Thoughts on Architectural Pedagogy, Draft 02, Paragraphs 6, 7
An investment in thoroughness has been another aspect of my work. The creation of a complex germ that insinuates a complete world seems a key to the characteristic of authorial transcendence. Makers of realities that oppose or distance themselves from their contemporaneous cultural fabric interest me here. Architects like A.W.N. Pugin on the reactionary extreme to artists like Iris Häussler with her fictional reclusive Torontan artist, Joseph Wagenbach, have generated worlds and lives that reflect the passionate embrace of personal interests while presenting a world that seemingly exists fully formed independent of them. This may seem antithetical to the goal of openness. However, the notion of this hermetic pregnancy of work follows Joseph Campbell’s theory that it is the special ability of myth to arouse a level of awe which moves the mind into participation. Another project by the work.group, an exhibition entitled ‘Marquis: A Post-Dated Picaresque Romp Through the Oeuvre of the work.group’ explored a series of unrealized projects in the context of a world in which they had in fact been realized, and followed the impact nationwide civil unrest on their intended function and appearance. In a historical narrative form the exhibition dissuaded visitors from seeing these as architectural projects meant to be scrutinized for their geometric invention, material virtuosity, or functional bravado, but as part of a fabric which they both were key to and which had no use for them specifically.
Similarly, the exhibition of the work.group’s ‘Hider-in-the-House House’ veiled its design process behind the falsehood, similar to Häussler’s project, that the executor had not in fact been responsible for the generation of the work but simply discovered the work of a man who lived in the walls of a tract house he built in order to spy on families. As with transcendent myths, this suppression found in these two projects is beneficial because it presents cultivated realities as immaculate conceptions that are more susceptible to projection.
