ABSTRACT
Irigaray’s criticism of scientific thinking in philosophy and psychoanalysis extends
to discussions about architecture, when architects ignore contingency in the
design, construction and use of buildings; for example, when architectural
design is defined as the systematic production of spatial ideas that take little or
no account of the client, environmental context or user. Such rigid and inflexible
definitions of the discipline rely upon limited scientific definitions of space and
result in symbolic and instrumental methods of construction that do not reflect
the physical and material complexity of its processes. However, this chapter also
shows that Irigaray develops a theory of sexed spaces or architectures that are
developed out of fluid, temporal, multi-sensory and multi-dimensional spaces.
