Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity (Routledge, 2010)

A major new interpretive work on the structure of spatial experience, this book is for theorists of Architecture, Art, and Visual Studies. It interprets the fifteenth century demonstration of perspective for today by putting it in relation to contemporary theories of subjectivity. It explores a link between Architecture and Psychoanalysis that has not hitherto been elaborated, and opens the way for the Lacanian critique of architecture that is now a familiar feature of discourse in the other arts and social sciences.

The text argues that perspective is the paradigmatic form of spatial consciousness. This explains why perspective remains such a satisfying representational form - the form of space that we tend to call real - and why it remains the primary visual form of architectural space, despite recent experiments in representation that claim to challenge this canon. This link between the inner world of the psyche and the exterior world of architectural space is as fundamental as it is problematic, and is perhaps therefore inevitable.

Lorens Holm is Reader in Architecture and Director of the Geddes Institute for Urban Research at the University of Dundee. He has taught architecture at the Architectural Association, University College London, and at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior publications on Lacan and Architecture have appeared in the Journals Perspecta (2010), Haecceity (2008 & 2007), Critical Quarterly (2000 & 2007), and Assemblage (1993).

Further details are available here.

The Thread will be on summer hiatus during the months of July-September.  Our third series will start in either October or November, subject to scheduling.  An updated schedule of shows will be posted to the website upon availability.  We appreciate your listening and look forward to another season of engaging discussion.

Philosophy of the Overlooked - String

ICA, 7 October 2008

The latest in a London Consortium/ICA series exploring the structures of lived experience and modes of human existence. What can be learned from other people’s experience of things we rarely think about? The seventh event in the series focuses on string: tying, knotting, measuring, adorning, playing. What are the origins of the modest string? Does an illlusionist use string the same way a musician does? Does a physicist think of string in similar terms to an artist?

Speakers: Cornelia Parker, visual artist; Mark Messenger, head of strings at the Royal Academy of Music; David S Berman, reader in theoretical physics at Queen Mary University. Chair: Martine Rouleau, London Consortium.

There will be a demonstration by John van der Put, award-winning contemporary magician and co-founder of standnotamazed theatre company.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.
Nash Room, ICA, 7.00 pm

London Consortium director Steve Connor and student Lee Scrivner will be contributing lectures to Resonance FM’s Free University of the Airwaves which runs from 18-22 August 2008. Steve Connor’s ‘Taking to the Air’ will be broadcast on 104.4FM or online at on Monday 18 August at 10.00 and 19.00. Lee Scrivner’s ‘Aphorism’ will be broadcast at 12 noon on Friday 22 August.