Architecture and the Unconscious

John Shannon Hendrix, Lorens Eyan Holm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317179252
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

There are a number of recent texts that draw on psychoanalytic theory as an interpretative approach for understanding architecture, or that use the formal and social logics of architecture for understanding the psyche. But there remains work to be done in bringing what largely amounts to a series of independent voices, into a discourse that is greater than the sum of its parts, in the way that, say, the architect Peter Eisenman was able to do with the architecture of deconstruction or that the historian Manfredo Tafuri was able to do with the Marxist critique of architecture. The discourse of the present volume focuses specifically for the first time on the subject of the unconscious in relation to the design, perception, and understanding of architecture. It brings together an international group of contributors, who provide informed and varied points of view on the role of the unconscious in architectural design and theory and, in doing so, expand architectural theory to unexplored areas, enriching architecture in relation to the humanities. The book explores how architecture engages dreams, desires, imagination, memory, and emotions, how architecture can appeal to a broader scope of human experience and identity. Beginning by examining the historical development of the engagement of the unconscious in architectural discourse, and the current and historical, theoretical and practical, intersections of architecture and psychoanalysis, the volume also analyses the city and the urban condition.

PART I
Historical Paradigms for Architecture and the Unconscious

1

The Unconscious and Space: Venice and the Work of Albrecht Dürer

Gordana Korolija Fontana-Giusti

This chapter focusses on the unconscious and space in the work of Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). By unearthing the layers of history and mapping the dynamics of Dürer’s spatial unconscious, it proposes a multifaceted argument of his work that considers Dürer not solely as a painter and engraver, but as a theorist of perspective, mathematics and human proportions, as evident in his treatises and commissions. The proposed analysis of Dürer’s opus examines the nature of his understanding of space and spatiality in the context of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It considers relevant works by Dürer in relation to his place of birth and subsequent travels. The attention is directed to the nature of Dürer’s stay in Venice and the ways in which the city affected him on various levels including the unconscious. The argument concludes by discussing how Dürer’s spatially innovative work was constituted in relation to melancholia imaginativa.

INTRODUCTION: DÜRER AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Dürer’s spatial unconscious can be reconstructed through the analysis of his work and the events of his life. By focussing on the spatial experience of his travels, this chapter sheds light on what might be thought of as his unconscious libidinal economy in relation to spaces, places and cities.

Let us begin by asking: how was the ‘unconscious’ defined in Dürer’s time? The concept of the unconscious in the contemporary sense did not exist as such; at the same time, people must have been profoundly aware of the realm of the unknown within themselves and how it can determine their lives in a compelling manner, allowing them to fight personal battles, suppress desires and test their anxieties, acts and morals.

In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the ‘unknown within oneself was contemplated and controlled by different sets of practices that included education, reading and contemplation of the stories from the Bible and the New Testament. As the practice of reading gained momentum with printed books replacing manuscripts, the boundary between the realm of reading and that of contemplation about one’s life became blurry.¹ The dynamics concerning meditation and the realm of life/action were mutually dependent and triggered by recognisable signs. Such signs could be unusual celestial occurrences, rare animals, plants or any other striking phenomena. Signs were discussed, written about and painted. Significantly for our considerations, they appear in Dürer’s prints and paintings. Signs are often strategically placed in Dürer’s self-portraits giving them a particular meaning.

Other secular practices that arose in search of the unknown within oneself included apprenticeships and travels (Wanderjahre) often to other places, corresponding to what Michel Foucault called heterotopia – the places where individuals, in development or crisis, learn something about themselves that was not possible in their usual environment.² The aspects of the unconscious were thus dispersed over the spaces and events in one’s life. They were recognised, referred to and interpreted according to the understanding of the world-view at the time and a person’s role in this setting.

Various scholars largely agree that despite his fame and certain vanity about his looks, Dürer was a pious person, devoted to his family. He attended a religious school, before joining his father’s practice. Albrecht Dürer the Elder was trained in the Netherlands ‘with the great masters’ and had thus served as an early intermediary between his son and ‘the very fathers of modern European painting’.³ According to the self-portrait now kept in Vienna, at the age of 13 young Albrecht was already a skilled draftsman. Many other self-portraits followed, as Dürer became the first painter to represent his own likeness in a systematic manner on important occasions, most famously in the paintings of 1493, 1498 and 1500.⁴

In 1494 after four years of travel in search of painterly knowledge and experiences, Dürer headed back to Nuremberg to marry. He was probably disappointed that he had not visited Italy – the major destination for aspiring artists, as Italian cities were leading in the revival of the arts. For my argument it is significant to recognise this moment in what I call ‘the libidinal economy’ of Dürer’s life. It is here understood as the distribution of the unconscious sexual energy (libido) on the level of the individual as they go through life and make different choices that are seen as libidinal investments. Freud argues:

Libido is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions. We call by that name the energy… of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word ‘love’. The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists … in sexual love with sexual union as its aim.

Importantly for this chapter Freud balances this statement by saying:

But we do not separate from this – what in any case has a share in the name ‘love’ – on the one hand, self-love, and on the other, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas.⁵

Although Dürer submitted to the will of his parents and married his bride, it is noticeable that his libidinal investments remained in his work and in the abstract idea of explorations. The family-imposed interruption to his unconscious libidinal desire to continue travelling and exploring life and arts, returned with force. It fuelled Dürer’s subsequent travels to Italy and his interest in art, sublimating in the life-long dedication to the art that must be based on scientific knowledge.⁶ This quest for ‘scientific explanations’ became obsessive and, I argue, could be recognised as his symptom.

THE ART OF SUBLIMATION: THE FIRSTTRIP TO VENICE, 1494–5

On his return to Nuremberg in 1494, and before setting out for Venice, Dürer married Agnes Frey in July of the same year. Dürer’s 1493 self-portrait with the thistle makes a reference to his future marriage in the inscription ‘My affairs will go as ordained on high’.⁷ It supports the hypothesis about Dürer’s compliant attitude to his marriage as it turned into a socially acceptable model that would allow him to explore the life of an artist as he desired it. This model that included a license to travel accommodated the healthy and vigorous libidinal drives of Dürer’s curious and complex personality.

Interpreters have agonised about the question of Dürer’s wife as they agreed that the wedlock was not a particularly happy one. Yet, Dürer remained attached to Agnes, and defended her from his friends’ criticism. It is important to think of Agnes’s role as a wife of a blossoming artist who had numerous responsibilities in supporting her husband’s career. Apart from being responsible for the household and providing food for family members, the apprentices, maids and various guests, Agnes was involved in selling and promoting her husband’s work. Dürer’s letters express confidence in Agnes and her professionalism.⁸ She was responsible for Dürer’s legacy, and posthumously initiated the translation of his Art of Measurement into Latin (1538).

This kind of complementary marriage is consistent with Dürer’s acceptance of the ‘orders from above’ and the related process that we can call the sublimation of libidinal energies towards an agreeable purpose. Sublimation is here understood in the Freudian sense of being a defence mechanism where socially unacceptable impulses are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour. As such sublimation has always been recognised as ‘an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development that makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play an important part in civilised life’.⁹ We can recognise this process in Dürer’s case. I emphasise this condition by naming it a libidinal transformation. By this I mean a transfer of personal energies where the individual assumes a different attitude to life and where this dynamism can be traced to his/her primary libidinal energy.

This libidinal condition that sublimates the drives and consoles Dürer’s desires into continuous studies of art in far-away places, was in the heart of his marriag...