PRIMA PAGINA
PSYchitectures – architectures of the psyche, architectures for the psyche, psycho-architectures... Architectures for the new psycho-modalities of sociality, of making sociality, of marking the microutopias of the quotidian, unto the com-possible liminalities that the architectural practice and technology engage, by almost spectralizing the forms. PSYchitectures, on the other hand, as a mark of the abstractization automatism in what we shall no longer be able to call «space», but the physical spacing of forms and dimensions, the effective spacing of affects, that are more and more precisely and diversely (dis)orientated. More and more «emotive», intuitive, and flexible in regard to the frames and functions of constructs, architecture becomes a genuine psychological, psychologizing practice, marking forms and ambients, transforming the proximate space and our instinct of reaction. By configuring perception, by re-outlining space, by tracing perceptual psycho-flags to appropriate space, architecture creates, not rarely, a subjectification (sur)plus, demanding new knowledges to the architect, who has now turned into a psychologist of in-spacing, shaper of some reference frames where orientation no longer belongs to spatial directing, but to the subject’s perceptual (dis-)orientation within its environment, a subject left to contemplate, to assume, to confront the forms, to react unabatedly to formal and emotional stimuli given by contemporary architecture.
Yet through (sur)plus, through over-charge, architecture eliminates precisely the difference, generating tension, affective forms that re-synthetize emotive properties and potentialities, an over-affected society, marked by affective crossing-over. Against identitary defaults, architecture comes, precisely by means of such PSYchitectures, to amplify the meanings and politics of social hypernomias (nomos = rule, law, marking at the same time the overregulation characteristic of penal social environments) as prevalence of the role upon the person. Architecture becomes an apparatus for inscription, it amplifies screened transparencies behind which we play «the tragedies of the content», the contemporary halographies of constructs, that, if we are to follow Virilio’s idea, do not reach «the perfection of perspective, nor the most perfect accomplishment of the relief and stereoscopic vision, but, on the contrary, the extermination of perspective reality». Without perspective, without horizon, architecture runs the risk of becoming a backdrop architecture, transsymbolized mediatically, mediatologically, the performative social function of an automatic capitalism, «staging» of some «scenes» on which we play the dramas of contemporary society.
Beyond the «machines of visibility and discursiveness» it builds, beyond the imagistic kit, beyond the masks under which it hides its true face many times, the «instrumentalizations of the habitat», beyond the psychotropic character by which it comes to define the city, the chance of architecture lies perhaps precisely in what it can still project on a psychological level, what it can still imagine before re-presenting, for a new alliance with itself.
(Translation: Sabin Bors)