Damisch avec Architecture

Abstract

An observer of clouds, miasmas, uncertain perspectives, of the disturbing psychic undercurrents of beauty, and the heterogeneity of vision, Hubert Damisch would seem to be an unlikely theorist of architecture. Something as firm, formed, stable, fixed, and unshifting as architecture would hardly appeal, let alone respond to the interrogation of the informe, the unseen, and the unthought as the subjects habitually attributed to Damisch. And yet from the outset, without much fanfare, and with no treatise or book to advertise the fact, this detective of the elusive has been elaborating, through incisive and regularly published essays, a theory of architecture. Or rather, on the surface at least, he has been interrogating other, historical, theories of architecture, in such a way that, if read systematically, and preferably consecutively in the chronological order of their subject-matter, an emergent theory of architecture might be discerned; one that, while not pretending to operative or instrumental status, nevertheless construes the subject in a radical frame, a frame that if allowed will shift the nature of architectural understanding, or, as Damisch prefers, architectural ‘thinking.’