The New Mood or Affective Disorder

Author(s): Sylvia Lavin

Source: Assemblage, No. 41 (Apr., 2000), p. 40
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171300
Accessed: 31/10/2008 15:27

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The New Mood or
When modernism broke from the obliga-
tions to King and God, architecture en-
tered the realm of aesthetic duty and was
introduced to the world of affect. A pri-
mary function of buildings was now to cre-
ate in the viewer emotional response, and
architecturaltheories proliferatedthat rati-
fied this process. From definitions of char-
acter in the eighteenth century to notions
of empathy and space at the end of the
nineteenth century, the emotive relation-
ship between buildings and people was
clearly established: architecture was an af-
fect machine designed to produce particu-
lar feeling-states in the observer.Criticism
reinforced this condition and modern lit-
erature is overwhelmed by passionate writ-
ers: Johann Winckelman aroused while
looking at Greek figures on ancient build-
ings, Jeremy Bentham instilling fear and
paranoid self-consciousness in inmates,
and John Ruskin waxing poetic before the
stones of Venice. Sigfried Gideon evalu-
ated the entire development of modernism
in relation to its impact on human feeling.
Since buildings were busy creating emo-
tion, and critics were busy having emotion,
architects themselves were freed from the
vagariesof emotional life. Surrounded,
thus, by fervent writersand needy clients,
architects had perhaps no choice but to
become psychiatrists.With mainly thera-
peutic intentions, the architect claimed
affective neutrality, intervening where
necessary in marriages,individual psychic
states, and social desires. From the work
of architects such as Richard Neutra, who
deliberately fashioned himself as a psycho-
analyst, to the wider phenomenon of using
40 Sylvia Lavin
Affective Disorder
architectureto ensure mental hygiene, to
the establishment of environmental psy-
chology, the discipline of architecture
structureda world of object relations in
which inanimate buildings assumed key
roles in the emotional lives of the nonpro-
fessional public while architects mediated
this psychic organization.
The Assemblagegeneration inherited this
order of things and, largely under the in-
fluence of Michel Foucault, rearrangedits
pieces. Critics assumed the role of analyst
once played by the architect while archi-
tects instead became analysands.Perhaps
even more consequential than the profes-
sional/public references to being analyzed
made by FrankGehry or Peter Eisenman
is the way in which the discipline itself be-
came subjected to a form of psychoanaly-
sis. Sublimated desires particularlyfor
power were located in most aspects of the
field, including the structureof the profes-
sion, the mechanisms of its discourses and
modes of representation,as well as the very
concepts that make architecturearchitec-
tural. Ironically, emotion itself came to be
repressedin the analytic discourses of criti-
cality and an affective disorderbegan to
emerge in which the pathological symp-
toms of the unconscious were identified
with great abandon but the passionate
drivestheoretically generating these symp-
toms were nowhere to be found. The
house had become a neurotic bundle of
tics and compulsions but affect itself no
longer had a home.
Reconfiguring this psychodynamic has
emerged as a major potential of the
postcriticalera. The workof Gilles
Deleuze has permitted the affective terrain
of buildings to organize itself anew and the
discipline seems to be entering an almost
hyperemotionalstate. Increasinglyunin-
hibited by repressiveregimes of regularge-
ometry and Tayloristmodes of production,
architecture is instead nurturedby the ar-
dent expressionsof consumer desires and
the secret pleasures of new, soft materials.
Buildings can now be animated, ecstatic,
and rapturous.While buildings may emote
with abandon, neither the critic nor the
architect is personallyexposed. The roles
of both have yet to be workedout in this
atmosphereof heightened affective inten-
sity and the locus and generatorsof the
effluence of feeling-statesarising in archi-
tecture today are still to be determined.
Traditionalmodels of the architect as emo-
tional genius and the building as instigator
of psychic sensation through association
are no longer tenable. Enforcing or impos-
ing a dominant sensibility through criti-
cism would be as pernicious as any form of
hegemony. Yet just as psychotropicdrugs
and talk therapyhave been shown to have
identical impact on the physiology of the
brain, which fundamentally challenges
both the content and import of sentiment
and sensation, criticism must now under-
stand sensibility as a form of intelligence
ratherthan as opposed to intellection. If
chemical engineers can design a happy
pill, the building in ecstasy is a concept
that takes on provocativesignificance and
opens pleasurablenew dimensions to the
theoretical project.