Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture

""Architecture generally considers environmental design to be repulsive, an odious amalgam of pseudoscience, bad form and moralism,"" writes UCLA Architecture chair Lavin. Yet she makes a strong case for 1950s work that aimed at creating an ""affective environment,"" and that of Neutra (18921970) in particular. By the term affective environment, Lavin means designs that are ""characterized above all by their sense of mood"" and that, thus, challenged modernism's idea of ""universal space."" She focuses on the houses that the Viennaborn Neutra built in California (shown in 36 b&w illustrations), which use a great deal of glass with wood and steel framing. These houses, Lavin says, ""argue for a continuity between material and psychic energy"" and are oriented toward resolving the tensions between psychoanalysis (then in its U.S. heyday) and architecturethat is, between the residential spaces and their inhabitants. Over eight chapters (with titles like ""The Empathic House"" and, wryly, ""Birth Trauma""), Lavin argues that Neutra literally thought of himself as a psychoanalyst, with clients as analysands, and houses as a kind of talk therapy. Not all of the details will be of interest to general readers, but as a piece of criticism that bridges aesthetics and American cultural history, this book breaks new ground.