PRE-MANIFESTO

Indeed Freud himself often used the metaphor of a three-level house when seeking to describe in spatial terms his hypothesis for a tripartite structure of the psyche: by analogy, he compared the id, the ego and the superego, respectively, to the cellar, ground floor and attic of an archetypal house. The cellar could be seen, symbolically, as the seat of our hidden, unconscious drives, the ground floor as the accessible realm of our conscious daily life and the attic as the lofty place where our superego reigns, also removed from our direct understanding. On the basis of this “analytical topology”, particular spaces and specific objects within them can legitimately be classified, according to their symbolic significance and to the associations that they evoke in each one of us individually, as belonging to the realms of the id, the ego or the superego.

Space, whether man-made or natural, is never psychologically neutral. Architectural space and the objects within it are always loaded with emotions, although most architects, since the birth of Modernism, have been loath to admit it, in their arid search for an universal, isotropic Euclidian space, preferably unfettered by meaning and untainted by emotion.

In fact we find ourselves, from early childhood on, incessantly projecting our fears, our hopes, our loves and our hatreds upon the familiar and less familiar spaces around us, as well as upon the objects that are contained within them; so much so that, as a result of the sustained intercourse between human beings and their surrounding habitat, such feelings eventually appear not only to be embodied in particular places and artefacts, to inhabit them and even to haunt them, but also to actually emanate from them: our houses and their objects, it appears, are not only external manifestations of our psyche, they also have a psyche of their own. Or so it seems.

Indeed Freud himself often used the metaphor of a three-level house when seeking to describe in spatial terms his hypothesis for a tripartite structure of the psyche: by analogy, he compared the id, the ego and the superego, respectively, to the cellar, ground floor and attic of an archetypal house. The cellar could be seen, symbolically, as the seat of our hidden, unconscious drives, the ground floor as the accessible realm of our conscious daily life and the attic as the lofty place where our superego reigns, also removed from our direct understanding. On the basis of this “analytical topology”, particular spaces and specific objects within them can legitimately be classified, according to their symbolic significance and to the associations that they evoke in each one of us individually, as belonging to the realms of the id, the ego or the superego.

If this is so, where does Kumiko Shimizu’s “angry house” belong within this psychological structure of space and in the dynamics of its formation?

At its inception, the angry house is not yet a house, nor even an object. It is a lump of malleable material, of wet clay, of undifferentiated grey matter, contained and hidden in a plastic bag, just as Man Ray’s elusive “enigma of Isidore Ducasse” is concealed in a sack tied up with common string. By asking the participants, in a collective act of creation, one after the other, to throw the bag to the ground, with all the anger they can muster, the artist institutes a quasi shamanistic ritual that has several essential properties: it ensures that the process of morphogenesis is unconscious, that it is out of our deliberate control, depending, as it does, on elements of chance and randomness; it ensures that it is fundamentally unmediated, that the act of throwing in anger is not a mediated representation of the act but the act itself, and therefore not a representation of anger but, literally, blind anger in the raw; and it ensures that the giving of form is a collective process transcending any concept of individual authorship and therefore transcending any possible intention, on the part of the participants, of attempting to leave any identifiable trace of a personal psychological history.

We understand consciously that the engine behind the piece is our anger but we also simultaneously understand, unconsciously, that this anger is not our individual anger. Neither is it anonymous mass anger. To put it cautiously: it is a proposition that the emergent form that is eventually released could be collectively understood as the form that anger might take within the hidden folds of the “id”. There lies the magic of this piece.

After this initial “blind” stage of genesis, the angry house undergoes a process of transformation that is, by contrast, totally conscious and under rational control. First the original, tormented plaster form is analysed by a 3D digitizer that translates its complex geometry it into an array of digital data. Then this 3D computer model is virtually sliced into a series of parallel 2D transversal sections. Thirdly these sections are given a scale and are virtually cut to define an outer shell with a certain structural thickness. Finally this set of digital data is fed to a laser cutter that produces two interlocked physical models: on the one hand the “positive” outer shell of the angry house and on the other hand its residual “negative”, internal form. At this stage, the angry house is no longer an object but has become an inhabitable space, albeit at a smaller scale that that of the final pavilion which will eventually be built. And its “shadow” remains impenetrable.

The final stage of mutation of the angry house is that it flows back again into the realm of the unconscious and now becomes, effectively, an artefact of the superego, imbued with a transcendent philosophical and spiritual meaning that has been partially formulated but deliberately not totally elucidated by the artist.

Thus, to return to Freud’s hypothesis of a psychological structure of space, it is interesting to note that the angry house, although obscurely originating from the id, subsequently takes on the identity of an object emanating from the ego, while ending up being an object of the superego, going through all three apparently contradictory processes of gestation and identification. It is the richness of this tripartite psychic identity that perhaps gives this work such a strong emotional force.

This small catalogue is intended as a preliminary manifesto for an “emotional architecture”, an approach to the design of both spaces and objects that gets to the root of emotions rather than merely illustrating them. Strangely, architects tend, unlike artists in other media, such as literature, painting, photography, music and particularly film, to be very reticent when it comes to expressing feelings and eliciting emotions from the observer, as if the praxis of their art were, by tacit agreement, one of exercising restraint and discretion.

The angry house, by playfully tackling one of our most primitive instincts, is intended as a radical provocation to encourage us to explore the whole spectrum of emotions and the psychospace that is defined by their conscious and unconscious interactions.

Through visualising my idea into art form, first in nature, in the forest, seaside, lake etc…then in an urban context, in streets and derelict buildings and now instead , reflecting upon the surroundings, I would like to make a building that stands on it’s own.

Art for me is not just self-expression but self-search and a challenge to myself as well as trying to reach the outer environment and society at large.

I recently found with whom I could identify as an artist: it is Vito Acconci, I could share his experience as a poet who became an experimental performance/video artist. He searched about self and sought his own space. His work progressed into public space and he became an architect and landscape designer. The space of architecture and landscape design is ultimately individual space extended to mass use.

Another example about individuality, I found in the old London red bus, That priority was an individual space, It was the most comfortable, enjoyable and friendly vehicle you ever ride on everyday. There was no space wasted. And the most beautiful public bus design ever produced. People still love it.

My curiosity does not seem to fade away but it is the same as it was when I was three, perhaps. Rapid change of society with new technology is awesome and confusing, but basic mankind never changes: two eyes, two hands, two legs, a brain, various organs, etc… and an endless desire to seek our entity. One of our mysteries is our emotions, very complicated. We enjoy our emotions as well as being afraid of them and we often cannot handle them. But they give us enormous energy, and vice versa. To take them away would be destructive. Without emotion, I wonder if we could exist. So I now challenge the subject of Emotion, how it could be expressed or made into a source of energy for creativity. My first challenge is Anger. The most powerful and purest abstract form among emotions.

Anger and Big Bang

The Angry House project challenge conventional architectural design, with the concept of “Anger”. Anger is the purest form of human emotion. There is no agenda but pure explosion of frustration, like the Big Bang, a state that holds very high density and very high temperature, waiting to explode. That is how the Universe was created. The state of the Big Bang is infinite density and extremely hot temperature. Leading cosmological theories believe that the universe expanded into its current state from this initial state of infinite density and temperature. In this way it is similar to our human anger, a state that holds very high density and very high temperature, waiting to explode.

Accident is Sacred

I provided an opportunity for participants to create an accident with my concept of “Accident is Sacred”. The Angry House project introduced the method and created a strong form that is beyond human control, and is therefore sacred. If it is sacred, nobody could challenge me with the cause and the result; in this case, the cause is people’s emotion and the result is architectural design.

The project continued to develop into different forms with the new technologies that enable the Angry House to become viable as architecture. Following my wondering off habit, I encountered new technologies. How the new technologies are used was more an accidental discovery than a controlled experiment. The concept “Accident is Sacred” applies for the first stage of the Angry House, performed and created by an audience and the new technologies are also used with this concept as well as the notion of “The Result is Unknown”.

New technology must not be ignored and should be cerebrated rather than feared. This is human achievement. My way of using technologies, 3D Printing and CADCAM is simple and direct but dynamic and the finished work shows the complexity. The journey of each process with the notion of “The Result is Unknown” is like a thrilling virgin voyage to an unexpected destination, but, in some sense, one arrives in the perfect place. The Angry House Project considers and signifies each stage of these accidental developments as the process of the design.

The project’s ultimate proposal is to build an Angry House Pavilion where concerts, discussions and meetings would take place. On the skin, goats and people could climb. There is still a lot of research and study that will be necessary to develop the Angry House further as the pavilion, and this work is under way.

As such Kumiko Shimizu’s innovative Angry House project posits the notion of the human and the digital in a fluctuating relationship that seeks to reveal an essential emotion at the very core of human existence. Anger is at once a typically extreme and all-consuming phenomenon. However, its manifestation here is articulated and counterbalanced by a collaborative and innovative approach that concerns a rich dialogue between both analogue and digital design and fabrication techniques. This led to the selection of the project for my forthcoming book, ‘Digital Fabrication in Architecture’ (Laurence King, 2012).

Angry House concretises the fleeting, quantifies the qualitative, implodes the explosive, and contains the tumultuous. Shimizu’s methodology embraces a series of steps that offer agency and an exploration of the unknown at each stage, thereby providing a symbiotic relationship between a culture of making and, indeed, the making of culture. The resultant artefacts exhibited here illustrate the visceral nature of the artist’s exploration and the hybrid nature of her approach that has borne nuance, grace and subtleties from ostensible chaos.

Nick Dunn is an Author, Principal Lecturer and BArch Director of Studies at the Manchester School of Architecture. His books include, The Ecology of the Architectural Model (Peter Lang, 2007) and the co-authored Urban Maps: Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City (Ashgate, 2011). His primary research interests are in the fields of visualization, modelling, mapping, representation in architecture, infrastructure, post-capitalist landscapes and urbanism.

Angry House is a means of directing the emotion of anger into an expression of joy and inspiration.

It is both a piece and a process and in some regards the full power of the idea comes from participation in the process.

A form is defined by an act stimulated by the emotion of anger; moulding a small piece of clay in a bag and throwing it on the ground.

That form is laser scanned so the piece is defined as a set of digitally defined slices.

In its digital form it can be scaled and the data used both to investigate and analyse the physical characteristics of the materials and drive cutting machines to create and label the slices.

The labelled slices can then be assembled and de-constructed.

Angry House, therefore, is also then a demonstration of the way the organic, analogue, world comes together coherently with the digital, Internet, world.

In this way Angry House can exist in the virtual and real world at many times, in many places and at any scale. As a piece and process its potential accessibility is only limited by the desire to seek joy and inspiration.