Self-Fashioning
Self-Fashioning
Definition
Self-fashioning, in this wiki's architectural register, names the designed self-presentation of an architect through their own dwelling and its museal afterlife: the architect's home built (or furnished, or curated) as the evidence of the architect's "program for living," and thereafter displayed as the warrant of the public persona. Georgina Downey's formulation: houses of architectural significance built by architects for themselves and "later converted to museums… have not only helped cement the legacy of the architect in question, but have also provided architecture, design, and art history students an opportunity for access to 'hands-on' sites of learning"; the visit is premised on the hope "to encounter and to understand their conceptual 'program for living' by walking through the house" (Postiglione). The concept carries a constitutive instability: the museal interior is meant to authenticate the public persona — Postiglione's "poetic manifestos to the creative spirit of the architect" — yet it is precisely the preserved traces of habitation that "manage to in some way shock, overturn, or subvert the main discourse being presented": Yvonne Jeanneret's pillow "approximately twelve inches from the curtained off toilet area" undoes the master's rationality; the wall-text note that the sculptor Matamala "often 'slept in the house'" opens "a radical new reading of Gaudi's life." The self-fashioning instrument thus furnishes the evidence that refashions its subject — the trace as "a remnant… of and a testimony to both a living past and a set of irreducible and ineliminable corporeal traces" (Grosz).
Key Thinkers
- Georgina Downey — the concept's wiki-theorist: the architect's house museum as persona-machine and as the site where "traces of habitation have… to play in shifting perceptions and the development of new discourses on their work and lives" (2018).
- Gennaro Postiglione — the type's cataloguer and theorist: the architect's home as "work" and "biographical testimony," the "more sturdy relation between occupant and dwelling," the "conceptual 'program for living'," the "poetic manifestos" preservation-claim (The Architect's Home, Taschen 2013; not yet paged — see log).
- Walter Benjamin — the precondition: the modern conception that "the domestic interior is both an extension and a representation of the modern individual" (via Downey) — the self-fashioning interior as the modern subject's medium.
- Beatriz Colomina — the scholarly motor of refashioning: "Battle Lines: E.1027" (1996) as the paradigm case of scholarship remaking a master's persona through his traces (via Downey).
Related Concepts
- House Museum — the concept's institutional form: the architect's house museum as the subcategory where self-fashioning is musealized.
- Interior as Biography — the doctrine the self-fashioning home weaponizes: the room reads its occupant "whether she likes it or not" — for the architect, by design.
- Domestic Interior — the medium: the interior as "extension and representation of the modern individual," the fashioning substrate.
- Trace — the self-fashioning interior's remainder: the corporeal traces that both authenticate and subvert the persona.
- House-Body Equation — the generalized conflation the self-fashioning home performs on the architect (not only the gendered woman-house version): the dwelling presented as the person.
- Site of Memory — the museal afterlife that converts self-fashioning into communal memory.
- Masculinity — the persona under refashioning: the "masters of modernism" whose stories "are no longer complete without reference to their companions, intimates, lovers, and supporters."
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
-
To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the concept's source: the fifteen-architect canon whose homes "helped cement the legacy of the architect in question"; Postiglione's two lines of interest ("works, and… biographical testimony," pp. 9, 11) and the "program for living" visit-premise; the subversion mechanism — relations between dwelling and occupant "that manage to in some way shock, overturn, or subvert the main discourse being presented" (Yvonne's pillow anecdote as "an effect of postfeminist inquiry"; the Matamala wall text as "a radical new reading of Gaudi's life"); the demotion of Le Corbusier from "god-like"; the closing claim that Keeble's optics plus Aynsley's "use, life, and afterlife" plus "the trace that is signed as authentic or not" permit "new and diverse readings of these architects' house museums."
-
War on Architecture: E.1027 (Colomina 1993) — the refashioning case-study behind Downey's Cabanon reading: the murals as persona-shattering trace; Gray's authorship restored against the master's signature.
-
Decorating Culture (Tang 1998/2006) — the concept's consumer register, extending it beyond the architect-museum frame: Heping's "significant metamorphosis in the process of assiduous self-fashioning" (p. 329) — physique (diseases gone, "radiating a robust glow"), attire (generic black shoes → "Italian-made crocodile skin shoes," costly designer wear), vehicles (Nanfang → Royal Honda with "twin tailpipes," ridden past all friends) — self-fashioning as consumer practice, the self assembled from brand progressions and displayed acquisitions rather than from a program for living; the wave-shaped variant of the persona-machine, furnished by Dandan's design and appraised in hotel terms ("This feels just like staying in a four-star hotel," p. 330) (see conspicuous-consumption, sign-value, interiorisation).
Open Questions
- Is the architect's self-fashioning home a candid document (Postiglione's "real, actual intention prevailing in the organization of the daily living space") or already a performance — a house designed for visitors that were always expected (the display-home origin of Casa Gaudí suggests the latter)?
- Downey's examples of subversion are all intimate (a pillow's distance, a friend's sleepovers). Is self-fashioning undone only by the domestic-trivial — and if so, is the persona's authority always domestic in origin?
- If "stories about 'masters' of modernism are no longer complete without reference to their companions, intimates, lovers, and supporters" (Downey), is self-fashioning essentially single-authored — and is the companioned interior (Yvonne's platform, Gray's E.1027) the refashioned genre?
- The wiki's interior-as-biography sources make legibility involuntary for women; the architect's house museum makes it voluntary and institutional. Does the architect's self-fashioning house confirm the gendered asymmetry (men's rooms read as works, women's rooms as character), or reverse it — the master's domestic trace undoing his monument?
