Form Follows Libido

Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture

Sylvia Lavin

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English

MIT Press
28 September 2007

Individual architects & architectural firms

Series: Form Follows Libido

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.

By: Sylvia Lavin
Imprint: MIT Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 279mm, Width: 216mm, Spine: 11mm
Weight: 635g
ISBN: 9780262622134
ISBN 10: 0262622130
Series: Form Follows Libido
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 28 September 2007
Recommended Age: From 18 years
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

Reviews for Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture

Form Follows Libido is a singular achievement in architectural history, remarkable for its seductive and adventurous prose as much as the revelatory force of its arguments. It provides the clearest, and most stimulating, recent example I know of architectural history as intellectual and cultural history, and should provide scholars in all areas of the discipline with an exemplary model of how to write the history of architecture today. Keith Bresnahan RACAR Provocative and readable, her study offers a fresh approach to architectural criticism... LA Architect Provocative and readable, her study offers a fresh approach to architectural criticism... LA Architect