Preface

Folds, blobs, nets, skins, diagrams: all words that have been employed to de-
scribe theoretical and design procedures over the last decade, and that have
rapidly replaced the cuts, rifts, faults, and negations associated with deconstruc-
tion, which had previously displaced the types, signs, structures, and mor-
phologies of rationalism. The new vocabulary has something to do with
contemporary interest in the informe; it seems to draw its energies from a
rereading of Bataille and a new interest in Deleuze and Guattari; its movies of
choice would perhaps be Crash before Blade Runner, The Matrix before Brazil;
its favorite reading might take in Burroughs (but no longer Gibson), Žižek (but
maybe not Derrida). The representative forms of this by now strong tendency
are complex and curved, smooth and intersecting, polished and translucent,
thin and diagrammatic. Both the new vocabulary and its materializations in-
tersect with and take many of their techniques from digital technology; indeed
many of the projected and built designs would be unrealizable, if not unimag-
inable, without it. They are words and forms conceived and manipulated in a
virtual space, with, nevertheless, an intimate relationship to production tech-
niques and the technology of materials. Such a relationship would be impos-
sible without the digital interface that construes information, theoretical and
practical, according to the same rules of representation and replication.
The terms and forms of this new tendency take their place, however, no
matter how unprecedented they may seem, within a particular modernist ge-
nealogy, on which they draw for their imagery as well as their philosophy. 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. The intersection of spatial thought
Preface

with psychoanalytical thought, of the nature of containment and the charac-

teristics of the subject, has been a preoccupation of social and aesthetic dis-
course since the turn of the century; certain of the avant-garde movements of
the 1920s and 1930s, among them expressionism, explored this intersection in
terms of its representation; contemporary experimentation preserves these two
terms, while distorting the traditional space of modernism and questioning the
equally traditional fiction of the humanist subject. The results in each case,
theoretically or in design, have been the production of a kind of warping,
which I have called warped space.
In this book I am concerned with two apparently distinct but in fact
closely related forms of spatial warping. The first is that produced by the psy-
chological culture of modernism from the late nineteenth century to the pres-
ent, 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 sub-
ject. Space, in this ascription, is not empty, but full of disturbing objects and
forms, among which the forms of architecture and the city take their place. The
arts of representation, in their turn, are drawn to depict such subject/object
disturbances, themselves distorting the conventional ways in which space has
been described since the Renaissance.
The second kind of warping is that produced by the forced intersection
of different media—film, photography, art, architecture—in a way that breaks
the boundaries of genre and the separate arts in response to the need to depict
space in new and unparalleled ways. Artists, rather than simply extending their
terms of reference to the three-dimensional, take on the questions of architec-
ture as an integral and critical part of their work in installations that seek to
criticize the traditional terms of art. Architects, in a parallel way, are exploring
the processes and forms of art, often on the terms set out by artists, in order to
escape the rigid codes of functionalism and formalism. This intersection has
engendered a kind of “intermediary art,” comprised of objects that, while sit-
uated ostensibly in one practice, require the interpretive terms of another for
their explication.
The relationship between these two kinds of warping, psychological and
artistic, is established by the common ground of all artistic and architectural
practice in modernity: the space of metropolis, in its different forms and cul-
tural identifications, from the Vienna and Berlin of the late nineteenth century
 Preface
to the Los Angeles of the late twentieth. This space, whether examined socio-
logically, psychologically, or aesthetically, has operated as the flux, so to speak,
in which subjects and objects have been forced to adjust their always uneasy re-
lations. And whether architects or artists seek to solve the problems inherent in
metropolitan life with material or utopian solutions, or simply to represent
them in all their implicit horror and excitement, the need to develop new forms
of expression was and is the result. Without idealistic enthusiasm, but also with
no extreme dystopianism, I have examined a few of the examples of this pro-
cess that, in all its ramifications, underlies the continuing experiment we call
modernism.

Anthony Vidler
Los Angeles, May 1999

viii ix
Acknowledgments

The initial inspiration for my study of the cultural history of agoraphobia was
provided by an invitation to present a paper at a symposium entitled “Siegfried
Kracauer: The Critic in Exile,” organized at the Goethe House, Columbia Uni-
versity, by Andreas Huyssen and Mark Anderson in 1990. The conceptual
framework and the first chapters of the book were developed during a residen-
tial fellowship at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities
in 1993; the suggestions of Kurt Forster, Keith Moxey, Michael Holly, and my
research assistant, Lori Weintrob, were invaluable. T. J. Clark, Tony Kaes, and
Anne Wagner have commented instructively on papers presented at Berkeley.
Mary Kelly hosted a presentation of the work in progress at the Whitney Crit-
ical Studies Program and, together with her students, offered important
insights. The late Ernest Pascucci organized a conference on “Public Fear,” un-
der the auspices of the Guggenheim Museum and ANY magazine, the themes
of which were generated from this book, and which, through discussion and a
series of highly original presentations, helped enormously to expand and clar-
ify my thinking at a crucial stage in the writing. Mark Cousins, as a generous
host at the Architectural Association in London, has heard almost all the chap-
ters over the last five years and has been a continuous source of encourage-
ment and judicious criticism. Susan Buck-Morss, Dietrich Neumann, Edward
Dimendberg, and Thomas Y. Levin have helped on questions of critical the-
ory, Benjamin, Kracauer, and the movies. I thank those artists and architects
whose work provided the main impetus to writing: Wolf Prix of Coop Him-
melblau, Daniel Libeskind, Eric Owen Moss, Thom Mayne, Mike Kelley,
Toba Khedoori, Martha Rosler, and Greg Lynn were always ready to share ideas
and explain their projects. Sylvia Lavin, as Chair of the Department of Archi-
tecture, UCLA, has provided a stimulating context for debate and discussion.
Acknowledgments

My students at UCLA between 1993 and the present have helped me work
through numerous problems. Spyros Papapetros, whose knowledge of the his-
tory and theory of animism, the uncanny, and phobia is exhaustive, was as re-
sourceful as Holmes himself in scouring the library, and was equally generous
in his critical readings of early drafts.
Roger Conover gently but insistently guided the book into press. Emily
Apter asked questions and offered suggestions that gave me a sense of direction
and an intellectual excitement that sustained every stage of the writing. Nico-
las Apter-Vidler was generous enough to share his knowledge of dinosaurs,
ants, and game software for my digital education.