Freud for Architects

John Abell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429751448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Freud for Architects explains what Freud offers to the understanding of architectural creativity and architectural experience, with case examples from early modern architecture to the present.

Freud's observations on the human psyche and its influence on culture and social behavior have generated a great deal of discussion since the 19th century. Yet, what Freud's key ideas offer to the understanding of architectural creativity and experience has received little direct attention. That is partly because Freud opened the door to a place where conventional research in architecture has little traction, the unconscious. Adding to the difficulties, Freud's collection of work is vast and daunting. Freud for Architects navigates Freud's key ideas and bridges a chasm between architecture and psychoanalytic theory.

The book highlights Freud's ideas on the foundational developments of childhood, developments on which the adult psyche is based. It explains why and how the developmental stages could influence adult architectural preferences and preoccupations, spatial intuition, and beliefs about what is proper and right for architectural design. As such, Freud for Architects will be of great interest to students, practitioners, and scholars in a range of disciplines including architecture, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Freud for Architects is intended as an introductory guide for architecture students, architects, and readers who are generally interested in the psychology of design. The aim is to outline how Freud's thought helps explain aesthetic experience in architecture and design preferences, particularly preferences associated with unconventional and experimental architecture, which is often simply called “avant-garde” architecture.

Freud is so much a part of modern popular culture that some of his ideas are taken for granted in everyday life. Dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes are commonly taken to have psychological double meanings, potentially embarrassing meanings that somehow, tantalizingly, also pique interest in them. Marketing campaigns and social media, consistently and knowingly, appeal to the self-centered tendencies of the human psyche that are otherwise often called narcissistic tendencies. Film and television routinely incorporate sexuality, celebrating the human capacity for sexual feelings and desires while fostering audience identification with characters. Social groups, professional disciplines, and workplace teams routinely reflect the influence of group psychology, typically involving a leader and inclusion-exclusion behaviors that reinforce the leader and group behavior. A head of state unwittingly and unconsciously follows the oedipal playbook when he says to his illicit lover, “you remind me of my daughter (Cooper, 2018; Lee, 2019).” Increasingly, personal pronouns, e.g., he, him, his, she, her, hers, are acknowledged to be matters of personal sexual preference and identity choice rather than genital inheritance.

With The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900, Freud's thought has greatly influenced the popular understanding of the personal and subjective aspects of self. During his lifetime, 1856–1939, Freud established a highly influential and emancipatory modern theory of selfhood, while generating a great deal of debate (Zaretsky, 2015: 36). Indeed, Freud remains a major influence on a system of thought that links different kinds of human experience to different ways of being human, that is, a system of thought on selfhood and self-determination, which, in all of its variety, has been credited with supporting the modern liberal democratic state, and yet has also been leveraged to support oppressive ideologies (Marks, 2017: 8).

Despite the prominence of Freud's thought, what his key ideas offer to the understanding of architectural experience and creativity has received little direct attention. That is partly because Freud opened the door to a place where conventional research in architecture has little traction, the unconscious. Adding to the difficulties, Freud's collection of work is vast and daunting. Freud for Architects introduces Freud's key ideas, navigating the terrain between architecture and Freud's thought, and focuses on ideas that are particularly relevant to architecture and aesthetic experience.

The psyche, aesthetic experience, and architecture

Though well established in the arts and humanities as one of the pillars of thought on subjective aspects of selfhood, Freud's thought has a rather obscure connection to architecture and what architecture generically refers to as the “designer” and the “user.” When considering the human experience of architecture, architects and architecture students are far more familiar with ways of thinking about the human experience that stem from the experience of one's own body in architectural settings, an awareness that phenomenology and phenomenologists have focused on. For example, phenomenologists such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), or Jacques Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), who focused on the conscious experience of the physical body and the senses, help architecture deepen its understanding of human experience. That is partly because body experience offers a straightforward way to describe and interpret the physical experience of a building and its parts (see, for example, The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa, 2012). Phenomenologists have also suggested that daydreams and childhood memories influence adult physical experience (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1969) and, further, that relations with objects in childhood influence the creation and experience of geometry in adulthood (Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, 1970). Yet the core psychical memories, body experiences, and objects in childhood upon which adult experience is based have remained elusive to phenomenologists. Thus, phenomenology aims to describe the direct experience of objects but lacks a psychical basis for understanding body experience, particularly when viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective (Cousins, 1996). Similarly, among the many important insights inspired by Freud's thought is the insight that human experience and human selfhood are more multidimensional than a correlation of physical body experience to architecture can account for. The same holds for the influence of Gestalt psychology on architecture and its influence on the understanding of the visual experience of the building facade. Some building facades, or a large part of a façade, are mainly transparent glass such that one sees through a glass façade into the building. In contrast, some façades imply outer surface to inner depth relationships rather than literally reveal those relationships. Based on the influence of Gestalt psychology, those relationships have long been known in architecture as the difference between “literal transparency” and on the other hand “phenomenal transparency.”

Drawing on Gestalt psychology, Colin Rowe (1920–1999), an architecture historian and theorist, and Robert Slutzky (1929–2005), a painter and architecture theorist, called attention to the innate human capacity to grasp and appreciate building façade designs that imply rather than literally reveal outer surface to inner depth relationships. They defined that aspect of façade design as “phenomenal transparency” in contrast to literal transparency. The garden façade of Villa Stein-de-Monzie, Garches, by Le Corbusier, 1926, is a case in point. There, Rowe and Slutsky note, a relatively shallow layer of volumetric depth and structure behind the façade are implied by a visual pattern of façade elements: there is a flat area of the façade with horizontal “ribbon windows” above the ground floor; there is the recessed area of the façade below on the ground floor; walls that define the left and right sides of the building when viewed from the garden also provide visual cues; and a deep void on the left side of the façade suggests the actual depth of the building. The relationships imply a shallow band of space behind the ribbon windows, yet the deep void suggests actual depth. The relationships establish a phenomenal transparency, rather than literal transparency. The façade of the workshop wing of the Bauhaus building by Gropius, 1925–1926, is an example of a literally transparent façade. There, one literally sees through transparent glass into the physical depth behind the façade. The visual relationships are literally revealed by the façade (Rowe and Slutzky, 1963). Yet, Rowe and Slutzky do not take up questions concerning why 2 people looking at the same façade, either a literally transparent façade or a phenomenally transparent façade, might have contrasting reactions, one finding it to be a favorable aesthetic experience and other finding it uninteresting if not “annoying” and unpleasurable. Freud hinted at this kind of issue in, “Findings, Ideas, Problems,” written in 1941 near the end of his life, he wrote,

Space may be the projection of the extension of the psychical apparatus. No other derivation is probable. Instead of Kant's a priori determinants of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended….

(Freud, 1941: 300)

That is to say, human experience is always influenced by the projection of the internal psyche outward onto relations with objects in the external world. Building on that idea, Freud for Architects explains what Freud offers to the understanding of architecture by explaining how the psyche is extended, helping to explain architectural design preferences, creativity, and architectural experience, with examples from early modern architecture to the present. The examples also highlight how Freud's ideas can be applied to analyze and interpret design and to interpret design criticism, with emphasis on the formal qualities of design. Examples are representative of particular kinds of formal expression in architecture, mainly “open form” and “closed form.” Each has a unique spatiality. For example, closed form is closed to the outside and what is beyond an enclosing wall. In contrast, the spatiality of an open form is physically open to what is outside, and the emphasis in relationships between a building's interior and site and site context is on continuity rather than discontinuity. Insofar as each architectural example presented in Freud for Architects represents a type of expression, e.g., closed form or open form, the analysis and insights in each case are in principle transferable to other similar cases.

…human experience is always influenced by the projection of the internal psyche outward onto relations with objects in the external world.

Freud's observations on the human psyche help explain the aesthetic preferences of the architect, client, and group audiences for architecture. The special focus in Freud for Architects is on designs that raise our awareness of conventions by challenging conventions, often simply called avant-garde designs. The examples help explain why, psychologically, any architect's formal preferences might align – or not – with consumer preferences, e.g., clients, users, critical flock of followers, or detractors. Likewise, the examples offer insights into unconscious motivations that lay behind attraction to, and avoidance of, formal characteristics of designs, e.g., open form and closed form. The examples also offer insights into discussions that fuel architecture debates, including concerns for conventional design versus “the new” or avant-garde design; debates on what defines architecture and what is “proper” for architecture versus what is “outside” of architecture or beyond the boundaries of architecture; and debates on whether building designs that emphasize the expression of constructed elements and how they join are more praiseworthy than building designs that emphasize ornamentation or surface-effects such as phenomenal transparency.

Another reason why Freud's thought has a rather obscure connection to architecture and what architecture generically refers to as the “designer” and the “user” is that introductory history courses in architecture school often describe building design in terms of style changes driven by social and technological changes. Similarly, historical time periods are defined by social conditions and technological conditions of a time period: different social concerns and different technologies. Thus, the social and technological influences on the designer and the user of one time period are, logically, different than another time period, and so too architecture style and architectural experience, it is supposed, are different.

A concern drawn from psychoanalytic theory is that when architecture histories and theories focus narrowly on social and technological conditions, they overlook the human psyche and indeed are not sufficiently mindful of human experience and selfhood. Nonetheless, social and technological conditions do act on something and leave their stamp on something: a person. Ignoring that does not make the problem go away (Cousins and Hussain, 1984: 254–256). Others have described that shortcoming as the difference between a “thick” (psychoanalytic) view of selfhood versus a “thin” view (Gay, 2000: 2–4). In raising these issues here, the aim is not to dismiss the histories and theories of architecture taught in architecture schools. Rather, the aim is to suggest what Freud offers to the understanding of style, aesthetic expression, aesthetic experience, designer, and user, beyond what architecture history and theory courses typically offer.

Reading Freud, psychoanalytic theory, and clinical practice

There are a number of general introductory reference books on Freud's work. Freud himself gave “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” between 1915 and 1917 and supplemented them in 1933 with “New Introductory Lectures.” Freud's introductory lectures are compiled along with his entire body of work, and many letters to colleagues, in 23 hardcover volumes titled The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated from German and edited by James Stratchey and Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, who was also a psychoanalyst. The last volume of the Standard Edition, SE XXIV, contains useful indexes and bibliographies for the entire collection. The Standard Edition is widely regarded as the primary and authoritative source on Freud's thought and as the proper source for scholarly citation. However, Penguin Books offers a Freud Library series of 15 paperback books that is widely available, conveniently sized, and contains what are generally regarded as Freud's key works reprinted from the Standard Edition. Further, The Freud Reader, by Gay, 1989, W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., New York, is perhaps most useful as a general reference for the newcomer because it presents a chronological selection of Freud's works, drawn from the Standard Edition, under helpful section titles such as “Classic Theory,” “Therapy and Technique,” and “Psychoanalysis in Culture,” highlighting content areas that are not obvious in the Standard Edition. The compilations mentioned here are for a general readership, and Freud's thought is not condensed or described in a way that makes his thought more readily accessible to the architect and specifically relevant to architectural issues. However, perusing Freud's writings repays the effort because it reveals that Freud was an eloquent writer and compelling thinker who was mindful of the reader, sometimes by necessity communicating ideas to a psychoanalytic audience, at other times addressing a wider readership. Nonetheless, because Freud's thought developed incrementally over time, he often refers to his previous publications, such that one of his papers inevitably leads the reader to his other papers, which altogether requires a committed and persistent reader. Freud for Architects highlights key ideas with the goal of rendering Freud accessible to the architect who has little or no prior experience with Freud other than perhaps terms or phrases that routinely find expression in popular culture.

…perusing Freud's writings repays the effort because it reveals Freud was an eloquent writer and compelling thinker who was mindful of the reader…

In the main, Freud's thought concerns the universal core developments of childhood upon which the adult psyche is based. He came to believe developmental phases influence debilitating psychological disorders in adulthood, as well as a “normal” range of behaviors, expressed by preferences and preoccupations, spatial intuitions, dreams, anxieties, avoidances, obsessions, repressions of childhood thoughts and experiences, and symbolic condensations and displacements of memory images. Two of Freud's key works on the developments of childhood and related ideas are: Three Essays on Sexuality, 1905 (1920), which Freud continually revised, and The Ego and The Id, 1923. Freud also made compelling observations on art, literature, and culture. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901, Creative Writers and Daydreaming, 1908, and Civilization and its Discontents, 1930, are among the most widely read and accessible of Freud's works.

Freud's thought concerns the universal core developments of childhood upon which the adult psyche is based. He came to believe developmental phases influence debilitating psychological disorders in adulthood, as well as a “normal” range of behaviors…

Understanding Freud's relevance to architecture also involves making a distinction between Freud's contributions to psychoanalytic theory today as a body of knowledge versus psychoanalysis as a clinical practice. Freud's works provide the theoretical foundation for the psychoanalyst today, works the psychoanalyst must read (ed. Phillips, 2006: 1). One of the subtle and overlooked aspects of Freud's continuing importance is that psychoanalytic theory stands on firmer ground scientifically than the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Clinical practices vary widely, influenced by combining different approaches with different emphasis, resulting in psychotherapeutic hybrids without a common guiding rubric for therapeutic technique (Marks, 2017: 5). Thus, clinical practices struggle with science-based expectations for mapping clinical results with evidence-based research strategies. Nonetheless, neuroscience researchers acknowledge that the unconscious influences emotions and thought processes and suggest that there is a neurological basis for at least some aspects of Freud's theory on the unconscious (Weston, 2002. Kandel, 2012). Certainly, neuroscience is gaining traction as a model for design thinking, particularly with regard to the brain's neurological embodiment of the body. For example, Harry Mallgrave, the noted architecture historian, in The Architect's Brain writes, “the neurons in the big toe are as much a part of our brain as the frontal lobe that allows us to think about our big toe. The brain is the body in all of its workings and vice versa” (Mallgrave, 2011, 135). Remarkably for the understanding of the architect's psyche, or anyone else's psyche, Freud long ago reasoned that emotional contents and processes of the adult unconscious are linked to the primary sensory organs of childhood. However, efforts to apply Freud's ideas should mind the cautionary as well as promising distinctions outlined above. On one side is the caution stemming from the natural sciences and cognitive science that psychoanalysis as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editor's preface
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Freud and modernity: selfhood and emancipatory self-determination
• 3. Aesthetic experience: the object, empathy, the unconscious, and architectural design
• 4. Open form, the formless, and “that oceanic feeling”
• 5. Closed-form, rule-based composition and control of the architectural gift
• 6. Architectural simulation: wishful phantasy and the real
• 7. Spaces of social encounter: freedoms and constraints
• Conclusion
• Further reading
• References
• Index