Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture

Author: Anthony Vidler
Year: 2000
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/vidler-2000-warped-space.md

Summary

Warped Space extends the questions of The Architectural Uncanny from the domestic unhomely to the whole of public territory, theorizing "warped space" as the aesthetic and psychological product of the modern subject's anxiety in spatial systems beyond its control. Vidler traces the emergence of a psychological idea of space — 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, Khedoori, Kelley, Rosler, Coop Himmelblau, Libeskind, Lynn, Gehry's Bilbao). The book's two kinds of warping — the psychological (space as projection of the subject) and the artistic (the forced intersection of media) — converge on the metropolis as the common ground of modern practice.

Key Claims

• Space in modernity is "increasingly defined as a product of subjective projection and introjection, as opposed to a stable container of objects and bodies."
• The modern preoccupation with space was founded on a "shifting 'point of view' determined by a moving body" — the psychology of space (Vischer, Lipps, Fiedler) calibrated "the endlessly shifting sensations and moods of a perceiving subject."
• Schmarsow's "body" paradigm — "the history of architecture is the history of the sense of space" — was countered by Riegl's optical theory; Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (1941) canonized the developmental history of space as the leitmotiv of modernity.
• The phobias (agoraphobia, claustrophobia) were "inevitably ranked among the most characteristic of anxieties produced by life in the modern city — exaggerated but typical forms of the all-pervasive neurasthenia."
• Contemporary digital space is "deeply obligated to the representational experiments of modernism": "Perspective is still the rule in virtual reality environments"; what has changed is "the technique of simulation and, even more importantly, the place, or position, of the subject."
• The "warping" of perspectival space is "tantamount to the marking of a process of thinking in architecture, a discursive meditation on the place of the subject and the other in space."
• Vidler's criticism is "consciously limited to that of representational space" — the space produced by architects, artists, and critics — "as it is marked by the one spatial practice left unanalyzed by Lefebvre: that of the post-psychoanalytical imaginary."

Connections

Concepts: Warped Space · Uncanny · Dwelling · Atmosphere · Spectacle
Authors: Anthony Vidler · Walter Benjamin · Henri Lefebvre · Michel Foucault · Gilles Deleuze
Theme: Phenomenology
Related source notes: vidler-1992-architectural-uncanny · vidler-troubles-in-theory-6-from-utopia-to-heterotopia · merleau-ponty-1945-phenomenology-of-perception · lefebvre-2014-toward-architecture-of-enjoyment · buchanan-lambert-2005-deleuze-and-space

Direct Quotes

"Space, in these various iterations, has been increasingly defined as a product of subjective projection and introjection, as opposed to a stable container of objects and bodies." (Introduction)

"The history of architecture is the history of the sense of space." (Part I, citing Schmarsow)

"Agoraphobia and claustrophobia... were inevitably ranked among the most characteristic of anxieties produced by life in the modern city — exaggerated but typical forms of the all-pervasive neurasthenia." (Part I)

"Perspective is still the rule in virtual reality environments; objects are still conceived and represented within all the three-dimensional conventions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice." (Introduction)

"The warping of perspectival space is tantamount to the marking of a process of thinking in architecture, a discursive meditation on the place of the subject and the other in space." (Introduction)

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 Vidler elsewhere critiques?
• How does Vidler's "post-psychoanalytical imaginary" relate to the wiki's Noopolitics and the affective turn — is warped space a form of governance or a critical disturbance of the subject?