ABSTRACT
When Structuralists and Post-Structuralists make the apparently outrageous claim that every object is both a presence and an absence, they mean that an object is never fully there – it is there to the extent that it appears before us, but is not there in so far as its being is determined by its relation to the whole system of which it is part, a system that does not appear to us. — Donald Palmer
There is no presence. There is no absence. There is only the difference between them, always and already in movement. — Michael Benedikt
The notion that a work of architecture can have a simultaneous quality of absence and presence is part of the late twentieth century Structuralist effort at placing designed objects within their larger contexts. For them, the quality of absence was relative to our unconscious understanding of the missing. The quality of presence was simply what we have before us, no more. The discipline for understanding these notions was borrowed from linguistics, a well-developed philosophical science, having been initiated by de Saussure in the first decade of the twentieth century. The qualities of absence and presence are not only significant to the Structuralists. Phenomenologists have an interest in the presentness of the object, devoid of the absence. What matters most to them is the raw reality of the experience of the object before them. In other words, the immediate presence of the object is what is truly real.
