In the summer of 1928 Sigmund
Freud meets with the avant-garde Russian designer El Lissitzky and his wife
who are spending some time in Vienna after a stressful period working on the
Soviet Pavilion at the International Press Exhibition in Cologne.[1] They talk
about psychoanalysis and modern architecture. Freud tells Lissitzky that in
1908 he visited Coney Island and went to a park called "Dreamland."
There he got the initial idea for the architectural realization of his theory.
Lissitzky gets very exited about this idea. They decide to create an architectural
construct based on Freud's model of the mind. What shall it be? Lissitzky points
out the parallels between Freud's model of the consciousness/unconsciousness
as articulated in Interpretation of Dreams and Marx's model of base/superstructure
(they don't know that it also parallels Saussure's model of signified/signifier).
Freud still thinks of the "Dreamland" park, but Lissitzky convinces
him that rather than building a one of a kind museum or park, they should design
mass housing --a popular idea with the avant-garde architects of the second
half of the 1920s and something which Lissitzky, who until now could not realize
any of his big-scale architectural projects, was eager to do. Freud's first
impulse is to have a house with three vertical levels corresponding to his typography
of id, ego and super-ego. He wants to put a second, smaller house inside a garden,
also with three levels corresponding to his first typography of the Conscious,
Preconscious and Unconscious, with staircases to allow communication between
them.[2] Lissitzky persuades Freud that the modern house should have only one
level with horizontal divisions, i.e. it should follow horizontal rather than
vertical development. They discuss how to implement the concepts of condensation
and displacement via mobile walls, an extension of Lissitzky's design for the
exhibition pavilion which he did in Dresden in 1926.[3]