Architecture and the Unconscious

Bringing together an international group of contributors, who provide informed and varied points of view on the role of the unconscious in architectural design and theory, this book expands architectural theory to unexplored areas, enriching architecture in relation to the humanities. It explores how architecture engages dreams, desires, imagination, memory, and emotions, how architecture can appeal to a broader scope of human experience and identity. Beginning by examining the historical development of the engagement of the unconscious in architectural discourse, and the current and historical, theoretical and practical, intersections of architecture and psychoanalysis, the volume also analyses the city and the urban condition.

Introduction; I: Historical Paradigms for Architecture and the Unconscious; 1: The Unconscious and Space: Venice and the Work of Albrecht Dürer; 2: Architecture and the Kantian Unconscious; 3: Gradations of Consciousness and Claude Bragdon's 'Space-Conquest'; 4: Composing Form, Constructing the Unconscious: Empiriocriticism and Nikolai Ladovskii's 'Psychoanalytical Method' of Architecture at VKhUTEMAS; II: The Unconscious as a Discourse for Architecture of the City; 5: Aldo Rossi and the Field of the Other; 6: Seducing God(s): Renaissance Ideal Cities as Mirror-images of Western Subjectivity; 7: Unconscious Places - Thomas Struth and the Architecture of the City; 8: X Marks the Spot that Will Have Been; III: Fantasies, Desires, Diagnoses; 9: Psychoanalytic Diagnosis in Architecture and Urban Design; 10: Architecture and the Unconscious: Fantasy, Construction, and the Dual Spatiality; 11: Shadows of Venice: Adrian Stokes, Aldo Rossi and 'Interior Darkness'; IV: Case Study: Maison de Verre; 12: Projection: On Approaching the Maison de Verre; 13: Imaginative Enclave in the Maison de Verre; 14: Part-architecture: The Manifest and the Hidden in the Maison de Verre and the Large Glass (or Towards an Architectural Unconscious)