Panic. Domestic Space as Imaginal Architecture

Anthony Vidler’s thesis at the end of The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely, is used as the main investigative hypothesis on the changes brought about by architectural design: “paranoid space is then transformed into panic space, where all limits are blurred into a dense, almost palpable substance that has replaced, almost imperceptibly, traditional architecture” (1994, 225). The replacement (transformation) of the word “paranoiac” with the word “panic” reopens the debate on the meanings of these terms, and how panic has taken over by establishing itself as a “spatial condition”, defining typologies (or better models) and strategies for inhabiting space. The paper, starting from the etymology, will go through the use of literature and psychology manuals that refer to “panic” and the (goat)-God Pan (Merivale 1969; Hillman 1972; Borgeaud 1979; Barthes 1977), trying to identify an updated definition of “panic” and transposing the updated meaning into the field of architectural design through the identification of “panic space”, using domestic space and domesticity as a specific focus. The domestic space (the house itself) identifies a key model to which a possible theory of “panic space” can be applied precisely because, as Hillman points out, it is in the home that one experiences one’s private self: “[...] the relationship with Pan, and therefore with the imaginal field we call ‘myth’ and ‘Greece’, begins in the relationship that the individual has with the manifestations of Pan within his own private experience” (Hillman, 1972, 19). By using three different case studies (The Room/La Habitación by Smiljan Radić Clarke, Maison à Bordeaux by OMA and the exhibition pavilion Casa Palestra by OMA) the essay aims to investigate the spatial and contextual conditions that are transformed into architecture, with reference to panic, to expand the definition of panic in relation to architectural space.