Dessine-moi une maison : psychanalyse d’un processus de design
This research is a continuation of those invested in order to clarify the question of the design process, especially the architectural design of the house. It also seeks to develop the reflexivity of the designer on his acts by offering a view from the perspective of psychoanalysis. It extends the initiatives brought by the third generation of design methods researches focusing on an unexplored field: the unconscious process of architectural design. Its’ problematic is the unconscious origins of creative work of the designer in architecture. Creation is one of the important topics of psychoanalysis, several psychoanalytic concepts like Freudian sublimation, try to explore and explain it. The design being a creative discipline, psychoanalysis can lighten us about the design process, and give us the opportunity to observe and approach it. The architectural metaphor, used to express the Freudian theory, is also the scope of several psychoanalytic theories and concepts. Architecture in general, and particularly architecture of the house, offers a field where many of the psychoanalytic concepts can be observed and applied, because of the emotional investigation that the designer, the user, or the builder invest in it. This research will approach the architectural example according to the concepts developed by the three most important psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Lacan and Jung. The application of these concepts will be made through an auto-analysis that puts the designer in a double stance: the research subject and the researcher, which highly promotes the reflexivity that the design researches look for. Free association is the first step that will start the self-study process, and follows its development. Applied to the speech and the shape of the house, free association will seek to distinguish several psychological mechanisms that inform our investigation. The results of the application of Freudian concepts will serve as a basis on which the concepts of Lacanian and Jungian theory will be applied. At the end of this analysis, we would be able to present a model of the unconscious process of design that lead to the creation of the house used as an example. We will discover the nature of the unconscious process that precedes and follows the creative work of the designer. We will also see how this process is fed from designer experiences dating back to the early years of his childhood. This would help to see the possibility of applying psychoanalytic concepts in architectural design and help identifying potential approaches to the contribution of psychoanalysis to the practice of design and it’s teaching.
architecture creation design process house psychoanalysis