Thesis Proposal - 18.

December, 2008

Joel Letkemann
6789583

Terri Fuglem, Advisor

“somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

- W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

“Now it is time that gods came walking out

of lived-in Things…
Time that they came and knocked down every wall
The Apollonian man, remade in the image of the Inside my house…
sun. Western civilization has basked in this glow. …O gods, gods!
The ideal subject. The ideal. The same. As the Who used to come so often and are still
fusion of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Athenian Asleep in the Things around us …”
humanism spread across Europe, whence across the
globe, this image, rooted in a misinformed dualism - Rainer Maria Rilke, “[Now it is time that gods
has followed with it. Humankind forgot the body, came walking out]”
and the phenomenal world that sustained it. To be
sure, this sun-worship, this human narcissism, has
taken its blows. Copernicus flung us from the centre
of the universe into the darkening void. Darwin
ripped humanity from the image of god, into the
muck, the flesh and slime of animality. Freud tore
the conscious mind from its pinnacle, no longer the
reasoning creature, we were once again naked to
our animal instincts, at the mercy of the vast and
terrifying unconsciousness1. Yet we cling to the
threads of this failed tradition, at great sacrifice to
the phenomenal body, the sensible/sensing thing.
There is no ideal subject. Human is an imbroglio,
embroiled and in constant negotiation with other
sensible subjects. We are monsters.

1 Harraway, Donna. When Species Meet, 11.

Traces of this other humanity have lingered in our
myths, in the pagan symbols of a world unknown
but mysteriously felt. Specifically, the figure of the
human-animal hybrid has served for centuries as the
figure of that which is human, but which supercedes
categorization. “…-ghosts
sapped of strength
wailing at the gate
heartbreak at the bridgehead
desire
dead in the heart
haw haw haw haw
-and memory broken
wheeeeee
There were never satyrs
never maenads
never eagle-headed gods
These were men
from whose hands sprung
love…”

-William Carlos Williams, “the Trees”

There’s something very human about the minotaur,
or satyr; what we’ve been unwilling to categorize as
‘human’ gets relegated to some animal or instinctual
nature. Instead of relegating the unknown to the
ideal realm, these myths set in a phenomenal form
those things which are profoundly human, that is,
above human, profoundly monstrous.
“mankind cannot remain indifferent to its monsters”

- George Bataille, “Deviations of nature”

The monsters still lurk within us, “this dangerous
presence dwelling just beyond the protected zone of
the village boundary.”2 The creation or continuation
of these myths in an architectural setting is meant to
provoke a confrontation with the animality inherent
in humanity, and conversely, the cyborgian ontology “The monster is a special case of human
of all things. Cyborgian, in the sense that it confuses representation, is the special phenomenon that
the subjective and objective natures of all beings. encourages metamorphosis, and through it, the
merging of the signifier with the signified.”

- Frascari, Marco, “Monsters of Architecture.”

“The fact that reason denies any valid content in

a mythological series is the condition of its most
significant value.”

- Bataille, “The Pineal Eye”

2 Campbell, Joseph. Hero with a Thousand Faces. 66.
Hybrid figures from pre-Christian Europe and
around the world, farther from the reach of
Athenian and Judeo-Christian philosophy, form
the basis of a new mythology for Montreal. A
mythology of the grotesque, aberrant, or monstrous
that supercedes categorization. The undertaking
is “… an anthropology that itself provides a
living and orgiastic myth to overturn, through its
experience on a collective level, “modern” sterile
bourgeois society.” 3 Myth, like poetry, supercedes
categorization in a labyrinth of meaning.
“Monsters thus would be the dialectical opposite
of geometric regularity, in the same manner as
individual forms, but in an irreducible way.”

Monstrosity - Bataille, “Deviations of Nature.”

Monstrosity in architecture is a function of hybridity.

Its promise lies in the constant overlapping and
excesses of two or more (not necessarily compatible)
systems or spatial constructs. No one mind can
plan a deserving space for another. The architect
must always be of two (or more) minds. The
monster promises the confusion of spatial signals,
of organizational schemes, of programmatic
content. The monster promises ambiguity, constant
phenomenological/ideal destabilization, unexpected
turns and consequences, which provoke a ‘creative’
user, an active engagement with the social status quo,
and with the city4.

The notion of monstrosity extends far beyond the

figures of mythology. It is primarily a social, a
relational, mechanism. Social space happens in
surplus or ambiguous space, in the tensions between
constructs, between territories. A social space
is necessarily a monstrous form, the tangential
graspings of two (or more) (mental) spatial
constructions, two amoeba floating past one another,
exchanging genetic sequences. Spaces of constant
or cyclical social encounters develop as a result of
constant overlapping, the friction of two tectonic
plates meeting, slipping over and under one another,
taking bits of the other with them, and sending
mountains into the sky.

3 Stoekl, Allan. Introduction to Visions of Excess, xiii.

4 See Hill, Jonathan. Actions of Architecture.
The monster in architecture has a significant
precedent. In his book, Monsters of Architecture,
Marco Frascari locates the monstrosity of
architecture in the detail, in the joining of material,
and in the threshold. These localities are a ‘trope,’
a turning. These transitions have often been
articulated, in Romanesque or Gothic architecture,
for example, by the figure of the monster, the signal
of metamorphosis, change, the grotesque excesses of
the perceptual, material, and, social transmutation of
space.

The monstrosity of architecture is also in profound

relation to topos, the varying social, cultural and
environmental forces that characterize ‘place’ as
such. In this sense, architecture that responds to
topos has always been monsterous.

The Proposal

The figure of the monster in mythology is a

generative component of the proposed project. What
is the animal in man? What spatial constructs are
appropriate to the way of life of the figure of Orobas,
the seer, or of the Fomorians, former nature spirits in
Ireland who were pushed from their native land by
the Celts to crystal castles in the sea? What is human
in these stories? And by that I mean, what isn’t
human about these stories?

Thus, there are two foci for the project. The first
explores the animality of humanity: that which is
beneath the rational mind and idealizing schemes, but
which constitutes the mass of our life.
“…already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home
in our interpreted world…”

- Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy’

The second uses this animality, the ‘meat,’5 as a way
to explore the consequence of monstrosity in the
organization of sacred space.
“You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of
instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider,
beyond logic… What we think of as ‘mind’ is only
a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the
reptilian brainstem and the other older, mammalian
mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it
as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads
continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular,
attending its ancient agenda.”

- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.

5 see Gibson, William. Neuromancer
Site
The site in Montreal is the abandoned CN Wellington
rail bridge and the adjacent CN Wellington control
tower. The site is caught between the working
class areas of Verdun and Griffentown and the
redevelopment of the Lachine canal into bourgeois
condos. The site was formerly the primary conduit
of trade in all of Canada, as mediator between the St.
Lawrence freeway and the Great Lakes. It was also,
at one time, the centre of industry in Canada. Now
it is a forgotten island in the middle of the Canal de
Lachine. It is abandoned, and removed from the life
of the city. It is a site rich with the potential for the
exploration of a new way of life.
“The adoration of an ass-headed god seems to me
capable of taking on even today a crucial value”
- Bataille,”Base Materialism and Gnosticism”
Program

The programmatic content of the project addresses

the notion of sacred space as a realm of monstrosity,
as the ultimate space of interface between the
material and immaterial. The aim is not to provide
a doctrinal interpretation of sacred space, but to
admit the inevitability of excess, of metamorphosis,
of monstrosity in any interpretation of the
sacred. The fusion of the Aristotelian categories
of Apollonian and Dionysian is a place to start.
Further explorations include notions of sacrifice and
expenditure.
“It is common usage to call “monsters” an
unfamiliar concord of dissonant elements” the
centaur, the chimera, are thus defined for those
without understanding. I call “monsters” all
original inexaustable beauty.”
- Alfred Jarry, “Les Monstres”

“No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity”

- Victor Hugo, “La Légende des siècles”

“Man (and Athenian humanism) asserted himself by

denying all participation in animality...
He does not want to leave the labyrinth... the desire
he brings into play is not... to get out, but specifically
the Minotaur’s desire, consequently the desire to set
free man’s animality, to rediscover the monstrous
metamorphosis repressed by the prison of projects.”
- Denis Hollier, Against Architecture
Resources

All of mythology, specifically focusing on pagan mythology (pre-christian, or, at least, records of pre-christian
myths)

Books
Bataille, George. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 – 1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. With Bill Moyers. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Daston, Lorraine et al. Thinking With Animals. Ed. Daston, Lorraine and Mitman, Gregg. New York: Colombia
UP, 2005.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books,
1995.
Frascari, Marco. Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory. Savage, Maryland:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1991.
Harraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women. London, UK: Free Association Books, 1991.
---. “The Promise of Monsters: a Regenerative politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” Cultural Studies. Ed.
Laurence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 295-337.
---. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hill, Jonathan. Actions of Architecture. London, UK: Routledge, 2003.
Hollier, Denis. Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
Lefevre, Henri. The Production of Space. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991.
Mazis, Glen A. Humans Animals Machines: Blurring Boundaries. Albany, NY: State University of New York,
2008.
Mcewan, Indra. Socrates’ Ancestor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1968.
---. “The spatiality of the lived body and motility,” in The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian
Dualism. Ed. Spicker, Stuart F. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.
Perez-Gomez, Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.
Rykwert, Joseph. The Dancing Column: On Order In Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992.