Sexuality and Space

Notes on Sexuality & Space
SA H US F-TS'NTTT
by
Samuel Ray Jacobson
B.A. Architecture UBRA R iE'S

Rice University, 2010
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE IN PARTIAL

FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE STUDIES

AT THE
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
JUNE 2013
@2013 Samuel Ray Jacobson. All rights reserved.
The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly
paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium
now known or hereafter created.
Signature of Author:
Department of Architecture
May 23, 2013
a^I
Certified by:
Mark Jarzombek
Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture
Thesis Advisor
Accepted by:
Takehiko Nagakura
Chair of the Department Committee on Graduate Students
Thesis Committee
ADVISOR
Mark Jarzombek
Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture
READER
Caroline Jones
Professor of Art History
Notes on Sexuality & Space
by
Samuel Ray Jacobson
B.A. Architecture
Rice University, 2010
Submitted to the Department of Architecture

on May 23, 2013 in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science in Architecture Studies
ABSTRACT
Very little has been written on sexuality in architectural scholarship. Sexuality & Space
(Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) contains the proceedings of an eponymous 1990
conference at Princeton University, and was both the first and last book-length
publication dedicated to a comprehensive discourse on sexual identity within the
discipline of architecture. While symposium organizer and proceedings editor Beatriz
Colomina writes in the proceedings' introduction that the occasion's effort to "raise the
question of 'Sexuality and Space'" was but "one small event" in an ongoing discourse,
that discourse failed to materialize. To the extent that feminist theorists conspicuously
ignored in architectural discourse and practice are addressed by Sexuality & Space, the
"interdisciplinary exchange in which theories of sexuality are reread in architectural
terms and architecture is reread in sexual terms," by its essays, asserts the very silence
that its inquiry ostensibly alleviated. By carefully examining the constative impact of
literary style within the publication Sexuality & Space-that is, by looking at how the use
of language, therein, impacts that document's inscription of its intellectual and historical
context-I have come to a better understanding of how that publication was both the
beginning and end of the conversation it sought to inaugurate. "Notes on Sexuality and
Space" investigates three related essays from that publication: Laura Mulvey's
"Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," Beatriz Colomina's "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism," and Mark Wigley's "Untitled: The Housing of Gender." Each
investigated essay has been given a corresponding chapter. My method has been close
reading, or the sustained interpretation of brief passages of text. Paying close attention
to individual words, syntax, and the order in which ideas unfold as they are read, I have
developed a comprehensive narrative of how these three essays, together, both
instantiate and negate a shared discourse. To these ends, this thesis raises serious
questions about what it means to have historiography after silence, and what it means
to re-open an already closed discourse.
Thesis Supervisor: Mark Jarzombek

Title: Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture
Figure 1 Notorious publicity still N. 105, MGM Studios, 1946.
NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE
11 Laura Mulvey and the Status of the Antecedent
18 Beatriz Colomina and the Excluded Middle
55 On "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" by Mark Wigley
77 After Sexuality & Space
87 Works Cited
I thank my advisors, Mark Jarzombek and Caroline Jones, for their advice and
encouragement; Mary Ellen Carroll, for her support; Nisa Ari and Abi Shapiro for their
feedback; Irina Chernyakova, Antonio Furgiule, and Mariel Villere, for putting up with
me; Izabel Gass, Diana Henderson, Ateya Khorakiwala, Linda Blum, and Kim Surkan,
for their ideas about what this thesis should (and should not) be; Reiko Wei, Ryan Botts,
and Nana Last, for unwittingly helping to start this project, many years ago; and Carlos
Minguez Carrasco, for his assistance at the Storefront for Art and Architecture archive.
I thank Lexx Gray, for being my friend, and Roland Betancourt, for loving me, somehow.
With apologies to Beatriz Colomina, who I've always admired.

For my mother.
11
"PANDORA: TOPOGRAPHIES OF THE MASK AND CURIOSITY"
LAURA MULVEY AND THE STATUS OF THE ANTECEDENT
At the beginning of "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," Laura Mulvey
takes note of her self-reflexivity in composing that essay. In her words, "I became
conscious of a dawning sense of d6je vu. While thinking I was mapping new ground, I
found myself back with themes that had frequently figured in my work before" (Mulvey,
"Topographies" 54). Where "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity"
encounters once more Greek myth, Hitchcock, psychoanalytic theory, and the look in
cinema, Mulvey proceeds as if through a "new turn of the kaleidoscope," representing
familiar themes in unfamiliar ways.
Mulvey's kaleidoscopic turn is appropriate, when examined in context. In its own
way, each essay included in Sexuality & Space takes a similar approach, presenting
material that had already been published in a new configuration. This is particularly true
of the two other texts considered in this thesis: "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism"
combines writings from a magazine Beatriz Colomina worked on during her college
years, a co-authored book, and articles published in Assemblage and AA Files;' Mark
Wigley's "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" consists entirely of historiography.
Moreover, in both "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" and "Untitled: The Housing of
Gender," Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) is cited
extensively. These citations are offered in a manner that makes the essay seem
emblematic of the "kinds of work on representation and desire developed over the last
fifteen years by feminist theorists" (Colomina, introduction to S&S n.p.) that the 1990
symposium intended to bring to the attention of architectural discourse and practice.
Respectively,
Quetglas, Jose. "Lo Placentero." Carrier De La Ciutat 9-10 (1980): 2. Print. Note, cited in Colomina, "The
Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" 92; for an in-depth discussion of this citation, see the second
chapter of this thesis. Print.
Risselada, Max, and Beatriz Colomina. Raumplan versus Plan Libre: Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier 1919-
1930. New York: Rizzoli, 1988. Print.
Colomina, Beatriz. "Le Corbusier and Photography" Assemblage 4 (1987). Print. Note, cited in Colomina,
"The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" 112 (footnote 47).
Colomina, Beatriz. "Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interior of Adolf Loos." AA Files 20 (1990): 5-15. Print.
Note, cited in Wigley, "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" 385.

12
Reading laterally, it is apparent that a shared interest in unveiling is what

established "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" as the primary conceptual
antecedent to both "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" and "Untitled: The Housing of
Gender." For example, in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Beatriz Colomina
considers the female body as signified in representations of space; as Colomina makes
evident in her essay, media such as photography and film undermine and dematerialize
architecture's gendered "organizing geometry." Additionally, in "Untitled: The Housing of
Gender" Mark Wigley considers the regulation of the female body through spatial and
disciplinary boundaries; as Wigley writes, "subordinated femininity is produced
historically" by the evolution of domestic interiors and discourse on exterior ornament. In
both of these essays, dialectics of interior and exterior are derived from connotations
implicit in the female/male gender binary; in the terms of "Untitled: The Housing of
Gender," this is "the role of sexuality in the construction of space." Following this
proposition, the role of the architectural historian is to make explicit these implicit
connotations. Such performance is analogous to Laura Mulvey's demonstration of how
the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form in "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema."
While it is unveiling that captures the attention of Colomina and Wigley, the veil
itself is the subject of "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity." It is through
the figure of the veil that Mulvey can speak to the spatial concepts of interest to her
architectural audience. In the essay, Mulvey considers the image of the female body as
a sign, and analyzes it in terms its symbolic topography. In this manner, the exploration
of cinematic tropes speaks to issues of ontology in space. As "Pandora: Topographies
of the Mask and Curiosity" explains, the topography of the female body in cinema both
conceals and reproduces anxieties projected onto the feminine within the patriarchal
psyche. Beginning with an extract from Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), Mulvey
explores how narrative cliches are translated into characters in art and drama, informed
by the aesthetics of gender. Because representations of the mythic figure Pandora in
different media 2 involve a shared iconography, Mulvey argues that the figure of Pandora
presents "an intermittent strand of patriarchal mythology and misogyny" that extends
"across the ages" (Mulvey, "Topographies" 63). The spatial manifestation of this
mythology derives from "the inside/out polarization" in castration anxiety,
iconographically represented in images of the female body. Depictions of Pandora by
men in art, psychoanalysis, and cinema are each in their own way generated by
castration anxiety, a fetish whereby "an appropriate object is substituted to stand in for
the missing penis" (68). In this way, fetish depends on topography, where the psyche
produces a signifier (Pandora) who functions as a mask, which veils a trauma which
cannot itself be signified (castration).
Because the concept of topography bridges the symbolic and spatial, as well as
space and its representation, it functions as a fulcrum between Mulvey's interest in
signification and her interlocutors' interests in media and the built environment. In both
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and
2 in
Renaissance painting, early twentieth century science fiction, Freudian psychoanalysis, and
contemporary consumer goods, specifically
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

13
Curiosity," signifiers articulate topography because they are spatial rather than because
they refer to spaces. Consider, for example, Mulvey's depiction of cinematography in
Hitchcock's Notorious:
The camera itself emphasizes the look of curiosity, tracking with Ingrid
Bergman's point of view as she surreptitiously and inquisitively looks for clues.
Again, the chain of signifiers builds up metonymically, linking together the images
of space and enclosure from the house itself, the double clanging of the front
door, to the montage of cupboards that she looks into. I would argue that the
topography of the mise-en-scene enhances the spatial implications of the look
of curiosity and also reflects the spatial configuration of the heroine's
masquerade. (Mulvey, "Topographies" 65; emphasis mine)
Here, the physical interval traversed by a tracking shot is analogous to its corresponding
duration in cinematic narrative. As Mulvey describes it, space is configured by the gaze,
which is in turn subject to the symbolic signification of what it sees. This process occurs
in space, but the space in which it occurs is only a medium.
The "space of secrets" Mulvey analyzes from Notorious and her study of
iconographically similar depictions of the figure Pandora emerges from the gendered
aesthetics of curiosity rather than a pre-existing territory. While Mulvey analyzes
realities manifest in space, the spaces she depicts are secondary to their intersection of
the feminine, memory, and cliche. Paraphrasing Dora and Irwin Panofky's iconological
study Pandora's Box (1956), Mulvey argues that the figure of Pandora can be identified
by the presence of a box, across art history. The connotation of woman and box,
together, is dependent on their juxtaposition in space.3 The space of this juxtaposition
and that to which it refers is represented by Mulvey-for example within the engraving
by Abraham van Diepenbeck and drawing by Paul Klee identified by the Panofksys in
their book 4 and cited by Mulvey in her essay-but only insofar as this depiction
illuminates an argument about symbolic signification.5
With this in mind it can be said that the evocative nature of Pandora's spatial
imagery is phantasmagorical, in the literal sense of the word. Like phantasmagoria, in
the literal sense of the word, the "intermittent strand of patriarchal mythology and
misogyny" evident in historical depictions of Pandora and her box consists of optical
effects and illusions, a constantly shifting succession of things seen and imagined, and
bizarre assemblages: images and the cinema are discussed, the representations
a Mulvey writes, "[t]he reverberations of connotation between Pandora and her box depend on contiguity:
both the juxtaposition of the figure to the box and the topography of the female body as an enclosing
space link metonymically to other enclosing spaces" ("Topographies" 63).
4 Panofsky, Dora, and Erwin Panofsky. Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol. New
York: Pantheon, 1956. Print. 77, 113
' As Mulvey notes, this method of spatial depiction has a precedent in the work of Sigmund Freud. "Freud
used the concept of a topography to convey the structure of the psyche, the relation, that is, between the
unconscious, preconscious, and conscious minds. He used spatial imagery to visualize the dream work,
describing the manifest content as a fagade, concealing the latent dream thoughts. The image of
concealment, of veiling, seems to imply that one lies, like a layer, behind the other" ("Topographies" 66).

14
produced are all dependent upon the manipulation of the visual, and the complete set of
art historical artifacts considered is eccentric to Mulvey's particular investigation. The
etymology of "phantasmagoria" captures this last, enigmatic nature of Laura Mulvey's
desired "reformulation" of Pandora's iconography. While Pandora characterizes cliches
of femininity as a transgressive and dangerous enigma, "Pandora: Topographies of the
Mask and Curiosity" resituates these motifs within a transgressive, feminist curiosity. In
so doing Mulvey leverages the spectral quality of phantasmagoria, as derived from the
Old French fantasme, in the interest of a collective, hermeneutic effort: "an investigation
of the slippages between signifier and signified, that characterize both the structure of
the individual psyche and the shared fantasies of a common culture" (Mulvey,
"Topographies" 66).
It is also noteworthy that phantasmagoria, in the theatrical (rather than literal)
sense, is politicized within Laura Mulvey's essays. In "Pandora: Topographies of the
Mask and Curiosity," the interval between the iconography of Pandora and Bergman's
portrayal of "the look of curiosity" inhabited by her character (Alicia Hoberman) is
analogous to the interval between the spectral terror of phantasmagoric theater and the
collective, affective pleasure of the cinema.' In Notorious the spatial register of mise-en-
sc6ne enhances the experience of feminine curiosity so that it can be "transmuted into a
pleasure of decipherment;" in this way, the "mystery and threat" of female sexuality
signified by Pandora's Box can be "interpreted as a curiosity about the mystery she
herself personifies" (Mulvey, "Topographies" 65-6, paraphrased liberally). As Mulvey
writes, the experience of cinema amplifies this phenomenon by translating the
imaginary into the symbolic. Inasmuch as Pandora functions as a collective mnemic
(imaginary) symbol, her presence in cinema materializes the anxiety she signifies in an
emotionally resonant form.' In this way, narrative is transformed into a collective
experience.
As Mulvey writes in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," when accompanied
by psychoanalytic theory this transformation can advance the understanding of the
patriarchal status quo as exemplified by the scopophilic gaze. In contrast to the
symbolic space of film, the topography of built objects resists connotation. Charged with
the responsibility for use, architecture lacks the "dislocation of word and image"
characteristic of cinema in Mulvey's description; while film is viewed, architecture is
6 Invented in France in the late 18 century, phantasmagoria is a theatrical technique which uses a
"magic lantern" to project frightening images onto walls and screens; this form of projection is one of the
many precursors of film.
7 "[Certain] images persist through history, giving private reverie a shortcut to a gallery of collective
fantasy, inhabited by monsters and heroes, heroines and femme fatales. To my mind, these images and
stories function like collective mnemic symbols, and allow ordinary people to stop and wonder or weep,
desire or shudder, resurrecting for the time being long lost psychic structures The symbolic space of
cinema allows for the resurrection of these persistent figures in the present imaginary: The cinema, with
its strange, characteristic dislocation between word and image, fulfills this psychic function beautifully,
drawing on preexisting connotations, metaphors, and metonymies to achieve a level of recognizable, but
hard to articulate, emotional resonance that evades the precision of language and then materializes
amorphous anxieties and desires into recognizable figures who will gain strength and significance from
repetition" (Mulvey, "Topographies" 67-8).
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

15
sensed: seen, felt, and occupied in continuous and unrepeatable ways. Although
Beatriz Colomina's investigation of architectural representation in "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism" and Mark Wigley's architectural historiography in "Untitled: The
Housing of Gender" seek for architecture to signify in the multiple registers of
metonymy, their use of second-order material (photography and film, and architectural
treatises, respectively) both render architecture as symbolically impotent on its own
accord. Their architecture cannot signify alone.
Ironically, the interdisciplinary exchange between theories of architecture and
theories of sexuality initiated by Sexuality & Space re-enforces architecture's symbolic
impotence. In the terms of castration anxiety outlined by Sigmund Freud, one can argue
that the discourse exemplified by the 1990 symposium stands in as an "appropriate
object" to compensate for the symbolic impotency of architecture relative to other
media. The shared dialectic of inside and outside allows for Laura Mulvey's feminist
theory of iconography to facilitate an architectural engagement with the gendered
ontology of space; to this end Beatriz Colomina expands upon Mulvey's theory of the
gaze to discuss the gendering of interior and exterior spaces in architectural
photography, and Mark Wigley interrogates the gender identity of the "Renaissance
space" referred to in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."' However, in their
engagement with gender both Colomina and Wigley inadvertently assert an
9
architectural interior/exterior condition coextensive with embodied sexual difference.
Even though Mark Wigley claims that architecture's "subordinated femininity is
produced historically" both "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" and "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism" portray an unavoidably phallocentric relationship between
sexuality and architecture. In sum, Colomina and Wigley's essays in Sexuality & Space
instruct readers in a chronic architectural reality rather than offering indications for
dialectical engagement and political transformation.
In Sexuality & Space, the mask of interdisciplinarity covers over the problematic aspects
of architecture's patriarchy. In this sense, without intending to do so, the historians
castrate architecture as a symbolic system. "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and
8 Intwo instances: 1) "A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the
male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment
the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and
space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in
To Have or Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo)
integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the
Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-
out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen" (Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure" n.p.). 2) "The camera
becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible
with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the
camera's look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator's surrogate can
perform with verisimilitude" (ibid.).
9 interiors are feminine and therefore the space of women, exteriors are masculine and therefore refer to
masculinity

16
Curiosity" was published two years after the initial symposium at Princeton University,
and its conclusion offers a critique of the event.
I bring this final passage to our attention now as a means of framing the aspects
of Sexuality & Space that made it of such interest to me, from a critical perspective. It is
clear that that rather than exploit curiosity about the condition of the feminine in
architectural history, Sexuality & Space remains fixated on concealed spaces, hidden
areas, and discursive silences. In this fetishization of the void, event and proceedings
perpetuate the "refusal to accept the difference that the female body signifies" identified
by Laura Mulvey as axiomatically antithetical to study of gender. Consequently,
Mulvey's paraphrased iconology of Pandora applies equally as a historiography of
Sexuality & Space:
Out of this series of turning away, of covering over, not the eyes but
understanding, of looking fixedly at any object that holds the gaze, female
sexuality is bound to remain a mystery, condemned to return as a mnemic
symbol of anxiety while overvalued and idealized in imagery. ("Topographies" 70)
In response to this problem/problematic, "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and
Curiosity" offers the scholarly subject-position of "feminist theory" as a type of
complicated directive:
The deciphering that feminist theory has undertaken in order to analyze the
female body as a sign has revealed the literal realities of spaces and images to
be as elastic as the forms of metaphor and metonymy themselves. There is
nothing behind the mask, no veil to tear away, not even an emptiness to be
revealed, only traces of disavowal and denial, the shifting signifiers that bear
witness to the importance that psychoanalysis and semiotics have had to feminist
criticism. ("Topographies" 71)
The final sentence in the excerpt above gives presence to the analysis Mulvey speaks
of, and then concludes using the present perfect tense. While Mulvey seems to imply a
progress from an antecedent, there is no projection and nothing to follow. Recalling
Frederic Jameson,'" Mulvey notes the ongoing methodological shift from decipherment
10 "This is perhaps the moment to say something about contemporary theory, which has, among other
things, been committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the
inside and the outside and of stigmatizing such models as ideological and metaphysical. But what is
today called contemporary theory--or better still, theoretical discourse--is also, I want to argue, itself very
precisely a postmodernist phenomenon. It would therefore be inconsistent to defend the truth of its
theoretical insights in a situation in which the very concept of "truth" itself is part of the metaphysical
baggage which post-structuralism seeks to abandon. What we can at least suggest is that the
poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutic, of what I will shortly call the depth model, is useful for us as a
very significant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which is our subject here. Over hastily, we can
say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside and outside which Munch's painting develops, at least
four other fundamental depth models have generally been repudiated in contemporary theory: (1) the
dialectical one of essence and appearance (along with a whole range of concepts of ideology or false
consciousness which tend to accompany it); (2) the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of
repression (which is, of course, the target of Michel Foucault's programmatic and symptomatic
pamphlet La Volante de savoir [The history of Sexuality]); (3) the existential model of authenticity and
inauthenticity whose heroic or tragic thematics are closely related to that other great opposition between
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

17
into interest in surface manifestations, and then the collapse of latent and manifest into
textual play. These lines question the relevance of feminist inquiry in the postmodern
era, undermining the structuralist framework of architectural theories developed by
Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. So Mulvey argues, by 1990 "feminist theory" had
exhausted itself as a depth model: its semiotics softened by deconstruction, such
inquiry could only offer ideological critique in the mode of self-reflexivity. With the
privilege of age Mulvey addresses hermeneutic crisis through kaleidoscopic self-
reflexivity, revising her earlier work through the prismatic refraction of the postmodern
turn. To the extent that this is not possible for her younger, extra-disciplinary peers, the
void that would emerge at the intersection of feminist and architectural theories resulted
from the critique of an ideology that had already been redacted.
In Sexuality & Space, there was nothing to say because there was nothing to say.
alienation and disalienation, itself equally a casualty of the poststructural or postmodern period; and (4)
most recently, the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified, which was itself rapidly
unraveled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. What replaces these
various depth models is for the most part a conception of practices, discourses, and textual play, whose
new syntagmatic structures we will examine later on; let it suffice now to observe that here too depth is
replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what if often called intertextuality is in that sense no longer a
matter of depth)" (Jameson, "The Postmodern Condition" n.p.). Thanks to Caroline Jones for making this
connection clearer to me.

18
"THE SPLIT WALL: DOMESTIC VOYEURISM"
BEATRIZ COLOMINA AND THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE
In the volume Sexuality & Space, Beatriz Colomina's contribution is positioned

immediately after Laura Mulvey's. In her opening quotation (below), Colomina plays with
that juxtaposition:
"To live is to leave traces," writes Walter Benjamin, in discussing the birth of the
interior. "In the interior these are emphasized. An abundance of covers and
projectors, liners and cases is devised, on which the traces of objects of
everyday use are imprinted. The traces of the occupant also leave their
impressions on the interior. The detective story that follows these traces comes
into being... The criminals of the first detective novels are neither gentlemen nor
apaches, but private members of the bourgeoisie." (Colomina, "The Split Wall"
74)
As we will explore, "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" engages the scopophilic
construction of space discussed in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" from a
perspective sympathetic to the male gaze. The dialectical character of this methodology
is represented through citation, and these first lines are one example. With her opening
quotation, Colomina situates her architectural inquiry within sociological critique, and
invests epistemological authority in the figure of Walter Benjamin. This can be
contrasted with "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," a deconstruction of film which
proceeds from psychoanalysis, isolating the voyeuristic activity of children, described by
Sigmund Freud, as the origin of objectification in mainstream cinema." The opening
paragraph of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" diffuses the possible associations of
its forthcoming arguments with those of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," first by
displacing Mulvey's interest in symptoms and symbols for critique and the physicality of
"traces" and, second, by invalidating the credibility of Mulvey's theory by invoking the
name of a postmodern father-figure.
Where Colomina's first paragraph displaces the "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema" constatively, by positioning "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" in another
historiographical context, the second paragraph displaces performatively: indicating an
affinity between "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" and "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," but appealing to another antecedent. In the second paragraph, "The
1 Mulvey argues that visual pleasure in narrative cinema emerges from an inability to recognize one's
likeness in the human form portrayed. Objectification depends upon the misrecognition of female bodies,
as subjects, from film's straight/male perspective.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

19
Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," said to reveal "the hidden mechanisms by which
space is constructed as an interior," is also described as "a detective story of detection
itself, of the controlling look, the look of control, the controlled look" (74). These phrases
correspond with Laura Mulvey's description of scopophilia as "taking other people as
objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze" (Mulvey "Visual Pleasure"
n.p.)," and therefore encourage association between that narrative and Colomina's
forthcoming arguments. However, immediately after alluding to "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema," Colomina's refers back to the Benjamin text quoted in her previous
paragraph, inquiring "where would the traces of the look be imprinted?" and implying a
scholarly method based on detective work ("What do we have to go on? What clues?").
This interest in symbolic decipherment is analogous to the psychoanalysis of "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," of course, but that affinity is less apparent than a more
literal similarity to the selection from "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" offered in
the previous paragraph.
With its opening citation of Walter Benjamin, "The Split Wall: Domestic
Voyeurism" enacts a structural dislocation between its author, as signifier, and her text's
signified antecedents. As a result, Beatriz Colomina occupies an excluded middle
between the essay and its citations." The first paragraphs of "The Split Wall: Domestic
Voyeurism" circumscribe an interval of difference between two schemas, that which is
personified by Laura Mulvey, and that which is represented by the figure of Walter
Benjamin. By virtue of Colomina's insinuation of their difference, each episteme is
portrayed as mutually exclusive. To the extent that she is successful in constructing
their dissimilarity, Colomina embodies the interval between the two systems
represented. It follows that, in the selections I have addressed, Colomina's authorship
acts as if it were transparent. Insofar as this transparency is believable, Colomina is
unaccountable for her prose. The author can say whatever she wants, as long as her
statements she can be associated with one external referent or the other, without
contradiction.
This is strategic. As I will demonstrate, Colomina's writing expresses its
intentions aesthetically and the expression of those intentions has a performative effect,
silently interpolating relationships between its readers, prose, and intellectual context.
This modification of reader relations has a meaningful impact on the constative content
of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," distorting the historical material discussed and
radically reframing the discourses the essay was written to participate in.
1 Following Mulvey's narrative, it is "the controlling look" that transforms people into objects, "the look of
control" that enforces this, and "the controlled look" which characterizes cinematic conventions; in noting
that the essay is "a detective story" of these categories, it is implied that "The Split Wall: Domestic
Voyeurism" situates itself in the framework established by "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."
13 In logic, the Law of the Excluded Middle states that every proposition is either true or false such that
there is no third truth-value and no statements lack truth-value. In this situation an "excluded middle"
exists between two mutually exclusive alternatives; what this instance contains is either untrue, or points
to the artificiality of its related binary.

20
Attendant, substantive stylistic maneuvers

In the first paragraphs of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Beatriz Colomina's
inscription of an excluded middle instigates attendant, substantive stylistic maneuvers.
Primary among these is a calculated exploitation of intellectual context. The
opening Benjamin quote is one example of this. What Colomina describes in the second
paragraph is analogous to what Mulvey has written previously, but this description is
couched in a different frame of reference. The excluded middle gives Colomina free-
play in fashioning her text's intellectual context. Here, a resemblance is constructed, but
also denied. It is meaningful that the text's expressed affiliation-with Walter
Benjamin-corresponds to a canonical forerunner to the postmodern turn. In "The Split
Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Colomina often grounds that which is described in its
possible characterization as or with the first entry in a series. In this case, Colomina
situates her essay in relation to a genealogically primary discursive coadjutor. The effect
of this constructed relation is to add meaning to theses by virtue of an implied reflection
and repetition in other venues. Colomina starts by quoting Walter Benjamin to add her
essay the clout of his reputation, by virtue of her affiliation, despite a more obvious
affiliation with the work of another scholar (Laura Mulvey). It is as if she writes with his
blessing.
For a slightly different example, consider Colomina's claim that the Moller House
(Adolf Loos, Vienna, 1928), "traditionally considered to be prototype of the Raumplan,
also contains the prototype of the theater box" (85). This statement comes during what
is perhaps the best known selection in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," describing
the optics of small spaces in two homes designed by Adolf Loos. In one, the Moller
House, a small raised sitting area allows a woman (presumably) to watch over an
entrance, awaiting intruders or a returning husband; in another (the Mcller House;
Prague, 1930) a small "lady's room" (Zimmer der damme) is designed with an interior-
facing opening, for the same effect. Drawing upon "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth
Century," Colomina describes this lady's room as a "theater box." Famously, Colomina
claims that the raised sitting area and theater box together signify the sexual power-
dynamics of Loos' architectures, simultaneously imparting femininity to the interior and
masculinity to the exterior, while treating stationary women, inside the home, like
objects, analogous to Loos' built-in furniture.
This use of architecture as cultural representation is dependent upon Loos'
unique method of designing spaces, Raumplan. In Raumplan, a home is designed
around its interior volumes, which are arranged freely within a constrained prismatic
volume. The concept, while well-known in architectural circles, is unique to the work of
Adolf Loos and has therefore never become famous enough to generate a broad
hermeneutic tradition. Nonetheless, the use of the word "traditionally," in the phrase
"traditionally considered to be prototype of the Raumplan," imparts to Colomina's
argument a level of gravitas not possible otherwise. Moreover in her formalist reading,
the raised sitting area of the Moller House is genealogically antecedent to the "lady's
room"/"theater box;" this aspect of her argument is reinforced stylistically by the
sentence "This house, traditionally considered to be the prototype of the Raumplan, also
contains the prototype of [Loos'] theater box," since Colomina's claim of genealogical
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

21
relation between the two rooms of interest is mapped onto a similar evolution, unfolding
at the scale of architecture's disciplinarity. Because of a related, strategic reference to
"tradition" in her description, what Colomina says about the Moller and Moller houses is
inscribed within a broader phenomenon.
I believe that broader phenomenon to be imaginary. No example of "traditional"
consideration is given within the text of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism." While one
could try to corroborate Colomina's claim about what is "traditionally" the case, no writer
can reasonably expect a reader to perform this sort of cross-referencing. The
historiographical project required is potentially endless, requiring a reader not only to
perform in-depth analysis of Loos' cultural context and place in history, but also to
determine a meaning and philosophy of history appropriate to an analysis of whatever
"tradition" actually means.
The term "tradition" bullies a reader into believing what Colomina has to say.
Colomina plays the prospect of a hermeneutic tradition against her reader. What cannot
be disproven appears true.
This bullying takes other forms. After a comparative discussion of photographs of
the Moller and Moller houses, Colomina notes that the Muller house's production of
"comfort" through "intimacy and control" "is hardly the idea of comfort which is
associated with the nineteenth century interior as described by Walter Benjamin in
'Louis-Philippe, or the Interior"' (79). A lengthy excerpt of this cited text is included in a
footnote.14 The title, "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior," corresponds with the brief chapter
of "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" Colomina draws upon in her opening
quotation;1 5 also, in the footnote, it is apparent that the term "theater box" is derived
from that brief text. Any of Colomina's arguments about Loos' "theater box" carry the
clout of Benjamin's name, as well as a level of depth gained through the implied
reverberation between his earlier text and Colomina's arguments. Moreover the
implication of Colomina's casual in-text citation, of "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior," when
viewed in the context of her repeated, un-cited references of this essay through the use
of the term "theater box,"' is that her audience should already be familiar with the
14 The footnote reads as follows: "'Under Louis-Philippe the private citizen enters the stage of history.
For the private-person, living space becomes, for the first time, antithetical to the place of work. The
former is constituted by the interior; the office is its complement. The private person who squares this
account with reality in his office demands that the interior be maintained in his illusions. This need is all
the more pressing since he has no intention of extending his commercial considerations into social ones.
In shaping his private environment he represses both. From this spring the phantasmagorias of the
interior. For the private individual the private environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote
places and the past. His drawing room is a box in the world theater.' Walter Benjamin, 'Paris, Capital of
the Nineteenth Century,' in Reflections 154" (Colomina 79-80, note 7).
15 From the footnotes it is apparent that the two citations are only one page apart in the English
translation Colomina cites; this continuity is not apparent, however, in the body text. This is not obvious
however, since the footnote for this second citation is split between two spreads. The title, "Paris, Capital
of the Ninetieth Century" is not visible on the page it is cited. I feel this could have been intentional, since
Colomina served as editor of the volume.
16 Of which there are fourteen

22
selection of Benjamin's writings cited. The effect of this citation on reader relations is
complicated. In reality, the reference to "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior" supports a
tautological claim: readers are never told why the Muller house doesn't support
Benjamin's description of comfort, or why this is important, only that it is so. The
effect of this non-sequitur is similar to the reference to a tradition associated with
Raumplan, which I mentioned earlier: in both instances, it is implied that any
misunderstanding is the result of some ignorance on the part of the reader, because
the intellectual tradition Colomina appeals to cannot be confirmed to be her
invention, alone. In this case, a questioning reader is left to wonder what in
Benjamin's text they might have missed that could explain the relevance of
Colomina's comparison. Here, the tautology of Colomina's claim is veiled behind a
possible, but imaginary intellectual tradition: whether or not "Paris, Capital of the
Nineteenth Century" was compulsory reading for the architectural academe circa
1990, the truth of that ordination is sustained by Colomina's stylistic treatment of
"Louis-Philippe, or the Interior" as if it were a canonical work inasmuch as its citation
needs no explanation. The implication here is that she shouldn't have to explain why
the comparison to Benjamin is relevant, the audience should already know.
Images in this section of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," are employed as
rhetoric to a similar and amplified effect. One image, Figure 7, depicts a plan and
section of Adolf Loos' Moller house, each of which includes a dashed line tracing
"the journey of the gaze from the raised sitting area to the back garden." The image
is referenced at the end of a short section on the Moller house, and is used to
transition to a discussion of a similar treatment of the gaze in the Muller house.
Curiously, the placement of the image on page 79, above a description of the Muller
house, subliminally reinforces Beatriz Colomina's argument that its "view of the
exterior, towards the city... is contained within a view of the interior" despite the fact
that the image refers to a different building. Additionally, it must be noted that the
source of the image, Raumplan versus Plan Libre,'" is buried in the last page of the
volume and therefore not readily apparent; therefore the fact that the drawings were
not by Loos (and may in fact have been executed by Colomina herself) is left
unaddressed. The overall effect of Figure 7's placement and buried citation is that
Beatriz Colomina's formal analysis of specific Loos interiors appears symptomatic of
his residential work generally, and the image included appears to be a sign of that
symptom (rather than an illustration of one specific instance). The fact that what she
is saying is corroborated by architectural drawings, which seem to have been
executed by Loos, makes Colomina's novel claims in this portion of the essay look
as if they were instead an objective description of Loos' own work and thought. Here
word and image together assemble Loos' architectural objects as a network of
performative details, with Colomina as their cipher; the actual houses, in their
manifest complexity, drop out of consideration.
17Risselada, Max, and Beatriz Colomina. Raumplan versus Plan Libre: Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier
1919-1930. New York: Rizzoli, 1988. Print. 10. This citation is given in the volume's final page as: "M.
Risselada, Raumplan versus Plan Libre (1988); 10"
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

23
Figure 2 Sexuality & Space, pp. 78-9 (author's copy)
This game of legitimation is consistent with Colomina's treatment of Loos,

generally, in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism." Here is a slightly different
example, where the definite article is used strategically in a manner similar to how
she uses Figure 7. The following selection contains Colomina's first lengthy
quotation of Adolf Loos' writings. Here, referring to a plural noun in the singular,
phrases "the Raumplan" and "the theater box" signify a category as if it and its
platonic essence are analogous.' By virtue of this certainty, "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism" treats Adolf Loos as if he were a discursive coadjutor; through
her prose, Colomina enables herself to speak on Loos' behalf:
18 This pattern is repeated throughout the essay: "In his writings on the question of the house...," "these
are drawings neither of the inside nor the outside but the membrane between them," "between the
representation of habitation and the mask is the wall," et cetera (emphasis mine).

24
In his writings on the question of the house, Loos describes a number of

domestic melodramas. In Das Andere for example, he writes:
Try to describe how birth and death, the screams of pain for an aborted
son, the death rattle of a dying mother, the last thoughts of a young
woman who wishes to die... unfold and unravel in a room by Olbrich! Just
an image: the young woman who has put herself to death. She is lying on
the wooden floor. One of her hands still holds the smoking revolver. On
the table a letter, the farewell letter. Is the room in which this is happening
of good taste? Who will ask that? It is just a room!
One could as well ask [sic] why it is only the women who die and cry and commit
suicide. But leaving aside this question for the moment, Loos is saying that the
house must not be conceived of as a work of art, that there is a difference
between a house and a "series of decorated rooms." The house is the stage for
the theater of the family, a place where people are born and five and die.
Whereas a work of art, a painting, presents itself to critical attention as an object,
the house is received as an environment, as a stage. (85)
In the selection above, the introductory sentence gives a sense of erudition and
familiarity, as if the author could express Loos' opinions on any number of topics at will;
while Colomina's command of Loos' repertoire is strong, it is the introduction of a
particular category, in the introductory sentence, which substantiates the expository
section after the quotation. In other words, here it is its categorization as writing "on the
question of the house" that instantiates the quoted passage as that, despite the fact that
the word "house" doesn't appear in the quoted text; the qualifications of that word,
"house," subsequent to the Loos passage quoted, are only relevant inasmuch as
Colomina has said they are.
It is because of the manner in which she cites his text that the reader is encouraged to
see Beatriz Colomina as a medium for the explication of Loos' thought. As "The Split
Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" unfolds, Colomina continues to speak through the work of
Adolf Loos, in order to enact an intellectual counter-position to the writings of Laura
Mulvey.
In a section of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" on Adolf Loos' speculative
house for Josephine Baker (1929), Beatriz Colomina projects an inversion of a
traditional organization of the visual. Through the discussion of "family life" as absent, a
position where relations between people follow a normative pattern of interaction in
residential settings is asserted through an implied privileging of "tradition" as that which
guarantees the scopophilic regulation of sexual politics, through the gaze. Consider the
following,
The breakdown between inside and outside, and the split between sight and
touch, is not located exclusively in the domestic scheme. It also occurs in Loos'
project for a house for Josephine Baker (Paris, 1928)-a house that excludes
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

25
family life [..] As in Loos' earlier houses, the eye is directed towards the interior,
which tums its back on the outside world; but the subject and object of the gaze
have been reversed. The inhabitant, Josephine Baker, is now the primary object,
and the visitor, the guest, is the looking subject. (88)
Here, "exclu[sion of] family life" is depicted as revolutionary because it causes a shift of
metaphysical terms whereby the voyeur becomes the observed and vice versa.
Considering her earlier assertion of the physical and Walter Benjamin opposite Laura
Mulvey, it is logical to read this revolution of the domestic environment as an invasion of
the fantastic, mythical, and collective, discussed in "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask
and Curiosity," into the interior associated with "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth
Century." The house for Josephine Baker is employed as a stage for a parallel,
specifically architectural investigation of the figure of Pandora and of the figuration of
curiosity.
Colomina's staging hinges upon the objectification of Josephine Baker as a
subject through Loos' design. This conceptual hinge turns in two steps. First, Baker is
interpellated as an object, objectified by the gaze of a speculative visitor to her house:
The most intimate space-the swimming pool, paradigm of a sensual space-
occupies the center of the house [for Josephine Baker], and is also the focus of
the visitor's gaze [...] between this gaze and its object-the body-is a screen of
glass and water, which renders the body inaccessible.... [continued below]
Then, Baker's identity is dismissed in favor of a categorical description; she becomes
"the swimmer," with the sexual contact between herself and her visitor rendered in the
uncertain terms of spectatorship:
[continuing] But the architecture of this house is more complicated. The swimmer
might also see the reflection, framed by the window, of her own slippery body
superimposed on the disembodied eyes of the shadowy figure of the spectator.
(88)
The space that Colomina describes in this passage satisfies the same "primordial wish
for pleasurable looking" as the cinema, as explained in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema;"19 however, as scopophilia is made literal in the watery lens of the swimming
pool, architecture is asserted as that which ultimately contains the gaze. This
description of a home designed for scopophilia should be understood as an assertion of
the sexism of the gaze, explicated spatially. 20
19 "The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing
scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human
form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a
fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the
human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world" (Mulvey, "Visual
Pleasure" n.p.).
20 This is because, as stated in Mulvey's psychoanalytic terms, here castration anxiety has been
transformed from figural to figured, within a pair of people and the prototypical space they share.

26
Through a subsequent comparison, Colomina expands upon this mise-en-sc6ne

to describe a topography of feminine objectification. Extrapolating from
Loos' essay, "The Principle of Cladding," Colomina postulates that "[fior Loos,
architecture is a form of covering" (91);2 subsequently, drawing on a 1980 Spanish-
language essay by Catalonian architect Jose Quetglas, translated by Colomina for "The
Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Colomina states that "[t]he spaces of Loos' interiors
cover their occupants as clothes cover the body (each occasion has its appropriate
'fit')." (92) Two examples of this act of covering are given: "Lina Loos' bedroom (this
'bag of fur and cloth')" and "Josephine Baker's swimming pool." The sublimation of the
physical/phenomenological here instantiates intended occupants as metonymical
figures: the spaces described are no longer that which might be seen and experienced,
but are instead made meaningful by their association with particular women. It seems
that, momentarily, Colomina has indulged herself in the symbolic topography of
Mulvey's feminist film theory, engaging space as a medium for the accumulation of
signification rather than as a contained void, represented by photography, film, or prose.
It can be argued that the scopophilic architecture of the two spaces referenced is
phallocentric in the terms outlined in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," where
Laura Mulvey writes:
The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the
image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of
woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus
as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus
signifies. (Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure" n.p.)
Taking some liberties with the quote above: the fetishization of Lina Loos and Josephine
Baker, as objects of visual pleasure, "stands as a lynch pin to" their related, signified
spaces, imparting a reference through the juxtaposition of their names and the spaces
created for them to be gazed upon/within ("Lina Loos'bedroom," "Josephine Baker's
swimming pool"). Because the women in Loos' imaginary, architecturalized gaze are
functionally similar in their being objects of sexual fantasy, their two spaces are
functionally equivalent. In this equivalence between projects, Loos the architect is
interpellated as the subject of his sexual desire and its variegated fantasies: per
21Also included is the following selection from that essay: "The architect's general task is to provide a
warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. He decides for this reason to spread one carpet
on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both
the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct
place. To invent this frame is the architect's second task."
Inasmuch as cladding is a primary task for the architect, as applied here, it might be possible to argue
that architecture is a form of covering for Loos, but this is specious at best. The eccentricities of
Colomina's styles of citation and external reference as modes of legitimation have already been covered.
As such, even as the factuality of her claim is suspect it will be sustained here for the purpose of
elucidating her anti-feminist theory of space-as-objectification. In any event, Loos's architectures, and
theories thereon, are not of concern here beyond their reference in Colomina's writings, so the fact of the
matter is irrelevant.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

27
Colomina's description it is Josephine Baker and Lina Loos' desire to become objects of
the male gaze, as imagined by Adolf Loos, that his architecture signifies.2 2
Crucially, this architectural exercise of sexual fantasy is described by Beatriz
Colomina as the disruption and dislocation of a pre-existing architectural order.
Describing Lina Loos' bedroom and Josephine Baker's swimming pool as theatrical
architecture, Colomina asserts that their design...
disrupts the role of the house as a traditional form of representation. More
precisely, the traditional system of representation, within which the building is but
one of many overlapping mechanisms, is dislocated. (Colomina, "The Split Wall"
92-3)
This assertion can be compared to Colomina's intention for the "Sexuality and Space"
symposium, as stated in the introduction to the proceedings:
[A]rchitecture must be thought of as a system of representation in the same way
that we think of drawings, photographs, models, film, or television, not only
because architecture is made available to us through these media but because
the built object is itself a system of representation.... To simply raise the question
of "Sexuality and Space" is, therefore, already to displace Architecture. In the
end, this book is but the documentation of a small event in the larger project of
this displacement." (Colomina, introduction to S&S n.p.)
Drawing upon Mark Wigley's "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" (whose syntax is
echoed in the passage above): if one is to understand Alberti's "theory of harmony"
wherein "the house is a mechanism for the domestication of women" as the "origin of
architecture on which traditional architecture bases itself," (Wigley, 352 and 357) then
"the traditional system of representation, which the building is but one of many
overlapping mechanisms," can be understood as analogous to that signified by the
proper noun "Architecture." Therefore, Loos' disruption and dislocation of "the role of the
house as a traditional system of representation" is an antecedent to the "larger project
of this displacement" of "Architecture," that the volume Sexuality & Space documents.
Consequently, Loos' displacement of "Architecture" can be interpreted as the
enumeration of an anti-feminist stance in opposition to Mulvey's feminist critique, and
politics. If Sexuality & Space can be said to have political dimensions because of its
proposition of a shared (viz. "larger") project, one can extrapolate to argue that "The
Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" identifies with the transformation of "Architecture" into
the exercise of heterosexual male fantasy, because of its displacement of the latter
while participating in the former. This treatment of sexuality can be contrasted with
Laura Mulvey's "[demonstration of] the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has
structured film form" in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." There, Mulvey outlines
a directive for a feminist counter-cinema that mobilizes the psychoanalytic theory
transformed into a "political weapon" by her essay:
22For a historicist reading of this aspect of the house for Josephine Baker, see El-Dahdah, Fares, and
Stephen Atkinson. "The Josephine Baker House: For Loos's Pleasure." Assemblage 26 (1985): 72-
87. JSTOR. Web.

28
The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical
in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions
of the mainstream film [...] The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of
traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free
the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the
audience into dialectics, passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this
destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the 'invisible guest,' and
highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms"
(Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure" n.p.)
In "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Colomina opposes such a project by asserting
a phallocentric spatial praxis analogous to "traditional film conventions," and negotiating
architectural discourse towards the sexual imagination of Adolf Loos. As "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism" demonstrates, Lina Loos' bedroom and Josephine Baker's
swimming pool displace their associated built objects as they assert for architecture the
role of the representation of male, heterosexual desire. "The Split Wall: Domestic
Voyeurism" does nothing to destroy the satisfaction, pleasure, and privilege of "the
invisible guest;" instead, by highlighting how architecture depends on a voyeuristic
mechanism, Colomina instantiates that mechanism as the epistemological foundation of
architectural inquiry.
As Beatriz Colomina fleshes out her counterpoint to Laura Mulvey's feminist theory of
scopophilia, she intentionally locates crucial terms and citations outside her text's
immediate frame of reference. Here is a detailed example: in the passage below,
describing the "theatrical" nature of Loos' architectural practice, "traditional
representation" is never defined denotatively; instead its meaning can only be gleaned
though comparison:
[S]pace in Loos' architecture is not just felt [...] his definition of architecture is
really a definition of theatrical architecture. The "clothes" have become so
removed from the body that they require structural support independent of it.
They become a "stage set." The inhabitant is both "covered" by the space and
"detached" from it. The tension between sensation of comfort and comfort as
control disrupts the role of the house as a traditional form of representation. More
precisely, the traditional system of representation, within which the building is but
one of overlapping mechanisms, is displaced. (Colomina, "The Split Wall" 92-3)
This operation structures reader relations to Colomina's intellectual advantage. Here,
Jose Quetglas' description of Lina Loos' bedroom forms the basis of a simultaneous
description of that space, as well as Josephine Baker's swimming pool, as theatrical. In
context it is apparent that "traditional representation" cannot be the theatrical
architecture of Loos which Quetglas and Colomina, together, describe; it must be
something else because that tradition has been "dislocated" by Loos, by his designs.
The full extent of this dislocating architecture, however, remains indeterminate because
it is based on ambiguous concepts, identified with scare quotes. Considered with the
intertextual enumeration of this argument, the quoted terms-stage set, covered, and
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

29
detached-locate themselves outside of Colomina's text, as external citations. These

concepts are logically positioned as outside the bounds of "traditional representation,"
because that category and the architecture these words constitute are mutually
exclusive. The category of "traditional representation" has therefore, by stylistic means,
been made unquestionable both in its meaning and existence because neither quality
can be externally verified (and therefore discredited). Because of her use of scare
quotes, all that is certain is Colomina's authorship as that which gives meaning by
indicating where meaning resides. This text grants Colomina epistemological agency by
legitimating a hermeneutic authority, imparted by a system of citation and reference,
which she herself has constructed.
That this is, itself, true can be evaluated by a comparison between Beatriz
Colomina's utilization of Jose Quetglas, and a more complete investigation of the
passage she cites. While Colomina has not mistranslated the magazine article she
cites, her framing of Quetglas' essay allows for a narrow reading, which construes his
argument in a manner that is more convenient to her purposes than it is accurate.
Colomina's complete citation is as follows:
The spaces of Loos' interiors cover the occupants as clothes cover the body
(each occasion has its appropriate "fit'). Jos6 Quetglas has written: "Would the
same pressure on the body be acceptable in a raincoat as in a gown, in jodhpurs,
or in pajama pants?... All the architecture of Loos can be explained as the
envelope of a body." From Lina Loos' bedroom (this "bag of fur and cloth') (figure
17) to Josephine Baker's swimming pool ("this transparent bowl of water), the
interiors always contain a "warm bag in which to wrap oneself." It is an
"architecture of pleasure," an "architecture of the womb." 2 6
26 Jos6 Quetglas, "Lo Placentro," Carrer de la Ciutat, no-9-10, special issue
on Loos (January 1980): 2. (92)
The juxtaposition of the discussion of "fit", in the first sentence above, to the introduction
of Quetglas' essay implies that this concept, "fit," is that which is substantiated by the
text cited. It is, but since this first sentence in fact paraphrases that which occurs in
Quetglas' text just prior to what is quoted, the sentence nullifies possible intervals of
difference between Colomina and Quetglas as it introduces to the latter to the reader.
While Colomina's statement in the sentence I have referenced differs from Quetglas'
prose in the most absolute sense, in that the wording and frame of reference are
inconsistent, her predicate is essentially an abbreviated translation of his, since
Raumplan is an architectural strategy driven by the arrangement of interior volumes. In
essence Colomina performatively restages Quetglas' writing as she introduces it. This
can be confirmed by reviewing the line-by-line translation provided on the next page.

30
El Raumplan, lejos de sor un Raumplan, far from being a

sistema do proyedtar o un credo projection system or a credo
ahorrador de espacios -contra el for saving space-compared to the
derroche del forjado iico- es la waste of the single slab-is the
dnica teorizacidn posible do ese only possible theorization for [Loos']
espacio sonsorial: los ambientes sensorium: environments
deben adherirse al ocupante como must adhere to occupants like
las ropas sobre la piel, con una clothes adhere to the skin, with a
presidn espeoifica a cada caso. specific pressure for each case.
,&Se aceptaria una misma presidn Would you accept the same pressure
sobre el cuerpo en un gabdn y una over the body in an overcoat as in a
bata, en unos pantalones de gown, in riding
montar y de pijama? Claro quo no. pants or pajama pants? Of course not.
La flotabilidad del cuerpo en su The fluidity of the body within its
funda depende do cada caso, es covering depends on, is
condicidn y resultado do los condition to, and is the result of
movimientos y los estados de its movements and dispositions.
Animo.
Figure 3 Screengrab from "Lo Placentero" with English translation by author
It should now be apparent that Colomina's performative introduction masks liberties that
she takes with Quetglas' text. For our purposes it should be noted that Colomina's first,
lengthy quotation of Quetglas contains an ellipsis of approximately one half of the essay
"Lo Placentero," wherein Quetglas cites and then discusses "The Principle of Cladding,"
in a manner comparable to the preceding page of "The Split Wall." Furthermore, the
portion quoted after the ellipses paraphrases rather than translates the following
sentence:
Toda la arqu:tectura do Loos , quo All of Loos' architecture, which is

siempre es interior, puede ser always interior, can be
explicada como funda de un explained as an envelope of a
cuerpo. body.
Figure 4 Screengrab from "Lo Placentero" with English translation by author
In effect, what Colomina has done is create an external referent for what she has
already said; in the process of translating, the flow of the cited text has been altered
radically. While the citation appears to add a depth of cross reference to this section of
"The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," its effect is to merely repeat the argument
already in progress.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

31
Invented historiographies
As I have demonstrated, while writing about "Josephine Baker's swimming pool" and
"Lina Loos' bedroom" Beatriz Colomina takes advantage of the disconnect between her
text and that which she cites, writing on behalf of a cited author, in order to support her
own points. In the past few paragraphs, I have tried to demonstrate the intentional
misdirection of Colomina's citation of Jose Quetglas; this section of "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism" more accurately paraphrases (and plagiarizes) "Lo Placentero"
than quote it. In her practice of hybrid quotation/paraphrase, Beatriz Colomina writes in
both her voice, and that of another author. Beyond stylistic resemblance, this excluded
middle points to an artificially constructed binary, which is used to some effect
(legitimation by appealing to an external source). Having established that Colomina
uses the excluded middle to her advantage, while simultaneously asserting a
phallocentric methodology for the analysis of "the gaze," I would like to turn how these
aspects, together, can articulate a disciplinary agenda.
This articulation and agenda can be summarized as follows: in "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism," the excluded middle facilitates a repossession of Laura Mulvey's
famed feminist interpretation of the gaze, for architectural purposes. This maneuver is
staged through the aesthetic critique of Adolf Loos; a historiographical preparation of an
architectural reader analogous to Mulvey's psychoanalytic training of the cinematic
viewer in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Having established a shared,
hermeneutic platform Colomina proceeds with an analysis of Le Corbusier's designs as
represented in film, and the camera as an agent of Le Corbusier as a hybrid architect-
author. In its logical consequences, this latter reading effectively undoes the feminist
counter-narrative "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" intended to facilitate, while
asserting its own counter-narrative about the ontology of sight in architectural
representation. These topics are discussed in detail, later in this chapter.
Now, I will explore Colomina's historiographical training of her reader, which
begins with an examination of Loos' displacement of "traditional notions of architectural
representation" through a comparison with Georg Simmel's sociology. In the passage
included below, Colomina invokes an external frame of reference as a foundation for a
further, ostensibly synthetic claim. The external frame of reference Simmel's is classic
essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life," quoted in a footnote, and the synthetic claim
that Loos' contemporary city dwellers struggled against abstraction in order to assert
their individuality, a struggle staged through clothing.
Loos' critique of traditional notions of architectural representation is bound up
with the phenomenon of an emergent metropolitan culture. The subject of Loos'
architecture is the metropolitan individual, immersed in the abstract relationships
of the city, at pains to assert the independence or individuality of his existence
against the leveling power of society. This battle, according to Georg Simmel, is
the modern equivalent of primitive man's struggle with nature, clothing is one of
the battlefields, and fashion is one of its strategies. 27
27 "The deepest conflict of modern man is not any longer in the ancient battle
with nature, but in the one that the individual must fight to affirm the

32
independence and peculiarity of this existence against the immense power of

society, in his resistance to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-
technological mechanism." Georg Simmel, "Das Grosstadt und das Geistleben"
(1903). English translation: "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in Georg Simmel:
On Individuality and Social Forms ed. David Levine (Chicago, 1971), pp. 324-
339. (93)
Referencing "The Metropolis and Mental Life" as a subtext to Adolf Loos' postulated
critique of "traditional notions of architectural representation," Colomina employs
Simmel's exposition on modern society to signify an abstract structure, within which
Loos is immersed; this is to say that Beatriz Colomina's creative citation of "The
Metropolis and Mental Life," above,2 3 makes the critique of Adolf Loos seem as if it were
a manifestation of what Simmel describes. This allusion is established by reading
Colomina's footnote, where it is apparent that the term "metropolitan individual," which
ostensibly describes the "subject of Loos' architecture," also refers to a category
described by Georg Simmel. Importantly, by representing "the subject of Loos'
architecture" in this manner, Colomina has removed herself, twice-over, from that which
is stated in her text: in the passage I cite, what Loos critiques is supported by what
Simmel has written, but Simmel's sociology has also been made relevant in this
interdisciplinary context through its association with Loos; that Loos should have
described what Simmel theorized makes his theory seem pertinent; thus, the reader
associates the writings of the two men where he or she might not have done so, before.
Through these operations, the existence of Loos' critique is made to seem as if it were a
response to the sociological environment.
My reading is enabled by the particular styling of Colomina's text. Comparing the
text I cite and its footnote it is apparent that the concept of "struggle" discussed is
derived from "The Metropolis and Mental Life:" 24 the footnote marker has been placed
23 The sentence included is actually a paraphrased reading of Simmel's opening paragraph, which
Edward A. Shils (reprinted by Levine) translated as follows, in 1948:
The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the
independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against
the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life. The antagonism
represents the most modern form of the conflict which primitive man must carry on with nature for
his own bodily existence. The eighteenth century may have called for liberation from all the ties
which grew up historically in politics, in religion, in morality and in economics in order to permit
the original natural virtue of man, which is equal in everyone, to develop without inhibition; the
nineteenth century may have sought to promote, in addition to man's freedom, his individuality
(which is connected with the division of labor) and his achievements which make him unique and
indispensable but which at the same time make him so much the more dependent on the
complementary activity of others; Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the
individual as the prerequisite for his full development, while socialism found the same thing in the
suppression of all competition - but in each of these the same fundamental motive was at work,
namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological
mechanism.(Simmel ed. Levine, 324)
While this passage has the same approximate meaning as the excerpt Colomina employs, the
connotation she derives is less possible without the urgency of her selective quotation.
2 As paraphrased by Colomina; cf. previous footnote
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

33
adjacent to the word "struggle" in the main text, and the footnote includes words such as
"conflict," "battle," "fight," "against," and "resistance." While the term "struggle" is cited,
other concepts, which also appear to be derived from Simmel's sociology, are not: this
includes nouns such as "metropolitan," "individual," and "city," as well as the term
"fashion," whose relevance here, particularly, is questionable.2 5 To wit, clothing is not
mentioned in the sentence provided from "The Metropolis in Mental Life," or anywhere
else in that essay; to this end the second sentence in the selection above is
misleading.2'
Even without intertextual verification it is apparent that Beatriz Colomina has
taken liberties with her quotation of "The Metropolis and Mental Life," stretching its
connotation beyond that which is explicitly offered in the brief excerpt she provides. It is
not clear from the sentence she has included, for example, that "the metropolitan
individual, immersed in the abstract relationships of the city, at pains to assert the
independence or individuality of his existence against the leveling power of society," is
that which is signified by the "battle" Simmel describes. This semiotic association can be
reasonably inferred of course, but the veracity of that inference is unsubstantiated. In
place of clarification, Colomina provides a detailed citation of both the English
translation (supposedly) featured here and Simmel's original text. The connotation of
this gesture is that, if a reader disagrees (or misunderstands) Colomina's connection
between the critique Adolf Loos and sociology of Georg Simmel, clarification can be
obtained through cross-reference.2 7 Veiling her manipulation of the performance of the
footnote, Colomina inflates her citation, transforming an incompletely quoted text into an
invitation to intertextual exploration. On the surface, this gesture generously incites a
2' Thanks to my advisors Caroline Jones and Mark Jarzombek to bringing this to my attention during a
review of this chapter's second draft. For Professor Jarzombek's benefit I will note that the term mode
doesn't come up in the original German; I will say, however, that it is very clear to me that Colomina relied
on the University of Chicago 1971 edition of On Individuality and Social Forms for both her references to
Georg Simmel, and to that end consider the matter of "fashion" here to be her invention and not an issue
related to translation. As we will see in a coming paragraph, Colomina here manipulates Simmel not
through translation (cf. passage on "Lo Placentero"), but by drastically editing the material she is quoting,
manipulating syntax to create new meanings for the text. It is clear that Colomina sees intertextuality as
fluid, freely remixing quoted passages as she sees fit. I am very critical of this practice because of its
relations to issues of academic integrity; at the same time, as a strategy it is quite interesting. So, I ask:
how much does it matter that "The Metropolis and Mental Life" doesn't concern itself with fashion, in this
context? I understand that Colomina has chronically warped her scholastic context vis-h-vis misquotation
and intimidation; at the same time it is possible that more architectural historians have read "The Split
Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" than have read "The Metropolis and Mental Life." From the perspective of
legitimation, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" does talk about fashion, precisely because Colomina says
so. Of course, this is tautological; since so much about this essay is, however, I think that tautology might
be the measure of accuracy for my last statement.
26 The "battle" Simmel discusses in Colomina's the footnote is related to individual autonomy in the era of
market capitalism, which, it is emphasized, is entirely novel in form even if equivalent scope to that of
"primitive man." This "battle," furthermore, is discussed only in terms of personality, in the relative
environments of the rural and metropolitan, not self-expression through commodity culture. To this end,
Colomina's insinuation here conflates neoliberal concerns with choice and self-expression with Simmel's
anti-materialist critique; aside from being manipulative it also, frankly, incorrect.
27This is only a connotation, however. As we have seen, what cross reference reveals is that Colomina
fabricated a quote, and her association between Loos and Simmel convoluted-it not entirely fictitious.

34
reader to additional, directed inquiry; however, it is also true that the veracity of
Colomina's argument can only be reconsidered with an additional (and unlikely) effort
on the part of her reader. For lack of a counterpoint, the narrative appears true.
Subsequent to the last passage and footnote I quoted, a more explicitly pedagogical
operation instigates reflection on gender, in an architectural context, and in opposition to
Laura Mulvey's feminist politics. As "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" proceeds,
further utilizing the sociology of Georg Simmel to condition its reader' in interpretation of
the thought of Adolf Loos, a sexual politics of the metropolitan landscape is developed;
this investigation has the effect of negating feminist depth models in the context of
architectural studies.
The literary procedure I describe unfolds gradually. Before addressing gender
directly, and immediately preceding the last selection examined, "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism" fabricates a syllogistic parallel between Simmel's struggle of the
metropolitan being and the role of clothing in the writings of Adolf Loos. This parallel is
constructed in the following excerpt:
Loos' critique of traditional notions of architectural representation is bound up
with the phenomenon of an emergent metropolitan culture. The subject of Loos'
architecture is the metropolitan individual, immersed in the abstract relationships
of the city, at pains to assert the independence or individuality of his existence
against the leveling power of society. This battle, according to Georg Simmel, is
the modern equivalent of primitive man's struggle with nature, clothing is one of
the battlefields, and fashion is one of its strategies. 27 He writes: "The
commonplace is good form in society.... It is bad taste to make oneself
conspicuous through some individual, singular expression.... Obedience to the
standards of the general public in all extents [is] the conscious and desired
means of reserving their personal feelings and their taste.'2 8 In other words,
fashion is a mask which protects the metropolitan being.
Loos writes about fashion in precisely such terms: "We have become more
refined, more subtle. Primitive men had to differentiate themselves by various
colors, modern man needs his clothes as a mask. His individuality is so strong
that it can no longer be expressed in terms of items of clothing.... His own
interventions are concentrated on other things."29
27 [see last block quote]

28 Georg Simmel, "Fashion" (1904), ibid.
29 Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime" (1908), trans. Wilfred Wang in The
Architecture of Adolf Loos (London, 1985), p. 103 (93)
(note: all ellipses original; previously quoted section indicated in gray)
To the educated reader it will be obvious that the selections from "Fashion" and
"Ornament and Crime" in this passage have been deployed to the effect of 1) divorcing
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

35
each from the content of its respective essay and, 2) substantiating a transposed term
("fashion").
The frequent ellipses and non-sequitur quality of the Simmel extracts above 28
should alert the reader to their constructed quality. A re-reading of "Fashion" reveals
that the three sentences that Colomina includes are presented out of order and to the
effect of changing their meaning.29 In the translation Colomina cites, the first two
sentences are to be found together, mid-way through page 313; the last spans the
bottom of 311 and top of 312. What this means is that the last sentence, which
precedes the first two, is presented out of order."0 Moreover, first ellipsis bridges a gap
of approximately 435 words, or one-and-one-half paragraphs (in addition to a numbered
section break). Finally, in addition to being presented out of order, and including several
gaps, the "Fashion" quotation Colomina includes contains several grammatical edits
that are not indicated.
In the University of Chicago Press edition Colomina cites, it can be seen that the
first two sentences quoted are derived from one sentence of Simmel's translated
prose. 3 ' That sentence reads as follows:
The fact that the commonplace is good form in society, in the narrower sense of
the term, is due not only to a mutual regard, which causes it to be considered
bad taste to make one's self conspicuous through some individual, singular
expression that every one can repeat, but also to the fear of that feeling of shame
which as it were forms a self-inflicted punishment for departure from the form and
activity similar for all and equally accessible to all. (Simmel ed. Levine, "Fashion"
313)
In this selection, one can observe that the first sentence Colomina quotes, "The
commonplace is good form in society...." is in fact part of a dependent clause;
grammatically it was never intended to stand on its own. It is an inaccurate reflection of
Simmel's argument to have led with this clause as an independent sentence. This
inaccuracy is redoubled by Colomina's use of brackets in the third quoted sentence,
which implies that her capitalization of the word "The" and use of a four dot ellipsis after
the word "society" appear to reflect the grammatical structure of the text from which she
has pulled her cited sentence, even though they in fact do not; by indicating edits
selectively, Colomina masks her alterations to Simmel's syntax.
28 Grammatically, the final sentence fails to follow the first two, because it is not clear to whom the
pronoun "they" refers.
29 This effect is different from that of Colomina's "The Metropolis and Mental Life;" while Colomina's
paraphrase there modifies the tone of Simmel's prose, and serves to emphasize what is in fact an axillary
aspect of his first paragraph it does little to change the basic argument.
30 The indication "ibid." in Colomina fn. 28 hides this, specifically.
3 For this edition, the editor chose to reprint a translation featured in the American Journal of Sociology
(issue 61, May 1957), and originally published in International Quarterly (issue 10, 1904). The translator is
unknown. MIT Libraries has two copies of the 1971 University of Chicago edition in circulation as of April
23, 2013, call number HM51.S592. I relied upon the Dewey Library copy, which was purchased in 1972.
There is no doubt that I have been checking Colomina's citations against the exact edition she cites.

36
Continuing: as we can see above, the second sentence in Colomina's quote

repeats the operations of the first with an added twist: Colomina has added two words,
"It is," in order to transform this second quoted dependent clause into its own sentence.
Again, while the brackets in the third quoted sentence lead a reader to believe that this
addition would be noted, it is not, and with good reason: beyond acting as a
grammatical convenience, these two added words change the constative nature of the
(real) cited phrase. Imposing the passive voice on a quoted clause, Colomina
transforms a Neo-Kantian argument into a pronouncement of aesthetic judgment.
Following the quoted translation more closely, one might paraphrase the portion of the
sentence Colomina has cited as follows: "In society, it is considered bad taste to make
oneself conspicuous though singular expression that others can repeat;" to this end it is
evident that in "Fashion" Simmel does not pronounce that being conspicuous is bad
taste, only that conspicuousness can give the appearance thereof, among other
consequences. When considering the essay "Fashion" in its entirety, it might be argued
that the sentence "It is bad taste to make oneself conspicuous through some individual,
singular expression" is an intentionally oversimplified misrepresentation of Simmel's
argument that fashion emphasizes both the human tendency towards both equalization
and individualization.
Intentional misrepresentation is equally apparent in the final quoted sentence.
Colomina's citation, "Obedience to the standards of the general public in all extents [is]
the conscious and desired means of reserving their personal feelings and their taste," is
an adaptation of the following two sentences:
It is this phase of fashion that is received by sensitive and peculiar persons, who
use it as a sort of mask. They consider blind [PAGE BREAK] obedience to the
standards of the general public in all externals as the conscious and desired
means of reserving their personal feeling and their taste, which they are eager to
reserve for themselves alone, in such a way that they do not care to enter into an
appearance that is visible to all. (Simmel ed. Levine, "Fashion" 311-312)
By transforming this phrase into a sentence using the passive voice and, also, brackets,
Colomina has changed the subject and meaning of Simmel's translated text. Now,
rather than refer to an eccentricity of "sensitive and particular persons," that which is
quoted takes "the modern equivalent of primitive man", described earlier in Colomina's
text (not Simmel's) as its implied subject. That fashion is a "strategy" in a "struggle" is
constant between the translation and Colomina's version of it, however in the translation
cited the battlefield is not "clothing" but the mind, and the opponent not a modern analog
of nature but the social anxieties of a limited class of individuals. The modification is
convenient, but inaccurate.3 2
32 Given the location of the page break in the translation Beatriz Colomina cites I am given to wondering
if, while writing "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Colomina opened to a portion of the essay
"Fashion," strung words together in a convenient combination, and then made an intentional error in her
footnote, incorrectly stating "ibid." to avoid divulging correct page numbers. Personally, I cannot disregard
the ethical complications of Colomina's adaptation of "Fashion" to her purposes, which demonstrates a
lack of academic integrity; however, in this thesis I focus on the issue only inasmuch as it is relevant for
its effect on reader relations.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

37
Beatriz Colomina's misquotation of Simmel's "Fashion" is effective for facilitating

association between Georg Simmel's "The Metropolis and Mental Life," "Fashion," and
Adolf Loos' "Ornament and Crime." For example, in the final sentence of Colomina's
"Fashion" quotation, an emphasis on the possessive pronoun "their" establishes
grammatically that "fashion is a mask which protects the metropolitan being:" this
assertion builds upon the earlier citation of "The Metropolis and Mental Life." Then, by
emphasizing a supplementary aspect of her citation-the phrase "the ancient battle with
nature"-Colomina elicits a comparison between "primitive man" and "the metropolitan
individual." An intertextual thesis implied by this comparison, made with the fabricated
quote from "Fashion," establishes the terms for "fashion" that Loos writes about
"precisely." "The Metropolis and Mental Life" does not concern itself with the decorative
arts; analogously, "Fashion" does not specifically consider a dialectical model of
modernity; however, by presenting a modern-primitive binary from the former along with
the aesthetic critique of the latter, with a common subject ("the metropolitan being"), a
composite argument about fashion and urban identity has been established.
This composite argument facilitates a comparison between Loos' "Ornament and
Crime" and Georg Simmel's critique of metropolitan culture. The intellectual affiliation
implied by the word "precisely," in the sentence "Loos writes about fashion in precisely
such terms" (emphasis mine) inherently frees Loos' text from its manifest content. This
is executed in the interest of exploring a dialectic, within which Loos' text is just one
component, displacing Loos' translated prose for its deep meaning. Reading "Ornament
and Crime" as a reflection on aesthetics as such (like she does "Fashion"), Colomina
implicates the essay in the multi-causal integration of facts and values characterizing
Simmel's sociological dialectic. Colomina's strategically selected excerpt from
"Ornament and Crime," as framed, allows a reader to reinterpret that essay as a
manifesto of self-fashioning (rather than as the critique of Viennese decorative arts in
the early twentieth century it was); consequentially, in the context of "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism," "Ornament and Crime" becomes a treatise on non-positivism
(analogous to the work of Georg Simmel).
Having established this possibility through comparison, Colomina expands its
hermeneutic through a subsequent, lengthier reading of a separate text by Loos
("Architecture," 1910):
Significantly, Loos writes about the exterior of the house in the same terms that
he writes about fashion:
When I was finally given the task of building a house, I said to myself: in
its external appearance, a house can only have changed as much as a
dinner jacket. Not a lot therefore... I had to become significantly simpler. I
had to substitute golden buttons with black ones. The house has to look
inconspicuous.
The house does not have to tell anything to the exterior; instead, all its
richness must be manifest in the interior.

38
Loos seems to establish a radical difference between interior and exterior, which
reflects the split between the intimate and the social life of the metropolitan
being: outside, the realm of exchange, money, and masks; inside, the realm of
the inalienable, the nonexchangeable, and the unspeakable. (94)
The final argument, above, is the result of a sophisticated language game, by which I
mean to say that that argument's historical accuracy is less relevant than its
substantiation in the given text. The fact that I may disagree with this interpretation of
the architectural thought of Adolf Loos with respect to "fashion" is irrelevant-what is
stated is substantiated performatively because a constative context has been
established. It really doesn't matter that it's wrong.
Myth and adverse possession

Colomina's claim to what Loos says in both "Ornament and Crime" and "Architecture" is
only possible within a hermeneutic that associates his texts with cultural critique rather
than the material phenomena that is the literal meaning of the quotations selected. As I
have demonstrated, the interval between this manifest content and its deep meaning is
abridged intertextually with fabricated quotations from sociologist Georg Simmel. In
entertaining novel readings of Loos and Simmel, Colomina parodies Mulvey's ambition
for feminist counter-cinema: 3 freeing the text from its referents just as Mulvey seeks to
free the look of the camera "into materiality in time and space," and freeing the mind of
her reader from the implications of Loos' cultural context where Mulvey wants to turn
"the look of the audience into dialectic, passionate detachment." Here the cultural
product at stake-for Colomina, the text-as-representation, as opposed to Mulvey's film-
as-accumulated-convention-is interpreted as an instrument of fact rather than gender
and possible political change. Circumstantially, this shift engenders another: pedagogy
displaces politics, as the political's regime of dynamic influence is translated into
pedagogical communication of knowledge, unilaterally.
In "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Beatriz Colomina enacts numerous
silent comparisons between work of Adolf Loos and that which is referred to in Laura
Mulvey's "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity." The shared critique of
Adolf Loos and Georg Simmel can only be verified within selections that have been
given, and Colomina's limited commentary. It is this quality that allows for the political
implications of the reader relations engendered by Mulvey's claim for feminist counter-
cinema to be transformed into Colomina's pedagogical mode. Once the hermeneutic
"The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" establishes through Loos and Simmel is turned
towards Laura Mulvey's contribution to Sexuality & Space, the political is re-inscribed
into the dialogue Colomina has initiated. This comparison, which remains implicit, is
made in order to establish Colomina's architectural articulation of the term "sexuality &
space" as the only viable method. In sum: Colomina grants herself epistemological
as "The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken
by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look
of the audience into dialectic, passionate detachment" (Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure" n.p.).
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

39
authority in the discourse engendered by Sexuality & Space by performing her

singularity, through the erasure of Mulvey as a potential second interlocutor.
This process occurs through comparisons of content, and then form, punctuated
by critique. Expanding upon her interpretation of Loos' "Architecture," Colomina writes:
[Loos'] split between inside and outside, between senses and sight, is gender-
loaded. The exterior of the house, Loos writes, should resemble a dinner jacket,
a male mask: as the unified self, protected by a seamless fagade, the exterior is
masculine. The interior is the scene of sexuality and reproduction, all the things
that would divide the subject in the outside world. (94)
That the production of identity in a given practice is dependent upon a disruption
between component parts in space-its inside and outside-shares concepts with
Mulvey's description of the figure of Pandora, including inside and outside, a disrupted
topography, and a practice of masking which signifies gender identity:
There is... a dislocation between Pandora's appearance and her meaning. Her
surface dissembles her essence. The very attraction of the visible surface
suggests antimony, a "dialectics of inside and outside," a topography that reflects
the attraction/anxiety ambivalence exerted by the iconography of femininity as
mask. This split is crucial. (Mulvey, "Topographies" 60)
Having established a type of conceptual equivalency between the writings of Laura
Mulvey and Adolf Loos, Colomina proceeds with a veiled critique Mulvey's exploration
of the terms articulated above:
The suggestion that the exterior is merely a mask which clads some preexisting
interior is misleading, for the interior and exterior are constructed simultaneously.
When he was designing the Rufer house, for example, Loos used a
dismountable model that would allow the intemal and external distributions to be
worked out simultaneously... To address the interior is to address the splitting of
the wall. (Colomina, "The Split Wall" 95)
In discussing the "split," Mulvey remains grounded in the feminine, and therefore
interior, never working through interior and exterior, as Loos did with his model. Mulvey
is thus implied to have made a mistake of method. If one can assume from Colomina's
analysis that the interior and exterior are female and male, respectively, then what is
inferred here is a critique of the discussion of "the feminine" without a masculine
complement and that the sexes are dependent upon each other for definition just as
"the interior and exterior are constructed simultaneously." Extending upon this
metonymy, to address "the interior" as "the splitting of the wall" can be read as a
methodological claim that, from the perspective of the sexual being always already
manifest in space, implies that to address the category of the feminine necessarily
means a consideration of sexual difference.

40
"The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" restages claims made in "Pandora: Topographies
of the Mask and Curiosity" while negating Laura Mulvey's claim to epistemological
authority through a methodological critique; the essay does this by re-composing
Mulvey's topography of the mask in the architectural terms of "the split wall." This re-
composition takes the form of architecture, first through Loos' play with drawing
conventions in sketch elevations for the Rufer house. These elevations are notable
because they show "not only the outlines of the fagade, but also, in dotted lines, the
horizontal and vertical divisions of the interior, the positions of the rooms, the
thicknesses of the floors and the walls." Because the windows "are represented as
black squares, with no frame," rather than, we can assume, with the frames, casements,
and mullions detailed, Colomina claims that the drawings portray "neither the inside nor
outside but the membrane between them." This drawing is understood as proof to her
claim that "between the representation of habitation and the mask is the wall," and that
"Loos' subject inhabits the wall" (95). In his drawing Loos represents subjectivity across
the sexual dimorphism of the interior-exterior dialectic, portraying the subject, per se, as
that which is between male and female; this is so because the elevation drawing
represents the physical space between the domestic environment of the interior and the
self-fashioning of the exterior.
This representation of subjectivity can be contrasted with Laura Mulvey's
representation of "the mask" as autonomous from its portrayal. In "Pandora,
Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," it is argued that cinema's media of
phantasmagoria represents mythical figures that necessarily pre-exist the medium, and
the power of their representation is latent in the fact of those figures' ability to transcend
history. 4 In "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" it is argued that Adolf Loos inverted
an analogous paradigm by breaking with pre-existing connotations and metaphors, to
express a metonymy that has been articulated (by Colomina) in language. Rather than
resonate emotionally, Loos' elevations of the Rufer house materialize the regulation of
gender identity within the uninhabitable interval between interior and exterior, and
therefore masculine and feminine.
Between Mulvey's interest in phantasmagoria and Colomina's enumeration of
"the split wall" in the Rufer house elevations, topography remains a constant feature.
What Mulvey called "a projection which attempts to conceal, but in fact reproduces, the
relation of the signifier... to psychic structures" (Mulvey, "Topographies" 56) relates just
as well to Notorious as it does to the elevation of the Rufer house. However, in Loos'
drawing, the process of signification upon which the image of femininity depends, in
"Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," has broken down. There, Laura
" To review, as Mulvey describes her, Pandora is one of a category of historical figures that persists over
time because of their persistence in a shared psychic vocabulary, and the symbolic space of cinema
allows for the resurrection of these persistent figures in the present imaginary: "The cinema, with its
strange, characteristic dislocation between word and image, fulfills this psychic function beautifully,
drawing on preexisting connotations, metaphors, and metonymies to achieve a level of recognizable, but
hard to articulate, emotional resonance that evades the precision of language and then materializes
amorphous anxieties and desires into recognizable figures who will gain strength and significance from
repetition. If Pandora is a prototype of the femme fatale, she found new life in the movies" (Mulvey,
"Topographies" 68).
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

41
Mulvey employs Freud's theory of castration anxiety to deconstruct psychological

symptoms, signified symbolically, arguing that "psychoanalytic theory transforms ...
fascinating images with their over-determined 'poetics of space' back into symptoms,
within a symbolic system, deciphering signifiers rather than unveiling phantasmal
space." In "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Beatriz Colomina has literalized this
interest in topography as signification, portraying a graphic delineation of features that
show their relative positions in elevation. This literalization displaces the "riddle" of
symbolism Mulvey addresses in the interest of manifest content. As Colomina points
out, in Loos' work there is no dislocation analogous to that which Mulvey posits, in
cinema, as a dislocation of word and image, signifier and signified;3 5 it follows that in
"The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Adolf Loos inverts Laura Mulvey's paradigm of
phantasmagoria because his elevations of the Rufer house materialize the regulation of
gender identity rather than connote it.36
Colomina continues this investigation of the topography of the split wall with
reflections on physical space. With reiterated descriptions of the "theater box,"
Josephine Baker's swimming pool, and the mirrored dining room of Loos' Steiner house
(Vienna, 1910), Colomina moves beyond metaphor to assert "the split wall" as a
phenomenological experience. This assertion is dependent on an intellectual hinge:
when Loos' subject inhabits the wall he or she creates a tension on the wall, construed
as the limit between interior and exterior.3 7 In the case of the Moller house, the theater
box reiterates the gender binary of the interior and exterior, and between the female
observer and male "intruder," to the effect of asserting the primacy of the masculine as
subjectivity:
In the Moller house [the] threshold/point of maximum tension is the raised alcove
protruding from the street fagade, where the occupant is enclosed in the security
of the interior, yet detached from it. The subject of Loos' house is a stranger, an
intruder in his own space. (Colomina, "The Split Wall" 95)
In the case of the house for Josephine Baker, the swimming pool inscribes scopophilic
pleasure within the material form of the interior, manifesting the objectification of the
female body for the pleasure of the masculine sexual imagination in built form:
In Josephine Baker's house, the wall of the swimming pool is punctured by
windows. It has been pulled apart, leaving a narrow passage surrounding the
pool, and splitting each of the windows into an internal window and an external
window. The visitor literally inhabits this wall, which enables him to look both
inside, at the pool, and outside, at the city, but he is neither inside nor outside the
house. (ibid.)
the Raumplan, for example, Loos constructs a space (without having completed the working
3, "In
drawings), then allows himself to be manipulated by this construction. The object has as much authority
over him as he has over the object" (Colomina, "The Split Wall" 96).
36 This drawing is considered symptomatic, like others.
37"Loos's subject inhabits this wall. This inhabitation creates a tension on that limit, tampers with it"
(Colomina, "The Split Wall" 95).

42
Rather than function metonymically, like "Pandora's box" in "Pandora: Topographies of

the Mask and Curiosity," here containment literally manifests the privilege of the
masculine in architectural space. It is made apparent that the division between interior
and exterior upon which the domestic universe of Loos' architectures depends is itself
dependent upon, and manufactured for, the assertion of male subjectivity as primary
and central. He is coextensive with the split wall around which this universe of the inside
and the outside is constructed, because this masculine subject also transcends the
regulation of the wall and the interval it represents. Circumstantially, that masculinity
also serves as the ontological framework for Loos' epistemological system: this evident
in the mise-en-scene of Josephine Baker's swimming pool, described above, where the
man is "neither inside nor outside the house," but has visual agency over both realms.
Here, space prescribes sexual identity. What you see is who you are.a"
In Josephine Baker, Beatriz Colomina finds her Pandora figure, a medium for the
unconscious assumptions and riddles of patriarchal culture of architecture in the
twentieth century. Turning from Loos' design and writing to his representation in others'
architectural writings, Colomina transitions away from the tactical differentiation of
herself from Laura Mulvey's feminist approach, and towards a strategic reinterpretation
of Mulvey's testimony of Pandora as a cultural figure.
After a lengthy excursus on Pandora, Pandora's Box, and their representation
together in the iconography of Abraham van Diepenbeek and Paul Klee, in "Pandora:
Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," Mulvey writes,:
The Panofskys record two examples of Pandora iconography in which the sexual
significance of the box is made explicit. One, an engraving by Abraham van
Diepenbeek dating from the mid-seventieth century, shows Pandora "holding the
fateful pyxis as a fig leaf' and accompanying contemporary text by Michel de
Marolles points out that Pandora is "holding her box in her right hand, lowered to
that part, which she covers, from which has flowed so many of the miseries and
anxieties that afflict man, as though an artist wished to show that there is always
something bitter in the midst of a fountain of pleasure and that the thorn pricks
among the flowers." The second example is a drawing by Paul Klee, dating from
1936, Die Busche der Pandora als Stilleben, "representing the ominous
receptacle... as a kantharis-shaped vase containing some flowers but emitting
evil vapors from an opening clearly suggestive of the female genitals. The
reverberations of connotation between Pandora and her box depend on the
contiguity: both the juxtaposition of the figure to the box and the topography of
the female body as an enclosing space link metonymically to other enclosing
38 Cannily, these instances of maximum tension between interior and exterior, and male and female, are
also that which amplifies the pleasure and power of the male figures of voyeur and visitor; this is an
inversion of Mulvey's proposition for feminist counter-cinema, where the "freedom of the look of the
camera into its materiality in time and space... destroys [the] satisfaction, pleasure, and privilege of the
'invisible guest"' (Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure" n.p.).
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

43
spaces. But the reverberations also depend on substitution. The box can, itself,
stand as a representation of the enigma and threat generated by the concept of
female sexuality in patriarchal culture. (Mulvey," Topographies" 62)
In her own, abbreviated, terms, Colomina rearticulates Mulvey's argument in the context of
Loos, Baker, and monographs of Loos' work:
Incapable of detachment from the object, the critic simultaneously produces a new
object and is produced by it. Criticism that presents itself as a new interpretation of
an existing object is in fact constructing a completely new object. On the other hand,
readings that claim to be purely objective inventories, the standard monographs of
Loos-Manz and Khnstler in the 1960s and Gravagnuolo in the 1980s-are thrown
off-balance by the very object of their control. Nowhere is this alienation more
evident than in their interpretations of the house for Josephine Baker (Colomina,
"The Split Wall" 96)
Colomina departs from Mulvey's psychoanalytic reading, instead beginning with the
manifest content of form. That this should be occurring is consistent with the shift in
media-from Mulvey's consideration cinema, to Colomina's consideration text-and also
serves to inscribe the decomposition of signification that can be seen in Colomina's earlier
observation of the literal. When discussing MOnz, for example, "The Split Wall: Domestic
Voyeurism" retains the assumption that composition is symptomatic but asserts this
through formal rather than psychoanalytic analysis, while simultaneously acknowledging
the spectral possibility of the psychoanalytic as episteme:
[In his monograph, Munz writes] "Africa: that is the image conjured up more or less
firmly by a contemplation of the model, "but he then confesses not to know why he
invoked this image. He attempts to analyze the formal characteristics of the project,
but all he can conclude is that "they look strange and exotic." What is most striking in
this passage is the uncertainty as to whether Manz is referring to the model of the
house or to Josephine Baker herself He seems unable to detach himself from this
project or to enter into it. (96-7)
As we can see, Mulvey's premise of Pandora as riddle and rebus is retained but method
and media have shifted. This is also apparent when, critiquing Gravagnuolo, Colomina
recalls Mulvey's description of Pandora always having "an iconographical attribute, a large
jar, which contained all the evils of the world." Specifically, where she cites Gravagnuolo,
Baker is linked with her swimming pool and a related dialectics of classicism and vulgarity.
He concludes:
The water flooded with light, the refreshing swim, the voyeuristic pleasure of
underwater exploration-these are the carefully balanced ingredients of this
gay architecture. But what matters more is that the invitation to the
spectacular suggested by the theme of the house for a cabaret star is
handled with Loos with discretion and intellectual detachment, more as a
poetic game, involving the mnemonic pursuit of quotations and allusions to
the Roman spirit, than as a vulgar surrender to the taste of Hollywood. (97)

44
Colomina's shift of method and media here reveals a difference in intent. Like Mulvey's
inquiry into the character Alicia in Notorious as an embodiment of Pandora, without
discussion of Ingrid Bergman as actress or woman, Colomina's historiography of the
Pandora-like figure of Josephine Baker includes little discussion of Baker herself. As
Colomina reinterprets Mulvey's riddle of Pandora she asserts a phallocentric paradigm
whereby Josephine Baker is treated as if she were only as the image represented by
Gravagnuolo and Munz. Here Josephine Baker is a cipher for the obfuscation of cultural
bias through faulty method, and the manifestation of prejudice, as masked by
objectivity, though the voice of the architectural historian:
The insistence on detachment, on reestablishing the distance between critic and
object of criticism, architect and building, subject and object, is of course
indicative of the obvious fact that Mtnz and Gravagnuolo have failed to separate
themselves from the object. (ibid.)
With critic, object, subject, and architects retained as stable ontologies there is no
conceptual space for the deepening or validation of Josephine Baker beyond her
existence in the masculine imagination of Loos and his historical chorus. Therefore,
even as she identifies castration anxiety, Beatriz Colomina fails to interpellate her
reader within a feminist dialectic against patriarchy. Josephine Baker, rather than
representing that which "signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic
mechanisms to circumvent her threat" (Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure" n.p.), in order to bring
readers to political consciousness, is historicized by Colomina as the hollow object of
masculine fantasy and shame. As Colomina writes, "The image of Josephine Baker
offers pleasure but also represent s the threat of castration posed by the 'other'
(Colomina, 97-8).
In "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," Mulvey at length reveals the
problem of containment as crucial to the topography of female identity in space and
identity; the iconography of Pandora is foundational to this study. Through her
historiography of Adolf Loos monographs, "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism"
attempts to refute Mulvey's feminist episteme by privileging the masculine subject.
Colomina's narrative addresses this refutation directly. In her critiques of Munz and
Kunstler and Gravagnuolo, the iconography of the house for Josephine Baker is
presented as always defined by the male gaze, and therefore a representation of the
male gaze as objectified rather than a figuration of the feminine. This, as a negation of
Mulvey's feminist agenda, is made clear through the juxtaposition of a claim resonating
with "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity" followed by one undercutting
feminist critique as such:
The image of Josephine Baker offers pleasure but also represents the threat of
castration posed by the "other": the image of woman in water-liquid, elusive,
unable to be controlled, pinned down. One way of dealing with this threat is
fetishization. The Josephine Baker house represents a shift in the sexual status
of the body. This shift involves determinations of race and class more than
gender. (98-9)
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

45
Read in the context of Sexuality & Space, the shift discussed not only "involves
determinations of race and class more than gender," but also asserts these
determinations over that of gender in defining the ontology of the body. Rather than
embrace Mulvey's logocentric approach to the metaphysics of gender Colomina
highlights Baker's physical attributes as they have been described in architectural
history. Synthesizing her description of Josephine Baker's swimming pool and
Garavanuolo's Colomina writes:
In the Baker house, the body is produced as spectacle, the object of an erotic
gaze, an erotic system of looks. The exterior of this house cannot be read as
a silent mask designed to conceal its interior; it is a tattooed surface which
does not refer to the interior, it neither conceals nor reveals it. This
fetishization of the surface is repeated in the "interior" In the passages the
visitors consume Baker's body as a surface adhering to the windows. Like the
body, the house is all surface; it does not simply have an interior. (98)
The gaze as a metaphysical problem has been reduced to its literal experience; the
puzzle of gender oppression Pandora represented in Mulvey's "Pandora" flattened
into the male gaze, and Josephine Baker's house into a symptom thereof.
Smash cut to Le Corbusier, and cameras

Responding to Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," the
concluding pages of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" contain a uniquely
architectural investigation of the gaze, as addressed in the work of Le Corbusier.
Where the first portion of the essay obfuscates through omission, and legitimates
through citation, the final portion foregrounds architectural representation over
secondary sources, while offering profuse and accessible description. While writing
about Corbusier, Colomina leads her reader to conclusions with description, detail,
and pedantic prose.
Colomina begins with a comparison:
If the photographs of Loos' interiors give the impression that somebody is
about to enter the room, In Le Corbusier's the impression is that somebody
was just there, leaving as traces a coat and a hat lying on the table by the
entrance of Villa Savoye or some bread and a jug on the kitchen table or a
raw fish in the kitchen of Garches. (98-9)
This tidy comparison provides an easy transition from one subject to the next. As it
offers this comparison, this second section has also reset to the beginning of the
first, staging a related but also different line of inquiry.
If the beginning of the first section of Colomina's essay was mediation on
Mulvey staged through Benjamin, this reset version has retreated towards a more
direct form of engagement: an investigation of architectural historical content
mediated thorough Mulvey alone. It is appropriate that the second section is written

46
in a different style and tone from the first. Where the first section obfuscates through
omission, and legitimates through citation and myth, the second foregrounds
architectural representation over secondary sources and offers more profuse and
accessible description. While writing about Corbusier, Colomina leads her reader to
conclusions with description, detail, and pedantic prose. For example, the sentence
preceding the quote above elaborates on argument introduced, introducing a second
level of detail:
And even once we have reached the highest point of the house, as in the
terrace of Villa Savoye in the sill of the window which frames the landscape,
the culminating point of the promenade, here also we find a hat, a pair of
sunglasses, a little package (cigarettes?) and a lighter, and now, where did
the gentleman go? Because of course, you would have noticed already, that
the personal objects are all male objects (never a handbag, a lipstick, or some
piece of women's clothing. But before that... (99)
This clear formal strategy complements the obscurity of the architectural
representation at stake, allowing one to feel like they're "getting it" even through the
details remain obscure. There is a casualness here that is new as well, conveyed
through short sentences and improper grammar. Before, Colomina was carefully
constructing a pedagogical/political position on the issue of the place of gender and
the scopophilic in architectural inquiry, and doing so in a manner which was
intentionally intimidating. Now, she's loosened up, becoming a bit more generous in
her explanation and talking directly to a reader presumed to be with her in what
she's saying (rather than abstractly addressing a methodological opposition). This
stylistic shift inaugurates a transition in the mode of Mulvey's kaleidoscope: a turn,
where the basic structure intent and content remains the same, but some elements
have shifted. As the kaleidoscope turns, Colomina modifies her relationship to her
reader. She gets closer to her audience, while Mulvey recedes from view, behind
criticism, veiled by detail and context.
As she writes about Le Corbusier, Colomina no longer presumes we are familiar with
what she is explaining. For example, whereas in the first portion the following artifact
would be referenced only with its title, here Colomina writes: "In the film
L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui (1929) directed by Pierre Chenal with Le Corbusier" and
then includes archival information and cross-references in her footnote:
37 A copy of this film is held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
About this movie see J. Ward, "Le Corbusier's Villa Les Terrasses and the
International Style," Ph. D dissertation, New York University, 1983, and by the
same author "Les Terrasses," Architectural Review (March 1985: 64-69.
Richar Becherer has compared it to Man Ray's movie Les Mysteres du
Chateau du De (setting by Mallet-Stevens) in "Chancing it in the Architecture
of Surrealist Mise-en Scene." (102)
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

47
It is interesting that there is a reference to mise-en-scene in the note above, but no

reference to Mulvey-who discusses the category both in "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema" and "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," at length.
The impression of Colomina's inclusions of additional detail and more informal style,
above, is that this portion of her essay has inverted its focus, moving from an
architectural mediation of feminist film theory to a filmic mediation of gender in
architectural representation. To this end, we are led through the film described directly
rather than through secondary figures like Benjamin, Simmel, or Lacan:
There is also a figure of a woman going through a house in this movie. The
house that frames her is Villa Savoye. She never catches our eye. Here we are
literally following somebody, the point of view is that of a voyeur. (104)
Meanwhile, our focus has shifted from women enclosed in spaces and the specter of
voyeurism to the direct representation of that voyeuristic view, as it relates to a woman
who moves through space. Whereas before we concentrated on the relationship
between a woman and her voyeur, here we follow the point of view of the voyeur.As she
describes the mise-en-scdne of L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, Colomina uses a method of
ipso-facto engagement. As with before, elision plays a key role in the construction of her
argument. Rather than legitimate through obscure citations, however, here Colomina
takes advantage of reconstructed reader-relations to make a particular and limited
interpretation of the film in question, as a representation of the gender politics of Le
Corbusier's architecture:
We could accumulate more evidence. Few photographs of Le Corbusier's
buildings show people in them. But in those few, women always look away from
the camera: most of the time they are shot from the back and they almost never
occupy the same space as men. (ibid.)
In order for this claim to operate as if introduced by her summary of L'Architecture
d'aujourd'hui, Colomina brushes over many crucial aspects of the film. For example, ,
Colomina fails to mention a thirty second sequence portraying two women and one man
engaging in calisthenics together, during which both women look at the camera at least
once (see figure 5). With this in mind Colomina's claim that the film is symptomatic of
gender dimorphism in Corbusier's architectural representation appears tautological. If
one considers the description as part of a network of citations which includes Mulvey's
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," however, Colomina's intention becomes
clearer. Instead of describing Corbusier's film and related media, Colomina is
constructing a performative counter-point to Mulvey's proposition for feminist inquiry
based on the psychological investigation of the gaze as symptomatic of pervasive
sexism as representing in visual culture. The situation of this reaction from within a
description of cinematic composition and stylistic tropes-mise-en-sc6ne -is pointed
considering the primacy of this aspect of cinematography within Mulvey's proposition of
feminist counter-cinema. 39 Rather than claim as Mulvey does that film restricts itself to
"However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself to a formal
39
mise-en-scene reflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides

48
Figure 5 Still, L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui, dir. Pierre Chenal, 1929
the representation of the dominant ideology, Colomina's focused description implies that
LArchitecture d'aujourd'hui is indicative only of that which it seeks to represent-Le
Corbusier's architecture-and is emblematic in doing so.
As she discusses the architectural representation of Le Corbusier, Beatriz
Colomina performs her counter-point to Mulvey's feminist proposition of the
psychological investigation of the. In this counter-point, the image of the castrated
woman is the lynch pin for a system of architectural representation whereby agency is
invested in the masculine. As she addresses the depiction of women in photographs of
homes by Le Corbusier, Colomina's descriptions reiterate the phallocentrism of her
earlier argument:
a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges
the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralistically, but to highlight
the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which
produced it, and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against
these obsessions and assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible,
but it can still only exist as a counterpoint" (Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure" n.p.).
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

49
Figure 6 Sexuality & Space, pp. 106-7 (author's copy)
[... T]he woman is placed "inside," the man "outside," the woman looks at the
man, the man looks at the "world." [ ...] Perhaps no example is more telling than
the photo collage of the exhibit of a living room in the Salon d'Automne 1929,
including all the "equipment of a dwelling," a project that Le Corbusier realized in
collaboration with Charlotte Periand.In this image which Le Corbusier had
published in the Oeuvre complete, Perriandherself is lying on the chaise-longue,
her head turned away from the camera. More significant, in the original
photograph employed in this photocollage (as well as in another photograph in
the Oeuvre complete which shows the chaise-longue in the horizontal position),
one can see that the chair has been placed right against the wall. Remarkably,
she is facing the wall. She is almost an attachment to the wall. She sees nothing
(figures 28, 29).
And of course for Le Corbusier-who writes things such as "I exist in life only to
condition what I see" (Prcisions,1930) or "This is the key: to look... to look
lobserve Isee limagine linvent, create," and in the last weeks of his life-"I am
and I remain an impenitent visual" (Mise au point)-everything is in the visual.
(104-7)

50
Perriand here faces the wall in the same manner that Josephine Baker swims in her
pool: to be looked at, as a representation of gender, as regulated by the figure of "the
split wall." As Colomina has written, where Loos' drawings manifested the space of that
wall, occupying the interval between inside and outside, Corbusier's photography
depicts the wall and its regulation literally. He, the architect, sees the blind woman
looking at and blended into the blank wall, which is itself representative of his vocation.
The photograph is a representation of the (male) subject of architecture; Corbusier
depicts what he himself sees. Where Josephine Baker in her pool literalizes the figure of
Pandora and her box, Perriand embodies architecture's subjugation of feminine agency
in Modernism's visually-determined universe. The pedagogical ambition of the text
sublimates possible counterpoints because of its self-contained tautology: what
Colomina describes is, as always, tightly framed by what she chooses to include and
what she chooses not to; there can be no alternative interpretation of the images
described because the description is already autonomous from that to which it refers.
Shaped more by latent critique than manifest content, the text asserts Corbusier's
sexism by signifying it while occluding any other possible response to his photographs,
because the photographs were always already less the object of the description than
the development of a response to "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."
I surmise that "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" is emasculating Charlotte
Perriand to a degree that might be inappropriate. After all, what do the photographs and
Perriand's positions within them signify beyond the pithy claim that Perriand "sees
nothing?" In her prose, Colomina does not analyze further. Meanwhile, with these
photographs, Le Corbusier is given a level of intellectual agency that is perhaps greater
than that of historical fact. It is questionable to what extent the representations
Colomina references, through the words of another historian, could be similarly
described as emblematic of "the look in Le Corbusier's architecture," as she does here:
But what does vision mean here? We should now return to the passage in
Urbanisme which opens this paper ("Loos told me one day: 'A cultivated man
does not look out of the window...') because in that very passage he has
provided us with a clue to the enigma when he goes on to say: "Such sentiment
[that of Loos with regard to the window] can have an explanation in the
congested, disordered city where disorder appears in distressing images; one
could even admit the paradox [of a Loosian window] before a sublime natural
spectacle, too sublime." For Le Corbusier the metropolis itself was "too sublime."
The look, in Le Corbusier's architecture, is not that look which would still pretend
to contemplate the metropolitan spectacle with the detachment of a nineteenth-
century observer before a sublime, natural landscape. (107)
In this passage, the connotation of the term "architecture" relative to "vision")remains
enigmatic even as Colomina is ostensibly writing in the interest of disambiguation. Is
she arguing that architecture-and the built works and representations that go along
with them (or before them, or after them)-exert a metaphysical push and pull that
constricts people and artists working within and around them (or "in" them) to engage
with vision in a certain way? Is Le Corbusier magic? The claim would not be
preposterous given the ambiguous subjectivity of the camera in Laura Mulvey's
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

51
"Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," and the trope of definition through
comparison to this essay in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism." Here, Le Corbusier's
visually-deterministic metaphysics of space is a construction of discourse, emphasized
through the concept of "the look," itself substantiated through a carefully curated series
of images, which themselves only signify in the context of the discourse they support.
Like the void endemic to the phenomenon of Pandora, this process of negation
and the tautology it produces is necessary for the configuration of gaze within
Colomina's argument. As with Mulvey's "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and
Curiosity," this topography of the void is motivated by narrative; however, in "The Split
Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" the fiction developed only operates with itself at stake,
rather than in the interest of work to come. In the introduction to "Pandora:
Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity," Laura Mulvey emphasizes an epistemological
imperative where "the desire to know by seeing with one's own eyes needs to be
transmuted into a pleasure of decipherment so that the process of uncovering is similar
to the exercise of riddle- or puzzle-solving" (Mulvey, "Topographies" 66). While
discussing the "look" of Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina draws on aspects of this
imperative-for example, signifying a reader's desire to know with rhetorical questions,
or emphasizing terms like "enigma"-however, in so doing Colomina has undercut the
political ambitions of that imperative by substituting a lesson in architectural history.
Therefore, in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," the desire to know by seeing with
one's own eyes emphasized by "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity" has
been transformed into a decipherment of that problem, as represented by architectural
design. It is instructive that where Mulvey relies on a self-constructed ground of her own
previous work Colomina retreats even farther inward, moving her argument forward
through language games and a redoubling of terms which have already been
established. Consider, for example, the description of the Beistegui apartment in "The
Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism:"
In this house, originally intended not to be inhabited but to serve as a frame for
big parties, there was no electric lighting. Beistegui wrote: "the candle has
recovered all its rights because it is the only one which gives a living light."
"electricity, modern power, is invisible, it does not illuminate the dwelling, but
activates the doors and moves the walls. Electricity is used inside this apartment
to slide away partition walls, operate doors, and allow cinematographic projection
on the metal screen (which unfolds automatically as the chandelier rises up on
pulleys, and outside, on the roof terrace, to slide the banks of hedges to frame
the view of Paris [... ] Electricity is used here not to illuminate, but to make visible
a technology of framing... doors, walls, hedges, that is, traditional architectural
framing devices, are activated with electric power, as are the built in cinema
camera and its projection screen, and when these modern frames are lit, the
"living light of the chandelier gives way to another living light, the flickering light of
the movie, the "flicks" [ ...] This new "lighting" displaces traditional forms of
enclosure, as electricity had done before it. This house is a commentary on the
new condition. The distinctions between inside and outside are here made
problematic." (107-110)

52
Upon reading, we can agree with Colomina that a new condition for the design of the
interior has been established by the apartment designed by Le Corbusier because she
has said as much; similarly, it is reasonable that, within this design, distinctions have
been made problematic and certain things displaced for others, because this is what her
narrative describes. That we should agree, however, is dependent upon our
subscription to the metonymic resonance between the frame, illumination, visibility, and
the production of images as analogous to rhetorical signification. Instead of being an
instrument of sexual politics, here the gaze is an instrument of wordplay. In the context
of the disciplinary ambitions discussed in the introduction to Sexuality & Space, this
displacement of the sexuality applies to "Architecture" as much as it does Colomina's
prose. In "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Architecture is autonomous from the
issue of sexuality inasmuch as the concept of "the gaze," always already implicated in
the regulation of gender, has been made to refer only to what it itself sees; Colomina's
language game manifests this political turning-towards-oneself by replicating it in prose
form.
This intellectual shift towards architectural autonomy initiates Colomina's final
critique of Laura Mulvey. Responding to "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"
Colomina re-inscribes the concept of the camera within an architectural framework. In
the process, she undercuts the figure of the feminine as the discursive content of "the
gaze" in favor of "the view" as that which regulates spatial ontology, generally. For
Laura Mulvey the camera embodies phallocentrism because of the way in which it
configures the look of cinema:
Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera
movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible
editing (demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The
male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which
he articulates the look and creates the action. (Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure" n.p.)
For Beatriz Colomina, the camera only configures the political possibility of a landscape
whose construction subjection to influence is made absent. This has the effect of
evacuating the sexually-motivated spatial illusion the camera represents for Mulvey:
For Le Corbusier, "to inhabit" means to inhabit the camera. But the camera is not
a traditional place; it is a system of classification, a kind of filing cabinet. "To
inhabit" means to employ that system. Only after this do we have "placing," which
is to place the view in the house, to take a picture, to place the view in the filing
cabinet, to classify the landscape. (Colomina, "The Split Wall" 120)
Just as Mulvey's camera enables the male protagonist's command of the stage,
Corbusier's architecture enables his inhabitant to command over the landscape.40
40 With this in mind it is not coincidental that the subjects of both Corbusier's and Loos's architectures are
described as "actors." Quoting Colomina: "The subject of Loos's architecture is the stage actor. But while
the center of the house is left empty for the performance, we find the subject occupying the threshold of
this space. Undermining its boundaries. The subject is split between actor and spectator of its own play.
The completeness of the subject dissolves as also does the wall that s/he is occupying. The subject of Le
Corbuser's work is the movie actor, 'estranged not only from the scene but also his own person.' This
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

53
Through this partial consistency, Colomina is able to articulate political stakes of her
argument in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism":
[In the work of Le Corbusier] the exterior world... becomes artifice; like the air, it
has been conditioned, landscaped-it becomes landscape. The apartment
defines modem subjectivity with its own eye. The traditional subject can only be
the visitor, and as such, a temporary part of the viewing mechanism. The
humanist subject has been displaced. (120)
Humanism, here, is a cipher. By negating the gendered aspect of Mulvey's argument

about the camera and patriarchy Colomina re-establishes the male protagonist enabled
by the camera of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" as the subject of space.
Colomina transposes Mulvey's concern for gendered subjects with the foregrounding of
the interior-exterior dialectic as that which regulates gender:
The separation on which the dwelling is based is the possibility for a being to
install himself But in Le Corbusier this installation splits the subject itself, rather
than simply the outside from inside. Installation involves a convoluted geometry
which entangles the division between interior and exterior, between the subject
and self.... The split between the traditional humanist subject (the occupant or
the architect) and the eye is split between looking and seeing, between outside
and inside, between landscape and site. In [Corbusier's] drawings, the inhabitant
or the person in search of a site are represented as diminutive figures ... This
inhabitation is independent from the place (understood in a traditional sense); it
turns the outside into an inside... "Le dehors est toujours un dedans" (the outside
is always an inside) means that the "outside" is a picture. And that "to inhabit"
means to see. (125)
Finally, Colomina returns to the allusion of Mulvey's camera to assert a masculine

protagonist that the production of a feminist counter-cinema is intended to oppose:
Power has become "invisible." The look that from Le Corbuser's sykscrapers will
dominate a world in order is neither the look from behind the periscope of
Beistegui or the defensive view (turned towards itself) of Loos' interiors. It is a
look that "registers" a new reality, a "recording" eye. (ibid.)
The use of the present perfect tense implies that the historical narrative in which Le
Corbusier's skyscraper's participate has no beginning and no end: it is, and therefore is
now just as it was then. Where Mulvey ends with projection, Colomina concludes with
the implication that what she has described is now as it has always been: it is what it is.
As she concludes "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," this philosophy of
history is made manifest through the final comparison of Loos' and Corbusier's views of
moment of estrangement is clearly marked in the drawing of La Ville radieuse where the traditional
humanist figure, the inhabitant of the house, is made incidental to the camera eye: it comes and goes, it is
merely a visitor" (125).

54
sexuality, space, and fashion. In her comparison, implicit sexual politics is again
obviated by a discussion of history:
... where Loos contrasts the dignityof male British fashion with the masquerade
of women's, Le Corbusier praises women's fashion over men's because it has
undergone change, the change of modem time. (126, emphasis original)
While Loos spoke, you will remember, of the exterior of the house in terms of
male fashion, Le Corbusier's comments on fashion are made in the context of a
discussion of the interior. (127) ... etc
Sexuality is displaced by the men discussing it, the structure of sexual oppression
configured by the discourse under examination remains.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

55
SIC ERAT SCRIPTUM:
ON "UNTITLED: THE HOUSING OF GENDER" BY MARK WIGLEY
"Untitled: The Housing of Gender," reframes the topic of the symposium Sexuality &
Space within concerns for the state of architectural discourse at the end of the twentieth
century. This is evident from the beginning of the essay; for example, in the introductory
section of "Untitled: The Housing of Gender," Mark Wigley asks (and responds):
What is it to talk of sexuality and space here, in this space, or rather spaces, this
room but also the space of architectural discourse and that of the university, to
name but two? Sexuality is not so easily accommodated here. The subject is still
without title in architecture, that is, it is still without a proper place. Of course, this
displacement of sexuality occurs within every department of the university, even,
if not especially, in those in which it appears to be addressed in the most rigorous
terms. (Wigley 328)
I'm not going to deny that what Wigley says above was true (and remains so), however
in context the description offers a self-fulfilling prophecy, and this is troubling. "Untitled:
The Housing of Gender" conflates gender and sexuality, by collapsing each category
into its expression, in space. This collapse, which occurs through an architectural
historiography of canonical texts by Leon Battista Alberti and Gottfried Semper,
"displaces" (to draw on both Wigley and Colomina's use of this verb) the attempt to
"give title" to sexuality within architecture offered by the symposium, "Sexuality and
Space;" by undertaking a rigorous investigation of the configuration of sexuality by
architectural theory, "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" projects an architecturally-
specific narrative of gender performance in architectural discourse; in its implications for
texts by Beatriz Colomina and Laura Mulvey, this projection displaces the narratives it
circumscribes historically, within the shared discourse of Sexuality & Space.
In his historiography, Mark Wigley states that the project of Sexuality& Space
was always already a dead-end; while seemingly benign, this gesture operates through
an intellectual enumeration of several deep-seated prejudices about gender and
scholarship. It is in the interest of exploring these prejudices that this chapter has been
written.
In "Untitled: The Housing of Gender," Mark Wigley uses sexuality as an agent in the
elaboration of a complex architectural tautology whereby what is, is inasmuch as it has

56
been described. Early in his essay, Wigley defines the terms of architectural discourse
and Sexuality & Space such that each grounds the other:
The talk of "Sexuality and Space" here, within the academic space of
architectural discourse, is therefore complicated. After all, this is the discourse
that advertises itself as concerned primarily with space. In a sense, this is the
space of space. The question of sexuality must be as much about the space of
the discourse as what can be said within that space.4 ' In these terms, my
concem here is to trace some of the relationships between the role of gender in
the discourse of space and role of space in the discourse of gender. This is to
say, with the interrelationships between how the question of gender is housed
and the role of gender in housing. (328-9)
In the passage above, the delegation of such words as "gender" and "sexuality" to the
ambiguities of "the question of sexuality" and the "question of gender" calls the meaning
of each term into question. In this sense neither of these crucial concepts identified by
Mark Wigley, which he will subsequently discuss in detail, have meaning unto
themselves. "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" is allowed to circle around these words'
possible signification, as informed by historical analysis (answering "the question"). This
is to say, while "sexuality and space," "architectural discourse," et al have been
represented as indefinite in their signification they will nonetheless circumstantially
come to mean what "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" says they do.
Having said this it is also important to note that the use of the term "department
of the university" in my first selection is noteworthy, because the feminist discourse that
Wigley identifies with those departments "in which [sexuality] appears to be addressed
in the most rigorous terms" is not given a genealogy and therefore, in this context,
definition. Instead, feminism is described through its ideological and methodological
tendencies; these tendencies are, in turn, utilized as the foundation for a corrective
which is asserted as if its possibility was latent in architectural historiography. Per
Wigley's deconstruction, feminism offers an established method for deconstructing the
suppression of aspects of the human experience within the study of architecture;
because of this method's already existing and having-been-followed, it was
inappropriate for Wigley's architectural inquiry. Impropriety is offered as an inherent
4 A reader pointed out to me that in this thesis I seem to agree with what is stated in the sentence "The
question of sexuality must be as much about the space of the discourse as what can be said within that
space." One the one hand it is true that I might agree: my consideration of sexuality here is as much
about the space of its attendant discourse as what was said. However, my allegiances in this matter lie
more with Laura Mulvey than they do with Mark Wigley, if such an opposition could be proposed, through
her more figural, formalist engagement with the category of space and Mark Wigley's more literal,
historiographical method. This thesis is not a manifesto; ergo I am not claiming that the question of
sexuality must be as much about the form of discourse as what issaid by that form, to take some liberties
with the Wigley passage that this note appends. I find that a little bossy (who is anyone to say what it is
"about," and why must what it is "about" be enforced?); rather, this investigation is a type of nonce
taxonomy: by configuring the discourse of Sexuality &Space in a certain way I hope to also reconfigure it.
Therefore, finally addressing the so-called "other hand," I disagree with Wigley's statement by default,
and offer no alternative; with that in mind, so far as this thesis might be a response to Wigley's sentence
about space and sexuality, it is an intentional non-sequitur.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

57
flaw, coextensive with the ideological ambition of the feminist project. To this end, in
"Untitled: The Housing of Gender," a feminist interpretation of space is offered only in
terms which are, and therefore only as, negative:
... the complicity of the discourse with both the general cultural subordination of
the "feminine" and the specific subordination of particular "women" can be
identified, often explicitly but usually by way of covert social mechanisms that
sustain bias at odds with overt formulations. Such readings would reproduce in
architecture readings that have been made of other discourses. (329)
By defining feminism as discourses interested in "the general cultural subordination of

the 'feminine' and the specific subordination of particular 'women'," the project is made
irrelevant because of its non-adherence to a historicist paradigm. Here, feminist thought
is described as methodologically flawed because it operates through the historical
consistency of categories such as "feminine" and "women;" this constancy "sustains"
chronic ideological biases and is therefore antithetical to a progressive project like
Wigley's architectural theory. If given the instability of "sexuality and space"-if, for
example, Wigley were sensitive enough to revise "the 'feminine"' to read "the question
of the feminine," as he has categorized "the question of sexuality"-he might not have
so readily cast aside feminism as a flattening of history. The accuracy of the above
passage notwithstanding, its disciplinary description is necessary to enact an epistemic
rupture whereby historiography offers the groundwork for a more sophisticated, and
simultaneously more architectural, line of inquiry. Wigley continues,
This work is necessary and overdue. It is equally necessary to think about why it
is overdue, why this discourse has been so resistant, its silence getting louder,
such that the question of "Sexuality and Space" [sic] is being asked in this way,
now, here. What specific forms of resistance to this inquiry does the discourse
employ? And to what extent was it established as precisely such a resistance?
(ibid.)
It is reasonable to assume that when he says "equally" here, Mark Wigley in fact means
"more." Wigley tends to assert through description; appropriately, in "Untitled: The
Housing of Gender," assertions often take the form of apophasis, or mentioning without
mentioning. In the passage above, Wigley implies that "specific forms of resistance"
have given architecture its role in culture because architecture was given a privileged
status in the perpetuation of sexism. Ironically, relationship between that status (the
subject of his essay) and its effect on "the complicity of [architecture] with both the
general cultural subordination of the 'feminine' and the specific subordination of
particular women' remains unidentified despite its foundational importance to Wigley's
arguments.
Subsequently, and without establishing that which is resisted, Wigley skips
ahead to investigate the form of this resistance:
Since these particular forms of resistance mark the disciplinary role of
architecture in our culture, the question becomes what exactly is being protected
here, in this space, for whom? To simply reproduce the analyses of other

58
discourses may be to preserve this secret. Architectural discourse is clearly

defined more by what it will not say than what it says. (ibid.)
To be perhaps overly pithy: if Wigley's last sentence is true, then "Untitled: The Housing
of Gender" is more defined by its ellipsis of that which would be described by feminist
inquiry than the essay's constative historiographical study. If this form of resistance
marks the disciplinary form of architecture in Wigley's scholarship, the question, for his
reader, becomes how this obviation impacts the conceptual space of the essay, and to
what effect.
I should say, now, that from the perspective of historicism there is worthwhile and
overdue work in assessing to what extent faith in historical specificity can be considered
sexist here, given the need for defining "the feminine" that Mark Wigley has chosen to
ignore for the time being, as well as in the fact of his choosing to ignore it. However, in
my present role as a historiographer I will turn my attentions to Wigley's writing more in
the specific than in the abstract; this is to say that, in this analysis, I redouble the
feminist interest in the covert by returning Wigley's question "what specific forms of
resistance to [feminist] inquiry does this discourse employ?," through a close reading of
"Untitled: The Housing of Gender."
The Gospel According to Mark

Like "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," "Untitled: The Housing of Gender"
establishes a political position based in pedagogy. For Mark Wigley, historiography
takes on a redemptive aspect as a corrective to the circumstantial pitfalls of feminist
inquiry, in order to assert a normative practice of architecture. In his essay, the fact that
that which is corrected always remains undefined is less relevant than the
establishment of historical concepts and their evolution, in examined texts, over an
established time frame; here, as we shall see, complication takes the place of the
political, and the constancy of inquiry takes the place of dialectical materialism-even
as the dialectic remains in place as a rhetorical trope. Wigley's close reading of a
passage from the introduction to Feminism and Psychoanalysis encapsulates his
pedagogical politic of complication. Discussing the passage,
In recent years, feminist psychoanalytic critiques have passed beyond these
issues... Emerging from the household, shifting from the illusion of privatized and
public spheres, from the family to the acknowledgement of an open confrontation
with the interlocutionary terms of cultural mediation [sic.]."
4 Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof, eds., Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1989), 2. (Qtd in Wigley 330).
It is not stated in "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" why this book was chosen for analysis, although from
how Wigley frames his discussion of it can be gleaned that the example seemed pertinent, and was
therefore exemplary. Consider Wigley's introduction to the volume: "The question of sexuality and space
here is that of the structure of the mask. To interrogate this institutional mask necessitates running the
risk of returning to the all too familiar scene of the patriarchal construction of the place of woman as the
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

59
Wigley claims:
Domestic space can only pose a danger inasmuch as the illusions that sustain it,
like all enfranchised cultural images, are real. Indeed, the spatial rhetoric
employed-"passed beyond," "emerging from," "situates," "fitting within," "closed,"
"open," "insulates"-restores the very space being critiqued. It reconstructs the
house as the paradigm of the definition of space in the very gesture of leaving it
behind. The house is literally left behind, intact, as if innocent of the violence it
appears to frame. But the house is itself a third term. The specific mechanisms
with which it constructs space need to be interrogated before its effects can be
resisted. (331)
In the excerpt above, "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" is presented as if its goal is to
repair an omission by reassessing a text's content and method. As he describes it here,
the solution to Feminism and Psychoanalysis's excluded middle of the house is the
introduction of a body of missing analysis, similar to what he has undertaken. What is
accomplished is a displacement of a displacement in order to re-orient the role of the
architectural in the discursive process in which it was initially dislocated; this is done to
redirect what is seen occurring towards a new goal, and that goal is assumed to be
coextensive with an originary disciplinary position or methodology.
The goal is, in other words, reactionary.
That which is canonical takes on a crucial degree of authority in "Untitled: The Housing
of Gender." While, in the essay, Mark Wigley laments aspects of phallocentrism latent in
Leon Battista Alberti's On the Art of Building in Ten Books and On Family, he
nonetheless treats these texts' content as coextensive with a larger body with
unassailable truth value. By ascribing to the first book the status of exemplary "canonic"
text,4 Wigley renders its content as metonymic for a canon as a whole; its narrative is
made to be the narrative of architectural history. Considered with this metonymic
function it can be reasoned that what Wigley writes about Alberti's texts is intended as
representative of the canon, generally." Mark Wigley's reading therefore reifies Alberti's
house precisely at the moment in which many dangers of such a return are being articulated. The
introduction to a recent anthology on feminism and psychoanalysis, for example, describes how feminist
theory domesticates itself inasmuch as it both assumes a familial relationship to other discourses, like
psychoanalysis, and focuses within that theoretical couple on 'private relations.' In so doing it occupies a
'stereotypically feminine space,' 'situating' itself 'in the sexualized, emotionalized, personalized,
privatized, erratic sphere of the home and bedchamber rather than the structured, impersonal, public
realm"' (Wigley 330).
43 "Take for example, a "canonic text like Alberti's fifteenth century treatise, On the Art of Building in Ten
Books, which was crucial to architecture's promotion into the liberal arts and therefore eventually into the
academy and, more recently, into the university and finally into this room" (Wigley 332).
44I thank Caroline Jones for pointing out that the critique alluded to in this sentence is opaque. I feel that
this lack of clarity is unfair to my reader, so I would like to address what I mean by this sentence for you,
through Professor Jones' comment. During a review of an earlier draft, Professor Jones asked me, in
regards to my claims about metonymy here, "Is he [Wigley] wrong?" My answer to this question is yes.

60
"overt reference to architecture's complicity in the exercise of patriarchal authority by

defining a particular intersection between spatial order and a system of surveillance
which turns on the question of gender" (332), and to that end instantiates that which is
referenced in Alberti's works as applicable to the field, generally, by virtue of the
epistemological authority of the canon.
The most important consequence of Wigley's treatment of the canon is a
resulting conflation of gender and sexuality. In "Untitled: The Housing of Gender," the
two terms "gender" and "sexuality" refer to related binaries; sexuality refers to the body
(for example, women) and gender to the attributes resulting from its social regulation
(the feminine, etc.). In his narration of Alberti's corpus, Mark Wigley maintains that it is
the body which is regulated by gender, and that space is the medium for that regulation;
since, in its historiography of Alberti, "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" refers to
gendered and sexed bodies as if they are coextensive in space, the categories of
gender and sexuality are treated as analogous." This association is consequential
because of its effect on the essay's relationship to other, extra-disciplinary discourses.
For example, when synthesizing Alberti's commentary on separate bedrooms for "the
husband and wife" in book V of On the Art of Building, Wigley argues that this historical
text "participates the production of 'woman' by high discourse and therefore has, at
best, a complicated relationship to the historically, geographically, and class-specific
regimes of social control and forms of resistance to them" (333). In this passage,
concepts such as discourse, domestication, class, social control, and resistance are
given reference (Alberti) but are not pursued; like intellectual ephemera, these concepts
grant context to the text but are only empty supplements. These empty supplements
effectively accentuate architecture's autonomy as an intellectual concern in "Untitled:
The Housing of Gender." By displacing certain concerns with intellectual white noise,
Wigley whittles down the intersection of sexuality and space to an intersection, as such;
to this end, in his writing, architecture exists in a state of suspension, which is
predicated on the sublimation of gender. Given his conflation of sexuality and gender,
the intersection of "sexuality and space" is precisely the limit of architectural discourse,
according to "Untitled: The Housing of Gender." Therefore, as we will see, from the
Now, there is nothing wrong with using part of a canon as exemplary for the canon as a whole-1,
personally, am suspicious of the notion of a canon and its attendant metanarratives, but recognize the
category of "the canon" as nonetheless operative in the humanities. That said, as a student of
architectural studies I find the idea of an architectural historical canon suspicious. Architectural history is
too small or too marginal a field to sustain a hegemonic hermeneutic tradition. Sometimes, the field is
seen as part of art history, on other occasions it is seen as an instrumental supplement to architectural
education; in either situation, an architectural historical canon would inherently be only a component in
some other, larger body of work. I feel that Wigley is employing the idea of a "canon" here to intimidate
his reader, putting the weight of written history, and dogma, on his side, without any substance to back
him save some vague specter. So, I write what I have written here about metonymy to imply a rejoinder
like, "Stand up for your beliefs, man!" or, "Say what you want to say; don't hide behind history." In the end,
I recognize my discomfort with the canon to be a matter of preference, and for that reason leave aside my
feelings about it and try instead to address only how the idea of a canon here functions to configure
Wigley's argument (rightly or wrongly).
4 In other words: building off of Alberti, Wigley writes as if the social determination of the body is subject
to its biological form; therefore, gender and sexuality are conflated in "Untitled: The Housing of Gender."
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

61
perspective of Mark Wigley's architectural history "sexuality and space" is, inherently, a
discourse constituted by and which itself encourages a historiography of silence.
In "Untitled: The Housing of Gender," alternative narratives for the intersection of
sexuality and space are bracketed off by the construction of an originary historical
ground. As written, the stakes of Mark Wigley's essay exist not in the intersection of
sexuality and space as explored but with the implication of Alberti's texts in architectural
history; therefore, inquiry around gender and sexuality has been displaced in the
interest of architectural historiography. As Wigley claims, Alberti's writing is responsible
for its own role in history-its "logic of historical placement"-because of its
incorporation of late medieval arguments within the framework of classical texts; as
such the text locates itself in a charged, liminal territory between the classical period
and its nineteenth century interpretations.** As a matter of the flow of time the
suspension Wigley describes is true ipso facto, since the Alberti wrote in the intervening
period between these two eras. While banal, specifying this fact establishes a historical
dialectic necessary for Wigley's argument: from an historical dialectic between two eras
(the renaissance and nineteenth century) additional, related claims can be made; these
claims telescope out from historical intersections of sexuality and architecture, towards
foundational ontological concerns for the (dialectical) evolution of Modern Western
society. In this manner, Wigley can map sexuality/gender onto an already apparent
historical narrative, transforming this inherently abject co-category into an appropriate
object of scholastic inquiry. One example of this is Mark Wigley's famous claim that the
space of "the closet,"4 7 as described, in other terms, by Alberti, is the foundation of the
ideologies of both individualism and hygiene:
Alberti condemns excess pleasure or, more precisely, pleasure understood as
excess. Such pleasure is dangerous because it makes men lose their reason and
become the "effeminate" servants of women. Desire is itself a woman that
masters men-"truly she is a master to be fled and hated"-and can only be
controlled by the strict enforcement of masculine reason. Alberti distinguishes
"erotic life" from "friendship" and identifies marriage as a form of friendship which
resists sexuality rather than hides it: "A most appropriate reason for taking a wife
may be found in what we were saying before, about the evil of sensual
indulgence." Marriage is an institution of reason which transforms sexual play's
confusion of gender roles into the virtuous work of procreation, which is seen to
depend upon the maintenance of those roles.
But Alberti's house even veils this virtuous labor of procreation by veiling the
opening in the wall between the bedrooms. It is precisely such unsupervised
46Displacing by establishing a state of suspension: "Alberti's text cannot easily be separated from the
systems of distinctions that are applied to it [sic]. As responsible for the logic of historical placement as it
is for that of spatial placement, it cannot itself be easily placed. It employs late medieval arguments to
stitch together fragments of classical texts into a structure which carries within its seams traces of critical
displacement that would be instituted in the following centuries. The text is strangely suspended between
classical arguments it appropriates and those identified with the nineteenth century [sic]" (342).
47Alberti does not talk about "the closet," but Wigley writes as if he does through a complicated language
game. See fn. 49

62
openings that make possible the new sense of privacy, beyond that of a closed
room, on which the emerging ideology of the individual subject depends.
The invention of personal privacy is marked by a new attitude to the body which
is written into Alberti's argument. The body now needs to be cleansed. Or, rather,
social order has to be cleansed of the body. Architecture is established as such a
purification [....] Purification must begin with the outer coverings, starting with the
building itself The mechanisms of this detachment, from sewers to toilets, would
come to be known as "closets." They literally closet away the abject domain from
the spatial representation of pure order. This masking of the abject cannot be
represented as such. It is a subordinate system which makes space for the
dominant representation. (343-4)
Despite its sublimation into a broader historical process, sexuality remains the hinge
between Alberti's views on passion and the synecdoche of "the closet" in the passage
above. Here, "the closet," becoming the icon of the interior's regulation of identity, is that
which signifies conceptual flattening-into-space also seen in Wigley's treatment of
gender and sexuality: in "the closet," performance, history, and the physical are all
treated as if they were components of a composite entity-and-category. Appropriately, it
is the words "the closet" which signify this discursively enabled collapse; for Wigley, "the
closet" is a category, encompassing a series of historically differentiated entities which
share common aspects, related to sexuality, hygiene, and privacy. Through Wigley's
heterosexist interpretation of Alberti-whereby the gendered body is inherently
configured by its role in sexual procreation (especially though marriage), as described
by a historical figure-the sexual becomes implicated in the historical; this is reiterated
as the substance of Wigley's argument; while discussing the denotation of sexuality by
architecture (as best he can), Wigley also asserts a very limited possible context for that
newly developed paradigm: architectural history.48
Transphobia, I
The process I just described is symptomatic of "Untitled: The Housing of Gender"
generally. Defined by excavated complication, "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" un-
folds a genealogy of ideas, based upon Mark Wigley's narrative construction, as erected
upon various cited referents. This aspect is particularly clear where Wigley writes that
"[t]he invention of personal privacy is marked by a new attitude to the body which is
written into Alberti's argument" (344). What Wigley is saying here is that Alberti's
repulsion to sexual intimacy is implicated in his treatment of "the house," and that this is
paralleled in developing attitudes about hygiene. By using the verb construction with "is
48 Paraphrasing Foucault, Wigley says as much himself: "The privatization of sexuality, where sexuality is
understood as feminine, is used to produce the individual subject as a male subject and subjectivity itself
as masculine....The interrelated terms 'sexuality,' 'body,' and 'privacy' are fundamentally historical.
Alberti's design should not be understood as the privatization of a preexisting sexuality. Rather, it is the
production of sexuality as that-which-is-private. The body that is privatized is newly sexualized" (Wigley
345).
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

63
marked" in the independent clause and "which is" in the dependent clause, Wigley
effectively negates the historical distance between himself and Leon Battista Alberti; it is
this negation which allows Wigley to express expertise about Alberti's historical
situation. As his text continues the constructed ambiguity between speakers becomes
the focus of Wigley's historiography, with the term "mask" enacting necessary
conceptual shuttle movements between the history of sexuality and Wigley's writing
position. Ergo, Wigley writes about the effect of Alberti's theorization of the architectural
exterior that, therein:
... distance is no longer the link between two visible objects in space but is the
product of a mask whose surface is scrutinized for clues about what lies beyond
it but can never simply be seen. An economy of vision founded on a certain
blindness. (345)
In this passage, note Wigley's use of the terms "no longer," and "never simply" as key
projective elements: thinking discursively, "no longer" and "not simply" describe a
method and position without content or center, a position founded on a certain
complication. Implied, here, then, is an autopoetic framework whereby new ideas
emerge from the complication and rearrangement of those which already exist, without
the participation of an external agent aside from the author, who is seen as always
already existing within the regulative boundaries of the canon by virtue of his writing on
canonical subjects. Building on this trans-historical instantiation, "Untitled: The Housing
of Gender," develops a narrative where the interval between "the man" and "the woman
is also that which is represented by the design of the residential interior. This
instantiation is staged through the historiography of a category labeled "the closet,"
which is described as having emerged during the renaissance, and whose evolution
undergirds Wigley's narration of Alberti's theorization of domestic spaces. This category
is genealogically related to "the study,"49 described by as a space for the preparation of
49 The explicit relation between the study Wigley describes, the writings of Alberti, and the specific "closet"
of "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" is more than anything else a language game; we can judge this from
the complicated machinations of following selection and its footnotes:
While one of the first signs of the growing desire for privacy for the individual, such that "aprivacy
40
within the house developed beyond the privacy of the house," was the separation of the
bedrooms that Alberti prescribes, which established a masculine space, this space is not
completely private, since women can enter it, albeit only when allowed. The first truly private
space was the man's study, a small locked room off his bedroom which no one else ever enters,
an intellectual space beyond that of sexuality.41 Such rooms emerged in the fourteenth century
and gradually became a commonplace in the fifteenth century. They were produced by
transforming a piece of furniture in the bedroom-a locked writing desk-into a room, a "closet"
off the bedroom." Indeed, it was the first closet.
40 Charles de La Ronciere, "Tuscan Nobles on the Eve of the Renaissance," in A History of
Private Life, Vol: 2 Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 212.
41 "He passed from chamber to chamber tyle he come yn to hir secreet study where no
creature used to come but hir self alone." Life of St. Kath, 1430 (Roxb), p. 14, cited O.E.D.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), Vol. X, p. 1181.
42 The word "closet" was used in this way in the sixteenth century but became a
commonplace in the seventeenth century: "We do call the most secret place in the house

64
familial financial documents, which not only represents but also establishes a fixed
power dynamic between married men and women. Synthesizing architectural history
and Alberti's theory, Wigley writes that, "[tihe first truly private space was the man's
study, a small locked room off his bedroom which no one else ever enters, an
intellectual space beyond that of sexuality" (346); he also writes that "[t]he study is the
true center of the house. The new space marks the internal limit to the woman's
authority in the house [sic]" (348). In sum, this space brings together masculine
intellectual agency and domestic authority, representing the man's investment with
these qualities by enforcing a boundary to this room's occupation, by others.
Mark Wigley's historiography of "the closet" is complicated by his texts'
relationship to other, contemporary discourses. Specifically, the historical interval
between man and woman described by "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" is reinforced
by a figural, flawed intellectual antecedent to its constituent analysis. For example, the
opening of Wigley's essay includes the following footnote, insinuating that inquiry
related to identity politics has failed to investigate the interactions between identity and
typologies of domestic space:
4 Such a complication of the "home" can be seen in some current revisions
of identity politics, but still the question is not yet architectural-home, not house.
The house remains unrevised. (331)
With this footnote Wigley creates for his text a counterpoint of oversight in "identity
politics," characterized by the incomplete interrogation of its historical and architectural
basis. In place of the un-interrogated house Wigley substitutes "place," a cipher for the
subject of his analysis of the Ten Books. With the concept of "place," Wigley has revised
the idea of "house" to include its role in the regulation of gender identity:
Place is not simply a mechanism for controlling sexuality. Rather, it is the control
of sexuality by systems of representation that produces place [sic]. The study,
like all spaces, is not simply entered. Rather, it is (re)produced. As such, the
issue here is not simply the existence of studies in houses but the ideological
construction of the study which is at once the construction of gendered
subjectivity that "occupies" it. (350)
Of course, "place" is not simply a mechanism for controlling sexuality; however the
claim is necessary, grammatically, to establish dimorphism as the guarantor of the
house as sexual body politic. In comparison to the footnote cited at the beginning of this
paragraph, it must be noted that the middle two sentences of my second citation can be
viewed as heterosexist because of a an implied relation between reproduction and
gender identity, a stylistic consequence of the phrase "not simply" in the second
appropriate to our owne private studies ... a closet." A. Day, English Secretary (1586), p. 103,
cited O..D., Vol. II, p. 520. On the study, see Orest Ranum, "The Refuges of Intimacy," in _The
History of Privacy, Vol. 3.: Passions of the Renaissance, pp. 225-227; W Liebenwien, Studiolo:
Die Entstehung eines Raumtypes und seine Entwicking bis zum 1600 (Berlin: Mann, 1977); and
Patrick Mauries, "I teatro dell'errore," in II progetto domestico: La casa dell'uomo: Archetipi e
prototipi, ed. Georges Teyssot (Milan: Electa, 1986), pp. 52-55. (Wigley 347-8)
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

65
sentence. This phrase necessarily implies a negative complement-I propose that that
complement is the "identity politics" referred to in that footnote. With this phrase, a straw
man is erected and then excoriated in the interest of something ostensibly identical and
more complicated; the effect is to reiterate the self-constructed ground of inquiry
through complication. I argue, therefore, that "the study" as a subject of architectural
inquiry signifies an intellectual dialectic between architectural studies and identity
politics; historiography is the anti-thesis to the flawed scholarship identified in footnote
4, and the study of the concept of "place" the resolution of the dialectic implied.
Mark Wigley's method of doubling establishes the centrality of sexual dimorphism
in "Untitled: The Housing of Gender;" this is in turn reinforced by the exemplary
"canonic" status of the Ten Books. The implied status of this text within the literature of
architectural history allows sweeping claims to the identity of architecture, with Alberti as
reference; for example, when discussing the canonical nature of Alberti's writings,
Wigley also claims that "domestic order" is a fundamental tenet of the architectural
"tradition:"
Alberti's celebrated theory of harmony-every part in its "proper place"-for
which he was canonized by the tradition, is no more than an elaboration of the
beauty of domestic order, the discrete charm of domestication. (352)
It can be extrapolated from the passage above that the interval between "the man" and
"the woman" is at the very center of architectural thought. However this extrapolation
fails to substantiate itself constatively, and without a recognizable canon behind his
claims, claims like the following read as if they are, in fact, Wigley's own:
The institution of architectural discourse is made possible by the subordination
and control of the feminine that detaches it from the inferior bodily realm of the
mechanical arts. (353)
With this sentence Wigley creates a conceptual continuity between Alberti's sexist
theory of the interior and the "institution of architectural discourse," establishing
architectural discourse as a regulation of gender identity.** As "Untitled: The Housing of
Gender" argues, architectural discourse is dependent upon a closet which regulates
gender identity. However, as I mention earlier, the closet is also an icon of that
regulation. It is from here that we can trace the emergence of Mark Wigley's own
epistemology of the closet, 1 a pattern where larger ideas are represented
metonymically as a means of constructing a conceptual foundation, which is only real
inasmuch as it has been treated as if it were. In "Untitled: The Housing of Gender," "the
closet" represents itself, and contains that which has been seen to have been contained
within it.
50 Consequentially, architectural discourse is "by man for man," as Wigley later claims.
51 A phrase used with apologies to the late Eve Sedgwick; there is no affinity between this epistemology
and her famous claim that "virtually any aspect of modern Western culture, must be, not merely
incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical
analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition," except, perhaps, a relative irony, posed by the issues
of voice and gender I discuss at the end of this chapter.

66
Just as the limit of the closet is the limit of two genders, so too is the exterior a
limit between the house's identities as masculine and feminine, according to "Untitled:
The Housing of Gender."5 2 This connection naturalizes architecture's regulation of
gender as a phenomenological entity, specifically as that of the "white wall," itself a
"mechanism of purification, a filter," wherein "the feminine materiality of the building is
given a masculine order and then masked off by a white skin" (345). In this scheme, the
discipline of architecture occupies the interval between interior and exterior, and
masculine and feminine: this time, materialized in the "white skin." Consequently,
through a series of associations, the identity of architecture not only as heterosexual but
as feminine is established. As Wigley argues below, the "discipline of architecture"
contains that which is given unto it for the purposes of pleasure and proliferation
But despite the fact that the discipline of architecture domesticates itself by
submitting to the visual order of man, that discipline remains itself a woman, a
woman giving pleasure... The disciplineof architecture, organized by man for
man, is feminine... Architecture is bound to natural order and is explicitly the
mother of the arts. The pleasure she gives is precisely not sexual. It is the
repressive pleasure of the image of the modest wife, a representation of purity
that is necessarily violently enforced. The iconographical figure of architecture in
all the Renaissance treatises was the figure of a virtuous woman, literally, "the
queen of virtues." The discipline is itself disciplined, given and confined to a
place, literally domesticated in the academy. (360-1, emphasis mine)
...as executed by a heterosexual, coupled man.
Architecture is... subordinated to a prior text which presents a theory of vision
that is seen to precede it. But it is a theory that cannot be separated from the
overdetermined space of the study (or "studio') which detaches the theorist-
father-husband-artist from the world precisely so that he can master that world by
viewing it through some kind of disciplinary frame, whether a painting, a
theoretical manuscript, memoir, or account book. (362)
Wigley's ascription of sexual identity to architecture in turn produces an argument for
the proper participation of the women in architectural discourse. The gender identity of
the discipline of architecture as feminine objectifies it as an object of the gaze-and,
therefore, as an assemblage of objects-which renders that gendered mode of
engagement ostensibly inescapable. In the selection below, we can see how "Untitled:
The Housing of Gender" identifies the motivation of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema" to train viewers in the psychoanalysis of the male gaze as a futile endeavor
(even as he pays lip service to Laura Mulvey's politics, as such):
52 Thus Wigley writes: "The skin effaces the transformation from feminine to masculine and maintains a
division, a visible line, between structure and decoration as a gender division... surface both produces
gender and masks the scene of that production, literally subordinating the feminine by drawing a line,
placing the ornament just as the walls place the possessions in the house.... Like the woman in the
house, it is given responsibility for sustaining the very structural order that restrains it." 354
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

67
Architecture is understood as a kind of object to be looked at, inhabited by a

viewer who is detached from it, inhabited precisely by being looked at, whether it
be [sic] by the user, visitor, neighbor, critic, or reader of architectural publications.
This general model of visuality still dominates current critical, theoretical, and
historical discourse even by those who have abandoned it, usually in favor of the
"political." The assumptions about visuality and architecture which are written into
the construction of theory remain unexamined and usually return tacitly to
organize theoretical work. But, of course, as contemporary feminist discourse
has demonstrated, the political lives precisely within the socially constructed
mechanisms of representation, of which vision is often the most privileged. (ibid.)
In the context of Sexuality & Space, it is implied here that Laura Mulvey's symbolic
topography of the veil is inherently flawed because it fails to recognize the physical
referent upon which it depends (space, and therefore architecture). It is obvious that
Wigley is enacting a counter-narrative whereby architecture is objectified by virtue of its
gender status (as revealed in the previous passage). What is less obvious is that Wigley
is proposing here that Mulvey's feminist theory disappoints because it does not
recognize the work of an inherently masculine architect, because she is instead treating
space as an autonomous, atmospheric entity. Rather than being a virtuous woman, in
the terms elaborated by Alberti's On Family-her ideas confined and domesticated by
that which has been produced for her by architecture of and for men-Laura Mulvey's
inquiries around scopophilia are not organized around the architecture which contains
them, therefore negating the epistemological authority of the production of built space in
favor of a feminist political agenda. Such is her failure: Wigley still expects her to
recognize the symbolic authority of architecture, and therefore by his own machinations,
men; to the extent that "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" fails to do so Laura
Mulvey is seen as acting in opposition to the underlying, gendered organization of
architectural space.
To his covert criticism of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Mark Wigley
compares his assessment of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism." In the passage
below (which, in the text, comes soon after what is quoted in the previous paragraph),
Wigley summarizes Beatriz Colomina's analogy of interior and exterior and the gender
binary. Although no citation of this summary is given, in context the passage can be
read as a critique of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism:"
The theory of vision that defines institutions like architecture cannot simply be
equated with theories of subjectivity in a psychoanalytic sense. At the same time,
it is not coincidental that so much of the respective scenes, and the language
used to construct them, is common. Some kind of relationship operates here
which can be explored in a way that neither simply imposes recent
psychoanalytic accounts of visuality onto architectural discourse nor simply
demonstrates that those accounts are somehow already embedded within that
discourse. Rather, it involves engaging with the specific constructions of vision
inscribed within the architectural tradition, and that constitute it as such, in some
unresolvable process of multiple translation. (364)

68
Wigley begins his critique of "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" with the caveat that
psychology and architecture cannot be equated hermeneutically, but chooses to
overlook this transgression of architecture's disciplinary limit. Despite his inherent
disagreement, Wigley provides for "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" a series of
apologies: that there seems to be some shared interest between architectural and
psychoanalytic discourses (1), that Beatriz Colomina also employs the deconstructive
method of "not simply" (with her method organized around the denials of neither simply,
nor simply, and rather) (2), and most importantly that Colomina makes her translation
between architecture and psychology seem unavoidable and therefore still recognizes
the inherent authority of architecture as a foundational spatial episteme (3). These
apologies, together, imply that while Colomina wants to investigate architecture's
qualities as a liminal ontology, she does so through its inherent visuality/objectivity; to
this end, while she might want to describe architecture in terms outside of its canonical
objectivity, she still recognizes the tradition as a given; she may want to talk about
representation but makes architecture primary: she might want to write about women in
space, but does so from the perspective of how they are seen by men. She might be a
woman, but at least she knows her place.5 3
In addition to motivating a critique of contemporaneous discourses, Wigley's
condescension is also generative of a philosophy of the history of architecture. In his
lengthy excursus on Gottfried Semper's The Four Elements of Architecture, resistance
to Semper's foregrounding of ornament over interior-exterior dialectic, within the
developing discipline of art history, is employed to define views towards architectural
disciplinarity in the nineteenth century." Here, the disruption of architectural history is
53 In case my intention in stating this is at all unclear, I disapprove of this aspect of "Untitled: The Housing
of Gender." I have been both witness and subject to this logic for years, and I'm sick of it. Reading
Wigley's essay as a feminist, I remain astonished that such writing could enter into the discourse of
architectural historiography. It is beyond me to answer why that should have been the case, as that
historical question is both too complicated and too simple for consideration in a project of this limited
scope. The architectural community is content to think that Mark Wigley is not sexist because he writes
about women in the same way as they occasionally identify Beatriz Colomina as a feminist because of
tropes involving femininity in her work. These facile identifications mask a dangerous and destructive
undercurrent of misogyny and trans-phobia which continue to inhabit the collective unconscious of the
contemporary architectural imagination. As a resolutely feminist and oftentimes unintentionally gender
ambiguous person I cannot possibly communicate the pain and frustrations I have felt watching the logic I
write of at this juncture play out again and again, and in having been subject to that bigoted regime
myself. But it is so ingrained, all of it, and so covert, whatever it all is, that there's never anything to say.
With passing years my hysteria grows. At present I can say that nobody talks about it, nobody-and this
close reading is all I have to break the surface of a reality to which I am resolutely opposed and yet also
too terrified, and too tired to take on in any more meaningful, dialectical way. The epistemological system
I am attempting here, now, to perform, for you, robs one affected so thoroughly of any possible
vocabulary for engagement that what becomes real is what is given, and the possibilities are subscription
or disappearance. It is shit, and it is my small and desperate hope that this close reading can turn all of it
from the scholarship it portends to present into the shit I know it to be.
" "The dominant economy of vision turns on the white surface ideologically protected by the convoluted
lines drawn by the institution of architecture. By defining this economy in psychoanalytic terms, it is
necessary to identify the nature of that protection by tracing the way architectural discourse has
attempted to resist the displacement of that ideology... This form of this resistance can be partially
sketched here by looking at the response to the writing of the nineteenth-century architect Gottfried
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

69
seen as concomitant with the disruption of architecture's sexuality. This is

circumstantial-it makes for a tidy essay; however, it also allows for Wigley to echo
Colomina's phallocentric theorization of the gaze, compounded by the conflation of
gender role and sexuality. When discussing the origin in ornament, Wigley makes the
claim that ornament is coextensive with the feminine and is therefore extra-architectural.
Similarly, Semper is treated as if his history involves an inversion of the intellectual and
sexual identities of architecture.
In this treatment, Wigley claims, first, that Semper's interest in ornament as the
origin of architecture necessarily involves a fundamental transformation of causation in
architectural history; because he engenders a history different from Alberti's, Semper is
considered categorically different." Just as he engenders an inversion of architectural
history, so too does Wigley see Semper as engendering sexual inversion. Rather than
manifesting a collapse of sexual embodiment and socially-determined gender
performance, as he did with his historiography of Alberti, Wigley describes Semper's
"Style: The Texture in Art" as subject to a resistance and falsification of both normative
spatial and sexual/gender dynamics. Whereas the architectural-the closet-serves as
a meta-narrative to Albert's theory, here the sexual-inversion, in the terms of Freud-
undergirds the architectural; like Alberti, Semper's sexuality is left unaddressed by
Wigley, but where it could be presumed before that the author and the sexual
implications of his text were heterosexual, here the reader is confronted with an
accusation of false appearances.
The textile is a mask which dissimulates rather than represents the structure. The
material wall is no more than a prop... Architecture is located within the play of
signs. Space is produced within language. As its origin is dissimulation, its
essence is no longer construction by the masking of construction. (367)
Appropriately, instead of the feminine veil, Semper is written about as the figuration of a
feminizing male "mask:"56 emblematic of an architecture for and by men, whereby the
field's object-identity and desire are turned towards its (now-masculine) self rather than
towards an externalized (feminine) objectivity. Building on the themes of inversion and
falsification, Wigley turns to Riviere's/Lacan's theory of the masquerade as feminine
Semper, who attempts to displace the institutional location of architecture by displacing the theories of
ornament and vision sustained by the emerging institutions of art" (Wigley 366).
s5On Semper's foregrounding of the ornamental, Wigley writes: "This reading involves a fundamental
transformation of the account of the origin of architecture on which traditional architectural discourse
bases itself. Architecture is no longer seen to begin with naked structures gradually dressed with
ornament. Rather, it begins with ornament" (367).
56 In the context of Wigley's essay the term "mask" is often a masculine analogue for "veil;" the feminizing
character of this mask (viz. my description) is that which instantiates this entity as part of a form of sexual
inversion.

70
performance," to explain this masculine femininity. As he continues describing the

implications of Semper's "Style,"
Just as the institution of the family is made possible through the production of
domestic space with a mask, the larger community is made possible through the
production of public space through masquerade. Public buildings, in the form of
monumental architecture, are seen to derive from the fixing in one place of the
once mobile "improvised scaffolding" on which hung the patterned fabrics and
decorations of the festivals that defined social life [as described in "The Four
Elements of Architecture]. 5* The space of the public is that of those signs.
Architecture literally clothes the body politic. Semper identifies the textile essence
of architecture, the dissimulating fabric, the fabrication of architecture, with the
clothing of the body. (367-8)
This critique of Semper builds off of Wigley's historiography of Alberti and the domestic
sphere, as well as the assignment of female gender to the discipline of architecture as
objectified by the built environment. That the residential architecture employs
enclosing/interior and white/exterior walls to regulate gender identity, and therefore
sexuality, is the dialectical thesis implied by the discussion of family and masks in the
first sentence of the selection above. In being architectural, this process is inherently
male in its execution, and female in its outcome, per Wigley's earlier analysis;
additionally, in this scheme it is the feminine only which is objectified, normatively (the
At the most basic level-and as far as is necessary here-Joan Riviere's essay "Womanliness as a
57
Masquerade" and Jacques Lacan's article "The Meaning of the Phallus" argue that feminine masculinity is
a performance enacted for, and flaunted in defiance of, an audience of men.
For an excellent overview of Lacan's particular theorization of the masquerade, see Zizek, Slavoj.
"Woman Is One of the Names-of-the Father." Lacanian Ink 10 (1995). Available through lacan.com
See also:
Lacan,Jaques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and
Knowledge, 1972-73 (Encore), New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
Riviere, Joan. "Womanliness as Masquerade." International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10 (1929)
58As Wigley paraphrases: "[According to Semper, building] originates with the use of fabrics to define
social space... Specifically, the space of domesticity [sic]. The textiles are not simply placed within space
to define a certain interiority. Rather, they are the production of space itself. Weaving is used "as a means
to make the 'home,' the inner life separated from the outer life, and as the formal creation of the idea of
space." Housing is an effect of decoration. It is not that the fabrics are arranged in a way that provides
physical shelter. Rather, their textuality [sic] defines a space of exchange. This primordial definition of
inside and, therefore, for the first time, outside, with textiles not only precedes the construction of solid
walls but continues to organize the building when such construction begins. Solid structure follows, and is
subordinate to, what appear to be merely its accessories" (Wigley 367).
Appended to this last sentence is the following excerpt from "The Four Elements of Architecture:"
"Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind
htem were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for
security, for supporting a load, for their permanence and so on. Wherever the need for these secondary
functions did not arise, the carpets remained the original means of creating space. Even where building
solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the inner, invisible structure hidden behind the true
and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colorful woven carpets" (cited in Wigley 367, fn. 84).
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

71
building, the surface, enclosing space-never the process of production or producer

which gave it shape, and meaning); moreover, it is the masculine, only, which is allowed
mobility.59 Here it is stated that Semper identifies an objective quality of architecture
which is derived from a formerly mobile element, portraying architecture's "body politic"
as "clothed." In the sense that this practice is a mask-like performance of the masculine
(the formerly mobile ergo masculine textile now clothing normatively feminine buildings)
enacted for an audience of men (architects, implicitly), it is a masquerade; in the sense
that the performance is itself objective (theoretically constituted by feminine built
objects, now clothed), it is female; in the sense that the performance is, also, executed
by Semper (a man), and only through text (treated as a transparent medium of
intellection), the masquerade is, therefore, a masculine performance. This performance
is equated with an intentional falsification of cultural production, as objectified by
Semper's resistance to the true nature of architectural production; embodied, it is
implied, by the thought of Alberti. It is with this in mind that in his final analysis, Wigley
claims that Semper's theory of style is a complete inversion of Alberti's canonical
architectural condition:
Culture does not precede its masks. It is no more than masking. The highest art
form is not that which detaches itself from the primitive use of decorative masks
but that which most successfully develops that practice by dissimulating even the
mechanisms of dissimulation... [Semper] inverts the traditional [read: Alberti's]
architectonic, subordinating structure to decoration by demonstrating that the
"false" accessories are the "true" essence of architecture. This inversion
necessarily distorts the economy of vision based upon a certain figure of
architecture in which what is seen on the outside articulates, and is subordinate
to, some inner unseeable truth. (369-70)
Wigley sees Semper's theory of style as immensely disruptive because of its

undermining of the social structure sustained by architecture. As Wigley writes,
Semper's inverted architecture/sexuality is subversive because of its uncontained
sensuality, which itself undermines the wall as the limit of the architecturally gendered
59 Mobility and gender are addressed only obliquely through paraphrasing of Alberti, such as in the
following passage, where it can be assumed that the discussion of the ornamental and the feminine are
essentially analogous: "Symptomatically, when addressing architecture Alberti prohibits a "well-known
harlot" from building a monument for her husband whereas a virtuous woman is allowed to. The woman
can represent the man only when virtuous, immobile, nonexchangable. The task of architectural theory
becomes that of controlling ornament, restricting its mobility, domesticating it by defining its "proper place"
(bondage to the ground, faithful representative of the presence of a building) in opposition to the
impropriety of the prostitute (mobility, detachment from the ground, independence, exchangeability). The
practices of ornamentation are regulated so that ornament represents and consolidates the order of the
building it clothes, which is that of man. It is used to make that order visible. The domesticated woman is
the mark of man, the material sign of an immaterial presence. In fact, classical architectural theory
dictates that the building should have the proportions of the body of a man, but the actual body that is
being composed, the material being shaped, is a woman. Clothes maketh the man, but they are woman.
Man is a cultural construction which emerges from the control of the feminine." (Wigley 357)

72
sexes.6 0 By inverting architecture's naturalization of gender through the visual, Semper

subverts the patriarchal social structure that Wigley's figure of the closet sustains:
Just as the whole patriarchal order is traditionally [i.e. by Alberti] seen to depend
on its enforcement within the limited space allocated the wife, architecture
assumes responsibility for the very division that at once places and subordinates
it. To expose the flaws in the traditional account of architecture would be to
subvert the whole system. This is precisely Semper's objective. (371)
To this end Semper simultaneously undermines both the unfolding of historical change
and the regulation of the sexes by negating history's hierarchical differentiations
between masculine and feminine and art and craft:
Semper's account of the origin of decoration is not gendered. While the model for
the historical transformation is the "primordial matriarch" of nature, she is not the
source of its forms. Before the constitution of high institutions like "architecture"
the adornment of the body followed that of building. The gender division only
emerges with the institutions. Their gesture of appropriation is only possible
when a certain gap has opened up, the gap between masculine and feminine, art
and craft, form and color, structure and decoration... The feminine term in each
case is produced as such in the very moment of its subordination of the other
term which depends upon it and upon a veiling of that dependence. (372)
Wigley's gendered critique of Semper as a figure of architectural failure emerges from

this diagnosis. By dissimulating the order of the canon Semper effaced himself from it.6 '
Furthermore by instantiating architecture's closet, by virtue of his masquerade, 62
Semper made it such that his work was inherently indefensible because its superficial
reality was itself the construction of inverted terms;'6 to describe what he had said and
done would either be to sustain the lie or to incriminate oneself as belonging to the
same class of masked architectural she-men."
60 Cf: "The surface texture that constitutes the architecture of the mask, [according to Semper] is
produced by this convolution of vision and sensuality. Architecture no longer simply occupies the visual.
Its sensuality is not screened off by a white surface in the name of the uncontaminated eye. Visuality
becomes a construction of necessarily sensuous transactions. This disruption of vision subverts the
institutional placement of architecture which turns on its division by the regime of distinctions that all turn
on the originary distinction between essential object and inessential accessory, structure, and decoration"
(Wigley 371).
61 "Unsurprisingly, Semper's position was completely intolerable to the tradition.... Semper is extensively
criticized and dismissed by the end of the nineteenth century and is largely effaced from the canon"
(Wigley 373-4).
62 Inasmuch as it reveals a possible but sublimated gender/sexuality fluidity for architectural practices
63 "This effacement takes a pathological form.... In each case, an apparent defense
of Semper is actually
his displacement" (Wigley 374).
64 "Through... complex gestures, Semper is at once appropriated and rejected.... The resistance to
Semper is... symptomatic. It takes more the form of repression than rejection. His work is not so much
written out of the institutional discourse as buried within it. It is swallowed, neither to be digested nor to be
thrown up" (Wigley 375).
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

73
At a certain point this critique begins to fold in upon itself, to Wigley's discursive
advantage. As "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" argues, the sexual politics of
ornament are coextensive with a disciplinary politics of traditionalist authority:
historically, Semper failed to respect the hegemony of the canon and anyone engaging
with his thought would either be guilty of the same, or would only serve to reiterate his
difference. Wigley's analysis of Semper is an epistemology of the closet from a
heterosexist perspective.'" When he claims that Semper's "dissimulation" effects a
condition whereby "the truth of architecture is now located in its visible outside," Wigley
implies that Semper's writing has changed something, enacted a shift; therefore
Semper's aberration of architectural order, itself, guarantees and is made possible by
Alberti's sexism/heterosexism. Synthesizing the narrative of "Untitled: The Housing of
Gender" it can be argued that sexual self-regulation is necessary to sustain
architecture's assertion of the masculine subject as subject as well as the discipline's
65 Famously, Eve K. Sedgwick's 1990 treatise Epistemology of the Closet is situated "in the larger context
of gay/lesbian and antihomophobic theory" (Sedgwick, 12); its perspective is anti-heterosexist inasmuch
as the book deconstructs such unsettled binary oppositions as heterosexual/homosexual, (cf. Sedgwick
9-10), and therefore inherently operates against the heterosexist assumption of sexual performance,
identity, and gender as composite and inherently interrelated in a fixed, diametrical relationship between
men and women. The "closet," as closely as it is defined by Sedgwick (which she all but-but never
actually-does in the book), consists of "relations between the known and unknown, the explicit and
inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition" (Sedgwick 3); denotatively, it is a discursive phenomenon
characterized by ignorance in the following ways: 1) "'Closetedness' is itself a performance initiated as
such by the speech act of a silence-not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularly by fits
and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially constitutes it;" (ibid.) and
"ignorance and opacity collude to compete with knowledge in mobilizing flows of energy, desire, goods,
meanings, persons" (Sedgwick 4) to the effect that ignorance "can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated
on a mass scale for striking enforcements" (ibid.). Because Sedgwick investigates the closet
antihomophobically, her engagement with the category is more often than not in the interest of exploring
its oppressive manifestation in the lives of gay men (as explored through literature). My reasons for
identifying Wigley's historiography as an epistemology of the closet stems from its discursive nature,
centered on sexuality. In the specific instance I discuss here Wigley is concerned with Semper's
historiographical abjection on the ostensive basis of his non-normative gender identity viz. masquerade
and the mask. The heterosexist perspective applied here revolves around a subtle, homophobic
emphasis on the closet as unwittingly opened; where it collapses, and reveals a truth that would
otherwise (and should otherwise) have not been known. Sedgwick's definition of the closet is therefore
constant with Wigley's historiography around the concept-itself concerning a type of silence (abjection),
and mobilizing meaning (the historical value of Semper's work), to the effect that ignorance is harnessed
for enforcement (essentially, striking Semper from the historical record/disciplinary boundaries of art
history, in order to maintain the ontological viability of "architecture"). As Wigley writes, art/architectural
history is dependent upon the maintenance of an ignorance of ignorance, or in his words, architecture's
"privileged role" within a "world of dissimulation" depends upon its implication in an "economy of masks it
appears to stand against" (Wigley 378): "[s]pace is itself closeted" (Wigley 389) because it is the "illusion
of a presence behind the representational mask" that "is the illusion of space itself;" therefore, "the image
of occupiable space [that] wraps itself around the subject position" (Wigley 387) is only an illusion, and
architecture sustains that illusion, in a manner that can be represented through the notion of "the closet"
("Untitled: The Housing of Gender" is that representation). It is in this way that the closet is a
manifestation of self-imposed homophobia-this architectural category regulates an ignorance of the
illusion architecture maintains while at the same time sublimating desires around disciplinary revelation
(of "the mask," a male category, by and about interlocutors who are definitively male), while asserting an
imagined, protective, alternative object of desire/identity (around transparency and "the veil," which is
definitively female). My claims about Wigley's interpretation of Semper stem from this reading.

74
role as body politic. Semper's ostensive inversion of a normative architectural sexual

politics is, consequently, disruptive because it reveals the discipline's self-regulation of
sexual/gender identity as he presents his scheme for an inverted, clothed public
architecture: Wigley writes, "what is so attractive in the feminine," and therefore the
writings of Gottfried Semper, "is the advertised presence of the masculine;" Semper's
writings are therefore problematic because, "[w]hat man is attracted to is his myth of
himself. This myth is a representation that can only be sustained by concealment...
Order cannot simply be exposed. Rather, disorder is concealed, removed from the eye
as unsightly. The representation of exposure depends on a veil. Transparency is an
effect of masking" (376). The femininity of Semper's masquerade reveals the solipsism
of architecture's tautological masculine self-identification and by virtue of its disruption
of normal "visuality" is considered repulsive.
Transphobia, ||
Within Wigley's historiography, there are holes. One of them, ironically enough, is latent
within the term "rigor." In "Untitled: The Housing of Gender," Wigley makes it clear that
even though he's examining architecture though the frame of psychoanalysis he's still
totally grounded in architecture's basis in the spatial; he's still going to treat it
objectively; he's using psychoanalysis but he's still thinking architecturally; he's writing
about this fag Semper but he's still totally one of the guys. In this way, Wigley's own
argument can be traced as a subtext of the historical traditions it critiques.
It's complicated, of course. Let's start, as he does, with the text as mask. Just as
he dismisses "recent revisions of identity politics" as not adequately grounded in the
architecture of the "house," Wigley similarly undercuts Mulvey's politicization of
psychoanalysis for lacking rigor. Because her "revision" of Lacanian and Freudian
theories of castration and gender identity fails to locate itself within a specific space,
Wigley identifies "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" as flawed:
The ongoing revision of psychoanalysis that explicitly examines the psychic
topography of the mask, by rereading the extent to which its manipulation both
effects, and is the effect of, the construction of gender, has only tacitly engaged
with its spatial prop.... Laura Mulvey's seminal [sic] essay on visual pleasure, for
example, in examining one of the contemporary forms of wall painting-cinema-
argues that the gaze is masculine inasmuch as it produces a subject position
occupying three-dimensional "Renaissance space" and directing itself at two-
dimensional surfaces of which the woman becomes one. In this sense, the
feminine position is precisely not a position. If this "illusion of natural space"
(produced by cinematic conventions) is made possible by the specific technology
of the camera, what is the status of "natural" space before the lights are turned
out? To what extent is it always already an illusion produced by specific
technologies of representation that are not recognized as such in order to
naturalize particular structures for specific ideological reasons? (385-6)
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

75
Extrapolated, and indulging in some vulgarity, Wigley here intellectualizes the mythic
figure of the sexually frustrated feminist: Unable to contain her unavoidable attraction to
the (masculine) technology of the camera, Mulvey loses herself within its point of view;
she herself becomes an extension of the apparatus. As a woman, her inability to resist
was unavoidable-and for this reason what looks like antipathy in her non-figured
indication of possible political action is nothing more than a facile attempt to question
while simultaneously giving in to the sexed charm of the cinematic gaze. Thus it is
implied that for the purposes of ideology-feminism-Mulvey ignores this, but we know
what she means.
In a less cynical way, Mulvey herself admits this in her essay "Afterthoughts to
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1981) where she famously claims, in regards to
her assumption of a male viewer, that "as desire is given cultural materiality in a text, for
women (from childhood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily
becomes second Nature. However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts restlessly
in its borrowed transvestite clothes." So, Mulvey loses herself within the camera's point
of view in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" only inasmuch as she identifies with
a respective viewer in order to explain and analyze "his" perspective. I think it is Wigley,
not Mulvey, who is "naturalize[ing] particular structures for specific ideological reasons."
What Wigley is doing, here, is undermining the performativity of gender. What he
is saying, about Mulvey, is that even though she's a feminist she can't escape the fact
that she's a woman; the more she tries to establish the fact that femininity is constructed
the more she emphasizes the fact of that construction, and the centrality of the
(castrated) man at the center of it. By this deconstructive logic, Mulvey's feminist
dialectic of the analyzed gaze in fact re-enforces that gaze even as she attempts to arm
the female viewer with knowledge empowered towards its destruction. To this end,
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" makes women see themselves as objects, as
they are seen by men:
The gaze is not simply directed across a space to a surface that is detached from
it. Rather, the feminine surface "orchestrates" the very gaze apparently directed
at it to produce the effect of interior, the space of masculinity. This "illusory"
psychic space cannot be separated from the physical space of the so-called
viewer... The surface is more mirror than window. (386)
This interpellation, Wigley argues, is true of any attempt at feminist hermeneutic

agency, in the face of epistemological systems wherein subjectivity is seen as always
already being a male trait. The reason this happens is inherent in space's regulation of
the limit between the gendered sexes: if gender is contained by the white surface," and
masquerade occurs through the ornamentation of that surface, then ornamentation can
never be fully autonomous from the split wall that supports it:
66 "Just as the wife must wear the "ornament of silence," the building must wear a white coat. The white
wall is the mask of unmasking. Its ideological authority is bound to the production-domestication of
woman, buildings, and the discipline responsible for them" (Wigley 381).

76
Masquerade operates by masking the absence of the very identity it appears to

mask. The illusion of presence behind the representational mask is the illusion of
space itself It is the ruse of surface to appear to be framed off as a discrete
representational system that simply occupies the space it actually produces.
(386-7)
... and this carries across feminist theories of subjectivity:
The Semperian sense of decoration as the production of space is clearly written
into Luce Irigaray's identification of the structural role of the mask. It is the
woman's confinement to the decorative surface that actually provides the "prop,"
the "infrastructural" role of space which "underwrites" the patriarchal order and
denies her any subjectivity understood as the control of space. The imposed
mask of femininity can be reappropriated through masquerade to produce
another spatiality, an "elsewhere." But this "elsewhere" is not so much a place, as
a displacement of place. The "distance" produced by the masquerade is
necessarily improper and cannot be described with traditional theories of space.
(387-8)
However you look at it: in architecture, the feminine is always already excluded. This is
Wigley's message: the intersection of sexuality and space is a void.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

77
CONCLUSION: AFTER SEXUALITY & SPACE
Mark Wigley concludes "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" with a dismissal of identity
politics, tautologically positing architecture as the metanarrative to a praxis (identity
politics) for which it had been proven as inherently opposed, by his own reasoning. For
this, Wigley returns to issue of "house" versus "home," referred to in an earlier footnote:
But no matter how improper, the image of the occupation of this supplementary
"house," like the political arguments "behind" most theories of masquerade,
inasmuch as they presuppose, even if only "strategically," the agency of a subject
behind the mask who can manipulate its surface, raises the dilemma of
essentialism whose complexity cannot be respected here other than to note that
the question of essentialism is no more than the question of interiority. Which is
to say that identity theory is necessarily spatial theory. (Wigley 388)
Pushing further, Wigley folds Beatriz Colomina's engagement of architecture and
representation in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" into his description of a future
project of sexuality and space, as initiated by the event of "Sexuality and Space" and
the publication of its proceedings:
The question of sexuality and space becomes that of the multiplicity of
mechanisms of representation that establish the subtle architecture of these key
psychospatial closets and whose contemporary displacement by new
mechanisms in the age of electronic representation marks the space of new
sexualities. An interrogation of these mechanisms is required in order to reread
the spatial arguments inscribed within psychoanalytic theory before that theory
can be applied to architecture in a way that does not simply reproduce the abrupt
separation of space and sexuality on which both institutional discourses currently
appear to depend. But this involves more than simply making space the proper
object of discourse by addressing its strategic role "in"theories of sexuality. As
Irigaray points out, "the fact that Freud took sexuality as the object of his
discourse does not necessarily imply that he interpreted the role of sexualization
in discourse itself, his own in particular." Likewise, discourses are spatial
mechanisms that construct sexuality before giving either sexuality or space a
title. Space is itself closeted. The question must shift to the elusive architecture of
the particular closets that are built into each discipline, but can only be addressed
with the most oblique gestures. (389)

78
It is not surprising that as he concludes his essay, Wigley is positing Mulvey's flawed
psychoanalytic engagement of space as the thesis of an ostensibly more rigorous
counter-engagement. It is furthermore appropriate that the change Wigley implies
travels through that covered in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism:" an address of "the
question of sexuality and space" by means of architecture and its trajective
representations. These things are expected because, together, "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism" and "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" configure a particular
place for sexuality within architectural scholarship. I'd like to dwell on this minor fact
before moving to consider what little came after Sexuality & Space, as a means of
closing out this thesis.
I need to say, first, that in Sexuality & Space, psychoanalysis is used to produce
a theory for the implication of space in sexuality, and vice versa. In "The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism" and "Untitled: The Housing of Gender," fashion is explored as a
node between the gendered individual and society, played out in the membrane
between public and private spheres. Thus style, as a formal expression of biographical
detail and individual eccentricity, is interrogated as the fundamental element of the
gendering of spaces and therefore of sexuality and space. As Roland Barthes argues, in
Writing Degree Zero, "the allusive virtue of style is... a matter of density, for what stands
firmly and deeply beneath style, brought together harshly in its figures of speech, are
fragments of a reality entirely alien to language." 67 What I have done, in this thesis,
primarily, is investigate Colomina's figures of speech as they configure her adaptation of
Mulvey's theory of the gaze, which is itself generative of Wigley's supporting
historiography; as I have done so, I have constructed a counter-narrative that explains
the mechanics of Colomina's particular and unforgiving blend of feminist film theory and
phallocentrism, which, as I demonstrated, engenders an inherently self-defeating
project.
Bearing in mind the centrality of the second chapter of this thesis, its composite
narrative can be summarized as follows: in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,"
Colomina applies Laura Mulvey's famous theorization of the male gaze, as that which
objectifies the female body, in cinema, to analogous architectural examples. Because of
contradictions between her subject matter and method, Beatriz Colomina's literalization
of applied theory elicits a pedagogical construct whose ultimate consequence is its own
negation. Psychoanalysis is a synchronic hermeneutic methodology; it reads human
thought as if its signification, while subject to dialectical sublimation, does not decay.
Similarly, in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," the psychoanalytic reading of
architecture's sexuality and sexuality's architectures operate on the assumption that
architectural disciplinarity is subject to synchronically legible epistemological structures,
i.e. the discipline is, itself, a symbolic system which whose signification operates
independent of historical progress.'" In the process, Beatriz Colomina inscribes within
67 Barthes, Roland. "What is Writing?" Writing Degree Zero. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2012 [1953, tr.
1967]. Print. 11.
68 such that an historian can read what was represented then, and always
will be able to, regardless of
any historical duration between the enacting of that representation, originally, and the situation in which it
is being analyzed
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

79
her narrative a predetermined abjection of feminist theory within architectural discourse.

This is because Colomina's assertion of a psychoanalytic metanarrative amplifies her
inherent positivism, such that her essay's description of Loos and Corbusier constructs
itself as an instance in a larger, but still bounded, solution to "the problem of 'Sexuality
and Space;' which is to say that, in "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," the
intersection of architecture and sexuality is defined as the shared disposition of a class
of (male) architects in the first half of the twentieth century. It is with this in mind that
Mulvey's feminist film theory takes on the supplemental nature ascribed to it.
It is no coincidence that Wigley follows Colomina in the volume Sexuality &
Space, as he takes her investigation of the gaze as the foundation for his historiography
of architectural discourse as "organized by man for man." It is furthermore no
coincidence that, as that volume concludes with Wigley's essay, historiography is used
as the foundation for further inquiry, which leaves sexuality aside in the interest of
revising the history of the architectural avant-garde. Although this is by no means the
conclusion of my thesis, from this last statement it can be argued that, intertextually,
"Untitled: The Housing of Gender" and "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" render
sexuality as a concept whose representation by architecture is inherently symptomatic
of its historical context. This is to say that in "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" and "The
Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism" the problem of sexuality can be understood as a
condition of related historical concepts (of Adolf Loos and the "metropolitan individual,"
of Le Corbusier and the camera; of Alberti and "the closet," or of Semper and 19th
century art history), and therefore sublimated into other scholastic inquiries (namely:
critical theory and historiography). That this should be so is itself symptomatic of
Colomina and Wigley's narratives of the architectural history of early Modernism-when
masculine subjectivity is taken to represent subjectivity as such (as it is in their essays)
it is not worth discussing. In such a situation the consideration of masculine subjectivity
as subjectivity is inherently the consideration of any other problem of ontology, since its
gendered status is considered transparent and, therefore, inherently inconsequential.
To this end, the void between feminist studies and architectural theory identified as the
subject and ostensibly alleviated antecedent to Sexuality & Space, by Beatriz Colomina,
in the proceedings' introduction, is precisely that which is asserted by her and Mark
Wigley's related essays. Taking some liberties with Colomina's introduction: to the
extent that "feminist theorists... conspicuously ignored in architectural discourse and
practice" are addressed by Sexuality & Space, the "interdisciplinary exchange in which
theories of sexuality are reread in architectural terms and architecture is reread in
sexual terms" by its essays does little more than to reassert the very silence that its
inquiry ostensibly alleviated.
Such is my thesis.
Returning to the introduction, and my motivations for performing this close
reading, I'd like to take some time to consider the few projects which came out of
Sexuality & Space in order to spell out, as directly as close reading allows, my critique
of that original publication. The conclusion of Mark Wigley's "Untitled: The Housing of
Gender" is written to leave one wondering, "now what?" In its own, complicated, way,

80
historiography answers this question with: nothing much; which is to say: more of the
same.
The abstract included with this document might be somewhat misleading in
implying that there are no architectural publications related to the subjects addressed in
Sexuality & Space. There are about a dozen readers on issues of sexuality, gender
identity, architecture, urban design, and planning that have been published since 1990;
it should be pointed out however that these works are both largely unassociated with
each other and are disconnected from that which was published in Sexuality & Space.
More importantly, I argue that such publications fail to address the need for a
comprehensive, architecturally-specific discourse on the subjects of gender and
sexuality, as is outlined in the introduction to Sexuality & Space. Therefore, based on
the singularit6 of "sexuality" that might be gleaned from that volume, I am confident in
saying that very little has been written on the subject of sexuality in architectural
scholarship. There is no discourse.
Here is an example of a book published after Sexuality & Space that proves my
point. In 1999 Routledge published the reader Gender Space Architecture: An
InterdisciplinaryIntroduction. Edited by lain Borden, Professor of Architecture and
Urban Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, the volume brings together "the
most important essays concerning subjects of gender, space, and architecture." The
book is divided into 3 parts, each of which includes an introduction by Jane Rendell,
Director of Architectural Research at the Bartlett. The publication is remarkable in its
scope, incorporating fundamental texts by feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, Betty
Friedan, and Audre Lorde alongside the critiques of Doreen Masse, bell hooks, and
Rosalyn Deutsche. It also includes texts by Diana Agrest, Alice T. Friedman, and
Beatriz Colomina (specifically, excerpts from "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism").
With its many inclusions, the publication intends to complement the understanding of
architecture "within the context of its production" as a means of "providing an opening of
[that] territory to future new ideas and practices." As an introductory text, the volume
instantiates a discourse to succeed it; inasmuch as this forthcoming inquiry is
forthcoming, it is not given any reality in the immediate present. To complicate this, the
rigorously interdisciplinary mode with which this volume presents its content implies a
categorical division between its explicitly philosophical content and that which refers
more directly to architecture. The conceptual progression between its three parts-
"GENDER;" "GENDER, SPACE;" and "GENDER, SPACE, ARCHITECTURE"-implies
the existence of a spectrum of related inquiries on gender and architecture, it is true, but
this spectrum nonetheless spans an interval between poles of the explicitly
philosophical and the explicitly architectural. As the volume traverses this interval, it also
moves forward in historical time, starting Part 1 with A Room of One's Own (Virginia
Woolf, published 1928) to and concluding Part 3 with "Bad Press" (Elizabeth Diller,
completed 1998). Although each subsequent section of the volume is labeled with an
additional word, as its text progresses the intellectual purview of Gender Space
Architecture actually narrows-from the literal and figural space of women in a tradition
dominated by patriarchy to the limited description of specific, post-feminist design
practices. As a whole its narrative would be beautifully poetic if it weren't so banal in its
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

81
implications: namely that, as time goes on, philosophy collapses into particular
architectural sites, projects, and ideas. History dictates silence.
The negative consequences of Sexuality & Space, as I have read it in this thesis,
are not related to the banality of Gender Space Architecture, or its contemporaries. No,
what Sexuality & Space suffers from-and what has been my interest here--is that
volume's specific production of silence. While it effectively instantiated a new,
interdisciplinary exchange, Sexuality & Space facilitates no possibility for further inquiry
besides what it, itself, has addressed. It is for this reason that the volume is both the first
and last book-length publication dedicated to a comprehensive discourse on sexual
identity and the discipline of architecture. I can prove this by pointing to its two stillborn
offspring.
Two works can be said to have succeeded Sexuality & Space-while both are
successful in their continuation of discourses initiated by the 1990 symposium, they do
little to advance that discourse beyond its transformation of architecture into a
phallocentric exercise of sexual identity and desire. Better known of the two is Mark
Wigley's 1995 book, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern
Architecture (MIT Press). In this revisionist history of architectural modernism Wigley
shows how the image of modern architecture as white is the effect of a historiographical
tradition that suppressed the color of the surfaces of its buildings; recalling "Untitled:
The Housing of Gender," Wigley argues that this suppression results from a sexual logic
that marginalized the "masquerade" of the nineteenth century's florid tendencies
towards polychrome and ornament. Less well-known' is the 1995 volume Stud:
Architectures of Masculinity; employing a blend of feminist and psychoanalytic theory
similar to Sexuality & Space, Stud illustrates the coding of masculinity and homosexual
desire in the design and adaptation of twentieth century architectural environments.
While each is compelling in its own right, neither project furthers the "displacement of
Architecture" Sexuality & Space had intended to initiate; on the contrary...
Something, something, something. I don't really know what to say here. I haven't
read either all that closely. I find them boring. I don't think there's much point in saying
that modernism is an exercise of male, architectural identity. Anyone who's been
through architecture school, lately, and doesn't have their head totally up their ass could
tell you the same thing; to put it in a book (or two) just seems, to me, like chauvinism.
Monumentalizing the unspoken sexism of twentieth century architecture though
revisionist historiography does nothing but substantiate our field's many unspoken
sexisms; written more cynically, I think that both Wigley and Saunders play to a certain
illiterate naivete that plagues the field of architectural studies, because nobody reads,
really, and everybody likes being told what they already know, by smart people, in
language they can barely understand. Nothing is gained, and the possibility of related
counter-narratives is deferred by one more instance of more of the same. As the status
69 Because of homophobic institutional disavowal, according an interesting conversation I had with its
editor over drinks at the Cambridge bar "Paradise," not long ago; in support of Mr. Saunders' claim I will
note that the publication is not included among the Princeton Papers on Architecture described on the
Princeton School of Architecture website, as of April 7, 2013, and that this seems to me to be an
intentional oversight.

82
quo re-instantiates itself, its myth becomes that much harder to demystify. From a
feminist perspective, this is incredibly unproductive-not because it is oppressive (who
cares about what Mark Wigley has to say, really?), but because it makes properly
dialectical engagement more difficult.
There is one more thing to say. The fifth Google Image Search result for "Beatriz
Colomina Mark Wigley" as of April 7, 2013 is the poster for a 1994 exhibition/event
series "Queer Space," hosted by the Lower Manhattan design gallery Storefront for Art
and Architecture. Organized by Beatriz Colomina, Hans Urbach, Cindy Patton, and
Mark Wigley, the exhibition assembled architectural mediations of questions like
How can minorities define their rights to occupy spaces within the city?
How can such space be legitimized, given a history and a future?
Is it even physical space that is in question, or is it the space of discursive
practices, texts, codes of behavior and the regulatory norms that organize social
life?
When I found out about "Queer Space" the first time, performing a Google Image
Search, a few months ago, I thought maybe by looking into it I could flesh out the more
incidental and secondary considerations I had had while drafting this thesis. Just from
the title and timing, "Queer Space" seems like it could have been a post-script to
Sexuality & Space; even though this thesis is a close reading, it might have involve
something interesting, that, maybe I could use in the conclusion. Also, maybe,
somewhere in the archive, I might discover some details about the working relationship
between Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley-since neither will talk to me in conjunction
with this project, and Princeton's archivist was entirely unhelpful.
In early April I went to New York, and I went through the Storefront's archive, and
I didn't really find what I was looking for-which is also to say that I did. In the two
binders of material saved from the talks and in-house installations associated with
"Queer Space," there is only one item authored by either Beatriz Colomina or Mark
Wigley. In the corner of a poster-sized, folded pamphlet there is a two-paragraph
introduction signed "Beatriz Colomina, June 9, 1994." I am a little suspicious but also
unsurprised that this is all that remains from "Queer Space" with either her name or
Wigley's attached to it. As far as I can tell, "Queer Space" started as a follow-up to
Sexuality & Space, and may have initially been related to the release of the
proceedings. According to Colomina's introduction,
The Queer Space project started as a discussion group formed in the Fall of
1992 [sic] between Dennis Dollens, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elizabeth Diller, and
myself. The initial impulse came from StoreFront's invitation to organize an
exhibition that would articulate the role of space in questions of sexuality.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

83
Figure 7 Google Image Search result for "Beatriz Colomina Mark Wigley." April 7, 2013.
The timing of the project's inception-late 1992-corresponds with the publication date
of Sexuality & Space; moreover, the language of the selection above, in particular the
phrase "the role of space in questions of sexuality" resonates with Colomina's phrase, in
the introduction to Sexuality & Space, "the question of 'Sexuality and Space'." For
reasons that remain unexplained, the "Queer Space project" rapidly became something
different from what Colomina expected, and I don't think that she was all that happy
about this. As Colomina writes, "Even before the first meeting, the focus became queer
space. I don't think that any of us quite realized what we were getting in to [sic]."
Considered with the reference to the event as "The Queer Space project" rather than
with the title, "Queer Space," this comment implies a level of derision, if not frustration,
hidden behind a scrim of professional courtesy. That this should be so is accentuated
by the exasperation implied by Colomina's ambiguous and ambivalent concluding
description of the exhibit/event:
The project did not initially have one single program but was always multifaceted
and ambiguous. The very idea of an exhibition was repeatedly contested. Many
possibilities were discussed involving the space of shop windows, billboards,
video games, e-mail, symposium, fashion shows, the Circle line, walking tours,
bus tours, queer kinesthetic, posters, personal ads, performances, actions
around the proposed AIDS drop in center in Soho, mapping homophobic
geographies, analysis of queer migrations, and so on. At a certain point we
decided to begin a long series of such events by registering the diverse
responses to an open call to proposals and manifestos. The resulting installation
is not so much an exhibition but a forum for debate.

84
Similarly, collective endeavors associated with "Queer Space" are only referenced in
relation to their failure to gain comprehension and validation:
What we had anticipated as a series of organization meetings to get the project
started turned into a long series of discussions over Chinese rolls at a local joint
across the street from Store Front. Over time, other people joined some of our
discussions, including Rosalyn Deutsche, Douglas Crimp, Robert Reid-Pharr,
John Ricco, Robin Lewis, Jackie Goldsby, Jeff Nunokawa, Mark Wigley, Henry
Urbach, and Cindy Patton-the last three quickly becoming part of the organizing
group. Traces of this organizing dialogue can be found in a series of manifestos
that were produced over these months and across many fax machines as we
struggled to clarify the project for ourselves and for the myriad of institutions to
which we applied for funds [... ] We are proud to announce that we were rejected
by every institution that we applied to for financial support.
I am not surprised that, here, Colomina really isn't saying much aside from explaining
what happened, while at the same time writing in a manner which implies the judgment
of failure, impotence, and obscurity often projected onto both homosexuals and to queer
theory.
How does this follow-up on Sexuality & Space? It doesn't. And that's how it helps
to conclude my thesis. They said a lot of things, and I don't really disagree; I'm just
frustrated by a lot of it. I think it was kind of short-sighted. This is how I feel about
Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley's contributions to Sexuality & Space, and I envision
that this is how Beatriz Colomina felt while organizing "Queer Space." I like to imagine
that, as she was eating her "Chinese rolls," Colomina recognized her frustration as at
least in part the result of her scholastic method, as an organizer, editor, and participant
in Sexuality & Space; because the sort of dilated confusion, apprehension, and false
starts she encountered while putting together "Queer Space" bear an uncanny
resemblance to that which, I think, is encountered when one tries to continue upon that
started in Sexuality & Space from a framework unrelated to that which is explicitly
addressed in the proceedings-like, from Eve Sedgwick's perspective (or, my own, as
informed by her work).
Thinking about it now, I have to laugh. Thinking again, I recognize that
Colomina's response to all that is additionally uncanny in the form it took. In the last
block quote, I noticed the following sentence:
Here we have reproduced one of those circulating faxes as an instances [sic] of
the kind of exchanges that occurred (and may be [sic] too, of the pleasures and
difficulties of collaborative writing).
To the left of the introduction, there is a reproduction of a fax from Eve Sedgwick.
Is this gesture not, in its own way, analogous my response to Sexuality & Space? In the
absence of having anything to say, we reproduce the original text and add some
notes... hoping that, now, we have somehow been able to add something. Or, maybe
we're just mad that things didn't turn out how we hoped they would, and hope that just
by representing the situation others will agree about the indignity.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

85
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Architecture, 1994. Courtesy Storefront for Art and Architecture Archive.

86
In the fax, Eve Sedgwick misspelled Colomina's first name. In the archive, I noticed this,
and I snickered. What an idiot, I found myself thinking.
Having written all this I am brought to wonder how much, really, needs to be said. When
I was in New York in early April I also met up with one of the partners of the architecture
firm I once worked for; we spent most of our time talking about what it meant to be a
gay architect: about the office on Canal Street he once shared with Joel Saunders and
Matthias Hollwich, years ago; about his voyeuristic design sensibility; about flirtation,
desire, and professionalism; bickering about Charles Renfro's media presence. It was
the second item in that list which interested us the most, and it was that which we
discussed for about forty-five minutes of the hour and a half we were together: what it
meant to him; how others capitalize on their gay sensibility, as a practice; how that
might differ, generationally. As we realized, together, the subject is not personal, but it is
atomistic: voyeurism, and a related design practice based on queer marginality, is
inherently based on an individual rather than communal identity; furthermore our
conversation emerged from and remains defined by the circumstances of our
relationship to each other, informally. Our discussion would have been changed
radically by moving that it to a more formal, academic setting.
My intention in writing this is not to say that gay architectural practice, or
whatever, has no discourse beyond gossip, or that there is an equivalency between the
conversation that I had and the subject matter of the essays I address in this thesis.
Rather, what I am saying is that the frustration of inventing a discourse to create
conversation is that which is signified by the void Sexuality & Space has left us with.
Sometimes there is nothing to say. This is what I have learned.
SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

87
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "What is Writing?" Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang,
2012 [1953, tr. 1967]. Print.
Colomina, Beatriz. Introduction. Sexuality & Space. Vol. 1. New York: Princeton
Architectural, 1992. N. pag. Print. Princeton Papers on Architecture.
. "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism." Sexuality & Space. Vol. 1. New York:
Princeton Architectural, 1992. 73-130. Print. Princeton Papers on Architecture.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Captialism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991. Print. 11
Mulvey, Laura. "Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Framework

15/16/17 (1981): 12-15. Print.
. "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity." Sexuality & Space. Vol. 1.
New York: Princeton Architectural, 1992. 53-72. Print. Princeton Papers on
Architecture.
. 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18. Brown
University. Web. 19 Feb. 2013.
Rendell, Jane, Barbara Penner, and lain Borden. Gender Space Architecture: An
InterdisciplinaryIntroduction. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.
Quetglas, Jose. "Lo Placentero." Carrier De La Ciutat 9-10 (1980): 2. Web.
Sanders, Joel, ed. Stud: Architectures of Masculinity. New York: Princeton Architectural,
1996. Print. Princeton Papers on Architecture.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California,

1990. Print.
Wigley, Mark. "Untitled: The Housing of Gender." Sexuality & Space. Vol. 1. New York:
Princeton Architectural, 1992. 327-89. Print. Princeton Papers on Architecture.
. White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture.

Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995. Print.

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What is the thesis about?

What is the thesis about?

What three essays does it examine?

What three essays does it examine?

Notes on Sexuality & Space

Samuel Ray Jacobson

B.A. Architecture UBRA R iE'S

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE IN PARTIAL

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE STUDIES

@2013 Samuel Ray Jacobson. All rights reserved.

Samuel Ray Jacobson

Submitted to the Department of Architecture

Thesis Supervisor: Mark Jarzombek

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

11 Laura Mulvey and the Status of the Antecedent

18 Beatriz Colomina and the Excluded Middle

55 On "Untitled: The Housing of Gender" by Mark Wigley

77 After Sexuality & Space

With apologies to Beatriz Colomina, who I've always admired.

"PANDORA: TOPOGRAPHIES OF THE MASK AND CURIOSITY"

LAURA MULVEY AND THE STATUS OF THE ANTECEDENT

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

Reading laterally, it is apparent that a shared interest in unveiling is what

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

"THE SPLIT WALL: DOMESTIC VOYEURISM"

BEATRIZ COLOMINA AND THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE

In the volume Sexuality & Space, Beatriz Colomina's contribution is positioned

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

Attendant, substantive stylistic maneuvers

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

Figure 2 Sexuality & Space, pp. 78-9 (author's copy)

This game of legitimation is consistent with Colomina's treatment of Loos,

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

In his writings on the question of the house, Loos describes a number of

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

Through a subsequent comparison, Colomina expands upon this mise-en-sc6ne

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

detached-locate themselves outside of Colomina's text, as external citations. These

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

El Raumplan, lejos de sor un Raumplan, far from being a

Figure 3 Screengrab from "Lo Placentero" with English translation by author

Toda la arqu:tectura do Loos , quo All of Loos' architecture, which is

Figure 4 Screengrab from "Lo Placentero" with English translation by author

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE

independence and peculiarity of this existence against the immense power of

SAMUEL RAY JACOBSON

NOTES ON SEXUALITY & SPACE