This book project, aimed to join the series of Lacanian criticism published by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by Derek Hook, and Calum Neill, planned to reformulate the standard “What Would You Like to Know about Architecture but Were Afraid to Ask Lacan” into its obverse. Does architecture have something to say that might assist Lacanian theorists with some of their knottier issues, such as the unary trait, projective geometry, the image, or anamorphosis? Is not the question of extimity, which Jacques-Alain Miller has claimed extends to every nook and cranny of Lacanian theory, not primarily an architecture concern? What about the Euclidean fixation of architectural phenomenologists? Doesn’t the cure lie in Lacan’s cross-caps and Borromeo knots? But, doesn’t the full understanding of these reach back — as Lacan himself does — to architectural-ethnographic precedents? And, are not the subjects marginal both to architecture and psychoanalysis (the internet, the Arabesque, the apotrope, parallax, etc.) best approached with architecture and psychoanalyst writers waling “hand in hand”?
why are we writing?
John Shannon Hendrix has written a compelling short essay about the state of architecture and architecture eduction. Every project needs a pull (presumably this is the desire to reach the general Lacanian readership), but it also needs a push, and this is the unsatisfactory state of our home field, architecture. Like Ukrainians fleeing their country from the Russian invasion, we do not cease to become architecture scholars simply because our field has been given over to foreign interests. We speak from architecture about architecture, but the Lacanian world has become our refuge and salvation.
It must be recognized that architecture is in crisis. Society is in crisis. Academics are in crisis. Psychoanalysis has something necessary to contribute to architecture and society. Contemporary architecture doesn’t communicate anything to society. It doesn’t contribute anything to society. Sustainability and computer technology are an important part of the means of production of architecture, but they are not architecture. Architecture must communicate ideas. It must contribute to the well-being, cultural aspirations, and intellectual development of society. In schools, architecture theory is dead (in the US anyway). Ideas as a basis for architecture as expression are not being developed. What little ideas the student might aspire to are crushed when they enter practice, because the educational system has not prepared anyone to engage in architecture in this way. Psychoanalysis can offer an alternative to the crisis of architecture as a reflection of the crisis of society. It can contribute to the re-establishment of architecture as a humanistic discipline. Throughout history, in its visual form, architecture has expressed and represented the highest aspirations of society, in relation to art, poetry, philosophy, theology, cosmology, ontology, linguistics, etc. Architecture has an extensive capacity to engage and communicate ways of thinking for the common good, but it is not doing that. Psychoanalysis can provide architecture with a way to re-establish a productive relationship with the people that use it, look at it, and think about it. Psychology has applications to architectural function; psychoanalysis has applications to architecture as art, as a visual expression of ideas, which can revive the spirit (zeitgeist) of a society losing its moral compass. Modern architecture has to figure out a way to communicate to people in order to have resonance and contribute to social reform. It cannot continue to be a tabula rasa. It must communicate ideas. This must begin with educational reform. In school, architecture is completely isolated from other disciplines, even the history and theory that are taught in architecture school. It has become an autonomous technocratic exercise. The architectural curriculum has to be re-invested with the humanities. Architects have to realize that their job is to communicate ideas to society and contribute to social well-being. This must begin with educational reform, with proposals for systematic ways in which psychoanalysis, philosophy, and other humanistic disciplines can be re-introduced into architectural education. In the process, psychoanalysis must cultivate its relation with other humanistic disciplines, contributing to the totality of social reform. These proposals might involve publications and seminars (live or virtual) which push toward educational and social reform, hopefully creating a movement.
lacan’s architectures
The iPSA project began as a collaborate effort among architecture teachers and theorists, interested in employing ideas of psychoanalysis into their (mostly) architectural scholarship, to better understand the theories of Jacques Lacan and his interpreters. The original direction-of-flow, from Lacan to architecture, seemed often to be accompanied by a strong back-current, particularly where concepts such as the Alethosphere, Anamorphosis, Extimity, and 2-d surfaces presenting conditions of Non-Orientation and Self-Intersection offered bridgework where, it was hard to deny, architecture and psychoanalysis offered 
equally stable footing.
Although Lacan mentions architecture specifically only in Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it is clear from those instances (the baroque, the “surface of no escape” of Daphne fleeing from Apollo, and anamorphosis) that the polymath Lacan continually advises us to look to ethnography for cases of “early Freud.” If human subjects have been psychoanalytically discontent with civilization, they have been discontent from the beginning, and in periods of cultural development most directly impacted by the uncanny, psychoanalytic principles will not only be more evident, they will be more clearly articulated.
Architecture may claim to know something of this ethnography, if only based on the uncanny’s German form, die Unheimlich, the unhomey. In themes of concealment, boundary-drawing, traps, surveillance, etc., the spatio-temporality of cultural features is decidedly non-Euclidean and specifically projective in ways that require both a psychoanalytical and an architectural sensibility. This proposed anthology, which may be said to include, in its list of authors, as much as 90% of those qualified to write on this subject, will address the ethnographical uncanny not as a remote historical period but as latent within the full range of 
architectural production, resisting (in good Lacanian fashion) the current trend toward what Joan Copjec has denoted as the rampant historicism in contemporary architecture theory.†
This collection of essays will be the first of its kind. It is addressed not so much to the very small audience of architecture scholars interested in Lacan but to the larger global audience of Lacanians who might be persuaded by their architecture colleagues that their most troubling conceptual difficulties with Lacanian knot-theory, projective topology, and mathematized notions such as the unary trait, can benefit from selective glances into ethnographic and specifically architectural cases. This collection extends the concept of the clinic to evidence found outside the physical examining room, just as Freud did in his accession of Paul Schreber’s written account of his psychosis. Where architecture in general has failed to acknowledge Lacan’s central importance for a comprehensive theory of human building, a psychoanalytical audience may come to regard architecture theory as a central and decisive resource.