Douglas Darden

• Name — Douglas Darden • Birth Name — Joseph Douglas Darden • Born — 20 October 1951 • Birthplace — Lakewood, Colorado, U.S. • Died — 3 April 1996 • Place of death — Denver, Colorado, U.S. • Occupation — Architectural Designer, Writer, Instructor

Darden was born in Lakewood, Colorado on October 20, 1951, to Joseph Darden and Nancy Lee Darden. In the fall of 1969 he enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder in Boulder, Colorado. He graduated in the spring of 1974 with his Bachelor of English and Psychology, Magna Cum Laude. He then attended Parsons School of Design in New York, New York from September 1977 to December 1978 on a design scholarship to study industrial design. Darden then went on to study architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall 1979, and graduated with his Master of Architecture, with distinction, in January 1983.

While still attending the GSD, Darden became the chief studio instructor for the Architecture Career Discovery Program in 1982. After graduate school he became a visiting lecturer at the Catholic University of America in Washington D.C. for the spring semester 1984, teaching a graduate seminar on the American industrial landscape. From September 1984 until 1987 Darden taught architectural design as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University in New York, New York. From January 1987 until 1988 he taught architectural design as a special lecturer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey. In 1989 Darden moved back to his home state of Colorado to teach. He became a senior instructor at the University of Colorado Denver in the fall of 1990, teaching advanced-level architectural design studios and lecture courses. He continued to teach at the University of Colorado Denver until shortly before his death. Beginning soon after the completion of his graduate studies at Harvard, Darden began writing and designing, publishing essays on architectural theory, as well as publishing theoretical architectural designs (which were later printed in Condemned Building), lecturing at various universities and conferences, and exhibiting various works in galleries and group shows (one notable exhibition was of his Museum of Impostors in the gallery Artists Space in the group show From Here to Eternity). In the course of his career he was the recipient of several fellowships, honors, and awards. Some of the most distinguished are the Entering Professional Designer Project Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984 for his work Museum of Impostors; The Young Architects Forum winner (now Architectural League of New York) in 1985, also for Museum of Impostors; recipient of a traveling grant from the Graham Foundation in 1988 for Hostel; and a Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1989, during which he developed Hostel, Temple Forgetful, and Confessional (see also List of Fellows of the American Academy in Rome). Darden was also listed as one of the leading fifty contemporary architects by Yoichi Iijima in 1993, along with Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Lebbeus Woods, and Eric Owen Moss.

Darden was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) on February 12, 1990. Darden references this date in his letter from Burnden Abraham for the project Oxygen House, which is a house for dying in. He began chemotherapy, and after a few years began to go into remission, although his cancer was not cured. In 1991–92 Robert Miller, having learned of Darden's illness, conducted a film interview—with grant monies from the Clemson University School of Architecture, and first screened at their Graduate Symposium—called Douglas Darden: Looking After the Underbelly in order to capture and preserve some of Darden's ideas. Darden went into blast crisis—the final and terminal stage of CML—in late September 1995, just weeks after he married Allison Jo Rosen on September 16. On the morning of April 3, 1996, Darden died in Denver at the age of 44.

For each of Darden's projects he would take a set of four images that were meaningful and inspiration for him concerning the project, and then overlay those four images into what he would call the ideogram, and that, in turn, would become the parti pris of sorts—i.e. the overall basis of the form of the architectural design. This process of compiling, overlaying, and deriving from inspirational images Darden called Dis/continuous Genealogy. The term originates with a friend of Darden's from The GSD, Ben Ledbetter, who termed a similar design process archaeologies; Darden said that it would be better termed "genealogies", and then later called it "Discontinuous Genealogy". In some ways the Dis/continuous Genealogies are a pre-text (as Darden would term it), which in-forms the origins of the project, but also conceals its actual inspiration. The term itself is not unlike a term Duchamp used to "cover his tracks": archaeology of knowledge.

Darden had a rather idiosyncratic term he used to describe the underside, substratum of architecture (and certainly this applied to anything in general), which he termed the underbelly. It was a term/idea that Darden himself did not feel could be fully defined, as he expresses in Douglas Darden: Looking After the Underbelly, but generally refers to the unknown and the unknowable, the unconventional, unexpected, improper, obscene, and ultimately the inverse of custom and tradition. He writes a short piece of prose—entitled Dweller by the Dark Stream—on the "Contents" page of Condemned Building: "I am inclined while watching the turtle to turn it over and study its underbelly. From this unnatural position I see how this platonically solid creature makes its way through the world."

• Illustration — Oxygen House

In 1993 Darden published his only book, entitled Condemned Building: An Architect's Pre-Text, which exhibits ten of his visionary architectural designs he had completed in prior years. These ten designs explore and attempt to understand architecture as it is commonly comprehended, but done so by overturning and inverting common notions and canons and studying, as Darden would call it, "architecture's underbelly". As is written in the "Forewords": The ten works of architecture cited in this book were constructed from a particular canon of architecture that has persisted throughout the centuries and the varieties of architectural styles. The buildings are like a turning-over, one by one, of those canons. Like the action of the plow, this was done not to lay waste to the canons, but to cultivate their fullest growth. The following are the projects with their respective canon and reversa. • Museum of Impostors — Architecture posits the authentic. • Architecture posits the fake. • Temple Forgetful — A monument is for remembering. • A monument is for forgetting. • Clinic for Sleep Disorders — Architecture domesticates our fears. • Architecture locates our fears. • Night School — Light is the revealer of form. • Darkness is the revealer of form. • Melvilla — Architecture is the reconciliation with nature. • Architecture is the irreconciliation with nature. • Hostel — Architecture takes possession of a place. • Architecture displaces. • A Saloon for Jesse James — Architecture is accommodation. • Architecture is confrontation. • Sex Shop — Architecture fulfills desire. • Architecture objectifies desire. • Confessional — Man is at the center of divine creation. • Man is off-center of divine creation. • Oxygen House — A house is for living. • A house is for dying. Thus, for instance, in the project Oxygen House the canon used is: "A house is for living "; its reversa is: "A house is for dying." This would most likely have come from Le Corbusier's infamous aphorism: "A house is a machine for living in." Darden overturns this canon and designs a house for a dying man—a fictitious character he named Burden Abraham—who suffered a collapsed lung from a railroad accident, and now must live in an oxygen tent for the rest of his life; the house would eventually become Abraham's tomb.

Around the time of working on producing Condemned Building Darden began to work on a new project with a former student of his, James Trewitt, entitled The Laughing Girls from Troy, New York, but was never completed due to Darden's untimely death. The project was meant to be an architectural graphic novel, in which they would "design and make sites, spaces, forms, objects, etc. as the narrative itself." That narrative was driven by laughter, and that laughter would become the process for architecture. The laughter was the laughter of three young girls, who were, in essence, their clients: the fourteen year-old twins, Cass and Polly, and their nineteen-year-old friend, Helen. Cass and Polly are most likely feminized renderings of the celestial twins of Greek mythology, Castor and Pollux (better known as Gemini), and their sister, Helen of Troy.

Many of his original sketches and drawings for Oxygen House are now owned by the Museum of Modern Art, along with a select few of Sex Shop drawings; gifts of Darden's widow. The remainder of his drawings are held at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, New York, New York, with the exception of a select few others, which remain in private collections, such as a couple of the final drawings for Temple Forgetful, which are held and displayed in the office of David Tryba Architects in Denver, Colorado.

Douglas Darden is recorded with the occupation artist. Established in Library of Congress under n92076912. Recorded as artist and architect. Established in FAST under 307622. Silo is dated c.