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ABSTRACT
The essay examines the influence of the psychoanalysis on architecture. Through the analysis of Anthony Vidler's discussion of the architectural uncanny and Sylvia Lavin's architectural forms of libido, it outlines the significance of psychoanalytical discourse in architecture. My main claim is that psychoanalysis not only assisted in positing the human subject in the architectural realm in order to examine the ways in which they shape each other, but also that this discourse underwent a shift between the early 1990s and the turn of the new millennium. Initially focusing on the concept of the uncanny, psychoanalysis in the early 1990s offered architecture ways to examine the deconstructed, the void and the fragmented. Transitioning to discuss the libido in the past decade, psychoanalysis proposed architecture that would concentrate on the constructed. This shift marks a change in the cultural and intellectual perception of architectural discourse. The paper concludes with a discussion of the rejection of the psychoanalysis of architecture by Deleuze and Guattari, and their interpretations of architect-theorists such as Greg Lynn.
Introduction
This essay discusses two models for the psychoanalysis of architecture, which were developed in North America over the last three decades. In the mid-1980s, after a decade in which deconstructivist theories dominated spatial analysis in architecture, psychoanalysis found its way into the writings of prominent architectural historians and theoreticians and infused their methods of architectural analysis on the symbolic and functional levels. The 1980s culminated with the "Deconstructivist Architecture" (1988) exhibition at the Museum of Modem Art in New York, which was co-curated by the New Zealand-bom, New York-based architectural theoretician Mark Wigley and die architectural icon, Philip Johnson (Johnson and Wigley, 1988). The exhibition presented the work of eight leading architects - including Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman and Coop Himmelb(l)au - who were occupied with deconstructivist theories in their work and marked a milestone, after a decade and a half in which architectural oppositions were positioned against structuralist formulations of architectural meanings. Journals of critical theory, such as Oppositions (edited by key figures including Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Mario Gandelsonas, Anthony Vidier, Kurt W. Forster and Diana Agrest), voiced ideas about the break from the mega-structures and meta-narrati ves (Hays, 1998). The 1988 MoMA exhibition...