Architecture's animals
Himmelblau's well-known rooftop remodelling in Vienna (see fig. 6, 7) must be one of the most body-threatening buildings constructed so far.
Fig. 6: Himmelblau - Rooftop design
Fig. 7: Rooftop
A chaotic and irregular explosion of lines, it is a very helpful illustration of what may be understood under frame deconstruction. It appears like the building's intestines want to free themselves from the geometrical yoke of the old building. The terms in which Mark Wigley (in Broadbent 1991: 22) describes this construction should not be misunderstood: the normal form of the roof has been mutilated by a "writhing, disruptive animal breaking through its corner". Yet, what Wigley thinks to be "particularly disquieting" (ibid.) is that it seems like this unleashed form has always been latently present in the geometry of the old roof itself. The architect has, as it were, released that latent form. In our discussion of Eisenman's City of Excavations we already pointed out the link between the archaeologist and the psychoanalyst. In Himmelblau's rooftop remodelling the architect himself dresses in psychoanalytic guise. The architect puts the old geometrical structures on the sofa and allows the latent forms, repressed by some geometrical repression mechanism, to rise up to consciousness again. Does this return of the repressed give rise to a certain hue of the uncanny? It probably does.
The missing limb
But there is another way in which Himmelblau's rooftop remodelling can be linked to the uncanny. Any building can be compared to the human body. Actually, architectural humanism since Vitruvius has held such an anthropomorphic view. A building's proportions and compositions were modelled on the "ideal" - "idealised" may be nearer the truth - proportions of the human body. A commonly known illustration of this view is Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of a man whose navel is the centre of a circle and a square construed around his body. Even Le Corbusier's utopian modernism still clings to this view. In 1942 Le Corbusier developed the Modulor-scale, a proportion scale for buildings that was mainly based on human proportions. Hence, the great modern(ist) buildings of the International Style were still indebted to the human body as far as their composition and proportions are concerned.If the pure geometric forms of, say, the villa Savoye represent the human body in one way or another, then Himmelblau's deconstructed geometry represents a mutilated, handicapped, fragmented body. Himmelblau's model for the Malibu Open House project (see fig. 9) might clarify this point. By means of plate and frame deconstruction the Austrian group of architects designs a house that is reminiscent of an igloo or a wigwam. Of capital importance here is the fact that the building does not possess a façade; the front side of the house is completely open, revealing the interior.
Fig. 9: Himmelblau - Malibu
Open House
In the theory that regards a building as a human body, the façade is
often compared to the face. Confronted with such a faceless body, the
spectator-subject begins to fear the loss of his own face by way of projection.
As Freud argues, feelings of the uncanny often rely on the return of infantile
complexes of which the castration complex is the most crucial. From the
analysis of myths and dreams, Freud learned that loss of limbs often functions
as a substitute for loss of the sex. The eyes, and with it, the head,
are privileged substitutes as they are the parts of the body that observe
the (sexual) difference. The sight of a building without a façade, like
Himmelblau's Open House or James Stirling's Stuttgart Staatsgalerie
(see http://www.stgt.com/stuttgart/statgale.htm),
produces that form of the uncanny that has to do with the repression of
the castration complex.
