Animation, Animism, Animosity: From Mies to Murnau

From Mies's Berlin to Freud's modernist Vienna and the primitive jungle of Totem and Taboo, the basic presupposition that the early twentieth-century has bequeathed to us is that we are living in a hostile external world; that any relation of human subjects to external objects -- including buildings -- can be predominantly expressed in terms of mastery or destruction (which ultimately proves mutual).

On the one side unfolds the play of light reflections on Mies's glass tower model of 1922, and underneath that side, expands the dark horror of the void in Murnau's Nosferatu of the same year.

The main argument presented in this lecture is that the vampires and animist spirits invented by expressionism's literary and cinematic unconscious haunt the birth of modern architecture by foreshadowing an effigy of its phantasmatic Gestaltung.

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory in the School of Architecture at Princeton University. He is also a member of the executive committees of the Programme in European Cultural Studies and the Programme in Media and Modernity at Princeton.

He studies the intersections between art, architecture, historiography, psychoanalysis, and psychological aesthetics. He is the author of 'On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life' (University of Chicago Press, 2012), the editor of 'Space as Membrane' by Siegfried Ebeling (Architectural Association Publications, 2010), and the co-editor, with Julian Rose, of 'Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture' (forthcoming by MIT Press in 2014).

Find out more about this lecture on our website at [ Ссылка ]

This lecture was recorded as part of the 2013-14 season of The Bartlett International Lecture Series at UCL on 11 December 2013.

свернуть