Canadian artist Alex Turgeon addresses queer subjectivity in an architectural context in his work. As a JUNGE AKADEMIE fellow, he realised the City of Angels installation, shown in March 2024 at the Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, in the group exhibition The Breath of a House is the Sound of Voices Within. Turgeon corresponded with Akademie member Siegfried Zielinski on this subject, discussing the symbolism of towers and stair- cases as metaphors, how an archive can be viewed as a „venue of power“ preserving knowledge and architecture interpreted as an instrument of control over the body.

Dear Siegfried,

I’ll begin by explaining the work produced during my fellowship at the Akademie der Künste. City of Angels conflates several ideas into a metaphor of the tower, rendered through an interpretation of the architect John Hejduk’s Kreuzberg Tower and Wings in conjunction with Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. In Bachelard’s metaphor, the tower rises from the ground as a product of its site. The foundation I construct is made up of the dual layers of the archive (logic, knowledge, academia) and the cellar beneath (the id, desire, erotics, lawlessness, etc.) – both located at the Akademie. By locating these ideas in a sequence of sub-basements, I position the earth’s physicality (land, dirt, place, site) as being subjected to gravity and the physical laws that bind the universe together.

Hejduk’s work has been an ongoing inspiration for imbuing architecture with subjectivity – more through the use of poetics and corporeal allegory than explicit representations of buildings as beings, as is evident in Hejduk. He also published several books of poetry, which is how I came to his practice. His work balances on the knife’s edge between the building as a subject and the building representing a subject. After spending time with his archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, I found his formal logic essentially erodes disciplinary distinction. For him, the distinction between architecture, poetry, visual art, and even religion is all simply structure.

When I lived in Berlin, Hejduk’s Tower was on the periphery of my Kreuzberg neighbourhood. Returning to Berlin for my fellowship, I reflected on the past and present, explicitly using the site of the tower as the grounding metaphor, like the meeting of spheres in a Venn diagram. Hejduk was a Catholic; his work often questioned the benevolence of God and angels. Learning that external design elements of this tower were supposedly intended for angels to climb resonated with this questioning of God as well as the god-like power of architects. So, for me, the tower reads as a ladder between the upper and lower worlds rather than the binary of Heaven and Hell, which implies a moral distinction. They are, instead, two sides of the same coin. In my interpretation of Hejduk’s logic, he grounds his angels as mortals, wielding architecture to subject them to the laws of gravity.

Dear Alex,

So, let’s fly, and then we’ll see where and how we land.

Is there a relation between Hejduk and Daniel Libeskind? The way you describe him is quite close to Daniel’s logic.

Am I correct in my perception that the connection between Hejduk’s Tower and the archive (as well as the Picture Cellar – the Bilderkeller at the Akademie der Künste) is absolutely imaginary?

Alex:

That’s interesting about Libeskind, as I am only familiar with his renovation of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where I now live. I find that Hejduk’s later work – especially his Victims project, proposed for Berlin’s Topography of Terror – is architecture as a performance of masque theatre. His buildings are designed with functions legible in their outward appearance. There is something about a building’s legibility that resonates, as a pastime of mine is exploring the years of change on the faces of buildings, interpreting designs in relation to renovations, DIY techniques of architectural renewals. Or, conversely becoming completely levelled and built as a monolith of modernity rising upward.

Yes, you are correct; the relation between the Tower, the Akademie archives, and Bilderkeller is fabricated. I wanted the work to use Hedjuk’s theories and form to anchor my own ideas. By suturing these locations together, I play the architect. My intention was to work within the context of site-specificity and the unique access my fellowship offered. During our introduction to the Akademie, we toured its archives. I was immediately inspired as I am also a collector of printed matter and aspire to some semblance of archival order. I often utilise graphic media, extruding the page into architectural space from a two-dimensional plane to a three-dimensional elevation. I consider this space an act of queer architecture and utopian world-building, with the model being a projected penthouse dreamscape. This, when viewed in relation to the abstraction of the Bilderkeller, describes a self-portrait as a building, a forming of omnipresent oppositional ideas – order and chaos.

Visual elements of the sculpture are sourced from queer archives in Canada. The interior images are taken from advertisements for gay hotels in the 1980s. They speak to an anachronistic ideal of interior life, a utopian future past. There is an intentional bridging of site, time, and personal experience through the combination of these materials.

Siegfried:

Daniel Libeskind studied with Hejduk at The Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. Like many others, he is still balancing on the thin borderline between art & architecture. For these architects, building the material object in social reality, as part of their imagination, is only one aspect of the art of architecture and urban planning. Drawing, painting, building three-dimensional visual objects, and installations are equally integral. I mention Libeskind (an Akademie member) because he was perhaps even more radical regarding the idea of Fantastic Architecture, an architecture of imagination in the tradition of Piranesi and others. In a text (originally in English, here in my translation from German), with a heading of a twice diagonally crossed out “being” followed by an “is” on the next page, Daniel Libeskind lists what his project “Between the Lines” consists of, which Berlin’s political administration called the “Extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum Department”: an actual “extension, two buildings, three visible forms, four separate structures, five gaps/empty spaces, six emptied building sections, seven buildings on a slope, eight undergrounds, nine blank walls, ten connecting corridors, eleven original main lines, twelve tones, 23 angles, 24 walls, 25 levels, 39 bridges, 81 doors and no less than 365 windows” (one for every day of the year). I mention Libeskind extensively here because he perhaps has realised more radically than Hejduk how to construct buildings like sculptures by de-constructing traditional architecture.

In this context, your idea of the Bilderkeller as the imaginary bottom of your conception of the Hejduk Tower is brilliant. Deep down in the darkness, where the light of attention and recognition does not shine, we find the other side of architectonic praxis and thought. The other side of the moon, so to speak, where it does not fit in and resists the powerful industrial complex of development.

But the archive? How does this epistemologically fit into your concept? The Bilderkeller is an anarchistic image container, an AnArchive, as I call such constructs. Archives like the ones at the Akademie der Künste are governmental in the sense of Michel Foucault’s conception of them. They form a power station which intends to preserve the country’s cultural heritage. Such archives are finely organised: every room and shelf is hygienic, and the grammar inside of the archives is not identical to that of the artist but the bequests through which the archives exist.

The tower you have built as a sculpture accompanying your video has a remarkable artefact inside: a spiral staircase installed in the centre section of the vertical triptych. What is your idea behind this element? It is especially interesting on a metaphoric level because it is a winding staircase with one straight spindle going straight down to this shadow world at the bottom of our consciousness. I associate it with Adolf Wölfli’s drawing Der Sturz, which he made in 1913, right when he was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. And, of course, with a film that is the height of all suspense movies – Hitchcock’s VERTIGO.

Alex:

It is interesting that you mentioned Piranesi, who has been an ongoing influence in my work. Previously, my interest focused on his fantastical, clearly phantasmagoric representations of ruin as situated somewhere between art and documentation – a kind of pseudo-scientific representation of a history rendered before the advent of photography. Then there are, of course, his Prisons, which speak so much about the authority, control and power of architecture over bodies, equally a psychoanalytic framework for society itself. Formally, I gravitated towards Piranesi’s etchings because of their interpretation of history in the epic – like cinema. Reflecting on his work now, I see that the prisons feel very much like a subconscious inspiration for utilising the Bilderkeller. Piranesi’s grandeur of incarceration creates a lawless heterotopic expanse. Space is represented as infinitely compounded into stairs (spiral and otherwise), as well as bridge systems and abstract machines of (supposed) torture that represent the very social mechanisms of imprisonment itself (class, sexuality, economy, etc.). It is outwardly menacing, but with the right eyes, it might resemble a dark room at Berghain, a particular site of pleasure and freedom. I am very interested in this act of perception, where one’s idea of hell is another’s idea of heaven. I have navigated this binary from somewhere in the middle, a kind of in-between space that is simultaneously neither/nor.

The archive contrasts with the Bilderkeller’s resistance to order and practicality, a freedom of creativity. Architecturally, the archive is attuned to the logic and science of discipline, scholarship, and the Akademie itself (both the AdK and the “academy” at large). As you say, it represents the countless volumes of pre-established ideas, the control of knowledge and what is kept vs. what is discarded. It is a space full of what has been done before; thus, any creative act is always viewed in relation to it. In my conversations about the Bilderkeller with Angela Lammert and Carolin Schönemann, who have done extensive work on historicising it and were instrumental in my working with the site, I have come to understand this space as antagonising linear chronology. The cellar offered a site of freedom for students at a time caught between the end of the war and the construction of the Berlin Wall. Since that in-between space was short-lived, it felt almost like a tomb for the idea of two co-existing ideologies, which the Wall enforced as separate.

The staircase motif links the formal structure of the tower. Hejduk’s tower is essentially five discrete towers connected together. Early sketches indicated that, when seen in plan view, each tower was a separate shape, with one being a circle, a square, a triangle, etc. In the final realisation, the shapes were simplified, but the circle stayed and is the single stairwell of the tower as a whole.

The model is based on the design of a single apartment within the tower. Each apartment has two storeys connected by an internal staircase. This sculpture is an abstraction of that space but alludes to the overall building. I was interested in the micro vs. macro relationship between the language of the upstairs and downstairs. Representing the staircase was about creating a formal contrast between the “hygienic” (to borrow your term) aesthetics of the model and that of a more ancient representation of a tower. The spiral staircase is also a nod to Hejduk’s interest in the form.

During our meeting in the studio last spring, you mentioned that you had just published a book on ladders and stairs. I wonder how these forms operate within that work? How did they warrant closer study? Do you find similarities in our work here, or perhaps more interestingly, how do our thoughts diverge?

Siegfried:

“One’s idea of hell is another’s idea of heaven” – thank you for this wonderful phrase expressing what ambiguity means, dear Alex.

It seems to me to be extremely urgent that we (re-)develop a sense of competence for ambiguity again and rehabilitate this attitude towards the world. Political, social and cultural realities are currently moving entirely in the opposite direction. One of the main tasks of applications for learning machines like ChatGPT is to avoid ambiguity. Ambiguity is something machines cannot tolerate. But to think in ambiguities is a privilege of human intelligence. Today, individuals are constantly asked to choose between divergent poles and apparent antagonisms. Good and evil anyway, war or pacifism, ecology or economy, male or female gender, vertical or horizontal structures. As if there were no alternatives that could be negotiated and developed in dialogue between the heterogeneous positions. It is as if there are no fluid existences, no being in limbo beyond fixed disciplines and rigid orders. If you look at Piranesi’s prison drawings as a pendulum, for me this pendulum swings mainly on the side of the imagination. They tell, above all, of the unlimited freedom that artists have to organise three-dimensional realities as possibilities. The spaces in which architecture is designed fundamentally differ from those in which the buildings stand. Piranesi’s work can also be interpreted as dialectical images in the sense of Walter Benjamin. They destroy the socially approved, prescribed pictorial space and create space for new ones.

Of course, this brings us back to the Bilderkeller, that heterotopic place that was undoubtedly a hell for some visitors, a wicked criminal place, but for others, harboured a tremendous potential for liberation. Images could be created there that could not be made anywhere else at these times. Here, art came into its own. This is entirely unlike an archive, where art has its spirit exorcised. As Bertolt Brecht remarked, order is a sign of scarcity, not abundance. Administration does not organise wealth but poverty.

I am not a specialist in architecture – but wasn’t it Rem Koolhaas who remarked that the ground plan has a special significance in architecture in that man is an earthling, an inhabitant of the earth, and therefore all his activities take place on the earth?

I worked for several decades preparing my book on the stairways to heaven and ladders to hell, titled Swinging In and Swing Out, but I always left the accumulated material lying around. It was only recently that I started to throw things away, cut the collected material which made the intensive writing process possible in the first place. Now, the manuscript is in the stage where it will be printed. The final book will be many things, but above all, it will be an experiment that allows transversal thinking to unfold in a concrete case study. My observations of an archaic form, namely the staged/stepped reality and our relationship to it, move purposefully diagonally to the sciences and the arts, architecture, cinema, music, and poetry. It is a great pleasure to be able to work, assemble and write in such an interdiscursive way …

Alex:

Time gets away from me as it has a habit of doing so these days. Quicksilver, silverfish, phantom, Geist, vapour.
I believe ambiguity is integral to art and creativity, to the creative voice. Ambiguity is so essential to art’s purpose. It’s a powerful site of interpretation, and it feels almost redundant to state it. However, due to the ever-present polarisation of positions, perhaps it is even more important (necessary?) to reinstate the obvious here, just like you mentioned. As polarities reify, so does the vastness between them. The tower grows, elongates, and spirals upwards like a monolith to stubbornness. Traversing the stairs becomes ever more cumbersome, exhausting, and seemingly impossible. Perhaps even angels lose their ability to fly to such heights. I guess Babel could be one precedent.

In addition to ambiguity, I would also underscore the value of art as artifice. There is a kind of safety in the framework of creativity in which it is composed, fabricated, and manufactured – not in the means of physical production but in the site of idea-making. There is freedom in knowing that it is, quite literally, made up. Art as a creative tool has so many roles, and I think it is essential to hold all of these together, to allow them to contradict each other while equally working to inform each other. Establishing some kind of value system between the uses of art doesn’t seem productive to me.

I would agree, the ground is the surface we all share. Whether it be under the terms of settler-colonialism, in which land is understood as capital and is conquered and divided as such, vs. the stewardship of the earth as a landscape of reverence and respectful collaboration. A more modern concept would be Spaceship Earth – the ultimate collective system of a utopian vehicle propelling itself through the universe. Even if architecture is always in response to the physical space it occupies, it is so often designed to remove that distinction between human and earth, to eradicate the inherent relation between body, land and their intrinsic collaboration within that ecosystem. As a result, humanity destroys earth in the face of capital, believing these systems as separate and infinite.

Stairs are part of an ableist tradition. I think about this perspective within architecture and how the stepped incline is a primaeval technology, yet a structure almost impossible to eradicate. Built space is so attuned to these methods for traversing up and down. It is efficient but specific to one-way access. City space is equally defined this way as a result of scale – elevation when the space is limited, necessitating verticality to encourage density. Yet the spiral is equally a stepped technology as well as a ramped one. How might your research reflect this formal distinction between the diagonal and the spiral? How does the shape these technologies take inform your analysis? The double helix is a universal form, from DNA to how the planets move through the universe. How, if at all, does the spiral extend this investigation for you?

Siegfried:

Time is the only thing we do not have because it is impossible to have it. Time has us, and it uses us as a display to show, how fast it is passing …

Babel, for me, was never merely a cacophony. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the narrative was coded as negative. The very influential Jesuit Athanasius Kircher interpreted the Turris Babel (Tower of Babel) as a disaster, absolute chaos and close to the end of the world. But he also argued vehemently against polyphony (in music), pluriversal values and true manifoldness. His task as a general of the Vatican was to universalise heterogeneities wherever possible. I think polyphony can be something very valuable. It is an essential dimension of any radical democratic structure. Strict, homogenous aesthetics is a nightmare. The cosmos rushes wildly, contradictory and with many, many voices, or it is dead and bloodless like Hades, a realm of shadows.

“The experimental film, called such only because it dares to lie to the mirror …”, Henry Miller stated at a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. What he meant by this is very clear and applies to the arts today, especially those made using advanced techniques. We show something and at the same time we make it clear that we are showing something. As an artist, I have a special ability to draw others into my world and seduce them into contemplation. This obliges me to always make it clear that the world I create is an artificial world of my own making.

At the beginning of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses from 1922, his protagonist Buck Mulligan, holding a knife, steps up to the banister of the highest landing of the staircase in his house and intones the Introibo ad altare Dei (“To the altar of God I will step”). Mulligan then looks into the dark, winding staircase and invites his visitor to climb up to him: “Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.” I dedicate a whole chapter of my book to the very complex phenomenon of the spiral staircase. This is my VERTIGO chapter. (The epistemological context with the double helix of the DNA I discuss in a special chapter on science and technology.) The etymological meaning of vertical is ambiguous (there we are again), an adjective derived from the Latin verb vertere, which means both straight down or up, but also has the meaning to turn, to turn around. It is used to describe the movement of a vortex in water, and this meaning is transferred anthropomorphically to the hair vortex. From there, the field of meaning is extended to head, crown, and tip, with the vertical as a directional designation: like a plumb line pointing from top to bottom, like a body falling into the depths, from the top of a tower, for example, which would be called vertex in Latin. The spiral staircase opens downwards into the dark eye of the staircase, enclosing the void, the empty space. Vertigo contains all these meanings and an additional dimension – the negative connotation of a whirling movement, a dizzying rotation. In Anglo-Saxon, this dimension is primarily associated with specific states of mental confusion: “a disordered state in which the individual or his/her surroundings seem to whir dizzily: giddiness. A dizzy confused state of mind”, teaches The Great Webster.

Alex:

In writing this conclusion now, my head is in a particular spiral, going upwards and downwards in all directions. Trying to parse through the relentless linearity of media, the endless scroll of information timelines, directing perspectives always forward, never encouraging a back step, second glance, or twist around to look behind and let what just happened take up space. This linearity is so much associated with the capitalist fever dream. The commute to the production line has become infinitesimally small, such that our fingertips now power the conveyor belt of product – information, the new immaterial self-generating product. Reflecting on our conversation, the loop takes me back to the beginning, standing at the base of the tower. I think about the urge to look simultaneously forwards and backwards, or in our case, upwards and downwards. It is perhaps a kind of superposition, straddling two realities at once, claiming neither, but requiring both for each to exist. This is also a position when working with the theme of the tower, with its spooky basement and idealised penthouse, establishing the polarities for one to exist in-between. Both are required for its identity as a vertical being. I think about how conflating these sites together blur the disciplinary distinction and perhaps is a way of eroding these divisional ideologies. In my research about Hejduk, I came across an interview transcription between the architect and David Shapiro. When asked about his use of poetry in his work, Hejduk responded: “I don’t make any separations. A poem is a poem. A building, a building. Architecture’s architecture. Music is music. I mean, it’s all structure. It’s structure. Its structure, essential.” This idea resonates with me as an artist, as someone who works across forms of making and resists being defined as one or the other. I think about how meaning is made through an exchange of superficial structural definitions from the micro to the macro. Perhaps in interrogating structures this way, power can be undermined and reimagined, like Piranisi’s prisons. Power can be re-networked and re-mapped to form new ways of defining our own heavens and our own hells – as a step towards the utopian impulse, enabling methods to construct anew from site, plan, to elevation.