To address the status of desire in modern architecture, much can be learned from a critical examination of architecture’s haunting presence in surrealist thought, surrealist tendencies in the theories and projects of modern architecture, and the theoretical and methodological concerns of surrealism informing past and future urban architecture.
Surrealism, as a movement, was almost always interdisciplinary; it was originally an avant-garde movement that eventually crossed cultures, contexts, and media forms, much like modern architecture’s emergence. To date, the status of architecture within surrealist thought remains undecidable - of the creative arts, it is only architecture that remains as the unfulfilled promise of surrealist thought. The dialogue between material representations and the (incomplete) subjectivity of the modern world, a dialogue of forms and spaces where irrational meanings and experiences are produced, lies at the heart of any surrealist architectural project: “their paintings and poems were characterized by images of searching and finding, of veiling and revealing, of presence and absence, of thresholds and passages, in a surrealized universe in which there were no clear boundaries or fixed identities.”
Modern architecture in the interwar period overtly drew upon rationalism in the form of instrumental logic, mono-functionalism to order the inherited world, and objective fact over subjective effect. The radical shift in the philosophical and political grounding of the spaces of life in the interwar period of “high modernism” are rarely made more explicit than in surrealism’s critique of this dominant rationalist orthodoxy.
There is not one surrealism, but many, and the significant variance between surrealist practices may function as an under-explored and expansive conceptual territory for architectural thought. Before functionalism, before formalism, there is thought forming in response to the possibilities of architecture to encode desires. For this reason, Breton’s claim that surrealism is simply “pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing, or by any other method, the real functioning of the mind” is an architectural premise.
