This page describes recent news and upcoming opportunities for extending the scholarship of architecture+Lacan.
iPSA-sponsored zoom seminars are maximally conversational, minimally presentational. Newcomers and late-comers are welcome; the point is to expand the discursive potential of new ideas lying latent within Lacanian theory, and within other theoretical frameworks as ‘anamorphic’ second senses. Sessions are normally held in series – minimally two sessions to pair informal brain-storming with formal presentations published on YouTube and discussed in a second session. This can be expanded to include invited speakers/critics, or even a final session in the style of the formal symposium, where speakers present abbreviated arguments and answer questions from critics and the audience.
the latest & recent past
INTERVIEW WITH ANCA CARRINGTON: How are spatial metaphors beneficial to psychoanalysis? What do they tell us about the psyche? How can they be applied to architecture? These include dimension theory, algebraic topology, and knot theory. Is it useful to develop a theory of the fourth dimension from Lacan’s writings, despite the fact that 
he dismissed such a possibility? If psyche is extended, how and why is spatiality a psychic apparatus?
Please join us for a Zoom conference on The Unconscious as Space with special guest Anca Carrington, practicing psychoanalyst in London and author of The Unconscious as Space: From Freud to Lacan, and Beyond (Routledge, 2024).
CARRINGTON: “My approach to psychotherapy is psychoanalytic, paying particular attention to the place of unconscious forces in every day life. I focus on the exploration of patterns of behaviour and of relating, on the shaping of thoughts and dreams, in ways that make it possible to link current difficulties to past experiences and to learn something new from these links. In particular, I concentrate on addressing the personal and hidden meaning of individual difficulties and in working towards finding ways to a less troubled and more rewarding life that are unique to each person. I have a particular interest in Lacanian analysis.” [LinkedIn]
Sunday, March 2, 12:00 PM
MELANCHOLIA: SYMPTOM OR STRUCTURE?
iPSA members and friends will join participants of the conference Melancholy: Embodiments in Architecture for an open discussion on melancholy’s history as a medical diagnosis, etiology, physiology, artist’s malady, and meeting point of genius and madness. The seventh Frascari Symposium honors the memory of sidereal architect, theorist, and educator Marco Frascari (1945–2013). The symposium gathers together architectural dreamers, storytellers, and critics to weave their tallest tales in the Vichian tradition as interpreted and represented in architectural theories and histories recounted by Frascari.
This zoom is in the iPSA (Sch)MOOZ (backwards zoom) tradition, designed to extend the potentiality of discussions prior or posterior to scheduled conferences. iPSA members meet with conference speakers, planners, and guests in an open-ended discussion of potential topical possibilities. The (Sch)MOOZ idea was a product of the pandemic, but it addresses the scandal of all academic conferences where open debate rarely happens and discussion time is regarded as an unnecessary surplus.
For background materials on melancholy, visit the boundarylanguage site. For a conversational follow-up exercise, see the Melancholy Mystery Story challenge.
Sunday February 9, 12:00 PM.
LORENS HOLM INTERVIEW: Lorens Holm was the subject of a podcast in the A is for Architecture series, in which I talk about his book, Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan: shadowing the public realm, which came out a year and a half ago. Lorens does a good job trying to make sense of the idea that the unconscious is a common condition (it is the human condition) and that it has an efficacy in the public realm alongside political discourse, only we don’t know it. The podcast can be found here and also on pod-aps:
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/ambrose-gillick
DON KUNZE PRESENTATION: On December 15, 1:30pm Eastern US/Canadian time zone, Don Kunze presented recent work and conducted a discussion on a “new Lacanian topology” based on the idea of inversion to the bi-monthly seminar of the Lacan Toronto group. While most Lacanians would say that Lacan doesn’t show any interest in topology before 1961 and no interest in extimité before 1951, the problem is that you have to change the search terms. Lacan talks about the “asymmetries of negation” in his first seminar on Freud’s technical writing and uses inversive geometry even before that, in the essay on Logical Time (the Three Prisoners’ Dilemma). Kunze’s talk will be short, with most of the session devoted to discussing a collection of inversion circle examples. For background on the idea of inversion, read “Inversion Geometry as Primary to Topology.” For the full invitation from Lacan Toronto, click here. For a page devoted to resources for this session, click here.
Zoom Login: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/
CLAUDIO SGARBI has been involved in a project to have a group of young children imagine and construct comprehensive worlds of animals. In a video produced by the Foundation of Architects of Modena and Ordine, Claudio worked with drawing, clay, paper origami, and other materials, inventing stories, songs and dramas to think of realities from the point of view of those who speak through movement, dwelling, and song.
Prego di vedere: Video prodotto per documentare il progetto “Costruire un mondo con gli animali” rivolto ai bambini e alle bambine della scuola dell’infanzia. Il progetto è stato proposto dalla Fondazione degli Architetti di Modena e dall’Ordine degli architetti pianificatori progettisti conservatori della provincia di Modena in collaborazione con Assessorato all’Istruzione del Comune di Modena, Fondazione Cresci@amo e Istituto Comprensivo 6 di Modena sulle linee guida di “Abitare il Paese. La cultura della domanda”, sesta edizione per l’anno scolastico 2023-2024.
opportunities
LACK 2025
The 2025 LACK CONFERENCE will be held at Otterbein University, in Westerville, Ohio, March 13–15. LACK was formed in 2015 to bring together theorists interested in engaging psychoanalytic theory and its intersection with philosophy, politics and contemporary culture. As its name suggests, historical focus has been on the work of Freud and Lacan. This next year’s event will feature Slavoj Žižek as keynote speaker. Anyone interested in a special session devoted to Architecture and Lacan contact John Hendrix or Don Kunze. Short presentations (12–15 minutes) are recommended. Email proposals (title, 250-word description, short bio, MS-Word format) to Jennifer Friedlander (jennifer.friedlander@pomona.edu). Participants can address any issues touching on Lacanian theory in the broadest sense.
PROPOSALS DUE SEPTEMBER 1, 2024
past events
TinyHouse/Lalangue Project
A series of zoom sessions is designed to refine the conversation around the popular culture meme of the Tiny House in relation to Lacan’s original notion of lalangue, signifiers that, freed from conventional signifiers, become road-maps for energy-efficient circuits. The first zoom was June 9; second and third zooms are planned for later in the summer of 2024. At that point, qualifying authors will submit full-paper drafts to Psyche Extended, a special issue edited by Jodi LaCoe and Cindy Zeiher.
the meaning of architecture • november 19, 2023
John Shannon Hendrix proposes: “Architects should be banned from society. Engineers can design buildings, contractors can design houses. Architecture no longer has any value for society. As Nikolaus-Ion Terzoglou wrote in The Cultural Role of Architecture, ‘Architecture has concentrated mainly on technological means and instrumental procedures that, in certain cases, manage empty forms without conceptual content …. This situation has marginalized architecture as a form of mental expression and spatial imagination. An almost exclusive and one-dimensional emphasis on material and technological means reduces the ontological complexity of architecture and often leads to results which lack mental depth.’ Architects have abandoned the elements of architecture which have given architecture value to society: the expression of ideas, the communication of cultural values, the modelling of philosophical structures. Psychoanalysis could provide fertile ground for those elements of architecture if the practice of architecture were able to return to them. Most students coming to architecture school say that they want to be architects to make the world a better place, but they soon discover that that is not possible, given the constraints put on the architecture profession. The elimination of architecture is necessary for the survival of the human race.”
Read Hendrix’s complete proposal here.
To discuss this topic, iPSA will host a reverse-zoom (schmooz) session this fall (members will be canvased to determine a mutually workable time). There are a number of ways of taking up this idea:
- What is the proper (if any) means of distinguishing between “building” and “architecture”?
- What has happened to architecture schools?
- “What would Lacan say?” — how does architecture constitute a medium for the Big Other (and one of its principal messaging services)?
- What would a Lacanian School of Architecture look like? Does psychoanalysis have its own special “architectural curriculum”?
Go to the MEANING OF ARCHITECURE zoom page to read position statements from participants. As soon as a mutually workable schmooze-time can be find, it will be announced on this page.
Architecture in the Alethosphere
Andrew Payne
click here for full prospectus
“Architecture in the Alethosphere,” aims to essay the explanatory power of Lacan’s comments concerning the alethosphere and those “lathouses” that are its objective correlatives for considerations of architecture in its current condition. This aim has two vectors. The first seeks to forge links between the alethosphere and the constellation of broader themes that animate The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, viz.: the novel alliance between science and capitalism that emerges with the transition from thermodynamic to cybernetic models of industrial enterprise; the diminishing significance of the Oedipal impasse in the subjectivation of contemporary individuals and the resultant decline in the prevalence of neurotic structure (with its associated dialectic of desire and repression); the replacement of this neurotic culture of desire by a culture of consumerist enjoyment, and with that replacement, the emergence of new psychical dispositions sharing certain features with, while nevertheless remaining irreducible to, traditional formations of perversion and psychosis.
Authors’ Conference: The Stendhal Syndrome
Angie Voela, Don Kunze, Kōan Jeff Baysa, MD
June 15, 2022
click here for full prospectus (when available)
Participants in 2021’s zoom seminars on the Stendhal Syndrome (the sudden collapse of viewers of art, landscapes, city views, works of music, and even texts (think of Paolo and Francesca) were invited to contribute essays collected in a special issue of Psyche Extended. The variety of Stendhal experiences suggests that the spatial and temporal structure buffering the work of art and the spectator can give way, its normal insulating powers worn thin at critical spots. The variety of art types capable of causing a viewer’s sudden collapse or even death (cf. The Great Beauty) call for a general theory of this space-time.
possible futures
Cassirer with Lacan
Angie Voela, Don Kunze, Franceso Proto, Christopher Bell
April 15, 2022 (est.)
click here for full prospectus (when available)
Where Lacan’s theory of the subject insisted on being non-philosophy, the early 20c. German neo-Kantian philosopher, Ernst Cassirer’s equally extensive theory of subjectivity was intensely philosophical. Within the complementarity of these two thinkers, born 26 years apart, there are parallels and affinities that cause their otherwise distinctive projects to short-circuit.
Magic+Architecture
Don Kunze, with (tentatively) Paul Emmons, Kōan Baysa, and Thomas Mical
July 31, 2022
click here for full prospectus (when available)
Architecture and magic have overlapped throughout history, although it could be said that, in the very beginning of human culture they were synonymous. From cosmograms of Yoruba slaves, inserted into masters’ houses to shrines and forbidden spaces, the agency of magic has been employed as a force-field of effectiveness. Join this zoom discussion with examples and arguments about the effectiveness of magic, using historical examples and contemporary theory.
[new and barely thought out]
Some projects are in the early planning stages, so if you are interested in participating — as a participant, planner, or critic — contact the organizer(s) to get in on the ground floor.
Psychic Comics
Francesco Proto, Don Kunze, (tentatively) Susan Squire, (possibly) Paul Emmons, (likely) Linda Heinrich, (with any luck) Ted Zelmo, and (really really hopefully) Tom Gauld
Fall 2022
click here for a full prospectus (when available)
It goes without saying that the advent of graphic novels was simply a formalization of the loose principle of popular culture’s ability to work as a collective unconscious, an “anxiety management machine” playing out, in the fictionalized lives of pathetic failures, animal totems, super-heroes, and timeless tricksters, a panel-by-panel freeze-frame version of psychoanalysis. Using evidence of Krazy Kat, cartoonists have merged their clever facility with the “inside frame” with cinematic sensibilities. Architecture theory has yet to treat this remarkable archive, but iPSA suggests that it should do so with Lacanian theoretics at hand.