May mo(u)rn: transitional spaces in architecture and psychoanalysis — a site-writing Jane Rendell, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London Abstract Addressing the architectural concept of the ‘social condenser of a transitional type’, the research traces this idea’s progress from the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow (1928–29), to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1947–52), to the Alton West Estate in London (1954–58). At the same time, with reference to the work of Sigmund Freud, D.W. Winnicott, André Green and Jean Laplanche, the research investigates the inherently spatial vocabulary of psychoanalysis, in particular notions of the transitional space of the ‘setting’. This physical and psychic scene of the psychoanalytic encounter is shown to offer new approaches for understanding relationships between subjects, objects, concepts and sites in architectural historical research and practice. **** This essay is woven together out of three transitions: a sequence of theoretical insights drawn from psychoanalysis concerning the transitional spaces which exist in the relationships between a subject and his/her objects; alongside a series of transitions from one architectural space to a second and then a third; and next to a third strand — one which narrates the story of an arts and crafts building in London’s green belt and the photographs of modern architecture I found within it — which aims to dissolve the frame of the story by recounting the writing and rewriting of this essay in response to its many tellings. 1 The psychoanalytic strand charts a particular set of ideas around transitional objects and spaces: starting out with Sigmund Freud’s reflection on how the first object is also the lost object in his work on mourning and melancholia; before moving to D. W. Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object as the object of the first relationship, and the transitional space it occupies between the internal psyche and external world; and then to André Green’s work on the setting, ‘a homologue’, in his own words, for the analytic object positioned at the space of overlap between analyst and analysand, inside and outside; and ending with Jean Laplanche’s critique of Freud’s understanding of mourning, and his own concept of ‘afterwardsness’. The architectural strand examines transitional objects and spaces in terms of Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’s Narkomfin Communal House (1928–9) in Moscow, whose design was influenced by Le Corbusier’s early work, but which in turn inspired aspects of his Unité d'Habitation (1947–52) constructed in Marseilles some 20 years later. Certain principles of the Unité were then adopted and adapted in some of the public housing schemes built, following the Second World War, by the Welfare State in the United Kingdom, specifically the Alton West Estate in Roehampton, London (1954–8), designed by the London County Council. The Narkomfin was designed as a ‘social condenser of the transitional type’, whose transitional status came from its intention, to help a bourgeois society transform into a revolutionary one. Historically, the Unité occupies a transitional space in the transformation of the social condenser from its invention in Moscow to its later reworking in London. The third strand, located in a transitional space between psychoanalysis and architecture, gives voice to May Morn, an Arts and Crafts house in London’s green belt and the decaying photographs of modern architecture I found there one morning in May. The essay is conceived of as a site-writing, a practice of critical history that searches for the most appropriate manner in which to try to articulate the position of the writing subject and her choice of objects of study and subject matter — intellectually, creatively, critically, emotionally. I am interested in investigating the sites between the historian-critic and the work, not just the material sites of production and reception of an architectural work, but also those imagined and remembered, near and far. Site-Writing is an attempt then to explore a form of situated criticism, to investigate the position of the critic, not only in relation to art objects, architectural spaces and theoretical ideas, but through the site