Because these and related works—Loophole (1992), Overexposed (1994– 2003), and Facsimile (2003)—effectuate a displacement of architectural embodiment into the space outside the building, we might think that they make common cause with the formalist techniques designed to disembody the architectural sign. Yet, to confine our analysis to such an understanding would be to overlook the crucial role Diller + Scofidio increasingly come to place on spectator-participant embodiment as the “origin” of architecture.
Nowhere is this emphasis on embodied response more apparent than in their critical negotiations with the modernist ideology of transparency. In the unrealized project Slow House (1991), Diller + Scofidio juxtapose “natural" and technically mediated visual frames in order to foreground not only the inherent doubling of contemporary visual perception but also, and perhaps more importantly, the bidirectionality of the gaze, the fact that the preeminent technology of modernist architecture, glass, has opened the path to our massively surveillant society. Designed as a vacation home in Long Island, Slow House is a passage to a view: presenting a façade entirely occupied by a 4-ft-wide by 18-ft-high front door, the house widens as it curves around to the left, culminating 100 ft from the doorway in a large picture window that frames the ocean view (see Figure 4.12). By subordinating all of its elements to this framing function, the Slow House is a "house-frame," a piece of architecture that exposes the contemporary framing function of architecture in its barest imaginable form.
Yet, what results is hardly a celebration of architecture's primitiveness in relation to electronic and digital media; rather, as Diller + Scofidio point out, Slow House foregrounds architecture's conventionality, the inherent cultural contextedness of its mediation of vision. "Having thoroughly naturalized and internalized the normally invisible' visual codes of perspective and landscape depiction, we fail to recognize that the picture window is as much a cultural construct as the televisual image."24 Indeed, if architecture can lay claim to a privileged role as the art of the frame, that is precisely because it is more technically advanced than television. “As advanced technology strives to dematerialize its hardware, leaving only its effects, is not the picture window, in fact, a more advanced technology than the television set, in that its socially and economically driven mechanisms are virtually invisible, leaving only a simple frame?"25
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