Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier

Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity

Lorens Holm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000158410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This well-argued, analytic text provides a greater understanding of spatial issues in the field of architecture. Re-interpreting the fifteenth century demonstration of perspective, Lorens Holm puts it in relation to today's theories of subjectivity and elaborates for the first time the theoretical link between architecture and psychoanalysis.

Divided into three sections, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier argues that perspective remains the primary and most satisfying way of representing form, because it is the paradigmatic form of spatial consciousness. Well-illustrated with over 100 images, this compelling book is a valuable study of this key aspect of architectural study and practice, making it an essential read for architects in their first year or their fiftieth.

Part I
Projection and introjection

1
The New Yorkers

Introduction

Let us return to the New Yorker covers. We opened with the gridded flatland of America, which situated the identity of New Yorkers. It is a question of what New Yorkers are to themselves, and to others. These covers exemplified the psychoanalytic structures of projection and introjection. The subject organises its relations to the world according to inside and outside, by articulating its identity with respect to space. In the Introduction, we said the aim of this argument was to construct an account of architectural space that is an elaboration of the psychoanalytic account of the subject. This account is not about different mathematical spaces, or mechanical space (moving bodies), Newtonian or otherwise. Nor is it about the space of everyday experience (the ‘what is it like for you’), an approach that leads to sampling and tasting. While experience has bearing on any subjective account of space, such phenomenologies begin their investigations as if space were a prior object of experience. While it seems difficult to see how one might begin otherwise, we contest both object and prior.¹ These are questions a subjective account of space cannot beg. We noted that the discovery of the unconscious posed a crisis for the architectural understanding of space. The present thesis about the space of the unconscious began with a joke about space. We said that A View of the World from 9th Avenue was funny because it revealed something about the subjective doubling of vision that could only be revealed within the brackets of a joke. The joke gives voice to an anxiety about something that can only be discharged with laughter and that is only discovered by the subject through subsequent interpretation. The diminutions of perspective reflected not just depth of field but also the self-importance of New Yorkers with respect to the world. These claims must now be unpacked in ways that amplify projection and introjection.

A View of the World …

In the foreground: the blocky grid of buildings which are themselves blocky grids; the Louis Kahn traffic-analysis pattern. In the background: a thin Pacific rim. It is funny because New Yorkers see the world like that and they are bullish enough about New York to assume that everyone else does too. As if even the people clinging to China think the Lower West Side is the coolest place on Earth. Better still: as if they see themselves the way New Yorkers on Ninth Avenue see them. Inhabiting a strip. One could diagnose a third-person spatial dysfunction whose symptom was to always refer to someone else’s there as your here. It would involve a predisposition to assume other people’s views of your world as your own.

The cover is funny for another reason. New Yorkers do think that New York is the biggest and best, even if they have the smarts to laugh at it. They are laughing at themselves. This view of the world says as much about New Yorkers as it does about the people they are looking at. The view has an opposite sense that works through interpretation, not vision. An interpretation of why this picture is funny leads to a recognition by New Yorkers of their geopolitical foibles in the non-threatening form of a joke. The view is projected onto the world by the subject; the interpretation returns a picture of the subject to the subject via language.

Let us look at the first sense: what this cartoon says about perspective projection. A View of the World … is not the view of the world, and not because there is another view which is, with which it does not coincide, but because there is no objective view. The lie of this joke, that this view of the world is everyone’s view, gives way to another truth, that all views are subjective. For the subject, every view is the view of someone. The view that comes back to the subject from the outside is just the view of an other. If the objectivity of the visual representation of space is undermined by this cover, it is not because it is confronted by a particularly persuasive image, a defeat of the objective by the rhetorical power of the subjective, but because it claims that every perspective is the view of a particular subject.

We formalise the relation of subject to image with the geometry of a triangle (Figure 1.1a). The subject, a New Yorker, occupies the projection point at the apex; the image becomes the baseline. The diagram applies to any image for the subject, at least any image whose relation to the subject could be described as a subject viewing an image. The image could be New Yorkistan as well as A View of the World …, or any other image, printed or in any other form. The diagram simply describes how a subject is positioned before the image, how its view of the image radiates outward, and stops at the image. The image is as opaque as paper. It equally describes the relation of the subject to an object. Lacan points out that this account of the relation of subject to the world accords with Descartes’ cogito in Meditations, for which the world is an extension of the subject.²

Figure 1.1a and b

Because the image is the image of a view, this viewing relation seems to be both strengthened and conflated. In a move that anticipates Lacan’s diagram of the visual field, we refine the diagram to distinguish image from view. The image at the base of the triangle becomes transparent (Figure 1.1b). What is looked at through the image is indicated by the base of an extended triangle in dashed lines. The diagram reflects the fact that for the subject, every view of the world is also an image. The triangle formalises a relation between two things, someone who identifies with Manhattan and the world, in the terms mobilised by the visual representation of space. The triangle indicates the way the view projects out at the world from a point of projection. The subject stands before this view as before the image, yoked to its centre, the projection point. Position, screen and the triangulated relation between them constitutes a conceptual apparatus, which organises perception and makes it intelligible. In order for projection to work, two things have to happen: New Yorkers have to, in a sense, internalise this apparatus – they have to take it up and make it constitutive of their relation to the world; and they have to identify with this point. New Yorkers easily identify with this point, placing themselves at it, what Lacan calls symbolic identification, and by so doing, make it their world. The fact that we are unaware of these symbolic burdens does not mean they do not operate, simply that they are unconscious.

Every perspective is someone’s view, and the fact that someone else can move into the same position to have the same view makes it no more objective than the fact that two people who repeat the same words make meaning objective. For the subject, the perspective is not an objective view but a universal form of subjectivity. It is the form of view which says that every view is subjective. It is not a view from all positions or from no position (whatever that might be). It is not clear what other forms of view there might be that would have a stronger claim on objectivity, a view that would constitute a standard against which any particular views – a New Yorker’s, a Chinese’s – could be measured. Such a view would be a truth against which subjectivity (image, opinion, prejudice, taste, fiction) is measured.³

It is no use protesting that view of the world is ambiguous between image and perspective: the image could be anything – a cartoon for instance – and a perspective is a precise survey of space; the image is subjective and perspective is objective. The joke is mobilised because this image takes the form of a perspective, and for the subject perspective has the status of an image. This cover inhabits two registers: it is not just a view (i.e. a perspective) of the world from New York, but an image that reflects the self-importance of New Yorkers. The smaller bits at the top are both farther away (perspective) and less important (image). The fact that the view in A View of the World … is a projection of the subject (its attitudes, prejudices, etc.) led to the conclusion that this cover functions as an image. But all perspectives are projections too. Every perspective is an image for the subject and every image is projected upon the world. If A View of the World … is ‘distorted’, it is because it is inconsistent with perspective, not because it is inconsistent with the world. Medieval painting is inconsistent with Renaissance perspective painting, not inconsistent with the world. Perspective deviates from other forms like plan or axonometric. That all perspectives are projections was one of Lacan’s points, perhaps also Holbein’s, when he asks us to view within the same space the immaculately foreshortened lute and an anamorphotic skull in The Ambassadors.⁴

In the first instance, the diagrams reflect the implied trompe l’œil or transparency of representation. We look through the image to the thing imaged. We see the world through the image of the view. If Figure 1.1a simply placed the viewer in front of an image or an object, Figure 1.1b shows that visual experience goes through the image. The diagram should be familiar to any student of perspective or to anyone who has ever run a slide projector. It is borrowed from perspective, but the image need not be a view (it could be the plan of New Yorkistan; A View of the World … isn’t exactly a perspective either). Perspective is but the form of the relation of subject to the world. Visual space, the kind of space where things seem to get smaller (opaque) when they get farther away (transparent), is a constant reminder of – but not the same as – another relation, which is the relation of image, any image, even a perspective image, to subject and world.

The image here seems transparent. When we look at the New Yorker cover, we either see a picture of an aerial view printed on a magazine cover, opaque; or we see an aerial view of the world, transparent. These options are indicated by Figures 1.1a and b respectively, and they always go together. But when we see Manhattan in an aggrandised relation to the rest of the world, the image functions as a screen. It becomes a screen when the truth of the humour emerges. This is a different sort of opacity; we might, with a nod to Colin Rowe call it phenomenal.⁵ The image becomes opaque in the sense that it is no longer just a New Yorker’s view of the world, but a view of New Yorkers that works not through the image, but through language and interpretation. When we look at a photograph of the Parthenon, we soon see the Parthenon. Not the photograph itself (Figure 1.1a), not even the Parthenon in pieces, of which any photograph of the Parthenon must necessarily be an image (Figure 1.1b). Now the photograph functions as a screen which interrupts the view of the Parthenon in pieces, and becomes the perfect whole image of the object to which we identify.⁶ The opaque image that returns to the subject is described in Lacan’s diagram by the triangle indicating reverse projection, to which we shall return in the discussion of New Yorkistan.

New Yorkistan

The plan of Manhattan is drawn as if it were a map of New Yorkistan, one of those places like Afghanistan that Americans only find out about when they become the sites of natural or military disasters. The New York Times obliges by publishing a map of tribal demographics. The place has so few natural features, so little infrastructure that all the Times can muster is something tribal. It is not particularly attractive or exotic. It is the kind of ‘foreign’ that remains foreign because there is nothing really to know about the place. New Yorkistan is a plan of Manhattan from the point of view of someone for whom New York is a foreign land. It recalls the humour of A View of the World … (as if the Chinese saw themselves the way New Yorkers on Ninth Avenue see them) but in reverse: as if New Yorkers saw themselves the way people in Afghanistan see them: occupying a tribal demographic map. We can formalise this relation in the same manner as we did A View of the World …, with the geometry of the triangle (Figure 1.2b). Except that now the projection point is on the side of the Other, and Manhattan is the screen upon which the image is projected. New Yorkers see an imaginary Manhattan projected from the position of that Pacific rim (the triangle is reversed so that New Yorkers occupy the same position as in Figure 1.2a). The world appears to gaze back. But if this seems to be a view of Manhattan from the outside, it is not exactly an Afghanistani’s view, but a New Yorker’s view of an Afghanistani’s view (New Yorkistan is featured on a New Yorker cover, and not a Kabul daily). As if New Yorkers saw themselves the way they see people in Afghanistan. It is a New Yorker’s view of Afghanistan directed back on him/herself. It is by this subjective circuit, in which New Yorkers see themselves through the eyes of others, or from the space they attribute to others with whom they cannot identify, that New Yorkers are brought to contemplate the possibility that they are strange to themselves.

Figure 1.2a A view of A View of the World… ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: façade… foundation
• Introduction: vision and its doubles
• Part I Projection and introjection
• Part II Perspective, the mirror stage of space
• Part III Space and its object
• Conclusion: the death of space
• Notes
• Image credits
• Bibliography
• Index