Argyro Loukaki, The Geographical Unconscious. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2014, 432 pages, £80.00 hardcover. ISBN 9781409426271.

Bringing together insights from a variety of historical periods and disciplines (geography, philosophy, art, architecture, and literature), Argyro Loukaki seeks to explore the dynamics of the geographical unconscious, “the shared and hidden or sidestepped layers, be them aesthetic, visual, mnemonic or urban, in order to propose a new, compassionate and participatory outlook upon society and space” (page 6). Her book offers a comparative analysis of archetypal spatialities and their emergence in different moments of cultural history through various media, such as poetry, painting, urban landscape and architecture, and between polarities such as past/present and East/West. The book can be read as a montage of “snapshots” (page 14) or episodes that are interconnected, even if they seem to be antithetical to one another. Their juxtapositions can illuminate the transparent character of the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious that always allows for their interpenetration.

The diversity of geographical expressions explored by Loukaki is really notable. While many of them have already been individually examined, it is the first time that all of them become part of a comparative study. Poetry, Byzantine iconography, painting, urban design and architecture are presented here as communicators of geographical knowledge. Interestingly though, the writer does not include traditional cartographic depictions in the examined material. The poetry of Homer and Sappho expresses, for the writer, archetypal geographical spatialities. In Homer, the Aegean is a “sea-garden” of “places of heroic actions” (pages 28-29) for the adventures of Ulysses and the interaction between humans and super-humans to take place. On the other hand, Sappho narrates “sacred cosmologies” of “luminous heavenly bodies” (page 72) expressed through “atmospheres of light” (page 73) in which nature plays again the role of a source of sacredness and creativity (pages 86-87) [1]. This examination is in line with contemporary debates on poetry and geography; for example, it brings Neal Alexander and David Cooper (2013) to mind:

“if place can be defined as a spatial location invested with human meaning, then the poetics of place refers to the ways in which such meanings are produced, understood and contested [also] in literary texts”.

Another characteristic “episode” opens with the almost paradoxical comparison between a twentieth-century flaneur’s reading of the city and Byzantine ekphrasis’ narration of religious architecture. According to the writer, the construction of meaning through vision is expressed in Byzantine icons, as well as in Cubist syntheses and surrealist understandings of place. In all three cases, single-point perspective is challenged in an attempt to transcend the traditional limits of an artwork and creatively deal with the translation and evocation of “feelings, spirituality and experience”, opening also a field of “participatory aesthetics” (pages 127-29).

Further exploring the communication between different locales of Europe, the writer also examines “Mediterranean syncretism”, the inter-cultural communication between different areas of the Mediterranean that gave birth to a number of “relational spatialities”, “a historical landscape and art geography”  that is based on the dialogue between the ancient and the modern (page 145). Connections between Renaissance Venice and Crete are emphatically examined to highlight interesting geographical interactions. These are investigated especially through the comparison between painters El Greco and Michael Damaskinos. The discussion on cultural exchanges between East and West culminates with the “architectural geography” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [2].

Loukaki’s architectural background dynamically informs her approach, illuminating the connections between (urban/landscape) architecture and geography. For example, collective memory, historic background and mythical associations are explored in a (rather unusual) comparative investigation of nineteenth-century Paris and Patras. The haussmannisation of Paris redefined the importance of the gaze in the perception of the city. This came in direct contrast with the traces of its medieval organic and non-ordered urban fabric and suggested an urban theatricality now based also on panoptical qualities and social hierarchy. Here the figure of the flaneur is reintroduced by the author to illuminate another aspect of the importance of vision in the experience of the landscape. The free movement of the flaneur’s urban scrolling highlights the fragmentary narrative of modernity. Patras also communicates a modernist vision through its new urban design by Stamatis Voulgaris. This design was further developed to produce a city divided in two sections: an upper one that carried Byzantine and ancient qualities and a lower one following the neoclassical orthogonal system of a well-ordered community. Bridging the mountain and the sea, these sections were impregnated with ancient Greek traditions and myths of the “spirit of stairs” (page 218) and highlighted the importance of vision in the embodied experience of the city.

Examining the different stages of architectural production (from concept to design, building and even dwelling), the writer also explores the translation of the architect’s ideas into a piece that silently carries a number of metaphors and opens also to the embodied interpretation of the viewer or the dweller. This reminds us of Susan Sontag’s argument about art and architecture being silent mediators of diverse intentions and meanings that may even be in conflict with each other (Sontag 2002, pages 3-34). Intentional and unintentional ideas, memories, meanings and actions are incorporated in the context of our individual and collective understanding of built and natural landscapes.

Though already investigated by different art and architectural historians, the examples examined by Loukaki are re-defined in the context of architectural geography. They are presented here as built palimpsests made of different layers, including geographical ones, which most of the times are overlooked in favor of historical documentation or design. For example, the introduction of Japanese archetypal spatialities (chapter 6) is followed by the examination of their appropriation by Frank Lloyd Wright, a key figure of twentieth-century architecture (chapter 7). Intensely influenced by Japanese prints’ aesthetics, his vision of an organic interrelation between architecture and nature was, according to Loukaki, in a simultaneously conscious and unconscious conversation with Japanese ideas about the spiritual dynamics of nature that imbue all the layers of daily life, including architectural experience. This is expressed in different examples of Wright’s architecture, like the Prairie style houses (page 275). Besides Japanese inspiration, Wright has also been in a constant dialogue with architectural qualities of different ancient cultures, such as the Ancient Greek and the Pre-Columbian. This is apparent in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, where elements of Maya and Japanese archetypal spatialities were combined into a built testimony of geographical intercommunication.

The architect Dimitris Pikionis and the painter Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas also sought to bridge East and West through their involvement in the “critical regionalism” movement. Seeking to re-discover elements of a more authentic communal identity, they employed mnemonic and synthetic techniques inspired by Japanese, Chinese and Ancient Greek civilizations. Admiring the commonalities between the three traditions, they suggested comparative architectural re-interpretations of them. In Ghikas’ paintings such as Kifissia (1973) and The Earth (1966) we can see the direct inspiration of Japanese painting translated through the representation of Greek built and natural landscape. Similarly, Pikionis combined the “transcendental energy” and moral qualities of Byzantine cultural tradition with Japanese and Chinese archetypal spatialities into a creative dialogue between poetic architectural language and nature as a reflection of metaphysical qualities of place. Gardens, like The Filothei in Athens, and larger complexes, like The Aixoni Settlement, manifest the architect’s “piligrim’s approach towards the Attic landscape … and ascetic’s method to accomplish it” (page 317). Remnants of the ancient past and elements of vernacular architecture are connected to the critical use of traces from other Eastern traditions and modernist ideas of new orders through narrational compositions of geographies of communal identity.

Closing her book, Loukaki explores again a seemingly uncommon pair of examples. She compares Baroque understanding of space and new media age spatialities. Vision is key in the understanding of Baroque morphologically complex spatialities that sought to translate "a godsend order" and "unity with the cosmos" (pages 341-43) and to translate an "unbounded cosmic experience" (page 343). Such encounters are  linked with the fluidity of current spatio-temporal situations. Indeed, Loukaki argues that “meta-, neo- or ultra-modern aesthetic … carries new meaning as constituent of … law, symbolism, the imagination, intuition, science and technology” (page 350). She thus proposes the emergence of new fluid, never-ending, hybrid, transparent (cyber, virtual, concrete) spatialities, that still echo non-finito qualities.

Moving from one ‘snapshot’ to the other, the reader gradually realizes that the writer unfolds different episodes of visual perception of the interaction between geographical conscious and geographical unconscious. As a whole, the book contributes to the long-established interdisciplinary debates on the role of visuality in the perception of natural landscape, art and architecture. Loukaki underlines its multiplicity as a physical-mental phenomenon through the analysis of a dense geographical textile made of numerous interwoven layers, which by definition need to be carefully approached and thought through. 

Notes

[1] Later Loukaki underlines also how Renaissance and Romantic poetry transmits different elements of geographical imagination, illuminating important aspects of the urban landscape of that period (pages 157-60 and 214-15).

[2] Though the term architectural geography is not used by the writer, it characteristically depicts a key contribution of her book, the exploration of architecture through geography’s point of view.

References

Alexander N and D Cooper (eds) (2013) Poetry and Geography: Space and Place in Post-war Poetry. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Sontag S (2002) Studies of Radical Will. New York: Anchor Books.