Topos and choros: Aspects of material space and social subjectivity in architecture

摘要

This work is concerned with the themes of material space and social subjectivity in the contemporary single family home. Selected interpretive strategies and analytic approaches proposed by Fredric Jameson, Julia Kristeva, Anthony Giddens, David Michael Levin, and Michel de Certeau among others are briefly discussed, and the two figures "architecture as topography", and "architecture as choreography" are introduced as tentative metaphors for a reconsidered architectural work.;Three houses designed by Mockbee-Coker-Howorth for rural Mississippi are analysed. Conventional formal descriptions of the houses are cross-read with Luce Irigaray's psychoanalytic and feminist writing. Certain unintended effects of architectural objects, including the reproduction of gender- and class-based social asymmetries, are considered, and it is proposed that such effects can be understood as deriving in part from the intersection of the bodily capabilities of the subject with the material constraints of dwelling space.;Writings of Jurij Lotman and John O'Neill provide the basis for understanding Steven Holl's Oceanfront House as an example of how architectural objects might act to disrupt pre-scripted effects of social routines, or choreographies, performed within their spaces. It seems that through the organization of spaces and the conditions of their boundaries, but in concert with the visual, auditory and motile capabilities of the subject, architectural objects are temporarily able to "unsettle" socially inscribed roles.;Writings by Jean Clavreul, Parveen Adams, Juliet Flower MacCannell and others seem to suggest that the structure of clinical perversion may be an apt model for the effects of certain cultural works. By structuring his Love/House project in terms of the perverse desire of a controlling subject, Lars Lerup is able to offer a critique both of the typal house and of the overarching cultural structure which underwrites it.;The questions raised at the beginning of the work and the positions developed in the course of the study are outlined. A reconsideration of the initial hypothesis is made, the topographic and choreographic metaphors are briefly re-examined, and the notion of a reading approach which seeks to understand space and subject together is reconsidered.