Architecture and Psychoanalysis University of Dundee School of Architecture Dr. Lorens Holm Research interest on this subject derive from Dr Holm’s PhD research (2003) which looked at areas of cross-over between psychoanalytic theory and the architectural discourse of space, which begins with Brunelleschi's invention of perspective. This PhD involved a close reading of the texts of Jacques Lacan and Freud, concerning perception and representation. Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and cultural theorist, far and away the most important student of Freud. The significance of Lacan is that he took Freud out of the context of late nineteenth century biology and put him in dialogue with contemporary culture and philosophy, including phenomenology, structuralism, existentialism, structural anthropology and the like. Current writing on this subject has several obsessions, including: how personal identity is articulated spatially; the extent to which perspective space is a projection of subjectivity and a precondition for desire; how psychoanalytic concepts like ego/id, conscious/unconscious are always already intertwined with fundamental spatial categories like inside/outside. The work attempts to critique architecture from a psychoanalytic point of view and psychoanalysis from an architectural point of view. In a secondary way, the work addresses the texts of the major western philosophers (mainly because psychoanalysis as a discipline takes them on), including Hegel, Kant, Descartes, and Plato. This research is important because although Lacan has been taken up in film theory and the visual arts, his work has remained relatively peripheral to architecture. And not just Lacan; architecture has tended to resist psychoanalytic theory generally, as if architecture, that most objective of arts, could resist being occupied by the psyche. The objective of this research is to provide a subjective account of architectural space, in the way that structuralism can be regarded as a subjective account of language or psychoanalytic theory as subjective account of a person. This work will add to our understanding of architecture and hence to our appreciation of architectural ideas, but it is difficult to see how or why it would issue in better buildings. The Duncan of Jordanstone Faculty of Art and Design is comprised of 4 Schools: Architecture, Design, Fine Art, Television and Imaging. Within the School of Architecture, there are 4 research groups, the two that overlap with this research are CARA (analysis, theory) and Field (design practice). This research reviews ‘difficult’ texts, what the writer Hanif Kareshi calls ‘migrane reads’. Papers are presented in conferences and published in relevant journals. In addition, the issues investigated in this subject are occasionally developed out of a lecture to students on problems in modern architecture or contemporary culture.

A Lacanian analysis of Holbein’s Ambassadors (London: National Gallery)

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A Lacanian analysis of Brunelleschi's demonstration of perspective (Florence, ca. 1420)

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Between 2 interiors: Florence, the visual field

Publications ‘eS aitcH Iee Tee’, in Gershenson and Penner, eds, Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets (forthcoming). ‘The Primitive Hut: fantasies of survival in an all white world’, in Odgers, Samuel, Sharr (eds.), Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture (Routledge, 2006). ‘Annunciation: language and light’, in Memory Image Narrative (Amsterdam: ASCA Press, 2003). ‘The Speech of Space/ Freud's houses or a tale of three plaques’, in Room 5 (London: The

London Consortium/Lawrence&Wishart, 2003), no 3. ‘Supersaturated Space’, preface to Marcos Cruz and Salvador Perez Arroyo (eds.) Unit 20

(Universidad de Valencia/ ACTAR, 2002). ‘The Property Line: Lacan and the Real Estate’ in Meaning, Frame and Metaphor (Amsterdam:

ASCA Press, 2002). ‘The Scene of Perspective – the scene of the crime’ in Room 5, no 2, Sept 2001. ‘La Boîte Orange’, in World Architecture, issue 95 (April 2001). Contributor to ABC Cultural, the Weekend Supplement to the Madrid daily, including reviews of

Jakob + Macfarlane, Will Alsop, Peter Cook, James Stewart Polshek (2000-01). ‘The Beauty of Surfaces/ memories of war’ in Room 5, no1, Sept 2000. ‘What Lacan said Re: Architecture’ in Critical Quarterly, June 2000. ‘Reading through the mirror: Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier’ in Assemblage 18 (Boston: MIT

Press, 1992). Recent Conference Papers: ‘The image of architecture: the gaze, space, emptiness’, the annual conference of the

Architecture Humanities Research Association, Nottingham, 2005. ‘Reflections on Stoic Space’ lecture for the London Consortium Postdoctoral Seminar Program,

Tate Gallery, March 2005. ‘Empathy theory recast (Lacan)’, the annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,

April, 2004. Scott Opler Fellow. ‘Seeing Through the Subject’, Architecture and Philosophy, Tate Gallery Conference, June 2003. ‘Mies van der Rohe’, Whitechapel Gallery, Gallery talk, December 2002 ‘Annunciation: language and light’ at Memory Image Narrative , ASCA Annual Conference,

Amsterdam 2001. ‘The Property Line: Lacan and the Real Estate’ in Meaning, Frame and Metaphor, ASCA Annual

Conference, Amsterdam 2000.