-1A woman asks her psychiatrist, My husband only seems to want to use the dining room table for

sex. What should I do? The psychiatrist responds, I would stop eating in bed.

Without the expectation of the built, the imagined and unbuilt, or the unbuildable, would have little resonance. 1 Elizabeth Diller

On October 24, 1990, the New York architectural duo of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio (Diller + Scofidio) staged a lecture/performance at Columbia University in which they presented their design for a seaside vacation house - known as the Slow House (Figure 1) using video, projected images, and competing voiceovers. It is likely that the impetus for this particular event followed from the publicity aroused when this project was awarded a prestigious prize in a competition administered by the influential journal Progressive Architecture (PA). 2 Significantly, the award was not based on the built house - construction of the home was suspended due to changes in the clients financial circumstances - but upon a series of models and drawings that, by the standards of architectural representation, were highly unconventional but which displayed theatrical qualities pertinent to the scheme itself. Indeed, noted architect Rem Koolhaas, who was a judge for the PA competition, observed that the house appeared from the drawings as a kind of mise en scne. 3 That this is the case in the work of Diller + Scofidio is not surprising. Their work both before and since the Slow House has been characterised by an attention to spectacle and other theatrical elements, including a collaborative performance with Susan Mosakowski in 1987. 4 Other installation projects that included performative elements followed. 5 The intermedia experimentation in Diller + Scofidios work of this period was not simply a provocation directed towards the deeply conservative culture of architectural practice. For them performance offered a way to re-introduce the body to architectural discourse after the emptiness of late Eighties Minimalism. 6 When asked whether they were more interested in art or architecture Elizabeth Diller replied: Were interested in a lot of things, from performance to construction, and it doesnt make a hell of a lot of difference what its called. 7 The Slow House changed this uncertainty. A house,
Diller, Elizabeth. Autobiographical Notes. The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constants New Babylon to Beyond. Eds. Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley. Camridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press, 2001. 131. 2 See Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. The Slow House. Progressive Architecture 72.1 (1991): 88-90. 3 Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. The Slow House. Progressive Architecture 72.1 (1991): 89. 4 The Rotary Notary and his Hotplate was written and directed by Susan Mosakowski at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a part of the Marcel Duchamp centenary. Diller + Scofidio provided the designs for the set, props and costuming. See Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate. AA Files 14.Spring (1987): 54-61. Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. Bodybuildings: Architectural Facts and Fictions. A+U March.222 (1989): 57-64. 5 These projects are dicussed by Diller + Scofidio in their anti-monograph Flesh. Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. Flesh: Architectural Probes, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. 6 Teyssot, George. The Mutant Body of Architecture. Flesh: Architectural Probes. New York: Princeton Architetcural Press, 1994. 7 Elizabeth Diller quoted in Princenthal, Nancy. Diller and Scofidio: Architectures Iconoclasts. Sculpture 8.6 (1989): 23.
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-2however avant-guard, differs fundamentally from a performance in that it does not operate in a temporal moment. Instead of immediacy and the momentary, this project had a patron with a site and brief, and the will to construct an enduring occupiable dwelling. The Slow House was distinctly architecture, but as a house it could still be a site of discursive practices, as they set out to prove.

Figure 1 Slow House: 1/4 scale model (Collection of the Museum of Modern Art)

George Teysott has observed that Diller + Scofidio consider architecture to be a set of stable and unquestionable assumptions needing alteration. 8 As Gaston Bachelard saw it, the house is our corner of the world, our first universe and cosmos. 9 The house is the point of stability about which all other experiences and encounters circle. The house is then a backdrop to performance and it should never be allowed to become performative in itself least our entire cosmos be threatened, which to some occurred with the Slow House. Initially the project followed a conventional professional path as
8

Teyssot, Georges. Erasure and Disembodiment. Book for the Unstable Media. Ed. Joke Brouwer. Netherlands: V2_Publishing, 1992: 162. 9 Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1964 ed. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994: 4.

-3the conceptual ideas developed through drawings and models, and eventually construction began. Unfortunately, soon after the laying of the foundations, the client, an art investor who suffered in a downturn in the art markets, stopped the project indefinitely with only the foundation walls completed. It is at this point that the Slow House became interesting. Freed from the limitations of physical production the architects embarked on a series of discursive drawings that explored the raison detre of the project without compromise. The result was the lecture at Columbia University in which performance overshadowed project to wide acclaim. However, what was lost in the immediacy of the spectacle, and subsequent discussion, was the attention Diller + Scofidio had given to the performative aspects of the actual drawings of the Slow House. Ostensibly, the Slow House was an intellectual exploration of the vacation house of leisure - as a distinctly modern concept defined by the screen: The vacation house, organized around devices which control optical connection to and escape from, culture, regulates degrees of each. The car windshield promises the reversibility escape into vehicular space, a space connecting the vacation home with the city. The picture window promises escape into a propriety scenic space, a space measured by and connected to market value. The television screen promises escape into solitary virtual space, a social space connecting viewers by an electronic weld. 10 The architectural apparatus of these three views are amplified in the Slow House to generate a formal organization driven by looking, seeing, and framing. The exemplary role of the television screen and automobile windscreen are emphasised as views for the present age, and they suggested that this was the model for the dominant picture window in their house design. The Slow House they wrote is a probe into the domesticated eye on vacation. The intention is to examine and reconfigure relations between the body and conventions of domestic space with particular emphasis on issues of leisure. 11 It is noticeably odd then that they do not mention the fourth view at work in this project that of the drawn screen. Like the windshield, the picture window, and the television screen, the architectural drawing is a category of scenic escape. I suggest the reasons why Diller + Scofidio do not reflect upon drawing as a part of a problem of viewing in architecture is due to a specific dependence on drawing that is not able to be made apparent. That is to say it cannot be displayed publicly performed. To demonstrate this there is one small drawing I will address specifically. For want of title provided by the architects I call this drawing A woman ask her psychiatrist, My husband only seems to want to use the dining room table for sex. What should I do? The psychiatrist responds, I would stop eating in bed. after the notation associated to it in a publication. 12 Eating in Bed, in short. Drawing as a performance That drawing has a performative component is self-evident. Drawing is firstly an action. Only after the action does it become a thing. The performance of doing a
Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. Homebodies on Vacation. Centre: A Journal for Architecture in America 9: 40. 11 Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. Reviewing. Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory 1: 31. 12 Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. Flesh: Architectural Probes, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994: npn.
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-4drawing necessarily pre-empts the drawing as artefact. In traditional creative practice a drawing might be described as evidence of drawing. Moreover, architects do not use drawing in a conventional manner. As a tool in the production of buildings, the architectural drawing is only a step in a process leading to the artefact, and it is described as a device of translation in a derogatory sense that denies drawing any discrete values of architectural production. The point of this is simple. If a drawing were to be seen as a repository of architectural value then the traditional relationship between architects and buildings could be challenged. Conversely some architects (including Diller + Scofidio) have argued through their work that drawing is the only realm of architectural production completely controlled by the architect, everything else is merely building. 13 Integral to this argument is a question of performance. In the paradigm of the architectural drawing as a translator the place of performance is transferred from an architect (instigator) to the built work (demonstrator), but where the drawing is seen as the site of architectural production it encompasses both instigation and demonstration in a gesture Marco Frascari has described as demonstrative literally, monster-like. 14 He continues: In their project drawings, architects act as Janus-like presences. On the one hand, or rather, on one face they are observers of the physical world of human constructions. On the other face, they observe their own hypothetical internal world of envisioning. The former experimentation takes place between the site of a construction and its visualization on the drawing board of an architectural survey: the latter takes place only on the drawing board where the architects are expressing diagrams and graphic constructions of their own. 15 Architectural drawing, unlike many other drawing types, contains a communicative ambivalence that shifts depending on the intention of the architect, the stage of the architectural project, and the particular convention applied. In architectural drawings the question is less what might performance mean in the context of drawing? than who is drawing performing for? That is, what, or who, does drawing serve? X drawing It is this question I will ask of the drawing Eating in Bed although it must be acknowledged that this is not an ordinary architectural representation. Eating in Bed is one of ten sectional (X-ray) drawings made of the Slow House that were reproduced on acetate and inserted back into a scale model of the house at the point at which the original section line was drawing on a plan (Figure 3). The result is drawing not quite drawing, and a model not quite model. In published images of the project it is the section Eating in Bed that is always partially extracted from the series (Figure 2). Regardless of the control, or not, that the architects had on this decision, the distinction has invested this section above the others as important. The real point of
This point is made by Leon Krier where he writes: I can only make architecture, because I do not build. I do not build, because I am an architect. Krier, Leon. Drawings: 1967-80. Bruxelles: Aux Archives Darchitecture Moderne, 1980: vii. 14 Frascari, Marco. A New Angel / Angle in Architectural Research: The Ideas of Demonstration. The Journal of Architectural Education 44.1 (1990): 11-19. 15 Frascari, Marco. Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory. Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1991: 91.
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-5this diagrammatic drawing/model is only apparent in one published image where each section station has an anecdotal commentary attached. 16 Long, slick and slender, tickles where its tender? A whip. What is the difference between walking up the stairs and looking up the stairs: In one you step up the stairs, in the other you stare up the stairs. 17 And so on for all ten sections. Diller + Scofidio juxtapose the analytical sterility of the architectural section with scenes constructed from painfully oldfashioned humour and illustrative figures (one holds a whip, another contemplates the stairs, etc.). In Eating in Bed there are two sets of figures. The first consists of three masculine forms sitting at an imagined dining table; the second group is composed of a male and female couple copulating in a ground floor platform. The accompanying gag reads: A Woman asks her psychiatrist, My husband only seems to want to use the dining room table for sex. What should I do? The psychiatrist responds, I would stop eating in bed. The home, in this view from Diller + Scofidio, is a world of disfunction, desire, and dependency, all conditions normally ignored by architects when they draw. The decision by the architects to reproduce the section in reverse and transparent supports a discursive reading of it the physical elements of building are rendered clear while the spatial is presented as filled but their decision to term it an X-ray presents other bodily interpretations. The X-ray provides a particularized view of the body not seen without technological intervention. The X-ray is another screen, and it is, in the tradition of comic book superheros, a privileged view not afforded to ordinary human sight. The X-ray drawing is a form of super-vision that sees that which should really be hidden. As John Hejduk (colleague and mentor to Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio) wrote, X-rays are tracings that penetrate internally. 18 They display the hidden. For Diller + Scofidio the house hides everyday performances that they wish to display. However, the effect is to turn this hidden domesticity into a voyeuristic display. The copulating couple are not so much exposed as displayed, and the voyeuristic tendencies of this are highlighted by the three figures above that are either navely ignorant, or waiting patiently for their turn. We have in this drawing a version of debased performance a sex-show, but it could be said that architectural drawing has always been a kind of peep-shop insomuchas it has always been concerned with the voyeuristic display of the parts hidden beneath and behind and inside buildings. That this is not acknowledged is due to the preference architects have to see the drawing as a tool of neutral translation rather than active performance.

Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. Flesh: Architectural Probes, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994: npn. 17 Diller, Elizabeth, and Ricardo Scofidio. Flesh: Architectural Probes, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994: npn. 18 Hedjuk, John. Victims: A Work by John Hejduk. London: Architectural Association, 1986: npn.

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-6-

Figure 2 Slow House: 1/8" scale model with X-ray sections (collection of FRAC)

Lost in translation Robin Evans has emphasised that the use of translation to account for the passage of architectural information in a drawing is reductive towards any architectural programme that seeks progressive development. 19 He writes: What connects thinking to imagination, imagination to drawing, drawing to building, and buildings to our eyes is projection in one guise or another, or processes that we have chosen to model on projection. All are zones of instability. 20 Issues of representational uncertainty are not removed by using the translation model to account for the movement (projection) of an architectural idea into a building, they are simply suppressed. Also suppressed are the modalities of immediacy, temporality, and spectacle that characterise performance. The performative qualities of architectural drawing are effectively banished by claims of translation. Walter Benjamin observed that the problem of translation lies in the fact that it must incorporate a mode of signification that belongs to an original, which is then described in a foreign language. To discuss a drawing as a translation is to remove it from its original intention and to replace this with one emphasising clarity of transmission. These can be thought of as the relations of addressee and addressor. For my argument, it might also be understood in the relationship of performer and audience, but I suggest it is not the architect that is performing, but the drawing.

19 20

Evans, Robin. The Projective Cast. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995. Evans, Robin. The Projective Cast. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995: xxxi.

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Figure 3 Slow House X-ray section at station 60 interval (collection of FRAC)

Performance Anxiety: The Tricks of Architectural Drawing For Jacques Derrida the translation is identified by the loss of an original condition. 21 For architects this moment can be considered as the instance of the architectural idea as the promise of an authenticity in a project that is transmissible from its performative origin though to an intended audience. The idea is an origin, and the success of its translation depends upon a hierarchical framing of authenticity. Typically, this framing takes the form of the conventions of architectural drawing exemplified by descriptive geometry. In the process of drawing, architects build on geometry, and by implication geometric relationships, to organize a linear relationship of idea into building not interrupted by unpredictable elements. 22 This process is canonized in the form of the orthographic set (plan, section, and elevation). 23 As Robin Evans has written:
Kamuf, Peggy, ed. The Derrida Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. For a discussion of the conventions of architectural drawing see Ching, Francis D. K., and Steven P. Juroszek. Design Drawing. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1998: 74. 23 See Evans, Robin. Translations from Drawing to Building. AA Files.12 (1986): 3-18.
22 21

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Orthographic projection is the language translators dream. Within its axioms the most complex figures may be moved at will into perfectly congruent formations anywhere else, yet this rigidly defined homogeneity made distortion measurable. 24 Translation suspends any disbelief over the improbability of shifting meaning from an abstract field to a concrete one without change. Any shift implies change since no two fields are ever the same but the translation model demands such hegemony requiring the suspension of critical disbelief. Descriptive geometry, regulated by the conventions of the orthographic set, is the way in which discursive elements (performances) are censored. Simultaneously it is the mechanism that introduces discussion of architectural drawing as a language. Robert Chitman writes: Drawing is the primary language of architects. Writing, the fundamental means of communication, is quite inadequate in the technical context of architectural practice . . . it is important for everybody in architectural practice to be able to draw, in order to be fluent in the architects primary language. 25 Drawing is a means of communication - it extends information through time and space - but treated as a language it assumes a homogenous space through which meaning passes imperviously. Fluent, in the practice based sense that Chitman uses it, means stable and unambiguous. Yet it is precisely ambiguity that makes drawing such an immediate creative medium. Without a certain conditional vagueness the drawing ceases to be useful as a device of creativity, and becomes a purely prescriptive tool with no imaginative read performative - properties on its own. Communication is a vehicle for representation as an ideal content called meaning. Writing is but one species of this more general communication. 26 The question of whether it can operate with hegemony assumes a closed economic system without loss, without absence. The notion of written communication, whether semantic or non-semantic, demands an absence in the form of the missing audience. This is not the case with writing, and it is much less the reality of drawing. 27 The audience constructs the drawing as a communicable field, and with it a performative realm also. Drawing as progeny Drawings do not translate idea into action, thought into project. The architectural drawing is active in its relationship to architectural discourse. It does not translate so much as construct the relationship between the architect and the architectural project. A drawing is an agreement between two parties that a creative performance has taken place, but it is one never seen in a temporal dimension. The first performative aspect of drawing is heralded in advance of the material fact of a drawing by the action of realising that fact. Conversely the second performative

Evans, Robin. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1997: 181. 25 Chitman, Robert. Measured Drawing for Architects. London: The Architectural Press, 1980: 2-3. 26 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Trans. Alan Bass. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982: 314. 27 Derrida, Jacques. "Signature Event Context." Trans. Alan Bass. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

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-9aspect is held by an audience to the drawing as fact and it is entered into without consent or acknowledgment. In architectural representation geometric systems are omnipotent and take the form of the orthographic projection that organizes the place of drawing, and therefore the architect. Catherine Ingraham has written of this: Modes of representation in architecture - drawing and model-building, for example - are the literal examples of this orthogonal dedication, but even in epistemological and representational accounts of its own artistic practice, architecture relies on a kind of orthogonality, a linear movement from drawing to building, architect to drawing. 28 The linearity of these relationships is absolute and unidirectional as drawing moves from a point of origin to one of termination. This passage of drawing is one of origin and has been compared to giving birth. Hlne Cixous has observed that, There is no end to writing or drawing. Being born doesnt end. Drawing is being born. Drawing is born. 29 Drawing is a performance that oscillates between concept and conception, each having its etymological origins in the Latin conceptus fetus. 30 All drawings are a form of concept and they are, by metaphorical association, a type of mental embryo. An architectural drawing represents the delivery of an architectural project as a translation from a before state to an after state. The architect Le Corbusier described the process of drawing in exactly these terms: . . .then one day, a spontaneous initiative of the inner being takes place, everything falls into place; one takes a pencil, a bit of charcoal, some colored pencils . . . and one gives birth right there on the paper: the idea comes forth, the child comes forth, it has come into the world, it is born. 31 Consequentially it comes as no real surprise to find fornication in the drawings of Diller + Scofidio. Intercourse is, after all, both a form of performance and a source of translation via transmission (fluids, emotions, pleasure), just like the drawing itself. Drawing is the site of conception and the place of birth. However, it would be reckless to dismiss the voyeuristic and erotic intentions evoked in Eating in Bed as a by-product of a visual pun. Writing in 1908 the architectural polemicist Adolf Loos linked architectural drawing to sexual intercourse literally: The first ornament that came into being, the cross, had an erotic origin. The first work of art, the first artistic action of the first artist daubing on the wall,
28

Ingraham, Catherine. "Initial Proprieties: Architecture and the Space of the Line." Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992: 264. 29 Cixous, Hlne. "Without End No State of Drawingness No, Rather: The Executioner's Taking Off." New Literary Review 1.Winter (1993): 91-92. 30 Onions, C.T., ed. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Third ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 31 Le Corbusier quoted in de Franclieu, Franoise. Le Corbusier Sketchbooks: Volume 2, 1950-1954. Trans. Agnes Serenyi. London: Thames and Hudson in collaboration with the Foundation Le Corbusier, Paris. 1981: 27.

- 10 was in order [for a man] to rid himself of his natural excesses. A horizontal line: the reclining woman. A vertical line: the man who penetrates her. 32 The relevance of Loos is not lost here. John Hejduk, so important an influence on Diller + Scofidio, described the effect of a photograph of a domestic interior by Adolf Loos. It was, he said, as though lightning was flashing in a dark sky: I thought to myself that I was witnessing the synapses of an architects brain, captured by an x-ray photo which revealed the workings of a tumultuous imagination. 33 The super-vision of the X-ray returns as another modality of performance: the bioelectrical activity that forms an idea. Loos himself was a strong critic of drawing and photography considering them both to be deceptive devices 34 which should never be considered more than a technical statement. 35 Loos wanted the drawing to perform as a graphic translator in order to ensure the privilege of a bodily experience in space over the mental construct of the drawing. 36 So he demanded that the drawing become graphically impotent outside of the architects strict projective direction. It is this dogma that Eating in Bed rebels against. By revealing a couple mid-coitus Diller + Scofidio disclose a world of architecture routinely suppressed in architectural drawings because the performance is made to serve the architect and not the audience.

Dr Peter Wood School of Architecture Victoria University of Wellington PO Box 600 Wellington NEW ZEALAND peter.wood@vuw.ac.nz

Loos, Adolf. Ornament and Crime. The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts Council Exhibition. Eds. Yehuda Safran and Wilfried Wang. London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985: 100. 33 Hejduk, John. John Hejduk. Schools of Architecture. Ed. Bart Goldhoorn. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1996: 19-20. 34 Loos, Adolf. Regarding Economy. Raumplan Verses Plan Libre. Ed. Max Risselada. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1989. 137-41. 35 See Colomina, Beatriz. Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interiors of Adolf Loos. AA Files 20 (1990): 5-15. 36 Colomina, Beatriz. Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interiors of Adolf Loos. AA Files 20 (1990): 5-15.

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