Douglas Darden and the Allegory of the Adversary

American architect Douglas Darden identifies the diptych of theory and design as an antagonistic pair. Through design practice, he identifies the rival as a constructive loss to a given idea of architecture by favoring another, understood as a "critical mediation on finitude and failure" (Darden, 1985). This controversy underscores an intrinsic theme of architecture, namely the relationship between construction and destruction, between positive and negative. Every act of architecture becomes a dialogue between these fundamental pairs, where the potential of architecture lies in the "recognition of this reciprocal condition" (Darden, 1989) and the centuries-old ability of architectural canons to be overturned. The contribution aims to investigate, in Darden's figure and work, the theme of the adversary as an attitude for a re-signification of architecture through the investigation of what lies behind, what is hidden, toward that limit that the architect identifies in architecture itself.