Surrealism and Architecture

Thomas Mical, Thomas Mical

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134343454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This is a historically informed examination of architecture's perceived absence in surrealist thought, surrealist tendencies in the theories and projects of modern architecture, and the place of surrealist thought in contemporary design. This book represents current insights into surrealism in the thought and practice of modern architecture. In these essays, the role of the subconscious, the techniques of defamiliarization, aesthetic and social forces affecting the objects, interiors, cities and landscapes of the twentieth century are revealed. The book contains a diversity of voices from across modern art and architecture to bring into focus what is often overlooked in the histories of the modernist avant-garde. This collection examines the practices of writers, artists, architects, and urbanists with emphasis on a critique of the everyday world-view, offering alternative models of subjectivity, artistic effect, and the production of meanings in the built world.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Thomas Mical

Architecture, as materialized desires achieved through subjective imagination and thoughtful cultural production, polymorphously draws from sources outside its own discrete disciplinary boundaries. Much of the premodern history of architectural theory can be read as the search to identify exactly that which distinguishes architecture from mere construction, and the shifting answers always lie outside utilitarian making. Architecture, even modern architecture, as an incomplete discipline incapable of autonomy or completion, is open to these associations, and it is doubtful if the sacrificial tropes on classical temples, or the original impulse to make these temples, were entirely rational or discipline-specific.¹ The science of geometry and musical harmony, and the artistic practices of painting and sculpture, in particular, became fetishes in the design and construction of classical and neo-classical architecture, as if the desires informing architecture necessarily precede and exceed their material boundaries. These “supplements” to premodern architectural construction are in effect an expression of a necessary fundamental lack in architecture, masking the incompleteness of mere building with aesthetically instrumentalized materialization of desires. Premodern architectural theory seeks to describe and rationalize these “others” of building. It is often the case that for architecture to exist, it must paradoxically stage the reemergence of its own excluded desires. In each work of architecture, the utilitarian needs can be satisfied, but the desire cannot: the “blind spot” of desire is the longing for a lost origin.² Hence the obsession over the history of architecture in premodern architectural theory – in this view, architectural history cannot be the history of style, but the history of lacks, desires, supplements, and new desires.

The prevalent assumption that modern architecture’s dehistoricized formations were overtly political statements, positing instrumental reason over bourgeoisie desires reconfigured as ideology, appears to suppress the excesses of architectural desire in favor of austere constructions under the guise of rationalism. Modern architecture, erupting from the challenge of industrialization to the neo-classical order, is therefore often read as an instrumental language of technologically described voids. Yet even in its extreme ascetic manifestations, works of modern architecture could not overcome the tendency to draw upon the fetish of art and technology, specifically the contemporaneous movements of modern art. Expressionism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Cubism (Purism) resonate within modern architecture, and are now inseparable from the historiography of the modern.³ The least-examined artistic practice informing modern architecture is surrealism: architecture as the “blind spot” in surrealist theory and practice, and surrealist thought is the “dark secret” of much modernist architecture – they are mutually understated or absent in most scholarship.⁴ To address the status of desire in modern architecture, much can be learned from a critical examination of architecture’s haunting presence in surrealist thought, surrealist tendencies in the theories and projects of modern architecture, and the theoretical and methodological concerns of surrealism informing past and future urban architecture. The essays collected in this anthology attempt to describe that which lies outside of the instrumental construction logic in modern architecture, and after.

Surrealism, as a movement, was almost always interdisciplinary; it was originally an avant-garde movement that eventually crossed cultures, contexts, and media forms, much like modern architecture’s emergence. To date, the status of architecture within surrealist thought remains undecidable – of the creative arts, it is only architecture that remains as the unfulfilled promise of surrealist thought. The dialogue between material representations and the (incomplete) subjectivity of the modern world, a dialogue of forms and spaces where irrational meanings and experiences are produced, lies at the heart of any surrealist architectural project: “their paintings and poems were characterized by images of searching and finding, of veiling and revealing, of presence and absence, of thresholds and passages, in a surrealized universe in which there were no clear boundaries or fixed identities.”⁵

Modern architecture in the interwar period overtly drew upon rationalism in the form of instrumental logic, mono-functionalism to order the inherited world, and objective fact over subjective effect. The radical shift in the philosophical and political grounding of the spaces of life in the interwar period of “high modernism” are rarely made more explicit than in surrealism’s critique of this dominant rationalist orthodoxy. Within the diverse spatial practices of the surrealist group, such as “objective chance,” the goal is explicit:

All the logical principles, having been routed, will bring [each person] the strength of that objective chance which makes a mockery of what would have seemed most probable. Everything humans might want to know is written upon this screen in phosphorescent letters, in letters of desire.⁶

All of the topics addressed in contemporary surrealist scholarship have a place in architectural thought, as the rethinking of craft, materiality, symbolism, imagery, social order, domesticity, urbanism, technologies, and divided cultures and contexts.⁷

There is not one surrealism, but many, and the significant variance between surrealist practices may function as an under-explored and expansive conceptual territory for architectural thought. Before functionalism, before formalism, there is thought forming in response to the possibilities of architecture to encode desires. For this reason, Breton’s claim that surrealism is simply “pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing, or by any other method, the real functioning of the mind” is an architectural premise.⁸ When he adds “surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought,”⁹ he is pointing towards techniques of representation that escape the Weberian cage of determinism. It is exactly these certain forms of association liberated in automatic processes that are excluded in modernist-rationalist architectural rhetoric, and it is the very same excluded associations that return to haunt the sites of rationalism, as a repressed “other.” Psychic automatism allows the author (or artist) to engage the “real” through the unseen movements of the imagination, a method that explicitly rejects the mechanisms of control, taste, calculation, and judgment. The automatic process erases the notion of the integrated rational subject in favor of its others – this tendency towards the multiplicity of voices expands the subject beyond the processes of reason – to the point of rendering the author as a “mere recording instrument”¹⁰ for the imaginary. Breton offers the possibility of surrealism as a means of recovering architecture from the symbolic, and points towards diverse artistic practices proceeding historically from the written to the visual and into the spatial, although his understanding of the spatial is often blinded by the primacy of the (surrealist) object.

Consider Breton’s 1935 Prague lecture “Surrealist Situation of the Object,” which follows Hegel in situating architecture as the poorest of the arts, poetry the richest.¹¹ For Hegel, architecture is the most base of the arts, made of earth, timber, and stone; the stones are outside art, and the distinction between architecture and building is slight. Breton’s vision of surrealistic practices drew upon the role of estrangement in art, the slippage between form and content Shlovsky described as defamiliarization: “by making the familiar strange, we recover the sensation of life … art exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.”¹² Jameson describes this defamiliarization as “a way of restoring conscious experience, of breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct, and allowing us to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror.”¹³ Vidler follows this logic in describing a “spatial estrangement” dominant in the sociology of modern urbanism.¹⁴

We would expect that Breton would see the phenomenal stoniness of stone as the point of sensual estrangement that could draw architecture up from building towards poetry, overcoming a lack. But Breton, in the same lecture, cites the modernism of the Art Nouveau movement as the first among all the arts to move towards surrealism by excluding the external world and turning towards the inner world of consciousness, of expressing the inner world visually, citing Dalí:

No collective effort has managed to create a world of dreams as pure and disturbing as these art nouveau buildings, which by themselves constitute, on the very fringe of architecture, true realizations of solidified desires, in which the most violent and cruel automatism painfully betrays a hatred of reality and a need for refuge in an ideal world similar to those in a childhood neurosis.¹⁵

Breton was incapable of understanding the design/making/meaning of architecture as Dalí could, and explained the “concrete irrationality” of modern architecture in the superficial exception of a wavy wall of Le Corbusier’s Swiss Pavilion of the Cité Universitaire in Paris. Breton was blind to the surrealist tendencies in this phase of the controversial modernist’s work: Corbu’s collection of “objets a reaction poétique,” and use of object-types in this pavilion and other projects, is very close to Breton’s terminology and concerns.¹⁶ Breton noted surrealist sculptures often incorporate the found object, because “in it alone we can recognize the marvelous precipitate of desire” where “chance is the form making manifest the exterior necessity which traces its path in the human unconscious.”¹⁷ We may see an example of this “awakening” in the imagery of Le Corbusier.¹⁸ Many of the avatars of surrealist imagery are in his work, as if illustrating a citation by Cocteau: “in the countryside we saw two screens and a chair. It was the opposite of a ruin … pieces of a future palace.”¹⁹ The surrealist precursor Giorgio de Chirico once wrote: “and yet, so far as I know, no one attributes to furniture the power to awaken in us ideas of an altogether peculiar strangeness.”²⁰ The strangeness of the sentient object figures significantly in de Chirico’s metaphysical interiors and exteriors, and the defamiliarized technical object in space recurs as a fundamental formal strategy for modern architecture, one can easily imagine Hans Bellmer’s poupee at home in a Corbusian villa, a objectified body of fragments inhabiting a sanitized “machine for living.” Le Corbusier’s modular man and the ascetic sensuality of the modernist villa historically follow the instrumentalized fetish of the irregular body informing modernist functionalism and construction. Yet the irregular surrealist body of semiotic impulses, banished from the prismatic rationalist volumes of an industrialized world, returns as its uncanny guest.

Can the Bretonian categorization of surrealist objects apply to spaces?²¹ Rarely, because architecture is procedurally distinct from sculpture, though for Breton the distinction is malleable. Breton came closest to imagining a surrealist architecture in his references to Dalí’s paranoiac-critical double-image, “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations.”²² Breton described the ability of the surrealist object to fuse two distinct images to produce “uninterrupted successions of latencies” from the “hidden real” of their origins, a technique common to architectural theory.²³

Desire forms and informs architecture, even modern architecture, where the technology of crafted details (fragments) are submerged into construction. The details of modern architecture, objectified markers of desire, like the sculptures inhabiting classical temples, register constellations of associative meanings. Thus modern architecture’s fetish of technology, as a supplement, marks the suppression of irrational desires, of ornament and historicism, and tends towards an architecture of blank walls within a totalizing oceanic space. The medium of modern architecture is not stone, but space. Architecture must remain void to function and incomplete to produce effects, because architecture can only be completed in the spatial immersion of the subject. The construct of the body-in-space, the consistent epistemological basis for premodern architectural pleasure and meaning, is inherently lacking in most modern architecture. The semiotic impulses of the self, fluid and formless, move easily through the formless continuity of modern domestic spaces and urban contexts. This is the locus of the formless in architecture – modernism’s space without qualities, emptied of inner experience, the vaporous undecipherable spaces of the “in-between” where the paradoxes of interiority and exteriority are to be resolved by the perceptive subject.

Any thorough description of surrealist space is absent from the primary works, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration credits
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘Un salon au fond d’un lac’: the domestic spaces of surrealism
• 3. Aragon’s armoire
• 4. “Home poor heart”: the architecture of Cornell’s desire
• 5. Matta’s lucid landscape
• 6. Menace: surrealist interference of space
• 7. Daphne’s legacy: architecture, psychoanalysis and petrification in Lacan and Dalí
• 8. The ghost in the machine
• 9. “… The gift of time”: Le Corbusier reading Bataille
• 10. Introjection and projection: Frederick Kiesler and his dream machine
• 11. Invernizzi’s exquisite corpse: the Villa Girasole: an architecture of surrationalism
• 12. The tangency of the world to itself: the Casa Malaparte and the metaphysical tradition
• 13. Modernist urbanism and its monsters
• 14. Surrealism and the irrational embellishment of Paris
• 15. Re-enchanting the city: the utopian practices of the Paris group of the surrealist movement
• 16. Landscape surrealism
• 17. Surreal city: the case of Brasília
• 18. Latencies and imago: Blanchot and the shadow city of surrealism
• 19. Surrealism’s unexplored possibilities in architecture
• 20. The most architectural thing
• 21. Acropolis, now!
• Bibliography
• Index