Cardillo

Depth architecture

Zurich,

Seminar Depth architecture—The aesthetic nature of the psyche, part of the Training Programmes in Analytical Psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute Zurich. Through the prelude and three sections, the seminar explores the implicit demand within analytical psychology for a pre-verbal dimension, relocating it within the sensorial and sensual register of a symbolic architecture. Here, ambivalence signifies emancipation from the disjunctive polarities of language, opening the way to a historicity of the Soul and to beauty as the sensual epiphany of psyche. The voices of Jung, Corbin and Hillman converge to show psyche not as disembodied doctrine, but as living image, woven into history and rendered in form

Listening to the dead

Architecture is made for the dead. Its existence is an enigma. It is rarely inhabited by those who commission it. Often the purposes that determine its construction are modest, and its future in the world of objects is always a happening. Patrons, places, and laws are the circumstances with which the form-idea converses or struggles in order to enter the image of the world. Yet architecture is above all the place where the dead speak to the living. Jung writes in The Red Book:

There is a necessary, but hidden and singular work, a masterwork, which you must accomplish secretly for the sake of the dead. […] Do not look too far ahead; rather look back and into yourself, so as not to miss listening to the dead.

Shortly before his death, Paolo Portoghesi confided to me that in the 1960s, together with his then close friend Bruno Zevi, he had submitted to the Italian National Research Council (CNR) a project for a national research programme intended to integrate academic studies of architecture and psychology. That project was to be grounded in depth psychology and, in his words, to have a ‘high tone’, capable of representing the recognition of a conjoining between two forces: architecture and psychology. ‘The work that Zevi and I could have done was to give it this Jungian imprint—Portoghesi said—because it is Jung who truly gave the fundamental impulse.’ The CNR rejected the proposal. A few years later, a violent conflict arose between Portoghesi and Zevi, which polarised the discussion on the architectural debate of their time into the reductive opposition of modern and postmodern. According to Nietzsche, the history of facts is a ‘dreadful case’; according to Lessing, history is ‘the giving of meaning to the meaningless’.

Thus, this brief prelude would like to introduce the thought of the heart of our seminar. Our symposium will be structured in three movements of conversation:

On each movement, a few brief reflections will constitute the moments of an imagined garden, in the attempt to give continuation to that interrupted desire between Portoghesi and Zevi.

The realm of twilight ambivalence

1913 – 1967

This section gathers citations from Jung (1913–1930, 1916) and Hillman (1967), where darkness, ambivalence and the dusty twilight world emerge as thresholds of psychic experience. Comprehending darkness seizes the soul, while the act of naming—language itself—introduces polarity, disjoining what in the pre-verbal was still one. The process of making conscious simultaneously generates unconscious, and ambivalence appears as the necessary atmosphere in which the psyche breathes

Comprehending darkness

If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night […]. And you prepare to sleep through the millennia […] and your walls resound with ancient temple chants.

(, 1913–1930)

Power to things

These dead have given names to all beings […] but this is precisely how they gave power to things unknowingly.

(, 1916)

Conscious makes unconscious

Illumining with the candle of our ego a bright circle of awareness, we also darken the remainder of the room. […] The process of making conscious thereby also makes unconscious.

(, 1967)

The dusty world

Ambivalence is […] the necessary concomitant to the ambiguity of psychic wholeness whose light is in a twilight state. […] The way is slower […]: “Soften the light, become one with the dusty world [Lao Tzu].”

(, 1967)

The historicity of the Soul and factuality

1913 – 1981

This section gathers citations from Jung (1913–1930, 1922), Corbin (1965) and Hillman (1967, 1981). The historicity of the Soul is revealed through temptation as the demand of the dead, through the thousand voices of primordial images, and through the narration as testimony of events themselves, distinct from the confessional mode. History is not mere fact but story woven by the Soul, where action in the phenomenal world links the living to the spiritual community of the dead. Factuality becomes animated by the Soul’s capacity to confer meaning

Temptation

What we call temptation is the demand of the dead who passed away prematurely and incomplete through the guilt of the good and of the law. For no good is so complete that it could not do injustice and break what should not be broken.

(, 1913–1930)

A voice that is stronger than our own

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.

(, 1922)

Action in the phenomenal world

Throughout his earthly life, man is acting upon […] the whole region of the spiritual world constituted by the fraction of humanity which, from century to century, is momentarily involved in the physical bodies of the phenomenal world.

(, 1965)

History is story first

Without the sense of soul, we have no sense of history. […] This core of soul that weaves events together into the meaningful patterns of tales and stories recounted by reminiscing creates history.

(, 1967)

Experience as narration

The récit [narration] is an account of events experienced rather than of my experiencing. […] The colors and shapes of the things illumined, their faces, are the confession—it is their coming to light, their testament, and their individuation.

(, 1981)

Beauty as the sensual epiphany of the psyche

1911 – 1981

This section gathers citations from Jung (1911–1952), Corbin (1965, 1974) and Hillman (1981). Beauty appears as the sensual epiphany of the psyche: symbols rooted in sexuality, form as a task of the Spirit, and the mundus imaginalis as the meeting-place of two seas. Hillman’s thought of the heart insists that perception must imagine, while aisthesis as wonder transfigures matter. Together, these voices suggest that beauty is not ornament but the very act by which the psyche reveals and incarnates itself in the world

Symbol and sexuality

Hence a discussion of one of the strongest instincts, sexuality, is unavoidable, since perhaps the majority of symbols are more or less close analogies of this instinct.

(, 1911–1952)

Form as the task of the Spirit

We can speak of […] form as a task to be accomplished by the Spirit […], with full meaning only if we are in possession of a space into which we can project the totality of this form.

(, 1965)

Mundus imaginalis

It is the world situated midway between the world of purely intelligible realities and the world of sense perception. […] It is at “the meeting-place of the two seas” that the Imago Templi reveals itself to the visionary.

(, 1974)

To perceive, it must imagine

The thought of the heart is physiognomic. To perceive, it must imagine. It must see shapes, forms, faces—angels, demons, creatures of every sort in things of any kind; thereby the heart’s thought personifies, ensouls, and animates the world.

(, 1981)

Aisthesis: through wonder

That is, the activity of perception or sensation in Greek is aisthesis, which means at root “taking in” and “breathing in”—[…] The transfiguration of matter occurs through wonder.

(, 1981)

References

  • , Symbole der Wandlung. Analyse des Vorspiels zu einer Schizophrenie [1911–1952]. (Symbols of Transformation, Collected Works, vol. 5, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1956).
  • , Das Rote Buch: Liber Novus [1913–1930], ed. Sonu Shamdasani, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2009. (The Red Book: Liber Novus, trans. Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2009).
  • , Die sieben Reden an die Toten, privately printed, Zurich, 1916. (The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. Sonu Shamdasani, trans. Mark Kyburz, John Peck, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 2009).
  • , ‘Über die Beziehungen der analytischen Psychologie zum dichterischen Kunstwerk’ [1922], in Über das Phänomen des Geistes in Kunst und Wissenschaft, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 15, Walter-Verlag, Olten, 1971 (The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, Collected Works, vol. 15, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1966).
  • , ‘La configuration du temple de la Ka‘ba comme secret de la vie spirituelle’, in Eranos-Jahrbuch XXXIV, 1965 (conference theme: Form als Aufgabe des Geistes), Zurich, Rhein-Verlag, 1966. (Temple and Contemplation, trans. Philip Sherrard, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1986).
  • , ‘Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present’, in Eranos-Jahrbuch XXXVI, 1967 (conference theme: Polarität des Lebens), Zurich, Rhein-Verlag, 1968.
  • , ‘L’Imago Templi face aux normes profanes’, in Eranos-Jahrbuch XLIII, 1974 (conference theme: Normen im Wandel der Zeit), Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1977. (Temple and Contemplation, trans. Philip Sherrard, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1986).
  • , ‘The Thought of the Heart’, in Eranos-Jahrbuch XLVIII, 1979 (Thema: Denken und mythische Bildwelt), Insel Verlag, Frankfurt a.M., 1981.

Source

  • , ‘Depth architecture—The aesthetic nature of the psyche’, paper presented to the Training Programmes in Analytical Psychology, C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, 31 Oct. 2025; transcript published on , 31 Oct. 2025.