Table Of ContentREADING ARCHITECTURE
WITH FREUD AND LACAN
Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan: Shadowing the Public Realm methodically
outlines key concepts in psychoanalytic discourse by reading them against key mod-
ern 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 provo-
cation 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. Psycho-
analysis is one of the great humanist discourses of the 20th century and this book will
be a valuable reference to the humanist in architects, planners, and social scientists,
whether they are students, professionals, or amateurs. It will appeal to historians of
the 20th century, and to psychoanalysts and architects who are interested in how
their respective discourses interdigitate with each other and with other discourses.
Lorens Holm teaches Architecture at the University of Dundee, where he runs a
design research unit called rooms+cities. His published work focuses on reconciling
Lacanian thought on subjectivity with contemporary architectural/urban practice.
He recently organised the international conference Architecture & Collective Life.
‘Lorens Holm’s highly informative primer on the relation between archi-
tecture and psychoanalysis will be much welcomed. The two disciplines
have recently entered a productive dialogue and in this respect Reading
Architecture with Freud and Lacan in its rigour and cogency is a major con-
tribution to both’.
Nadir Lahiji, author of Architecture in the
Age of Pornography: Reading Alain Badiou
‘It is with a sense of urgency, but also a lightness of touch, that Holm
draws on his intimate knowledge of Lacan’s work to address architecture
in this time of climate crisis. Aiming to “reboot” architecture’s ethical
potential, Holm takes us through some of the most challenging theoretical
twists of psychoanalysis. Erudite and witty, “wreck[ing] havoc with linear
arguments, clear categories, and objective forms of research”, Holm dedi-
cates his precise – and kind – intelligence to flagging our urgent need for
Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious as a space of inter-subjectivity.
Holm argues that via Lacan we can change our culture – as one that values
individuality above all else – “all fantasies of the ego” – and instead grasp
architecture’s capacity for articulating the relation between individual and
collective. This is Holm’s best book on architecture and Lacan yet, and
makes for some gripping, yet vital reading’.
Jane Rendell, author of The Architecture of Psychoanalysis,
Professor of Critical Spatial Practice, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
READING ARCHITECTURE
WITH FREUD AND LACAN
Shadowing the public realm
Lorens Holm
Cover image: Lorens Holm
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Lorens Holm
The right of Lorens Holm to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Holm, Lorens, author.
Title: Reading architecture with Freud and Lacan:
shadowing the public realm / Lorens Holm.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022005964 (print) |
LCCN 2022005965 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367077983 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780367077990 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429022845 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychoanalysis and architecture.
Classification: LCC NA2543.P85 H65 2023 (print) |
LCC NA2543.P85 (ebook) | DDC 720.19--dc23/eng/20220715
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005964
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005965
ISBN: 978-0-367-07798-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-07799-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-02284-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429022845
Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Mark Cousins, Director of General Studies and Head of
the Graduate Program in Histories and Theories at the
Architectural Association School of Architecture, whose
PhD students – I was one – have formed an expanding core
of critical enquiry for years, in the area of psychoanalysis
philosophy history and politics, in schools in London,
in the UK and around the world. His thinking and his
approach to problems remain the driver behind my own
thought. This text is dedicated to his memory, with love,
respect, and humility.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
Preface on entitlement ix
1 Introduction to psychoanalysis [the unconscious] 1
2 Reading Giedion reading history through Lacan
[symbolic, imaginary, and real space] 19
3 Brunelleschi and the visual field [desire and space] 44
4 Rossi and the field of the Other [planning or the unconscious] 60
5 Frampton and Scott Brown/Venturi [the social institution
of the city or the death drive] 81
6 To conclude with climate change [discourse and
the ethics of psychoanalysis] 107
Postscript: Subjective theory and practice [rooms+cities] 128
Bibliography 137
Figure credits 147
Figure notes 149
Index 155
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In a free-associational order …
My close colleagues in IPSA, the Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies in
Architecture, including:
Francesco Proto, Tim Martin, John Shannon Hendrix, Andrew Payne, Angie
Voela, Donald Kunze, Stamatis Zografos, Wouter van Acker, Berrin Terim,
Nadir Lahiji, who generously read this manuscript, and Cameron McEwan my
longstanding teaching and thinking partner in all things relating to architecture
and the categories by which the intellect organises it, who generously read this
manuscript.
The Architecture’s Unconscious network at University of Newcastle, including
Adam Sharr, Kati Blom, Andrew Ballantyne, and Emma Cheatle, whose think-
ing informed the inception of this project.
Jane Rendell always a supporter and contributor and whose The Architecture of
Psychoanalysis has achieved something unique in contemporary English academe –
to be so sensibly English and so speculative at one and the same time.
The community of scholars and researchers that formed around Architecture
and the Unconscious (2016), including David Green and Lesley Caldwell, London
analysts whose discussion at the launch of Architecture and the Unconscious –
unbeknown to them – have informed this book.
My fourth-year Humanities students at the University of Dundee who have
been on the receiving end of my interpretative approach to architecture in lec-
tures and seminars.
The fifth-year architecture students in my rooms+cities design research unit
who have taken up the challenge.
FIGURE 0.1 The possibility of a tympanic subject.
PREFACE ON ENTITLEMENT
In 2010, Routledge published my book Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier: Architecture
Space and the Construction of Subjectivity. In this book, I used psychoanalytic theory
to interpret two key moments in the history of architecture: the formalisation
of modern space by the invention of perspective and Le Corbusier’s traumatic
encounter with that arché object of modern architecture, the Parthenon. I say
modern space, modern architecture. That book was nothing if not a reflection upon
modernism. Psychoanalysis is the paradigm of modern discourse. Psychoanalysis
kicked off when Sigmund Freud, the young neurologist, formalised the uncon-
scious at the turn of the century and placed it in the centre of the new discourse
of psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan was arguably Freud’s closest reader, whose sys-
tematic interpretations of Freud’s text lifted it out of 19th-century biologism and
put it in the context of post war structural theory. By the 1950s, Sigfried Giedion
and other historians of modern architecture simply assume that their readers will
understand their references to the unconscious and other psychoanalytic con-
cepts without the need for elaboration.
