How psychological ideas of space have profoundly affected
architectural and artistic expression in the twentieth century.
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.
