Architecture and the Mimetic Self

A Psychoanalytic Study of How Buildings Make and Break Our Lives

Lucy Huskinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351247306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Buildings shape our identity and sense of self in profound ways that are not always evident to architects and town planners, or even to those who think they are intimately familiar with the buildings they inhabit. Architecture and the Mimetic Self provides a useful theoretical guide to our unconscious behaviour in relation to buildings, and explains both how and why we are drawn to specific elements and features of architectural design. It reveals how even the most uninspiring of buildings can be modified to meet our unconscious expectations and requirements of them—and, by the same token, it explores the repercussions for our wellbeing when buildings fail to do so.

Criteria for effective architectural design have for a long time been grounded in utilitarian and aesthetic principles of function, efficiency, cost, and visual impact. Although these are important considerations, they often fail to meet the fundamental needs of those who inhabit and use buildings. Misconceptions are rife, not least because our responses to architecture are often difficult to measure, and arein large partunconscious. By bridging psychoanalytic thought and architectural theory, Architecture and the Mimetic Self frees the former from its preoccupations with interpersonal human relations to address the vital relationships that we establish with our nonhuman environments.

In addition to providing a guide to the unconscious behaviours that are most relevant for evaluating architectural design, this book explains how our relationships with the built environment inform a more expansive and useful psychoanalytic theory of human relationship and identity. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists, architects, and all who are interested in the overlaps of psychology, architecture, and the built environment.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Buildings design us as much as we them

This book argues that the more we understand the hidden motivations that underpin human behaviour, the better equipped we will be in designing buildings that satisfy our basic, existential, needs. The criteria for effective architectural design have for a long time been grounded in utilitarian principles of function, efficiency, cost, and visual impact. Although these are important considerations, they often fail to meet the fundamental needs of those who inhabit and use buildings. There is often a mismatch between the values endorsed by the architect and town planner, and the existential needs of the person who uses their designs. In this book I intend to establish how we engage with architecture on a day-to-day basis in ways that are not so obvious to those who design our built environments, and not always so evident, even, to their inhabitants and to those who believe they have mastered their neighbourhoods and familiarised themselves with all that the buildings of their home and workplace have to offer. I am concerned with the manner in which we identify with architecture and use its features unconsciously, and how this has fundamental repercussions for our wellbeing. A central thesis of this book is that buildings design us as much as we them, and our appreciation of architectural design is rooted in a fundamental need to establish an identity or sense of self that is coherent and abiding. In other words, I shall go to explain how we are attracted to the structural forms of architecture, and seek somehow to mimic their character, in order to acquire from them essential qualities and experiences that we desire for ourselves. We shall see that the characteristics of architecture can therefore impact on our wellbeing to positive or negative ends.

Architects and town planners are pressured by having to balance the changing demands of those who use and interact with their designs with constraints such as budgets, building codes and regulations, and the dictates of geography and engineering, to name just a few. If we consider as well the fact that buildings outlive the architectural styles and aesthetics of passing trends, we find that architecture is in a precarious position, one that inevitably disappoints, for its ambition is met with ever present pressures to compromise. There is a necessity, therefore, for architects to become acquainted with the fundamental needs of human beings, and to understand the innate desires that inform and shape our relationships with the built environment; in other words, to appreciate what our expectations and requirements of buildings are, how they impact on our sense of self and our general wellbeing, and, moreover, how architectural designs can be modified to meet these needs.

There is extensive scholarship on the relationship of human behaviour to architecture and urban planning, but most of it bypasses the important connection between architectural design and the construction of personal identity. One likely reason for this is the lack of clarity on what personal identity actually involves. What exactly constitutes the self, one’s state of mind, and existential wellbeing is open to debate. With almost as many definitions and theories as there are philosophers, psychologists, and scientists to argue for them, how is the architect to choose between them? What are the salient features of this vital and complex phenomenon that will help the architect to design and construct buildings that are satisfying to those who will come to use them? This book addresses key aspects of the formation and construction of personal identity in relationship to the built environment, and provides a framework for considering our need of specific architectural design features and our expectations of them.

Disagreements likewise prevail over what constitutes successful architecture. These are perhaps most viscerally felt between architectural practitioners—the supposed experts—and public opinion. In recent decades it is not uncommon, for instance, for designs to win prestigious awards for architectural excellence while at the same time featuring on popular ‘name-and-shame’ lists of the ‘ugliest’ buildings. A case in point is Strata SE1, or the ‘Electric Razor’ or ‘Knuckleduster’, as it is commonly known (Fig. 1.1): a forty-three-storey residential high-rise building in Southwark, London (built 2007–2010; BFLS Architects).

Figure 1.1Strata SE1, Southwark, London (BFLS Architects, 2010)

Strata SE1 has won several awards, a number of which recognise its sustainability and efficiency, due in part to its onsite wind turbines and combined heat and power system.¹ Less appreciative, however, are the general public, who expressed their contempt for the building by nominating it for the Carbuncle Cup, an award given annually by Building Design magazine to the ‘worst new building in the UK in the previous 12 months’—an award it went on to win in 2010 ‘for services to greenwash, urban impropriety and sheer breakfast-extracting ugliness’. The Telegraph newspaper ranks it number seven of the ‘30 ugliest buildings in the World’. Rival newspaper The Guardian ranks it number three of the ‘10 worst London skyscrapers’, comparing it to Tolkein’s fictional Dark Tower of Mordor (2014).²

© Colin, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

‘Successful architecture’ is arguably something of a misnomer. Popular opinion of successful architecture is often skewed by the emphasis given to visual aesthetics, and, for the many who aren’t regular users of a building, it is often only the aesthetics of the façade that is taken into account. Nevertheless, as I shall argue, measures can be taken to achieve the idealistic goal of ‘successful’ designs if architects and planners stay clear of common misperceptions about what it is that we seek in architecture and expect to find in it, and conversely, what we seek to avoid and find problematic about it.

Broadly conceived, problematic designs can be construed as failures to arrive at an appropriate compromise between utility on the one hand and artistic vision on the other. Architecture that accommodates the former at the expense of the latter is designed and constructed to maximise functionality and efficiency, often seeking maximum floor space with minimum cost, and often designed according to a generic template with minimal embellishments and ornamentation (see Fig. 1.2). But buildings designed to such utilitarian specifications often come at great existential cost to those who use them. Utilitarian principles alone cannot accommodate the complexities of our instinctual needs; they lead instead to sterile buildings that treat people as if they are predictable and machine-like, and reducible to the same rational precepts that inform their designs. Buildings of this nature tend to feel oppressive and alienating because they fail to accommodate our contrasting, non-rational nature—a nature expressed by artistic vision.

Figure 1.2Examples of sterile architecture: Manchester, UK

Examples of sterile architecture, designed according to utilitarian principles that tend towards repetition of features in the promotion of efficiency over creative vision. Superficial attempts to make uniform buildings appear distinctive may include the addition of different colours or textures. As Jane Jacobs notes in her study of American cities, these superficial attempts may be ‘eye-catching’ momentarily but ultimately fail to disguise their lack of character or distinction (1961: 292–4). The illustrations here are of buildings in Manchester, England, but could be from any town or city in the UK. Cities in other countries have their own monotonous styles. The last two buildings depicted here have colourful cladding. These images have been reproduced in colour in the plate section.

© Lucy Huskinson

An architecture that promotes artistic vision at the expense of its utility is equally problematic. This can lead to an idiosyncratic or ‘quirky’ architecture that aims to make a provocative statement by circumventing our expectations of the built environment, and subverting the utilitarian principles upon which conventional architecture relies. Its distorted references to historical style and their ironic social commentary often fail to establish a rapport with the people who use or encounter them. Instead of captivating our imagination or provoking us into fresh ways of thinking, their twisted shapes and complicated juxtapositions often appear to be a parody of themselves; more ridiculous, naff, or kitsch than genuinely intriguing (see Fig. 1.3).

Figure 1.3Example of ‘quirky’ architecture: M2 Tokyo, Aoyama Technical College (Makoto Sei Watanabe Architects, 1990)

Commonly known as ‘the Robot’ (specifically, the robot ‘Optimus Prime’ from the Transformers, in mid-transformation), this building is intended to exemplify ‘a new order’ through ‘the tolerance of chaos’ (www.makoto-architect.com).

© Wiiii, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Misconceptions about what we require from our built environment are rife, not least because our responses to architecture are often difficult to measure, and are in large part unconscious. It is therefore both unfair and unrealistic to expect architects and planners to have expertise in the complex workings of the unconscious and to factor this knowledge into their designs and constructions accordingly. It is hoped, therefore, that the chapters that follow will provide a useful theoretical guide in their explanation of the most salient aspects of our unconscious behaviour in our response to architecture, and will help us to understand our needs and uses of buildings, and both how and why we are drawn to specific elements and features within architectural designs.

The ideas of psychoanalysis and its related schools of thought are well placed to make sense of unconscious behaviour and its role in the construction of identity and relationship.³ Traditionally, psychoanalysis as a field of study and therapeutic practice has been heavily preoccupied with interpersonal and intrapersonal relations, and has passed over in relative silence the vital relationships we inevitably have with nonhuman objects and environments. To assume that the built environment has little or no part to play in shaping our lives is nonsensical, and tantamount to assuming that human behaviour can be understood as if in a vacuum. Problems taken to psychotherapy are almost always attributed to interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict, but this is of little help in those cases where the underlying problem is, for instance, an aspect of the building in which the client or patient lives or works. The psychologist and cultural critic James Hillman briefly alludes to this conceptual problem by noting that ‘psychological problems’ that we experience at work—such as absenteeism, the need to take pills, sexual harassment’—are often ‘architectural problems’ (Hillman quoted in Kidel 1993: 1).

By developing psychoanalytical ideas to account for our intimate relationship with the built environment, I seek not to undermine them, but to extend their application to a vital dimension of our experience that has largely been ignored. Thus, in addition to providing a framework that emphasises the unconscious behaviours that are most relevant for architects, I explain the significance of architecture and the built environment for elaborating and extending psychoanalytic theories about human relationship and identity.

There have been few attempts to relate psychoanalytic theories to architecture, and the majority have sought to emphasise Freud’s theories of sexuality and to make sense of our identifications with buildings in somewhat reductive terms as unresolved Oedipal issues. Although I am not denying the validity of such research, their discussions are often unhelpful to the practical needs and objectives of the architectural theorist, practitioner, and planner. This book, by contrast, considers psychoanalytic ideas of unconscious behaviour more broadly, and seeks to adapt them by grounding them in related ideas from other subjects and disciplinary practices, including other fields of psychology, aesthetics, and, of course, architecture.

Architectural blueprints of being

The importance of architecture for personal identity and wellbeing is far-reaching and demands an interdisciplinary response. The widespread interest in the intimate relationships between human self and architectural form is perhaps most vividly demonstrated in the centuries-old custom of characterising human nature through architectural metaphor and analogy. Examples of this custom, or the various ‘architectural blueprints of being’ as I shall refer to them, are discussed in an array of texts, scattered across the ages from antiquity to present day and spanning disparate fields, discourses, and traditions. Collectively, they identify an extensive catalogue of interpretations about human nature and behaviour. In order to introduce the arguments of this book, let us turn briefly to two of the more prominent types of ‘blueprint of being’: those that emphasise human bodily form as an architectural template, and those that arrive at similar templates by stressing the workings of the human mind. The purpose of these blueprints is not, as is often assumed, an arbitrary exercise of rendering ideas about human nature into abstract architectural imagery. Rather, as I shall demonstrate throughout my investigation, they reveal useful insights into the various ways in which we attempt, often unconsciously, to inscribe ourselves into the architectural fabric of our environments, in such a way as to experience their features as if incorporated into us as animate parts of ourselves. In the chapters that follow I explain the impressive consequences of this relationship with architecture for the cultivation of our sense of self and the quality of our relationship with the buildings we encounter on a daily basis.

Perhaps the most recognisable ‘architectural blueprints of being’, to architects especially, are those that identify correspondences between architectural features and the human body. This convention is often traced back to the Roman architectural engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who in his Ten Books on Architecture [De architectura libri decem], written c. 13–15 BC (1486), asserts that every architectural composition should have ‘an exact system of correspondence to the likeness of a well-formed human being’ (3:1.1).⁴ This idea was elaborated upon in the Italian Renaissance by such architects as Leon Battista Alberti, who in On the Art of Building [De re aedificatoria] (written between 1443 and 1453, published 1485) refers to columns and the fortified areas of walls as the ‘bones’ of a building, the infill walls and panelling as its ‘muscles and ...