Full House Rachel Whiteread's Postdorncstic Casts As we have seem the notion of architecture as comprised of "space," rather than of built elements like wills and columns, is a relatively modern one;, ir first emerged with any force at the end of ihe nineteenth cenrury as a result of Ger~ man psychological theories of Raunt—one thinks of Schmaisow, Lippsn and cheir art historical followers WolfHin, RiegL FrankL et al. Space* indeed, became one of the watchwords of modernist architecture from Adolf Loos to Le Corbuxier and Prink Lloyd Wright, rapidly ci:Kti;i:igas a primary critical term for rhe definition of what was "modern.'" Space, more even than function, became a limir term for modernity not leasr for its connection with time borh before and after Einstein. Space moved; it was fluid, open, filled with an .idi.: its very presence was a remedy for the impacted environments of the old city: rhe modern <.\irrier of rkc f.nli^k:^n:iK'm i :n oi hv;;iu:iL' anC liberty. For most modernist architects, space was universal, and was intended to flood both public Jind privaTC rr-iiLms em 1;illy. .Space in rhese terms,, at least after Frank I.loyd 'wrinhr, wns even poliricaIly charged; the Italian critic Bruno Zevi argued insistently after the Second World War that Wrighcian space was synonymous with democratic space, as against a previous and undemocratic "Fascist" inattention to space. With hindsight, the specific kinds of politics embedded in the idea of rnodcmisr space have inevitably hocomc more ambiguous, as rhe trumpeted beneficence of modern architecture and its attendant "space" for contemporary living has all coo clearly demonstrated its. shortcomings, and as rhe alliances of modernist architects and unsavory patrons in the thirties have been revealed by historians. But the notion thai space itself is good has hardly been erased from our mental vocabularies. This might well bo a result of what one mighr call space's historical pedigree. As a product of theories of psychological extension—either of projection or inirujecrion—space naiuralb- .ind early on became a cure For [he twin phobias of late nineteenth-century urbanism, agoraphobia and clauitrophobu. To open up the city would, in Le Gorbusiet's terms, and in much post-CLAM rhetoric, rid it of all closed* dirty, dangerous, and unhealthy comers andn in the absence of dramatic contrast between open and closed spaces- would rid metropolitan populations of any spatial anxiety they might haw felt in the first wave of urbanization. Perh.ips rhc residue of this attitude partly accounted rot the virulence of London County Council attacks on Rachel Whiteread 5 Hottse. This cast of the interior space oi 1 soon-to-be demolished terrace bouse was accused of standing in die way of slum clearance, of blocking the plaining of healthy greenery, of making a monument to an unhealthy and claustrophobic past. On another level, that of the uhousc." the simple act of filling in space, of closing what was once open, would naturally counter the received wisdom of a century of planning dogma chat Qptn is better if not absolutely good. The "house" of Rachel Whiteread was on the surface a clear enough statement, and one carefully executed with all the material attention paid by a sculptor to the casting of a com- plicated figure piece. But seldom has an event of ihii kinH—.-cknowledged as temporary, and supported by the artistic community—evoked so vituperative a reaction in the popular press, It was as if wc had been Transported back in time to rhc moment when Duchamp signed rhe Fountain, Since its unveiling. White read's house has been portrayed in cartoons, 2nd in the critkid pjeis, widi varying degrees of allegory and irony; even its supporters resorting to punning headlines—on the order of "the house that Rachel built/: "home work," "bouse calls," *a concrete idea," "the house thai Rachel unbuilt,71 "home truths," "no house room to art." But from another viewpoint Whirercad's House, far from undermining modernisms spatial ideology, reinforces it, and on its own terms. Tor, since the development of Gestalc psychology, space has been subject to all the intellectual and experiential revetsiis involved if) the identification of figure Jind groundh is well as the inevitable ambiguities between the two dial were characteristic, as critic* from Alois Riegl to Colin Rowe have pointed our. of modernism itself. Thus many modernises have employed figure/ground reversals to demonstrate the very palpability of space. "ITie kalian architect Luigi Moretti even constructed piaster models in rbc 1950s to illustrate what he saw as the history of different spatial types in architecture. These models were cast, as it were, as che solids of what in reality were spatial voids; die spaces of compositions such as Hadrian's Villa were illustrated as sequences of solids as if space had suddenly been revealed as dense and impenetrable.1 Architectural schools from the late 1930s 00 have employed similar methods to teach "space"—die art of the impalpable—by means of palpable models. By this method, ic was thought, all historical architecture might be reduced to the essential characteristics of space, and pernicious "styles* of his-toricism might be dissolved in the flux of abstraction. In these terms. Whiteread's Home simply rakes its pi.ice in thistradition* recognizable to architects, if not to artists or the general public, as a didactic illustration of nineteenih'Cenmry domestic "space" To an architect, whether trained in modernism or it* "brutalist" offshoots, her work take? on the aspect of a full-scale model, a three-dimensional exercise in spatial dynamics and statics. A oot accidental side result of this exercise is the transformation of the nineteenth-century rraiist house into an abstract composition; Whitcread has effectively built a model of a house that resembles a number of paradigmatic modern houses, from Wright to Loos, from Rudolph Schindler co Paul Rudolph. In this sense her Now wuuld aiouiť tilt ire of the entire postmodern and traditionalist movement in Britain and elsewhere., dedicated to the notion rhar 'abstraction' equals "eyesore."'4 Eur it seems also true that this project touched another nerve entirely ociť not dissociated from those we have mentioned but more generally shared outside the architectural andartistLL Lonmiuimy, ,md ;:cxply embedded in ihe "domestic'' character of the intervention. Whitcread touched, and according to Mime commenrators mutilated, rhe house, by necessity die archetypal space of homeliness, Article alter article referred to the silencing of the past life of the hau^e, the traces of former patterns of life now rendered dead but preserved, as it were, in concrete if not in aspic. To a cľ1lh:jI hisrorijn. tkis commentary, pro and Con, wlí: strangely reminiscent of the accounts úl [lie discovery, cxcav.irion. .iIaI vlkí":'.!:- lľ i"\ !'l :>i:JU; ijj H L" l LULIIľJ LU ľ. Jľ.d Jompcii. ľ K C'C C Í V II 701 ľod cities, which had been preserved precisely because they had been rilled up like molds by lava and ashes, seemed, when excavated, to have hern alive tmlyshordy before* their inhabitants caught by rhe dtsasrer in grotesque postures of surprise as they went about their daily work. Much travel and fantasy literature of the nineteenth century circled around this point: the lire-in-suspcnsion represented by die mummified tracts of everyday existence, A cartoon of the Whiteread Hnuse by Kipper Williams fed on jusi this fear, that of being trapped inside a space filled so violently, the space and air evacuated around a siill-living body. Nineteenth- *nd twcnricth-centurv writers and literary critics, from E, T A, Hoffmann to Henry James,, subsumed this horror of domestic inter-mem/disinterment io the popular genre and theory of d*e uncanny, a genre often evoked in the discussion of Whitereads project. This characterisation would have it that the very Lraces of lire extinguished, of death stalking through die center of life, of rhe "nohomeliness" of rilled space contrasted with the former homeliness of lived space (to use the terminolog)' of the phenomenologisť psychologist Eugene Minkowski) m i sed the specter of demonic or magical forces, at rhe very least inspiring speculation as to the permanence of architcccure, at most threatening all cherished ideuli of domestic harmony—the''children who once played on the doorstep" variety of nostalgia so prevalent among Whitehead's critics, Robin Whale's cartoon of the negative impression of Whi reread s ''east" body in die wall of House echoes this sensibility; unwittingly it stems from a line of observations on die uncanny effects of impressions of body parts beginning with Chateaubriand's horrified vision of the cast breast of a young woman at Pompeii: '"Death, like a sculptor, has molded his victim," he noted. Added ro this was what many writers saw as the disturbing tuialirirs of the "blank" windows in the Hoit.tr: This mighi again be traced back 10 romantic tropes of blocked vision, the evil eye, and the uncanny effect of mirrors that cease to reflect the self; I loffmann and Victor Hugo, in particular, delighted in stories of hoarded-up houses whose secrets might only be imagined. The abandoned hulk of Whiiereads Home holds much in common with thai empty house on Guernsey so compelling for f lugo's fantasies of secret history hi Ln tnsatUnm