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READING ARCHITECTURE WITH FREUD AND LACAN Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan: Shadowing the Public Realm methodically outlines key concepts in psychoanalytic discourse by reading them against key modern and post-modern architects. It begins with what is, arguably, the central concept for each discipline by putting the unconscious in a dialectic relation to space. Each subsequent chapter begins with a detail in architectural discourse, a kind of provo- cation that anchors each excursion into the thought of Freud and Lacan. The text is cyclical, episodic, and cloudlike rather than expository; the intention is not simply to explain the concept of the unconscious but, to different degrees, perform it in the text. The book offers powerful critiques of current planning practice, which has no tools to address our attachment to places. It concludes with powerful critiques of our incapacity to change the environmentally damaging ways we live our lives, which is an effect of our incapacity to recognise the presence of the death drive in our nature. The text is an extended thesis – spanning the chapters – that the field of the Other is the common grammar that organises subjects into civilisations, which has consequences for how we treat the public realm in architecture, politics, and the city. The field of the Other is a slightly different slice through the urban social world. It shadows – but does not correspond exactly to – more familiar categories like private/public, inside/outside, figure/ground, or piazza/boulevard. Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan will be an essential resource to anyone interested in how the environment we build is a reflection of our desire. Psycho- analysis is one of the great humanist discourses of the 20th century and this book will be a valuable reference to the humanist in architects, planners, and social scientists, whether they are students, professionals, or amateurs. It will appeal to historians of the 20th century, and to psychoanalysts and architects who are interested in how their respective discourses interdigitate with each other and with other discourses. Lorens Holm teaches Architecture at the University of Dundee, where he runs a design research unit called rooms+cities. His published work focuses on reconciling Lacanian thought on subjectivity with contemporary architectural/urban practice. He recently organised the international conference Architecture & Collective Life. ‘Lorens Holm’s highly informative primer on the relation between architecture and psychoanalysis will be much welcomed. The two disciplines have recently entered a productive dialogue and in this respect Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan in its rigour and cogency is a major con- tribution to both’. Nadir Lahiji, author of Architecture in the Age of Pornography: Reading Alain Badiou ‘It is with a sense of urgency, but also a lightness of touch, that Holm draws on his intimate knowledge of Lacan’s work to address architecture in this time of climate crisis. Aiming to “reboot” architecture’s ethical potential, Holm takes us through some of the most challenging theoretical twists of psychoanalysis. Erudite and witty, “wreck[ing] havoc with linear arguments, clear categories, and objective forms of research”, Holm dedi- cates his precise – and kind – intelligence to flagging our urgent need for Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious as a space of inter-subjectivity. Holm argues that via Lacan we can change our culture – as one that values individuality above all else – “all fantasies of the ego” – and instead grasp architecture’s capacity for articulating the relation between individual and collective. This is Holm’s best book on architecture and Lacan yet, and makes for some gripping, yet vital reading’. Jane Rendell, author of The Architecture of Psychoanalysis, Professor of Critical Spatial Practice, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL READING ARCHITECTURE WITH FREUD AND LACAN Shadowing the public realm Lorens Holm Cover image: Lorens Holm First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Lorens Holm The right of Lorens Holm to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Holm, Lorens, author. Title: Reading architecture with Freud and Lacan: shadowing the public realm / Lorens Holm. Description: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022005964 (print) | LCCN 2022005965 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367077983 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367077990 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429022845 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis and architecture. Classification: LCC NA2543.P85 H65 2023 (print) | LCC NA2543.P85 (ebook) | DDC 720.19--dc23/eng/20220715 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005964 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005965 ISBN: 978-0-367-07798-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-07799-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-02284-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429022845 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd. Mark Cousins, Director of General Studies and Head of the Graduate Program in Histories and Theories at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, whose PhD students – I was one – have formed an expanding core of critical enquiry for years, in the area of psychoanalysis philosophy history and politics, in schools in London, in the UK and around the world. His thinking and his approach to problems remain the driver behind my own thought. This text is dedicated to his memory, with love, respect, and humility. CONTENTS Acknowledgements viii Preface on entitlement ix 1 Introduction to psychoanalysis [the unconscious] 1 2 Reading Giedion reading history through Lacan [symbolic, imaginary, and real space] 19 3 Brunelleschi and the visual field [desire and space] 44 4 Rossi and the field of the Other [planning or the unconscious] 60 5 Frampton and Scott Brown/Venturi [the social institution of the city or the death drive] 81 6 To conclude with climate change [discourse and the ethics of psychoanalysis] 107 Postscript: Subjective theory and practice [rooms+cities] 128 Bibliography 137 Figure credits 147 Figure notes 149 Index 155 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In a free-associational order … My close colleagues in IPSA, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies in Architecture, including: Francesco Proto, Tim Martin, John Shannon Hendrix, Andrew Payne, Angie Voela, Donald Kunze, Stamatis Zografos, Wouter van Acker, Berrin Terim, Nadir Lahiji, who generously read this manuscript, and Cameron McEwan my longstanding teaching and thinking partner in all things relating to architecture and the categories by which the intellect organises it, who generously read this manuscript. The Architecture’s Unconscious network at University of Newcastle, including Adam Sharr, Kati Blom, Andrew Ballantyne, and Emma Cheatle, whose thinking informed the inception of this project. Jane Rendell always a supporter and contributor and whose The Architecture of Psychoanalysis has achieved something unique in contemporary English academe – to be so sensibly English and so speculative at one and the same time. The community of scholars and researchers that formed around Architecture and the Unconscious (2016), including David Green and Lesley Caldwell, London analysts whose discussion at the launch of Architecture and the Unconscious – unbeknown to them – have informed this book. My fourth-year Humanities students at the University of Dundee who have been on the receiving end of my interpretative approach to architecture in lec- tures and seminars. The fifth-year architecture students in my rooms+cities design research unit who have taken up the challenge. FIGURE 0.1 The possibility of a tympanic subject. PREFACE ON ENTITLEMENT In 2010, Routledge published my book Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier: Architecture Space and the Construction of Subjectivity. In this book, I used psychoanalytic theory to interpret two key moments in the history of architecture: the formalisation of modern space by the invention of perspective and Le Corbusier’s traumatic encounter with that arché object of modern architecture, the Parthenon. I say modern space, modern architecture. That book was nothing if not a reflection upon modernism. Psychoanalysis is the paradigm of modern discourse. Psychoanalysis kicked off when Sigmund Freud, the young neurologist, formalised the unconscious at the turn of the century and placed it in the centre of the new discourse of psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan was arguably Freud’s closest reader, whose sys- tematic interpretations of Freud’s text lifted it out of 19th-century biologism and put it in the context of post war structural theory. By the 1950s, Sigfried Giedion and other historians of modern architecture simply assume that their readers will understand their references to the unconscious and other psychoanalytic concepts without the need for elaboration.