A book review of Anthony Vidler's Warped Space

1. Warped Space
Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture
Anthony Vidler

2. Author: Anthony Vidler
Date of Publication: 2000
Name of the Book: Warped Space: art, architecture, and anxiety in modern culture
Edition: Reprint
Name of Publisher: The MIT Press
This book was set Adobe Garamond by Graphic Composition, Inc. and was printed and
bound in the United States of America.

3. ‗Beginning with agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the late
nineteenth century, followed by shell shock and panic fear after
World War I, phobias and anxiety came to be seen as the
mental condition of modern life. They became incorporated into
the media and arts, in particular the spatial arts of architecture,
urbanism, and film. This "spatial warping" is now being reshaped
by digitalization and virtual reality.‘
(Book Description, [Internet], Available from: <http://www.amazon.com/Warped-Space-Architecture-Anxiety-Culture/dp/0262720418>)

4. Architecture Today …
• Explained by an influenced vocabulary
• Represented as ‗complex and curved, smooth and intersecting,
polished and translucent‘
• Conceived in virtual space
• Intimately related to its available production technology
How do we establish historical continuity with the avant garde?

5. By analysising of spatial thought with psychoanalytical
thought
‗A common concern for space albeit defined in an entirely different manner
from that of the first avant-gardes, and a similarly shared registration of the
after effects of psychology and psychoanalysis, provide a historical continuity
with early twentieth century developments.‘ (Vidler, 2000, vii)
Image Courtesy: Judith Birdsong, Judd's Bed, 2003, Austin, TX., Available at: http://www.grahamfoundation.org/grantees/3810-center-
17-space-+-psyche, Accessed on October 17, 2012

6. Vidler deals with …
• Forms of spatial warping
• The relationship between the two kinds of warping
• Examines the underlying philosophy behind the ‗continuing
experiment of modernism‘
• The anxiety of the modern observer attempting to make sense of his
architectural and spatial environment

7. Of space
• Space is no longer a stable container of objects and bodies
• It has become a product of subjective interpretation -
‗projection and introjection‘
• Laws of design and perspective are transformed or ignored in
the search for a space to represent ‗modern identity‘

8. Modern space is represented as …
Image Courtesy: Lijo John Mathew, 2012, URBAN MACHINE_UNDERGRADUATE THESIS_2011.2012, Available at:
<https://www.facebook.com/lijo.j.mathew.9?ref=ts&fref=ts#!/media/set/?set=a.2954781902753.144154.1057599532&type=3>

9. claustrophobic and painful

10. agoraphobic

11. the body in pieces …

12. Part I
• Horror Vacui - Constructing the Void from Pascal to Freud
• Agoraphobia - Psychopathologies of Urban Space
• Framing Infinity - Le Corbusier, Ayn Rand, and the Idea of ―Ineffable Space‖
• Spaces of Passage - The Architecture of Estrangement: Simmel, Kracauer,
Benjamin
• Dead End Street - Walter Benjamin and the Space of Distraction
• The Explosion of Space - Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary
• Metropolitan Montage - The City as Film in Kracauer, Benjamin, and Eisenstein
• X Marks the Spot - The Exhaustion of Space at the Scene of the Crime

13. • Through a series of anecdotes, examines agoraphobia, its origins and
its founding case - mathematician Blaise Pascal‘s thought.
• ‗... he saw an abyss at his left side, and he would have a chair
placed there to reassure himself. I have this on good authority. His
friends, his confessor, and his director tried in vain to tell him that
there was nothing to fear, and that his anxiety was only the alarm of
an imagination exhausted by abstract and metaphysical studies. He
would agree, . . . And then, within a quarter of an hour, he would
have dug for himself the terrifying precipice all over again.‘
• Thus Pascal remains a potent source for ‗reflecting on the void‘.
• Maurice Barres examined Pascal‘s malady and traced it to the
‗earthy precipitate‘ of architecture.

14. This explains Pascal‘s theory of infinity:
because ―a space can be infinitely
extended ... it can be infinitely reduced‖.
‗Pascal gave the example of a ship endlessly drawing near
to the vanishing point but never reaching it: the ship endlessly
disappearing toward the horizon, the horizon point endlessly rising,
the ship infinitely close to, and infinitely far from, infinity.
Here geometrical theory coincides almost too neatly with the
interlocking relations of agoraphobic and claustrophobic space.‘
Thus, architecture informs the mind informs
subsequent concepts and products

15. • Explains how the metropolis began to create social maladies – agoraphobia
and claustrophobia
• Speaks of how it engendered a culture of interpretation explaining new urban
phenomena through the social changes it created, informed by other
disciplines
• ‗The Great City was seen to shelter a nervous and feverish population,
overexcited and enervated, whose mental life, as Georg Simmel noted in
1903, was relentlessly antisocial, driven by money.‘
• Urban space as an area of social alienation
The ―universal trend of the time,‖ concluded Sitte, was the fear of open spaces.
‗Existence thus becomes a realm of a larger hostile space and a
disproportionately smaller friendly space—with a loss, that is, of distance and
thus of freedom in the world.‘

16. Cites the ‗case of a young soldier with a fear of contact, a ―délire de propreté,‖
accompanied by a panic fear of being alone in a closed space, a sensation of being in a
passage getting narrower and narrower to the point of being able to go neither forward or
back, an intolerable terror that was generally followed by a flight into the fields. A second
patient panicked while climbing the stairs of the Tour Saint-Jacques. Neither could remain in
their apartments when the doors were closed.‘
Also presents the case of a patient who suffered epilepsy, agoraphobia, and vertigo, who
described his inability to cross the Place du Carrousel or the Place de la Concorde without
fear of their emptiness and a corresponding sensation of paralysis.

17. Social space became a repository for:
‗Agoraphobia (the fear of places) was supplemented by atremia or stasophobia
(fear of elevated or vertical stations), amaxophobia (exaggerated fear of
carriages), cremnophobia (the fear of precipices), acrophobia or hypsophobia
(fear of elevated places), oicophobia (aversion to returning home), lyssophobia
(fear of liquids), hydrophobia (fear of water—also connected to agoraphobia by
the fear of the sea as expanse, and of crossing a bridge), monophobia (fear of
solitude), anthropophobia (fear of social contact) ...‘

18. The first phase of spatial warping is, thus, addressed in Part I. Vidler says that it was
produced by the ‗psychological culture of modernism from the late nineteenth
century to the present, with its emphasis on the nature of space as a projection of
the subject, and thus as a harbinger and repository of all the neuroses and
phobias of that subject.‘
Here, the subject attributes space as filled with ‗disturbing objects and forms‘ and
ascribes them to various forms of architecture and the city. This informs the arts of
representation which ‗are drawn to depict such subject/object disturbances,
themselves distorting the conventional ways in which space has been described‘.

19. Part II
• Home Alone - Vito Acconci‘s Public Realm
• Full House - Rachel Whiteread‘s Postdomestic Casts
• Lost in Space - Toba Khedoori‘s Architectural Fragments
• Deep Space/Repressed Memory - Mike Kelley‘s Educational Complex
• Terminal Transfer - Martha Rosler‘s Passages
• Angelus Novus - Coop Himmelblau‘s Expressionist Utopia
• Beyond Baroque - Eric Owen Moss in Culver City
• Death Cube “K” - The Neoformations of Morphosis
• Skin and Bones - Folded Forms from Leibniz to Lynn
• Building in Empty Spaces - Daniel Libeskind and the Postspatial Void
• Planets, Comets, Dinosaurs (and Bugs) - Prehistoric Subjects/Post historic
Identities

20. ‗Public space is leaving
home.‘
Vito Acconci
• Part II explains how cities today advocate ‗nomadology‘. It explains things in
terms of the symptoms its citizens exhibit.
• Explains the context of the huge population movements and urban invasions
of the turn-of-the-century metropolis, characterized by the nomad (city
dweller). He is no longer the ―wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow
but the person who comes today and stays tomorrow.‖
• Deals with the psychological phenomenon by which design strategies
envision the triumph of the homeless, placeless and marginalised through
spatial revolution.

21. Today, space is considered to be ‗an already occupied terrain,
a territory to be surveyed carefully, invaded silently, and with
preparations made for partial retreat.‘
‗... the present seems to be embracing a combination of strategic planning and
tactical incursion as a way of intervening among the blighted remains of
capitalism‘s last cities: total rebuilding, total demolition, or total revival are all
blocked by the inertia of the ―already built‖ and the ―institutionally confirmed‖.‘
‗In a fundamental updating of this characteristic, the squatter
homeless refuses to move, the
appropriates, the
vagabond ignores fixed boundaries ...‘

22. Thus, Part II deals with the second phase of spatial warping – the city as a manifestation of the
various neuroses through ‗the forced intersection of different media—film, photography, art,
architecture—in order to make sense of and evocate space in new and unexplained ways.
Artists take on architecture that critically informs their art. Architects, parallely take on art to
‗escape the rigid codes of functionalism and formalism.‘ It has created a type of ―intermediary
art,‖ formed of objects situated in one practice that require the interpretive terms of another
discipline.
Image Courtesy: Lijo John Mathew, 2012, URBAN MACHINE_UNDERGRADUATE THESIS_2011.2012, Available at:
<https://www.facebook.com/lijo.j.mathew.9?ref=ts&fref=ts#!/media/set/?set=a.2954781902753.144154.1057599532&type=3>