ABSTRACT
Concentrating on the mature phase of Surrealism, after the period of automatic writing, with its more careful attention to the work of analogy, Vesely notes that ‘the coherence of analogies is not a result of personal imagination but has its roots in the coherence of the experienced world’. This, of course, challenges the notion of the artistic imagination as representative of individual freedom; and Vesely uses the Surrealist recourse to the house as embodiment of latent experience and creativity to clarify the phenomenon. Beginning with the office of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, he indicates the indebtedness to the Renaissance villa, then, via the Bachelardian oneiric house, he argues that the Surrealist house is a metaphor or paradigm, existing between dream and reality. Because of architecture's greater indebtedness to reality than other visual arts, Surrealism has been of limited influence on architectural design, despite the potential link to myth that one sees in, for example, the journeys through Paris of Breton and Aragon.
