The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely

Author: Anthony Vidler
Year: 1992
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/vidler-1992-architectural-uncanny.md

Summary

The Architectural Uncanny traces the concept of the uncanny (das Unheimliche, the "unhomely") from its origins in the romantic sublime and the nineteenth-century haunted house, through Freud's 1919 essay, to its deployment in contemporary architecture and urbanism. Vidler's central thesis is that the uncanny is not a property of any building or space but a representation of a mental state of projection — "there is no such thing as an uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities." The book reads the modern condition of estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness through the slippage between the homely (heimlich) and the unhomely (unheimlich), and shows how contemporary architects (Coop Himmelblau, Stirling, Tschumi, Eisenman, Diller & Scofidio, OMA, Hejduk) exploit the uncanny to critique the "unlivable" modern condition.

Key Claims

• The uncanny is the "quintessential bourgeois kind of fear": a domesticated version of the Burkean sublime, experienced in the privacy of the interior, "carefully bounded by the limits of real material security and the pleasure principle."
• For Freud, the uncanny is rooted by etymology in the domestic (heimlich), which "develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich." Schelling's definition — "everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light" — supplies the "return of the repressed" principle.
• The uncanny is not a property of space itself: "it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming."
• The uncanny is a way to think the two "postwars" (1919 and 1945): estrangement and unhomeliness are "the intellectual watchwords of our century," given material force by the resurgence of homelessness.
• The modern uncanny is a product of the metropolis: from the 1870s on, the metropolitan uncanny was conflated with metropolitan illness (agoraphobia, claustrophobia), "a pathological condition that potentially afflicted the inhabitants of all great cities."
• Contemporary architecture exploits the uncanny as a critical instrument: Coop Himmelblau's neoconstructivist forms "challenge the notion of the bourgeois Heimlichkeit by means of the demotion of the classical body"; Eisenman derives forms from geomorphic traces; Diller & Scofidio treat architecture as prosthetic devices with "a sinister life of their own."
• The uncanny has a political connotation: the "incessant reference to avant-garde techniques devoid of their originating ideological impulse" — a fulfilled aesthetic revolution stripped of social redemption — "at least approximates the conditions that, in Freud's estimation, are ripe for uncanny sensations."

Connections

Concepts: Uncanny · Dwelling · Warped Space · Atmosphere · Heterotopia
Authors: Anthony Vidler · Martin Heidegger · Gaston Bachelard · Walter Benjamin · Theodor Adorno
Theme: Phenomenology
Related source notes: vidler-2000-warped-space · vidler-troubles-in-theory-6-from-utopia-to-heterotopia · heidegger-building-dwelling-thinking · heynen-1999-architecture-and-modernity · harries-1997-ethical-function-of-architecture

Direct Quotes

"There is no such thing as an uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities." (Introduction)

"The uncanny, in this sense, might be characterized as the quintessential bourgeois kind of fear: one carefully bounded by the limits of real material security and the pleasure principle afforded by a terror that was, artistically at least, kept well under control." (Introduction)

"The uncanny is uncanny only because it is secretly all too familiar, which is why it is repressed." (Introduction, citing Freud via Adorno)

"Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world." (Introduction, citing Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism")

"Estrangement from the world is a moment of art." (Introduction, citing Adorno)

Open Questions

• Can the uncanny function as a critical instrument for architecture, or does its exploitation risk becoming mere "decoration or caricature" — a formal frisson that trivializes real homelessness (the charge Vidler himself raises)?
• How does the uncanny relate to the wiki's more recent attention to atmosphere and the phenomenology of place — is the unhomely the dark double of the homely dwelling that Heidegger, Norberg-Schulz, and Pallasmaa affirm?