Class Unconsciousness and the project of architecture

Pietro Accolti, Prospettiva Pratica (Florence, 1625), anamorphic projection

Architecture is the praxis that takes our collectively held ideologies, attitudes, and understandings, and puts them concretely into the world. In so far as architects are asked to transform our environment by putting new bits in and removing old bits, architects do something other professions do not do. When a client commissions an architect to build, e.g., a hospital, the architect is asked to take our collectively held views on hospitals and health care generally – all our collectively held ideas, knowledge, attitudes, prejudices even – and put them into material form. In order to do this, the architect must reflect upon these social formations. S/he must internalize them and project them into the environment. This is the architectural meaning of the word project, and the definition of the architecture project [Tafuri].

These social formations are collectively held, but they are transformed into the particular, material and spatial form of a building by a process that is channeled through the reflection of a single architect. Society places a burden of trust on architects. How accurate a reflection, how comprehensive a materialisation, depends upon the capacity of the architect to reflect, and the capacity of the design process to allow for reflection. Architects reflect by drawing. This is what happens when a client briefs an architect, the architect briefs his/her design team, the design team returns to the client with a design proposal.

Every time someone throws a Sainsbury cart through a storefront (an act that is not without a certain social integrity or legitimacy), or a volume home builder puts 500 homes on a site in the beltway, a social formation is concretised in the world. The difference between the architecture project on the one hand and a riot or sub-development on the other, all of which are radical projections of a social formation into a physical one, is that the latter are forms of acting out. The riot in particular is a form of class action that has not been sublimated through a process of reflection. Both issue from an unmediated drive that is creative-destructive [Schumpeter’s gale, Klee’s angelus novus]. These transformations of the environment occur without reflection on our collectively held views, or at least without reflection in a form that is recorded in a design process. They are not architecture projects in the architectural sense of project: a trope that goes from the conceptual and collective to the material and particular. It is reflection which gives the architecture project its fictive quality, a quality that the riot or sub-development will never have.

We are reasserting here a version of Mies’ thesis that architecture is the expression of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age. Except instead of spirit [Hegel], we are speaking about a form of class consciousness [Hegel, via Marx].

The architecture project is a form of materialisation of class consciousness [Marx], except that it is more often than not class unconsciousness, because many of the ideas, presuppositions, prejudices, clichés, ideologies that we hold collectively, we are unaware of. It takes a form of cultural analysis, which proceeds as a form of reflection upon our artefacts, to make them manifest, explicit, conscious. The collective unconscious is the library from which Rossi’s collective memory draws forth its forms. The project makes conscious, i.e., puts into material space and form, the social formations that had hitherto remained hidden. To go from concept to material, hidden to visible, latent to manifest, unconscious to conscious, inside to out, are different glosses on the idea of the project, which involves a transformation.

Reflection involves introjection [Lacan] as well as projection. The architect has to internalise the social formation that s/he finds her/himself amidst – inhale this ambient social cloud, as it were – before it can be projected as material form.

Note: Throwing a cart through a storefront is a form of projection, but no reflection on social life has been undertaken and consequently, there has been no transformation from conceptual to material. It simply involves the translation of material from one location to the other, like vomit.

architectural evidence that the spatial subject exists

The relation of mouth and hand, speech and gesture (the poignancy of both), a concrete cantilever beam accusing a concrete plane surface to describe a triangular site (the poignancy of both), the people beneath, a scalar relation: the immediate and intuitive intelligibility of this project is additional evidence that the spatial subject exists.

Le Corbusier, project for a monument to Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Villlejuif, Paris (1937). Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Villlejuif was editor-in-chief of the Communist newspaper L’Humanite.

architectural evidence that the spatial subject exists

We draw buildings,

build buildings,

use buildings, and

write about buildings.

No one has yet explored, or explored fully, the quadripartite structure of our engagement with architecture. And in particular, the relation between these terms – drawing, building, using, writing – which is sequential episodic and cyclical. One thing is clear however: this engagement with architecture is also an engagement with ourselves. We draw buildings, which puts them in relation to the symbolic world of desire and ideology (think of the ideological shift attending each new technique of representation). We build them, which extracts them from a representational context and puts them in an organised world of finance and production. We use buildings in symbolic and material ways, the latter primarily by inhabiting them. We write about them to reorient them within their symbolic and material contexts, and to plot the path of their efficacy, as part of a continual process that critically rearranges our thinking on architecture. This is not a process of correction; it is work, psychical and physical work.

In order to put buildings in relation to the human subject that inhabits them, we draw on philosophy and psychoanalysis because these are the two discourses that treat the human subject in its capacity as a thinking being and a speaking being. These capacities are so essentially human that research relevant to architecture always ignores them. One of the challenges of writing about architecture is how to bring the human subject as a thinking and speaking being in line with the human subject as a spatial being. This capacity to be spatial is not exhausted by the material fact that we have a body; nor indeed, is the capacity to inhabit architecture exhausted by the fact of the body. The relation between thinking, speaking, and spacing needs to be explored. How does architecture reflect the fact that the human subject who inhabits space, inhabits it as a speaking being and a thinking being? How does this fact change our thinking on the social political economic historical material aesthetic efficacy of architecture? The immediate and inherent intelligibility of a project for a palazzo that addresses the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, witnessed by the Colosseum, is architectural evidence that the spatial subject exists.

If spatial subjects did not exist, this architectural project would not be intelligible as a project, or, if intelligible, not poignant.

Guiseppe Terragni, with A. Carminati, P. Lingeri, M. Nizzoli, E. Saliva, M. Sironi, & L. Vietti, Competition entry for Palazzo Littorio, Rome, project A, 1934. Littorio addresses Maxentius, witnessed by Il Colosseo, on a triangular site. Note also Il Duce’s podium and the curved facade decorated with stress fractures.

images of the multitude > the old testament

Humanity is an endless lineage that constitutes an open set: the lineages of Genesis – ‘Shem begat Arphax and Arphax begat Salah…’; the progeny of Babel. Anchored and made material in the world by an urban artifact.

Images of the multitude > suburbia

Suburbia and contemporary forms of settlement (= semi-permanent distribution of people). The multitude takes a particular form of repetitive space that appears to be bounded but infinite, like the field of the Other.

human >< nature

We can ask, what is the subject of architecture, or perhaps more fundamentally, the subject of space? What positions does space, theorized as a system, leave open for filling with subjects and objects? How do we understand this subject – does it have components or form or internal relations? This may be a new, less ontologically loaded, way of approaching the question of human nature. This blog will go from self to Other, from human nature to nature. This blog will begin with the problem of the subject, and it will end with a consideration of the environment. It will attempt to articulate, or at least point in the direction of, the environment. How do we position ourselves in nature with our human-ness? How do we recuperate our originary wildness? If it has an instrumental value, it will be for thinking a new humanism, a humanism for addressing the environmental problems of our world.

We will go from subject to environment:

1. from individual to habitat (social habitat or Other, spatial habitat or environment)

2. from the problem of the subject of architecture (what is the subject of architecture + what sort of architecture has a subject) to our problem of habitat destruction and the sustainability of our environment

Frontispiece to Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture (1753/1755) showing an image of the primitive hut by Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen

self & society

Lacan is arguably the most astute and extensive theorizer of self and society, in a discipline and practice dedicated to self and society.

Lacan is someone whose theories an architect may be interested in knowing about if they want to know more about how their buildings may have an effect on an individual (a self) and on a group (a society). And also how they may have an effect on their client or their client on them, because to you your client is part of society, and to your client, you are society.

We need to know more about what Lacan means by self and society. Lacan does not say society, but Other. Other with a capital O. Other is not other people per se, that’s others (small o) other people, your significant other, but rather the social, ethical, legal, economic, political, legal codes that regulate other people and organize them as a society, and, known and unbeknownst to you, regulate you too. It is all the codes, laws, regulations, taboos, customs, what Foucault called power relations, whether they be explicitly stated and enforced, like the legal code, or an uncodifed practice, like customs that regulate marriages or care of the body or familial relations. And self has at least two components. There is an ego which is what we usually refer to as sense of self and which in psychoanalysis is regarded as imaginary, because it is something that only you perceive even though you think others do too, and is closely related to self-image. And an unconscious which is subject to the codes that constitute the Other. If the ego is imaginary, the unconscious is symbolic because codes are symbolic and language like, and when explicitly formulated, are formulated as symbols with a form of grammar. The self is therefor an assemblage of ego and unconscious, which Lacan usually refers to as the subject, the human subject. He also calls the subject the speaking being or parletre, which underscores the important role that the symbolic realm – in particular, language (hence a neologism) – plays in human life, but also the fact that psychoanalysis is the talking cure. In psychoanalysis, the subject speaks. In addition to subject and Other, we can speak about the relation of self to Other. Lacan frequently says ‘field of the Other’. The Other is an almost limitless symbolic field that we navigate as our daily lives. We can ask, what relation does the subject have to the field of the Other; how is the subject positioned in this field? The three so-called clinics of psychoanalysis, or broad areas of treatment are the neurotic the psychotic and the pervert.

Pierre Patte, Key Plan of the Monumens eriges en France a la gloire de Louis XV (1765)

genus loci & zeitgeist

The upshot of the argument in Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier (2010), if not its conclusion, is that Brunelleschi and Le Corbusier are arch-types of the modern subject. Le Corbusier invented the temporal subject through his practice. And Brunelleschi, through his practice, invented the spatial one.

Eisenman’s project has been to expose the underlying metaphysics of presence that operates through architecture. He has used his practice to invent architectural strategies for deconstructing presence, showing it to be what it is, a metaphysics that has no more a place in a material practice such as architecture as it does in a material practice such as language. For Eisenman, the metaphysics of presence enters architectural discourse through the twin doctrines of zeitgeist or spirit of (the) time(s) and genus loci or spirit of place(s).

Following Eisenman then… Le Corbusier, the subject of zeitgeist; Brunelleschi, the subject of genus loci.

For Le Corbusier, inventor of the free plan that freed the plan of space,… a future anterior subject, or subject of time in the future anterior tense. I argue that he used his practice to articulate a kind of future anterior loop in which he will have always already seen himself looping the Parthenon. The story of Le Corbusier’s career: he stands before the Parthenon as a young man [1911], with the premonition that when he is on his deathbed, he will realise that he was always obsessed with the Parthenon and that all his work was dominated by it. He glimpses what he will only learn about himself in retrospect, that his future practice is now being formed by his encounter with the Parthenon. The lesson of this story about a reflective practice is that the zeitgeist thrusts forward, by looping back upon itself. Although it takes the form of forward thinking through technology, a present that is already flush with the future, it anticipates itself, it repeats.

Brunelleschi invented perspective [probably 1420s] and went on to invent the perspectival space of the nave [San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito, 1440s-60s], and by so doing, the modern punctual subject of space, whose model is visual space. I argue that perspective is a form of space bound to the vanishing point in the way that we are bound by our fathers. The spatial subject is always threatened with annihilation and always imagining its way back into the picture.

Close readings of the following texts will substantiate these arguments:

Le Corbusier, Journey to the East (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1987) + The Final Testament of Pere Corbu: a translation and interpretation of Mise au point (New Haven: Yale, 1997)

Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, The Life of Brunelleschi (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970)

Places

Lorens Holm, photomontage of downtown St. Louis, 1990

Place-making – still popular amongst planners in search of a legitimate and certain practice – is derived from a watered-down phenomenology. We attribute the failure of place-making to the phenomenological concept of place as a locus of qualities. In other words, to the place bit of place-making. The making bit is potentially ok. There is an unspoken but underlying phenomenological approach to city thinking that privileges sense experience and has led directly to thinking about places as if they were constituted of qualities. This has led to city planning full of places with terrible qualities because they fail to engender any genuine engagement with the architectural environment. It is precisely the attempt to build qualities that screens or cuts off the occupant from its environment. Think of all the plaster-board Il Redentores that clutter our cities. What is missed is thinking the environment as a grammar-like construction for subject-object relations. Grammar is the structure of a language. The idea of subject-object is borrowed from grammar and grammar is theorised in linguistics. Subject-object only exist in so far as they are positions in a grammar. They exist only within a structured system, the more highly structured, the better. If we want to understand the conditions under which can obtain a genuine, resilient, enduring engagement with the architectural environment, we could do worse than look to the ways we structure our environments and the objects in them. We could do worse than to look sideways at both linguistics and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is where subject-object are most fully worked out within the realm of human affairs.

We need to start thinking the city as a structured space in which subject-object are defined as positions relative to each other. How can we talk about a grammar of space, of which the city is an emergent property? How can we talk about the city as a system that has a position for a subject? Film studies talks about the film-goer, which film addresses generically, and which has certain attributes that film is designed for [the 24 frames per second subject]. The economy has its labourer and its capitalist, which exist entirely as functions of the money system. Literature has its reader and its author, such that Barthes could proclaim the death of the author [1967] and Foucault could ask what is an author [1969]. Architectural thinking is not completely bereft of the subject, but it needs to be developed. City studies has the flaneur [1863] for instance, the detached man in the crowd who watches people flow by. This subject is invoked or called into being by the boulevard and its multitudes. For Geddes, the city is an interactive knowledge-scape that invokes, like the agora, the informed voter or participant in democracy. In this view, you cannot have an informed participant of democracy without a certain type of city, not because you cannot vote in the countryside, but because the informed voter is a position defined by a type of city that functions as a knowledge landscape for its inhabitants. [Note – the flaneur is invoked by the boulevard; the agora invokes the participant in democracy] We need to be able to ask of any space, who is its subject?

The phenomenological concept of place, as it is used by architects, is infantilising. If a place is thought as a container for qualities, then the question about places becomes a question about the qualities you like (do you like red? a fountain for the missus?). The subject of place is reduced to a grasper after qualities. Consensus becomes impossible because everyone likes something different. And no one really cares what you like, anyway. Architecture is not about what you want, but about living a good life. As soon as we get away from making places and instead start making structure, we will find that the architectural environment is full of good places to be.

Lets pretend that posts can have footnotes.
In architects’ phenomenological discourse, place is always singular. It is always place, never places, even though place is a ‘thing’ word like car or hat, and not a ‘stuff’ word like, e.g., space, hair, or water. This tends to elevate its status: place becomes an abstract and hallowed concept that sometimes deigns to touch down upon the surface of the earth and bless us with an infusion of its metaphysical content. Imagine if we had hat, which sometimes infused the things we put on our heads with the quality of hatness. We can help to undermine phenomenological discourse amongst architects simply by attending to our language. Always use places [plural] rather than place [singular], in cases were we are not referring to a particular place, but to places generally.

The subject of architecture

Psychoanalytic theory, as it is articulated in the text of Freud and Lacan, is the most systematic, extended, and closely observed account of the human subject. It is a spatial subject. To cite a few examples. Freud referred to the discovery of the unconscious as his Copernican revolution because it decentred the subject from its conscious world. Desire after Lacan is about position, the position of an object with respect to a subject. And Lacan argued that Freud’s detail, Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, is about where? not who?

Arguably, the problem with the architectural avant-garde – the critique that emerged in the 1970s in response to modernism – is that it was not able to articulate a sufficiently resilient account of its subject, the subject of architecture and the city. Deconstruction (predominant in America) and phenomenology (UK), both of which philosophies were drafted in by architects to theorise their architecture and urban practices, are inadequate to the task. In 1978, Mario Gandelsonas asks who/what is the subject of architecture, ‘the subject as origin and determinant of the architectural object….’ In structuralism, the subject is a function of structure. The linguistic subject is made possible by the systematic structuring of language by Saussure. Gandelsonas again: ‘At the point when this object [i.e. architecture, urbanism] becomes clearly, and almost autonomously, defined in its systematic internal, formal relations then does the subject take on a clear configuration. In linguistic terms the definition of an organisation as a normative system, which in architecture would be the constitutive rules of the object, implies at the same time its subject.’ Arguably, Eisenman’s syntactical project made it possible to articulate an architectural subject.

It is unclear why Gandelsonas’ question is never clearly taken up, never given more currency in architecture.

It is unclear why Eisenman and Tschumi flirt with, but never engage with Lacan, in the way that they collaborated with Derrida.

One of the strengths of psychoanalysis is that it does not lead so easily to form the way Deconstruction could lead so quickly to plan fragmentation (the enjoyment of a problematic unity) and phenomenology to touchy feely surface treatment (the comforts of interior design). The consequences for architecture of the desiring decentred subject is never worked through.

Long before the IAUS folded in the early 1980s, the post-structuralist critique of the modern object had collapsed into the stylistic post-modernism we recognise in plasterboard Il Redentores.

Perhaps this po-mo is an instance of the repression of the unconscious by the ego.

Mario Gandelsonas, ‘From Structure to Subject: The Formation of an Architectural Language’ in Oppositions 17 (1978) pp6-29. Lorens Holm, photomontage, Beckett in St. Louis, 1990.