House for Two Psychoanalysts
Buenos Aires, Argentina
1978
A sequence of spaces and buildings accommodates working and living quarters for two psychoanalysts and their children in a party-wall lot and defines a transition from the public realm to the private world. This transition is established through a dialectic between the monumental and the domestic.
The house is organized around the contradictions between fragment and whole, individual and family. The house is vertically structured by the contrast between communal family space (living room, dining room, kitchen) along an axis perpendicular to the party walls, and four, autonomous, double-height cells (bedroom-bathroom), one for each member of the family. Individual access to these cells is provided by four enclosed spiral staircases, which are perceived as four corner columns in the living area. These four rooms are whole, independent volumes that are interconnected only by a very light passerelle. From the common space below, the rooms are perceived as individual floating volumes. This organization provides the context for a mise-en-scéne of a way of life and of a mode of architectural writing. The users can be seen as a typical family (father, mother, boy, girl), as a hierarchical, pyramidal structure. However, the formal organization of the architecture suggests the break of this structure and the possibility of a reorganization where four people live as individuals or as part of a family group interrelated through a variety of associations.
The model of the house has been built to condense and multiply the representative power of the architectural model and drawing. The space with projection of four volumes traditional architectural drawing fragments the building to produce a knowledge of its parts and relationships while the traditional model verifies the building as an object. In this case the specific qualities of drawing are displaced to the model. This displacement introduces a temporal dimension that fragments the model as object and impregnates it with narrative and sequential qualities.
Since psychoanalysis could be seen as one of the most recent liberal professions to appear in Western culture, this House for Two Psychoanalysts is proposed as a possible late addition to Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s typology of houses for the ideal city.
The house is organized around the contradictions between fragment and whole, individual and family. The house is vertically structured by the contrast between communal family space (living room, dining room, kitchen) along an axis perpendicular to the party walls, and four, autonomous, double-height cells (bedroom-bathroom), one for each member of the family. Individual access to these cells is provided by four enclosed spiral staircases, which are perceived as four corner columns in the living area. These four rooms are whole, independent volumes that are interconnected only by a very light passerelle. From the common space below, the rooms are perceived as individual floating volumes. This organization provides the context for a mise-en-scéne of a way of life and of a mode of architectural writing. The users can be seen as a typical family (father, mother, boy, girl), as a hierarchical, pyramidal structure. However, the formal organization of the architecture suggests the break of this structure and the possibility of a reorganization where four people live as individuals or as part of a family group interrelated through a variety of associations.
The model of the house has been built to condense and multiply the representative power of the architectural model and drawing. The space with projection of four volumes traditional architectural drawing fragments the building to produce a knowledge of its parts and relationships while the traditional model verifies the building as an object. In this case the specific qualities of drawing are displaced to the model. This displacement introduces a temporal dimension that fragments the model as object and impregnates it with narrative and sequential qualities.
Since psychoanalysis could be seen as one of the most recent liberal professions to appear in Western culture, this House for Two Psychoanalysts is proposed as a possible late addition to Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s typology of houses for the ideal city.