A 1hrcc-<lim c nsional t-. focbius 
strip foldin g hack on it self 

TI1c foan generated froot 1...cdom:'s 
shadows u s i~g a prophyl ac ti c 

A n undcmarcatcd surface merging 
i11 sidc/outsidc , puhlicJprivmc 

Sexually a111biguous, it dissolves 
<li scrllniuato11· brnmdarics 

Eng rave d plates of Claude Nicholas Ledoux's Ba1/z Hous e a l 
C lrau x and the House for th e Agricullura/ Guards of 
Maupertuis an overlapping of an ideal of public space with au ideal 
of pri vate lpace 

The re sultant fom1: a product of 
distort ed s urface ten sions 

,, 
A serie s of parall el cuts pcm1i1 s 
reproduc tion of the fmm 



MARK GOULTHORPE 

In the shadow of 1:edoux 
Installation at Le Magasin, Grenoble 

Material dissolution went furthest in our development of a sculptural piece for 'le Magasin' in 
Grenoble named 'In the Shadow of Ledoux'. Here we literally poured the form in plastic, squeezing it as 
the resin set; the form clarifying with time, fading into existence. This form was generated, not in a 
'positive' sense, but negatively, from the imagery of Ledoux in two of his utopian projects (the 'Bath 
House at Chaux' and the 'House for the Forest Guards of Maupertuis ' ); from the shadow, in the shadow - in 
the graphic margins of his oeuvre. It, hangs in the balance between past and future, in a suspension 
in time (poised in the abyss of the present), in a suspension in space, a suspension of space perhaps. 

The exhibition 'Application and Implication' intended to raise the question of the public and private 
faces of architecture which we felt had changed markedly throughout history, from the strict · 
symbolic codes of feudal or despotic orders, codifying and controlling the socius, containing desire to 
the much more diffuse and ambiguous influences of democratic, capitalistic society. 

No longer limiting or restricting energy, they release it, opening space to the great flows of modernity; 
flows of money, flows of people, flows of desire . It is a great curving social surface across which everyone 
is free to circulate, led by desire,by all the mechanisms of capitalist attraction. Our question, though, 
apropos Ledoux (last architect of the King, first architect of the Modern) (Vidler) was whether we still 
inhabit Enlightenment space? Whether the fraternal ideals of these utopian projects - one public, the 
other private - still capture our imagination? 

Our collage, merging Ledoux's social and aesthetic radicalism (hugely transgressive in its time) 
subverts the still clear demarcation between inside and outside. It problematizes notions of public 
and private by projecting one into the other. But such violation of Ledouxian precedent, a continuing 
transgression, is not a controlled or measured manoeuvre, for our use of a prophylactic, a condom, as 
a generative model has resulted in unpredictable and non-geometric volumes. 

A product of distorted surface tensions, the resulting form, is a nebulous and un-demarcated social 
surface. Curving back on itself (as an almost three-dimensional Moebius strip) it creates an 
invaginated pocket for which it is impossible to define a transition point from inside to outside, from 
public to private. No longer an architecture which projects itself out into space through elaborate 
systems of signification, it is codifying space, controlling space . It is the flow of space which invades 
the architecture - a turning inside-out of public space; now a mute and implacable surface. 

The form sets up a series of oppositional logics which reverberate across time. It is a staged 
dissolution of demarcated and structured space and the merge and fade of public and private in an 
indeterminate space of social milieu (Ledoux neither really present nor absent). It is a folding back 
of historical and social issues condensing a form mute yet resonant. It is an irresolute repetition, an 
altercation. 

We built the piece with rings of plywood chosen for their laminated, annular intensity which gives 
the surface a kinetic energy, an oscillation which desubstantiates in some curious way its objectivity. 
An eroded monolithic form, worn smooth eccentrically, it reveals itself as sedimented, archaeological: 
a memorial of the instant. 

In small steel letters, sanded flush with the surface, we embedded the names of the sponsors into 
thegrain of each ring, creating a very real social surface - names flowing across its deterritorialized 
and undemarcated surface. But each one alone, trapped within their own circuit (the independence 
and isolation of the post-modern self) emerged as the antithesis of Ledoux's idealized fraternity, and 
this, too, is evoked by the generative model of the condom, the perfect quotidian object for 
problematizing all boundary conditions: public/private, inside/ outside, self/non-self, the free and 
unrestricted body of the present unsheathed in a transparent veil. 

In this sense the object is not simply a 'body without organs' (Deleuze and Guattari's slippery, 
unrestricted social surface) but an organ without body, a curiously hermaphrodite modern creature. It 
is both a tactile promiscuity and a flotation of sexuality (Barthes, Baudrillard), ambiguous couplings 
endlessly fracturing, endlessly reconfiguring duets: a 'poetry of the incomplete ... ' 

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