A Dream House
A sun-washed saloon lined with curved Rococo furniture, ornate sculptures from the newest collections, and rare paintings that inspire envy. This room represents the side of ourselves we show to the world; polished, composed, curated. Its ornamentation is elaborate, like the performance we put on for others to see.
Venturing past the saloon brings us to a deep, sullen staircase with no bottom in sight. As we step down we are led to a more primarily organized space where the curated, polished floors become damp, chipped, stoney floors. Here, the air cools, the walls lose their ornament, and the décor of the ego gives way to something older, unrefined, and without performance.
As we push further the basement narrows into a crypt-like room filled with fragments of broken pottery scattered across the ground, remnants of civilizations long past. Half-buried in the earth lie two disintegrated skulls ,a reminder that beneath everything we present to the world lives an ancient, collective inheritance we rarely dare to face.
This was a dream of Carl Jung’s that would prove to him that architecture could help him understand the psyche. As he analyzed the dream he categorized the saloon as his ego, a polished, curated performance we put on for the world to see. Then as we peel below this layer of our public image we find the basement that is our unconsciousness, the element of our psyche that we cannot see –. In the basement is the small dusty room with disintegrated skulls and artefacts crumbling, this is our collective unconsciousness, the part of our psyche that we all share. It was developed throughout our evolution and contains beliefs, images and patterns that reoccur across our psyche’s regardless of time, culture and place. An example of collective unconsciousness would be our fear of snakes which is an aversion we developed in order to survive early evolution.
When his dream mapping intangible parts of our psyche into physical space, Jung was able to quantify the relationships and hierarchy to each component, ego-consciousness, is the first room we greeted by, the top layer and below the basement is our unconsciousness, finally leading us to the ancient collective unconsciousness, the foundations that we all share. The way Jung’s dream was mapped out can be seen as a “boxology approach” to understanding the hierarchy and relationship, it is akin to when architect creates a bubble diagram to map out how large each room will be in order to define hierarchy and their connections to other rooms in the building to define their relationship to each other.
After his dream Jung became interested in how architecture could be a manifestation of the psyche and also an incubator for healing a split-psyche.