In Episode 133 of A is for Architecture, I speak with architect, academic, and writer Lorens Holm. We explore the fascinating intersection of architecture, psychoanalysis, and the public realm, themes Lorens addresses in his book, Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan: Shadowing the Public Realm, (Routledge 2023) where Holm examines how Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory can illuminate the way we design, inhabit, and interpret spaces.

Reading Architecture with Freud and Lacan presents an argument for how architecture shapes—and is shaped by—our unconscious desires, cultural narratives, and societal structures. Lorens also sheds light on the public realm and how the unconscious both informs it but is in particular ways also part of it. From this, we discuss what it means to read architecture not just as physical space but as a layered text of human experience.

Lorens can be found on his University of Dundee website, on LinkedIn and even Instagram. The book is linked above, and you can also find his 2010 book Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier: Architecture, Space and the Construction of Subjectivity on the Routledge website.

Are you an architect? A psychoanalytic thinker? Or just curious about the deeper meanings of the spaces we live in? This one’s for you.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick