From Anish Kapoor to Louise Bourgeois, artists explore anxiety through architecture

At a time of rising tensions and collapsing certainties, anxiety does not represent merely a physiological response linked to worry and nervousness, but a persistent atmosphere and defining condition of contemporary life. It extends like a shadow across everyday experience, as the outcomes of societal and psychological futures grow increasingly elusive. In this precarious landscape, buildings and interiors can no longer be relied upon as markers of orientation or privacy. Contemporary art has responded by turning architecture and domestic space into settings where anxiety is made tangible. The works surveyed here do not simply depict unease or discomfort, but materialize a specific kind of mood in which perception and the integrity of the body are continuously challenged or questioned. 

In the aftermath of prolonged confinement, intensified surveillance and mediated forms of presence, the built environment can no longer be assumed as a stable site of reliability and continuity. Interiors have become sites of heightened bodily awareness and psychological strain, registering tension and exposure. Domestic space is no longer simply inhabited but negotiated, rendered provisional and unprotected from external pressures. Within this state of anxiety, people find themselves yearning for protective illusions, while contemporary artistic engagements with architecture reflect this level of fragility.

Spatial theorists such as Anthony Vidler have argued that modern architecture is haunted by its own pathologies: the house, despite its domestic familiarity, can easily turn into a site of anxiety when its comforting nature is inverted. This uncanniness is tied to the bodily experience of space, as buildings mirror human states and can evoke fear, instability, or a sense of collapse. Mark Fisher extends these ideas beyond architecture, describing anxiety as a persistent cultural climate that structures human perception and infiltrates the environments we inhabit and the ways our bodies register them. From a phenomenological perspective, such conditions underline how space is never neutral but experienced through a sensing, situated body. Thinkers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty have emphasized perception as embodied and oriented, while Gaston Bachelard foregrounded the house as a lived and affective space rather than a purely functional structure. Examining contemporary artistic practices through the lens of such writings helps account for the aesthetic persistence of anxiety in built space.

Vidler also infuses modernist and postmodern concepts such as alienation, estrangement and transcendental homelessness to address concerns within contemporary architectural discourse and broader societal conditions. He insists that the resurgence of homelessness and forced displacement lends particular urgency to any reflection on the modern condition of the unhomely. As people are not only dealing with the ontological sense of not being at home, but also with the political reality of not having a home at all. At a moment when the ways bodies navigate space are simultaneously monitored and regulated, topics of migration, housing precarity and ecological instability become inseparable from spatial anxiety. Anxiety is then, not merely staged symbolically in contemporary art, but emerges from concrete conditions that render space compromised or uninhabitable, operating as a critical reflection on how power and control are inscribed into the environments humans occupy. In contemporary art, the architecture of anxiety manifests in two primary forms: either as a threat to function or as a threat to being. Although this distinction is not absolute, as many works hover between the two registers and some deliberately exploit that ambiguity to avoid any single taxonomy, there are distinctive features that are present in each: in the first register, the notion of the everyday collapses, and the ordinary elements that are expected to enable and support entrance, circulation, and shelter lose their purpose. In the second, space destabilises orientation, perception, and bodily comfort as it shifts from being entirely ocular to being first and foremost corporeal. Both forms demonstrate that “architectures of anxiety” do not only have spatial or architectural implications, but also historical, psychological, and existential ones.

A prominent example of the first type of spatial threat is the work of German artist Gregor Schneider. He is widely known for transforming the banality of quotidian life into asphyxiated interior spaces in which people once lived. At its core, his architectural interventions call for a  defamiliarization of everyday objects: electrical outlets, switches, and ventilation ducts are all present, yet they serve no function whatsoever. Everything is concealed under a veneer of familiarity, in a setting where the operational or the utilitarian are rendered unusable and withdrawn from ordinary function. Schneider’s most ambitious and long-term project is undoubtedly Haus u r. This work is the outcome of the artist dismantling and rebuilding, for years, the interior of his family home, creating exact replicas of existing rooms inside others. The resulting edifice—derelict, austere and sparsely furnished— is completely blocked off from the outside world and often accessible only through claustrophobic hallways. The untraditional arrangement of commonplace objects reinforces this atmosphere. Windows through which one could normally gaze outside are sealed, and any everyday function is halted. There is even an area containing a halogen lamp that artificially illuminates a false window, with a fan producing an illusory morning breeze within it. As a result, the room gets flooded with daylight even during the night, offering a radical distortion of the visitor’s understanding of the environment around them. 

In the 1980s, Louise Bourgeois began constructing enigmatic sculptural environments she calls “Cells”. They represent a kind of sculpture that categorically departs from being a singular object and instead becomes directly concerned with objects situated in architectural spaces. With a total of sixty Cells created over a span of two decades, this series preoccupied the artist for a large part of her career. Out of all the “Cells”, only two are composed as a pair. Both made in 1994, Red Room (Parents) and Red Room (Child) take the form of semi-closed structures, each presenting an individual microcosm made of materials such as wood, metal, rubber, wire, glass, fabric and wax. Each is delineated by a spiral of discarded wooden doors taken from a Manhattan courthouse. The viewer is invited to enter them, walk around, and pay attention to their specificities, while projecting personal memories or associations onto their enigmatic mise en scène.

In Red Room (Parents), the viewer finds themselves inside a parent’s bedroom. A child’s toy train is meticulously laid out on the bed for display, next to what appears to be a case for a musical instrument. A pillow at the top of the bed reads “je t’aime”. This evocative composition of furniture and fabric enhances a charged barrier separating the internal world from the external exhibition context. Giving the impression of a study of a character longing for security, one may enter this apartment refuge only to paradoxically find themselves trapped within it.

In Red Room (Child), the narrative shifts to the child’s room. The space is populated with a multi-faceted collection of objects and sculptural forms, arranged in a way that resembles a domestic interior. Bathed in red, this assemblage of disparate items includes multiple spools of thread and coiled glass tubes, all seen through a single window from the outside, which adds to the viewer’s voyeuristic position. Being simultaneously closed in on itself and watched over, this environment heightens the tension between exposure and enclosure. This emphasis on enclosure and bodily proximity resonates with several phenomenological accounts of space as intimate and interiority as shaped through sensation and recall instead of visual coherence.

Similar to Schneider’s Haus u r, in these two pieces by Bourgeois function is disrupted, as the recognisable items housed in these caged-like rooms are unusable. They interrupt the logic of domestic space by adopting and relating to a visual vocabulary of everyday life, only to end up being inaccessible and resisting privacy, protection, or interiority in any normal sense. What is also worth mentioning is that both artists start from the house as the locus of their investigations into spatial dislocation.

There are also artists whose practice encompasses conceptual projects and large-scale installations that are absent of human presence or interaction, yet operate in different registers. British artist Mike Nelson (b. 1967) transforms existing spaces through constructions assembled from an array of salvaged materials, often sourced from demolition sites. Informed by a mixture of information retrieved from film, literature and actual personal experience, his visual language often unfolds through the viewer’s own projections and assumptions. In Studio Apparatus for Palais de Tokyo (2014), Nelson materialises a psychic residue in the form of an evacuated, tomb-like construction cast in cement and timber.  Despite its title, the work functions far from a functional artist’s studio. The viewer is allowed to enter the monumental chamber and grasp a transient mental state in a situation that destabilises the relationship between observer and environment. Such disorientation aligns with phenomenological accounts of anxiety as a breakdown of spatial familiarity, where the human body loses touch with its habitual orientation within the world. In this work, there is a frustrated expectation of bodily affinity with an edifice that appears welcoming but is designed to resist habitation. The piece evokes uncanny thoughts related to the future status of the body, as well as death and the fear of internment. It puts a sense of suffocation on central stage, tapping into the collective fear of experiencing one’s own burial. The sterility and silence that characterize the work offer additional reminders of the fate of the human body. In a way, it acts as a kind of memento mori, capable of moving its viewers through its evocation of the finality of human loss. There is a sense of vulnerability as the viewer is expected to walk into a construction that appears unfinished and exposed, with a rebar cage above and a narrow, tunnel-like passage suggesting containment.

But spatial anxiety does not only imply contained spaces. It also pertains to their absence. When British artist Anish Kapoor installed a black hole at Documenta IX Kassel in 1992, he not only introduced a sculptural void but a collapse in the integrity of the space itself. The absorptive blackness of the work, titled Descent Into Limbo, is anxiety-driven precisely due to the way it introduces swallowing space as a physical threat to the viewer. Triggering sensations of relentless vertigo and somatic disorientation, the work also reminds the viewer of their own mortality. The onlooker gazes into the void only to be confronted with a gravitational pull toward disappearance that refuses to return back the gaze. The piece disturbs the viewer’s sense of bodily integrity and spatial differentiation from the black void with which they are confronted. If the work of artists such as Schneider and Bourgeois sets up anxiety by the play and manipulation of architectural forms, such as corridors, thresholds and sealed rooms, in Kapoor’s work, it is formulated through the erasure of form altogether. 

Teresa Margolles’ major conceptual, site-specific work La Promesa (The Promise) presents a low-income abandoned house as a failed promise. The project emerged from the artist’s long-term investigation of Ciudad Juárez and the effects of migration and displacement that have shaped the city’s landscape. Over the course of eleven days, the house was meticulously taken apart, wall by wall, until it was completely torn down. The resulting tons of remains were then gathered and transported overland to Mexico City, where they were reconstituted for exhibition at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). 

By dismantling and pulverizing the edifice, Margolles transforms domestic architecture into debris. Reduced to compacted dust, the piece exists as matter spread across the floor. No longer standing upright, it becomes something entirely new as the house itself ceases to function as such in any traditional sense. Anxiety circulates through the denial of enclosure and functional interiority, reflecting how one gets used to seeing things destroyed.

Unlike Kapoor’s work, where anxiety is located in abstraction and the void, Margolles’ anxiety is materially grounded: it has weight and volume. The piece reads as an autopsy of space after architecture has failed its inhabitants. It highlights a structure originally designed for life that now registers loss, while the city that the house belonged to is shown through its material, crushed and milled into residue. All of the artworks surveyed here reject the modernist-white walled gallery. This refusal sits in a lineage of spatial interventions that reach back to a series of structural and site-specific experiments of the 1960s and 1970s, pioneered most notably by architectural dissections by Gordon Matta-Clark or expanded-field practices of installation artists Dan Graham and Mary Miss. Yet there is a clear distinction between those artists who pursue a breakdown of domestic function and architecture that has been altered, displaced or re-oriented, and those whose work threatens stability by putting into question one’s trust in built space and the environment surrounding the human body. In the end, regardless of the means or mechanisms employed by these artists, what becomes clear is that the human relationship with structural orientation is a precarious state that continually re-invents itself through artistic expression.

Taken together, these works reveal that architecture in contemporary art is both a tool for artists to stage conditions of exposure, often connected to personal or collective histories, and a symptom that challenges broader cultural states of anxiety. In some cases, the ordinary becomes suspect, while in others, spatial certainty is inverted into absence or a void. Rather than simply enacting a critique of the white cube, these practices insist that our relation to space is inseparable from questions of vulnerability, exposure and historical memory. They compel the viewer to reconsider what built environments do for us, but also what happens when they are no longer able to do so. From this point, they help map a contemporary anatomy of anxiety: a set of forms through which we can better grasp how modern life produces, resists and sometimes endures states of structural and psychological precarity.

Opening image: Mike Nelson, Studio Apparatus for Palais de Tokyo or The Exorcism, 2014. Photo André Morin, Image provided by: Palais de Tokyo, Paris.