Sylvia Lavin

How modern architecture came to embrace the urges and fears of the affective unconscious. "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.

Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture

Form Follows Libido

Kimberli Meyer

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name organized by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, at the Schindler House, May 9-August 4, 2013, as part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.

1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles

Everything Loose Will Land

How modern architecture came to embrace the urges and fears of the affective unconscious.

Kissing architecture

Temporary: The temporary contemporary; Plasticity at work; What good is a bad object?; What colour is now?: Vanishing point.

Flash in the Pan

Sylvia Lavin uncovers the origins of one of the fundamental concepts of modernarchitectural theory, the idea that architecture is a form of language.

Quatremere de Quincy

Helene Mary Furján

Penelope Dean

Architectural discourse today is characterized by an overlapping conversation between architects and academics, teachers and students, theorists and practitioners. Certain terms -- "diagram, " "extreme form, " "autonomy, " and "the generic, " among others -- capture the moment in architecture in definition and in operation. Crib Sheets is a guide -- a "crib" -- to twenty-two of those buzzwords, framing contemporary currents and trajectories. Each of the words is presented with a list of quotations, or sound bites, arranged in order of length and drawn from more than two hundred commentators, from Charles Baudelaire, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller to Frank Gehry, Paul Goldberger, and Rem Koolhaas. The structure attempts to evoke the present-day architectural conversation, capturing social milieus, current events, clusters of topics, and even background noise and eavesdropping.

Notes on the Contemporary Architectural Conversation

Crib Sheets

Kissing Architecture explores the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art. In this fresh, insightful, and beautifully illustrated book, renowned architectural critic and scholar Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of "kissing" to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art--particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings--and to capture the sensual charge that is being designed and built into architectural surfaces and interior spaces today. Initiating readers into the guilty pleasures of architecture that abandons the narrow focus on function, Lavin looks at recent work by Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and others who choose instead to embrace the viewer in powerful affects and visual and sensory atmospheres. Kissing Architecture is the first book in a cutting-edge new series of short, focused arguments written by leading critics, historians, theorists, and practitioners from the world of urban development and contemporary architecture and design. These books are intended to spark vigorous debate. They stake out the positions that will help shape the architecture and urbanism of tomorrow. Addressing one of the most spectacular and significant developments in the current cultural scene, Kissing Architecture is an entertainingly irreverent and disarmingly incisive book that offers an entirely new way of seeing--and experiencing--architecture in the age after representation.

Kissing Architecture

Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths' brings together an array of building fragments, drawings, models, and primary source documents, to present canonic projects from an unexpected and unfamiliar point of view. The exhibition challenges the typical narrative of the heroic architect by revealing a counter- reading of postmodern procedures. The purpose is simultaneously to deflate the postmodern mythologizing of the architect and inflate the importance of empirically describable architectural activity. In so doing, the exhibition will make original contributions both to a counter-historiography of the postmodern and to contemporary curatorial method. A broad selection of material evidence -- gathered from building sites, libraries, and archives -- supports accounts of architects? and architecture?s entanglements with bureaucracy, the art market, and academic and private institutions, as postmodernization challenged the discipline to redefine its modes of practice and reconsider the very idea of architecture itself.00Exhibition: CCA, Montréal, Canada (07.11.2018 - 07.04.2019).

Sylvia Lavin

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