Bianchetti_Bodies.-Between-Space-and-Desi_9783868599497

THE SICK BODY
The idea of purity and
impurity must be yielded.
Neutra, 1954 1
16
THE SICK BODY
California in the Fifties
In the first half of the fifties, many fears were rife in the United States.
The signs were everywhere: in the repeated sightings of unidentified flying
objects; in the global nuclear nightmare detonated by the mushroom cloud
over Hiroshima; in the ghosts of environmental pollution; in the belief that
the environment itself could be a real threat to man’s physical and mental
wellbeing. Variously described and manifest phobias and neuroses were
everywhere. The golden age of American noirs that starts with The Maltese
Falcon is a good reflection of the atmosphere of fear and infatuation with
psychoanalysis and expressionist oneirism. 2 The metropolis and the desert
were contrasting geographical and metaphorical spaces onto which concerns,
phobias, obsessions, and experimentations could be projected. Both represent
scenarios of a civilised world 3 in which survival is crucial. In his book
Survival Through Design, 4 Richard Neutra provides an excellent illustration
of the anxieties of those years; of the belief that “man may perish by his own
explosive and insidious inventions”. 5 Long before it became popular, environmental
design was a pressing issue for many people. 6 All this seems very
recent, but in fact we’re talking about the distant fifties.
The Austrian architect Richard Neutra is one of the protagonists of modernism
in architecture: he was Otto Wagner’s pupil, Adolf Loos’s collaborator,
and Erich Mendelsohn’s assistant in Berlin until 1923, after which he
moved to the United States where he met Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolf
Schindler. 7 We know a lot about Neutra’s relationship with Freud; he was
a friend of Freud’s son (who also became an architect) and often met with
Freud, eventually beginning to use psychoanalysis as a tool for his own introspection
and in his profession. 8 He himself provided glimpses of all this, 9
including in his long review of Edward Hall’s strange, rambling, and forward-looking
book The Hidden Dimension, a psycho-anthropological study