Information about this project

In the winter term 2013 Kathrin Moertl & Stephan Steiner organized the seminar "Architecture and Psyche". The idea to this experimental class originated partly from the regular meetings of the "Psychoanalytical social research group" of Sigmund Freud Private University, partly from an evening in a Viennese coffee house. In this class, we gave three lectures, students could choose one of six projects, and we planned an excursion to the ASPERN project in Vienna. There was no exam of any kind to this class, students were asked to document their projects and post comments and ideas to the class on this blog here.

The three lectures were dedicated to following topics:

1. Discussion of Georg Simmel's text "Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903)
2. Shopping Malls. With excerpts from the documentary "Der Gruen Effect.Victor Gruen und die Shopping Mall"
3. Virtual Rooms 2013. Watching the episode "15 Million Merits" of the TV series "Black Mirror" by Charlie Brooker.

Students could choose to engage in one of six projects.



1. Grande Hotel Mozambique: Appropriation of room
2. SFU NEW: Anticipated experiences as a student between WU campus and Prater
3. Kowloon City: Appropriation of room
4. Therapie(t)räume: Which room fits your psyche? (Book by Lempa & Matejek)
5. Stolpersteine Wien/Stumbling stones: Remembering Jewish victims on the grounds we walk
6. Nakagin capsule towers Tokyo: Utopia of stabilized individuals in a rapidly changing world.

Below you can find an attempt to bracket this class.
Have fun reviewing and commenting on the results of this class!
If you have questions or want to get in touch, please email kathrin.moertl@sfu.ac.at

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Architecture and Psyche - preluding comments:

Room, especially architectural room that is created by us, does not only meet our needs, it represents our dreams, our wishes, our nightmares and repression. Every created room represents a little utopia in itself: The utopia of effective work space, of a harmonious living space, a space for encounter, a space of retreat.

Once we create rooms, these rooms resonate with us. More so, they are a framework. They influence our actions in a specific room, influence our emotions, our thinking abilities. As much as we create rooms, one might say that rooms also create us.

When we approach the concept of architecture and psyche in this class, we would like to look at this idea from 4 different angles:

(1)

Architecture. Exterior architecture. Its the apartment skyscrapers we build. The plazas and inner city planning. Its the university campuses and business centres we build. This is the social-psychological perspective on rooms.

These rooms are historical. They have a historical perspective. Are influenced by population over time, monetery success, availability of raw materials. And by Zeitgeist. Architectural spaces are transgenerational. Some sustain, some discontinue. Some were built by 6 generations. Some others were destroyed in two hours. They leave marks in our lives. And sometimes they are iconic landmarks.

(2)

Interior design/Innenarchitektur.   We are still talking about explicit exterior room, but this perspective zooms in on the private and intimate space. It is family space. Living space. It is the rooms we arrange and decorate. They mirror our individual more directly. Look at a sleeping room and it tells you who the person is who sleeps in it.

These rooms are also historical, they tell a story about our present life, or are relicts of a past live. They are highly influenced by fashion. When we look into a room, we take it in, sense it and make sense of it. Maybe it is not the eyes but our rooms that are the portal to our soul.

(3)

Inner psychic space. The core of our professional endeavours. Our internal world that starts narrow and widens, grows over the time of our adulthood. We need inner space to be creative. When we are anxious our inner world narrows down.  It is the space of inner objects, parts that we neglect and lock away. Psychologists aim to map the psyche, like in the topographical model.  It is the space of dreams, phantasies and emotion.

These rooms do not know time nor space. While the (1) and (2) architecture is concrete and explicit, our psychological architecture is immaterial and implicit. All of them can be experienced.

(4)

There is another last perspective. Another type of room that seems to be an inbetween space of inner and outer experience. The virtual/online rooms: We connect in chatrooms, forums, channels. facebook. It is the world of online games. Personalized Avatars. It is a world of excitement or rewarding soothing experience.  We have marketplaces to shop, to find love, to find sex. And there is rooms which distract us and make us zone out, relax, wind down. Some online rooms or object-directed love and connect us, some are narcissistic love directed from and towards ourselves. When we talk about enormous rooms, we need to look at the online connections. 5 million users online in WOW every night. A medium that forgets nothing.

Looking at these 4 perspectives, we have prepared a set of projects for the students. We asked students to pick one project, as a group of 3-5, and approach the topic. Some were more active projects (where they go out and experience), some others consist of a movie they watched, or a specific architectural structure they researched online.