Architecture as Metaphor

The physical presence of a building (constructed or designed) is a tangible reality which the mind can grasp easily. Architecture has always invoked more meaning than its basic reality; from ceremonial burial sites such as Stonehenge or Newgrange to an American tv show host's neo classical mansion, the design and structure of a building alludes to more than its base function.

Architecture can be viewed as a representational tool, one which allows a flow of understanding between seemingly disparate areas of knowledge. Through its incarnation in walls, windows, doors, columns and the promenade through their various possible arrangements, complex and subtle theories can be represented and thus understood clearly. Arguably, this visual and spatial representation of ideas can further their meaning and create new avenues of exploration within them.

The design of a 'Library of the Brain' which I am currently undertaking seeks to represent the workings of the brain as that of a constantly dynamic organism, one which grows and shrinks according to use and one which processes information and produces maps of said information. It also seeks to represent the relationship between these internal workings and the external / personal physical experience of these mental maps.

On a slightly skewed note, other reading I have been doing of Lacan and Zizek - Freudian influenced philosophers has opened the possibility of the assessment of my project as a representational journey of the self through reality and its incarnations: The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

The question I find interesting here is whether new developments in neuroscience - the ability to now more than ever witness how the brain processes and reveals reality can shed light on what it is to exist, to have consciousness and the Freudian theories expounded to explain such things?

Psychoanalysis, I have always found to be lacking in scientific rigour and experimental evidence proves that its direct use doesn't have particularly positive effects. However, the questions it forced into public debate into human consciousness and sub consciouness has been fruitful in the understanding of the human mind as a complex system. Only recently since technology has allowed for methods of brain scanning has neuroscience - the study of the brain (and thus the mind) become a real science - that is one which can be empircally measured and tested. Freud's analysis although insightful and ground breaking was speculative and subjective, not as he claimed scientific.

In my current project, I hope to use architecture as a representational tool to question and understand an individuals experience of reality in relation to both current understandings of neuroscience aswell as Lacanian / Freudian notions of the self.