Warped Space

Definition

Warped space names the psychological and aesthetic distortion of space produced by the modern subject's anxiety in spatial systems beyond its control. Vidler theorizes it as the product of two related kinds of warping: the psychological (space as a projection of the subject, "a harbinger and repository of all the neuroses and phobias of that subject") and the artistic (the forced intersection of media — film, photography, art, architecture — that breaks the boundaries of genre). Both converge on the metropolis as the common ground of modern practice. Warped space extends the uncanny from the domestic unhomely to the whole of public territory — "the landscapes of fear and the topographies of despair created as a result of modern technological and capitalist development."

Key Thinkers

• Anthony Vidler — the founding account: from Pascal's horror of the void, through the fin-de-siècle phobias (agoraphobia, claustrophobia) and the spatial theories of Schmarsow, Riegl, and Giedion, to the "warped" spaces of contemporary art and architecture (Acconci, Whiteread, Libeskind, Lynn, Gehry's Bilbao).
• Walter Benjamin — the sense that space is "gradually becoming flattened out, closed in, exhausted," reducing the "elbow room" of the human subject.
• Henri Lefebvre — the classification of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces that Vidler draws on.
• Gilles Deleuze — the Deleuzian roster of "folded," "smooth," and "striated" space that Vidler situates within the warping tradition.

Related Concepts

• Uncanny — warped space is the uncanny's extension from the domestic unhomely to the public, phobic metropolis.
• Dwelling — the anxious, phobic subject of warped space against the affirmation of being-at-home.
• Atmosphere — the felt, pre-intellectual impression of space; warped space as its anxious, pathological register.
• Spectacle — the "warped" forms of digital/parametric architecture (Lynn, Gehry) as they are absorbed into the image economy.
• Heterotopia — the counter-site that disturbs the syntax of space, sharing warped space's disturbance of the subject.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Warped Space (Vidler 2000)
• The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992)
• Deleuze and Space (Buchanan & Lambert eds. 2005) — the Deleuzian spatial roster and the "any-space-whatever"
• Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1945) — the lived body and oriented space against which warped space is a distortion

Open Questions

• Does the "warped space" of digital/parametric architecture (Lynn's blobs, Gehry's Bilbao) constitute a critical reflection on the subject, or is it recuperated into the spectacle and the image economy?
• How does warped space relate to the wiki's Noopolitics and the affective turn — is it a form of governance or a critical disturbance of the subject?