YB ARCHITECTS

There is perhaps no better place to start a discussion about the architecture of the mind than the movie Psycho, especially now that the story is being elaborated upon by the show Bates Motel. First, some notes about the symbols used in the original movie to describe the murderer’s psyche. Norman is the man version of Norma, his mother. She has taken over his subconscious mind and often succeeds in taking over his physical actions by doing things for him that he is unable to do on his own, or would have prevented her from doing if he could. Norman is also a word very close to “normal” but not quite there. The world that his mind occupies is not the same as the one actually around him, and what he has been made to believe is normal by his mother is anything but. His hobby hints at this detachment from the real world. The taxidermy is an allusion to the murders he commits, but stuffed with the lies he uses to hide the truth about these murders (that he is the one who committed them, and that it's wrong to kill people). He is more at ease with dead things than he is with live ones. Birds in particular represent the women that are unattainable to him, both because of his insecurities and his mother’s jealousy. Stuffing them allows him to keep them from flying away. In particular this refers to his mother, him being the stuffing. He cannot bear being separated from his mother, so he allowed her to occupy his own mind from time to time.

Perhaps the most abstract is the tension between the motel and the house as the diagram of his mind. On the large scale, it’s Hobbes’ Leviathan, with the motel representing the people, the body politique, and the house on the hill as the head. Hobbes claimed that a functioning commonwealth must demand that all it's people's strengths and fears be entrusted in one entity. In Psycho, this agreement is subverted: when “the people” have given up all their powers, and enter the shower naked and unarmed, the tyrannical mother takes advantage of their vulnerability and strikes. This is also where the "crime" she is responding to had occurred since Norman had spied on the guest undressing and was aroused. On another scale there’s Freud’s tri-partite division of the psychic apparatus into the id, ego, and super-ego. The motel in this analogy would be the outside world, his mother’s room on the second floor would be the id, the basement would be the superego, and the stairs up to the house and those between floors would be the ego, attempting to bridge between all realms, although sometimes unknowingly aid in murder.

The Cell is a film that also attempts to replicate Freud’s structural model of the psyche. Vincent D’Onofrio plays a schizophrenic serial killer that we soon learn is possessed by a demon embedded in him from the violence and abuse he received from his father. He also witnessed his father sadistically abuse his mother and was too young and weak to protect her, a fact that plays into the polarization of his dual personality. Jennifer Lopez’s character, a child therapist equipped with the technology to enter and participate in her patients’ subconscious, attempts to intervene in the struggle of the killer’s manifestations. In effect, she appears to be encountering a mind that has on the one hand a very powerful and constantly growing id, and on the other hand a weak, defenseless, stunted and infantile superego, with no ego to keep the id in check and encourage the compassion of the superego, or the conscience.

(As a side note, Freud had assigned the love drive, Eros, and the Death drive, Tanatos, both to the Id part of the mind as the place of passions. In this character’s psychotic mind we see the uninhibited Eros exhibited in the effervescent creativity of the demon’s empire, contrasted with the obsession of death in the repeated murderous act. Furthermore, the uninhibitedness manifests itself in the almost medieval chains and piercings that he uses to suspend himself in the air above his victims while entering a sadistic state of trance.) This is in essence a recreation of the dynamic between his parents in his childhood home, only now, he is the oppressor, his mother is any woman that arouses him, and there is no one to protect his inner child or the female victims. Here enters the therapist who quickly assumes the role of the protective mother, a role he didn’t encounter before and was lacking all his life. Women in his life were not a source of comfort and strength but a weak creature to be trapped and abused. We learn that the balanced home is what grants the mind in its formative years the Ego, a mediator between animalistic and irrational instinct, the Id, and the more compassionate and moderate Superego.

Henry Miller, like Proust, believes that memories have a stickiness, a way to merge with a place or thing in such a profound and integral way that the entity absorbs the memory.  "All those yearning looks I bestowed on the buildings and statues ... That by now my thoughts have become part of the very buildings and statues, they must be saturated with my anguish." (Tropic of Cancer).  Miller projects his personal thoughts and emotions, ideas and anxieties, onto the places and buildings around him as he walks down the streets of Paris.  In passing these places again, he is reminded of those feelings almost involuntarily, although not quite.

Proust doesn't ask the Madeleine cookie what he was feeling the last time he ate it.  He doesn't even realize the memories are in the cookie and not the tea.  As a matter of fact, the rush of emotions he receives from biting the cookie dipped in tea is not immediately recognizable as a set of memories.  It was "a delicious pleasure that invaded me, isolated, without any notion of a cause.  It filled me immediately with the indifferent vicissitudes of life, its harmless disasters, its illusionary brevity, in the same way that love functions, in filling me with a precious entity; or perhaps this entity was not in me, it was me.  I stopped feeling mediocre, random, mortal."  This is not just a vision he experiences, but an overcoming sensation of exuberance, the antithesis to nausea, something abstract and decidedly physical at the same time.  Abstract because at the first bite he had not put a "face" to the sensation.  And in effect, he quickly realizes it's not the appearance of the cookie and tea that caused this invasion, but the taste.  Taste, being one of the more abstract senses, offers in this sense an abstract sensation, and an abstract of memories.

That the set of memories that launches Proust's opus "In Search of Lost Time" would be entrusted in the fragile collection of crumbs that is the Madeleine cookie as it melts in a spoonful of hot tea evokes the fragility of our memory banks; how things begin in chronological and organized systems when they enter our minds, but are classified haphazardly in our minds, with no spoon of meaning to hold them together.  What makes this fragility all the more humbling is that for Proust what appears very quickly to be at stake is his acceptance of his mortality, the insignificance of his existence, perhaps even the lightness of his being (a discussion on Kundera will come soon enough).  Proust has spent his life horrified at moments of anxiety at the thought of living and dying a mediocre and forgettable existence, devoid of any lasting meaning or importance.  In that cookie that one day he (or his character) finds the wellspring of his memories to which he did not have access prior to consuming the cookie. 

Henry Miller does not instruct us on whether or not he had beckoned the building facades of Paris to reflect onto him the memories he had entrusted in them, but indeed the exchange relates to that of a man depositing memories in a bank or storing them in containers outside of his own home, and then withdrawing them at will.  This is a useful concept for architects to conceive of buildings as memory banks, and this thesis may yield formal implications such as more complicated arrangements or skin conditions to allow for memories to be inserted in, like notes of prayer on the Wailing Wall.

Proust, however, very distinctly explains that the almost nauseating vision he receives was not called upon and hits him entirely involuntarily, so much so that he has a hard time replicating it for long enough to interpret it.  It's a drugging sensation that forces him to try over and over again for a long time to access it again until he finds what it contains.  The exchange here is of a fleeting sensation that transcends the physical and thus the object becomes the subject, asking and even demanding the observer to invest more of himself, to open up and release the valves of past aspirations.

Phenomenology was quickly developed into existentialism in its French interpretation (Sartre) from the German original (Husserl).  It's not too surprising that existentialism borrows a lot from, if not is based in, phenomenology.  Phenomenology implies and requires an investment of the self outwards.  The result of the disseminating of consciousness in one's surroundings is a sense of caring, of empathy, not because it's the "other" but exactly because it's an extension of the self.  This is why Sartre introduced existentialism as a humanism: because it's precisely the mirror image of that concept.  In a way, it's a more approachable concept of social living.  It expresses a narcissism, a love of oneself even as an expanded entity, beyond the limits of the skin (Palaasma didn't go far enough).  In psychology, this love is at the core of motherhood.  Rudolf Steiner says that the love for a baby is hardwired to the mother as if she were loving herself, and now a part of herself is separate from her, but not separated.  Steiner suggests that we must expand this love to other people and things around us.  Primal union is at the core of our capacity to love in the first place.  This connection is symbiotic, and benefits both the mother and the child.  What follows, as Phil Stutz explains, is a mandatory severing of this attachment so that the child may break free and become an independent human being.  This benevolent act is a sacrifice on the mother's part, which means that it's a work of love.  The child's well-being is an extension of her own well-being, even after death.  Steiner's postulation is a response to the challenges we face today, which he had predicted, namely a dangerous individualism.  In a way, his advocacy for a ethical individualism is at the core of the drive felt in the existentialist movement.

Buildings are the intermediary between man and god.  Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor postulated that the common man is not able to bear the burden of divine presence on Earth all on his own.  "The kingdom of God is within you" is thus translated from a form of liberation to a heavy cross one has to bear.  Instead of this direct and constant confrontation, the Church intervenes to take on the burden of divine surveillance to meet the common man and his common sins with an earthly presence.  Similarly, architecture provides more than a shelter or a venue for events to take place in.  It contains, reflects, and retains dreams and memories, hopes and achievements.  There's a promise with every building of a relationship to experience that is not singular or linear.  It begins long before it is acknowledged and it lasts long after it is granted.  That promise is the earthly expression of will and opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of, waiting to be remembered, waiting to be changed.  It is the physical existence of something that did, does, or will happen, and the patience it evokes is indicative of its fragility.  As contingent as the belief in a god, it can only subsist if it is relevant.  Therefore, Tschumi's event-space can be repostulated as if-space.

In House of Cards, Frank Underwood professes, "I pray to myself for myself."  Here is an update to the idea of having an intermediary between God and man.  Here both God and the intermediary are canceled, or rather, replaced.  The New Testament thus meets its Nietschian challenger, an ubermensch holding an armor that on the outside proclaims "God is dead" and on the inside is nothing but a mirror.  It is a narcissistic declaration of strength and autonomy.  Power is not earned; is self-referential and subjectively objective.

This type of existence is happily limited.  Happy because it is of its time and place.  The man feels a sense of control, perhaps not of his surroundings, but of his reaction to and confrontation with the world around him.  Where he starts is where he ends.  "I've got my balls and word and I don't break neither one of them for nobody."  What you see is what you get.  You don't need god or architecture to understand this man.  You need only fear him.  The story is driven by a revenge a la montecristo, but this man needs no motive to be vengeful.  He's the Hobbesian degree zero of man in a society.

Such an insulated and introverted interface with the world stands in contrast with the one that, in spite of itself, is more fluid and porous.  Sartre's nausea is not a passive occurrence.  It is triggered by the investment of the mind in its physical delimitations, which very quickly depart from the extents of the body and its sensory abilities.  It effectively expands the sensibility of a body in space, of bodies in space.  The multiple become one, or at least the consciousness(es) thereof explore objects, living or not, in the vicinity of the body.  The conscious mind floats and bounces like a bullet that ricochets from and through otherwise inanimate environs.  The cliche of "out of body experience" is avoided in the way the physical body deals with the explorations of the expanded mind, namely with nausea.  This sickness seems to be related to the introduction of the body-in-space feeling, not to the feeling itself.  in The Matrix, Neo experiences the same nausea as he is first introduced to the idea that his mind had been imprisoned his entire life.  The body rejects with violence the introduction of greater truths, and this is that level of understanding (perhaps Chris Marker will grade it a Level 4 on his Level 5 scale) that the Grand Inquisitor warns the second coming of Jesus against.  That nausea is not fit for the common man, at least not the submissive one of a violently oppressive empire.

Carrousel du Louvre, Ieoh Ming Pei, 1993

Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco, Michaelangelo Buonarroti, 1508-1512

Seen recently: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

One step further towards disenfranchising the architect, brought to you by:

1) Gramazio & Kohler and Raphallo D'andrea