According to architects, architecture has reached a limit. For a psychoanalyst, the architect has forgotten his art.
Architecture psychoanalysed
Paul Laurendeau
d isillusion with virtual materials and blob forms can only be tempo- rarily rescued by a new imaginary vision condemned to future destitution. Likewise, concepts of heaviness, lightness, transparency, grav- ity and weightlessness will be impotent if they are used a priori . Art is not a recipe . This essay outlines the uneasy and problematic gap between ideas (the symbolic dimension — language) and the real (the experience of the work itself, or what cannot but not happen).This division arises when built buildings are not as exciting as they were intended to be; when the theory that supports them gets overthrown by experience. Architects do not have the discursive tools to analyse how language paralyses and short-circuits their action.To re-establish continuity between language and experience is no easy task in the current architectural context where design and construction are most often deprived of a discursive relationship caused in part by the inherent problem of transmission. Universities structure their teaching of art along the divisive avenue of science. In science, to approach reality with a hypothesis produces predictable results that are useful at best. In art, reality cannot be reduced to objectivity and testing. Art is not about verifying a conscious idea. A thesis, in a school of architecture, is the selection of a topic in absentia , a premise developed into an architectural project expected to reflect this premise as proof of learning. This process is nonsense if architecture is to be poetic, expressive of a meaning that can only be interpreted but never imposed. In love, people that build a theory to find the ideal lover will only be met by anguish. People engage and make their own those things that trigger their desire. They build their narrative from experience, from the residues, the signifying fragments of perception. Why then do we construct theory to drive the making of architecture? To sublimate sexuality and not have to admit it — to not articulate the truth without repressing the sexual, the ex-centric position where we unconsciously either are or have , and from where we assume that another will stand where we are not, or for what we do not have, to make operative this illusion of unity. Establishing a question before making the artwork is a fallacy that often leads to baffling intellectualization. Architects use theory as an insurance policy. They should not attempt to catch meaning before making it. To assume that the world is a mirror of thought and to then modify the world to equate it with thought is pure psychosis. A psychotic takes seriously what he thinks and entertains a non-dialectical (a frozen) relation with his ideas. Political regimes that work in this way proclaim laws for the masses as an extension of a dictator’s intentions and
world vision, creating the illusion of mastering perception.The individual, in this position, is greatly destabilised when reality presents a hole in knowledge that cannot be logically stitched. In history, architecture has at times been structured as such, creating spaces where a sense of orientation is impossible to maintain without a set of instructions. University pavilions, built in the 1960s and 70s as applied theory, are perfect examples: walls get covered with signage to compensate for a lack of spatial meaning. Words at the rescue of buildings! Centuries ago, scientists positioned god as the cause of their experi- ments when presenting their work to the sovereign, until they realised that reality worked on its own. In art, no one yet can say that an absence of hypothesis leads to production that cannot be interpreted. Interpretation, the architect has no control over.
Create a building as if it means nothing. Transfer the burden of interpretation to the other. See what sense people make out of it.
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semblance
true
reality
Three realms unite consciousness: the real, the symbolic and the imagi- nary. They are not equivalent; they overlap and are held in a Borromean fashion. The Borromean knot is made of three pieces of string tied together without passing through one another. If one is removed or cut, the two others become free. The real , the symbolic and the imaginary cannot work without one another. They are separate but dependant entities. Ideas (imaginary) never quite correspond to experience (real). Reality (symbolic) lies somewhere between the real and the imaginary. It is perception con- noted by an image. A neurosis is when the symbolic and the imaginary would like to operate on their own, disregarding the real which inevita- bly resurfaces as an imperative that overthrows a dream — a real(ity) check.
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O n S ite review
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I ssue 10 2003
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