Archigram's mini-environmentsThis paper investigates J. G. Ballard's vision of the house, tracing its origin to the ideas expressed by the British architectural avant-gardes of the fifties and sixties; these regarded inhabited spaces as psycho-physical membranes, bio-architectural constructs functioning as extensions of the body. The philosophical sources of Ballard's early fiction are also investigated to show the impact of Existentialism on his concept of dwelling, both via early Pop Art and directly through Sartre's and Heidegger's works. One of the aims is to disclose the importance for Ballard of Archigram's fantasies of bio-technological responsive houses but also to interrogate the imbrications in his fiction of such fantasies with contemporary theoretical ideas of dwelling (McLuhan, Banham), authenticity, and the estranging chaos and unhomeliness of the world (Heidegger). The article discusses specific examples of Ballard's unhomely, post-human habitations, from psychotropic houses to the neo-gothic technological tower-block, showing how they are imbued with contemporary architectural and philosophical theories. A special emphasis is placed on the uncanny and -so I argue here -gendered spaces of High-Rise.
In Ford Madox Ford's No Enemy, the mortal threat posed by the war affects the forms and even the possibility of empathy. After showing how he participates in contemporary discourses on Einfühlung, I investigate his musings on the distortions of his sympathetic imagination and his grief for mutilated territories. The aim is to show how rare surreal visions of landscapes untouched by the war offer him the possibility of reconnecting himself with the deepest thoughts, fears and longings of his fellow beings. Recent psychological research on different levels of empathy and its impairment under stress provide the conceptual framework of my analysis.
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