Warped Space Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture

by Vidler, Anthony

• ISBN13: 9780262720410
• ISBN10: 0262720418
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-02-22
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

Named one of The Art Book's Best Books of the Decade (March 2003).Beginning with agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the late nineteenth century, followed by shell shock and panic fear after World War I, phobias and anxiety came to be seen as the mental condition of modern life. They became incorporated into the media and arts, in particular the spatial arts of architecture, urbanism, and film. This "spatial warping" is now being reshaped by digitalization and virtual reality. Anthony Vidler is concerned with two forms of warped space. The first, a psychological space, is the repository of neuroses and phobias. This space is not empty but full of disturbing forms, including those of architecture and the city. The second kind of warping is produced when artists break the boundaries of genre to depict space in new ways. Vidler traces the emergence of a psychological idea of space from Pascal and Freud to the identification of agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the nineteenth century to twentieth-century theories of spatial alienation and estrangement in the writings of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Focusing on current conditions of displacement and placelessness, he examines ways in which contemporary artists and architects have produced new forms of spatial warping. The discussion ranges from theorists such as Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze to artists such as Vito Acconci, Mike Kelley, Martha Rosler, and Rachel Whiteread. Finally, Vidler looks at the architectural experiments of Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn, Morphosis, and Eric Owen Moss in the light of new digital techniques that, while relying on traditional perspective, have radically transformed the composition, production, and experience-perhaps even the subject itself-of architecture.

Author Biography

Anthony Vidler is Dean and Professor of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, New York. He is the author of Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), and The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992), both published by The MIT Press, and other books.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(16)
Part I
Horror Vacui
Constructing the Void from Pascal to Freud	17	(8)
Agoraphobia
Psychopathologies of Urban Space	25	(26)
Framing Infinity
Le Corbusier, Ayn Rand, and the Idea of ``Ineffable Space''	51	(14)
Spaces of Passage
The Architecture of Estrangement: Simmel, Kracauer, Benjamin	65	(16)
Dead End Street
Walter Benjamin and the Space of Distraction	81	(18)
The Explosion of Space
Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary	99	(12)
Metropolitan Montage
The City as Film in Kracauer, Benjamin, and Eisenstein	111	(12)
X Marks the Spot
The Exhaustion of Space at the Scene of the Crime	123	(12)
Part II
Home Alone
Vito Acconci's Public Realm	135	(8)
Full House
Rachel Whiteread's Postdomestic Casts	143	(8)
Lost in Space
Toba Khedoori's Architectural Fragments	151	(8)
Deep Space/Repressed Memory
Mike Kelley's Educational Complex	159	(14)
Terminal Transfer
Martha Rosler's Passages	173	(14)
Angelus Novus
Coop Himmelblau's Expressionist Utopia	187	(6)
Beyond Baroque
Eric Owen Moss in Culver City	193	(10)
Death Cube ``K''
The Neoformations of Morphosis	203	(16)
Skin and Bones
Folded Forms from Leibniz to Lynn	219	(16)
Building in Empty Spaces
Daniel Libeskind and the Postspatial Void	235	(8)
Planets, Comets, Dinosaurs (and Bugs)
Prehistoric Subjects/Posthistoric Identities	243	(16)
Notes	259	(36)
Index of Names	295