A House for Josephine Baker

Author: Karen Burns Year: 2006 (reprinted in Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley; original publication 1997 in Postcolonial Space(s), eds. Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu & Wong Chong Thai, Princeton Architectural Press) Source type: chapter

Raw file: raw/chapters/burns-2006-a-house-for-josephine-baker.md

Summary

Karen Burns's essay (Intimus pp. 64–67) analyzes the critical reception of Adolf Loos's unbuilt Josephine Baker House (1928) as a case study in how race and gender organize architectural reading. Starting from Beatriz Colomina's observation that "writers have persisted in reading the architecture of the Baker House as attributes of Josephine Baker," Burns asks why the same critics insist the building's interior is unreadable from the exterior — a consensus repeated across thirty years of Loos scholarship (Münz & Künstler 1966, Gravagnuolo 1982, Groenendijk & Vollaard 1985, Tournikiotis 1994). Her answer: the "unreadable interior" is not a failure of criticism but its productive engine. The exterior's blankness and its "exotic and mysterious" black-and-white marble bands send the referent 'Africa' into an unfocusable "smudge," staging Baker — and the racialized female body generally — as an all-surface being without interiority. Drawing on Foucault and Butler's theory of corporeal inscription, and on Gayatri Spivak's criticism of the "epidermal schema," Burns argues that the Baker readings work within a surface/depth binary in which Baker is construed as lacking interior — "Without an interior, she has no possibility for an internal psychic space and no fantasized locale for the identity of self." The essay closes with a self-critique of postcolonial-feminist reading itself: retrieving Baker "as an exemplum of alterity is to keep pinning her back against the wall, to that place already assigned to her by criticism," and the readings of the internal swimming pool are revealed as the climax of a suspense-structure — "a place where criticism finds and flexes its own identity." The editors' headnote: Burns is "careful to avoid repeating colonialist operations," noting that "costume, skin and interior space are all described as surfaces supporting a point of difference and otherness."

Key Claims

A thirty-year critical consensus declares the Baker House's interior unreadable from its exterior: "the exterior says nothing about the interior" (Gravagnuolo); the "vast blind surfaces" created "an exotic and mysterious image, vaguely evocative of African architecture, while providing no clues as to the interior" (Tournikiotis).
The same critical tradition has persistently read the house's architecture as attributes of Josephine Baker (via Colomina's "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism") — a double operation: the building veils criticism's vision by sending "the referent 'Africa' into a hazy and apparently unfocusable, imprecise reading (a smudge)" while presenting "a blankness, rather than a transparent path for criticism's line of sight."
Vision in criticism "is often associated with mastery and assumed (but ultimately failed) distance" (via Pollock/Irigaray: "More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters"); the Baker House "confronts (or is read as confronting) critics, again and again, with their own fallibility," eluding "the project of 'interpretation' that nominally guides architectural criticism."
The facade's failure of transparency is always re-decipherable as authorial origin: "the author decided to reverse the tried-and-true terms of criticism (exterior must reveal interior) and build a blank or blind wall" — criticism itself "opens again, and closes, the problem of reference."
Because architectural writing attributed Baker's features to the house, critics may be "narrating a story about Baker's own interior" — the body and the house are conflated.
Foucault's analysis erases the social work of inscription in the inner/outer binary: "The interior is a privileged trope for the soul," the locale of the body's sovereign will; Butler extends this — "acts, gestures, and desire produce the semblance of an internal core or substance on the surface of the body."
Burns's critical addition: "Neither Foucault nor Butler in the texts I am citing address the question of corporeal inscription as cultural difference, ethnicity, and race" — the raced body is the theory's missing case.
Spivak's criticism of the epidermal schema: against "the ridiculously simple and singular nature of the epidermal schema's insistence on skin as the visible sign of difference" — there is "no natural, essential connection between skin and racial difference"; skin is one organ "within a multiple network of corporeal organs, cells, and tissues," and the epidermal focus "conveniently ignores all the other work carried out by inscription on bodies."
The domestic interior functions as psychic allegory: "While film and literary genres have rendered the domestic interior as an allegory of the psychic lives of its inhabitants, the architectural interior may be projected as a topography of the individual's own interior life," with inhabitants' "sexual and psychic identities… worked by and within the spatial settings of the interior and its ritualized, sexual dramas."
Within the conventional surface/depth binary, Baker's house and body are construed as lacking: "Without an interior, she has no possibility for an internal psychic space and no fantasized locale for the identity of self. This lack of interiority, or deferral, renders her not only as different from other inhabitants, but as someone whose interior is completely unknowable."
The house's unbuilt status compounds the deferral: "All that remains is a model and plans whose interiors we are unable to inhabit. Within architecture, then, Baker's interiority is in one sense never realized; it is eternally deferred" (reading suggested by Rose Lucas).
The strategy of "forever pointing out exclusion and failure… leads to a dead end" — it assumes the subject as a problem for criticism without explaining "how the logic of criticism works in the Baker House commentaries: what tasks it performs, what actions it enables."
The unreadable interior has a narrative function: "To produce the interior as a secretive place, one whose secrets cannot be guessed, at this stage of the story, creates narrative suspense" — the blocked dream of visibility "is recovered in the readings of the internal swimming pool, a place where criticism finds and flexes its own identity."
The editors' framing: Burns "raises questions about the presence of race and gender in architectural design and how they are disclosed through criticism that attempts to 'read' architecture," examining "the conflation of Baker's body and house in writings about the house."

Connections

Concepts: interiority · epidermal-schema · corporeal-inscription · primitivism · domestic-interior · separate-spheres · inside-outside-dialectic · embodiment · psychoanalysis · interpretation · chromophobia · postcolonial-identity · gender-and-the-interior Authors: Karen Burns · Adolf Loos (the Baker commission's architect, via the historiography) · Taylor & Preston (editors) · Beatriz Colomina ("The Split Wall" is the essay's pivot) · Michel Foucault (inscription; Discipline and Punish) Debates: ornament-vs-purity (the banded surface as race-coded ornament) · power-and-space (the gaze as critical power; the assignment of otherness) Related source notes: Deyong — A history of style and the modern interior (the Baker house in Loos's interior/exterior schism, via Anne Anlin Cheng's Second Skin) · Batchelor — Chromophobia (the 'primitive' as colour's foreign body) · Taylor & Preston — Proximities (the gendered conflation of women, dress and interior) · Braham — A Wall of Books (the gendered palette convention) · Colomina — War on Architecture: E.1027 (gendered reading of a canonical interior)

Direct Quotes

"The interior cannot be guessed at by looking at the outside." (Münz & Künstler, quoted p. 64)

"In line with Loos's way of thinking, the exterior says nothing about the interior." (Gravagnuolo, quoted p. 64)

"The compactness of the volume, the flat roof, the small, low openings, the vast blind surfaces and the bands of black and white marble created an exotic and mysterious image, vaguely evocative of African architecture, while providing no clues as to the interior." (Tournikiotis, quoted p. 64)

"If, as Beatriz Colomina has argued, writers have persisted in reading the architecture of the Baker House as attributes of Josephine Baker, how might one understand these same writers' insistence that from the exterior the building's interior is unreadable, impenetrable by criticism?" (p. 64)

"the building's exterior veils the vision of the critic by sending the referent 'Africa' into a hazy and apparently unfocusable, imprecise reading (a smudge), and, on the other, the exterior presents a blankness, rather than a transparent path for criticism's line of sight. Vision fails criticism as insight." (p. 65)

"Vision is often associated with mastery and assumed (but ultimately failed) distance." (p. 65)

"The Baker House seems to be a project that confronts (or is read as confronting) critics, again and again, with their own fallibility." (p. 65)

"as Loos's biographers always strive to remind the reader, the failure of a facade's transparency is ultimately decipherable as authorial origin: the author decided to reverse the tried-and-true terms of criticism (exterior must reveal interior) and build a blank or blind wall." (p. 65)

"Is it that Baker's house and body possess an unreadable interior, or is it that they provide a different model of the body, one that can be described as all surface, one that radically confounds the surface/depth binary." (p. 65)

"The interior is a privileged trope for the soul. Occupying the body's internal cavities, the soul is the interior space intrinsic to the substance of a particular body, the locale of that body's sovereign will." (p. 65, on Foucault)

"acts, gestures, and desire produce the semblance of an internal core or substance on the surface of the body." (p. 65, on Butler)

"Neither Foucault nor Butler in the texts I am citing address the question of corporeal inscription as cultural difference, ethnicity, and race." (pp. 65–66)

"Spivak argues against the ridiculously simple and singular nature of the epidermal schema's insistence on skin as the visible sign of difference." (p. 66)

"There is no natural, essential connection between skin and racial difference. But the intensity of focus on the epidermal schema conveniently ignores all the other work carried out by inscription on bodies." (p. 66)

"While film and literary genres have rendered the domestic interior as an allegory of the psychic lives of its inhabitants, the architectural interior may be projected as a topography of the individual's own interior life." (p. 66)

"Without an interior, she has no possibility for an internal psychic space and no fantasized locale for the identity of self. This lack of interiority, or deferral, renders her not only as different from other inhabitants, but as someone whose interior is completely unknowable." (p. 66)

"Ironically the Josephine Baker House was never built. All that remains is a model and plans whose interiors we are unable to inhabit. Within architecture, then, Baker's interiority is in one sense never realized; it is eternally deferred." (p. 66)

"To keep retrieving Baker as an exemplum of alterity is to keep pinning her back against the wall, to that place already assigned to her by criticism." (p. 66)

"To produce the interior as a secretive place, one whose secrets cannot be guessed, at this stage of the story, creates narrative suspense. This is a function of critical writing. It sets the stage for the final drama of the interior." (p. 67)

"If the critic's dream of unimpeded visibility is blocked by the apparently mute surfaces of this place, it is recovered in the readings of the internal swimming pool, a place where criticism finds and flexes its own identity." (p. 67)

Open Questions

Burns shows the Baker readings pinning Baker to alterity — but can architectural criticism ever read a raced female subject without the surface/depth binary, or must the discipline's interpretive apparatus itself be rebuilt?
The swimming pool: Burns names it "a place where criticism finds and flexes its own identity" — is every canonical interior reading (Loos's Raumplan, the undercover voyeurism Colomina finds at E.1027) secretly a scopophilic climax-structure?
What would a criticism look like that followed Spivak (via Burns) in dissolving the epidermal schema — reading inscription across the "multiple network of corporeal organs, cells, and tissues" rather than fixing difference at the skin?
Butler's Bodies That Matter (1993, note 7) does address "ethnicized, raced corporeality" — does that book answer Burns's 1997 objection, or relocate it?
The essay ends at the suspense-structure's disclosure. What is the positive program for reading interiors that are "all surface" — and does the all-surface body model (Foucault/Butler/Kirby) offer interior design a non-depth model of its own object?