A major new interpretive work on the structure of spatial experience, this book is for theorists of architecture, art and visual studies. It interprets the 15th-century demonstration of perspective for today by relating it to contemporary theories of subjectivity. It explores a link between architecture and psychoanalysis that has not hitherto been elaborated, and opens the way for the Lacanian critique of architecture that is now a familiar feature of discourse in the other arts and social sciences.
The text argues that perspective is the paradigmatic form of spatial consciousness. This explains why perspective remains such a satisfying representational form – the form of space that we tend to call real – and why it remains the primary visual form of architectural space, despite recent experiments in representation that claim to challenge this canon. This link between the inner world of the psyche and the exterior world of architectural space is as fundamental as it is problematic, and is perhaps therefore inevitable.
Lorens Holm is Reader in Architecture and Director of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research at the University of Dundee. He has taught architecture at the AA, University College London, the Mackintosh, and Washington University in St. Louis. Prior publications on Psychoanalysis and Architecture have appeared in the Journals Perspecta (2010), Haecceity (2008 & 2007), Critical Quarterly (2000 & 2007), and Assemblage (1993).