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grace on the architecture. “This is what happens.” In the opening of this
paragraph I cite Deleuze: “It is not a question of reducing the unconscious;
it is much more a question for us of producing it”. 32 The question is: under
what circumstances, and with the support of what events, can the unconscious
be produced politically, socially, and historically? The Perkins House,
designed sixty-five years ago in Pasadena, California, shows just how much
the design of space can fuel the unconscious.
Neutra’s work is an interesting crossroads at which to explore the area of
affect intensity that insinuates itself into the cold, rational space of modernism.
The architectures are clean and perfect—so much so that they appear
impossible to reach. They triggered the Smithsons’ rather presumptuous
irony. In that cold, rational, perfect, clean space, design relocates disturbed
bodies, unsolved traumas, and infantile desires.
THE SICK BODY
A Question of Survival
Survival Through Design was published in 1954. More than ever before,
the issues that threaten us today are a question of survival. 33 Atomic nightmares
have been replaced by climatic, environmental, and social nightmares:
pollution, diseases, ageing, habitat alterations, the extinction of traditions,
languages, and cultures, and so on. Faced with the dark clouds gathering
overhead, we urgently need to wake up. Or rather, we need to reposition;
something untiringly repeated by current literature about our Anthropocene
age. 34 As in the past, design now takes centre stage as the repairer and
replenisher, capable of “allying with other protagonists of the universe” 35
from bacteria to silkworms. Design is hailed as a plural practice capable of
facilitating new ways of producing mobility and economic growth. Capable
of redesigning relationships between fields of knowledge. Capable of
implementing the most virtuous recycling, remediation, optimisation, and
consumption reduction programmes. Capable of generating connectivity
between enterprises, institutions and citizens, as well as recreating imaginaries.
The complex apparatus of design culture is dedicated to preservation:
a new step in that “longer history of planet imaginaries” 36 which, in its best
manifestations (from Crystal Palace to Malevič’s planets), has always been
primarily political: breaching walls and breaking through the dimensions of
the world. Today it appears to be more of an ascetic practice: the practice of
a naturalist overcome by the ungovernable nature of his study objects. This
was the typical position of early modernity: burdened by terror, sadness, and