Abstract
This essay radically re-conceptualises architecture as a psycho-social subject entwined with the psychology of its creators and inhabitants. Seeking to understand the psychology of architecture, it discusses innovative, transdisciplinary, practice-based methods derived from psycho-social studies, psychoanalysis, and conceptual art, to explore the consciousness and unconsciousness of buildings. It then tests those methods on a case-study example – Oscar Niemeyer’s Communist Party headquarters in Paris – to speculate how psychological profiling may lead to a deeper understanding of the entangled human/non-human relations within a building, while also revealing potentials for therapeutic adaptation or reuse.
The essay’s principal contribution is the re-conceptualisation of architecture as having profound and active psychological dimensions – the awareness and management of which potentially impacts upon liveability and lifespan – aided by a set of methods with which to reveal those psychological dimensions. It thus expands the scope for processes of architectural practice and contributes to transdisciplinarity within conceptual art.