During the Spanish Civil War, Alphonse Laurencic designed jail cells to punish patriots and nationalists using Modern Art to create a torture prison, with cells designed to be psychologically disorienting.
These carceral spaces were notable for their alleged inspiration from 3-D modern art, including surrealist and Bauhaus styles, with the explicit aim of torturing prisoners through psychological distress and confusion.
Architecture and city planning are the most important art forms, influencing fundamental human orientation, self-perception, and relationships to others, with poorly designed, abstracted spaces capable of causing deep alienation. Laurencic's designs represent an extreme application of this principle, manipulating the built environment for punitive psychological effect.
Alphonse Laurencic: Biography and Role
Alphonse Laurencic (2 July 1902 – 9 July 1939) was a French painter and architect, born in Enghien-les-Bains, France, the son of Slovene immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
He was also known to claim the professions of painter and conductor. Laurencic supported the leftist Republican forces fighting Francisco Franco's Nationalist army in Spain, aligning himself with the anarchist National Confederation of Workers and being a sometime member of libertarian, dissident Communist, and mainstream socialist unions.
In 1938, he collaborated with Republican state intelligence services to design and construct jail cells intended to torture captured Nationalist supporters. Laurencic referred to his method as "psychotechnic" torture.
He was executed by a Nationalist military court in Barcelona on 9 July 1939.
Design and Features of the Cells
The jail cells, primarily located in Barcelona, were specifically engineered to inflict psychological and physical torment. Laurencic's designs included several key features:
- Sloping Beds Beds were positioned at a 20-degree angle, making sleep nearly impossible. Other accounts specify a 45-degree angle, designed to prevent prisoners from lying down without sliding off.
- Disorienting Floors The floors of the 2 m x 1 m (or 6 ft x 3 ft) cells were laid with irregularly shaped bricks or geometric blocks, sometimes in a zig-zag pattern, which prevented prisoners from walking either backwards or forwards.
- Surrealist Walls The walls were covered in mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines, and spirals, utilising tricks of colour, perspective, and scale. These surrealist patterns were designed to induce distress and confusion. Laurencic indicated a preference for the colour green, believing it produced melancholy and sadness in prisoners.
- Lighting Effects Dynamic lighting effects were employed to make the artwork appear even more dizzying, giving the impression that the patterns on the walls were in motion.
- Uncomfortable Seating Some cells featured a stone seat designed to cause occupants to instantly slide to the floor upon sitting.
- Extreme Temperatures Other cells were painted with tar, causing them to become stiflingly hot during summer months.
- Auditory and Temporal Manipulation Prisoners were also subjected to an amplified metronome operating at varying speeds and were kept within sight of a clock that ran too fast. This misleading clock was primarily intended to intensify the sensation of hunger.
Modern Art as Psychological Warfare
Laurencic's designs drew inspiration from modern artists, notably surrealist Salvador Dalí and Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky. Other influences reportedly included Bauhaus artists Paul Klee and Johannes Itten, as well as surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel.
This use of modern art principles for torture was considered by a Spanish art historian to be the first instance of its kind. While Laurencic referred to the patterns as psycho-technic additions, his inspiration appears to have stemmed from vague artistic notions about the impact of colours on mood rather than from scientific psychological understanding.
In a related instance of using modern art for psychological distress, Nationalist prisoners in Murcia were forced to watch a disturbing scene from Dalí and Buñuel's surrealist film _Un Chien Andalou_, which graphically depicts an eyeball being sliced open.
Alienation and Demoralisation in Modernist Architecture
The broader principles inherent in certain modern and modernist architectural movements can contribute to deep alienation and demoralisation within the built environment.
##### • Deliberate Ugliness and Abstraction:
Modernist architects, mirroring certain modernist artists, embrace an ideal of ugliness, deriving a sense of distinction if their work is universally disliked.
This approach frequently results in abstracted spaces that lack a sense of centre, community, or relational coherence.
Modernist architecture, characterised by its total abstraction and absence of traditional order, can become unrelatable, often failing to evoke any emotional response. This architectural philosophy is interpreted as an abstraction of human experience, contributing to the creation of an "abstracted human" or "global consumer" devoid of cultural expression.
##### • Nihilistic Undertones:
Certain architectural styles, such as brutalism, embody a Nihilistic desire for us to live in inhumane spaces to remind us of our own horror or to remind us of our own death. Such buildings often appear empty, necessitating the invention of narratives to justify their existence.
##### • Lack of Readability and Soul:
In contrast to classical architecture, which offers inherent readability to the human mind through elements such as a three-part facade division and symmetrical window placements, modernist buildings frequently lack this intrinsic order.
The absence of a discernible craftsman's touch and meaningful ornament can result in "soulless" structures, even when they superficially adopt a classical shape. Such designs fail to create a "participative space" that enhances an inhabitant's sense of purpose.
##### • Disregard for Cultural and Climatic Context:
The global propagation of Modernism has fostered a reductive architecture that disregards local cultural expressions and climatic adaptations.
This abandonment of traditional, evolved solutions, such as sloped roofs in regions with heavy rainfall, leads to practical problems like building leakage. This departure from organically adapted, place-specific designs represents a disregard for centuries of "Darwinian work" in architecture.
The prevalent ugliness observed in the contemporary built environment is considered a deliberate choice by architects, rather than an unavoidable necessity.
Architectural education frequently omits classical traditions, categorising them as historical subjects and ideologically conditioning students against learning from the past by tiredly associating it with negative historical aspects such as classism, racism, and slavery.
This ideological stance impedes architects from acquiring the skills and understanding necessary to create beautiful, humane, and climate-responsive environments, leading to a deficit of talent in traditional design.
The contemporary architectural landscape, characterised by either generic, mundane structures or novel, bizarre forms, reflects a focus on profit maximisation through cost-cutting or a narcissistic pursuit of novelty, rather than genuine artistic or humanistic value.