Psychological Ideas in Architecture

Psychological Ideas in Architecture Written by Sadina Tursunovic z3461731 Course: ARCH 7214 Architecture and Politics

Psychological ideas, especially in the field of behaviour and the unconscious, have been present in philosophical discourse throughout the 20th century. They are described as the study of the mind, and later, the study of behaviour due to the denial of the existence of the mind by some psychologists.1 During the 20th century, Sigmund Freud was recognised as one of the key figures in this discourse of psychology – Herbert Marcuse was also noted for his renewed views of Freud’s ideas. Freud’s ideas will feature strongly in this essay that will peruse the notions of psychology that appear in the discourse of architecture.

Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation and some of his other notable texts will introduce the essay and highlight some of the social conditions within the 20th century. The underlying theme of repression, and how it was formative for its time, along with his ideas on psychoanalysis, will be explored.

Eros and Civilisation is amongst one of Herbert Marcuse’s most well received works. It, alongside One-Dimensional Man, is the platform upon which Marcuse gains notable recognition. His comments on social construct, and notably the positivity with which he reviews Freud in these works, are considered as formative for the 1960s.2 .

His ideas of repression and perceived freedom inspired revolutions across Europe in demands for change. This can especially be seen in regards to One-Dimensional Man, which influenced many Parisian students in their 1968 protests.3 Sadina Tursunovic

Marcuse explored the notion of the repressed nine years before One-Dimensional Man in Eros and Civilization. The effect society has on an individuals interpretation of the world is explored in Marcuse’s first chapter. Here he engages with Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis, namely the Reality principle and the Pleasure principles, as well as the conscious and unconscious. He also highlights topics of repression and muting instinct in order to become civilised man. He notes the influence of social conditions on the formulation of the repressed reality, and the effective organisation with which people are subscribed to such a system.4

Also in the first chapter, Freud’s theories are explained. The unconscious is ruled by the pleasure principle, which is describes as “the older, primary processes, the residues of a phase of development in which they were the only kind of mental processes.”5 The Reality principle on the other hand is defined as the organised ego not ruled by primitive instinctive drive.

Reason, testing between good and bad, true and false, attention, memory and judgement are all associated with this principle.6 It is also with this principle that society represses instinctual ideas of reality for social ideas of reality– such as the need to work in order to support life.7

Marcuse’s ideas in Eros and Civilisation can be summarised as a search for liberation through the psychoanalytical observation of the liberating unconscious pleasure principle and the repressive conscious reality principle. Unlike Freud, who pessimistically believed that a nonrepressive civilisation was impossible,8 Marcuse alludes to the possibility of liberation through the “recherché du temps” – the search for the lost.9 Peggy Deamer describes his work as “overcoming the alienation or discontentment that Freud saw as a defining feature of civilisation”.10

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The importance of both Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Freud’s psychoanalytic theories is that they provide a new way in which to understand the human psyche. The accounts of the conscious and unconscious, pleasure and reality, allow an understanding into a new way of analysing the world. Their thoughts allowed, in the 1900s, for the emergence of a new way with which to view and critique of art, politics, social constructs, architecture and multiple other aspects of the world. The psychoanalytic does away with the obstructions of traditional sentiments in critique and views seemingly subjective objects through a scientific and seemingly objective frame.

There is attempt by numerous critics to write on psychoanalysis and its relationship to architecture, but a connection between built work and how it reflects the human psyche and culture, is often ignored. Architecture is observed as more a physical mean onto which the conscious and unconscious are projected. The ideas that the conscious reveals as a result attempt to communicate culture and society. Much like with Adorno’s assessment of psychoanalytic critique on art being able to draw too much fictitious meaning into an artists work,11 the critique of architecture through the psychoanalytic lens can also often leave great room of ambiguity and false meaning.

John Hendrix for example writes on Psychoanalysis and Identity in Architecture, describing Lachlan’s idea of linguistics, in particular the language of dreams and the unconscious, in relation to Architecture. He concludes that the language of the geometries of architecture reveal hidden desires for unattainable objects in people. He says: “… architecture functions to reveal the absence, to reveal the unconscious of culture, the zeitgeist of a culture, and thus communicate a cultural identity.”12 Hendrix claims that architectural composition and the language of physical forms such as repetition, voids or overlays13 are interpreted by the conscious and unconscious. This interpretation then reveals an understanding into the culture that made the forms being analysed. Hendrix argues psychoanalytic explorations of linguistics, and relates them to the architectural forms. He fails however to support his ideas with any physical Sadina Tursunovic

built or unbuilt architectural example where such a situation may be observed.

Timothy D. Martin similarly delves into the relationship that architecture has with psychoanalytic methods. Unlike Hendrix, who looks at the linguistics of dreams, Martin explores the scientific and medical nature of psychoanalysis. He explores the idea of the conscious and unconscious through the three psychoanalytic clinics: Psychosis, Neurosis and Perversion.14 Martin argues the idea that the mind is the house of thoughts,15 and looks at the ability of architecture to cure repressed thoughts. Martin highlights this notion that psychoanalysis is a science of curing people by finding prevailing repressed memories in the unconscious and bringing them to the conscious. In Martin’s argument for psychosis he highlights the case of “Anna”. Through this case Martin attempts to bring a very Freudian notion of treatment through psychoanalysis into the realm of architecture. In this particular account he describes the story of Anna, who has hallucinations of a man swearing at her from a building, which was discovered to be unoccupied.16 The man happened to be a repressed memory of her father before she married and left her household. The connection between the conscious and unconscious – when Anna realises that the man she is seeing is but a hallucination, and the link as to why the hallucination appears is made clear, then Anna will be “cured.” Here Martin makes a connection that even he regards as “limited … but one that is adequate”17 to the unoccupied house and the notion that architecture can house the unconscious, and as a result, be instrumental in curing individuals of repressed thoughts. 18

Martin is a lot more successful in highlighting the link between architecture and psychoanalysis in his later case of perversion and the works of Bernard Tschumi and Robert Smithson.

Perversion is linked to Freud’s ideas of the sexual understanding of children and their “lack of sense for a pre-given order of the heterosexual purpose of sex.”19 In these particular cases of perversion, it is the idea of the sexual, sadist desires that are explored. Tschumi here identifies the French social housing system as “serving an unconscious sadism”20 in the way the users are treated. His social project Parc de la Vilette

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(1982-98) challenges the unconscious sadism in the social system through the design of an architectural folly upon which user desires can be materialised.21 Martin describes the follies as “architectural beginnings” and highlights how the users ability to manipulate the project liberates them from being bound by the choices of the architect and the state.22 Tschumi in this case can be seen as “curing” the sadist condition identified in the social housing system through the application of psychoanalytic theories in the physical form of architecture.

The notion of curing is also what is seen in Smithson’s Bingham Project where he creates user experience paths along the Utah Bingham copper mine. The paths are based on the psychological traits of a sadist and a neurotic,23 and attempt to highlight the destructive force of man on nature by getting visitors to understand the environmental and social implications of the mine. The paths are designed so that the sadist can “sense” the result of their actions, whilst the neurotic can “clear their mind of their idealised view of nature.”24 Martin continues that by creating a response to the psychoanalytic diagnosis of sadism and neuroticism, the path then can act as a cure for this diagnosis.25 Unfortunately the architectural techniques employed by Smithson to create a distinctly sadist and neurotic path fail to be discussed. However, Martin does raise clear notions that architectural form has the ability to cure when designed using diagnostic principles of psychoanalysis.

Fig. 1 Tschumi’s Folly

In the discussion of psychology and its application in architecture, there is a general lack of physical built examples of architecture in the discussion of psychoanalysis. Rather it is in psychology’s behavioural field that intellects offer a better understawnding between psychology and the design qualities that can be implied in architecture.

Fig. 2 Smithsons Utah Bingham

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Fig. 3 Panopticon

Take for example Michel Foucault’s exploration of the behavioural impacts the design of a panopticonon prison can have on inmates. Neil Leach writes on Foucault’s ideas, noting that the panopticon prison allows the authority full view over the imprisoned at any given time. 26 The prison is designed with a central core with prison cells that emerge radially around it. Blinds or the like on the central tower prevent inmates

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from seeing the guard, meaning that inmates must constantly assume that they are being watched.27 Leach describes this as the inmates being “under the perpetual control of the gaze of the guard”28 and links this to a wider possibility of architectures ability to create and sustain power relationships within society through such archetypes. John Watson shares Leach’s concerns on behaviourist architecture, writing that it will design in such a way that will “force people to live in certain ways.”29 Foucault on the other hand claims that it is not the architectural form, but the political system, that is the leading in the creation of such a scenario. He explains that it is not the design of the panoptic prison that controls the behaviour of inmates, but instead the fact that the building itself is socially constructed as a prison that punishes people.30 The study of psychological behaviour of the human has the capacity to affect the way people behave in a space, but it is not necessarily the form, but the systems which teach the effects of these forms, that affect the way people behave.

Broadbent’s notion in Design in Architecture furthers this thought, borrowing on perceptual psychology. Broadbent writes: “… what one perceives consists of a transaction between what is ‘there’ physically in the real world stimulating ones sensory receptors and the thoughts or ideas one has already inherited at birth, or more particularly, learnt from ones past experience … the building itself, the object of our perception, is constant, a physical thing which is quite unchanged by our perceiving it.”31

Behaviour of man is influenced by stimuli and his experience with objects in space. Broadbent elaborates how ones perception of space is influenced by their experience of the world.

The perception of spaces, in particular through a psychological understanding of the unconscious, is highlighted in Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language. In the book, Alexander rationalises the design processes into a series of 253 patterns.

These patterns are divided into three scales from which a reader can distil different patterns – the scales are the towns, buildings and construction.32 Through these patterns Alexander creates a Sadina Tursunovic

series of steps that, if applied correctly and thoroughly, can be used to design a numerous array of spaces successfully. The language is composed of both pragmatic ideas, such as “Roof Entrance, ” “small parking lots” and so on, but it also contains lists of descriptive words language such as “intimacy gradient,” and “filtered light” that allows users to make an accurate pattern of what they desire of a space. It is notably because of features like these that Ritu Bhatt acknowledges Alexander’s work as a reaction to the alienating style of modernism33 which was dominant in the 20th century and highlighted by its functionalist and prefabricated forms.34 Alexander’s work is also further commended for its recognition of unconscious cognitive spatial relationships and life patterns which modernist buildings abandoned.35 Although the conformity, which the piece promotes, was refuted36 the piece remains recognised for its ability to resurface unconscious philosophies in architectural spatial design that had been mostly abandoned at the time.

The presence of phycology in the discourse of architecture brings to light the psychological affects architecture can have on people. Different intellectuals summarise different views, but holistically, the idea that architecture has the ability to portray and influence the actions of a particular individual or culture is prevalent.

Some writers, namely Christopher Alexander and Michel Lachlan, attempt to formally describe the quality of architecture that would result from the application of psychological thoughts.

On the other hand, Freud’s notions of the reality and pleasure principles, and the conscious and unconscious, are used to formulate a large part of the philosophical discourse on architecture. This includes the ideas of curing through architecture and interpreting architecture through a psychoanalytic lens.

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ENDNOTES 1 Osgood in Geoffrey Broadbent, Design in Architecture, (David Fulton Publishers Ltd., 1988), 85.

2 Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States c.1958-c.1974, (Oxford University Press, 1998), 291.

3 Kerry Bolton, Revolution from Above, (Arktos, 2011), 110.

4 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, (The Beacon Press, 1955),31.

5 Ibid., 30.

6 Ibid., 31.

7 A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis in Marcuse, Eros and Ciivlisation, 33.

8 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 33.

9 Ibid, 9.

10 Peggy Deamer, The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, (Bloomsbury, 2015), unpagnated.

11 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 12.

12 John S. Hendrix, “Psychoanalysis and Identity in Architecture,” Paper 10, (School of Architecture, Art, and Historic Preservation Faculty Publications, 2009), 8.

13 Ibid., 4.

14 Timothy D. Martin “Psychoanalytic Diagnosis in Architecture,” in Architecture and the Unconscious ed. John Shannon Hendrix and Lorens Eyan Holm, (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2016), 168.

15 Martin, “Psychoanalytic Diagnosis in Architecture,” 170.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 172.

20 Ibid., 176.

21 Ibid., 175.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 178.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Neil Leach, “Architecture or Revolution?,” in Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, (Rutledge, 2003), 11.

27 Ibid., 11.

28 Ibid., 11 Sadina Tursunovic

29 John Watson in Geoffrey Broadbent, Design in Architecture: Architecture and the Human Science (David Fulton Publishers, 1988), 64.

30 Foucault in Leach, “Architecture or Revolution?” 11.

31 Geoffrey Broadbent, Design in Architecture: Architecture and the Human Science, (David Fulton Publishers, 1988), xii-xiii.

32 Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishkawa, Murray Silverstein et al. A Pattern Language, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) contents.

33 Ritu Bhatt, “Christopher Alexander’s pattern language: an alternative exploration of spacemaking practices,” The Journal of Architecture, 2010,711.

34 Broadbent, Design in Architecture, xii.

35 Bhatt, “Christopher Alexander’s pattern language,” 711.

36 Ibid., 713.

IMAGE CREDITS Fig. 1 Tschumi’s Folly http://www.tschumi.com/media/files/00358.jpg Fig. 2 Smithsons Utah Bingham http://notations.aboutdrawing.org/wp-content/ uploads/2385_Web-720x478.jpg Fig. 3 Panopticon http://a.architexturez.net/data/styles/large/ public/media//ILLINOIS.jpg

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