On a visit to Oslo I wandered rather aimlessly into the Opera house, before returning for each subsequent day of the trip. It wasn’t a reflection of an affection for opera but rather a fascination with the immense feeling of calm the building provoked in me, particularly the seating area outside:
The concept for the building is described here in terms of multiple overlapping thresholds, symbolic and literal, embodied in the design of the building:
“The wave wall:” Opera and ballet are young artforms in Norway. These artforms evolve in an international setting . The Bjørvika peninsula is part of a harbour city, which is historically the meeting point with the rest of the world.. The dividing line between the ground ‘here’ and the water ‘there’ is both a real and a symbolic threshold. This threshold is realised as a large wall on the line of the meeting between land and sea, Norway and the world, art and everyday life. This is the threshold where the public meet the art.
https://www.archdaily.com/440/oslo-opera-house-snohetta
As someone who compulsively categorises while feeling frustrated by the rigidity this gives rise to, I can see why this concept moves me when realised with such confidence. Mark Bracher draws attention to the variability of these experiences and their psychoanalytical complexity:
A forest can fortify a body ego through the enclosed, protected spaces that it provides, or it can constitute a maze in which the body ego is disorientated and vulnerable to physical danger at every step. Similarly, a plain can nourish the body ego through the sense of unrestricted, unencumbered freedom of movement that its space offers, or it can threaten the body ego with its absence of structures that would serve as refuges, points of orientation, or sites of activity.
Psychoanalysis at its limits: navigating the postmodern turn, Pg 157
In these environments we grasp ourselves in the imaginary order as particular kinds of bodies in particular kinds of spaces. The overlapping thresholds of the Opera House provided precisely such ‘refuges’ and ‘points of orientation’. It was a peaceful space which I could literally traverse that let me find my own way to be within it. The turbine hall in the Tate Modern provokes a similar feeling in me: a capaciousness which doesn’t dictate how to be in the space, in contrast to the rationalised spaces of shopping centres.
I often feel apologetic about the fact that, in a particular mood, I find at least some shopping centres perversely soothing, precisely because of that rationalisation. I feel the same way about many airports, at least when I’m not in a rush. But when not in these odd moods I can rapidly find myself physically chafing against the sterility of these environments, subsumed with each passing breath into a larger system I neither chose nor can exercise influence over.
It’s interesting from the Lacanian perspective Bracher is advocating to think about why that might be so. Approached in one emotional state, airports and shopping centres permit one mode of being within the imaginary order (the man in his 30s immersed in work on a laptop in an airport cafe) whereas the same environment might preclude such a mode if encountered in a different state (the ennui of being exhausted half way through a journey of multiple-stages over which you can exercise no real control). They can facilitate a sense of coherence or frustrate it depending on what we show up with in them.
Mark Carrigan 