8/2/2019 Vidler Wagner Interview 07

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Anthony Vidler, Ph.D., is the Dean o the Irving S.Chanin School o Architecture o Te Cooper Union,New York City. A historian and a critic, he speciali-zes in French architecture rom the Enlightenmentto the present ( Te Writing o the Walls: Architectural Teory in the Late Enlightenment , 1987), particu-

larly in the work o the French radical neoclas-sicist, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux ( Architecture and Social Re orm at the End o the Ancien Régime, 1990;Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture o the Revolutionbetween Vision and Utopia, 2006).

o students o modern and contemporary archi-tecture, Vidler has made an equally important markby his insistence that the discourse about the archi-tectural eld become as nuanced and intense as arethe building ambitions inherent in daily architecturalpractice. Conceptual material or both the extensionand deepening o this territory, he proposes, canbe ound in psychology and psychoanalysis. wo oVidler’s books, Te Architectural Uncanny: Essays inthe Modern Unhomely (1992) and Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture(2000),ofer a persuasive guide not only into how this canbe done, but why such a project is intellectuallyrewarding or architects themselves.

Tis conversation is a probing o some o themany potentials or widening the scope o archi-tectural history and theory. Its keyword is the un-canny . Te concept was taken up by Sigmund Freud

as a subject o an 1919 essay, Das Unheimliche.Freud opens his text by stating that “it is only

rarely that a psycho-analyst eels impelled to in-vestigate the subject o aesthetics, even when ae-sthetics is understood to mean not merely thetheory o beauty but the theory o the qualities o

eelings. He works in other strata o mental li e…”By announcing the moment o disciplinary boun-dary-crossing, Freud himsel acknowledges a need

or a psychoanalyst to dwell in conceptual territo-ries not taken or granted by the common divisiono intellectual labor. Yet, what Freud also makesclear is that “comprehensive treatises on aesthe-tics” pre er to concern themselves with what is“beauti ul, attractive and sublime… rather than withthe opposite eelings o repulsion and distress.”Tis, the work in the ‘negative,’ is what Freud takesto be the psychoanalyst’s task. By investigatingthe efects o psychoanalytic thought on the intel-lectual, and architectural, practices o modernism,Anthony Vidler takes the same, critical, position.

Seen rom such a vantage point, an interrogationo the meanings o the uncanny and an identi ca-

A erritory of the UncannyInterview with Anthony Vidler

tion o the possible unction o this term in the realmo architecture, does two things at once; it attendsto the eelings which mark the li e in modernity andthus shape the practices o the modern sel , and loo-ks or the sources where, at the particular historicalmoment, architecture searches or its authority.

Aleksandra Wagner |What made you think o the uncanny, as a concept and as a rame or your owntheoretical project — or your thinking about art and architecture?

Anthony Vidler |I can speak here o a number oaccidents, and o a number o intellectual que-stions. Te concept, through its various expres-sions, was haunting the intellectual li e in moder-nity since the Romantic period; it had a traceableintellectual history. While largely excluded romthe modernist architectural discourse — a discour-se ar more concerned with ideas such as tran-sparency, zoning, abstraction — to me the uncannywas a stratum within modernist thought. Yet, espe-cially a ter Freud, its isolation in a specialized eld— o psychoanalysis — set it even urther apart

rom the general modernist sensibility.Following Foucault, I elt it was important to

excavate it and bring it back into a larger moder-nist discourse. In my view, the uncanny bound to-gether questions o alienation, psychic destabi-

lization, exclusion, personal anomie and real li eexperiences o the displacement and exile o theintellectual in modern culture. It was a guide tohow intellectuals con ronted the conditions omass urban metropolitan li e.

I wrote Te Architectural Uncanny 1 (and later,Warped Space2) as an investigation o the efects opsychoanalytic thought on the intellectual practi-ces o modernism; it has been commonly mistakenas a “psychoanalytic reading” o architecture.

Aleksandra Wagner |You seem to suggest that theuncanny is a kind o bourgeois sentiment…

Anthony Vidler |Te uncanny is never a product oan environment itsel ; it is a view rom the subject.A mirror is not uncanny, unless you cannot seeyoursel in it. Tis is an uncanny moment — but themirror itsel is ‘normal’ be ore, and it is ‘normal’a ter. What is important, I’d say, is that this expe-rience is unrepeatable. Its orce is the orce o the

rst-time encounter; each subsequent experienceo the same kind is merely a repetition o an expe-rience already elt.

I have no empirical evidence about the uncannyat all. I don’t know i any psychoanalyst ever usedthe concept clinically; and I don’t know i such a use,i practiced at all, was help ul. Tere is no uncannyarchitecture per se, no uncanny room, no necessari-ly uncanny experiences motivated by any thing. Teuncanny cannot be produced, like ear, or like a sta-ge production… yet it is a sensation that a numbero people got engaged in, saw as something that im-

pacted their lives. Not a conscious ear, not the earwith a cause, not the sort o terror that comes withsituations o imminent danger and destruction ( rombombs to unemployment) — this eruption o theworld o unease into the world o ease, a disruptiono the com orts o everyday li e and its equally qui-

ck disappearance, was o interest to me.Again, I looked at the uncanny as an intellec-tual construct — o what could be an everyday oc-currence — used in short stories, in photographs,in lms, in the productions o intellectual elites. Inthat sense, and in this particular context, it cannotbe dissociated rom the question o class.

Te uncanny erupted in several moments in hi-story. It erupted in the work o German litera-ti, such is E. . A. Hofmann, and in work o F. W.J. von Schelling. Te unheimlich was de ned withgreat precision in the dictionaries o that era. InGerman intellectual history it emerged as a disrup-tion o domestic com ort at the moment when thedomestic com ort itsel had just been invented.

Te second time it emerges is in the late 19 th century. Interestingly enough, it emerges aroundquestions o archeology, o unearthing o whatwas long dead. Tere is an author called WilhelmJensen, who writes the novel, Gradiva (1903), whi-ch Freud uses as a subject o his own study in1907.3 From there, Freud goes on to explore his a-scinations with Etruscan tombs, with burials, with

death and the death-drive… Yet, it is hard to pindown the ‘originary’ moment o Freud’s interest inthe term. It occurs, as a named sensation, in otemand aboo (1913). Ten he drops it, and picks it upin essays that address the response o Europeanmiddle classes to the severely destabilizing con-ditions brought about by World War I. Nowhereis that more clearly stated than in his essay “On

ransience,” whereby the sense o European homehad been broken. In terms in which Freud esta-blishes the uncanny, there is always a rupture othe present, by a discom orting occurrence that,in one way or another, is brought to the ront — toconsciousness… You could say it was repressed;you could say it was orgotten. For Freud, “the un-canny is that class o rightening which leads backto what is known o old and long amiliar.”4

Te resurgence o interest in the concept comesin late sixties and early seventies, in French theory.Te rst real investigation is in the circle aroundJacques Derrida, who nds it lurking in the intersti-ces o language. O course, this can be urther linkedwith lectures that Jacques Lacan gave in Paris, inthe early sixties — on the subject o anxiety. Tisis the nexus o the uncanny, at this particular mo-ment. Te act that the concept emerges again in the 1990s, probably has to do with the time-lag in tran-slation… so you get the Anglo-Saxon, Italian, Germanauthors responding, having a conversation.

Aleksandra Wagner | o what degree is the uncanny a concept that belongs to the modern, pre-industrial and industrializing European West, or do you see it as

something that can unction as a ramework in other landscapes and other times?

Anthony Vidler |I suppose we should ask, ‘Howdoes the concept, any concept, come to existence?’Is its invention (as well as usage) linked with someabstract date, or does it become salient only whenit serves to explain something?

For example, we’ve always lived in what we call,space. However, the word, ‘space,’ was not part oarchitectural terminology until 1870s. Why werethey thinking space in a certain moment in time?Why is someone thinking the uncanny? Why is so-meone thinking psychoanalysis, when, presuma-bly, all kinds o mental disturbances existed wellbe ore Freud? Why does a certain thought-struc-ture emerge in a certain moment in history? Howdoes the conceptual territory get charted? Whywas it necessary to invent phobias; to invent spa-

ce — in 1870s? Be ore that moment, space was amathematical, philosophical construct, a universalconcept. And, it was invented just then, becausepsychology revealed that my space and your spaceare not the same; that space is as much a projec-tion o an individual sel , as it is a universal, geo-metrically absolute entity.

Questions o personal space became extremelyimportant, and there ore the space o diferent buil-dings produced by diferent architects, produced bydiferent moments in history — became somethingto be studied. One was no longer studying the sty-le o the building, but its spatial properties as well.Historical questions o the 1890s, such as, whatproduced the curvilinear con rmations o spa-tial organization in Borromini?, were not histori-cal questions be ore. Francesco Borromini did nothave a concept or space.

Aleksandra Wagner |Did you expect, or hope, that the introduction o the concept into the feld o archi-tecture might become somewhat destabilizing not only or the ‘reading,’ but, also, or the making o

architecture?

Anthony Vidler |When I write history, I write as anintellectual and social historian; when I write cri-ticism, I write as an interpreter; and when I wri-te theory, I write as a partisan-designer-architect.Since I was trained in all those areas, I shi t mylens accordingly. I am always interested in destabi-lizing historical myths about architecture and, spe-ci cally, historical myths about the history o mo-dernism. I want to nd concepts that have beenexcluded by art historians who look at moderni-sm as a stylistic development, or by architecturalhistorians who look at modernism as a moment indevelopment o mass architecture, o social archi-tecture, or a development o new urban patterns.

I tend to eel that precisely psychology andpsychoanalysis have been sidelined in terms otheir ‘use’ or architectural design, and equally si-delined, there ore, by the historians o architectu-re. Historians o architecture don’t nd themsel-ves involved in the study o all the disciplines thatmake up architecture. Psychology and psychoa-nalysis constitute major modes o thinking thatemerge rom the 1860s on, and as such they have to have entered into the conceptualization o space,conceptualization o the object, conceptualizationo the subject in relation to the object. Tere occur-red a moment in which psychological analysis in-terpreted causes o mental disturbances as relatedto real space, real time, real environment; phobias— claustrophobia, movement phobia, agoraphobia— have been articulated or the rst time as pro-

ducts o urban li e, as generated by precise urbanconditions. Tere ore, it is historically incorrect toscreen psychoanalysis and psychology out o thehistory o modern architecture.

In 1920s and 1930s there were many attemptsto apply psychoanalysis to history. Yet, they wereso crude that generations a terward have come tosee psychoanalysis as a tool to be avoided, as op-posed to having a place in intellectual history. Ilearned this by teaching, or many years, with a hi-storian o fn-de-siècleVienna, Carl Schorske 5; heand I were working to re-establish the meaning othe complex historical territory in which an archi-tectural proposition gets made.

Tere are other things that should not have beenscreened out o the history o modern architecture,such as religion and religious thought. Religion is stillthe big rontier to be breached by those architectu-ral historians who want to understand the discursi-

ve ramework in which architecture is projected. oreach such an understanding, one would have to re-examine common assumptions about secularization;about continuous modernization; the notion that ar-chitecture has nothing to do with religious thought inany national or local context — as i architects havenever been in any way involved with religion… eitheras believers, or as its opponents.

When I worked on the 18th century, I elt it wasvery important to bring into architectural history thetheories o sign, theories o language — to talk aboutthe relation between the subject and the object,communication o societies to each other, the waysin which signs and their assumed representationscirculated at that time. What matters, in my view, isnot just the question o style; in this particular case,it is also the question o architects and their circlesbeing deeply involved in language theory.

Again, because o the disciplinary regimes oarchitectural history being within art history, andapart rom social, political and economic history, this type o interrogation does not come easily.Discursive ormulation o architecture which draws

rom, and utilizes, at any moment in time a who-le series o disciplinary practices, is not open to theconventionally trained architectural historian. Mywork in architectural history has always been tochallenge the boundaries o disciplinary historicalpractices and to see where, at a particular moment,architecture searches or its authority, or its moti-vations, or its relationship with society. Sometimesit is a medical discourse; sometimes it is a discour-se o science; sometimes it is a discourse o indu-strial technology; and sometimes it is a political di-scourse o social massi cation and class struggle.

Architecture continuously, through the modernperiod, searches or its authority in other discipli-nes and it is there ore important to know how thediscourses in other disciplines intersect with ar-chitecture. It is important to know how the archi-tectural discourse is, in act, established as a co-ming together o diferent authorities.

Yet, these kinds o projects have not gained inorce; there has been a turn away rom general in-

tellectual history, to more specialized, more ocu-sed history. Te real problem o the manu acture odoctorates is that they ‘tunnel’ vision, by insistingon specialization.

Aleksandra Wagner |You make a comment at the end o theIntroduction to Te ArchitecturalUncanny, which alludes to the elimination o the po-litical ( rom architecture) — except or the ghost o the politics o avant-garde, that still lurks… Tere isa sense that you are reminding the reader o the di-sruptions produced by the new arrangements o race,

class and gender. dress is a submergan anxiety o a m

Anthony Vidlerwritten at the timstmodernism, watus o social comtects that had beeII (in relationshipand post-war (in rnization and o reabandoned at that

For someone lclimate o post-wcial wel are, quewant, o a class stic means — werere. Te loss o tha

ever been here, ispecially in the Eigmaybe it was a serepressing the entTis repression, asthe aesthetics o to the corporate athis was part o mre erring to, I thi

I was trying to chitecture that looled deconstructionword, the merger ting together o thRussian revolutionthe taking-apart. RIlich Leonidov; DLissitzky, and the at the exhibition tMOMA; but, or I remain much motects aiming to deto pro le — the c

Clearly, the citymean that the parawhole, is no longeand to interpret ththe moments in tharchitecture whichthat brings the subcon rontational, c

Tehničkom omaškom u prošlom broju ČIP-a došlo je doizostavljanja završnog dijela engleskog teksta intervjua sAnthonyjem Vidlerom. Ispričavamo se Anthonyju Vidlerui autorici intervjua Aleksandri Wagner, te objavljujemointegralni engleski tekst istog intervjua.

In the previous issue o the magazine, the fnal part o theEnglish text o the interview with Anthony Vidler was mis-sing due to a technical error. We apologize to both AnthonyVidler and Aleksandra Wagner. Following is the integralEnglish text o the same interview.

Ispravak | Correction

| Aleksandra Wagner

E n d n ot e s

1 Vidler, Anthony (199Modern Unhomely. Te

2 Vidler, Anthony (200 Anxiety in Modern Cu

3 Freud, Sigmund (190diva. Te Standard Editof Sigmund Freud, 9,

4 Freud, Sigmund (191Te Standard Edition ofSigmund Freud, 17, p

5 Schorske, Carl E. (19

Culture. New York: A