IPSA met for the first time in 2020 at the initiative of Prof. Lorens Holm, University of Dundee, Scotland. The group has remained small. Its founding members are all related to academia in some way, but their varied expertise means that the group’s viability will continue to depend on different points of view. Members listed with biographies are “founding members” with equal responsibilities in maintaining iPSA as a cooperative, autonomous organization. iPSA additionally invites affiliate members to participate in events and contribute to the journal and working papers pages. With permission, they will be listed by name with email contact information. Academics, practitioners, clinicians, and independent scholars interested in either field are invited to be affiliate members who participate in zoom symposiums, interviews, and other events and who would be invited to serve as visiting critics for events. Contact kunze767@gmail.com.
Past participants of iPSA schmooz-zooms, affiliate members, friends & family are shown on this collection of ipsa-mail-lists for possible inclusion in activities and events.
Wouter Van Acker • Wouter.Van.Acker@ulb.be
Wouter Van Acker is engineer-architect and associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture La Cambre-Horta at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) where he teaches research methodology and architectural design, and co-directs the research group hortence. His research focus is the history of architectural epistemology and aesthetics in the twentieth century, and more recently the problem of returns and referentiality in late 20th century architecture. He co-edited four volumes among which most recently Architecture and Ugliness (Bloomsbury, 2020). See also: https://hortence.com/user/wvacker/
John Hendrix • jhendrix@rwu.edu • jhendrix@risd.edu
John Shannon Hendrix has been writing about architecture and psychoanalysis since 1993. Books written on the subjects are Architecture and Psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan, and Unconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. There is also a book co-edited with Lorens Holm, Architecture and the Unconscious. Articles include “Architecture and Dream Construction,” “Psychoanalysis and Identity in Architecture,” “Architecture and the Kantian Unconscious,” and “The Architectural Other.” Classes in art and architectural history have been taught at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, and other places, since 1999.
video links:
Lorens Holm • l.holm@dundee.ac.uk
Dr. Lorens Holm is Reader in Architecture and Director of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research at the University of Dundee. At Dundee he runs the rooms+cities design research unit, which uses architectural theory to open up a space for designing new forms of city and social life. He is a registered architect in the UK and the State of Massachusetts. His work is concerned with reconciling psychoanalytic thought on the self, and in particular the texts of Jacques Lacan, with contemporary architectural practice. His work takes as given that architectural space — the space that is the product of human work and labour and that is the chief constituent of our artificial world — is in a dialectical relation to how we think about ourselves as subjects of spatial and social experience. The aim of the work is to elaborate that relation within the thought threads that link architecture to philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, and machines. Publications include Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier: architecture space and the construction of subjectivity (Routledge 2010) and, with John Hendrix, Architecture and the Unconscious (Routledge 2016). His papers have appeared in The Journal of Architecture, Perspecta, Critical Quarterly, and Assemblage.
Don Kunze • kunze767@gmail.com
Don Kunze presently writes and creates educational videos as an independent researcher. His dissertation (1983) was about the place–theoretics of Giambattista Vico. He has taught architecture theory at Penn State and given workshops at Penn, NCSU, NDSU, Penn, WAAC, and Carleton, lectured at Harvard, Yale, Carleton, and WAAC, and taught at University at Buffalo, LSU, and Virginia Tech (Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center), He currently resides in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, USA, with his wife Elaine.
Nadir Lahiji
Nadir Lahiji is an architect. He is most recently the author of Architecture, Philosophy and the Pedagogy of Cinema (Routledge, 2021), Architecture or Revolution: Emancipatory Critique after Marx (Routledge, 2020) and An Architecture Manifesto: Critical Reason and Theories of a Failed Practice (Routledge, 2019). His previous publications include, among others, Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy, and the co-authored The Architecture of Phantasmagoria: Specters of the City.
Tim Martin • tdmartin739@googlemail.com
Dr Tim Martin is an architecture educator, television presenter and architecture critic. He was director of History and Theory at the Leicester School of Architecture from 2000 to 2014. His research on architecture and art is published by Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou. For more information see also: https://dmu.academia.edu/TimothyMartin
Andrew Payne • paynea1958@gmail.com
Andy Payne has published widely in the fields of architecture, art and cultural theory, both in Canada and abroad. He authored (with Professor Rodolphe el-Khoury) Architecture and the Culture of Sense and is currently working on two other manuscripts: Thales or some Other: Construction in the Intellectual and Cultural Legacies of Modernity and Clamors of Being: The Genesis of Sense in Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Derrida.
Francesco Proto • fproto@brookes.ac.uk
Francesco Proto has either curated and/or participated in a number of exhibition such as “Italian Pop Art: 1960s Until Now” (University of Chieti), the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale, “Cities: People, Society, Architecture”, where he exhibited short films on urbanism entitled “Serial Townscapes I & II” for the cinematic exhibition “Other Visions” (2006), “The Post-human and Architecture” at the Lincoln ‘Frequency’ Digital Arts Festival (2015), opened the 57th Art Venice Biennale with an open lecture on art, politics and simulation (2017), presented an open lecture and public talk at the Milan Design Triennale for the 40 years from the construction of the Pompidou Centre in Paris (2017). He is also active in entering international architecture competitions. He recently submitted entries for three international ideas competitions — the ‘RIBA Journal Bull’s Eye Design Competition’ (2013), the Berlin Natural History Museum (2014) and the Costa Concordia Lighthouse Memorial (2015), all of which having received special Honourable Mentions.
Berrin Terim • berrinterim@gmail.com
Berrin Terim’s research in architecture focuses on representation. Her early studies centered on cosmological perspectives, particularly exploring the dichotomy between perception and de-centralized point of view constructed by the intellect. Her dissertation work is focusing on anthropomorphism in architectural design, through the role of metonymy. Her research is exploring this framework through the narrative of the fifteenth-century Florentine architect Filarete’s treatise on architecture. Berrin has presented her work at international conferences.
Angie Voela • a.voela@uel.ac.uk
Angie Voela (BA, MA, MSC, PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Theory and Practice. She is the Research Degrees Leader for Social Sciences and the co-convenor of the Feminist Research Group (UEL). She is also the co-editor of the international journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. Her research interests include psychoanalysis and feminism; psychoanalytic and philosophical approaches to identity and gender; psychoanalytic and psycho-social approaches to culture, families, space and contemporary politics; myth in contemporary culture. Angie has published several book chapter and articles, in journals like Psychotherapy and Politics International, The European Journal of Women’s Studies; Subjectivity; Somatechnics; The Journal for Cultural Research; Gender and Education and Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Studies in the Maternal, etc. Her monograph Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Myth in Contemporary Culture: After Oedipus, was published by Palgrave in 2017.
Stamatis Zografos • stamatios.zografos@ucl.ac.uk
Dr Stamatis Zografos is a Lecturer (Teaching) in Architectural History and Theory at UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and a Visiting Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at Royal College of Art. He is also a practising architect and co-founder of ‘Incandescent Square’, an interdisciplinary platform for research and design with interests spanning from architecture and urbanism to critical heritage and curating. His research is best positioned at the intersection of architecture, critical heritage studies and psychoanalysis, and engages critically and methodologically with the element of fire. He is the author of Architecture and Fire: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Conservation published in 2019 by UCL Press.
widening the circle, tightening the focus
The co-founders of iPSA maintain a central thesis: that, in the relation of architecture and Lacan, each gains from the other. Just as architecture theory requires a theory of the subject that can be found only in the Lacanian-Freudian field, Lacanian psychoanalysis is intensely architectural, first and most obviously in its topological investment, but secondly in its commitment to the Other, where structure is key. In his essay “Science and Truth,” Lacan makes this claim: the object of psychoanalysis is none other than the objet petit a. Instead of asking if this small other is the “science” of psychoanalysis, the small other must be inserted into the division of the subject, the bar, the (katagraphic) cut that, among other things, divides the conscious from the unconscious. This divide is simultaneously a bond, as the ancient contronym cœlum confides.
This central feature, this relation of psychoanalysis to science, allows iPSA to be very narrow in its concerns in order to talk about anything and everything. It is the axis that must be maintained, the axis held in position by Architecture and Lacan, that allows the world to spin. Lacan gives us access to the subject as such, Architecture give us access to the world of the Other that this subject constructs, in ethnology, the arts, popular culture, and forms of livability as well as the landscapes where the lack of livability has created scenes of chaos and horror. If there is “home” in architecture, there is simultaneously the un-home, the uncanny (unheimlich) that is the subject’s drive to a point simultaneously occupied by death and Nirvana. Every breath that iPSA takes simultaneously refreshes both architecture and psychoanalysis. This is the basis of our conviviality.
Iradj Ghouchani • iradjesmailpour@gmail.com
Iradj Esmailpour Ghouchani (Farsi: ایرج اسماعیل پور قوچانی) was born on October 1, 1968, in Tehran. He is an Iranian visual anthropologist and the founder of the IFEKT Institute (Institute for Ethno-psychoanalytical Art and Theater) based in Germany. Iradj is renowned as a Lacanian ethnologist who has dedicated his work to the exploration of dream culture and art pedagogy in Iran, Kurdistan, and Germany, beginning in 2005. Notably, one of his significant works is an online-accessible dissertation titled ” Bābā Āb Dād ,” published by the library of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In addition to his studies on dream culture, Iradj has conducted research on Moorish Architecture in Spain, with a particular focus on Moorish door-gates. In Iran, Ghouchani pioneered the multidisciplinary field of ethno-psychoanalysis, named Mardomkavi (مردمکاوی), combining mardomshenasi (ethnology) and ravankavi (psychoanalysis) in Farsi. Mardomkavi is an innovative, holistic approach aiming to transform immigrant communities living in Germany as well as the Iranian educational landscape. Currently, Ghouchani co-authored, with Kunze, the HAL project for integrating OpenAI with group theory innovation. Many of his essays can be accessed online.
Camila Mancilla Vera • camimancilla@vt.edu
Camila Mancilla is an architect at the Austral University of Chile and Technische Universität München, Master in Cultural Heritage at the Catholic University. Through these specialization studies, she has developed a creative thesis based on architecture as an archetype that reflects the character of cultural living through her compositions, geometries, and transfigurations. In this way, she has managed to intertwine Architecture with Visual Arts and illustration. She works as a Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts of the UACh and independent Illustrator. She is currently a PhD. candidate in Architecture at the Washington-Alexandria Architectural Center of Virginia Tech. University (WAAC).
Fatemeh Naji Meydani • 72fatimanajim@gmail.com
Fatemeh Naji is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a clinical psychologist who holds an M.Sc. degree from Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences Tehran/Iran. She is passionate about exploring the intersection of AI and psychoanalysis, and how they can inform and enhance each other in theory and practice. She has been a member of Tehran center for Psychoanalytic Studies since 2019 and her research interest is the relation between AI and psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian concepts. She investigates how AI can affect and improve the psychoanalytic practice and theory, as well as how psychoanalysis can offer insights into different dimensions of AI. She has delivered talks and papers on this topic at academic venues, such as the 4th Iranian Congress on Psychoanalysis and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, where she gave a speech on “Psychoanalysis, Humans and Artificial Intelligence”. She has also organized and appeared in a symposium on the psychoanalysis of AI with Dr. Isabel Millar, Dr. Don Kunze, and Dr.Iraj Ghoochani, where she discussed the book “The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence” by Dr. Millar and gave an introduction about the connection of AI and psychoanalysis. In her private practice, she provides psychoanalytic psychotherapy to adult individuals. She is also an enthusiastic follower of Lacanian theory, which she finds useful and fascinating for understanding the psychic dimensions of AI. For additional information, read “Psychoanalysis, humans and Artificial Intelligence.”
Cindy Zeiher • cindy.zeiher@canterbury.ac.nz
Cindy Zeiher is a Lacanian psychoanalyst in training and senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where she teaches modernist and postmodernist critical theories in the human services program. Her writings explore Freudian-Lacanian interventions and interpretations relating to the contemporary nexus of subjectivity, ontology and desire. Alongside this, Cindy is passionate about performance cello and collaborates with musicians and composers ranging from baroque to experimental soundscapes. She is currently preparing a monograph which situates the various iterations of the cello as an anguished instrument of wartime. More recently she has completed a book manuscript which interrogates musicologist and philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch’s radical refusal of German culture from the perspective of Lacan’s theory of the speech-act. Cindy’s creative essays and poetry (tone and text) will be published in various forms during 2023/24. She is currently collaborating with US percussionist, Justin de Hart and Aotearoa/New Zealand composer, Reuben Derrick. Cindy along with Mike Grimshaw is co-editor of CT&T: Continental Thought and Theory: http://ctt.canterbury.ac.nz/.
Francis Conrad • francisconrad767@gmail.com
Francis teaches media studies at Darnoc University, New Wye. She writes on identity and gender transformation in the urban South and is the author of The Sciagraphy of the Infinite (Gnomon Publications, 1987). Before her academic career, Conrad worked as a cryptographer for Phaal Institute, Rotterdam. Her forthcoming book with Soufals Press is on anamorphosis in cinema.
Biography. “I am a physicist convicted of levity, and served four years with anchovies, with time off and on for so-so behavior, and another year for good riddance. I detest fish and small children, can flip omelets between alternative skillets and hommes-l’êtes between alternative gendarmes. I have never been accused or convicted of writing Symphony for the Devil, which has disappointed me greatly. I wrote Secondary Placesas a mortal proxy of a ghost writer, with whom I time-share two lake-front properties in Italy. Speaking of which, in my spare time I design faux entrées for Cum Quibus, a highly regarded restaurant in San Gimignano, Via S. Martino, 17. Before dinner I like to translate 200 lines of Macrobius’s Saturnalia into Amenian. With no more than shoe-horn (in F major), I held off a band of starving fire ants intent on divesting a favorite poplar tree, and became unpopular with that Insects for Restitution for Fabular and Fibular Defamation, founded 1877. I have written more books than I have read but maintain spiritual contact with Bruno Schulz, Norman Mailer, Mikhail Bolgukov, and Sir Arthur Pym, all of whose reading is considerable. I sleep curled up in a custom-made coffin in the shape of a dreidel designed by Fabrigé, spirited out of Russia in 1915. Colorless and green, I sleep furiously.”
Additional Affiliate Members
iPSA invites academics, practitioners, clinicians, and independent scholars with interests in architecture’s psychoanalytical conditions to participate in zoom symposiums, contribute works-in-progress, and initiate projects.
Jodi LaCoe, jlacoe@maryu.marywood.edu
Noé Badillo, badillon2020@icloud.com
Kati Blom, katriina.blom@ncl.ac.uk
Anahita Shadkam, annahita.shadkam@gmail.com
Kōan Jeff Baysa, MD, usartdoc@gmail.com
Mark Aerial Waller, markaerial@gmail.com