Output details
16 - Architecture, Built Environment and Planning
University of Dundee
Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: architecture, space and the construction of subjectivity.
The book received three reviews, all of which were extremely positive, in presses with different readerships and editorial approaches:
arq: Architecture Research Quarterly Vol. 14, No. 2, 2010 (Academic);
Studio International 02 04 2010, at http://www.studio-international.co.uk/books/brunelleschi-10.asp (Fine Art);
RIBA Journal March 2010 (Professional).
It has also led to speaking engagements, recognition at the annual 2012 DIA (Dundee Institute of Architects) convention, and a blog-based reading group (Architects.Lacan) at http://lholm.wordpress.com/. Speaking engagements include public evening lectures to the Architectural Association and the Bartlett, and to the British Psychoanalytical Society at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London (all 2011).
The book employs psychoanalytic theory to build detailed extended interpretations of Brunelleschi's invention of perspective and LeCorbusier's traumatic encounter with the Parthenon. It puts two distinct research contents in dialogue. It interrelates two historical periods, and discourses in two disciplines - the architectural discourse of space and the psychoanalytic discourse on perception. It argues that there are links between the way we conceptualise space and the way we conceptualise the self, and that neither entity exists outside the symbolic systems we use to represent them, the entailments of which have yet to be fully developed in architecture theory and practice.