Cloud as an Alternative Architecture

In A Theory of /Cloud/ (1972), the cloud, or rather, the graph of cloud, served as the entry point of the French art historian and theorist Hubert Damisch (1928-2017) in his understanding of the limits of Western art and art history as framed since the Renaissance. Here he initiated another possibility of painting—a “theory” of painting, which he simultaneously termed “a history of painting”—by concluding the book with an examination of Chinese landscape painting. Participating in the sinophelia of French intellectuals that accompanied the Chinese Cultural Revolution launched by Mao, Damisch’s turn represented his philosophical initiative to reflect on and shift away from Western metaphysics, especially from the negative dialectics of Hegel, and towards a different architecture based on a harmonious and positive materialist dialectic inspired by Chinese Taoist and Chan Buddhist philosophy. Here, in Damisch’s “reinvention” of Chinese painting, the cloud not only literally entered paintings to negotiate the intertextuality of mountain and water, ink and brush, and even that of the painter and painting, but also to fill the role of the materialist body in a different perspective of world formation—as the breath, the one movement that sustains or constitutes all life. In Damisch’s vision, such a cloud even leads to a different kind of architecture, one that counters the philosophical metaphor of architecture as the stability of the arche, the subject, the essence, or any anchored center. The cloud and its philosophical architectural alternative also contribute to a reflection on the very physicality of architecture, leading to the formation of an architecture in absentia, to which Damisch was to return in 2003 when discussing Diller+Scofidio’s Blur Building (2002), as well as the Chinese architecture of the Ming Dynasty.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.45

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-37-1