Architecture and Surrealism: A Blistering Romance

The story of surrealist architecture is more a story of possibilities than of realities, but Spiller (Visionary Architecture) easily convinces readers that there’s no reason it should remain that way. The surrealist movement spread into many disciplines in the 20th century as architecture’s regnant credo, modernism, proved hostile to its interdisciplinary ambitions. Consider modernist Le Corbusier’s description of the house as a “machine for living in,” whereas for the surrealist, Spiller explains, “the house is simultaneously womb, alchemist’s kitchen, semiotic library, Wunderkammer, and pornographic memory theater.” Spiller’s book is a picaresque wander across the history of surrealism and its actual or potential intersections with architecture. Spiller includes the architectural imagery of Hans Rudolf Giger, Max Ernst, and Giorgio de Chirico, and discusses the physical structures designed by Kurt Schwitters, Ferdinand Cheval, and Salvador Dalí. More recent projects such as Diller + Scofidio’s withDrawing Room (1987) are profiled to demonstrate that surrealist architecture is not merely a territory of fever dreams. Indeed, the book as a whole is largely an argument that these dreams should not be hermetically sealed from the creation of built realities: “As technology augments/changes the sensitivity of our bodies, the constitution of our perception of space changes, and consequently architecture changes too—a notion the surrealists understood well.” Color illus. (Nov.)