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The Journal of Architecture

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Drawing the female nude

Penelope Haralambidou

To cite this article: Penelope Haralambidou (2009) Drawing the female nude, The Journal of
Architecture, 14:3, 339-359, DOI: 10.1080/13602360903027863

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Drawing the female nude

Penelope Haralambidou The Bartlett School of Architecture, University
College London, UK

Introduction

Taking the theme of this special edition quite

literally, I am going to look at a painting and a build-

ing, which share as a common trait the drawing of a

female nude: Euan Uglow’s Nude, from Twelve

Regular Vertical Positions from the Eye, 1967 and

Adolf Loos’s design of a house for the performer

Josephine Baker, 1928. In the painting the nude is

meticulously drawn as a figure, but absent as an

erotic object, whereas in the building the figuratively

absent nude is drawn forth in the imagination

through a reading of the erotically charged architec-

tural design. However, by bringing the two works

together, it is not the aim of the essay to force a

link between them. Apart from deriving from

distinct practices, they clearly belong to different

historical and cultural backgrounds. Rather, their

dialectical presentation will help focus on a discus-

sion about drawing spaces and bodies, which

pertains to the two works analysed here — but

also to painting and building in general.

In 1972, one of the most extraordinary paintings

by Euan Uglow, Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical

Positions from the Eye, 1967, won the prestigious

John Moores prize with mixed critical response.

The model is Daphne Todd, a portrait painter and

ex-President of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters,

who at the time of the sittings was a student at the

Slade. The painting shows a female nude figure in a

classical pose, with her arms behind her back and

her left leg forward, standing in front of a wall

(Fig. 1). The wall is divided into twelve segments

by dark coloured horizontal bands and the body is

strangely elongated and separated by dagger-

shaped bands of lighter colour. Uglow’s aim was

to represent the female body devoid of the perspec-

tival distortions that the single fixed viewing point

creates. To overcome these distortions he devised

a way of sliding up the model’s body and scanning

it in sections from twelve vertical positions.

According to Richard Kendall the picture brings

to the forefront Uglow’s merging of mathematics

and geometry with the representation of the female

nude ‘in an unforgettable and — for many — discon-

certing fashion’.1

Mieke Bal in Looking In: The Art of Viewing

suggests that the main viewing tradition in

Western culture ‘has the female nude as its favoured

subject, [and] voyeurism as its dominant semiotic

mode’.2 Although most of Uglow’s other nude paint-

ings could be seen to fit comfortably within a voyeur-

istic viewing tradition, Nude, from Twelve Regular

Vertical Positions is surprisingly un-erotic. The

desire that fuels its construction is a desire to see, a

desire accurately to record the ideal female form.

‘Visually engrossing and technically spectacular’ for

some, or ‘over-cerebral’ and even ‘masochistic’,

for others, the resulting image turns the depiction

of flesh into a geometric design.3 The incisions of

the analytic gaze and coded rendering of depth

make Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions

a geometric construction, akin to the conventions

of architectural drawing, which is rarely connected

with eroticism.

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# 2009 The Journal of Architecture 1360-2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360903027863



One of these rare occasions, when architectural

drawing fits comfortably within a voyeuristic

viewing tradition with the female nude as its favoured

subject, is an unrealised design for a house in Paris by

the Viennese architect Adolf Loos. Loos designed

the house in 1928 for the performer Josephine

Baker, famous for her erotic dancing and for appear-

ing practically naked on stage (Fig. 2). Although there

is little evidence of how and when Loos met Baker,

340

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 1. Euan Uglow,

Nude from Twelve

Regular Vertical

Positions from the Eye,

1967. (University of

Liverpool Art Gallery

and Collections.)

Figure 2. Josephine

Baker, 1927. (Postcard,

private collection.)



and even of whether Baker was aware of the design’s

existence, the architect considered it one of his best.4

Loos’s design depicts an extravagant domestic

interior, full of voyeuristic contraptions that long for

the appearance of Baker’s nude figure. Farès

el-Dahdah in his ‘The Josephine Baker House: For

Loos’s Pleasure’ has seen the Baker House as a

‘bachelor machine’ and a love letter that was never

sent. This essay argues that rather than a love letter,

as el-Dahdah suggests, the design for the Baker

House can be compared to a drawing of a female

nude. Similar to the Renaissance practitioners’ con-

struction of pictorial architectures in perspective

where bodies are framed, Loos draws this imaginary

architectural structure to hold the image of Baker.

Lynda Nead in The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity

and Sexuality claims that the female nude ‘symbolises

the transformation of the base matter of nature into

the elevated forms of culture and the spirit’.5 Nead

discusses the female nude in terms of ‘containment’

aimed to define femininity and female sexuality: ‘out-

lines, margins and frames — procedures and forms

that regulate both the ways in which the female

body is shown and the proper conduct of the pros-

pective viewer’.6 As we will see, Loos’s design clearly

aims to contain the exotic femininity of Baker in a

theatrical domesticity for his voyeuristic pleasure,

and Uglow’s painting dictates a way of looking at

the female body beyond perspective distortion.

Additionally, in response to Nead’s central argu-

ment of the role of the female nude as containment

of femininity, the main voice of this essay will be

‘interrupted’ by short fragments of another

account.7 This secondary voice — by a female

architect posing for a nude painting — will attempt

to present the experience of drawing the nude

from the point of view of the model. Furthermore,

this account puts forward the idea that drawing —

before its traditional definitions in art and architec-

ture, and even before any physical act or trace — is

a way of looking and a desire to understand and

measure the fleeting nature of visual space.

The Baker House

The house that Loos designed for Baker, when he

was fifty eight and she was twenty two, was to be

sited in Paris, where she had moved three years

earlier, in 1925, to join La Revue Nègre at the

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. According to el-

Dahdah the house may have been intended to

replace two adjacent houses she owned on Avenue

Bugeaud.8 Loos’s design consists of four floor plans,

two sections and a detailed model, currently held

in the Loos Archive, at the Albertina Museum in

Vienna (Fig. 3). It describes a corner building

composed by simple geometric volumes. The plain

white volume of the ground floor follows the

outline of the site, while the top floors are contained

within a large parallelepiped and a tall cylindrical

tower above the main entrance, both wrapped in a

dramatic, striped, black and white skin.

The surviving drawings of the Baker House are not

spectacular as images.9 They are typical examples of

simple architectural plans and sections, which do

not always have an immediate visual impact,

especially for an audience not trained in architectural

design. Loos himself insisted that ‘a true building

makes no impression as a picture, reduced to two

dimensions’.10 Embedded in the manner in which

architectural drawings communicate, is a form of

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reading, a journey guided by the lines on the paper.

This imaginary journey and a comparative evaluation

of both plans and sections slowly unfold the rep-

resented spaces in the mind. Similar to a narrative

hidden in the unread words on a page, the drawings’

lines can be silent; the meaning and essence of the

space does not become apparent until the story of

the building has been interpreted into a three-

dimensional imagined experience. Furthermore, in

architectural drawing the human body is absent. The

drawing weaves a narrative of occupation around an

imagined inhabitant but the figure is hardly ever there.

342

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 3. Adolf Loos,

architectural plans and

sections of the Baker

House, Paris, 1927.

(Albertina, Vienna.)



The Baker House project, however, only exists

through a series of drawings. Although never built

it has an enduring allure and has inspired and influ-

enced many architects, architectural theorists and

students, not as a space that can be visited and

photographed, but as a spectre created in the

mind through a careful reading of the architectural

drawings. It is perhaps the lack of any subsequent

development of the scheme, of fleshing it out in

the material construction of a building, that frees

its existence as a narrative structure inviting a spon-

taneous imaginary occupation and the possibility of

alternative interpretations.

By reading Loos’s drawings for the Baker House

and following a journey within the space they

describe, a spectacular setting full of surprises is

revealed. A large theatrical staircase greets the

visitor and marks the start of the public realm of

the house. It leads to the grand salon on the first

floor, where a second dramatic semi-circular stair-

case connects to the second floor, where the

dining room is found. Beyond this main public

journey an ingenious weaving of spaces of different

sizes and heights creates secret pockets and

passages: spaces for services, two master bedrooms,

but also a cylindrical café and a large internal top-lit

swimming pool surrounded by a dark corridor.

Although Baker never mentions the project in her

memoirs, apparently Loos considered it one of his

favourite designs. But what made this design so

special for Loos? Perhaps in this ‘theoretical’

project he was uninhibited in exploring the full

potential of a complex internal spatial arrangement,

often known as the Raumplan. The term Raumplan

— the resolution of the plan in space — was intro-

duced by Heinrich Kulka to describe Loos’s ‘new

and more elaborate conception of space’ (Fig. 4).11

Loos’s invention was an ingenious spatial distribution

of rooms that would vary in height, as well as size.

Loos’s use of the Raumplan derived from treating

the section of the building in a way analogous to

how another architect might treat a plan, leading

to a greater complexity and ‘quantity of habitable

space’. Efficiency and economy, more space within

the same volume, seems to be the main value of

Loos’s spatial organisation of the section, according

to Kulka. However, as we will see, in the extravagant

and scopophilic allocation of spaces in the Baker

House, it is clear that the primary gain of the Raum-

plan is not economy, but pleasure.

It is a sunny morning and I am lying in the bath.

Patterns of light, from the window immediately

above the bath, merge with the warped shapes of

my legs and feet. The image of the rest of the

room, mirrored in the flat surface of the water, is

deep. I enter it visually and flicker my focus

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Figure 4. Adolf Loos,

model of the Dice

House showing internal

distribution of spaces,

1928 – 29. (Albertina,

Vienna.)



between two illusions: the window reflected and my

feet refracted.

Nude, from Twelve Regular Vertical Positions

from the Eye

According to Martin Golding, Uglow’s work ‘takes

the most sensual and immediately interesting

object, the human body, and puts it out of reach

of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational

concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical

order, and makes it a delight to the senses’.12 What

works is ‘right’ not ‘like’, Uglow insisted.13 Correct-

ness is not a matter of representing the appearance

faithfully but of the whole image becoming harmo-

nious and readable. So he arranges his poses to

convey the image he has in mind. A battle between

appearances and idea finds an extreme in Summer

Picture, 1972 and is manifest in both the nude

figure and the table on which she sat (figs 5, 6).

Uglow had to wait 45 minutes in every hour for the

model to relax her back into the ‘unnatural’ pose,

matching his idea of the perfect curve of her back.

Furthermore, he changed the shape of the table,

the simple frame staging her pose, because he

found the observed perspective too ‘violent’.14

His ‘correction’ of the physical form of the table

makes it appear closer to the ideal, the ‘right’ one.

The tactile idea of the solid shape of the table, as a rec-

tangle with parallel sides, is more resilient than the tra-

pezoid that foreshortening renders visually. The

natural binocular perception of the table from the pos-

ition of the painter would also be less violent. There-

fore, Uglow physically cut the table into an inverted

trapezoid that would render a straighter appearance

from his observing position, to fit into the mould of

the right image: the perceptual residue of the table

in the mind, which is both visual and tactile. Uglow’s

acute sense of the ideal as expressed through geome-

try, proportion and harmony negotiates an excessive

scrutiny of perception.

According to Golding, Uglow’s most single-minded

investigation is the Nude, from Twelve Regular Pos-

itions from the Eye. Making this painting involved

building an apparatus, a throne-like structure of

variable height which allowed Uglow to view the

model from twelve different levels (Fig. 7):

344

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 5. Euan Uglow,

Summer Picture, 1971 –

72. (Private collection.)

Figure 6. Euan Uglow,

Still Life with Model

Marks, 1971 – 72.

(Uglow estate.) (Drawn

by the Author: the

white lines linking the

edges of the table with

the vanishing point

reveal its inverted

trapezoid shape.)



My painting of a girl standing against a wall was

painted in an effort to cancel the distortion (that

of an elongated lemon) which had occurred in a

previous painting. . . To overcome this distortion,

I painted from twelve equal vertical positions of

the eye and at a constant distance from the flat

vertical wall surface. I also wanted to explain the

three dimensional relationship between the wall

the girl and my eye as I moved from one regular

position to another. These relationships I tried to

interpret onto the flat surface of the painting. In

trying to do this, a completely different form of

distortion took place — not unlike some of the

interpretations of the globe we see in an atlas.15

Uglow’s representation of the nude departs from

the normal visual perception of it: he splits the

view into twelve segments which correspond to

his changing position on a vertical axis. By ‘dissect-

ing’ vision, the resulting painting, a two-dimensional

image, becomes a composite drawing offering

precise geometric information about the spatiality

of the nude. Uglow asserted that one should be

able to work out the form just by studying the

dagger-shaped triangles that separate the painted

areas. Indeed, these triangular shapes describe

depth and accurately render the three-dimensional

volume of the nude in two dimensions, similar to

the effect of combining the information of plan

and section in architectural drawing.

Uglow’s gaze measures the body as the vertical

movement of his single eye, on the relocating

contraption, scans its form. The picture describes

the contours of the figure, but also the painter’s pres-

ence as a body looking from regulated positions in

space like a surveying tool. The machine reduces the

distortions of one-point perspective by placing the

eye nearer to each segment and attempts to grasp

the fleeting purity of a body as it exists theoretically,

without these distortions. Consequently, the view is

closer to a tactile than a visual evaluation. His depic-

tion pins down the nude like a captured butterfly,

but bestows on her the coded blossoming of volume.

The artist explained that the distance of the projec-

tion of the body from the back plane is expressed by

the ochre bands, the wider the band the further the

345

The Journal

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Volume 14

Number 3

Figure 7. Uglow on his

repositioning device

surveying the model for

Nude from Twelve

Regular Vertical

Positions from the Eye,

1967. (Uglow archive.)



body projects at that point. Consequently, the dagger-

shaped bands are the gaps resulting from the

repositioning of the gaze and rendering the image

on a flat surface. The body appears severed by the

observing eye in a similar way to that in which archi-

tectural drawing conventions sever the body of the

imagined architectural building. According to Golding:

[Although] the whole enterprise might be

described as an experiment in a rigidly literal mon-

ocular vision, the upshot is in effect a conceit,

which gives the model a majestic presence which

reverberates. The arrow-headed interventions —

the gaps occasioned by the apparatus — become

her properties; armed with which she remains

separate and whole, unaffected by the lesions

the analytic vision opens. The scrutiny of that

analytic eye, with its deliberate separation of the

familiar whole into unfamiliar parts, creates an

image which is barbarically strange. . . .16

I close one eye. Then I open it again, and close the

other. I observe the lines of the tiles shifting with a

jolt behind the two taps. Both eyes open again cast

the single view. Apart from a lime- scale mark on

the rim of the left, and a white spot of paint on the

top of the right, the images of the two taps are iden-

tical. Hot water on the right, cold on the left. I decide

to mix them: focus on the image of the right tap with

the left eye, and the image of the left tap with the

right eye. A monstrous single tap appears devoid of

acceptable perspective distortion. I close both eyes

and watch the impossible image fade.

Bachelor machine

Susan R. Henderson discusses the importance of

‘bachelor culture’ in Loos’s work, which emerged

as a reaction to the more fluid gendered identities

embedded in Jugendstil.17 According to Henderson

‘Loos maintained that strict gender distinctions were

basic to the ordered logic of modern society, and he

decried the ambiguous gender roles that had

invaded art and culture.’18 The two orders of the

feminine and masculine are clearly defined in the

design of the flat he shared with his first wife Lina.

The outer room, the public realm occupied by

Loos, is furnished in an architectural language

reflecting the scarce ‘medieval and Germanic

notions of comfort’, with solid surfaces and sharp

edges formed by heavy beams, and a brick fire-

place.19 Conversely in his wife’s bedroom, which

he called Lina’s Room, the feminine prevails in the

form of soft covers, flowing silk curtains for the

walls and a massive stretch of angora sheepskin

rugs that hide the edge of the bed and cover the

whole of the floor creating a sea of sensuous

furriness (Fig. 8).

Loos maintained that woman belonged solely

to the private realm; the family house, therefore,

346

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 8. Bedroom of

Loos’s wife, Lina, Loos

flat, 1903. (Albertina,

Vienna.)



was the perfect frame of femininity.20 The Baker

House, however, is far from familial. Farès el-

Dahdah uses Marcel Duchamp’s term ‘bachelor

machine’ to describe an architecture of pleasure

connoting a kind of trap that orchestrates reversible

roles akin to those played in seduction.21 According

to el-Dahda the house is:

an epistolary attempt to detail her image in

‘various points’ through a kind of writing that

stretches a third skin between the body of the

architect and that of the dancer. The house is an

apparatus (like the note) through which one can

somehow rub against, or trap, a dancer’s exoti-

cised body. It is a building designed as a tactile

enterprise, as the imaginary ‘prose’ of an

amorous conquest in between whose lines (in

between the stripes of its façades and the distri-

bution of its rooms) one is to decode a longing

to signify desire.22

Hidden in the heart of the building is a volume

of water, a piscine (swimming pool). The presence

of this feature in the design implies a sense of

fantasy. If not unfeasible, the construction of a

container able to support such a large, suspended

volume of water would be at least challenging,

especially in a relatively moderate residential

project, such as this. The swimming pool occupies

the space of a normal room, but is full of water

and therefore, uninhabitable. This fantastical dimen-

sion of the design is not without a hint of danger.

What if the building were to give way under the

weight of the water? The house’s very safety is

put at risk by the compulsive urge to include in its

core a watery vessel, a frame awaiting a reverie of

Baker’s naked swimming body.23

A secret passage wraps around the volume of

water, which is suspended in the heart of the

house. Accessible from the salon, it seems to

derive from a splitting of the surrounding walls

allowing an inhabitation of the inner flesh of the

building. Although relatively inconspicuous from

the interior, the passage is marked with windows

on either side, looking out, towards the street, and

looking in, towards the water. The ingenious appli-

cation of the Raumplan, far from being economical,

creates uninhabitable spaces and hidden passages,

only useful to a voyeur.

He is looking at me. I am looking back, but he does

not see me. His focus moves from the canvas

towards me and back again. His eyes — following

the contour of my shoulder, the edge of water

around my left arm and the submerged forearm

leading to my fingers on my thigh — are empty.

Architectural painting

Although clearly painterly, Uglow’s work is also

dependent on drawing, a logical, single-minded

and precise description of form. More specifically,

I see Nude, from Twelve Regular Positions from

the Eye as a drawing rather than painting; a

drawing that as we have seen can also be described

as architectural.

Uglow used to often repeat to friends and students

a quotation from Henri Matisse: ‘Making a picture

would seem as logical as building a house, if one

proceeded on sound principles. One should not

bother with the human side. Either one has it or

one hasn’t. If one has, it colours the work in spite

of everything.’24 So for Matisse and also Uglow the

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The Journal

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Number 3



process of making a painting is similar to building a

house. Implied in this suggestion is the lack of an

intentional attempt to infuse the painting with

emotional or intellectual values, but to follow a see-

mingly neutral procedure based on ‘sound principles’.

However, according to Golding, Matisse’s metaphor

has a further relevance in regards to Uglow’s paint-

ings. Architectural is a term one might apply to his

work, and the artist’s discerning eye resembles the

architect’s desire to shape spatial configurations.

Uglow’s fascination with the mathematical framing

of bodies in space was influenced by his interest in

the painters of the Italian Renaissance, especially

Piero della Francesca, whose painstaking method of

measuring the human form has been unparalleled

since.25 During the Renaissance, art and architecture,

painting and building, merged under a common

novel understanding of visual space: perspective

construction, which was ‘invented’ as a true represen-

tation of natural vision. For the first time, pictorial

space lost the floating quality of previous two-dimen-

sional depictions and derived from mathematical

observation combined with careful use of projective

geometry. This structural background was disguised

as architecture, turning the horizontal and vertical

grids of the perspectivists to squared floor patterns

and colonnades. So in painting, perspective construc-

tion became synonymous with architecture, organis-

ing the placement of the portrayed human figures

like puppets suspended within pictorial depth by

invisible strings, the projection lines.

A few highly conscientious theorists had the

patience to apply perspective construction rules to

the depiction of human figures (Fig. 9). One of the

most determined accurately to represent the

human body with the new technique was Piero.

Robin Evans suggests: ‘Painters like Botticelli and

Raphael found a different type of liberty in Alberti’s

central perspective. Architecture (plotted) is mar-

shalled by the system of projection, while figures

(intuited) move freely in its measured space. In

Piero’s art people and things seem to be more

alike’ (Fig. 10).26 Piero’s method depends on ortho-

graphic projection and the dissolution of surfaces

into constellations of dots (Fig. 11). According to

Evans, the perspective result was achieved entirely

by orthographic means, just like architecture:

‘Piero’s other method makes pictures of light paths

348

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 9. Unknown

artist, Codex Huygens,

fol. 126, c. 1570.



between points in exactly the same way that archi-

tects make pictures of buildings’.27

Similarly, space and body are interdependent

in the structure of Uglow’s paintings. Geometry

regulates their conception and execution. The

proportions of the rectangle of the canvas, the

figure and the dimensions of the real space it

occupies, all contribute to the design of a precise

geometrical construct that Uglow often called the

‘idea’ of the painting. For instance, Double Square,

Double Square, 1980 – 82 is a double square rec-

tangle, and double square in space (Fig. 12).

Uglow maintained that he was trying to paint ‘a

structured painting full of controlled, and therefore,

potent, emotion.’28 Uglow’s painstaking process of

rendering the image of the body, through accurate

measuring and precise colour matching, results in

a picture that at first encounter, although spectacu-

lar, is impenetrable. The transfer from observation to

marks on the canvas involves the creation of a cipher

that the viewer’s astounded eye cannot immediately

decode. In the same way that an architectural

drawing needs to be read before the space it

depicts acquires volume in the imagination,

Uglow’s paintings demand time. A longer physical

presence in front of the picture initiates a slow

unfolding of the true dimensions of the image,

and the body flowers in the viewer’s mind at a

space between them and the canvas. Delayed and

trapped, caught within Uglow’s painstaking tran-

scription of the veil of appearance, the female

figure is there fully blossomed; she is brought to

life bathed in luminous colour.

349

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 14

Number 3

Figure 10. Piero della

Francesca, Flagellation

of Christ, 1455 – 60.

(Galleria Nazionale delle

Marche, Urbino.)

Figure 11. Piero della

Francesca, orthographic

projections, elevations

and plans, of a tilted

head, from De

prospectiva pingendi,

c. 1474 – 82.



The water holds me and keeps me warm. Parts of the

body emerge from the surface of the water like

islands. I can see three: a curve around my right

breast and arm forms the coast of the first, my

knees are the mountaintops of the second, and the

third, the smallest one, consists of the caves

between my toes. The skin above the coastline is cold.

Nude Descending a Staircase

Uglow had an enduring attraction to Marcel

Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No.1,

1911, of which he kept a photograph in his studio

(Fig. 13). In an interview with Andrew Lambirth,

Uglow explains his interest in Duchamp’s painting.

To Lambirth’s question ‘What about movement?’

he responds that many of his pictures are concerned

with movement. Yet, he suggests that his work is

more about implied movement and he dismisses

the Futurist’s depiction of movement as too concep-

tual: ‘I have more sympathy for Duchamp’s Nude

Descending a Staircase, because it is more analytical,

it’s more to do with trapping movement.’29

Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase is an

aggregate of superimposed images of a body in

motion observed from a static position. The

images of the nude succeed each other according

to the intervals defined by the staircase. Nude,

from Twelve Regular Positions from the Eye is also

350

Drawing the

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Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 12. Euan Uglow,

Double Square, Double

Square, 1980 – 82.

(Private collection.)

Figure 13. Marcel

Duchamp, Nude

Descending a Staircase

No. 1, 1911.

(Photograph from

Uglow’s studio.)



a composite image, an aggregate of twelve different

views of the nude that succeed each other accord-

ing the intervals defined by the painter’s viewing

armature. Here the nude is static and the painter’s

eye ascends and relocates itself in twelve steps.

Both works use an ordered succession of images

to describe in a composite coded picture the

geometric spatiality of the naked female body.

Furthermore, both could be seen as tributes to Ead-

weard Muybridge’s Woman Descending a Stairway,

1887, one of his photographic experiments captur-

ing the human figure in motion (Fig. 14). Muy-

bridge’s nude was photographed by a series of

cameras positioned in a row — parallel to the back-

drop and the model’s course of travel — at regular

horizontal intervals.

As a consequence and similarly to the reposition-

ing of the painter’s eye in Uglow’s set-up, there is no

shift in perspective as expected from a single vantage

point. Further than the measured description of the

nude’s descent, implied in the photographs is the

movement of the viewer. Accordingly, the implied

movement in Uglow’s Nude, from Twelve Regular

Positions from the Eye is twofold. On the one

hand, the stillness of the figure’s pose standing

solidly against the wall is accompanied by a compel-

ling sensation that she might suddenly start moving,

exaggerated by her forward left leg. More signifi-

cantly though, on the other hand, implicit in the

viewing of the work is the original movement

of the painter’s eye that scans the female body

incrementally.

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Figure 14. Eadweard

Muybridge, Woman

Descending a Stairway

and Turning Around,

c. 1887. (From the book

Animal Locomotion.)



The water contains me. His gaze contains me. I can

feel the boundaries of the rectangular canvas, the

limits of his gaze, cutting the space around the bath:

the lower edge of the window, the tiles behind my

head, the lino on the bathroom floor and back to

the upper part of the taps. This room contains us both.

Striped optical models

The frontispiece of Catherine Lambert’s catalogue

raisonné shows a seated Uglow in his studio at

Turnchapel Mews (Fig. 15). The photograph was

taken during filming for a television programme

in 1986.30 On a stool by Uglow’s feet, a peculiar

object lies inconspicuously. At closer inspection,

the object, an L-shaped base to which a scaled

dummy of a female figure has been attached,

reveals itself to be a three-dimensional scaled

model of the spatial arrangement of Nude, from

Twelve Regular Positions from the Eye (Fig. 16).

Five holes drilled through a metal bar at the front

of the model allow the viewer to study different

sections of the figure straight on, while the backing

is striped, marked with dark- and light-coloured

bands at regular intervals, like a ruler. Lambert

reveals that Uglow considered the idea behind this

particular painting to be complicated and suggested

that the best way of ‘getting it’ was looking at the

little model he made depicting the studio set up.31

So, similarly to traditional architectural practice,

Uglow built a model of the three-dimensional

arrangement of the painting. The original purpose

of the model is unclear, as well as whether it was

built before, during or after the completion of the

painting. Nevertheless, the model accentuates

the voyeuristic aspect of the act of painting, and

the metal bar with the five drilled holes makes it

similar to a peep show. The wooden model’s peep-

holes bring to mind another unmistakably voyeuristic

work of art: Duchamp’s pornographic assemblage

Given, 1st the waterfall, 2nd the illuminating

gas. . ., 1946– 1966, which also features a dummy

of a female nude viewed from two peepholes in a

door, scanning the nude from ‘two regular horizontal

positions’: the left and right eye.32

The spatial organisation of Given can also be

compared to Loos’s scopophilic treatment of the

pool. In the case of Given, the bachelor machine

consists of an everyday architectural element, a

door, while in the Baker House we find a hidden

corridor with windows overlooking an internal

pool suspended in the heart of the house that

refracts the fleeting image of a body through

352

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 15. Uglow in his

studio at Turnchapel

Mews, London, 1986,

during the course of

being filmed by the

Aquarius television

programme team.



water. In both layouts the voyeur/bachelor occupies

a domain hidden from the nude — behind the door

in Given and in the clandestine low passage

surrounding the swimming pool in the Baker

House — but exposed to the public: the gallery in

Given and the street through windows in the house.

Emblematic of the Baker House is the model fea-

turing the design’s striking striped façade (Fig. 17).

Photographs of the model do not reveal whether

this is an empty box or whether the internal distri-

bution of space is constructed within. However, if a

truthful scaled version of the interior existed, then,

the holes of the model’s windows would allow a

view of the swimming pool brightly lit from a skylight

on the roof. The act of looking through the model’s

scaled windows would transform the model into

yet another voyeuristic device: the stereoscope,

infamous for its association with pornography.33

Accordingly, the swimming pool would be the

equivalent of a watery three-dimensional stereo-

scopic slide, and peeping into the model would

render a fantasy image of a naked Baker swimming.

So both models — Uglow’s for a painting, and

Loos’s for a building — frame the female nude with

a striated surface. The bands in Uglow’s model are

clearly a measuring device, they form a ruler organis-

ing the vertical repositioning of the male gaze

attempting to capture a composite pure image of

the female body. Muybridge’s photographic exper-

iments of capturing the human body in motion

feature a similar ruled background, this time in the

form of a grid. Such a grid offers a scientific status

to representing the movement of the naked human

body. The smooth shifting of the female flesh is

gauged against a lined background. There have

been many interpretations of the significance of

the striking striped façade of the Baker House.34

Were the façade a measuring device, Baker’s

spectre of nudity would be projected and accessed

against the sharp contrast of the black and white

bands, framing her wild, exotic femininity.

It is a sunny morning and I am lying in the bath, in

the same position, for the seventh time. Everything

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Volume 14

Number 3

Figure 16. Detail of

Fig. 17.

Figure 17. Adolf Loos,

model of the Baker

House, Paris, 1927.

(Albertina, Vienna.)



is the same, the taps, the tiles, the reflected patterns

of light. Everything, apart from my body, which is

changing; the measure is evident in the different

curvature of the waterline. Within the same room,

the same absent gaze, delineated by the rectangle

of the canvas, I carry her nebular image swimming

inside me in black and white.

Embodied drawing

Loos was very suspicious of architectural drawing.

In his essay ‘Architecture’, 1910, he accuses the

contemporary architect of reducing ‘the noble art

of building to a graphic art’.35 He believed that

draftsmanship and what he called the ‘fluent

hand’ had alienated the architect from the honest

craftsman. He was disappointed that architectural

forms were no longer dictated by the craftsman’s

tools but by the architect’s pencil.36 Loos’s reaction

has to be viewed relative to the contemporary pre-

vailing architectural style, the Jugendstil and the

Viennese Secession. The name Jugendstil (‘Jugend-

style’) derives from the magazine Jugend (‘Youth’),

which was an illustrated weekly magazine, estab-

lished in 1896 and instrumental in promoting

Art Nouveau in Germany, especially the forms of

organic typography and graphic design. Indeed,

Secessionist architecture was often dependant on

graphics, which found their way into not only archi-

tectural drawing, but even into the final building

itself. One of the most celebrated examples is

Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze for the 14th

Vienna Secessionist Exhibition in 1902 (Fig. 18).37

The form of the nude human body, consistently

absent from architectural representations, here

appears etched into the internal skin of the

Secession building (Fig. 19).

Although Loos was against the graphic quality of

architectural drawing, he depended on the structure

of architectural drawing conventions to conceive his

designs’ distribution of space. I would like to argue

that without the use of the architectural convention

of the section, as ‘invented’ during the Renaissance,

Loos would not have been able to formulate his own

‘invention’ of internal volumetric manipulation, the

Raumplan.

Furthermore, Loos was against the practice of

indicating dimensions graphically on measured

drawings. He believed the process of doing so

354

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 18. Gustav

Klimt, detail of The

Beethoven Freeze,

1901 – 02: The Hostile

Powers; The Three

Gorgons. (Albertina,

Vienna.)



dehumanised design and preferred to decide on

interior details, magnitudes and proportions in situ:

‘I stand there, hold my hand at that certain height,

and the carpenter makes his pencil mark’.38 Then

Loos would step back and look at a detail from

different angles to try to visualise the finished

result: ‘this is the only human way to decide on the

height of a wainscot, or the width of a window’.

Loos’s ‘drawing from life’, far from being Modern,

is similar to mediaeval drawing techniques.39 Loos

put forward architectural design as an embodied

experience that cannot be sufficiently described in

drawing, but ironically the Baker House, one of his

most iconic projects, only exists in drawn form.

Loos’s need physically to enter the space of rep-

resentation resonates with Uglow’s commitment to

painting from life. Uglow’s practice involves mark-

making both on canvas but also on the setting.

The act of looking is not a merely removed perform-

ance from a distance. Before marking the flat

surface of the canvas, the painter enters the deep

space of the depicted scene and touches it with

his brush leaving a trace. However, not only the

setting but also the model’s body is physically regis-

tered. Todd, the model for Nude, from Twelve

Regular Positions from the Eye, recalls being

marked with indelible ink and ordered into shallow

baths for the duration of the pose.40

This practice of marking is reminiscent of the

fields of marks on Piero’s drawing of a head; an

abstract geometric armature anchoring the relation-

ship between the real and its image, on which he

erected the architecture of the painted flesh. In

Uglow’s case, the setting and the body are infested

with a multitude of marks, thus dividing the act of

drawing into two domains: the three-dimensional

setting at the studio and its image on the canvas

(Figs. 20). Uglow performs a transcription of this

three-dimensional net of points touching the

depicted scene into its correspondent limits and

coordinates on the flat canvas.

Although deriving from distinct practices — paint-

ing and building — the two works presented in this

essay are similar in that they both stage the male

gaze and set up spatial apparatuses, or ‘bachelor

machines’, to capture an apparition of female

nudity. More specifically, rather than belonging to

traditional definitions of painting or building, I have

analysed Nude, From Twelve Regular Vertical Pos-

itions from the Eye and the Baker House as drawings,

which — beyond the obvious figuration of the female

nude — describe a space of desire, whether erotic

desire, or the desire to measure and to tame the fleet-

ing nature of vision. Indeed the aim of the essay has

been to discuss the rôle of drawing in the production

of architecture and art, and more specifically,

drawing as an underlying structure interlinking the

355

The Journal

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Volume 14

Number 3

Figure 19. View of

Klimt Room at the

Fourteenth Secession

Exhibition, 1902.

(Albertina, Vienna.)



figure of the body with the space it occupies. We

have seen how in Uglow’s paintings, the nude’s

pose orders, and is ordered by, the specifically

designed ‘stage’ on which it is displayed, as well as,

the rectangle of the canvas. Equally, Loos’s use of

the Raumplan allows each room to acquire the

right volume around the occupant in relation to use

and significance. The rooms become an extension

of the body, spatial frames of different sizes deriving

from, and matching, the occupant’s activities.

Nevertheless, space in both works is not only

commanded by the female body as subject matter,

but perhaps more so, by the body of the author. In

Nude, From Twelve Regular Vertical Positions from

the Eye, we have seen how, in transcribing the

image of the model, the painter portrays his gaze

356

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou

Figure 20. Set-up for

Double Square, Double

Square with the

painting in the

foreground, Uglow’s

studio, Turnchapel

Mews. (Photograph by

Steve Pocklington,

2000.)



codifying depth by the incremental repositioning of

his own body. Accordingly, in the Baker House the

client is seemingly Baker, but it can be argued that

in fact the architect designs a house for himself,

his own body looking at her imaginary apparition,

fulfilling a voyeuristic daydream. Therefore, both

works presented in this essay endeavour to

capture an image of the female body, but what

they primarily communicate is an embodied act of

drawing. The trace of the painter’s observation,

and the architect’s imaginary occupation, is etched

on the surface of their drawings. Their embodied

act of drawing conduces a similar observation and

imaginary occupation to the viewer. We are drawn

into the space of the representation, and we are

suddenly there, looking at them looking.

Bibliography
Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (London,

Routledge, 2001).

Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architec-

ture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass, The MIT

Press, 1994).

Beatriz Colomina, ‘Sex, Lies and Decoration: Adolf

Loos and Gustav Klimt’, in, Gustav Klimt, Painting,

Design and Modern Life, eds, Tobias G. Natter and

Cristoph Grunenberg (London, Tate Publishing,

2008), pp. 42 – 51.

Farès el-Dahdah, ‘The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s

Pleasure’, Assemblage, no. 26 (April, 1995), pp. 72–87.

Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its

Three Geometries (Cambridge, Mass, The MIT Press,

1995).

Martin Golding, ‘Euan Uglow’s Nudes’, in Euan Uglow

(London, Whitechapel, 1989), pp. 9–26.

Susan R. Henderson, ‘Bachelor Culture in the Work of

Adolf Loos’, in Journal of Architectural Education,

v. 55, n. 3 (February, 2002), pp. 125–135.

Andrew Lambirth, ‘Snatches of Conversation’, in Euan

Uglow (London, Whitechapel, 1989), pp. 57–60.

Catherine Lampert, ‘Uglow in His Eartly Observatory’, in

Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalogue

raisonné by Catherine Lampert (New Haven and

London, Yale University Press, 2007), pp. xix–xxix.

Richard Kendall, ‘Uglow at Work: The Formative Years’, in

Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalogue

raisonné by Catherine Lampert (New Haven and

London, Yale University Press, 2007), pp. ix–xvii.

Adolf Loos, On Architecture, eds, Adolf and Daniel Opel,

trs., Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA, Ariadne, 2002).

Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, ed.,

Adolf Opel, trs., Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA,

Ariadne, 1998).

Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexu-

ality (London and New York, Routledge, 1992).

Jan Svanberg, Master Masons (Stockholm, Carmina, 1983).

Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos (New Jersey, Princeton

Architectural Press, 2002).

Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalogue raisonné

by Catherine Lampert (New Haven and London, Yale

University Press, 2007).

Notes and references
1. Richard Kendall, ‘Uglow at Work: The Formative

Years’, in Euan Uglow, The Complete Paintings, catalo-

gue raisonné by Catherine Lampert (New Haven and

London, Yale University Press, 2007), p.xii.

2. Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (London,

Routledge, 2001), pp.79 – 80. According to Bal: ‘the

way we perceive and interpret images is based on

fantasy, and fantasy is socially based. Thus there is a

dissymmetry between men and women when they

357

The Journal

of Architecture

Volume 14

Number 3



look at male and female figures. This dissymmetry is

also unstable, varying according to which aspects of

the unconscious are more or less strongly implicated

in the act of looking’.

3. Kendall, op. cit., p. xii.

4. Based on an account by Claire Loos, Adolf Loos Privat

(Vienna, Herman Böhlaus, 1985): quoted in Farès

el-Dahdah, ‘The Josephine Baker House: For Loos’s

Pleasure’, Assemblage, no. 26 (April, 1995), p.76.

5. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and

Sexuality (London and New York, Routledge, 1992),

p.2: Nead’s book is a feminist response to Kenneth

Clark’s classic survey of the subject in The Nude: A

Study in Ideal Form (New York, Pantheon Books, 1956).

6. Ibid., p. 6.

7. The fragmented description is a partly remembered,

partly constructed, account of my experience posing

for a nude painting by my husband, the painter

James Lloyd, in 2004. James was a student under

Uglow’s tutelage at the Slade School of Art, University

College London, 1994 – 95. The painting, entitled

Penelope in the Bath, was shown at ‘Being Present’,

a group exhibition at Jerwood Space in 2004. At the

time of the pose I was in the first stages of pregnancy

with our first daughter Iris.

8. El-Dahdah, ‘For Loos’s Pleasure’, op. cit., p.76.

9. Small inconsistencies between the plans, sections and

the model, reveal that the design must have been at

a preliminary stage when abandoned.

10. Adolf Loos, On Architecture, eds, Adolf and Daniel

Opel, trs., Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA., Ariadne,

2002), p.78.

11. Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos (New Jersey,

Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), p.180.

12. Martin Golding, ‘Euan Uglow’s Nudes’, in Euan Uglow

(London, Whitechapel, 1989), p.9.

13. Ibid., p.17.

14. Ibid.

15. Competition brochure (anon.), John Moores 8, Walker

Art Gallery, Liverpool, 27th April – 2nd July, 1972.

16. Golding, ‘Euan Uglow’s Nudes’, op. cit., p.19.

17. Susan R. Henderson, ‘Bachelor Culture in the Work of

Adolf Loos’, in Journal of Architectural Education,

v.55, n. 3 (February, 2002), p.125.

18. Ibid., p.125.

19. Ibid., p.130.

20. Ibid., p.130.

21. El-Dahdah, ‘For Loos’s Pleasure’, op. cit., p. 74. For

more on the notion of the ‘bachelor machine’ see:

Hilary Robinson, Feminism-art-theory: An Anthology,

1968 – 2000 (London, Blackwell, 2001), p.379.

22. El-Dahdah, ‘For Loos’s Pleasure’, op. cit., p.75.

23. In a note, Henderson mentions what was publicised as

the ‘Loos-Skandal’ in 1928, when he was arrested for

the seduction of three minor-aged girls. He was found

guilty of a lesser charge and paroled. See Burkhardt

Rukschcio and Roland Schachel, Adolf Loos: Leben

und Werk (Vienna, Resindenz Verlag, 1982),

pp.339 – 342. Disturbingly, 1928 is when he designed

the Baker House, which might explain why the house

was never completed and was never mentioned by

Baker in her memoirs.

24. Henri Matisse, Matisse on Art, ed., Jack D. Flam (Berke-

ley, University of California, 1995), p.132.

25. Uglow was greatly influenced by Bernard Berenson’s

Piero della Francesca or: The Ineloquent in Art, 1954:

‘There’s something in that title — the fact that

there’s more force in controlled passion than in exuber-

ant passion. That’s the idea I like. I like it slowly to creep

out on you.’: quoted in Catherine Lampert, ‘Uglow in

His Earthly Observatory’, in Euan Uglow, The Complete

Paintings, catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert

358

Drawing the

female nude

Penelope

Haralambidou



(New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007),

p.i.

26. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and its

Three Geometries (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press,

1995), pp.151 – 152.

27. Ibid., p.151.

28. Andrew Lambirth, ‘Snatches of Conversation’, in Euan

Uglow (London, Whitechapel, 1989), p.57.

29. Ibid.

30. The programme was filmed by the Aquarius television

team.

31. Lampert, Euan Uglow, op. cit., p.96.

32. For more on my analysis of Given see: Penelope

Haralambidou, The Blossoming of Perspective: A

Study (London, Domobaal Editions, 2006) and

http://www.domobaal.com/exhibitions.html

(accessed 16th March, 2009).

33. See Jonathan Crary’s analysis in Jonathan Crary, Tech-

niques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the

Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press,

1996). For more on my analysis of Given as a stereo-

scope, see: Penelope Haralambidou: ‘The Stereoscopic

Veil’, Architectural Research Quarterly, v.11, n.1

(March, 2007), pp.118 – 129.

34. For instance, see el-Dahdah, ‘For Loos’s Pleasure’,

op. cit., pp.75, 77.

35. Loos, On Architecture, op. cit., p.76.

36. Ibid., p.78.

37. Colomina wonders why Loos’s objections to ornament

in architecture were never directly focused on Klimt:

Beatriz Colomina, ‘Sex, Lies and Decoration: Adolf

Loos and Gustav Klimt’, in, Gustav Klimt, Painting,

Design and Modern Life, eds, Tobias G. Natter and

Cristoph Grunenberg (London, Tate Publishing,

2008), p.42.

38. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Archi-

tecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT

Press, 1994), p.269.

39. Jan Svanberg, Master Masons (Stockholm, Carmina,

1983), p.124. During the Middle Ages, in addition to

scaled drawings of façades and details on parchment,

the master builder had also to make full-scale draw-

ings of individual parts of the building like traceries

of windows or ribs vaults. These were drawn with a

large pair of compasses onto a layer of plaster of

Paris on the floor of the lodge’s ‘tracing house’.

Instead of an abstract projection plane, later consoli-

dated on paper, the drawing is inhabited. The act of

design is not a removed intellectual procedure but a

physical act, a performance involving the whole

body, linked with the etymology of geometry: the

measuring of the earth, the marking of ground.

40. Todd’s recollection described in Lampert, Euan Uglow,

op. cit., p.96.

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Number 3