ABSTRACT
Today, one does not have to go to Massachusetts General Hospital, as one did in the late nineteenth century, to study anaesthetics or to experience the manipulation of the synaesthetic system of the human sensorium. 1 Effects of intoxication can just as easily be obtained – for free – by walking down the streets of any number of contemporary cities, where architecture has become a vehicle for ‘voluptuous sensations,’ ‘dazzling visible impressions,’ ‘entrancing visions,’ ‘a world of new sensations,’ even the extreme feelings of pleasure and pain. As Susan Buck-Morss says, ‘the experience of intoxication is not limited to drug-induced, biochemical transformations. Beginning in the nineteenth century, a narcotic was made out of reality itself.’ 2 Whereas drugaddiction was the characteristic of modernity in the nineteenth century – from Baudelaire to Freud, all took either opium or cocaine – intoxication through architecture has become one of the primary modalities of postmodernity in the early twentieth-first century. In this chapter, we articulate why this is the case.
