It was entitled ‘Champ de Bataille’ and combined a cemetery with social housing. It was possibly too strictly and directly linked to Bataille’s Le bleu du ciel. That was the first book I had ever read by the French writer; I had found it in a Paris bookshop and devoured it in a transvestite bar in Rue St. Denis in one feverish night-time reading.

A while later I heard that Fassbinder had Le bleu du ciel under his pillow when he died, and much later I learnt that Rossi was thinking of Le bleu du ciel when he designed his cemetery in Modena. I stormed through Tschumi’s texts exploring Dennis Hollier’s analogy of Bataille’s work with architecture.

I noted how Tschumi later appeared to push those texts aside and also noted the flood of dubious texts about Bataille which burst forth, especially in the Netherlands, learning as a result the importance of Bataille’s term ‘Interiorization’. Now the first Dutch translation of Le bleu du ciel is in the bookshops (translator: Walter van der Star, Publisher: Yves Gevaert). Incredibly, the book doesn’t sell. Is it because the cover isn’t tantalizing enough? The cover and the typography have the kind of interiorization and restraint you might hope for with architecture. (For the cost of one Archis you’ve got a classic which might keep you occupied for the rest of your life and threatens to alter your views on architecture. I won’t venture to comment on whether or not that’s a decent offer). I read the book again and again, and, twenty years later, the disconcerting recognition is as strong as ever.

‘…all there was between us was hostile disillusion. We sensed that we meant little to each other, at least from the moment we were no longer living in fear… At a bend in the road, an abyss opened up below us. Oddly enough, the abyss at our feet was as infinite as the starry sky above our heads. A great many tiny lights, moved by the breeze, were holding a silent, inexplicable nocturnal celebration. Hundreds of stars, hundreds of candles were burning simultaneously on the ground: the ground where there were rows of illuminated graves… we were fascinated by the abyss full of grave-stars….We dropped down on the loose soil and I penetrated her moist body, as a well-driven plough penetrates the soil. The earth beneath her body opened like a grave, her naked body opened to me like a freshly-dug grave….and I should have imagined we were falling into the void of the heavens.’

Knowing that Rossi knew Le bleu du ciel, I also know that when, in his Scientific Autobiography, he refers to a room with an abyss, he could not have meant a room with a lifting platform, but had the same abyss in mind as in Bataille’s Le bleu du ciel. Rossi’s question to architecture, which he, as an architect in search of happiness, was unable to answer, was how architecture could accept that abyss, how it could be contained in a room: a room in which the blue of the sky falls into the decaying earth, in which the stars lie beneath you like an abyss, an abyss in which heaven and earth coincide (co+incidere, fall together): a room which formalizes and interiorizes acceptance of total nothingness, a room in which the sky falls into the grave. And, of course, the room is merely an example, albeit the architectural example, and, of course, that room might just as well be a classroom, a hall or a square, the main thing is that it relates to architecture as a discipline.

But is architecture able to transpose the reversal of the heavenly concept into earthly decay? Can architecture which, in the course of its history, has increasingly made planning its medium, which has sought to think ahead to a growing extent, which has sought ever more to be at the forefront, which has sought to keep ahead of life and so of death and was frustrated if life did not want to keep up, if planning led to neurosis instead of the hoped-for Valhalla – can that architecture open up to the words of that other French writer Céline (as recorded by Robert Poulet):
‘Death haunts me. I have seen it every second of my life and see it within myself and facing me. Everyone who speaks to me is a dead person in my eyes; a dead person who has been temporarily reprieved, as it were; someone who happens to be living for a moment….With amazement and irony, I discover that most people appear to have absolutely no inkling of the fact that they are dead, or as near as makes no difference. Dead from their birth onwards….All those politicians, all those scholars, all those people of letters who act and feel normal, as if they really were alive, as if they did not already have the worm of decay within them, from their very first cry – I find them ridiculous. And pathetic. Arrogant, blind people who walk at the very edge of an abyss.’

You might expect architecture to have queried in advance, beforehand, prior to going to work, the point of planning for an unpredictable life, the point of planning for a pointless life. But architecture continued to suppress (repeatedly) the question – to which the answer would, of course, have been ‘none’ and continued to busy itself obsessively with planning. Experiments with flexibility and multivalency are no exception: they are ‘planning squared’. Planning is a standardizing act of denial or, at best, of resistance, an act of non-acceptance. The elevation of planning to the panacea has put architecture into a defensive, pedantic position: the pointlessness of resistance against a pointless life has taken concrete form in architectural planning, pointless planning.

At a time when architecture is being overtaken, ignored and disparaged on all sides, it would seem to be time to look back rather than think ahead. Looking back, not in the simplistic sense of looking behind one to learn from history and, even less with the intention of starting some retro-mechanism or other, but the very opposite – contemplating, considering with absolutely no hope of learning, with absolutely no hope, no notion of a conclusion.

The ‘looking’ to which I refer is accepting, receiving, looking without being perverse, without perversion, without the projection of any desire whatsoever, without resistance, without opposition, without wishes, without hope, looking out from the niche of despair. An endless staring at nothing. Looking in the same way as weeping or, even better and quite literally: weeping ‘in reverse’, interiorizing the endless bouts of tears which we shed with no specific reason or cause. Looking at what you already know, looking at what we have always known: staring.
If architecture is to extend its resources to the ‘after the event’ position, the post-planning position and does not assume the war position (‘Architecture is War,’ Woods said) because war, now more than ever, is planning, but rather the post-war position, Loos’s distinction between architecture and the other arts (which have accepted an a posteriori position from the start) immediately loses its validity and a distinction can no longer be made between the social responsibilities of one (architecture) or the other (art).

If architecture relinquishes the plans and observes the world with its architectural gaze, with no hope of ever making that gaze productive, if architecture accepts the pathological condition, if architecture seeks out the mental acuity of the tuberculosis patient, if architecture recognizes the ‘Knowledge through the abyss’ (Henri Michaux), if architecture permits doubt, if architecture allows the blue television sky to splash in the mud, if architecture accepts the post-factum position, if architecture accepts the a posteriori position, it will at last be able, openly and unashamedly, to face up to economic interest, to economic compulsions, to power and standardization, to both sides of the bourgeois and the functional, to the short-sighted illusion of eternal life. It is a well-nigh virgin, unexplored territory which awaits architecture.