ABSTRACT
Architecture is the masterly correct and magnificent play of volumes in the light. Architecture is the view of an object in space from the eyes of man. It creates a spectacle where it takes an onlooker and puts him in front of the paysage: the architectural landscape. Brunelleschi’s voice and gaze succeeded in binding space tightly around the point of an image; the indomitable gaze of the Parthenon succeeded in unravelling it again for Le Corbusier. Desire has very little to do with pleasure or the satisfaction of needs. For the tragic Freud, the Freud of drive theory, desire was simply the relief of excitation. It has nothing to do with inherently attractive features of the object. Architecture is first and foremost about space-making. Lacan’s diagrams of the visual field and the drive are important to architecture because they make radical spatial propositions such as are rarely seen in architecture.
