“Three Laughing Girls.” CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture. Eds. Alberto Pèrez-Gòmez and Stephen Parcell. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Vol. 7 (2016).

Though very little has been written about Douglas Darden, his work is well known, mostly for the exquisite pencil drawings displayed in various exhibitions and for his text, Condemned Building, published in 1993. Condemned Building contains ten acts of building. Each begins with a canonical statement and the turning over of that canon. The act of turning over is a tactic often used and represented by Darden. The frontispiece of Condemned Building, for example, shows the turning over of a turtle to reveal the animal’s underbelly. This turning over was considered by Darden to be an architectural trope and indeed the word trope, from the original Greek τρόπος, means, “to turn.” Each of the projects relies upon this act of turning over to reveal what Darden referred to as the “Underbelly” of architecture.

This essay will describe and begin to unpack a project that Darden had been working on for at least five years prior to his death in 1996 named in various ways, but most often as “The Laughing Girls.” Much bigger in scope than any of the ten condemned acts of building in the Princeton publication of 1993, Doug was working on a 150-page graphic novel to include at least forty objects. It was intended to be an architectural novel to the Condemned Building collection of short stories. The first dated material related to “The Laughing Girls” goes back to 1990 and was, at that time, already described as “An Architectural Novel.” To put it into context with his other better-known work, only about half of the projects in Condemned Building were complete. Although attempts were made, “The Laughing Girls” has never been published and remains unfinished.