Bianchetti_Bodies.-Between-Space-and-Desi_9783868599497

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THE SICK BODY
reveal Neutra’s penchant to model his role as an architect on a therapy session:
he wanted to satisfy his client’s psychological needs, to imagine and
build an architecture in which physical consistency had a direct emotional
effect. The construction of an emotionally intimate bond became a necessary
condition of interpreting space as a therapist.
Neutra tackled a key topic in psychoanalytical theory: the repression and
sublimation of the libido. He considered Freudian sublimation to be a transformation
of energy, or in his words: “transformation of repressed energy
into a symptom”. 19 The problem facing architects was that of tackling the
changes in energy that define the relationship between man and the environment.
20 Neutra wrote to Freud that the latter’s idea of a “sublimation
of sex energy into something else was very analogous to the idea of energy
transformations”. 21 Architecture, being in itself a body, is no longer a system
of proportions, or a machine for living in, but a flow of powerful energies
transformed in space. It is yet again, if you like, an organicist analogy, albeit
one with a difference: what is being projected in space is not the harmony of
the proportions and ratios of the body, but the impurities and adulterations
of life. So much for the search for purity in modernist space.
Limiting the Unconscious
or Producing the Unconscious?
The ability to interpret the client’s stories and produce spaces capable of
interacting with the unconscious required a well-oiled therapeutic machine,
suitably represented in the photographs of Neutra with his clients. This is the
design concept for his extraordinary houses: brash, polished, luminous modernist
houses, combined with stretches of water reflecting the transparency
of the Californian sky; swimming pools, open-air lounges, huge glass walls
that frame the very beautiful, estranging landscape when looking out from
inside, and the study and bedrooms when viewed from the outside. Houses
with “spider legs” (long pilasters and steel beams anchored to the ground);
uterine spaces mediated by the external environment. 22 It was an attempt to
connect a desirous economy with technical, acrobatic expertise.
The therapeutic triangle between the architect, client, and house is tested in
each design, and it is clearly unique every time. 23 The most famous of these
cases (or stories) involves the Lovell House; even for the lukewarm Zevi,
its structural boldness was exceeded only by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.
24 The owner of the Lovell House used to write the column Care of