I C A R C H 





A HOUSE FOR SIGMUND FREUD

 
Should we start with the nephew...? With Lucien...?

Maybe the painter's outlook on life was even sterner than that of the psychoanalyst.

But Freud fascinates even those who never read his writings.

Why the mystique...?

Essentially, it is the mystique of their own "psyche."

THE UNKNOWN par excellence.

In the physical space we have the Michelin guides... and many others.

But in the psychic one, no guide is good enough, despite countless attempts at producing them.

There is, indeed, an immense bibliography around the subject. And if one would contemplate a map of Manhattan showing the location of its myriad of psychotherapy centers, one would see an ocean of them.
Maybe we are spoiled. Never before the analysis of the mind / the soul took so many forms. But somehow, Freud is still unavoidable.

So we ask you to design A HOUSE FOR SIGMUND FREUD.

A troubled house, no doubt.

Dark and mysterious.

A house WITH a troubled sexuality.

But isn't sexuality somehow always troubled and troubling...?

IT IS.

There aren't more sure certitudes than this.

This is an unending subject, as rich and complex as life itself.

The relationship between Eros and Life is the relationship between the roots of a tree and the tree.

How else to put it...?

No doubt, Freud himself was troubled. To "force" his sister in law to pass through his and his wife's bedroom on her way to her own bedroom, in a house with fourteen bedrooms, is telling enough.

But at least Doctor Freud tried to explore his troubles under the guise of others'.

To reduce though psychoanalysis to sexuality is to reduce a tree to its roots. There is much more to it, inasmuch as even the nephew, the great Lucien Freud, besides depicting troubled characters and aging bodies, he also depicted flowers.

So what would the flowers be, in the case of Sigmund Freud...?

It is hard to tell.

We let you discover them.

It is surprising though that despite the indisputable prestige psychic matters and psychoanalysis had and have, the relationship between them and architecture is still shallow, to say the least.

Very rarely, if at all, the architect is also a psychologist.

It would be interesting, though, if some kind of marriage between the two happens.

This is exactly what we ask you to do:

MARRY THE PSYCHOLOGIST WITH THE ARCHITECT.

Bring Oedipus, Hamlet and any of the Brothers Karamazov on the building site.

Encourage them to become architects.

To build.

And then show us their work.

OUR work.

Our troubled self's work.

Thank you,

ICARCH Gallery