,
Colombia ( 1916-1949). Here, a basilica and bridge were
built together, spanning a canyon of the Guaitara River.
However, an examination of the building reveals that it
is not to be simply understood as a church sitting on a
viaduct-however odd this would be. The overpass extends
from a level roughly halfway up the height of the structure;
rooms continue below, as does Romanesque fenestration
that has clearly been designed to echo what stands above.
This would suggest a single object, a meld of infrastructure
and building. However, the instability of this proposition
makes the result more suggestive. Note, for example,
that the bridge has not sin1ply been "assumed" into the
composition. It does not merely jut out, like a car porch
or canopy. Rather, it is a strong organizational datum,
and the material treatment of the Santuario-as well as
the intensity of its ornamentation-transforms across this
line. Above, the materiality is delicate and embellished.
Below, it is rugged and rustic. There is a fascinating visual
contradiction at work; one is unsure whether to interpret
the totality as two discrete horizontal strata, or as a very
vertical building with a horizontal addendum. Neither
reading is, in fact, supportable. The former is invalidated
by the continuation of the church architecture (albeit in
ruder form) below the bridge. The latter seems implausible
due to the emphatic doubling of architectural vocabularies.
This is to say, Nuestra Senora de Las Lajas cannot be
interpreted according to the two most obvious grammatical
conventions that would relate its parts to its totality. Rather,
it is one body, "incorrectly" assembled.
1 . Nuestra Senora De Las Lajas, lpiales, Colombia 2. Dar Al Hajar, Yemen
3. Furness & Evans, First National Bank of the Republic, Philadelphia
Partially and Mostly Dead

The literature of fear is replete with characters

that are multiple. And also with those that are, to various
degrees, dead. Take the zombie, whose body continues to
labor under a horrid automatism after the soul and intellect
have been evicted. Or the vampire, who-as the vile
inversion of Christ-has conquered death by feeding on
the vitality of the living. 1 Less fantastically, a similar unease
is focused upon partially necrotic individuals: amputees,
paraplegics and quadriplegics, sufferers of paralysis, lepers,
and even "vegetative" persons. The victim of terminal
illness has likewise been stigmatized for bringing death
into life, for having "one foot in the grave." As Georges
Canguilhem pointed out, it is not long since clinical
definitions of pathology were focused upon a quantification
of"morbidity" among the living.
By analogy, the moribund cityscape produces
some striking imagery, steeped in the romance of ruin.
For example, ongoing warfare between FARC guerillas
and the national military in Colombia has given rise to a
number of temporary and permanent ghost towns.Villages
such as La Union Peneya were forcibly deca1nped, their
houses left with food on the table and radios playing. 2 A few
residents dared to remain, alone. The 1974 de-occupation
of Varosha, in contested territory between Greek and
Turkish Cyprus, was sin1ilarly abrupt. This formerly chic
...

'" \ 'C I
,......,.....,.,_ ..."'
~-1-------
\ I, I /\ T I> ,
........
_,_.._
.J.._ .. ,_.
. ......___,

1 2

1 uNancy Linton," victim of patent medicine, c. 1833 2. Herbert Bayer,

Humanh· fmpossibte, 1932 3. Filip Dujardin, from the series Fictions, 201 O
 1

1. Abandoned floor, Bonn 2. Takashi Kuribayashi, "For Aquarium: I Feel Like

I Am In A Fishbowl!", 2006 3. Ruyungyung Hotel, Pyongyang 4. Mountain
Farms Mall, Hadley, MA 5. Partially destroyed buildings, Shanghai, 2004
3 4

5
98

vacation spot-a favorite of Brigitte Bardot-moldered as

an improvised demilitarized zone, its streets growing with
beach grass. The image recalls Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker
(1979), in which nature begins to reclaim a Soviet town
in the wake of an unnamed incident. A similar atmosphere
hovers at Gunkanjima ("Battleship Island"), a coal-mining
town located 15 kilometers off the coast of the Nagasaki
Peninsula, in the East China Sea. The Japanese government
completed its depopulation in 197 4, and the resulting
decay of high-density concrete architecture has given the
outpost new life as a popular attraction for tourists.
The urban world is full of such necrotic
topologies. Jeremiads have focused on the decline of
Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Cleveland. But also downtown
Johannesburg, "spectral" Kinshasa, Ciudad Juarez and
Sheffield, among many others. Here, the archetype of the
mostly dead building is the abandoned dwelling or squat.
Urban nightmares of "the ghetto" and "the projects"
commonly fix upon wasted lots and apartments, either
destroyed or home to that proto-zombie, the junkie
or crackhead. Likewise, in post-Katrina New Orleans,
imagery has conflated water-damaged houses and the
drowned. The fear is of death ascendant, seizing pockets of
the urban lifeworld,just next door. Detroit is often cited as
the singularly terminal figure, a discursive opposite to the
"vibrant" city fabric. Indeed, one finds here extraordinary
instances of dereliction and waste. These include not only
houses, but also the grandest examples of civic building:
Michigan Central Station, United Artists'Theatre and Old
First Unitarian Church. These are perhaps rivaled only by
Pyongyang's R yungyung Hotel, a pyramidal high-rise that
loomed, empty, above the skyline as from 1992 to 2008.
 99

Less rarefied examples exist, also. In America,

one of the more visible metrics of devaluation is the so-
called "dead mall." The suburban and "rurban" landscape
contains many examples. The visitor can read their degree
of morbidity through vacant units, as well as the presence
of sub-prime tenants. Notable specimens include the
Brickyard Mall in Chicago; Assembly Square Mall in
Somerville, Massachusetts; and the famous Sherman Oaks
Galleria in Los Angeles, which served as the set for Fast
Times at Ridgemont High (1982). The death of the mall is
commonly marked by a slow decline, in which surviving
units abut empty ones. Typically, owners and management
attempt to fend off total closure, but devaluation is
endemic to the high turnover of the commercial real
estate cycle. Continual demand for one-stop shopping
appears to result in ever larger consolidations and newly
built centers. Regardless, abandonment occurs alongside
an occasional dramatic renaissance. 3 There is sometimes a
form of"morbid exchange," also: a transfer of value among
competing facilities built near one another. This was the
case of Mountain Farms mall in Hadley, MA, which was
flatlining throughout the 1990s as a result of competition
from the adjacent Hampshire Mall.An injection ofhigher-
end chains--such as Barnes and N oble--has reversed this
balance, with Mountain Farms returning the malignancy
to its competitor.
Abandoned structures are often assumed to be
haunted, and not merely by the apparition of poverty. In
much of Asia, for example, accounts of spectral visitations
thrive, and focus in particular upon deflated and devalued
architecture. Such a stigma is logical with respect to "dead"
space. Why otherwise would usable human inhabitations
JOO

be left idle? Are these not the trysting-place of death and

life? As with the partially necrotic, haunted houses are not
merely-or even thoroughly-dead. Certainly they are
vacant with respect to humans; but they are lively with
men1ories, and homeless or unsettled spirits. They present
the mixture of life and un-life in the same object. As
Nabokov wrote, in Terror,

"I looked at houses and they had lost their usual

meaning .. .leaving nothing but an absurd shell ... I
understood the horror of a human face. Anatomy,
sexual distinctions, the notion of "legs," "arms,"
"clothes,"-all that was abolished, and there
remained in front of a mere something--not even
a creature, for that too is a human concept, but
merely something moving past." 4

Buildings that appear spectral need not even be

abandoned or destroyed. To be unoccupied is enough.
Such is the case, for example, with the Singapore Telecom
exchange at Hill Street, which combines the haunted
house with the technical object. This looming metal tower
is what is known as a "cable hotel," effectively a vertical
convolution of telephone wiring, which sits improbably
on a low podium of Islamic style. Its status as architecture is
particularly ambiguous-not being a building for humans,
it is subject to relatively few rules or conventions. It is a
node at which zones of the city's telecommunications
infrastructures come together. It is a mostly non-inhabited
structure, divided into rooms that are filled with lines,
switches and interfaces. The exchange seems not a building
as much as a haunted technology. Disembodied voices pass
here in conversation; signals speak to each other. Almost
 101

no one enters. Its location is arbitrary, its centralization

(and central location) bizarre. Its dark rooms are full of
chatter, silent and yet reverberant with speech. It is at once
full and empty, a center of reference, gesturing toward life
elsewhere.
Such objects-terminal malls, haunted houses
and infrastructures, and devalued neighborhoods-are
mostly dead. Perhaps equally horrid is the partially dead
building. The latter should be distinguished from "not dead
yet," a notion that will be familiar from the absurdisms of
Camus and Monty Python. Instead, this is the problem of
the quasi-deceased body, the missing limb or corporeal
cavity. The abandoned house is like a corpse, within which
yet flicker animations of the spirit. The partially dead
building is occupied and vacated at the same time. It is like
a damaged tree, which will stanch the flow of nutrients to
a compromised limb, hastening its decomposition. Broken
appendages are capped with a protective seal, leading to
a proliferation of stumps and hollows: a kind of creepy
anatomy in which life and death coexist in the same
body. An analogous architecture, one partially decayed,
is in certain ways more discomfiting than a total ruin.
Such a building appears locally penetrated by death; it has
"imbibed of the shadows of fallen columns," but has not
succumbed. 5
This condition often results, perhaps un-
surprisingly, fron1 the cold-blooded rationality of the
economic. We see this, for example, in the contemporary
practice of "decanting." In the United States and Asia,
buildings that are undergoing renovation may decant part
of their gross floor area (GFA)-that quantum upon which
development charges are levied-by removing areas of
102

floor plate. This has the effect of making pockets of space

effectively uninhabitable. As developers pay municipal
authorities on a per-area basis, the most effective way to
"massage" the GFA is to amputate. This practice results in
a series of ghostly voids, pockets of uncanny space that
are abandoned. Strangely, the presence of inaccessible
and hidden compartments is a mainstay of contemporary
facilities planning, as it was of the literature of the fantastic:
Lovecraft, E. T.A. Hoffinann, Poe, and Rudyard Kipling
have all engaged the subject.
"Decanting" is a strategy of hotel renovations,
in particular, where the flootage given to guest rooms
is weighed against other profitable programs, such as
restaurants and retail. Less profitable distributions are
quickly and brutally rectified: the floor of a guest-room
is cut away, and replaced with a non-structural material.
As such, a sort of" ghost room" is inserted, partitioned by
ceiling board. This combines a number of terrors: the sealed
void; the floor that cannot support a person; the forbidden
room. This occurs against the backdrop of the already
horrifying hotel, a facility that mixes categories of personal
and public, and implies all manner of seedy exchanges and
violences. Its mechanical and bureaucratic character-its
stacks of numbered cells-leads to a phantasmagoria of
forgotten transgressions. This was clearly the case in Stanley
Kubrick's The Shining (1980). But within the hotel trade
itself, in Asia in particular, are stories in which haunted
rooms are sealed off by management. 6
Distaste for the idea of decanting reflects, perhaps,
the ruthlessness of its logic. The term itself describes an
emptying of the spirit in the name of fluidity. We are
shocked to imagine that part of a "body," an inhabited
 103

object, might si1nply be voided and relegated to non-

life. This echoes the Gothic horror of the only-partially-
inhabited space, sealed attics or basements, and storage
rooms. It recalls the nightmare sequence from Terry
Gilliam's Brazil (1985), in which the maternal body opens
to reveal a sort of smooth hollow containing fruit-like
objects-in a manner reminiscent of Giles Deleuze's "body
without organs." 7 This is disgusting. As Aristotle famously
noted, nature abhors a vacuum.
The decanted space represents a sort of waste
that is counter-intuitive to any logic outside the rentier. It
seems unimaginable that usable rooms would be left in this
way. However, the phenomenon is actually quite common.
As elsewhere, German cities have seen a dramatic increase
in such practices. In Bonn, for example, the second and
third floor rooms of high-street buildings are commonly
abandoned. The rental rates of different floors are so
disproportionate that entire upper levels are valued less than
the footprint of the stair at the ground. The stairs are thus
often removed, and the spaces above abandoned. This is
likewise the case in other major German cities. Even more
poignant is a phenomenon documented by photographer
Greg Girard in Shanghai, where spaces and their inhabitants
are sometimes jettisoned. This is the condition of certain
disabled elderly, who are placed in attic voids in the old city
fabric of the French Concession, accessible only by ladder.
Although cared for, they are "parked" here and generally
do not leave. This symbolic congruence of cheap space and
devalued personhood is particularly alarming.
In these cases, the broader city internalizes the
economic logic of rentier architectures-retail, hotels and
convention halls-which are always-already partially dead.
 IO/.

These do not expect thorough inhabitation, as in domestic

architectures. l nstcJd, their profit n1odcl works on the
arbitrage of differentially productive assets, roon1s and
spaces. En1pty roon1s are offset by the returns on rented
ones. This is the highly tc111poralarchitecture of occupancy
rates, in which tin1es of low de1nand arc 111etwith strategic
devaluation. This leads to other interesting manifestations
of the heterotopic interior, such as n1ega-churches that
take Jdvantagc of cheap weekend rates for their Sunday
services. We see this at Singapore's Suntec City and Expo
Centre, where convention functions are mixed with big-
box "revival" and Christian spectac1e during off-peak
hours. Since 2010, Suntec has been partially owned by an
evangelical holding cornpany. 8
An introduction to partially dead typologies
should also properly include a brief description of the
taxidern1ic. In this phenomenon, the preserved corpse of
a structure is preserved in state as an urban fragment, or
more disturbingly as a false front for son1ething new. The
latter is analogous to the wearing of a skin for ornamental
purposes, or as ca1nouflage. The urban ruin becomes like
a cere1nonial hide, or the suit stitched by Buffalo Dill in
The Sile11ceofthe Lambs (1991 ). This is a commonplace of
heritage conservation, where the ren1ains of non-viable
buildings are stretched across the surfaces of newer and larger
asse1nblies. In particular, one finds this technique en1ployed
in giving "character" to waterfront developments and post-
industrial districts. This was the case with the failed Davol
Square Marketplace (1982) in Providence, Rhode Island.
Buildings along the Suzhou Creek in Shanghai follow the
sa1ne n1odel. Likewise the old "go-downs" that line the
Singapore Riv<!r,where the corpse is inhabited, somewhat
 105

like a pair of pants, by taller comn1ercial structures. In

reality, such artifacts n1ay not be genuine; fake taxidermy
is an an1azing fact of contemporary architecture. It is a
poignant irony of malls such as Providence Place in Rhode
Island (1990), and Cambridgeside Galleria (1990) in
Massachusetts, that they fabricate artificial post-industrial
environments. That is, these construct new abandoned
factories to inhabit--an appropriate, if depressing, optic for
the magic of post-productive America, in which economic
failure is repackaged as a marketable product.
It is an interesting post-note that dead spaces
have also been a site of some itnaginative investment,
which converts their negativity into a form of life. This is
especially the case with the revivifying architectural art of
Takashi Kuribayashi, who fills necrotic voids with plants,
water, and light. In a poignant moment, sequestered spaces,
as well as the poche-world of suspended ceiling and flimsy
partition, are transformed into miniaturized landscapes.
Kuribayashi inserts into his lin1en-scapes poetic beings,
seals and n1anatees, as well as plants, "rivers," stones and
fallen logs. Just as an1phibeans are able to move between
environ1nental worlds, through water and land, earth and air,
they likewise--in Kuribayashi's reden1ptive imaginary-
becon1e blithe spirits with the agility to trespass across the
lively and n1orbid economies of the late modern building.
106

Reiteration and reflexivity

The reiterative is an odd kind of deviance. It is

defined by replication, as well as in some cases by changes
in scale. Although structured by common principles, the
products of reiteration tend to be unpredictable. One
instance might appear osmotic, like a clone emerging
from a host. Another may be fractal or kaleidoscopic,
with recognizable fragments-assemblies of limbs, or
constellations of features-multiplying wildly. Much
depends upon whether reiterated elements are complete
or fragmentary, mature or juvenile, identical or distorted.
This is perhaps most clearly visible in botanical
examples. In fact, the term "reiteration" is used by
horticulturists to describe how a plant, under conditions
of environmental stress, will attempt to grow itself anew
at its own periphery. It will try to survive via replication,
using its own tissue as a planting bed in lieu of soil. For
example, a tree suffering compression of its roots will often
produce stems called "water shoots." The latter exhibit
a clear signature amid the normal branching of the tree,
being rigidly vertical-they appear like flares, signaling the
presence of an emergency. Water shoots look very much
like saplings, sprouting upward from the existing limbs.
And this is precisely what they are: the moribund tree is
making a last-ditch attempt to transport its genetic self
away from danger.
 1

2
3

1. Danny Choo, "Separated at Birth," figurine series 2. Monozygotic

twins, or "fetiform teratoma" 3. "Water shoots" in a damaged tree
 1

nn
2 a□

1. "Four-headed" frog found in UK, 2004 2. Still from How to

Get Mead in Advertising 3. Still from Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
4 "Osmotic" versus "fractal" reiteration
 109

This same log1c, applied to human anaton1y, ha

produced a unique trope of bodily horror. Graphic in1.1ges
exist, for example, in Bruce Robinson's How to Get Ahead
i11Advertising (1989), and Sam Raimi's Anny of Darkness
(1992). In the former, a ne1vvhead gro\vs from the neck-
pimple of copY'-vriter Dennis Bagley. This rumescence
turns out to be a ruthlessly effective Thatcherite executive,
and the original Bagley begins to \vither a\vay. In R.aimi 's
film, antihero Ash undergoes a similarly painful osmosis,
as an evil doppelganger emerges from his shoulder. Osmotic
reiteration appears in both cases as a shocking perversion
of birth. Firstly, the ne\v self is inappropriately identical to
the original. Secondly, the procreative act does not take
place in an organ that is prepared for it, but rather at an
arbitrary rupture of the dermis. Thirdly, the new being
arrives in so1ne sense fully formed, with coordination and
sophisticated malice. Here, osn1osis is applied to creatures
that do not reproduce in such a \Vay, and the contrast is
horrible.
In fact, the vegetable kingdom abounds with
reiterative strategies of this kind, such as root-suckering
and multi- tenuned gro\vth. It is common to observe
trees that appear as c1 tangle of conjoined clones, especiaJly
after damage. The arboricultural technique of"pollarding"
n1akes use of this tendency. Principal branches are bluntly
cue, and the tree responds by sending up clusters of ,vater
shoots at the sttunps. The crown regrows fuller and faster,
in a kind of Nietzschean pruning. A less controlled life-
struggle is seen in the wake of storn1s, lightning strikes,
or uncontrolled bro,vsing by anin1als. In the sprouting of
clont!s, a single specin1en often appears at differing scales
and stages of life, n1erged in a multiple exposure.
1

1. Stave churches, Norway 2. Bernd and Hilla Becher,

Grain Elevators, Ohio 3. Michelangelo, Medici Chapel and
Tomb of Guiliano de' Medici, San Lorenzo, Florence
 By contrast,fractal or kaleidoscopicreiteration more
commonly resembles the normal branching of a healthy
tree. Here again, similar forms are conjoined in varying
distributions, albeit in a far more fragmentary manner.
Again, what is normal for the vegetative is aberrant in the
vertebrate. Rhizomatic structure is acutely weird in anim.als.
This principle is clearly sensed in genetic glitches, such
as the "multi-frog"-in which several heads are attached
to a common body. The arrayed limbs of the goddess-
incarnation Bhadrakali are a powerful symbolic example, as
are the hundred arms of the Greek giant Hecatoncheires.
Reflexivity does not simply mean profusion, however.
Fractal reiteration may also involve the nesting of one
particular anatomical component in a new location. The
faces of Janus are a sinister paradigm. William S. Burrough's
"Spare Ass Annie" has an extra orifice (that one) in her
forehead. In a ridiculous variant, the central character of
Bob Odenkirk's Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002), is host to
a wise-cracking face on the end of his tongue--that is, his
tongue has a tongue. 1 The vagina dentata likewise reiterates
 J

I 12

the mouth, but via a particularly alarn1ing instance of what

Paul R.icoeur has elsewhere referred to as "predication." 2
The os1notic 111aythus be distinguished from
the fractal. In the latter, a single feature can define the
aberration: an eye in the middle of the brow, an arm in the
thorax, etcetera. This is the misplacen1ent of a corporate
element, not a new body infetu or in miniature. It may also
involve mass replication, as in an ostentation of eyes, limbs,
fingers, teeth, and the like. However, the osmotic and the
fractal n1ay form part of a conlffion process. That is, the
reiterative may begin from a single component and grow
into a competing subjectivity. Dennis Bagley's zit, and the
evil eye in Army of Darkness, quickly become heads, with
the intention of co1npleting a malignant doppelganger-this
is where the reflexive overlaps with other horrible tropes,
such as the double and the clone.
In other cases, the reflexive is very n1uch its own
problen1atic: a remarkable kind of repetition. It is unlike the
conjoined twin, wherein two equal beings are forced into
a contiguous relation. In the latter, horror sten1s precisely
fron1 the erstwhile individuality of the two constituents.The
"Sian1ese" twin would seen1 able to function independently,
ifhe were not so yoked. Reiteration 111oreproperly involves
the superin1position of fragn1ents or partial copies. While
the host is reduplicated, the second "self" is imperfectly
related. It is often shrunken or distorted, a kind of faulty or
fearful synm1etry. For exa111ple,the monozygotic twin-
beca u e it dies and ceases to gro\v-is a n1orbid converse of
the water shoot. Here, the body does not beco1ne refle~rive
in the truggle for life; the struggle has already been lost.
The engaged corpse of the non-viable twin is the evidence
of this uterine Cain-and-Abel dra1na.
 1

1. Holabird and Roche, Boston Department Store, Chicago, c. 1916

2. Boston Store, after a postcard c.1912; the height of the corner block
(what was formerly the Champlain Building) appears to be incorrect
114

In its play of repetition and scale, the category

of the reflexive might also be thought to include the
homunculus. But here again, some precision is needed.
Reiteration is highly specific: a particular individual, or
part thereof, is repeated. In most cases, the new element
remains attached to its host. By contrast, the familiar, the
troll or the tokoloshe occupies an independent body.
Moreover, these need not replicate a person-only a type.
The homunculus is, in this sense, a much more Platonic
concept, in which the tiny being imperfectly mimics an
ideal. Priapus likewise mirrors man, but less Platonically:
his body and his genitals are at two different scales. What is
being distorted here is not a man, but manhood generally.
In architecture, the unique character of reiteration
becomes apparent when we consider some examples. One
instance is the 1913 expansion of the Boston Department
Store, in Chicago, by Holabird and Roche. As with many
other deviants, this beautifully reflexive object grew from
a purely commercial logic, as a casual byproduct of the
expanding department store. The Boston was a voluminous
establishment agglomerated in stages, a slow process of
consumption that began from the original Chan1plain
Building at the intersection of Madison and State in
1905, and spread north and west in phases. The original
premises-seen at the corner in 1913-was massed as a
tower. When read against the looming wings on either side,
it provides a benchmark for the scalar explosion of the type.
Later additions appear as a dramatically upscaled version of
the original edifice. Note that the architects avoided any
opportunity to ameliorate this disjunction. For example,
they chose not to n1atch any horizontal datum from
the pioneering structure, which was stunted by the new
 115

standards of 1913 (and was demolished to make way for

a new corner block a year later). No lines are continuous:
no floor levels, no cornices, nothing. Even the portico at
street level, and the entablature at its top, were enlarged in
the later additions. The resulting effect is the appearance, in
1913, of two scales in a single building. One notes the fact
that all phases employ a similar language, albeit differently
sized; this emphasizes the abrupt disjuncture. As in a classic
mise-en-abyme, the Boston store appears to replicate itself,
and to shelter the wee double within its own body.
This is interesting if we recall the example of the
water shoot. Like the tree, the Boston stands as an attempt
to regrow itself. An identikit miniature appears to sprout
from the tissue of the original. But in Holabird's building,
the process is reversed: the dwarf version pre-dates the
"proper" entity. The Boston is what the department store
was eventually to become, and not the Champlain. Frozen
in 1913, however, this phase in a progressive composition
appears as a strikingly ambiguous and refractory take on the
building as a singular object. Its "oneness" is a kind of Zen
koan, a formal paradox. It is both one and more, a "whole"
composition as well as an arrangement of differently scaled
parts-which are, otherwise, nearly identical. This slippage
defines the nature of the reiterative. It is an embryonic
society of the self. In this way, the osmotic reiteration makes
a muddle of the social. The self metastasizes to become
self-and-other, "I-and-thou," parent and child. The Boston
store is, in architectural terms, one hand clapping.
Of course, the architect of the Boston Store
knowingly undertook no such project. Its reflexive
narc1ss1sm is pre-post-modern, simply an outgrowth
of the desire by the modern commercial enterprise to
I /6

grow through progressive stages and iterations. Much like

the analogous tree, the Boston store merely wished to
continue being the Boston store, and-due to the nature
of its industry, and to the expansive nature of characteT
enterprises in a monopolistic moment-proliferation was
crucial to its survival. [.
Again, these are osmotic examples of reiteration.
Regardless of deviations, the tree and the building are
replicated as largely "complete" entities. By contrast, in the
fractal or kaleidoscopic version, a recognizable portion of the
building-in effect, a thematic unit-is playfully repeated ~
within the composition. This might be a shape, an assembly ,
(such as an arrangement of windows) or an iconographic
element. It is a technique that has often been used in the
production of Mannerist and Postmodernist architectures.
The work of Michelangelo, for example, is full
of reflexive moments. These have much to do with ludic
disproportion, as seen in the Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo.
Behind the sarcophagus of Guliano de' Medici, orders
of two scales are nested. Great pilasters frame the walls
and support the vault. Within these are set a secondary
fa~ade in pietra serena, with another, redundant structural
system: smaller paired pilasters, a sub-entablature and blind
windows. These are tightly tucked between the larger
elements. It is a telescoping in which the wall appears
to contract and recede. As with many of Michelangelo's
reiterations, the bay provides a frame~ a representational
space in which the involution may occur. The fa~ades at
the Campidoglio on Rome's Capitoline Hill are an equally
subversive statement. Two different orders are interposed
within a single system of trabeation that adorns the
building. The fa~ades are built of self-supporting masonry.
The pillars are largely ornamental, a fact that is emphasized
in their absurd disposition. These occur in two alternating
types-large engaged pilasters and smaller freestanding
columns-which famously appear to support lintels of
different heights. The former make the latter unnecessary.
This deployment gives the elevation a very peculiar tension,
as if it were pulling and pushing against itself. Again,
Michelangelo's repetition involves a kind of mischievous
double-exposure. The architect plays in the space between
structure and its expression, producing a vortex of readings.
A similar taste for paradox is at work in 19 Bin
Tong Park, a private home in Singapore. This building is
hardly high Mannerism. It is more an instance of "Low
PoMo," characterized by a slightly hokey formal play
around the repetition of the gable. The architect labors this
joke heavily. The iconic form is exploited via a strategy of
antanaclasis:it proliferates wildly, in each instance assuming
a different connotation. Most obviously, the overall volume

Frank Gehry, ICA Building, New York

 of the house is figured as an extruded gable; the part standing
for the whole. This overarching envelope is then segmented
into a number of imbricated gables of differing sizes and
shapes. Gabled window pediments also intersect the house,
perpendicularly. The shape is then deployed, yet again, in
the production of decorative touches: pediments, triangular
windows and glass-block openings in the perimeter wall.
The architect's insistence on quotation is further weirded
by the use of conflicting vocabularies. In some areas, for
example, the roof is figured as an independent piece, while
elsewhere it is bonded with the facade in a continuity of
ceramic tile. Likewise, particular elements are ornamented,
while others seem intentionally abstract. This would seem
t~ be mere happenstance, if so many gestures in the design
did not otherwise appear intentional.
19 B.in T◄ong Park rrught seem like an exuberant
•

an~maly,_an hon:iage to Venturi or Stirling taken a little too

far. But interestingly, it is not the only example. A similarly

19 Bin Tong Park, Singapore

 119

telescopic, reiterative hip roof is found not far away, in the

James Tan Animal Clinic on Whitley Road. This example is
rather more conservative, allowing itself less latitude of both
forn1 and material. Regardless, the architect interpolates
the roof in order to produce a telescoping effect, in which
the gable-end appears to contract. The building is, again,
scaled and repeatedly inter-posited.
An excess of reflexivity, put to ambiguous ends,
marks both buildings. In their self-referentiality and re-
cycling of themes, they present a jejeune and excessive
version of the modernist artistic product. In contrast to
the controlled reflexivity of a Villa Savoie, for example, Bin
Tong Park speaks in garbled--or gabled-quotations. This
element becomes a mixed metaphor, hyper-extended and
over-involved. It is literal and iconographic, tectonic and
decorative. The hip roof is at once itself, a representation
of itself, and the house entire. By contrast, biophysical
reiteration tends toward clarity. The multi-frog is obviously
a senes of anura unhappily intersected, a zoomorphic
stutter.
This begs the question of possibilities. What
architectural freedoms are offered via the reflexive? What
is interesting about osmotic reiteration is, in part, its
imperfection: like Theseus's ship or Heraclitus' river, the
original is never reconstituted exactly. It remains both the
same and different. While the water shoot is a clone--the
same genetic individual-it shadows its progenitor within
a certain range of deviance, a margin of error. The new
tree has a similar habit, as well as bark and foliage, flower
and fruit. But it will not exactly replicate the original. The
Boston store closely shadows the Champlain, but with
some interesting deviations of vocabulary. This is a source
120

of some creative possibilities. The reflexive monstrosity does

not simply incubate an identical version at its perimeter.
Rather, it produces a conjoined being that is ambiguous
with respect to its independence.
Osmotic reflexivity thus introduces a fundamental
break with architectural tradition: the freedom of the
building not to be conceived as an object, but rather as
a juxtaposition of versions. Its beauty involves seeing the
same form, in multiple instances. This defies the notion
of the conclusive product, and in so doing subverts one
of the central assumptions of design. Instead, this strategy
treats the reiterated morpheme as something between form
and type. It assumes the character of a trope, a composition
attempted through multiple iterations. In this process, the
specific character of the work is subverted, and it begins
to take on the heightened aspect of the general. Each
version appears as an imperfect and conditional attempt at
a transcendent ideal. The latter, rather romantically, is never
fully realized.
Such an effect is central to architectures that draw
their aesthetic charge from imperfect repetition. Many
of Frank Gehry's later projects, post-Vitra, employ this
technique. His ICA building in New York, for example,
derives much of its beauty from the variability of its prows-
curvatures which, it must be said, would border on trite if
any were to be treated as the singular or conclusive version.
A number of Bilbao-era projects similarly superimpose
many variants of a common element. Peter Eisenman 's
Church of the Year 2000 in Rome, and his Emory Center
For the Arts (1991), suggest a more calculated version.
Other examples of this technique include Oosterhuis
Associates' Dancing Fa~ades, in Groningen (1995);4 J.L.

,....,. ...
 121

Esteban Penelas' Sanchez-Mendez House project for

5
Madrid (2003); and MVRDV's Donau City competition
for Vienna (2002).
The apparent casualness of this technique
conceals its power. Osmotic reiteration, in particular, offers
something more than the kaleidoscopic distributions of
Postmodernism or parametric architecture. Its emphasis is
less upon the play of icons, as in the former. Or, in the
building made from scripts, upon the minor degrees of
freedom exerted by elements en masse. Particularly in the
latter, the singularity of the object remains dominant-
the "swarm" is, in spite of its roiling, a unitary thing.
Multiplicity is, here, a kind of superficial or ornamental
effect. This is not true of the water shoot or the interrupted
act of osmosis, which instead emphasizes the genuine
possibility of the single work of architecture as (again)
a kind of awkward social being. Reiteration proposes
a transformational play of multiples, an undefined and
largely unexplored midpoint between architecture and
urbanization, individual and species.
122

Incontinent Object

Speech, consumption and excretion are acts

that connect the social world to an otherwise inscrutable
interior. For this reason, in part, we monitor orifices closely.
We like to know where they are and what they will do.
The relative predictability of the orifice is
contrasted, in horror, with holes.The latter are unexpected
perforations of the body's external membrane, and
unsurprisingly, there is some discomfort associated with
them. These are disturbing by degrees. Cuts and abrasions
are certainly unwelcome. Gaping voids are worse (see
Partially Dead). But especially revolting is the appearance
of a functionally-specific aperture. Such is the case, for
example, in Charles Burns' Black Hole, when a virus
causes a teenager to grow a mouth on his chest. 1 Or in
Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness, when a socket opens in
the shoulder blade of the protagonist, and an eye begins to
look about.
The hole suggests an inability to enforce the order
or territoriality of the body. It may operate independently
of the will of its host-performing strange functions,
allowing traffic in or out. 2 The breach is a threshold of
momentous, and possibly ~angerous, agency. Aleksandar
Hemon captured this in his description of Archduke
Ferdinand, staring into the sphincter of an imperial horse
at the moment of his assassination:
 the horse on the left raises its
tail-embarrassingly similar to the
tassel on Archduke's resplendent
helmet-and the Archduke can see
the horse's anus slowly opemng,
like a camera aperture. 3

Of course, what is about to be birthed from this anus

horribilis is the 20th century itself, with the cataclysmic
founding violence of the Great War. This dilation opens a
rift in the fabric of history.
As the hole opens where it should not, the
incontinent object releases that which should be kept
inside. It is a form of physical deviance in which bodies
resist enclosure. The interior refuses to remain so; those
elements that should rightly be hidden burst into public.

Factory shed, Jurong, Singapore

(above) Wiring in a collectivized house, Shanghai
(below) Still from John Carpenter's The Thing
Fayade accretions, Shanghai
1

1. Ducting reclaimed during demolition, Shanghai 2. Bernd

and Hilla Becher, Blast Furnace, Cleveland, Ohio, 1980
 4

3. Extraction ducting and chimney stack, restaurant, Shanghai

4. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Pompidou Centre, Paris
 Incontinence emerges here in two major
variants: herniation and pollution. These incorporate
ideas of putrefaction, expulsion, and contagion-but
also enchantment and power. All are part of a common
horror. Numerous examples exist in the broader culture,
and in the mythosphere: from the Scylla of the Greeks, to
ghosts and poltergeists, to the cursed De La Poer family
of Lovecraft's The Drowned. In the recent Japanese genre
of "tentacle porn," an opening in the skin may erupt into
a bolus of articulate viscera. This trope is present, also, in
popular imaginaries of magic and witchcraft, as well as in
the fear of the contagious outsider, the plague-bringer, and
the irradiated subject.
In certain respects, this is a modern nightmare. As
Lewis Mumford, Michel Foucault, and others have pointed
out, it was only recently that continence was expected of
people, buildings, and cities. 1 Not so long ago, all was-to
a degree-porous. In an age of humoral medicine, bodies
were understood to be radiant, and susceptible, beyond the
limit of their dermal horizons. Such an assumption fueled
the belief in phlogiston, a combustible essence presumed to
grow from the metabolism. This was thought to rise above
the shoulders in a coniform taper, like a hood. Melville's
Ishmael described it, in Moby-Dick, as "a curious involved
worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my
head." 2 Likewise,Victorians presumed "animal magnetism"
to be a a medium of influence, a social electricity. In 19th-
century Britain,WJ.Vernon and other Mesmerists staged an
invasion of the will by means of this intimate conductivity. 3
Individuals, under the persuasion of another's penetrating
current, were made to follow commands and exhibit
unorthodox behaviors.
 129

But assumptions of human sensitive interaction-

for example, of the brain and blood as parts of a "galvanic
battery"-were increasingly under attack. 4 In the
conception of new clinical science, hun1ans were re-
fashioned (in Louis Althusser's term, "interpolated")
as contained subjects with unseemly interiors. 5 Lewis
Mumford noted that each came to be emptied, bathed, and
sexed in a regime of what he called "Baroque regularity."
This may be polemical overstatement, but historians of
science observe that the development of tissural medicine
reinforced a conception of the person as increasingly
hermetic, and bounded.
Buildings were subjected to a similar process.
Prior to the internalization of plumbing, human waste
was evident and available, a fixture of the public sphere.
It lay at the road in open drains, or was unceremoniously
ejected fron1 windows. The builders of the eighteenth
century devised means of enclosing effluents, sequestering
bodily functions and hiding their evidence. 6 Cloacina,
the goddess of Rome's main sewer, was-after nearly nvo
nullennia of inactivity-once more ascendant. Cities were
"cloacinated," their drains enclosed. Shortly after, they
were also electrified, and linked through the attenuations
of telephony. The interior ,vas sewn ,vith ducts, wires,
and cables. The order of pre-modern urban building was
turned inside out. Or rather, it was turned outside-in. 7
Modern buildings, like modern subjects, thus
came to contain unspeakable cavities. Channeled winds,
n1obile '\vaste, captive lightnin~all of these are smuggled
into the walls of the home and the office.Those who work
in design and construction are familiar ,vith these obscure
and recessive spaces, ho'\v they contradict the resolved
 bourgeois exterior. Simply put, they are a mess. In order
to sustain this disappearing act, the modern partition is
conceived as a complex assembly of membranes, organized
around a vacancy. Again, this is quite recent. The walls of
the pre-modern building had no unseemly interior. Their
poche was merely mass that simulated the geological.
In the modern era, "better" architectures have
generally been more successful in their attempt to hide
this dark matter. But it has everywhere given rise to a
crisis of concealment. The pellucid design strategies of
Modernism-what Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky
called its "literal and phenomenal" transparency-have
consistently failed to meet the challenge of plumbing. 8
Like the psychoanalytic subject, the modern building has
frequently been unable to assimilate its revolting technical
interior.
The crisis of concealment resulted in many
solutions, two more common than the others. One is the
Functionalist exposure of working elements. This was a

I
l
Former Stasi listening stations, Teufelsberg, Germany
 131

common area of experiment in the famous Case Study

Houses of the 1940s and 1950s, and will be familiar to
anyone who has inhabited the stylistic space of the "post-
industrial." This approach veered into more anarchic
expressions in the 1960s and 1970s, in the interiors of Joe
Colombo, Verner Panton, and Team X. True to the culture
of the Archigram moment, the errant duct here assumed a
ludic, loopy, hippy aspect. But more frequently, its contents
were remanded to the rarely-accessed "chases" that vein the
modern structure. Such unmentionables have rarely been
confidently aired in public. For this reason, the inversion
of Renzo Piano and Richard Roger's Pompidou Centre
still has a vaguely transgressive and scatological atmosphere
about it--evoking Bunuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
(1972), in which characters sit side-by-side on the toilet.
A second, contrastingsttategy vvasthat of disappearance.
This was the illusion that the building need no services
whatsoever. Mies' Barcelona Pavilion (1929) is perhaps the
clearest expression of such a fantasy.Mechanical systems seem
to have vanished. Even sttucture has become attenuated. The
steel colunms appear to be in tension, as if straining to keep
the roof from floating away. The notion of function is
dissolved in a planar abstraction, a vagueness structured
by formal precision. This is the realm of ideas. Ducting
would imply embarrassing physicality, out of place in
such a rarefied aether. The same is true of the glass box,
which would appear to hide nothing so literal as a pipe--
despite longstanding ideological links between utopia and
plumbing. 9 One must suspend disbelief when looking at
the John Lautner houses, perched like aeries at an altitude
above hygiene. For we know that, without fail, plumbing
has been banished to some dusty cabinet within.