Spirit

‘Spirit’ is a photo-essay that combines a fictional text with a series of documentary images of the concrete outdoor projection screen designed for the roof of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. The monumentality of the screen is used to explore the capacity video has to move us to agreement, to immerse us and to produce what we understand to be our commonality. This work is underpinned by readings of cinematic space as architectural field, leading to the notion that social life may be figured as cinematic territory. ‘Sprit’ is developed from a conference paper ‘Vicissitudes Histories and Destinies of Psychoanalaysis’, London University, 2008. Spirit is also the title of an early video work By Joseph-Lester that focuses on a small housing community in Dornach, Switzerland (visited by Le Corbusier in the late 1920s). Through the video the relation between spaces of work, home and leisure are experienced through a single vernacular of unusual architectural forms. This body of research takes specific moments in architectural and social history (both real and imagined) to consider the conflicting ideologies that are embedded in built space. The forthcoming book ‘Venice, Venice’, co-authored with Professor Norman Klein (published by Greenbox 2014), widens the scope of this research by looking to the many incarnations of Venice as a tool for understanding the aspirations, failures and spatial politics of western urban development.