Douglas Darden, Architext

09/17/2022

Some new thoughts on Darden's Dis/continuous Genealogies and how they likely were influenced by Georges Bataille's concepts of continuous/discontinuous beings.

http://thoughts-out-of-season.blogspot.com/2022/09/discontinuous-genealogies-revisiting.html?m=1

08/17/2022

There are few opportunities to read about Darden by someone who was close to him. Ben Ledbetter was Darden's best friend at Harvard GSD and beyond. This is a great piece, and certainly very insightful into the personality that was Douglas Darden.

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08/11/2022

When Darden taught at University of Colorado Denver, he taught in this building, the Dravo Building at Larimer and 14th.

08/07/2022

As you thumb through Condemned Building, you will notice that Darden does not give a typical description of his buildings, their concepts, and site history. Rather he provides what he calls psychodramatic scripts. This is an attempt to understand these and how they fit into his process and narrative.

Early draft of the psychodramatic script of Night School Exploring the works of Douglas Darden in Condemned Building , one will note first...

07/31/2022

This is another piece I wrote some time ago that I forgot to share. Why are Darden's drawings always a little disorienting? Why does he almost never provide a scale or north arrow or a larger site plan? Why is it the more you dig into his designs, the more space and history appear distorted? Here's a thought.

Untitled, 100 Building Nights , charcoal and graphite on paper, Douglas Darden, 1985 For some time I noticed that Darden barely does site pl...

07/31/2022

Did you know that Oxygen House was inspired by a little silo on the edge of Liberty State Park, New Jersey? Of the dozen photos Darden took of this silo, only one gives a clue where it is located, and it is the World Trade Center in the background. With a bit of luck and some time on Google Maps, I found the silo. It's still there, it got a new paint job, but it's still kind of cute.

Silo, Liberty State Park, New Jersey, photo by Douglas Darden On the edge of Liberty State Park in New Jersey is an industrial area of war...

06/15/2022

"Reading Moby-Dick is as if we are holding a Sears catalog in our left hand and the Old Testament in our right."

05/24/2022

The base of the condos that Darden lived in when he moved back to Denver is black stone, and curiously preserved in the black stone is fossils. Given his love of trilobites and other peculiar fossils, I'm sure he must have love this aspect of where he lived.

04/28/2022

Having explored mines and mining structures in Colorado, it becomes apparent where Darden gets his fascination with derelict mining and industrial structures.

Paris Mill mining structure, Colorado I grew up in South Carolina. You don't grow up in South Carolina without having spent time hanging o...

04/27/2022

"Architecture displaces."

Thus spake Douglas Darden.

Throughout the city of Denver, citizens, city officials, business owners, et al are so hellbent on preventing the homeless from having anywhere to sleep that they will utterly destroy the entire urban fabric. They complain about tents being ugly, yet everywhere across the city are fences and boulders and trenches and netting... Who cares about a beautiful city, as long as the homeless don't have a place to go.

This all started in the last decade when a massive building boom began with so many wanting to cash in on the newly decriminalized ma*****na trade. Anticipating ma*****na tourism and more residents therefrom, all the little corners of the city began to vacate the homeless to make way for huge apartment blocks, hotels, and pubs. With fewer places for the homeless to be, they begin to congregate in larger numbers in fewer areas. The rate of homelessness in Denver has barely changed, but the places for them to simply exist has diminished, making it look like a vastly larger population than what has always existed in Denver.

What we've seen is architecture has displaced the homeless, and the places they've gone to stay are destroyed to further displace them. This is Denver. This is Darden's hometown.

04/21/2022

Darden was immensely influenced by Jean-Jacques Lequeu. This is a fantastic lecture by Berry Bergdoll on Lequeu. Enjoy.

Draftsman and architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) left a corpus of drawings to the Bibliothèque nationale de France that had been largely forgotten unt...

04/20/2022

One of the greatest assessments of Moby-Dick was made by Douglas Darden: "Reading Moby-Dick is as if we are holding a Sears catalog in our left hand and the Old Testament in our right." (Melvilla: An Architect on Moby-Dick, Melville Society Extracts, N.91, Nov. 1992)