ABSTRACT
On the side of materiality, the master's house is one that is frequently easy to identify on account of its prominence in the landscape, its conspicuous display of wealth or control, its symbols, its grandeur. Mastery is exercised through architecture in ways that are not always obvious. Mastery is not simply quantitative superiority. It is not the successful solution of a functional, climatic, resource or sustainability problem, although it can be the way rhetoric situates a building project within these anxieties. Prohibition involves the dropped-out metonymy of wealth and its reciprocal force, the evil eye that enviously and literally holds the master's house in its gaze. The kidnapper's telescope casts a shadow that inverts the house's interior space, forcing police assisting with negotiations to crawl beneath the sight line. The McGuffin's emptiness and meaninglessness captures the essence of the master signifier, whose very power and pervasiveness is based on the fact that it has no logical relationship to any referent.
