“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”
— The Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales.1
After the guns of the World Wars had fallen silent, Sigmund Freud’s consulting room deliberately placed a mirror directly opposite the window. When the patient sat down, he was forced to face his reflection head-on, representing the patient’s externalized self. This spatial layout metaphorically represents the essence of therapy: the individual’s confrontation with oneself. The analyst sat in the middle, becoming the mediator who guided the patient to dissect himself. Here, the mirror simultaneously serves as a symbol of diagnosis and healing.
Freud was more sensitive than anyone else of his time to the psychological upheavals caused by the war. He was acutely aware of the fundamental and irreconcilable tension between human instinctual desires and civilization’s moral, legal, and social norms.2 This internal tension had been eased in the pre-war era by religious faith, a vision of the future, and an optimistic spirit, but the war destroyed culture and belief, and people’s previous trust in power—whether political or religious—transformed into widespread dissatisfaction, culminating in hostility towards architecture.
Why would dissatisfaction with power connect with architecture? Michel Foucault pointed out in Discipline and Punish that architecture is not a neutral physical space but a medium through which power is most directly implemented.3 For example, the spatial layouts of prisons, hospitals, and schools imply a profound logic of discipline, in which bodies and behaviors are strictly monitored and shaped within these structures. Each individual within architectural spaces is subject to control. Architecture is stable, orderly, and solid; thus, architecture becomes the most immediate intermediary of manipulation between power and individuals.
The gunfire of war and the rapid expansion of industrial technology have infected architecture with illness. Unprecedented doubt has made us unable to trust the stability and eternity that architecture once claimed. The architecture and authority once regarded as absolute truths have all shattered into fleeting and illusory dreams in the face of the violence of war.
However, the city’s destruction was accompanied by enthusiasm for reconstruction and regeneration. In post-war Paris, people became obsessed with the spacious and bright streets of upper-class residential areas. At the same time, in the old city, spaces following medieval patterns remained dark, damp, decayed, and crowded, lacking sufficient ventilation and drainage systems. Working-class families were compressed into cramped attics and back alleys. Architecture thus became both a symptom and the only means of self-healing, becoming a mirror called “modern.” As Mumford said, people at one with the world need no mirror. Still, in an era of psychological regression and cultural disintegration, people must hold up a mirror to examine themselves.4 Le Corbusier keenly perceived this necessity, starting to reflect and heal the wounds of the times through architecture.Mirrors are permeable.
In most pre-modern or traditional architecture, the unmistakable sense of boundaries creates a sense of physical security and order, with walls, roofs, doors, and windows demarcating a stable social order and a space for memory. Solid boundaries typically correspond to stable traditions, identities, and memories of traditional society. However, modern architecture has broken this clarity. Deleuze’s classic image of a person facing two parallel mirrors vividly expresses the infinity of mirrored space.
In Paris, people trapped in narrow alleys longed for breath and openness, precisely the traditional city conditions that Le Corbusier deeply resented. Through techniques such as the spiral staircase and continuous ramps of the Villa Savoye, he continuously extended and expanded the space, allowing people to experience the infinity of space beyond physical boundaries, achieving a psychological therapeutic effect akin to mirrors.5Mirrors are Hallucinatory.
In “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Georg Simmel pointed out that urbanites have developed a “blasé attitude” (an attitude of indifference) in the face of excessive stimulation, which is a mechanism of escape and self-protection from the overload of urban cultural symbols.6 This reveals the reality of people’s boredom with the explosive proliferation of cultural symbols. In the mirror-like modern space, people experience detachment from reality and mental emptiness. The infinite nature of mirror-like architecture forces people to repeatedly re-orient themselves in a space that is unclear where it begins or leads. As Mumford said, in a fragmented reality, people must constantly use mirrors to relieve anxiety, reaffirming their subjectivity.7 Alternatively, they confirm their objectified self-image and identify with their reflected self.
Mirrors are sublime.
When Le Corbusier revisited the Acropolis in 1933, he described its architectural space as transcendent.8 The experience created by this space approached Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime,9 for he felt violence and oppression from the Parthenon, a feeling that directly produced the sublime. This sharply contrasted with the Parisian slums he considered ditches.
Modernist architecture significantly weakened preexisting “decorative meanings.” Here, architecture is like a vast, smooth mirror where all external cultural textures are erased. The purity and abstraction of space imbue architecture with a certain violent power—direct, intense, uncompromising.
Mirrors are revealing.
In Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas suggests that the vertical collage and functional juxtaposition of Manhattan’s skyscrapers reflect a radical urban logic: the infinite expansion of human desires and ambitions. Each floor is like a fragment of the city’s subconscious, separated yet collectively forming a surreal whole.10 This practice is not absurd or random on the surface but profoundly reveals the essential nature of the modern city as a projection field of the collective unconscious.
Koolhaas further argued that architecture should actively correspond with the city’s unconscious. As Freud said, the subconscious is not evil or chaotic but an authentic reflection of human internal trauma and desire. Architecture thus subconsciously resonates with human psychology, offering a therapeutic response—an absurd yet precisely effective remedy for an absurd reality.
Just as mirrors reveal inner truths, this deep dialogue exposes urban trauma to the daylight, becoming the starting point for healing. The city and its architecture no longer suppress desire but become sites for releasing and reconstructing it. Thus, we understand architecture’s more profound significance—a collective therapy of confronting truth and accepting oneself. Humanity can finally reconcile with itself through countless gazes and introspections, and the city’s wounds will ultimately become the source of creativity.
- Brothers Grimm, The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Pantheon, 2011) ↩︎
- Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1930. ↩︎
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975). ↩︎
- Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1934). ↩︎ - Anthony Vidler, Warped Space : Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern
Culture (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT, 2002). ↩︎ - Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903; repr., Rome: Europaconcorsi,
2017). ↩︎ - Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1934). ↩︎ - Le Corbusier, Journey to the East (MIT Press (MA), 1987). ↩︎
- Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (Scholar Select, 1757). ↩︎ - Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York : A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978; repr., New York, New York: Monacelli Press, 1994). ↩︎