Form Follows Libido – Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture - Hardcover

Lavin, Sylvia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262122685 ISBN 13: 9780262122689

Publisher: MIT Press, 2005

Synopsis

"Eight million Americans a year cool their heels in psychiatric waiting rooms. Design can help lower this nervous overhead."
—Richard Neutra, 1954

Sylvia Lavin's Form Follows Libido argues that by the 1950s, some architects felt an urge to steer the cool abstraction of high modernism away from a neutral formalism toward the production of more erotic, affective environments. Lavin turns to the architecture of Richard Neutra (1892-1970) to explore the genesis of these new mood-inducing environments. In a series of engaging essays weaving through the designs and writings of this Vienna-born, California-based architect, Lavin discovers in Neutra a sustained and poignant psychoanalytic reflection set in the context of a burgeoning psychoanalytic culture in America.

Lavin shows that Neutra's redirection of modernism constituted not a lyrical regression to sentimentality but a deliberate advance of architectural theory and technique to engage the unconscious mind, fueled by the ideas of psychoanalysis that were being rapidly disseminated at the time. In Neutra's responses to a vivid range of issues, from psychoanalysis proper to the popular psychology of tele-evangelical prayer, Lavin uncovers a radical reconstitution of the architectural discipline.

Arguing persuasively that the received historical views of both psychoanalysis and architecture have led to a suppression of their compelling coincidences and unorthodoxies, Lavin sets out to unleash midcentury architecture's hidden libido. Neither Neutra nor psychoanalysis emerges unscathed from her investigation of how architecture came to be saturated by the intrigues of affect, often against its will. If Reyner Banham sought to put architecture "on the couch," then Lavin, through Neutra, leaps beyond Banham's ameliorative aim to lure contemporary architecture into the lush and dangerous liaisons of environmental design.

About this title

Review

"Provocative and readable, [Lavin's] study offers a fresh approach to architectural criticism and it may change the way you view these familiar white volumes." - LA Architect "Lavin's argument is as lucid as it is persuasive, a great achievement in architectural history and theory." - Rosalind E. Krauss, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University "Like a skillful remix of an already good song, Form Follows Libido gives us Richard Neutra again for the first time.... A genealogy for much of what is interesting about current design practice." - K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architecture Theory, Harvard University"

About the Author

Sylvia Lavin is Professor and Chair of the Architecture Department at UCLA.

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262122685
• ISBN 13: 9780262122689
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 150