Bad Spaces

Z. Bart Thornton Bad Spaces The starting point ofarchitecture is dislocation—the dislocation ofthe universe that surrounds the architect. —Bernard Tschumi I Defective and doomed, the crudely glued balsa house fissured in the heat while I wrestled with a bad case of ambivalence. As an architecture teaching assistant, paid to celebrate geometry, harmony, and other happy things, I knew I should give my student an F. But as a deconstructive theorist, a readerofDerrida, I loved thehouse's shabby jags. On university letterhead, I scribbled myevaluation: Every slanted room offers a stunning vision ofhell. I knew that my supervisor, Professor X, would detest my hyperbolizing. As it turned out, so did my student, who saw his grade and promptly smashed the house with his Doc Martens. I was pissed. I tried to explain that although his vision fell outside the parameters of Architecture, as dictated by its fascistic establishment (represented at this moment, unhappily, by me), the house was wonderfully, savagely now. He could not have cared less. Kicking wildly, he scattered the shards across the courtyard, toward Leticia, whose name I did not yet know. In dark glasses and fraying cut-offs, sitting cross-legged on a Navajo blanket, she was reading Baudrillard with her customary three highlighters (pink, green, yellow). Thinking I was a different sort of architecture student, she approached me with a photograph of her crumbling Hyde Park house. My foundation is cracking, she said. Magic words. I told her I was trained to revel in flaws. She beamed all the way to the university pub: we drank Herradura shots until we retreated to her canopied bed, where, splintered windows propped open by hardback Foucaults, we were ruffled by the kind of spring breeze that blows only when you're skipping school. Since the Day of the Balsa House, an anniversary we celebrate each spring, Leticia has become a licensed literary theorist (PhD last spring, PMLA article last fall). I remain what I was: an architect who will never practice, a graduate student who will never finish his dissertation . I have not written a word since last November 30, when Mohammed spiraled through the Austin sky, trailed by a squadron of poorly folded paper airplanes. Thornton 23 A splendid graduate student, Mohammed spoke with his hands, wore colored t-shirts, knew all the right words. Queer theory was booming and Mohammed, a lapsed heterosexual, believed that his transgressive scholarship would catapult him to an assistant professorship at Harvard or Berkeley. Instead, on a breezy night, he leapt to his death from the roof ofSpradlin Hall, the English building, just one week after hosting a well-attended Armistead Maupin party. Tales of the City had just been released on video. Having grown up in San Francisco, I felt compelled to sit with Leticia's friends and purr at the pretty city, but I did so with cotton stuffed in my ears to protect me from the sappy soundtrack, which I found too groovy by far. In bellbottoms and sequined visors, we drank boxed wine and smoked Humboldt pot and repeatedly toasted Mohammed, the department's top placement prospect. In Social Text, a journal known for its radical politics and its bland covers, an anonymous commentator called Mohammed's death "a meticulously plotted response to an abysmal job market." It was Leticia's idea. She and her colleagues voted last October to begin a new departmental tradition: suicide. After a week offurtive speeches (the administration does not officially sanction death), a vote is taken and, on Halloween night, a winner is announced. (Mohammed won what Leticia calls a bloody campaign against Michael, a queer theorist with lesser credentials.) If the winner does not receive any interviews for the MLA convention, where the hiring game begins, a coterie climbs Spradlin on the last day of November for an evening of Stargazer lilies and softjazz. The winner recites some poetry or prose while the invitees make paper airplanes out of the winner's job rejection letters. As the planes fly into the night, the winner races them down. II I'm thinking aboutMohammed, a devote ofbock beer, as a liquor store lackey taps a keg of Shiner. It's Halloween, and...