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Architecture's Return to Surrealism

par Van Acker, Wouter ;Vervoort, Stefaan
Editeur scientifique Kurg, Andres;Vicente, Karin
Référence European Architectural History Network(5: 13-16 June 2018: Tallinn), Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the European Architectural History Network, Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn
Publication Publié, 2018-06-13

Abstract de conférence

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In 1978, coinciding with the exhibition Dada and Surrealism Reviewed in the Hayward Gallery, Dalibor Veseley edited a double issue of Architectural Design on surrealism and architecture. The issue mined manifold connections between modernist architecture and surrealism, and it marked a penchant for surrealism among postmodern architects. It included, among others, essays by Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi referencing the key ideas of Salvador Dali and the playwright and surrealist Antonin Artaud, respectively. In hindsight, such links seem ubiquitous in postmodern architecture. John Hejduk’s Masques call upon a self-proclaimed ‘medieval surrealism’; Aldo Rossi’s images are indebted to the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico; designs by Oswald Mathias Ungers include René Magritte’s bowler man and doll-in-doll motif; and Peter Eisenman’s work deals with psychoanalysis, automatism, and the links between perception and representation.Surprisingly, this reuptake of surrealism in the architecture of the 1970s and 1980s has seen scant attention in the historiography. While most of the essays in Surrealism and Architecture (2005), edited by Thomas Mical, examine how surrealist thought, critiques, and techniques affected the architectural practices of the modernist avant-garde, Neil Spiller’s Architecture and Surrealism (2016) maps out routes of congruence between surrealist thought and the contemporary, ‘surreal worlds‘ drawn up by advanced digital fabrication techniques and computer visualization. Still, surrealist tendencies in postmodern architecture warrant an inspection of their own, which accounts for the secondary nature of these tendencies with regard to modernist interplays of surrealism and architecture. As Michael Hays notes in Architecture’s Desire (2010), many of the architects above do not simply replay modernism, but they home in on its limits through an extreme reflexivity and a deep understanding of its forms, references, and ideologies. Yet, what does such secondariness or lateness imply for the referential framework of surrealism in these works?This session aims to explore how the reanimation of surrealism in architecture can be interpreted historically at this tangled, asynchronous juncture of the modern and the postmodern. It will investigate how surrealist strategies, both visual (e.g. collage, analogy, scalar play) and discursive (e.g. Jungian, Freudian, or Lacanian), allowed formulating a critical project for architecture in reaction to a neoliberal economy that produces its own dreams, needs, and desires.