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Anthony Vidler - Warped Space

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This lecture explores the historical and psychological evolution of "space" as a concept in modernism, moving from Enlightenment ideals of transparency to the anxieties of psychological alienation, spatial distortion, and the breakdown of traditional notions of place.

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my lecture tonight is is called Warped

space and as I drove down from New York

on trends I tried to refigure my space

so that I could talk about warp space

I've been for an entire weekend between

different aspects of my my English

family you remember going home to your

parents at the weekend so at that point

warp space became very real and

alienation became even more real and

it's almost impossible for me to talk

about alienation of course in the AAA

where I feel so much at home

this talk is set in the context of a

book that I'm the process of completing

a kind of sequel or parallel work to the

architectural uncanny I I do promise by

the way after the architectural and

county and the anxiety of space too I

thought I should choose a happier title

for the book the book after this you

know it's just like Marquez my cousins

has to choose something sort of more

cheerful than than damage or ugliness

after after his next set of lectures so

something like the third book would be

the house beautiful how to be

comfortable at home and various other

things and I contracted with Ralph

Lauren and a number of other Harrods the

new Harrods interior decorating a book

department to to write that so but

that's after this so you'll have to deal

with a little nervousness still tonight

but believe me I'm getting tired where

the uncanny book investigated the

uncertain foundations of thinking about

da Mosta city and home Lena's in an era

of homelessness as events in certain

problematic works of the contemporary

avant-garde this new book is more

concerned with a conceptualization of

public space in the modern period I give

you a photograph by Tom Jacoby entitled

France 1984 this new book is more

concerned with the conceptualization of

public space in the modern period from

the Enlightenment to the present and

especially with its representation

painterly photographic filmic digital

and theorization as reflecting the

profound sense of anxiety and

psychological alienation attendant on

the emergence of mass social space I

begin by examining the Enlightenment

subsection with transparency and its

desire to rid the existing city of any

obscure or dark insalubrious

or dangerous spaces I end with an

analysis of the completed Rompuy J of

Meatballs presidency in Paris as a narrative

narrative

despite the different subject matters

various chapters the book might be said

to trace the progress of transparency in

the face of the constant resistance

posed to Urbanus and their imaginaries

by everyday life and by the newly

discovered diseases of space agro phobia

and claustrophobia last year here I

spoke of the phobic reactions to fit is

embedded in the presets of infinite

space shared by Howard Roark and look

Avicii eight alike in the 1930s Gary

Cooper tonight I want to look more

closely at the theorization of spatial

form itself in the first third of the

century theorization that took place not

only in the consulting rooms of

psychiatrists but also in the work of

art historians and critics and that was

determined to see the formal

dislocations of futurism constructivism

cubism and Expressionism as the marks of

a period of deep spatial unease a period

where the desperate search for place

seems destined to be undermined by the

universalizing space of modern

technology life and movement in his

brief review of the photographic album

entitled x marks the spot

published in Chicago by the spot

publishing company in 1930 and published

in document in 1930 respect I remarked

on the custom of publishing photographs

of criminal cadavers which seems equally

he said to play well in Europe and

certainly represents moral

transformation the considerable moral

transformation touching the attitudes of

the public with regard to violent death

to illustrate the point but I selected a

photograph from this first photographic

history of Chicago gangland slayings as

it was touted on the jacket depicting

the corpse of an assassinated gangster

found in the ice of Lake Michigan the

figure face up as if frozen while

floating a literal monument to its own death

death

in one sense of course this image has no

relation to the concept of x marks the spot

spot

announced in the title of the album and

referring to the custom of marking the

position of the victim after removal of

the body there was in this case no mark

to be left on the ice

following the excavation of the frozen

corpse and its place of discovery with

destined to be effaced forever with the

subsequent four for instance however the

corpse acted as it as its own mark one

only to be rendered permanent in the

police photo and this photograph assures

the Nuba man has recently pointed out

was itself an enigmatic record at first

one sees not very much an image pure of

a pure and simple place chaotic a mess

of both of white and black and then one

recognizes very gradually the man dead

and probably assassinated frozen in the

ice of the lake of michigan transformed

into an anamorphic vision by virtue of

the flattening surface of the ice and

the angle of the photo the dead gangster

has been doubly recomposed first as the

martyr of the sight of his own death and

secondly as a visually encoded

hieroglyphic image of that mark further

whatever place was marked by position of

the body it was not the site of the

assassination itself but rather of the

place where the gangster had ended up

propelled by the currents of the lake

and frozen by chance on rising to the

surface a mark therefore the ever exact

ever transitory place of death in modern

urban life but at the same time the

consistent popular fascination with a

nature and signs of that place this

signal of baptized interest in the

position and role of X in marking the

spot of death in the city anticipated by

eight years his more developed

reflection on leeches proclamation of

the death of God an essay in which the

role of the mark is now played by a

monument the obelisk of Luxor

rekted in the Place de la Concorde in

1836 and the spot marked by the obelisk

of course is that at the erection of the

guillotine for the execution of louis

xvi in this process of transformation in

which a police inquiry into a murdered

gangster is enlarged to encompass the

death of God the mystery who is the

victim and who the murderer is similarly

deepened both by the historical age and

mysterious origins of X the obelisk in

Egypt marking the spot and by its

subsequent deracinated and transposition

to modern Paris the circumstances of its

reutilization that is the reutilization

of the obelisk and the subsequent

history of its interpretation and

reception in the plus place or plaster

la concorde when during to the

monumental history of this plus itself

established for george Bataille the

appropriate news on sin in which the

stage reaches fool running into the

public square with Lantern lit in broad daylight

daylight

crying I'm looking for God the obelisk

held a special place in Betazed symbolic

typography for by virtue of its origin

in history and its monumental

role in space it once potentially

reconciled time in space

if facing the one in favor of the ladder

at the same time as opening the way

through a process of each symbol at D

symbolization and by it too insistent

presence to a negation of all historical

meaning X then marks the spot not only

of the proclamation of the death of God

and of the actual murder of the king in

this case but also of the threshold of

all ensuing consequences and

potentialities or rather the place from

which it would be possible to imagine

any such future the conjuncture of the

Place de la Concorde and the obelisk was

thus an entirely appropriate plus or

place for any Gian inquiry the place

itself had indeed been the object of

almost as

many redefinitions and imposed identify

identities as the obelisk as a place

that is its place with singularly

unstable in both political and

architectural terms begun in the mid

18th century on the site of a vast

waterlogged field on the edge of the

city the plaster was originally

dedicated to Louis fifteen a maned as

such selected as a result of a

competition in 1748 to determine the

appropriate site on which to erect the

statue of the king in celebration of his

miraculous recovery from a severe

illness it had finally be conceived by

Jacques Gabrielle in the form of a large

octagon defined that is corners by

pavilions and with Bouchard all's

equestrian statue of the king at its

center in 1792 revolution the statue was

topple replaced by the figure of Liberty

and the class renamed plaster la

revolucion at the end of that year the

guillotine was installed to the first

time appearing game in 1793 for the

execution of louis xvi and Marie

Antoinette the fantasy of a plus full of

beauties is there to remain until 1794

following the execution of Robespierre

in 1795 the plus was renamed plus the

Latin Quarter in 1814 plus three the

15th in 1826 plus louis xvi in 1828 plus

Louis the 15th again and finally in 1830

once more returns to the convulsions

name plus de la Concorde plans for its

architectural embellishments were

equally changeable throughout the period

in 1890 1794 Jacques Derrida vide the

artist has set up the horses of mockery

at the entrance of the shoals of easy

joining those that have been erected in

1719 in 1800 the Polian took down the

figure of Liberty with a plan of raising

a national column in its place

two years later changed his mind and

proposed substituting a statue of

Charlemagne with the face of Napoleon

this didn't fly either and in 1811

projects were developed for a fountain

louis xviii proposed a funeral monument

to larry xvi in 1826 Charles the tenth

laid the first stone for the base of the

statue of the executed monument monarch

Louie the 16th and in 1836 before a huge

crowd and in the presence of the king

Louis Philippe the engineer of the bath

re-raise the obelisk of lips or gifts of

Muhammad Ali of Egypt onto the base

prepared by the architect his architect

it off over the next four years the

plastiscines its present form with eight

allegorical statues each dedicated to a

major French city mounted on Gabriel's

pavilions together with some 20 columns

holding lamps and two fountains

emulating those of the square of

saltpeter in Rome an eclectic plus

indeed baptized observations on this

place while said in the context of his

reading of Nietzsche in the 1930s were

also informed by his inquiry into

architectural monument allottee and the

space of a public realm in modern

culture an investigation begun in the

articles architecture Espace a news day

in documenting continued as Daniel ei

has recently demonstrated throughout his

writings Herbert I began to explore that

profound destabilization of the realm of

the monumental operated by the force of

space itself and met precisely the

psychological power of space considered

as fluid boundary of facing always

displaced and always a displacing medium

characteristically his brief article on

his space or space published in the

first issue of document in 1930 was

illustrated by the tie by four

apparently unrelated but in fact

carefully selected photographs placed in

pairs on facing pages the first

depicted the demolished or collapsed wall

wall

prison revealing the bars of the cells

within the second immediately below

showed a monkey dressed up like a

the third across from the destroyed

prison was an image of a Nandi

initiation ceremony photographs in

Tanganyika in 1929 the fourth the scene

of a giant fish about to swallow a small

fish each of these images was provided

by a title drawn from the text of

in relationship to the to the prison the

day when the walls collapsed in front of

the bars of their cell and then in

relationship to the monkey that a monkey

dressed as a woman should be only one of

the divisions of space and then an

ignoble initiation rite practiced by

savages and finely spaced can become one

fish who eats another I'm only going to

deal tonight with the prison and the

fish the monkey and the initiation right

would require a whole inquiry into the

anxiety of space the space of the other

generated by the rediscoveries of

different kinds of initiation rites and

and ceremonies in in Africa in the 1930s

a clue as to bow ties meaning may be

gleaned from his first qualification of

the word of space for space as

questioned the covenants covenants or

suitability had always been in

architecture especially a loaded term

referring to the classical codes of

appropriateness of a genre or an order

to a particular program at its simplest

regulating the application of the orders

and constraining decoration to a rigid

and social hierarchy but evident even on

the nonces of which but ty speaks are

very different from those of the

classical Canon or rather even as they

rely on former canons are conceived in

order to establish entirely new mix onra

and canons not of social hierarchy but

if it's dissolution lot of social

propriety but it's withering away new

genre and canons that is of power and

eroticism represented in space precisely

through the abilities of space itself to

dissolve boundaries but I'd examples

reinforced by carefully chosen

photographs refer not to the power

invested in the controlled spaces of an

aristocratic tastes or burgeois function

nor for the ritual spaces of traditional

political erotic practice but to the

most fundamental eroticism of spatial

transmutation itself thus for the Thai

space can become one fish who eats

another traditionally conventional space

such as that of a prisoner for example

is indeed only perceptible in its full

force when caught in the act of passing

from one space to another as in the

moment of collapse a try didactic to the

last speculates that evidently no one

has thought of throwing the professor's

into prison to teach them what space is

for example the day when the walls

collapsed in front of the bars of their

cell unquote this imagined collapse of

the sardian universe which was after all

anticipated by the Maquis destroyed

himself once for the tie and opening

onto a world of unmitigated eroticism in

unimaginable freedom from traditional

criminals that this imaginary freedom

took place in bataille terms in space

pointed to the special place of the idea

and practice of space in modernism in

what follows I want to trace the

prehistory of both eyes work on space

the prehistory of inner of his anxiety

of place so to speak as a first step to

the reformulation of spatial thinking in

our present found us yet the condition

one in which the themes first propose

by Michi and later extended bye bye-bye

but I seem to find at least a distant

echo architects and their apologists

have throughout the 20th century tended

to celebrate space if in the 19th

century architecture would seem in terms

of style and structure related to

nationality society and culture in the

20th century the dominant theme has been

that of space space protagonists of

architecture noted Bruno xavie in 1948

summing up over 50 years of spatial

theory and practice but marked out

Architecture from the other arts as a

functional and experiential

accommodation of the moving body and the

perceiving subject in space embraced by

art historians and architects alike the

idea of space has held a double promise

of dissolving the rigid stylistic

characterizations of the 19th century in

two fundamental 3-dimensional

organizations and providing the

essential material so to speak for the

development of a truly modern

architecture space to paraphrase Viktor

Bergen paraphrasing Heinrich Berlin has

a history or rather considering its

multiple definitions in different

academic and professional domains has

many histories far from the apparently

neutral and universal entity imagined by

philosophers after cont space can be

seen in the light of these histories as

a complex cultural and intellectual

construct continually shifting in its

formulation application and

instrumentality in historical cultural

terms like the body or like sexuality

itself space may be considered not so

much as a constant but as a concept that

shifts and changes over time according

to the conceive er and a perceiver to

assert this of course doesn't mean that

what a Marxist philosopher space-like

only Lefevre calls material space does

not exist

certainly the physical enclosure and

occupation of space together with the

instrumental expansion consumption and

reproduction of territories and

boundaries assisted by technology

mapping and viewing is a constant factor

in our lives spaces in this sense

produced like any other material object

with corresponding social political and

economic effects but precisely because

of this cultural social and economic

production this space however measurable

is not as Cantonese followers a pine an

unchanging a universal our priori its

perception and inhabitation are the

products of individual and social

experience space becomes contested at

its very origin as a sociologist georg

simmel noted at the turn of the century

social space is not so much defined

geometrically and in measurable terms

that is as it is quote a specific

psychological content produced

reciprocally by individuals perhaps for

this reason the word space has continued

throughout this century to designate a

central concept for the analysis of

architecture and urbanism generally

recognised by pioneers of formal

analysis by Heinrich Berlin and Elias

regal space became central to the

architectural histories of August

Marshall and Paul Frankfurt and was

canonized so to speak within the

modernist tradition by the publication

of secret Gideon's space time in

architecture in 1941 given new art

historical life by only saw steel in

v-day form of 1943 sir Gideon as the

most modernist architect the invention

of a new space conception was the right

motif of modernity itself and this theme

was taken up after World War two by

Bruno's AV Rex Martinson and Renato de

Frisco the political and social

characteristics of space theorized in

political geography and sociology since

the turn of the century by Theodor Herzl

zimo and how blacks were also

increasingly seen as keys to the

understanding of architecture and

urbanism in forming studies as diverse

as those by Sean Barlow von Paris and

the situation as critiques of urbanism

in the International Situationist

between the late fifties in the late

sixties psychological and existential

theories of space based on the theories

of Eugene minkovski

jean piaget and of course Heidegger and

Sartre we easily equally influential on

the interpretation of architectures

poetics remember the Gaston Bachelard

the poetics in the fast was first

published in 1957 alternatively

architectural functionalist were

comforted by the empirical experiments

of ET hall the hidden dimension of 1969

and robert's summer personal space 1969

also at the same time as being helped in

different ways by the manuals of spatial

organization turned out by Christopher

Alexander and Kevin Lynch in an eighth

rank flight late 1960s Marxist by Corey

Lefebvre and post-structuralist like

Michel Foucault their analysis

reinvigorated the idea of space by

relating it to power and

institutionalized systems of order

prisons asylums and schools as well as

the ideology who functionalism became

the privileged objects of study the

historians concern to locate and resist

the sources of power within the

professional discourse of architecture

itself post-modernism has similarly been

characterized as a reaction to modernism

whether in its spatial complexities or

its return to traditional spaces

critics like Frederick Jameson in a

seminal essay on the hotel Bonaventure

in Los Angeles have even postulated a

generalized postmodern space

notwithstanding this history of overuse

and imprecise application the notion of

space has recently shown signs of

another revival this time on two fronts

supporters of minority discourses based

on gender sexuality and ethnicity have

explored the potentiality of spatial

analysis for the assertion of specific

values and sites that might confirm and

sustain subjects and societies more

differentiated in nature and

construction in the imaginary Universal

subject of modernism and traditional

Marxism sociologists and urban

geographers have rewritten Marxism to

include the spatial and the territorial

in their considerations of class and

ethnic struggle gender theorists have

interrogated the space of sexuality

attempting to identify what might be the

dimensions of feminist gay lesbian or

queer space post-colonial thinkers like

homi Bhabha have stressed the liminal condition

condition

of exhibit subjects in space at the same

time a critical rereading of the

foundational text of art history from

reference tomorrow from regal to

Panofsky has renewed interests in the

spatial aspects of our historical

interpretation even as the study of

visual culture has engendered historical

research into the way in which vision

has been framed into the last century it

is no accident then that space has

beamed from the turn of the century on

understood as fundamentally modern both

as a concept and as a produced reality

and it's supposed modernity resided in

the most symptomatic disturbance in the

concepts of space since Descartes the

radical effects of temporality long

before the popularization of Einstein

the calibration of space to time

preoccupied philosophers and

institutions writers painters and

architects to the extent that space time

became a dominant like motif of

modernism the visual experiments of

maría and Muybridge along with his

running man followed by their

instrumentalization in the service of

time and motion studies and tailor

ization provided images of movement in

space that were ratified and exploited

not just in moving pictures but in the

overlapping and multiple exposures of

futurism and cubism the diagram of

Etienne moiré of a man jumping off a

chair from the the 1860s ree-ree priest

in a Duchamp celebrated nude descending

a staircase staircase in 1911 1912 in

architecture the moving subject in space

was given the role of forum giver

accommodated mechanically and

phenomenally through all the techniques

and representational devices of speed

and transparency and as the subject was

not only moving in its physical

dimensions the new space was called on

to reflect its shifting moods and

psychological states the resulting call

for a spatial representation of such

double movement physical and psychical

found diverse responses in modernism

from expressionist distortion purist

promenade in infinite space to the

psychological planner

of Surrealism for all these reasons

special ideas were particularly

attractive to modernist architects first

as a way of escaping the historicist

trap of stylistic revivalism and

incorporating time movements and social

life into the conceptualization of

abstract form in general and then as a

way of defining the terms of this new

life its relationship to nature the body

and the psyche the industry of Marvel

ISM indeed might be an often has been

written as a history of competing ideas

of space at the turn of the century

Hendrik Braga wrote on round Princeton

architecture in 1907 August indle who

had followed the lectures of fellow lips

in Munich joined spatial theory to

empathy theory in his the beauty of the

big city in 1908 both authors have been

seen as influential on the spatial ideas

of Mies van der Rohe

the Dutch architects and painters in the

de style group including Theo van

osburgh and Piatt Mondrian advanced

their revolutionary concepts of

neoplastic space in their own journal in

the United States Frank Lloyd Wright

took on the entire space of the

continent in his vision of a prairie

space fit for democratic individualist

s' is Viennese assistant Rudolph

Schindler dubbed this space architecture

in a brief homage to what he called this

new medium published in 1934 in France

the reflections of only Beth saw on time

movement in space were quickly picked up

by architects and artists and

incorporated in the popular writings of

Amie floor taken up by the painter Ozone

full and the architect of Abruzzi a

later to be elaborated into the latter's

poetic a vocation of a modernist it's

fast and easy blur or ineffable space

Syria's discovering ineffable space on

the Acropolis it was hardly coincidental

then that historians of the modern

movement armed with the same spatial

concepts in their own discipline were

able to find elite correspondence

between space and modernity in the early

and yet the idea of space has by no

means always held the positive

connotations attributed to it by

modernists from community a to Gideon

indeed it is far more often being seen

as marked by instability and an elusive

negativity as opposed for example to the

apparent securities involved in the

notion of place the attempt of

phenomenological thinkers from Rousseau

to bash law to arrest the fluidity of

space and to domesticate it for the body

and society in place has ever been

thought by the anxiety attached to space

and its tendency to invade even the most

defended of places the theory of the

uncanny outlined by shelling and

redefined in psychoanalytic terms by

Freud but stresses this capacity of

invisible space the unsettled space to

play to unsettle place in high militia

erupting in the Heimlich model space

after all takes its initial definition

from the sublime where infinite

extension whether a distance height

depth or light and dark approximates the

terror of the naturally infinite space

in the sublime of Burke and Schiller is

precisely that incommensurable

unknowable invisible nothingness that

represents if it represents anything the

very extent of our incapacities space

and boundary space and limit and more

importantly from our cuts for

architecture space and monumentality has

therefore been opposed to each other in

the modern period from the outset the

dream of bathing in space a dream suited

to the dimension of the crusiers aerobic

imagination was thus from the outset

countered by the troubling realization

that space of such was posited on the

basis of an aesthetics of uncertainty

and movement and a psychology of anxiety

with a nostalgic tree melancholic or

progressively anticipatory with its

roots in the empirical psychology and

neo-kantian formalism of the late night

century Robert wishes theories of

optical perception tailed ellipse

concepts of empathy and realm aesthetic

and Conrad's Fiedler's mentalism the

psychology of space was one that was

devoted to calibrating the endlessly

shifting sensations and moods of a

perceiving subject whose perceptions

moreover had less to do with what was

objectively there than what was

projected as seen the social psychology

of space as elaborated by Zemo was

established on equally insecure grounds

space itself as we have noted was

conceived by zimmel as the dynamic and

continually shifting resultant rather

than the neutral container of social

relations in these terms we might well

characterize the space constituted by

and for modernism a psychological space

this kind of spatial construction was

developed so to speak along with and as

a product of the modern subject and

enter the vocabulary of Urbanists and

doctors architects and artists around

the 1870s it was a space invented

initially to respond to what was seen to

be the pathological conditions of life

endemic to the metropolis conditions

that were to be described in symbols own

metropolis a mental life of 1901 it

follows the psychological space as first

formulated was- space or

psychopathological space construed as

the meteor in which flourished a gamut

of newly identified spatial socio or

socio mental diseases George Miller

beards neurasthenia shaco's hysteria

vest Falls agoraphobia here illustrated

quite self-consciously by Thai Baht both

claustrophobia here also illustrated by

Thai Baht one of the first of the

post-impressionist to understand the

psychological theories of space in the

modern metropolis these among many

metropolitan space seem most both

essentially modern and this

estranging the zimmel wrote awful of the

fear of contact a pathological symptoms

sped endemically in the

turn-of-the-century berlin constructing

at a spatial fear one that stems from

the too rapid oscillation between post

mass and distance in modern life beyond

this perhaps over literal understanding

of spatial pathology considered simply

as a matter of priscilla the-- and

distance in a generalized field that

gradually emerged what for Freud and

perfect perhaps for birdsong and the

little later for psychoanalytic

phenomenologist like regime minkovski

the gradually emerged a conception of

space that adhered to none of the

dimensions literal or phenomenal of

perspective or quantity

beginning with the space of the dream

and continuing with the space of drives

psychic space was seen to be a

simultaneous container of everything

that in real space has to be separate

and temporarily this freak in this

context it is symptomatic that the

initial our historical interpretation of

architectural space from Berlin on was

first worked out also in response to an

uncertainty and uncertainty about limits

precisely in the face of the difficulty

of comprehending space after the

Renaissance that barak space that seems

all together to break the bounds of

architectural stability and

three-dimensional harmony whether it was

the need to understand the Rococo in

France or later the Baroque in Germany

the terms of spatial analysis by the end

of the 19th century were conceived by

art historians in the face of what to

many was a distasteful signs of the

solution fragmentation illusion and

indefinable 'ti thus from Baudelaire on

the destroyed the disruption of passive

oppose Envato and Fagen are could only

be explained in terms of the spatial

unreal the space of dream fantasy fable

a myth

and this in turn demanded a

psychological explanation the fatto as

Norman Bryson has shown became the

subject of multiple psychopathological inter

inter

stations all of which converged in a

dissolution of classical space thought

so the painter of revelry of frivolity

of music was at the same time vato the

invalid the melancholic the painter of

psychological relations and moods

representing these unrepresentable

states by means of spatial ambiguities

obscuring the boundaries between reality

and fiction real life and dramatic

staging late for Coco space was held to

extend this transgression of clarity and

perspective all security into the erotic

from the brothers Goncourt to norman

Bryson himself Boucher and fraggin are

here on this famous swing of 1760 was

seen deliberately to suspend their

erotic subjects in a space that is

neither theirs in the way that the body

depicted through his perspective window

is anchored and distanced from the

spectator nor space of the spectator

their bodies were according to brighton

accessible but untouchable as they rest

on the insubstantial clouds or cushions

that ambiguously define their position

through objects of the fetishism of sight

sight

similarly for berlin the block which he

dated from the council of trent pushed

the limits of classical and renaissance

architecture to the potential

destruction an architecture of deaths

and obscurity was replacing an

architecture of surface and clarity the

Baraat recordings of rippln introduced

an entirely new feeling of space tending

toward infinity space he wrote that in

the Renaissance was regularly lit which

can be represented only as tectonics it

closed here in the Baraka seems to be

lost in the unlimited and undefined no

longer faced with a clear external form

the gaze is led towards infinity such a

dissolution of space in the

incommensurability verged on a

pathological need to be explained from a

psychological point of view that

understood every object to be judged

according its relationship to the body a

view that the reference had already

espoused in his thesis product prolegomena

prolegomena

to a psychology of architecture two

years before in the baroque the capacity

of the human body the empathize with the

building was stretched to deformity by

only a deformed body for

fundamentally identified with the

defamations of barrage space such a

psychological interpretation was to

influence that of Jacques Lacan whose

summation of the Baroque echoes Wirthlin

the Barack said in one of his seminars

it is a regulation of the soul by the

stupid regulation of the body equally

what the art historian August massif

called the round Villa or roundest out

sermons of arak was more a psychological

force than an aesthetic code setting the

tone for Volta Benny means melancholic a

rock of allegory ruins and fragments

echoing reference characterization of

the Baroque is representing the decline

in the conductance of the Renaissance

Benjamin wrote of a period of Baraka

tragic drama as one that witnessed and

epoch of decadence against the exact

mean between excess and deficiency

achieved by Renaissance harmony the

Baroque for Binyamin signaled the

solution of all forms and boundaries the

call for unlimited space and the elusive

magic of light leading to the

transgression of all architectures

natural limits it was no doubt for these

reasons that the Baroque proved so

seductive a model for Siegfried Gideon

in his attempt to provide a convincing

historical genealogy for posts through

this architecture

if Ruslan involves a Benjamin saw the

Baroque is representing an end to an

architecture of stability and perfection

Gideon celebrated just these qualities

as proto modernist exhibitions of the

will to overcome all structural and

spatial limitations in the service of a

new architecture Gideon formulated a

baroque that was both triumphant and

prospective for him the baracan is

complex question a renaissance

perspective stability and realist

representation its combination of

perspective multiplicity and illusion

found its most developed form in the

work of bali-ba romanian Guarani seed in

retrospect through prefigure cubism when

joined to the spatial interpenetration

exhibited in the engineering structures

of the late 19th century the potential

of the baroque was turned to a

constructive possibility this

possibility was Leighton it latent in

the skeleton system of construction but

the skeleton had to be used

as Luca Brasi a uses it concluded Gideon

in a service a new conception of space

in this model of spatial history the

role played by structural became pivotal

Gideon's pairing of barman is Lambton of

Santiago and tat Keens project for a

monument to the Third International has

itself become a commonplace as has his

analysis of viremia pillar of San

Lorenzo where quote the impression of

unlimited space has been achieved not

through the employment of perspective

illusions or of a painted sky but

through exclusively architectural means

that go to the very end of

constructional resources it remains only

for modern construction methods but to

overcome these limits and for Modern

architects to imagine modern space and

the equation spatial imagination plus

structural invention equals progress

would be for Gideon confirmed for less

optimistic spirits however Jerusalem

celebrated remark of 1888 one can hardly

fail to recognize the affinity that our

own age in particular bears to the

Italian Baroque reinforced their

perception of a post median age of

decadence and decline

ver Flynn hast had after all cited the

historian Karl just his characterization

of Piran AZ as having a nature entirely

modern in its passion embodied in the

mystery of the sublime of pace of space

and of power and compared this to the

same emotions which are Richard the

vogner evokes to act on us concluding

that in this fever of emotional torments

however cathartic all sense of classic

limits has finally been lost

Nietzsche ten years earlier had already

characterized the Barack as a kind of

vertigo that takes hold of the spectator

adding we can now study the phenomenon

of Baroque art very well if we are

enough masters of ourselves for the last

of the arts music has now under the

influence of Ricard vogner reached this

stage and this was an extraordinary pomp

of appearances suitable to trouble the

soul and the senses for many mean

writing in the 1920s the analogy was

more poignant still

two periods of decadence by means of a

symptomatic analysis of forms in tumult

disrupted forms who were emblematic of

the conflicting forces of their

respective epochs he spoke of the

striking analogies with a present state

of German literature and noted the

common themes between Barak tragic drama

an expressionist drama beginning with

the presentation of hands vessels

trojans in 1915 as with many myths

surrounding the emergence of modernism

the Baroque effect was seen in terms of

light and dark rather as modernity

itself was construed as poised between

reason and the abyss of expressionist

degeneration exaggeration in

architecture as represented by paul

scheer Botts manifestos and group doubts

drawings of 1914 to 18 expression of

space was deliberately constructed to

reflect the tormented psychological

states of modern alienation as Ernst

Bloch noted this resulted in the desire

to construct an entirely non Euclidean

kind of space what L listed he termed

pan geometrical whether or not such a

space was ever attainable the formal

exalts were clear as blocked noted

Expressionism experimented with it by

generating stereo metric figures through

rotating or swinging bodies which at

least have nothing in common with this

perspective visual space an architecture

of the abstract which wants to be quasi

a meta cubic sometimes seeks structures

appealing to be similarly remote not

organic anymore not even mezzo cosmical

such a space as we know it from the

drawings were dynamic crystalline and

potentially infinite the very notion of

a non Euclidean space one that might

escape the bounds of limited perspective

or vision and hints like Alice's mirror

act as a means of stepping into the new

world was however tantamount to an

admission of utopian impossibility for

in the events as bloc recognized the old

Euclidean world was entirely necessary

for any non new Trillian hypothesis to

have any effect of course he said

ironically the space of these bodies of rotation

rotation

Dafydd e'en as any other and the

so-called only new trillion pan geometry

provides positive ways for architecture

in symbolic illusion Panofsky to whom

block refers as his authority was

equally skeptical in his discussion of

Ellis it's his idea of pan geometry in

fact Piznarski noted the space of the

sisters imaginary turret aching bodies

is no less Euclidean than any other

empirical space this is why the

expression of spatial medium parked

along some precisely the medium in which

expressionist architecture found its

fullest development was in fact not

architecture that's film which was to

say that no matter how expressionist

space tried to construct its material

analogues it was inevitably bound

precisely because of its counter your

Chilean aspirations to the realm of the

imaginary expressionist space in its

most authentic form was for all intents

and purposes unrepresentable this would

be to say that expression of space was

truly in the domain of a modern sublime

but the expression is sublime while on

the surface subscribing to all the

outlying common places of the Romantic

period with most Bruno Taos

transcendentalist utopia of an Alpine

architecture carved out of the snow and

ice of the mountain ranges was marked

less by the sense of absolute terror

described by Burke that it was by the

lurking anxiety characterized by Freud

as uncanny a post psychological era

founded three-song not so much in the

extremes of light and dark but in the

ambiguities of obscurity

so the expressionist the world was

pervaded by a sense of loss a sense of

unexpected and frightening return a

sense of something homely heimlich

turning without warning into something

unholy or in Heinrich the space of the

uncanny was not a space of clear

boundaries or satisfying emotions

he destroyed indeed any such clarity's

in favor of psychological suspension

insecurity and the effects of estrangement

estrangement

it was astroid himself recognized on his

visit to the Acropolis a space that

might be experienced anywhere even on

the highest hill of civilised

aspirations on the site where he

expected the sublime he found instead

what he called the realization letdown

this but point

and also strange sentiments and loss and

betrayal presumably because having been

fed with romantic visions of what the

appropiate once was when he got there

there wasn't very much to see the heir

home of Western culture have been found

less than homely even as the experience

of the war as freud noted in his

thoughts on war and death had

transformed the happy Museum of Europe

into a bloody battlefield at the moment

when Expressionism heir to this

battlefield attempted to assert a world

of purity in glass the real foundation

of such crystalline utopias was revealed

in the sets of Caligari as much in the

wastelands of alfred kuban's the and the

reciter the other side to lie in the

uncanny eruption of the uneasy psyche

the destiny of touts Alpine architecture

was in the end to reside in Ernst Nunez

from the marble crypts standing between

a nostalgic dream of fairyland happiness

and abroad and ever expanding domain of

the terrifying chief Ranger Yuna's

marble cliffs transformed the Alpine

landscapes of Taos dream into the sillas

to look out the pointed towards and was

in some way complicit with fascism in

what in what George Steiner has

characterized its alienated coldness

such a perception of the young knees

behind the crystal might lead us to

recharacterize expressionist space in a

way that escapes the easy platitudes of

geometrical deconstruction and his

combination of the psychological anxiety

and geometrical instability to see it as

fundamentally warped space where space

would then be essentially psychological

and defined not so much by the clear

prismatic nature of a geological opposed

to this representation but by its

lurking opacity and obscurity Alice's

mirror yes but in this context a mirror

that takes on the role of a reflector of

the psyche something like that mirror

evoked by Jean Cocteau in 1937 as the

instrument and harbinger of

schizophrenia the space of such a mirror

is not Cartesian nor yet

Euclidean by projection it is

transformed into a space that turns on its

its

a bent or webspace the kind of space

that michi not yet cognizant of Freud

tried to imagine when he noted that we

can't see around our own corner

workspace would then be what Panofsky in

his seminal essay perspective of

symbolical form called

psychophysiological space geometry

transformed by psychic projection it

would not have to be overstating the

case but web space has been a condition

of modernist anxiety and alienation

throughout the century a hallmark of

architecture and its filmic video and

recently digital representations that go

further than a mere positive

construction of reality to reveal the

unstable conditions of modernity in

conclusion I would like to look briefly

at the persistence of these themes in

the present sandesh yet to a period but

as I showed in the book on the uncanny

has not been without its own anxieties

of dwelling the persistence of spatial

warping as a contemporary signal of

modernist operation aspirations has been

marked in the work of coop himmelblau

since the late 1960s work in which the

uncanny visions of Expressionism has

found appears a peculiarly appropriate

home in a space of canted planes

intersecting angles pyramids of light

shifting floors and tilted walls with

evident reference to the vocabulary of

the original expressionist himmelblau

formulated an environment that went

beyond imitation to construct an

entirely contemporary world of disquiet

and uneasy estrangement and distance

from the assistant insistent world of a

modern real as similar wrote as early as

1968 our architecture has no physical

plan but a psychic plan it was

especially appropriate then that

himmelblau were called to install the

exhibit expressionist utopias for the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1994

in this installation and in many others

this is the angel bar of tourists and

here's doctor folly the psychic plan was

doubled in a tantalizing way it was once

an archaeological reference to an

imaginary scene long buried

that of expression is to topia before

World War one and the contemporary scene

of deliberate distortion and

displacement troy'd once remarked but it

would be impossible to conceive of the

same space containing two different

contents at the same time he was

speaking of a series of monumental

constructions over the centuries built

one on top of the other in Rome only in

the mind he argued that was the

retention of two places in the same

space possible but it is a peculiar

property of some architecture to

resonate with double meaning in such a

way as to approximate the imaginary of

Freud and the leaves after images of

Expressionism such double exposures are

evidence considering from the purely

psychological level of course such

architectural formulations of warped

space are merely caricatural

illustrations of states of mind that are

for all intents and purposes entirely

independent of actual spatial conditions

more the result of introjection of

projection than of any warped stimuli in

the world itself in this understanding

lay the roots of the already strong

critique of the sets of Caligari and

metropolis in the 1920s from Cracow and

others to the effect that in the movies

at least the camera itself was the

mobile instrument taking the place of

the moving eye and that's the meson sin

which emulated the bent and warped

spaces of the psyche itself no longer

should imitate the effects of movement

in its own forms the shadowy and

sinister movements of the camera from

high to low distance to close-up in for

example a film like Lang's

M were for Cracow and his contemporaries

far more successful Lang's M here and

the third man far more successful at

evoking the anxiety and terror latent in

space the street as hunter and the

camera following the hunter and M and

Peter Lorre as prey of the street itself

as registered through the rapidly

shifting lens

for us at the end of the century it's

perhaps even more important to insist on

this separation between the anxiety of

space and it's all too easy caricature

of representation in architectural terms

whether pure an Asian postmodern or dare

I say it be constructivists I began this

talk by evoking the post Nietzschean

critique of classical space and its

boundaries advanced by by tie in the

1930s considered from the vantage point

at the end of this century and in the

light of the history of modernist space

whether that of Luca viziers infinite

kind or of Expressionism x' warping

these remarks by Bert I become I think

all the more pertinent for the

interpretation of late twentieth-century

urbanist dict space certainly they may

be read as they were intended as

fundamental destabilization of the

normal in favor of the pathological

certainly as Rosalind Krauss and George

de Hubermann have indicated they presage

contemporary interest in the our form

and form in their direct critique of the

traditional idea of monumental ism but

if we think back to the uneasy

speciality of bowties frozen waters the

body in lake michigan or another image

from document the san frozen in winter

we might also be reminded of the vast

and frigid emptiness of the Kabuki

inherited today so proudly recall in the

search for a strong link with a supposed

transparent modernity I give you

something that's already built at the

heart of this apparently Universalist

vision of a space for all in which each

individual within math society might

find his one has to admit really her

home as if only the ineffable could

shelter the ubermensch there is I

believe as I have noted before a special

kind of anxiety from the point of view

of the architect this would seem to be

an anxiety of the small the particular

the banal and

every day ensure the claustrophobia in

the face of the crowded metropolis a

claustrophobic that hides its misogyny

its racial preferences is anti

communitarian and its anti social

prejudices beneath a veil of the

apparently universally transparent from

the point of view of the subject the

anxiety aroused by modern space has been

commonly translated into terms

approximating agoraphobia a disease

interestingly enough still referred to

in medical Turkey as housewife complaint

and earlier in the century

unhesitatingly attributed to the so tall

decadent and weak members of society the

homosexual the woman the following but I

we might be more inclined to see the

anxiety of space as residing in the

notion of space as an endlessly fluid

psychopathological condition a kind of

spatial trans Vestas 'm that anticipates

the often heralded potential

potentialities of virtual reality and

that in and of itself provokes an

instability of identity this will be so

to speak a positive critical reading of

the kind attempted by Walter Benjamin in

the 1930s and homi Bhabha today where we

might depart from both Luca Brasi and

Bert I however will be in refusing the

assumption common to each that space

might in any way be recuperated for

individual or social proper duties that

space is anything else but a trouble of

or with place in this we might be closer

to the original meat chief the many of

his more positive interpreters including

but I have wanted to admit for where

both Part I and Luca Brasi a despite

their obvious antagonism attempt in

their own ways to reconstitute space for

their own purposes Dionysian or

Apollonian for Nietzsche space always

represented an agonizing vertical of

potential annihilation a falling into as

Nietzsche said and Heidegger would

repeat but without too much hope in

finding solid ground beneath the public

square or at least the modern

public square was funny cheap the very

expression of modernity is lack of truth

the stage for the manifestation of every

mosque like false identity the space of

the public realm then was never so empty

as when fully populated a sentiment

echoed by Cracow and his

characterization of the mass ornament as

purest surface as for example in Czarist

risk characterization of the flies in

the marketplace as for its architecture

Nietzsche was unambiguous for the

beginning I worked through the new

streets of our cities and I imagine that

in a century nothing will remain of all

these hideous houses built by the

generation of those who think publicly

and that by then the opinions of these

house builders will also have crumbled

how wrong he was I think it's

appropriate that when Dominique devil

identified as public the space interior

of his new library a space in which one

cannot enter to read or to walk but

which one only looks into he compared it

quite aptly to the space of the

plastered I come forward but without the

Ovilus no spot no X no place just space

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YouTube Transcript:Anthony Vidler - Warped Space