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The aim of this studio, to borrow a formula from Jean-Luc Godard, is to mark out “the tangible terrain of one’s uneasiness.” Architecture occupies this terrain, which it shares with art, when it touches upon the difference between space and place. Dislocation names the rupture between space and place. A space that cannot be placed becomes disorienting. Let us consider an example, Asger Jorn’s Disquieting Duck(1959), in which he took a found painting and inserted into its edifice a painterly element extrinsic to its tableau that comically disturbs its clichéd dream of peace and quiet, its readymade pastoral fantasy. Here the duck, far from being a comforting feature of the pastoral scene, becomes a disquieting and disruptive element, dwarfing the house with its monstrosity. The duck belongs to the scene like a gash upon its surface. As if formed accidentally through a violent and uncontrolled smearing of paint, the duck is no longer a duck by being a duck: recognizable as if by chance. It is a duck that has lost its identity. Freed from the signification that places it, it belongs to the scene as a rogue element. If this creature evokes a feeling of unease, it is because its lack of identity becomes something tangible like the hollow of a joint that has become dislocated. It is placed into the space of its absent place. This is perhaps what architecture can do when it too becomes attuned to the dislocated spaces that upset the ease with which subjects can be placed. The aim of this studio is to become acquainted with dislocation as a condition of the subject’s relation to space.

In the course of the semester, we are going to consider a number of spaces in detail: the Sadean boudoir, Duras’s The Lover, Duchamp’s Green Box, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Louise Nevelson’s open boxes, Kelley’s Educational Complex, Ballard’s novel Highrise. The aim of the course will be to render an architectural apparatus for Ballard’s Highrise, developing a complex model of its form and structure. 

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