Clouds of architecture

Mark Dorrian

According to the newspapers, the recent unveiling of plinary constitution, opening architecture onto what is
Frank Gehryʼs design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation taken to be excessive to it, or mounting an assault upon
for Creation – to be built in the Jardin dʼAcclimatation it. At one point in his book A Theory of /Cloud/ – to
in the Bois de Boulogne – left observers struggling for which Iʼll return – Hubert Damisch characterizes cloud
a suitable metaphor. However, as the Guardian reported as ʻ“matter” aspiring to “form”ʼ, thereby registering
it, the architect himself seemed in no doubt: ʻ“Itʼs a its infinite provisionality and imminence.3 But equally
cloud of glass – magical, ephemeral, all transparent,” the cloud might be thought of as ʻmatter after formʼ,
[Gehry] said. It was, he added, “not stodgy.”ʼ1 the characteristic ʻthingʼ that accompanies destruc-
Stodginess, certainly, is something that the appeal tion and demolition, the dispersion and suspension of
to clouds might well be hoped to ward off. Of all the particles that follows convulsions of matter and that is
flow-motifs available to oppose the heaviness of con- historically and iconographically fixed in photographs
gealed and earth-bound stodge, the slow and complex such as those of the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe
three-dimensional circulation, drift and dispersion of housing in St Louis in 1972, or the attack on the World
the nebular seems the most promising. Moreover, not Trade Center. Curiously it was two buildings by the
only does the cloud seem opposed to all material same architect, Minoru Yamasaki, that supplied the
loading, equally it appears to resist being weighted material for these two most iconic examples of the
down and tethered by signification. As, symptomati- destructuring of form into cloud. At the same time, the
cally, the Guardianʼs report concluded: ʻGehry added Pruitt-Igoe demolition was famously promoted – by,
that one of his main aims was to attract youngsters. for example, Charles Jencks – as the death rattle of
He said: ʻI hope they will look at the building and say, modernism itself, thereby staging that particular cloud
“what is that?”ʼ2 as the registration of not just the collapse of a specific
While there is a long association of divine and architectural project but of an entire ideology.4
fantastic architectures with cloud, from the heavenly
city, to fairytale giantsʼ castles reached by beanstalks, Lightness and pneumatology
to Swiftʼs flying island of Laputa buoyed upon the In 1995 Coop Himmelb(l)au, an Austrian-based archi-
magnetic field of the giant lodestone at its core, it is tectural practice, produced a competition project for
only recently that we have had a situation in which a United Nations building in Geneva, under the title
the cloud has shifted from being a fabulous support Cloud #9. In a breathless text written fifteen years
for the building to a trope for the architectural project earlier, this group – whose affiliation with the sky, and
itself. Clouds of architecture have been accumulating, indeed the clouds, was declared in their name (Himmel-
and the allusion has become increasingly visible as a blau meaning ʻsky blueʼ and, with the ʻlʼ bracketed off,
sort of postmodern counterpart to the high modern ʻsky buildingʼ) – concluded ʻArchitecture must burnʼ.
metaphoric series of organism, crystal, machine, and This text accompanied their Blazing Wing installation
so on. My intention here is to explore this architectural in the courtyard of the Technical University in Graz,
aspiration for the cloud, to try to make some sugges- whose heat, it is reported, smashed the windows in
tions about how we might understand it, and to try to the surrounding historic facades.5 However, the cloud
describe the work that the cloud motif might be said of which they dreamed in 1995 did not consist of the
to do for architecture and architects. smoke of architectureʼs combustion: instead it was,
From one point of view it is unsurprising that they wrote, ʻa soft, fluctuating enigma – a building that
the cloud is an area of interest for practices that see does not want to be a building any moreʼ. Declaring
themselves as aiming to transgress architectureʼs disci- cloud to be ʻan idea without an appropriate conceptʼ,

26 Radical Philosophy 144 (July/August 20 07)

they insisted that ʻat the end of the twentieth century the atmosphere as a medium traversed and saturated
… the idea of cloud acquires a new significance.ʼ with invisible radiation, communication and interfer-
Cloud is ʻa differentiated system rather than an objectʼ, ences.8 And there is something of the sense of this
which as ʻa product of a complex tissue of influences electromagnetic cloud in Coop Himmelb(l)auʼs new
in which it constantly recreates itself … is entirely description of public space as a ʻsemi-conductorʼ.9
without identity.ʼ6 Whatever the gap we might feel Yet, at the same time, one is struck by the resplendent
exists between this and the actual building proposal, luminous, translucent (and auratic) character of these
what is being rhetorically conjured here is something proposals for architectural clouds. Compare Gehryʼs
infinitely responsive and in transformation, something, statement that ʻI wanted to create something that
that is, that is always on the point of becoming some- every time you approach, it shows a different character
thing else. The following year Coop Himmelb(l)au depending on the light and the time of day. I wanted to
extended the allusion to the city itself, comparing emulate everything this word “transparence” meansʼ,
the digitally networked city to a ʻfield of cloudsʼ in with Coop Himmelb(l)auʼs description of their Geneva
constant flux in patterns of complex interaction. ʻThe project: ʻThe cloud envelope becomes a glass-like net
vocabulary of urban planningʼ, they wrote, ʻshould be structure that loosely defines a semi-public space. The
placed in an architectural antique shop and replaced transparency of this shell makes it possible to look at
with phantasms still to be defined, which fluctuate and people moving about through the layers of light and
flicker like television screens after broadcast.ʼ7 colour.ʼ10 It is almost as if, by some trick of history,
At the end of his essay ʻHaze: On Nebular Modern- the destination of Paul Scheerbartʼs Glasarchitektur
ismʼ, Steven Connor extends a discussion on the visual has turned out in fact to be the cloud.
registration of mist in the direction of an account of However, we could also draw a very different
historical line to architectureʼs
contemporary clouds, one that
would pass through the 1960sʼ
and 1970sʼ preoccupation with
pneumatic structures, those
structures structured by air. The
current prevalence of bouncy
castles can obscure the political
past of this technology, whose
architectural uptake occurred in
a context of radical commitments
to the mobile, the temporary, the
nomadic, the anti-authoritarian
and the event. We can look
again at Coop Himmelb(l)au
here, who produced a number
of pneumatic projects in the
wake of the German engineer
Frei Otto and, more locally, the
Austrian architect Hans Hollein,
who had ʻshifted his mobile
one-man-office into a trans-
parent inflatable – a “pneu” – for
a time, to extraordinary effect
in the media.ʼ11 In 1968 Coop
Himmelb(l)au produced their
pneumatic Villa Rosa, a cocoon-
like structure that might be char-
acterized as an expanded essay
in atmospherics, the inhabitant
being enveloped doubly by the

27
pressurized inflatable and an environment of sensory that articulated the homology between the eye of the
stimuli released by technical apparatus located in observer and the vanishing point. However, on the
small spherical compartments. This led, in turn, on to painting Brunelleschi crucially did not render the sky,
their Cloud (Wolke) I and II projects of 1968–72. but instead provided a silvered surface upon which the
In their commentary on the Villa Rosa, Coop real sky was reflected, before being again reflected in
Himmelb(l)au wrote: ʻSince the erection of the first the hand-held mirror. Damisch argues that cloud is
totem pole the goal has been dematerialization. The thus presented as something excessive to the perspec-
dream has always been release from the force of tival system, something that escapes the jurisdiction
gravity.ʼ12 If the pneumatic structure could be under- of perspective and forms its constitutive ʻoutsideʼ. Of
stood as a building made of air, with a minimal cloud he writes:
material support – a building of ʻalmost nothingʼ this unmastered, unmasterable background element
– then by the same token it was minimally borne upon … had to be shown but could not be except by the
by gravity, which is to say, minimally hitched to the use of a mirror – that is, paradoxically, by resorting
earth, that great sump of material and material history to a di-monstratio. Thus the cloud mirror functioned
(ʻeverything we loved and by which we have livedʼ, as as an index (narrowly construed) of a discontinuity
between the order of that susceptible to representa-
Malevich said).13 Here we can recognize the proximity
tion by the means of perspectiva artificialis, and
of the cloud to a modern thematic of lightness and another element which, admitting of no term and
detachment from the ground. Sources as diverse as no limit, seems to escape capture, demanding to be
Heinrich Wöfflinʼs Prologomena to a Psychology of presented ʻin its natural formʼ.16
Architecture and Georges Batailleʼs entry on Form-
less for the Critical Dictionary suggest an elevational Nebular atmospherics and euphorics
economy whereby the movement upwards is associated Now it seems to me that there are legitimate connec-
with the sublimation of base matter into vital form tions to be drawn between this transcendent lightness
– reprehensibly so for Bataille – in contradistinction to that cloud offers and certain reflections on architectural
the lateral, descendental and gravity-directed seep of drawing, which bring the latter within the ambit of our
the former. Batailleʼs famous argument posits ʻform- concerns with contemporary clouds of architecture. I
lessʼ as a declassifying term that serves to depress the am struck, for example, by the terms in which John
status of things, and his references are to squashed Hejduk described his drawings for his Lancaster/
spiders, earthworms and gobs of spittle.14 Yet at the Hanover Masque, produced between 1979 and 1982.
same time we would have to admit that the cloud The community of scripted ʻobjectsʼ and ʻsubjectsʼ
presents us with a formless thing that ascends in all that this work describes are organized in relation to a
senses of the word. central, voided square across which the Church House
In his commentary on the frescoes painted in the and Death House face the Court House and Prison
earlier sixteenth century by Correggio in the cupolas House. Hejduk proposed that the drawings he did for
of San Giovanni Evangelista and the Cathedral in these were, ʻI believe, the first X-ray drawings … The
Parma, Hubert Damisch, borrowing a phrase from drawings are apparitions.ʼ He continues:
Gaston Bachelard, describes these images enabled by During the revealing of a thought the pencil in
cloud as ʻoperators of elevationʼ, while at the same my hand was almost without weight. The lead of
time noting that the cloud theme ʻcontradicts the very the pencil hardly touched the surface of the paper;
idea of outline and delineation and through its relative a thought captured before total concretion. The
insubstantiality constitutes a negation of the solidity, drawing of the Court House … may at first appear
to be the vaguest, yet it is most complete. It encom-
permanence and identity that define shapeʼ.15 We have
passes the whole of a dematerialised thought.17
the paradigmatic example of this last point by way
of Damischʼs classic analysis of the demonstration of Here the material ineffability of the drawing, pre-
perspective reportedly carried out by Filippo Brunel- cisely the lightness of the material of the pencil upon
leschi. Onto a small panel, Brunelleschi painted a the paper – a lightness that, again, makes it almost, but
perspectival rendering of the baptistery in Florence, not quite, nothing – is correlated with thought itself,
making a hole in the board at the vanishing point which finds itself transported and registered on the
towards which the parallels converged. Holding the paper before, as Hejduk puts it, ʻtotal concretionʼ. Here
back of the painting to his face, and looking through we are close to the cloud once more and specifically to
the hole, he used a mirror held in front of him to its spectral equivocality and resistance to being defini-
sight the image, thereby producing an optical structure tively located or contained within representational

28
forms, insofar as the precondition for its appearance with an invitation to work collaboratively on a com-
turns out to be its simultaneous (virtual) absence petition project for Swiss Expo 2001, Diller + Scofidio
– in this case the lightness of a drawing produced first worked – and were entrusted with what was called
by a pencil that ʻhardly touched the surface of the ʻimmaterial designʼ – as part of a team called Extasia,
paperʼ. Thus too Hejdukʼs reference to the X-ray. For on what was conceived as a new media landscape. The
if photography has been claimed to be a spectralizing overarching theme of the Expo was to be ʻSwissnessʼ,
technology,18 how much more so is its offspring the and Extasiaʼs ʻassigned themeʼ was ʻsensuality and
X-ray, which works by lightening and absenting matter, sexualityʼ.21 At first, it seems, the project was imagined
dissolving solid fleshiness into cloud or ʻa spectral as a void that would be made in the lake itself, and be
haze or plasmaʼ.19 called the ʻWaterhole Restaurantʼ.
It may be happenstance that Hejduk – in his peda- In the event the Expo was deferred for a year,
gogical role as Professor of Architecture at (and, and Diller + Scofidioʼs pavilion emerged as a separate
from 1975, Dean of) the School of Architecture at project. Variously described as ʻpure atmosphereʼ and
the Cooper Union in New York – was a teacher and ʻthe making of nothingʼ – the title of a book document-
colleague of three other architects to whom we could ing the work22 – the project was specifically envisioned
refer at this point. The first, Daniel Libeskind, can be as an anti-spectacle, a refusal of the demand for visual
passed over quickly, simply noting his comment that clarity and the scintillating display of commodities
ʻWhat I tried to do with the problem of architecture normally associated with exhibitionary pavilions. The
… was to disengage it from its position on earth … building would take the form of a cloud hovering over
to send it to its stellar sourceʼ,20 along with the ʻcloud the lake, a ʻfog massʼ,23 a piece of architecture made,
propʼ of his competition-wining City Edge project for according to the architects, out of nothing but the ʻsite
Berlin in 1987. The other architects, Elizabeth Diller itself: waterʼ.24 One of the project descriptions put it
and Ricardo Scofidio, who practice together as Diller like this:
+ Scofidio (and latterly as Diller, Scofidio + Renfro),
here require a little more attention as they are the Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic
producers of the most literal and celebrated of contem- references are erased, leaving only an optical ʻwhite
outʼ and ʻwhite noiseʼ of pulsing nozzles. Contrary
porary architectural clouds. Iʼm referring of course to
to immersive environments that strive for high-
their Blur building, an exhibition pavilion constructed definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical
for Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchâtel, beside the virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is
town of Yverdon-les-Bains, in Switzerland. Originating nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself.25

29
 Now it seems possible to claim this as part of a as experiential ambience – was orchestrated. ʻWe
more general equation that links humidity and visual were determined to defy natureʼ, commented Ricardo
definition. As Paul Carter has pointed out, a precondi- Scofidio. Blur ʻwas like a magic trick. A great effect
tion of legibility tends to be that things are dried out, that took a lot of artifice.ʼ32
so that – to take an example – inkʼs temporary flow The hidden support of the project was a steel
occurs upon an arid surface that guarantees the future tensegrity structure anchored into the lake bed, which
shape of the dried character. To expose a document to was armed with 31,500 nozzles through which water,
humidity is to place in hazard its stability won through pumped from the lake and filtered, was fed at high
dryness, by exposing it to the warp and wrack of its pressure and vaporized. During the design process,
material substrate. Under the encouragement of the some large-scale fog tests were carried out, and consid-
humid, whose very emblem could be the cloud, things erable sophistication and ingenuity had to be deployed
lose their linearity, contour and shape: they seep, blot in fine-tuning the technique to produce the desired
and blur. As Paul Carter puts it: effect (irregular nozzle concentrations, for example).
To maintain the cloud within defined limits – to stop it
the humid … is what causes lines to spread, to get
back in touch with the ʻinteriornessʼ of the world. blowing away, dissolving, and so on – the whole water
The humid usefully resists the drive toward ʻleg- delivery system and assemblage was controlled via a
ibilityʼ, producing instead a class of marks where ʻsmart weatherʼ system that monitored the broader
writing and drawing discover their common ground. environmental condition (temperature, humidity, wind
As matter writing back, the humid is the site of
speed and direction, etc.) and regulated the rate of feed
movement traces normally overlooked.26
to the nozzles accordingly. This pumping of stuff into
The architectsʼ own descriptions of the project a zone could be described, I suppose, as a technology
consistently characterize Blur through claims of what of ʻinflationʼ used – paradoxically – in the absence
it excludes, rather than what it incorporates, the claims of any building envelope. And, at the same time, this
culminating in the statement that it is the ʻmaking of technology of inflation was producing what we could
nothingʼ. Described as a ʻmassless and elastic medium call a sort of ʻair-conditioningʼ. Such a point, it seems
in which time is suspended and orientation is lostʼ27 (no to me, opens Blur on to a different kind of cultural
mass, no time, no direction), and again as ʻspaceless, history than that within which it is usually situated
formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, and suggests another, perhaps more critical, way of
surfaceless, and dimensionlessʼ,28 one is encouraged thinking about the project.
to suspect that cloud approximates the propertyless At the invitation of the architects, Hubert Damisch
ʻthingʼ which Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida himself visited the project, and subsequently wrote
sought during their ill-fated collaboration on the design a commentary on it. In this he suggested that Blur
of a garden related to Derridaʼs commentary on the had ʻsomething to do with the idea of an inhabitable
Platonic chora, for the Parc de la Villette in Paris29 place, a place where it would be good to breathe, and
– especially when one recalls the momentary flickering to breathe differently, by inhaling a different air.ʼ
and dissolution of aleamorphic forms that have his- Blur had, he said, a ʻkind of “pneumatic” beautyʼ
torically been glimpsed in clouds, whose art historical (where pneuma is both breath and spirit).33 There is
aspects have been studied by Ernst Gombrich, James a euphoric aspect to Damischʼs discourse here, and I
Elkins and others.30 want to offer for comparison an earlier architectural
It is tempting, then, to see Blur as representing an project which is also euphoric, about an inhabitable
overcoming of ʻconstructionʼ by a non-hylomorphic place and breathing, and which will return us very
ʻatmosphericsʼ. In a richly suggestive essay on the archi- directly to the experiments with pneumatic structures
tecture of atmosphere, Mark Wigley has written that at which we glanced before. The project I have in
atmosphere ʻis precisely that which escapes analysis. … mind is Reyner Banham and François Dallegretʼs
Atmosphere may be the core of architecture but it is a ʻEnvironment Bubbleʼ from their 1965 article ʻA Home
core that cannot simply be addressed or controlled.ʼ31 is Not a Houseʼ, published in Art in America.34 What
There is much to this, and yet one of the things that is is interesting here in terms of the comparison with
striking about Blur is the huge technological sophisti- Blur is that, analogously, the ʻstuffʼ of the site – air
cation and the hyper-hylomorphic control of material – is drawn in, filtered, and then pumped out by the
upon which the vapour cloud is predicated, and indeed internal air-conditioning system with the resultant
how effectively it – as a melding of the meanings internal pressure then inflating the dome. It is as if
of atmosphere as gaseous envelope and atmosphere the project develops an internal environmental cloud

30
which takes the form precisely of air-conditioning and in short, show-stopping. And what could be more
which is consolidated and restrained by virtue of the jaw-droppingly extraordinary than the anchoring of
skin, which, in the Diller + Scofidio project, disappears a ʻreal, liveʼ cloud just above the lake, like a mass hal-
to leave a visible environmentally conditioned zone lucination or a little piece of heaven brought down to
which is locationally stabilized not just by the steel earth. The computer simulations that Diller + Scofidio
structure with its array of nozzles, but by the computer produced indicate that their nebular vision participated
monitoring system too. in the same kind of iridescent, diaphanous imaginary
as that of Coop Himmelb(l)au and Gehry.38 These are
Environmental commodification magical, transcendent and rather untroubling clouds.
Damischʼs euphoric response to Blur was by no means Despite my comments on dust clouds at the start, it
unique, and in this regard it is interesting to note shifts seems that architects are not so much interested in
in the architectsʼ own accounts as the project devel- historicizing their clouds, and certainly not clouds
oped. In 2000, they presented it in terms of an inte- that are part of the modern history of desolation
grated media installation entitled Blur/Babble, in which – whether Ruskinʼs ʻstorm cloud of the nineteenth-
visitors would be equipped with so-called ʻbraincoatsʼ, centuryʼ,39 the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb,
electronically equipped raincoats, enabling fragments or others.
of conversation to be detached, jumbled, resequenced As such, it may be that for some Blurʼs achievement
and relayed to visitors, thus supersensitizing, as they is, in fact, the pioneering of a new kind of environ-
put it, hearing and ʻproducing an architecture of atmos- mental commodification – a new development in the
phere in which the spectacular is traded for the oracu- socio-political history of air conditioning – which
larʼ.35 The Babble media installation was in the end takes the form of a localized air conditioning of
shelved due to loss of sponsorship, but the paranoid environmentally manipulated zones, no longer encap-
sense of being tracked by the building – an explicit aim sulated within building envelopes, secured against a
of the project at this point – is very different in flavour generally degrading environment. As the planetary
to the description we find when the completed project environment atrophies, this argument would run, so
was published in the architectural journal Lotus. Here, capital will seek to reconstitute it in localized and
the visitorʼs ascent to the ʻAngel Deckʼ at the summit socially exclusive zones, and an ideology of purity
of the structure is likened to ʻpiercing a cloud layer would be part and parcel of this. In this regard, it
while in flight to the blue skyʼ.36 might be suggested that Blur has some surprising
The euphoric response might, then, make us suspect filiations with, for example, some of the buildings
that we are indeed rather closer to the spectacle here produced for another exhibition: Expo ʼ92 in Seville.
than previously suggested. As Damisch noted, Blur There localized cooling effects were produced by
did not fit into the tradition of expositionary pavilions tower constructions that used micronizers to spray a
displaying the objects of mercantile production. Yet fine water mist. Similarly, Nicholas Grimshawʼs British
it certainly still sold something, for located within it pavilion used evaporative techniques, such as a water
was a ʻwater barʼ stocked with bottled waters from wall that produced a mist, to cool visitors. This may
around the world. Which is to say – I think without be – like bottled water – an admirable technology that
stretching things too far – that what was being sold addresses a problem: but it is a problem in which the
was an idea of purity. Damisch seems to say as much social can no longer be intelligibly detached from the
when he comments that, at the bar, ʻone could take natural, and it does it in a localized, restricted and
the waters once more, this time as mineral water, still even distorted way.
or sparkling, everything playing on the juncture of And, in the end, what do clouds do for architects?
the two elements of water and air with nothing earthy They allow architects, it seems, to have a foot in two
muddying the waters.ʼ37 very different places at the same time: to rhetorically
There is no doubt that Blur was a remarkable, present works as anti-essentialist, de-ontologized, pro-
and properly architectural, achievement: certainly visional, shifting and dynamic, while simultaneously
one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking enjoying a wonderful weightlessness and a transcen-
projects realized in recent times. It provided a witty dental purity. As a ʻdesignerʼ of clouds one can, rather
and critical commentary on expositionary architecture magically, be a visionary without the burden, and
and, more widely, visual desire. Presenting itself as attendant vulnerability, of having to delineate a vision.
an anti-spectacle, at the same time it conformed As Frank Gehry said of his commission to build a
to the spectacular demand of the exhibition: to be, cloud in Paris, it is ʻheavenlyʼ.40

31
Notes Since Merleau-Ponty, Routledge, London and New York,
1988, pp. 259–96.
1. Kim Willsher, ʻIs It a Cloud? Is it a Cocoon? Gehryʼs 19. Connor, ʻHazeʼ, p. 12.
Paris Museum Unveiledʼ, Guardian, 3 October 2006, 20. Daniel Libeskind, ʻThe Pilgrimage of Absolute Archi-
p. 15. tecture (A Conversational Explanation)ʼ, in Countersign,
2. Ibid., p. 15. Academy Editions, London, 1991, p. 42.
3. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History 21. Charles Renfro, ʻBlur Buildingʼ, A+U 428 (2006), pp.
of Painting, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002, 62–73, 67.
p. 35. 22. Diller + Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing, Harry
4. ʻModern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July N. Abrams, New York, 2002.
15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts), when the infamous 23. Diller + Scofidio, ʻBlur Building, Expo 2002, Yver-
Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, don-les-bains, Suisseʼ, Lotus International 125 (Liquid
were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.ʼ Charles Architecture) (2005), pp. 76–81, 78.
Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 24. Renfro, ʻBlur Buildingʼ, p. 67.
Academy Editions, London, 1987, p. 9. 25. Diller + Scofidio, Lotus International, p. 78. Presumably,
5. Frank Werner, Covering + Exposing: The Architecture it is this ʻlow definitionʼ effect that Anthony Gormley
of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Birkhäuser, Basel, Berlin and sought to recreate with his much-publicised installation
Boston, 2000. at the Hayward Gallery (May–September 2007), in
6. Ibid., pp. 67–8. which the cloud reappears inside a glass box, open to
7. Ibid., p. 21. visitors.
8. Steven Connor, ʻHaze: On Nebular Modernismʼ, a paper 26. From a work in progress. I am grateful to Paul Carter
given at ʻModernism and Beyond: Interdisciplinary for his permission to quote this.
Seminar in Art Theory and Literary Theoryʼ, Trinity 27. Diller + Scofidio, ʻBlur: Swiss EXPO 2002 Diller
College, Oxford, 12 May 2006, pp. 12–16. Available at + Scofidio, Ear Studio, MIT Media Labʼ, Assemblage
www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/haze/haze.pdf. 41, 2000, p. 25.
9. Werner, Covering + Exposing, p. 21. 28. Diller + Scofidio, Lotus International, p. 78.
10. Willsher, ʻIs it a cloud?ʼ, p. 15; Werner, Covering + 29. See Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, Chora L
Exposing, p. 68. Works, Monacelli Press, New York, 1997.
11. Werner, Covering + Exposing, p. 27. 30. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psych-
12. Ibid., p. 28. ology of Pictorial Representation, Phaidon, London,
13. Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Mani- 1977; James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On
festo of Suprematism, Dover Publications, Mineola and the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity, Routledge,
New York, 2003, p. 68. New York and London, 1999.
14. Heinrich Wöfflinʼs ʻPrologomena to a Psychology of 31. Mark Wigley, ʻThe Architecture of Atmosphereʼ,
Architectureʼ, in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Elef- Daidalos 68, 1998, pp. 18–27, 27.
therios Ikonomou, eds, Empathy, Form and Space: Prob- 32. Patricia C. Phillips, ʻA Parallax Practice: A Conversation
lems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, Getty Center for with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Art Journal,
the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, 22 September 2004.
1994, pp. 149–90; Georges Bataille, ʻFormlessʼ in Atlas 33. Hubert Damisch, ʻBlotting Out Architecture? A Fable
Arkhive Three: Encyclopaedia Acephalica, Atlas Press, in Seven Partsʼ, Log: Observations on Architecture and
London, 1995, pp. 51–2. the Contemporary City 1, Fall 2003, pp. 9–26, 19, 26.
15. Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, pp. 21, 15. 34. Reyner Banham and François Dallegret, ʻA Home in Not
16. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, MIT Press, a Houseʼ, Art in America 53, 1965, pp. 70–79.
Cambridge, MA and London, 1994, p. 94. 35. Diller + Scofidio, Assemblage, p. 25.
17. John Hejduk, The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, Text 8, 36. Diller + Scofidio, Lotus International, p. 78.
Architecture Association and Canadian Centre for Archi- 37. Damisch, ʻBlotting Out Architecture?ʼ, p. 19.
tecture, London, 1992, p. 13. 38. Diller + Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing, pp.
18. ʻI then experience a micro-version of death (of paren- 48–9.
thesis): I am truly becoming a specter.ʼ Roland Barthes, 39. See Raymond Fitch, The Poison Sky: Myth and Apoca-
Camera Lucida, Vintage, London, 1993, p. 14. See also lypse in Ruskin, Ohio University Press, Athens OH,
Jacques Derrida, ʻThe Deaths of Roland Barthesʼ, in 1982.
Hugh J. Silverman, ed., Philosophy and Non-Philosophy 40. Willsher, ʻIs It a Cloud?ʼ, p. 15.

subscribe online at
www.radicalphilosophy.com
www.radicalphilosophy.com
www.radicalphilosophy.com
32