Response to Danze and Sonnenberg

I am grateful to Elizabeth Danze and Stephen Sonnenberg for commenting on my paper on Philip Johnson’s Glass House (Tutter 2011a) and pleased that it has proved something of an inspiration to them. I will respond to just a few of their comments.

Danze and Sonnenberg observe that walls of glass—“a material that possesses . . . complex and dreamlike phenomenological properties”—provide an inherently ambiguous boundary, calling attention in particular to its reflective surface. They might be interested to know that Johnson deliberately omitted any external overhang that could shadow and thus reduce the reflectivity of the glass curtain, thereby enhancing its optical barrier qualities. However, he soon found the mirror-like surface too much to take at night and illuminated the trees around his glass house in order to soften the reflective barrier between inside and outside. Eventually, transparency, too, was problematic; Johnson described living there as like being in a “vacuum” and chose to sleep nearby, in the opaque Brick House. And thus the glass walls of Johnson’s house both crystallize and actualize his lifelong ambivalent search for containment (Tutter in press).

I think Danze and Sonnenberg are right to bring attention to the presence of dreamlike processes in the waking brain. While I have used the dream more as a metaphor to look at Johnson’s design process, it does seem that his practice involved procedures analogous or directly related to the distortion, condensation, and displacement processes of dream work. Danze, a working architect, explains that architectural design must accommodate and satisfy myriad concrete requirements and constraints, and thus involves problem solving as much as it does creativity. Dreams are thought to help solve problems: hence the phrase “sleep on it.” Mechanisms akin to some of those involved in dream-work likely operate not only in the designing brain, but also, and more generally, in the problem solving brain—both sleeping and waking. Those designs that bear traces of their inspiration and evolution allow a privileged view—a literal “window”—onto these mysterious processes, creative in every sense of the word. Another somewhat accessible example of synthetic dreamlike activity in the conscious mind is reverie, so essential to the work of many analysts. Visual imagery often influences my interpretations, suggesting the engagement of primary processes during the waking state.

When I first visited the Glass House, it was the single painting, a Poussin, in the middle of the Glass House that first struck me: what was that ruined Old Master doing there? As Vincent Scully said, “it is not there for nothing” (Tutter 2011b). At the time, I was in the midst of teaching The Interpretation of Dreams, and I wondered whether this seemingly inexplicable design choice could be understood as akin to a dream-within-a-dream (Tutter 2011b). After studying the painting’s classical subject, the Athenian general Phocion, I became curious about the possible significance of Atreus, whose tomb inspired Johnson’s Painting Gallery at the Glass House; this became the foundation of the study at hand. If the overdetermination and condensation of the material at the heart of the Glass House seemed to resemble the structure of dream content, my experience of following links and associative threads to reach this material was eerily reminiscent of the process of interpreting dreams.

There is only one minor point I would like to clarify: I did not mean to quote Scully on Frank Lloyd Wright to support my conclusions, as Danze and Sonnenberg indicate. When Scully uses terminology such as “condensation” and “waking dreams,” he does so in a thoroughly poetic yet decidedly concrete sense—referring to something altogether different from what most analysts, myself included, would understand these words to mean. Rather, my intent was to acknowledge that long before me, Scully was on to something: he sensed something dreamlike in great architecture. Anyone who appreciates the power of psychoanalytic psychology, as does Scully, can recognize how illuminating its constructs and concepts can be when employed outside their usual context.

I thank Danze and Sonnenberg for their interesting discussion, and for their contributions to the deepening interface of architecture and psychoanalysis. I look forward to hearing more.