Читать книгу Inseminations - Juhani Pallasmaa - Страница 32

‘Architecture is constructed mental space’, as my late friend architect Keijo Petäjä used to say. When experiencing a negative attitude towards life or a sense of gloom and anxiety, often projected by environments of our time, we are usually unwilling and incapable of identifying our own mental landscape in it. If we could learn to interpret the unintentional message of environment and architecture, we would certainly understand better both ourselves and the problems of our fanatically materialist and irrational collective mind better. A psychoanalysis of the environment could cast light on the mental ground of our paradoxical behaviour, such as adoration of individuality and the simultaneous unconditional subordination to conditioned values. The regressive attitudes in relation to architecture in the case of Collegiate Gothic in American universities, for instance, calls for an urgent analysis.

The disappearance of beauty in the environment cannot mean anything else but the disappearance of the capacity of idealization and reverence of human dignity and the loss of hope. Yet, man is able to construct only if he has hope; Hope is the Patron Saint of Architecture.

George Nelson an American architect‐designer, who died 15 years ago, foresaw the fall of the Nazi Empire already in the mid‐1930s through reading the unconscious hidden messages of Nazi stone architecture. He understood that the message which made most observers believe in the thousand‐year future of the Third Reich, in fact, signified an unconscious fortification against self‐destruction.³⁸