Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan: Shadowing the Public Realm

Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and architecture, using key modern and post-modern architects to illustrate key concepts. It argues that the unconscious is a central concept for both disciplines and offers powerful critiques of current planning practice. The book concludes that the field of the Other is the common grammar that organises subjects into civilisations, which has consequences for how we treat the public realm in architecture, politics, and the city.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 160 pages
Publication date: 30 September 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This book methodically outlines key concepts in psychoanalytic discourse by reading them against key modern and post-modern architects. It begins with what is, arguably, the central concept for each discipline by putting the unconscious in a dialectic relation to space. Each subsequent chapter begins with a detail in architectural discourse, a kind of provocation that anchors each excursion into the thought of Freud and Lacan. The text is cyclical, episodic, and cloudlike rather than expository; the intention is not simply to explain the concept of the unconscious but, to different degrees, perform it in the text. The book offers powerful critiques of current planning practice, which has no tools to address our attachment to places. It concludes with powerful critiques of our incapacity to change the environmentally damaging ways we live our lives, which is an effect of our incapacity to recognise the presence of the death drive in our nature. The text is an extended thesis – spanning the chapters – that the field of the Other is the common grammar that organises subjects into civilisations, which has consequences for how we treat the public realm in architecture, politics, and the city. The field of the Other is a slightly different slice through the urban social world. It shadows – but does not correspond exactly to – more familiar categories like private/public, inside/outside, figure/ground, or piazza/boulevard.

Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan will be an essential resource to anyone interested in how the environment we build is a reflection of our desire. Psychoanalysis is one of the great humanist discourses of the 20th century, and this book will be a valuable reference to the humanist in arc.

Weight: 453g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367077990