PART7: Technology & the Home

The House at the End of Time:
Douglas Darden's Oxygen House
by Peter Schneider

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.

Fig 1: Douglas Darden; Family House, 1983; pencil, prismacolor, pastel, rubber cement on yellow trace, 7.8x11.5 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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':

I do not believe the house is a safe place. For me, it is a collision of dream, nightmare and circumstance: a portrait of an inner life. The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears. Its interiors are a map of the conscious and the unconscious: of their securities and insecurities. There is danger in the house. Closets, hallways, stairways, doors and windows, attics, basements, eaves and cabinets expand and contract with fear and desire. They are the night side of the house, in which the identity and security of domestic life is symbolically tested: they form another realm where daily life is displaced, condensed, fragmented. Within every contented home there resides the house that anxiety built and buried to counterbalance the security of the known self.¹

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.'

Fig 2: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, Oblige Elevation at Night, 1988; pencil, graphite, white crayon, ink on Strathmore paper, 28x34 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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:

Oxygen House is perched on a depressed flood plain north-northwest of Frenchman's Bend, Mississippi. The structure is designed for Burnden Abraham, an ex-train signalman, who must live in an oxygen tent. In the early spring of 1979, after torrential rains, the railroad tracks on which Abraham worked were flooded. They were never fully repaired. That following summer during a routine operation, Abraham suffered a collapsed lung when a train jumped the track and sent metal debris puncturing his right lung. Three years later the railroad company put the property up for sale. Abraham purchased the plot where once he had worked. He requested that his house be built over the scene of his near-fatal accident. Abraham also requested that he finally be entombed in the house.
The house is arranged as a near triptych comprised of an open-air blockhouse, a live-in nurse' station, and a drum-torso encircling an oxygen tent. The functions of the house are organized around three sets of lines which are drawn in relation to the derelict railroad tracks and a living willow tree.³

Fig 3: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, model, 1997; Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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:

July 6, 1979⁴
Dear Mr. Darden:
Today, my nurse, sister Jewel, and I went down from the hamlet, following the path as good as she could push me and my rolling chair. It was my third visit to the place where I was almost killed three years ago. Anyone watching us from the bluffs could have seen Jewel's straw-colored hair blowing more than a full head above my own in the dust.

You can still see the faint depression of the wash baked brick-hard by the heat, which undermined the tracks. The tracks run straight as a plumb line, crossed by the wash. I can now look calmly at the break in the line. My chest no longer goes chuck chuck chuck. I am doing the right thing to purchase this plot for my house.

Close to the break, in the center of the plain, is an old blockhouse. A path now circles the house at four soft right angles and goes on across the plain again. The blockhouse is square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch; it leans in empty dilapidation in the sunlight with a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the tracks. You should have seen Jewel step through the window in a single stride while I took in the shimmering willow beyond.

Jewel tells me that there once was a spring next to the willow. Even from the foot of the bluffs you can see its branches move as gracefully as Addie's curtains. Mostly all that is here is this tree, the tracks, and the sand.

You have asked me to share with you my thoughts about death. Now is not the time for this. I have lived for too many months thinking in a fury that I had only a few days--sometimes only a few hours--to live. I was a bubble.

I can only say that death no longer threatens me. It runs like soft gold between the shadow spaces, a diagonal vein passing through my life. Even though I hardly ever emerge from my tent, this vein gives me an enduring sense of sound movement, of amazement, and privilege. Let's go on and build the house.⁵ (fig. 3)

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:

"It is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human."⁶

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:

Bright Drum-Torso: living chamber for Burnden Abraham
Stone Fort/blockhouse: burial chamber for Burnden Abraham
Shutter-Gate: live-in nurse's quarters
Oxygen Tank: tent support and nurse's tomb
Lift: circulation and Abraham's tomb
Tar Road: entry/exit to the West
Life-Line: stockpile of oxygen to the East
Derelict Track: broken North-South train line
Wash: dried up tributary of Mississippi River
Spring: source of pure water
Willow: existing tree, deciduous
Spruce: new tree, evergreen

Fig 4: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, plan at ground level, 1988; pencil, graphite, white crayon, ink on Strathmore paper, 28x34 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

instruments:

life lines: diagonal: Evergreen, lift, bed, and willow (vertical)
orthogonal: Visitors' tar road (ascending from center, east to
west) finite oxygen stockpile (descending to center, east to
west)

death lines: diagonal: Dried-up wash (horizontal)
orthogonal: Broken tracks (descending from center, north
to south)

mediating lines: diagonal: Live-in nurse's station (vertical/horizontal)
rotational: Nurse's shutter-gate/visitors' stair (view
down/access up) (fig. 4)

Fig 5: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, post-mortem section, 1988; pencil, graphite, white crayon, ink on Strathmore paper, 34x34 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

operations:

operations during life:
visitor arrives on tar road, heading east
visitor is screened by nurse
nurse releases facade
visitor ascends stair
Abraham receives visitor
visitor leaves Abraham, descends by lift
visitor leaves on tar road, heading west

operations after death:
oxygen tent is dismantled
Abraham is wrapped in tent membrane
Abraham's body is removed and buried in base of lift
Abraham's bed is used to cover the tomb
willow is uprooted
willow is replanted in drum-base, level with field
drum-torso is dismantled
drum-torso relocated over well-spring (fig. 5)

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:

when on high the heavens had not yet been named,
and the firm ground below had not been called by name
when no hut had been matted and woven,
when no marsh land had appeared,
and no gods at all had been brought into being,
then it was that the gods were formed within the waters.

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.

Fig 6: Douglas Darden; water tower, 1988; color negative in project file. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

pre-text 1:

This project started with a photograph I took in 1987 of a little industrial building cast out on an open field in the country just north of Oxford, Mississippi.⁸ I don't usually use the word, but I have to say that the building nearly looked "cute." It was very appealing to me.

I started thinking about this little building and what it was that had prompted me to photograph it. I wanted to use the building, to graft it, to turn it into something that was mine and into something which could reveal why I was attracted to it in the first place.

As I said, the building sat alone on an open field. Even so, when I began to think about going inside, I became claustrophobic. This sensation haunted me as the opposite of my initial attraction. Here was this structure, which was from the outside one thing, and from the inside something entirely different. From the outside I felt free, open, and light; and inside, I felt a deep, dull pressure. The sensations were not unlike those I imagined I might feel if I had trouble, on occasion, breathing: as a man might feel if he had a collapsed lung.

I began to wonder what would happen if a house no longer simple accommodated life, but was actually crucial for life's sustenance. It seemed to me then that the house would not only have to anticipate the longevity of the person living there, but it would also have to account for the inhabitants death. The house would be a sort of contest that could quite literally be described as the capacity to hold one's breath. (fig. 6)

pre-text 2:

In January of 1979 a young signalman named Burnden Abraham suffered a collapsed lung when a train speeding next to where he was working jumped the track and sent steel debris piercing his right lung. Abraham now lives in an oxygen tent. He is moderately ambulatory, but he cannot climb stairs. For most of his hours he is confined to a bed. In an interview I conducted with him in 1988 he told me that he sees death "as a diagonal line, making its way progressively through my life." Everyday at least one friend, sometimes two, visit him in his tent. Abraham has a live-in nurse who feeds and takes care of him. Compressed oxygen is stockpiled in canisters to the East of his house. The oxygen in the canister is drawn through a refrigerated tank whose size describes the amount of oxygen used by an average man during an average life expectancy of 74 years.

pre-text 3:

To posit the notion of "house" is to anticipate the LONGEVITY of an idea, of a place, and of a person or a group of persons living there. In the service of this longevity the architect uses the timelessness of geometry to both enunciate and to camouflage the original arbitrariness of the timing of death.

"Oxygen House" is consequently a contest of endurance initiated by geometry and waged by construction using temporal and transitory materials. The limits upon the existence of the architect's conception and design of the house emerge through the elaboration of two things: first, the positing of an enduring metaphor, the lungs, and second, the creation of a terminology of relationships which have a fidelity to the thing to which the original metaphor refers: the breath.

The notion of "house" is thus a concentrated exercise in the context of the architect's breathing in a milieu of conventions: of limits. The house's center shifts to its periphery. It loses its place: its breath. It uses the value-laden terminology of architectural construction to an ironic end. The contest of endurance initiated by the geometry can be described literally as Burnden's - and the architect's - capacity to hold his breath in an atmosphere exhausted by codified volumes.

The project is a concerted exercise in the control of breathing: of inhalation. The house is a bright illumination which is enclosing an opaque, shadowed tent: it allows for the expansion of darkness as a means to extend life. It straddles the gap between out and in.

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.

Fig 7: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, dis/continuous genealogy, 1988; ink on mylar, 14x44 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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.

Fig 8: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, pre-mortem section, 1988; pencil, graphite, white crayon, ink on Strathmore paper, 28x34 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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!

We are still frail and vulnerable creatures, bound in the prison of our bodies, subject to infirmity, pain and the inexorable rule of time. It is the body which, as a system of openness and high 'imbalance', sustaining a living interchange with its ever-fluctuating, so-called 'environment,' perpetually produces feelings of anxiety. But with the triumph of western logocentrism, technological power and material affluence, we seem to have lost resilience in accommodating these anxieties.¹⁰

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:

I inhale great draughts of space,
the east and west are mine,
and the north and south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought,
I did not know I held so much goodness.
Now I see the secret
of the making of the best persons,
it is to grow in the open air
and to eat and sleep with the earth.¹¹

The final con-text is a short selection from an essay by the psychologist Bernd Jager:

Dwelling places the landscape within the tension of an inside and an outside, of intimacy and alienation, of admission and rejection. Prior to our capacity to build there lies embedded in out flesh, as a sign of what is to come, the thresholds which portent of dwelling. The realm of dwelling is one of discontinuity, a world of thresholds requiring the interruption of a fall, the breaking of a straight line. The entire realm is intersected with curvatures, stops and starts, adaptations, changes of mind, irregular weavings: quilts. All entry within the realm of dwelling moves across thresholds. And all crossings of the threshold, all commitments, require a sacrifice: a death in life.¹²

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.

Fig 9: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, elevation from south, 1988; pencil, graphite, white crayon, ink on Strathmore paper, 28x34 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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:

It is a fear in our stomachs that teaches us to build.
To build shelter to absolve and dissolve our fear,
and to domesticate risk.

What if the systems through which we build were reversed and put at risk,
so that the work of architecture returned us to that fear, to that anxiety,and had us see it in a new way.

A way which reconstituted the fear and also gave it a breath: a life.

That life would, by necessity, have to incorporate its own perennial death.¹³ (fig. 9)

The second, again undated, reads:

Death works its way through our lives on a diagonal line; it rarely plunges as abruptly as a vertical loss or a horizontal equivalence. Death, in other words, permeates life: we straddle it and we feel the shadow of life passing all the time. In Cocteau's words, "each day in the mirror I watch death at work." The shortness of the moments of existence between birth and death are the inhalation: we live in the space between breaths: between their in and their out.¹⁴

There are two other short notes that deal with the project itself:

I believe that a work of literature can not only be a source of inspiration for an architectural project, but that a literary work can more directly in-form architecture: that is, a novel can be the veritable client for a building's design. This project will be derived from literature!¹⁵

The man (Abraham) has had his life shaken up and this suggested to me that, in his house, I could put into play - or perhaps risk - the systems that quietly give us peace in the normal world.¹⁶

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:

This project displays my ongoing concern with architecture and its broader relationship to narrative space. Although I was "formally trained" as an architect, I have produced over the past ten years a number of theoretical projects which have been grounded in works of literature. One of my undergraduate degrees was in literature, and I continue to read avidly. More importantly, literature continues to create an agenda for representation which I deem to be pertinently as large as life. I want architecture to have that same agenda and literature has thus been my inspiration and, effectively, my sponsor.

"Oxygen House" is an attempt to draw in architectural terms a parallel text from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. I have not sought to make a set of illustrations for Faulkner's novel, but, rather, I have endeavored to make a somewhat oblique equivalent to the story's effects in the configuration of architectural space. "Oxygen House" is at, once a meditation on the so-called death of the South and on the more general, deeply overlapping terrain of fact and fiction, the real and the invented.

The impetus for the project came out of my attraction for literary maps. Specifically, I mean the kinds of maps drawn to accompany works of fiction, such as Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy, and, most of all, Faulkner's map of Yoknapatawpha County, in which so many of his novels' characters live. Faulkner's map impresses me the most for its ability to set up reverberations and adumbrations with today's South. Whether the map is real or not quickly flies from my concerns. It is carved out of a territory which is wholly true, and that is what matters. I have attempted to carve a similar territory through Oxygen House.

The central character- client is a man named Burnden Abraham who is terminally ill. I had three concerns in designing the work of architecture. Firstly, I sought to design a house for a man who could not stand up, that is, for a man who had to live his life horizontally in bed: lying. [and dying.] Like Addie Bundren, Burnden Abraham is 'propped on the pillow, with her/his head raised so that she/he can see out of the window as her/his curtains move gracefully in the breeze.'

Secondly, I wanted the house to convey the bittersweet balance between Abraham's life and his death: the house had to be his life-support system by which he would be completely dependent upon the architecture for his bodily existence, as well as eventually be his tomb.

Lastly, I wanted a woman to act as a hinge for the man, mediating between his survival and his expiration. In Abraham's case, the space of the live-in nurse acts as a third element which binds his bedroom and burial place, functioning much like the gap we find between our own inhalations and exhalations. It is that gap, a pause, which signals the real possibility of breathing, and of its end.¹⁷

sub-text 2:

Fig 10: Douglas Darden; section of edited letter from Burnden Abraham, project file, 1988; carbon type, pencil, ink on white bond, 8.5x11 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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:

Today, my nurse, sister Jewel, and I went down from the hamlet, following the path as good as she could push me and my rolling chair. It was my third visit to the place where I was almost killed three years ago. Anyone watching us from the bluffs could have seen Jewel's straw-colored hair blowing more than a full head above my own in the dust.
You can still see the faint depression of the wash baked brick-hard by the heat, which undermined the tracks. The tracks run straight as a plumb line, crossed by the wash. I can now look calmly at the break in the line. My chest no longer goes chuck chuck chuck. I am doing the right thing to purchase this plot for my house.
Close to the break, in the center of the plain, is an old blockhouse. A path now circles the house at four soft right angles and goes on across the plain again. The blockhouse is square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch; it leans in empty dilapidation in the sunlight with a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the tracks. You should have seen Jewel step through the window in a single stride while I took in the shimmering willow beyond. Jewel tells me that there once was a spring next to the willow. Even from the foot of the bluffs you can see its branches move as gracefully as Addie's curtains. Mostly all that is here is this tree, the tracks, and the sand.
You have asked me to share with you my thoughts about death. Now is not the time for this. I have lived for too many months thinking in a fury that I had only a few days--sometimes only a few hours--to live. I was a bubble.
I can only say that death no longer threatens me. It runs like soft gold between the shadow spaces, a diagonal vein passing through my life. Even though I hardly ever emerge from my tent, this vein gives me an enduring sense of sound movement, of amazement, and privilege. Let's go on and build the house.¹⁸

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.

Fig 11: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, plan at delta level, 1988; pencil, graphite, white crayon, ink on Strathmore paper, 28x34 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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.'

Fig 12: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, Abraham's window on the world, 1988; black and white negative, project file. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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) ~~buried on~~ his ~~own~~ ground.'

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:

I must tell you that when I designed Oxygen House years ago I had no way of knowing how autobiographical the project would become· I myself was diagnosed last year with a rare kind of leukemia that my doctors stubbornly and somewhat ruthlessly call 'terminal'· It too, am stubborn and ruthless, but on the side of life. (According to two 'experts', I was supposed to be dead last January. I am happy to have proven - and to continue to prove - them liars·)

I discovered doing Oxygen House that when one is willing to really delve into a question and unearth the truth about it, the work that one has done can't help but be personal. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I believe now that when I designed Oxygen House my body KNEW that I had cancer. I was acting out my own difficult connection to that mysterious thing we call LIFE. 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.²⁰

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:

"Oxygen House" was completed in 1988. Two years later I was diagnosed with cancer. At the time that I designed "Oxygen House" I felt that I had cleverly invented Abraham. I thought that the project was operating purely outside myself, in the realm of art and ideas. I had no inkling that I had cancer, even though today, I am sure that it was present in my body when I designed the project. Now when I read Burnden Abraham's letter I realize that there was a deep knowledge within my own body which was being exer/exorcised through the project. Long before I knew that I had cancer and was able to come to terms intellectually with the disease inside of me, my body was struggling to work out its own sensed understanding of the mortal flesh. The friction between this incomplete understanding and my simultaneous ignorance drove the project's creation.²¹

Fig 13: Douglas Darden; Oxygen House, elevation from west, 1988; pencil, graphite, white crayon, ink on Strathmore paper, 28x34 inches. Digital Image by Peter Schneider, courtesy the Darden Estate

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.

Notes

1. Anne Troutman, "Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Places in Dwellings" in Nan Ellin, ed. Architecture of Fear, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997, p.143.

2. The originals of all of the texts and documents used in the research and publication of this essay are a part of the Darden Archive. They are published with the permission of the Darden Estate, which holds the copyright to all the material that constitutes the archive. They may not be republished in any form without the explicit consent of the Darden Estate. The essay itself is copyright Peter Schneider, March 2001.

3. Douglas Darden, typewritten document, undated, Oxygen House File, Darden Archive.

4. There are a number of different versions of the letter in the file. They carry different dates. The date that appears most frequently is July 6, 1962. In all of the other variations, the month and day always appear as July 6. It is only the year that changes. William Faulkner died in a hospital room in Byhalia, Mississippi on July 6, 1962.

5. Typewritten letter, signed Burnden Abraham, dated July 6, 1979, Oxygen House File, Darden Archive.

6. Douglas Darden, handwritten note on index card, undated, Oxygen House File, Darden Archive.

7. Indra Kagis McEwen, Socrates Ancestor, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997. She discusses the connection between building and weaving, and the connection between order/kosmos and the act of covering, clothing or cloaking between pages 43-45 and 107-113.

8. There is a sleeve with 35mm color negatives of that 'little industrial building cast out on an open field in the country just north of Oxford, Mississippi.' There are also two business cards with the initial sketches for the project. The connections between the emerging idea for oxygen house and the existing industrial building are quite evident. The business cards are Douglas Darden's and give his address as Jersey City, New Jersey. A careful inspection of the images of the 'little industrial building cast out in an open field in the country just north of Oxford, Mississippi' show that it is in fact cast out in an industrial area on the New Jersey shore of the Hudson river, opposite the World Trade Towers in Manhattan.

9. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p.23.

10. Klaus Poenicke, Violence, Body, Text: The Hazards of an Ecological Hermeneutic, Discourse 9 (Spring-Summer 1987):10.

11. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, photocopy from unknown paperback edition, p.138.

12. Bernd Jager, The Space of Dwelling, Humanitas, Vol. XII, No.3 (November 1976): 327.

13. Douglas Darden, handwritten note, undated, Oxygen House File, Darden Archive.

14. Douglas Darden, handwritten note, undated, Oxygen House File, Darden Archive.

15. Douglas Darden, handwritten note, undated, Oxygen House File, Darden Archive.

16. Douglas Darden, handwritten note, undated, Oxygen House File, Darden Archive.

17. Douglas Darden, "Oxygen House: A Near-Triptych on the Act of Breathing," The Southern Quarterly, Vol. 32, No.2 (Winter 1994): 123-24.

18. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text, New York: Vintage Books, 1987, pp.3-4. (Chapter I marked in the paperback copy in Darden archive.)s

19. In the early pre-texts for Oxygen House, Jewel died before Darden's Abraham and the blockhouse became her grave. In the Genesis account of Abraham's life, Sarah was buried in the cave at Mach-pelah near Mamre that Abraham bought from the Hittites.

20. Douglas Darden, Typed original letter, unsent, dated July 20, 1991, Oxygen House File, Darden Archive.

21. Darden, Oxygen House, op. cit., p. 124