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Douglas Darden's Oxygen House
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prologue: first things "The beauty of architecture," to repeat Louis Kahn's captivating insight, "is that it deals with the recessions of the mind from which come that which is not yet said and that which is not yet made." Seen in these terms, architecture deals rather directly with the dilemma of origins. It also deals with the archetypes in and through which the images of those origins are brought once again into the present. The primordial image that holds those recessions of the mind is that of the primitive hut. The simple, one-room hut is architecture's first artifact: the aedicula. The stories of its origin set up architecture's enduring and central mythology. The first house is that mythology, the magical place where the dreams of architecture meet the facts of nature and the circumstances of culture. It is the place where the ideas and elements of architecture combine to become a great event in the mind. It is the place where we dwell, where we abide, and where we encounter our selves. Its presence as a theme in the realm of architecture has been persistent and powerful, as life affirming and life giving, a place for living in. We delight in its firmness and commodity as well as its permanence and our ease.
The image of the first house also holds within itself the significant discourses with which architects have preoccupied themselves in the course of their own unique history. The discussion of the transactions which take place between site and program, nature and culture, ideas and facts, image and reality, space and place, order and chaos, technology and craft, and dwelling and building exist as the central preoccupations and perpetual possibilities of architecture. Included are its artifacts, its ideology, its very profession and its complex internal life, fig. 1. Louis Kahn also commented that "when you make a building, you make a life. And it talks to you!" To build is to give life. It is to call forth a life and to embody and instance it in the world. All things though, as the archetypal psychologist James Hillman reminds us, have a shadow. In making a building and thus making a life, one inevitably shapes the end of that building, the end of that life. Within the compelling idea of the first house - the house at the beginning of time - is buried the equally compelling image of its shadow: the house at the end of time. This is a place for dying in. Its fragility and hostility, its ephemeral and temporary aspects, change our delight to anxiety, our ease to dis-ease. In the essay Inside Fear, Anne Troutman describes this 'other house':
The House at the End of Time: Douglas Darden's Oxygen House is about that last house. Instead of dealing with the pervasive image of the house as 'home, sweet home,' it deals with the images found in its shadow. It is about the house that anxiety designed, and buried. Instead of being concerned with a house for living in, it deals with a house for dying in. And not just a house for dying in, but a house for being buried in, entombed in. In that house, the image of home is not longer sweet, secure and comforting. It is dangerous, treacherous and disquieting. It is 'home, wicked home.'
This 'home, wicked home' is called Oxygen House. It is a two-room house that is located at both the end of a time and at the end of a history. It is the archetypal last house. Douglas Darden, a young and very talented architect, designed the house for Burnden Abraham, a disabled signalman for the Southern Pacific railroad, on a site near Frenchman's Bend in rural northern Mississippi. The drawings were completed in 1998. Abraham died shortly after the footings for the house were poured. The construction of the house was abandoned. Oxygen House was not built, fig. 2. Burnden Abraham was confined to an oxygen tent because of disabling chest injuries. Those injuries were caused by the derailment of a Southern Pacific train on precisely the spot that was later intended as the site for his house. The house he wanted was to be his oxygen house: a shelter and setting that would sustain and support his life. It was to be, quite literally, the place that 'held' his breath and gave him life. He also asked that the house be transformed into his sepulcher and his tomb at his death. This was to be a house that would hold and mark the end of a history, Abraham's history. Following are discussions of the literary and figurative origins of the project and the architectural tactics and instruments used to order its composition. These enact, embody and instance the 'soft' technologies that support and sustain the project's existence as a work of architecture. In The Question Concerning Technology Martin Heidegger develops two very careful interpretations of the term techne and discusses two markedly different attitudes towards technology itself. In the first, he links the words techne and poiesis, and writes of technology's inherent purpose as that of revealing things. In this case, technology serves to fashion and fabricate revelations about the essential nature of things and show them forth. In the second, he connects techne to episteme and discusses technology as a means of challenging things. Here, technology confronts, opposes, interrogates and subordinates the essential qualities of things. The technologies that support the design and construction of Oxygen House embody both attitudes. Therefore, the house functions as revelation and as interrogation. Daedalus, architecture's mythic ancestor, was accused of fashioning opera contra naturam, works contrary to nature, works that challenged nature. Oxygen House fits within this archaic tradition of architectural alchemy, but in the end uses its architectural confrontations and challenges to carefully reveal aspects of human nature and culture. It brings these to light, illumines them, and honors them. Letters, notes, photographs, sketches, and final drawings from the architect's archive are used in The House at the End of Time to build an image of the house and its intentions.2 This is in a sense an exegesis: a careful reading and analysis of the texts themselves. The role of the text was of paramount importance in all of Douglas Darden's work. The essay presents the house using the words of its architect, the voice of his client, and a range of other images and texts that embody and support Oxygen House's different constructions. Darden's words, images and texts used to construct this essay are found in the O2 project file in the architect's archive. They are organized under a series of headings that reflect their genealogy: texts, pre-texts, con-texts, sub-texts, and archi-texts. They will be presented in that order in this essay although they do not necessarily appear in that order in his papers. texts: This description of the house and the circumstances leading to its design were found in the O2 project file. Between 1991 and 1995 Darden repeatedly published articles describing the project. He also left copious notes about it. For example:
The following letter was written by the client, Burnden Abraham, and sent to the architect from Abraham's hospital room in Byhalia, Mississippi. It records his thoughts about the chosen site and his impending death:
At some point Abraham made a brief handwritten note regarding death on an index card which is in the project file. It quotes a short passage from Alexander Smith's book Dreamthorp. The words and the thought he sent to his architect were:
Darden included his own ideas about about the project in the O2 file. There are three typed documents that shed light on his intentions for the project. They describe the elements used to compose the house, the instruments that guided and controlled the composition, and the operations that established the program and ritual for the house. These are categorized as: elements:
instruments: life lines: diagonal: Evergreen, lift, bed, and
willow (vertical)
operations:
pre-texts: Douglas Darden used the term pre-text to mark and isolate the ideas that constituted the origins of his projects. He used the hyphen quite deliberately to indicate that these texts were the portents of things to come. They were the heralds of those things that would emerge as he turned the problem over and became engrossed in the dilemma of its origins. They were 'pre-' or that which comes before, that which deals in the archaic, that which deals with the shadowed regions out of which things come into their light. There is also another sense, certainly undeclared, in which the term pre-text was used in the Oxygen House project. The dictionary definition of the word 'pretext' reads: 'pre·text: from prae- + texere to weave - 1513: a purpose or motive alleged; or an appearance assumed in order to cloak the real intention or state of affairs.' (my underline) Our word text has its roots in the idea of weaving and in the construction of a fabric, a textile. It comes from a Sanskrit root tekht meaning to weave. The tect in the word archi(tect)ure comes from that same root, and establishes a connection between the act of building, tecton, and that of weaving.7 One of the oldest creation stories in existence speaks of this connection between the acts of building and weaving. It is Sumerian, and deals with the time of the first appearance of all things. It reads:
We still speak of the fabric of buildings, of buildings as fabrics, and of fabricating things, affirming the bond between our intertwined ideas of building and weaving. The compelling images that come to mind such as the building clothed, the space wrapped, the interior cloaked, the elements draped as if all were in an exquisitely and perfectly woven cloth are an integral part of the making of Oxygen House. They manifest themselves in its ideas, in its elements and geometries, and in our experience of its disturbing 'life.' This idea of the pre-text as a cloak in which secrets are wrapped, in which meanings are hidden, in which truths are shrouded so evident in this project, is a fundamental characteristic of all of Darden's projects. The project files for Oxygen House hold a number of drawn, handwritten and typed documents and diagrams that are all labeled carefully as 'pre-texts.' They are the intertwined threads out of which its validities and truths have been woven and fabricated.
pre-text 1:
pre-text 2:
pre-text 3:
pre-text 4: the dis/continuous genealogy: Douglas Darden's labyrinths for the imagination Douglas Darden's way of approaching this project as well as all his projects constitutes a precise method, a mannered practice. It exists as a personal and highly refined technology. For Darden, each design project was an opportunity to encounter architecture. While one could call what he did research in one sense, the term 'insearch' that the psychologist James Hillman has coined is perhaps much more appropriate. C.S. Lewis observed that we are of two minds about things. One of those minds works in the realm of reason and is in Lewis' words "the organ of truth." The other of those minds works in the domain of imagination, and it is "the organ of meaning." Research, as we commonly understand it, is about discovering, uncovering, and articulating truth. Insearch, on the other hand, is about encountering, unwrapping, and assimilating meaning. And Darden's whole being was focused on the task of unwrapping - untangling is perhaps a better term - architecture's meanings and realities. He fervently took to heart the challenge that Martin Buber articulated in one of his essays: "the only purpose of the imagination is to imagine the real." Imagining the real became an exercise in (or is it of) forethought. For Darden once the project had been made real, there were no afterthoughts. Because of this, each and every element of a Darden project is essential to the construction of the whole. One merely has to unravel its role and purpose. Darden's work is marked by its relentless pursuit of meaning. And his consistent and almost obsessive use of the tool he invented, the dis/continuous genealogy, is the compass that sets the directions for his architectural wanderings and imaginative wonderings in search of meaning.
The dis/continuous genealogy is a superposition of a set of images, each of which holds and carries its own world of meaning. When these are superposed, they become in a sense a labyrinth for the mind. The labyrinth is a unique place in which the imagination can wander/wonder to come upon, encounter and find unexpected and/or surprising meanings. The genealogy becomes a tangle of intentions, loose threads left by an attentive Ariadne that one comes across, follows, and unravels to weave a new set of realizations about architecture, and about life. Darden never separated the two and believed that they could not be separated, fig. 7. He also never forgot that at the labyrinth's center one always encountered the Minotaur. Through that encounter in the heart of the labyrinth one must reckon with the difficult aspect of the self. One is asked to confront and reconcile the tension between self and other, between the cultured and the wild, between existence and annihilation, between the known and the unknown, between love and hate, between hope and despair and, always, between life and death. The archetype of the labyrinth frames a lens through which the intellectual and imaginative potentials of the project beneath the project can be observed, magnified, studied and clarified. Mircea Eliade talked about his own life as a series of encounters with the labyrinth. In his words, a labyrinth is: "defense, sometimes a magical defense, built to guard a center, a treasure, a meaning. That symbolism is the model of all existence, which passes through many ordeals in order to journey toward its own center, toward itself, toward realization and insight. Once the center has been reached we are enriched, our consciousness is broadened and deepened, so that everything becomes clear and meaningful."9 The dis/continuous genealogy, as the specialized labyrinth Douglas Darden fashioned for Oxygen House, was certainly that. The four components that in/formed the dis/continuous genealogy for Oxygen House are exquisitely rendered ink-on-mylar images of an airship or zeppelin. These are a Westinghouse brake coupling; a pre-civil war tender used for inspecting and repairing the railroad's tracks; and a signalman's water cooler and sink. They are drawn individually, and are then rendered as a composite drawing in which they are superposed, conflated, and combined. But, it is not just the images that are being conflated. Each possesses certain formal characteristics. Each carries carefully chosen ideas, facts, and memories. And, each provokes a particular feeling and emotion as one encounters and experiences its particular elements. The superposition and conflation of these particular forms, ideas, and experiences creates the dense and tangled web out of which the project can be woven. They establish the dancing-floor on and through which an Ariadne can weave her dance. She can find her way through the labyrinth of the imagination to find the treasure at its center. And leave a thread/s that one may follow her intricate path. con-texts: The term context, or con-text as Douglas Darden often writes it, can have a range of meanings. The entry for con-text, as the dictionary defines it, reads: Middle English, weaving together of words; from Latin 'contextus,' connection of words; from 'contexere,' to weave together; from com+texere, to weave: the parts of a discourse that surround a word or passage and can throw light on its meaning: the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs. Oxygen House clearly uses its con-texts in this sense, as contrapuntal measures to the shadowed realms that its pre-texts establish. The prefix 'con-' carries another conventional meaning: against or contrary to. It is not used in this sense in the O2 project. In many ways the con-texts exist to counteract the challenges and confrontations that the project's architectural alchemies and 'soft' technologies brought into play. It also, as a form of the prefix 'com-,' carries the meaning of with, together, jointly, and thoroughly. It is clearly used in this sense in the project.
The term con has two other meanings, both of which shed some light on its use in Darden's work. Con, as an intransitive verb, is derived from the Middle English term connen, an alteration of the Old English cunnen, which carries the meaning of to know, to learn, to examine, to test, to study. Con, used again as an intransitive verb, is derived from the Old French term conduire, to direct, which is in turn derived from the Latin conducere, to conduct. In this sense con carries the meaning to lead, to guide, to direct. The three con-texts that are a part of the project file certainly do that. They were obviously noted and carefully filed because they do just that, fig. 8. There are three photocopied con-texts that are clipped to the front cover of the project file. The first is an excerpt from a piece by Klaus Poenicke. Scrawled on a yellow post-it attached to its reverse and written in red are the words: Yes! Use this!
The second is a copy of one page taken from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in the project file. Two disconnected sections of the poem, nine lines, in the section titled Song of the Road are marked and underlined. Another a hastily scrawled note on a post-it stuck to the margin reads: the antithesis of these lines for house. The lines that are apparently singularly antithetical to the architect's position read:
The final con-text is a short selection from an essay by the psychologist Bernd Jager:
These three excerpts establish the interrelated conditions, the con-texts, within which the project occurs and finds its validity. They are there to teach and to guide, to test and direct. They establish the cartography of the projects intentions and fix the intellectual and emotional directions of the project. The directions that bind the north and the south, east and the west, that are powerful portents of Abraham's dwelling. archi-texts: Douglas Darden often labeled some thought that came to him and was subsequently written down on a sheet of trace or scrap of paper as an archi-text. They were, for Darden, the primary and original ideas which colored the project. James Hillman, the archetypal psychologist, uses the Greek word archai often in his essays and other writings. He uses the term carefully and deliberately, writing that 'to the ancient greek philosophers, archai are the basic elements out of which experience is made.' Archi or archai is often translated as chief or as first but it also carries the meaning of primordial, or original, or basic. Tectus, from tekht, means to build. It also means to weave. The archi-tectus may be seen as the chief builder or master fabricator. That is the conventional translation and interpretation of the word architect. But - and it is a significant but - the archai-tectus can also be seen as the weaver (tecton) of the basic elements (archai) out of which our experience of our world is fabricated. This is perhaps a more accurate rendering of the term than the first, conventional interpretation. It is also, perhaps, in this second sense that we should read and interpret all of Darden's archi-texts. They constitute the basic elements out of which our experience of the project and its world are made.
There are a series of handwritten archi-text notes in the file and on the preliminary drawings that deal with the project. Two of those record Darden's reflections and realizations on the subject of death and its relation to architecture and the project. The first one, undated, reads:
The second, again undated, reads:
There are two other short notes that deal with the project itself:
In addition to these handwritten notes, there are four images of the Hindenberg in the file that clearly speak to the project in a range of ways. One is an archival photograph of the airship at the instant of its destruction. It is a remarkable picture, showing the airship as it explodes/implodes and loses its air, loses its breath. The other three are images of the Hindenberg in its hanger. One shows the Hindenberg without its cover, exposing the airship's structural frame: its skeleton and 'rib cage.' Another shows the Hindenberg 'clothed.' Its cover a taut skin that wraps its delicate frame and contains its air, holds its breath. The last image is one of the interior of the airship, with its cover loosely draped within its skeletal frame just before the airship's finely woven skin was wrapped tightly over the ribs of its steel cage. The image is disquieting and disturbing. It reminds one of the folded and 'draped' interior of a lung. It embodies the feeling held by the words Darden used to describe the little industrial building he encountered in that field outside Oxford with startling clarity: I became claustrophobic... I felt a deep, dull pressure...The sensation was not unlike that I imagined I might feel if I had trouble, on occasion breathing: as a man might feel if he had a collapsed lung. sub-texts: Douglas Darden talked frequently about his preoccupation with exposing architecture's underbelly. He was not at all ashamed of his obsession with those things that lay below the surfaces of convention. The things that existed in the realm beneath the conscious, in the Piranesi-like understories of architecture's secret, shadowed, and hidden intentions. He used architecture to expose architecture: to probe the project beneath the project, the program behind the program, the building beneath/within the building. Each project as a result had a set of clear sub-texts - the private stories beneath the public tale. There are a range of documents in the project file that illuminate this 'private' reading of the project and that unwrap the dilemma of its origins. sub-text 1: In 1994 Oxygen house was published in the literary journal Southern Quarterly. Darden wrote a letter to the editor on May 25, 1993, to place the project (and indeed all of his work) within an intellectual context and an architectural agenda. That context 'straddles the gap' between architecture and literature. In that letter, he discusses the connections between literature and his work, and reveals the nature of the sub-text that informed its intentions and design. He writes:
sub-text 2:
Oxygen House is an architectural text that parallels William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying which is the tale of the death of Addie Bundren and of the saga of her burial. Burnden Abraham's letter to his architect is one clear example of the simultaneity that occurs between the texts. There are multiple copies of Abraham's 'letter' in the project file. One of those is a typed manuscript literally covered with handwritten corrections. The text has been extensively reworked, not just once, but over, and over, and over again. Quite often the final version returns to its pure, original and unchanged state. At other times, consistent changes are made to adjust the text's meaning, and to redirect its flow. If one reads the first chapter of As I Lay Dying carefully, and then reads the letter attentively, one cannot help but be struck by the correspondences and analogies that appear. Abraham's letter - or rather Abraham's letter as Douglas Darden writes it - takes the first chapter of Faulkner's novel, isolates, and subtly changes some of its phrases. It then weaves them back together to fashion the text of the letter, fig. 10.The underlined phrases in the letter's text as it appear below show the fragments from Faulkner's original, and map their re-weaving so that they can speak with the echoes of Abraham's voice, and Abraham's heart, and Abraham's soul:
sub-text 3: At the end of the first chapter of As I Lay Dying, at the top of the bluff and directly above the spring and the willow, Cash is standing in a litter of chips, fitting two boards together, making a coffin for Addie Bundren. He is a good carpenter. Addie Bundren could not want a better one, or a better box to lie in. It will give her confidence and comfort. Abraham's house - the place that holds his breath - is neither a mausoleum nor a tomb. The house is in a very real sense Abraham's coffin, as finely wrought and carefully crafted as Cash's box for Addie, where 'between the shadow spaces it is bright as gold, like soft gold, bearing on its flanks in smooth undulations the marks of its making.' It is a better box to lie in, a better box to die in. It is one that gives him confidence and comfort. It was always intended to be just that, as Burnden Abraham lay abed, dying. sub-text 4: There are seven copies of the map of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi in the project file. There are three different versions of the map, charting the evolution of the county in geography, history and memory. Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county. It provides the fictive setting for a range of Faulkner's stories. There is a note on all of the maps recording that William Faulkner drew them. They appear as an appendix to Absalom, Absalom and the different elaborations accompany the successive editions of that work by William Faulkner. The three versions of the map establish a clear 'text' that parallels the written word. They also parallel the geography of Lafayette County in Mississippi, the 'real' locus of Faulkner's world. Events from Faulkner's works appear on the maps, which gives them a place and establishes their ground. The events that weave themselves through Addie Bundren's saga in As I Lay Dying mark the final version of the map. They locate Fisherman's Bend in its south and east corner of the county, on the edge of the Yoknapatawpha River. It shows the run of the railroad track, to the north and west of the hamlet of Fisherman's Bend. It shows the bluffs that move from east to west across the county and that establish the site for Oxygen House at the point where they intersect with the north-south railroad tracks. It locates the bridge that washed out in the flood, the site of the near loss of Addie's coffin: the source of her confidence and comfort. That washed-out bridge points to and foreshadows the washed-out railroad track: the origin of Abraham's death. Faulkner's map also establishes the major lines that are the precursors of the instruments that structure Oxygen House. These are the horizontal, vertical, diagonal, and rotational forces that establish its plan. Its center is also marked by a disjunction in its major lines showing a break in their continuity. That disjunction prefigures the break in the tracks that lie at the center of the diagram of Darden's Oxygen House and that prefigures Abraham's tragedy in the course of his life and death.
In one publication of Oxygen House the plan of the house is overlaid with a not-quite-transparent page. The map of Yoknapatawpha County is printed on that not-quite-transparent page. As one peers through that translucency, one cannot help but be struck by the correspondence between the 'parti' of the plan (the organization of its basic elements) and the structure of the roads, rivers and railroad in Yoknapatawpha County. They are parallel diagrams. One is confronted by a situation in which the ideas on which Oxygen House is based parallel Faulkner's fictions, in which the diagram of Oxygen House parallels Faulkner's fictional map, in which Faulkner's map parallels Yoknapatawpha Faulkner's fictions, and in which the structure that holds the Yoknapatawpha fictions parallels the fabric of Faulkner's real world. Sub-texts within pre-texts within con-texts, fig. 11.
sub-text 5: The quotation from Whitman's Leaves of Grass is both a con-text, and a sub-text. In Douglas Darden's world, things are never quite as they first seem. There are always allusions, and just as often there are carefully crafted illusions. What appears to be an antithesis, what is labeled as antithetical can and often does changes into synthesis. This is particularly true of the Whitman excerpt. Darden's note to himself is apparently unequivocal: the antithesis of these lines for house. That statement is perhaps true of the house at its base, its basement. The opposite seems to hold when one looks at the house's attic which is the level of Abraham's bed and Abraham's world. The base of the house is a dark world. It is the zone in which one confronts the blockhouse and its embedded tomb, the nurses station, the threshold between Abraham's world and the rest of creation, and the oxygen stack that is the source of Abraham's breath, and his life and death. Its directions are downward and inward, and it locates itself within the realm of the shadow. As a closed underworld, a dark place, it is below the surface of the land. It is the 'airless' place where one encounters the Minotaur. It is where one confronts the disquieting, meets terror and anxiety, and where one loses one's breath and comes upon the 'fear in our stomachs that teaches us to build - to domesticate risk.'
Abraham's world, the world of his bed, is a world made whole again. He lies on his bed at the level of the original delta. He rests, trans/figured, on the remade earth: growing in the open air, eating and sleeping on and with the earth, his reconstituted and sustaining 'ground.' It is a world that opens itself up to the land, his land. He lays claim to the east and the west, the north and the south. And, he gathers that land as he lies dying, 'propped on the pillow, with his head raised so that he can see out of the window as his curtains move gracefully in the breeze.' Bound to that land by his infirmity, he gathers its four horizons and claims its four directions. Abraham lies dying/living in and on his ground. He inhales great draughts of space, uplifted, resurrected, redeemed and revealed. He is made good again, and lies/dies holding his goodness, larger and better than he thought. It is a better house to lie in, but, a better house to die in. Abraham, dead, is buried and lies in his own ground. He finds rest in his in his well-crafted box. Like Addie Bundren, he could not want a better one, a better box to lie in. It gives comfort confidence and comfort, because it held the secret of the making of the best persons who grow in the open air, and eat and sleep with the earth, fig. 12. sub-text 6: In the early pre-texts for the project there is no Burnden Abraham. The client is called Mark Veritan. His story, as it appears in the pre-texts, is identical to Abraham's story. He is there in one text, gone the next. There is no record of how he came into the narrative, nor one that tells why he left the project's narrative as abruptly as he did. There is also no record of the coming of Burnden Abraham into the architect's narrative. Burnden Abraham's coming is clearly no accident and neither is the choice of that name. The persona is just too well developed. Its links with the Faulkner tale are just too carefully wrought for his coming to have been an afterthought. His arrival and his character clearly constitute an intentional sub-text within the intellectual and imaginative fabric of the project. Burnden is quite obviously an anagram derived from Bundren. This is a sportive play that weds the main characters in two stories: Faulkner's story and Darden's tale. Making that link is easy. But why did Darden choose the name Abraham? There are no parallel characters in As I Lay Dying. The name Abraham does not appear in that work. Nor does a character with the name Abraham assume any significant role in any of the other works by Faulkner. So, whence Abraham? And why? There are scriptural themes embedded in many of Douglas Darden's projects. The use of the Whitman excerpt as a sub-text in the text for Oxygen House puts a number of scriptural ideas and references into play, as do a range of other ideas and elements which are central to the project beneath the project, the program behind the program. The ideas of revelation, redemption, transfiguration and even resurrection implied by the Whitman piece make clear allusions to scripture, as is the idea of holding so much goodness. The transformation of the fabric of the oxygen tent into the shroud is pregnant with scriptural connections, as is the use of the lift shaft with its lidded cover - the constructed cave - as Abraham's tomb. The presence of the tree in the blockhouse - the burial chamber/field - and its proximity to the well-spring also points to scripture. The presence of the willow that stands near the spring, biding its time, living, dying and being brought back to new life each spring does as well. 'Oxygen House is,' at one level and in Darden's
words, ' a meditation on the so-called death of the South.'
It is also, quite inevitably, a meditation on the South's transformation,
transfiguration and redemption. Abraham, as the central character
in that meditation, is the metaphor that holds the story of his
dying land, the lost south. Just as Abraham, the great patriarch
in the Genesis narrative, held the story and the hope of his age:
the hope of the promised land. The stories in the two texts each
describe their Abraham and their Abraham's tomb in remarkably similar
ways. Each has a woman who 'acts as a hinge' in their lives. The
Abraham in Genesis has Sarah; the Abraham in Oxygen House has Jewel.19
Both Abraham's, as death drew near, established themselves in what
had been 'the land of their sojourning.' Both 'placed'
themselves by buying the land where they were to be buried. Each
was buried in a cave in a field, near a tree and a spring. And each
was buried, as scripture puts it, 'on his own ground.' While
the Abraham of Genesis 'lay buried on his own ground,' the Abraham
who exists as the metaphor for the lost South 'stood buried on
his own ground.' He, as Douglas Darden no doubt intended it,
'stood (and stands) epilogue: last things Oxygen House is an enormously rich and complex project, as this tentative unwrapping of its 'soft' technologies has tried to show. 'Its entire realm,' to return to Bernd Jager's realization, 'is intersected with curvatures, stops and starts, adaptations, changes of mind, irregular weaving.' It is a quilt, a tapestry, a weaving. It is, as are all quilts, a complex text. It is an archai-text that sets out to tell a range of intertwined tales, with interwoven plots, that show forth the basic elements out of which all real experience is made. Its 'official' texts are opaque, and cloak and hide its elusive interiors. Rooms in which one encounters the reality that has been brought into being by and through a profound imagination. Douglas Darden, the project's architect, died on April 3, 1996. In a letter he wrote to an architect in Oxford, Mississippi on July 20, 1991, but evidently never sent, he made the following comment:
In a letter dated May 25, 1993, discussing Oxygen House he sent to the editor of Southern Quarterly that was printed as an appendix to its publication of the project, the architect writes:
The allegorical, hermeneutic, figurative and metaphorical devices Douglas Darden used to shape his Oxygen House also shaped and transformed his thought and his work between 1991 and his death in 1996. Oxygen House defined the technologies, the poetic intentions, that shaped his mature and, as yet, unpublished work from those years. That work became the frame through which he refined and redefined his architecture: "this to me is all that architecture IS: by designing a building the architect asks us to envision a certain attitude towards life and what it means to be alive." For, after all, as Louis Kahn told us: "to make a building is to make a life!" And, if one does it well and gets it right, as Douglas Darden did, it speaks to us compellingly in strange and beautiful ways, fig. 13.
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