Gold’s heaviness and malleability

Assemblage 13, December, 1990, includes Ann Bergren’s “Gold’s Gym in Venice, Ca.” In this text, Bergren, Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California and architectural theory teacher at Southern California Institute of Architecture, submits one eccentric work of architecture to a feminist poststructuralist reading. “Gold’s Gym in Venice, Ca.” exercises richness and poorness, excess and lack, beauty and grotesqueness, drugs, myth, and religion. It actively challenges architecture’s practices of interpretation, definition, and ability to deal with difference. It is a complex, non-linear, and experimental text, highly articulated yet unambiguously heavy. Assemblage 15, August, 1991, includes Rob Miller’s “A Punchlist for ‘Gold’s Gym’: The Echoing of a Dumbbell.” In this text, Miller, practising architect and teacher at Clemson University and Georgia Institute of Technology, directly responds to “Gold’s Gym in Venice Ca.” He enacts a so-called “re:assemblage” of “Gold’s Gym in Venice, Ca.” In so doing, he responds to the challenges that text presents architecture and architects of the type that Miller self-ascribes. This paper will examine Miller’s article in relation to Bergren’s and Miller’s re:assemblage in relation to Bergren’s assemblage. It will interrogate Miller’s attempts to use conceptual apparatuses formed by Umberto Eco, most centrally the open work, to refigure Bergren’s text. As such, the paper will trace an attempt at discursive remoulding. It will critique one architectural history text’s attempt to control reading and writing of another text, and itself. In conclusion, the paper will reinforce the value of heavy, reflective, and reflexive texts for architectural discourse and disciplinary intellection.