Part-architecture: The Manifest and the Hidden in the Maison de Verre and the Large Glass (or Towards an Architectural Unconscious)

At the opening of the twentieth century Sigmund Freud wrote that the role of psychoanalytic research is ‘to uncover connections by tracing what is manifest back to what is hidden’. ¹ Some 50 years later Jacques Lacan developed Freud’s thinking on the part-object and unconscious. This chapter traces my own critical architectural research method, ‘part-architecture’, which develops a framework for analysing ana recovering the hidden or repressed past to a piece of architecture. Part-architecture is heavily influenced by Lacan’s psychoanalytic ideas and the art historiography of Rosalind Krauss. ²