ABSTRACT
Douglas Darden's work is well known, mostly for the exquisite handmade monochrome drawings displayed in various exhibitions and for his book Condemned Building , published in 1993. The first dated material is from 1990, and at that time was already described as “an architectural novel” named in various ways, but most often as The Laughing Girls. By its very nature, the project questions the relationship between architecture, storytelling, and representation. This chapter discusses that Darden’s particular act of building may yield an alternative mode of architectural agency. Images of Greek vases, themselves covered by pictograms that tell a story, are very much present in Darden’s notes for The Laughing Girls. The first iteration of The Laughing Girls was for an architectural competition in the early 1990s. In many ways, The Laughing Girls may be Darden’s most autobiographical project. Darden spent the 1988–1989 academic year at the American Academy in Rome.
