ABSTRACT
Drapery is the extreme expression of the ‘binary logic’ of the modern architectural system, in which the ‘covering principle’ or dressing–what is named skin, style, or ornament—is categorically detached from the ‘bearing principle’. This ultimate condition stages an absolute incommensurability between the inside and the outside without mediation. The chapter discusses the logic behind this correspondence between Drapery and this so-called ‘Islamic Baroque’ by locating the analysis of its meaning in a wider historical context of modernist architectural theory which goes back to Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand—. It argues that Drapery constitutes the ‘Sartorial Superego’ in modern architecture. In the ‘structuralist’ teaching of Durand, in other words, architecture enters the binary logic of language in which, as Ferdinand de Saussure would show, there is only an arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified. Functionalist architecture and modernity were directly based on the inherent splits in utilitarianism.
