The Inner Studio - Riverside Architectural Press

THE INNER STUDIO
especially symbols of the paradoxical and perplexing, the unfinished
experience, and the unanswerable question.
We need built places that allow us to gather ourselves to reflect
on the irrational forces that effortlessly and randomly penetrate life.
And one of the new ways we can begin to understand the design of
cities is through the inclusion of places that sponsor these symbols
of both sorrow and happiness. Great cities have instinctively
understood this. A city that only remembers its great and glorious
moments is probably a city that is incomplete. We need to remember
that it is more helpful to be whole than perfect, and that vision
calls for us to make places that can hold the difficult and unrecognized
as well as the exceptional. We are practiced at the art of
memorializing what we want to remember, but every city might
want to ask itself, “What is it that we would rather forget?” “What
would we like never to see again?” Somehow, somewhere, we may
wish to try to make a place where this seemingly undesirable
psychic material can be safely contained and visited.
People come to Berlin today and are surprised that so little of
the wall remains. For 50 years Checkpoint Charlie was the focus of
world attention. Somehow a plaque cannot represent this
adequately. Beautiful plazas and great buildings stand where once
the wall once stood, but people seem more interested in the difficult
and unfinished dark reality of the wall. What visitor to that
place doesn’t have a few dark stubborn walls of separation and
isolation in their own history? Who doesn’t have standoffs and
escapes? This is a call to cities to acknowledge and assimilate their
real history as a way of bringing new and shadowy place-making to
the urban world.
The last word on difficulty must go to Marie Louise von Franz,
a colleague of Carl Jung who spent many years studying alchemy,
dream, and fairy tales, and became well known for her learned
insight and full of practical advice.
Jung has said to be in a situation where there is no way out, or
to be in a conflict where there is no solution, is the classical
beginning of the process of individuation. It is meant to be a
situation without solution: the unconscious wants the hopeless
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