La deformazione dello spazio. Arte, architettura e disagio nella cultura moderna
Anthony Vidler, Postmedia, Milano 2009 (pp. 239, € 21,00 / italiano)

Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the concept of space as an objective, constant and stable a priori of perception was steadily dismantled. The Kunstwissenschaft of Alois Riegl, Gottfried Semper and Heinrich Wölfflin, and subsequently the Warburg school with Panofsky, helped to capture the spatial dimension in cultural dynamics, by identifying spatial models for each great civilisation of human history. Thus space, abruptly displaced by external reality within subjectivity, found itself removed from its quiet transparency and comfortable reliability.

Within this typically fin de siècle cultural setting, two quite unprecedented phenomena made their appearance: on the one hand the modern metropolis, which designed previously unseen spatial and interpersonal relations; and on the other, the new topological neuroses (agoraphobia, claustrophobia). The thesis put forward by Anthony Vidler in Warped Space springs precisely from this scenario, maintaining that the modern city, populated by disturbing architectural forms, had impressed on smooth space a twist towards the problematical. This ambivalent and uneasy conditioning of urban space is what psychoanalytical culture calls perturbing, in other words the transformation of something familiar (heimlich) into something extraneous (unheimlich). Poe's and Engels' "man in the crowd", Benjamin's and Baudelaire's flâneur, and Charcot's tramp, but also Siegfried Kracauer's hotelhalle and the expressionist sets of UFA movies, are all eminent figures in this deformed and unstable spatial paradigm which has acquired depth and fascination in defiance of trust and custom.

This pattern, Vidler believes, has been reintroduced today too: both contemporary art and architecture have in fact reassessed the idea of "uneasy space", making it the instrument of a radical denunciation of the inconsistency of ideological concepts like transparency, function, evidence and rationality. The spaces designed by Vito Acconci or Coop Himmelb(l)au, Vidler explains, are fragmented and emotive places where all faith in the hygienic and positive myths of architectural modernism have been lost forever. From this angle, the modernist adventure looks to Vidler like an abstract parenthesis, a temporary interruption in the wider oscillation of de-formed space.

With Warped Space, Vidler continues his research into the optical unconscious of the modern age, to which the monograph on Ledoux and The Architectural Uncanny also belong.