SEEING IS BELIEVING

Is space created by the viewer or the building? How does its representation in images translate in our minds? Where do reality and illusion collide? Olivier Richon investigates

This erudite book is a study of architectural space in relation to psychoanalytical space. It is also homage to what we may call the triangle of representation, where the eye, as the viewing subject, forms the apex whose base is occupied by an object or an image. On this triangle is another, superimposed to it but inverted: the object or image becomes the point from which the viewer is looked at.

In a Lacanian perspective, these two triangles form a chiasmus. The second has a structural priority over the first: I am the object of the gaze of another person, object or picture – being looked at is anterior to my gaze. This is intuitively obvious for most architects: buildings look at us, they interpellate us.
A key work in Loren Holm’s argument is Brunelleschi’s masterpiece, the San Lorenzo corridor in Florence (c. 1420), where the perspectival space of receding columns meets a fresco painted in perspective. It makes the transition from architectural to painted space almost invisible, contributing to the trompe l’oeil. 

Another key image is a portrait of the 24 year old Charles Edouard Jeanneret on the Acropolis, taken by his friend Klipstein in 1911. Not yet Le Corbusier, the figure stands before ruins and is part of the grisaille of the stones; the photograph is awkward, there is an unevenness of tone as if the light finds it difficult to pass through the lens.

While the Brunelleschi corridor is a triumph of organised space, Klipstein’s photograph bears the marks of the accidental snapshot. It fails to deliver what Holm calls a reality effect – ‘a certain equivalence of space and its picture’ – as Brunelleschi does; nor does it convincingly mobilise the effect of perspective that photography can.  Here, the discourse of photography enters the argument about space, architecture and subjectivity.

Holm compares this snap to an image by the modernist photographer Lee Friedlander, taken from the window of a car that includes on its left a wing mirror in which we can see the photographer in the act of seeing. It produces a fractured visual field closer to an optical collage than to the reality we expect from a photograph.

Friedlander’s shot is critical. It calls into question the photograph’s transparency. Klipstein’s snap of Charles Edouard is critical in the sense of being in crisis. It is unstable, not by design but by accident. For Holm, this is both an image in crisis and the image of a crisis: the shock encounter of Jeanneret with the Parthenon and Acropolis gazing at him: he is interpellated by the symbolic and spatial dimension the site embodies. Brunelleschi’s corridor lets Holm address the place of perspective as a discourse and move away from the common sense idea of perspective as a faithful rendition of actual space.
However, his use of Gombrich as an Aunt Sally of the notion of perspective as reality is too hasty. Is perspective really ‘the natural way of seeing’ for Gombrich?

Holm invites us to walk through the realms of psychoanalysis to interrogate the relation between space and architecture. At times it looks as if the discourse of architecture is mobilised to think through the edifice of psychoanalysis rather than the other way round. In this sense, the author is giving form to an architecture of psychoanalysis. The research and scholarship are engrossing and trigger the desire to revisit the source materials he makes use of.
Unfortunately, the cluttered and ungenerous design of the book is a disservice to the author. It is time academic publishers paid more attention to book design and realised illustrations are more than footnotes to the text.

Olivier Richon is professor of photography at the RCA

Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity
Lorens Holm, Routledge
PB £29.99

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