On Becoming Petrified: the Erotic Gaze in Architectural Conception

Medusa’s irresistible charms condemned to a life of petrified seduction holds parallels with the practice of architecture. Le Corbusier once described the paralyzing effect of places that paradoxically move us as “ineffable.” The quality of being “out of words” simultaneously tells us, much like in Jorge Luis Borges’ Aleph, an infinite amount of words that cannot be spoken. The moment of being petrified or frozen in stone may be called stupor, which is the condition by which one experiences extreme silence and loudness simultaneously.

In a lecture at the IUAV, Carlo Scarpa described the role of erased marks in architectural drawings. Stressing that strong paper hosts erased marks better, he compared the traced memory of lines to the swirly nature of architects’ thinking. By creating a mnemonic machine for remembering, the architect would encounter his/her forgotten thoughts through the gentle presence of lines engraved within the skin of the paper. To further elaborate on this thought, he compared the act of remembering as a form of encounter. Such encounter, he explained, emerges from an acute intuition that is comparable to the being stupefied by the hair of woman. The fertile realm of his imagination relied on the unexpected and ineffable qualities of the erotic. Within his silent and constant practice of drawing, Scarpa nonetheless sought moments of stupor, of suspended disbelief and awe where an apex of loud silence occurred at the moment of a design realization. While many women inhabit Scarpa’s imaginary repertoire of architectural discourse, the erotic stupor of his drawing practice cannot be reduced to just these representations. This paper will unfold Scarpa’s practice of drawing as an erotic seduction that plays on secrecy and discoveries to find moments of stupor within such absolute and fleeting silence, a chance, much like men looking at Medusa, to become architecture.