Preface Introduction 1 Houses Unhomely Houses Buried Alive Homesickness Nostalgia TI Bodies Architecture Dismembered Losing Face Trick/Track Shifting Ground Homes for Cyborgs III Spaces Dark Space Posturbanism Psychometropolis Oneirism Vagabond Architecture ‘Transparency Notes Acknowledgments Index 69 101 ur ur 16er it 189 207 217 207 249 251Intrigued by the unsettling qualities of much contemporary architec ture—its fragmented neoconstructivist forms mimetic of dismen- bered bodies, its public representation buried in earthworks or lost in mirror reflection, its “seeing walls” reciprocating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its spaces surveyed by moving eyes and si lating “transparency,” its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions—I have been drawn to explore aspects cf the spatial and architectural uncanny, as it has been characterized in literature, philosophy, psychology, and architecture from the begir- ning of the nineteenth century to the present. Marked by its origins in romantic thought, the theme of the uncanny serves to join archi- tectural speculation on the peculiarly unstable nature of “house and home” to more general reflection on the questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile’ and homelessness, Architecture has been intimately linked to the notion of the un- canny since the end of the eighteenth century. At one level, the house hhas provided a site for endless representations of haunting, doubling, dismembering, and other terrors in literature and art. At another level the labyrinthine spaces of the modern city have been construed as the sources of modern anxiety, from revolution and epidemic to phobia and alienation; the genre of the detective novel owes iss ‘existence to such fears—"the unsolved murder is uncaiiny,” wrote the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik But beyond this largely theatrical role, architecture reveals the deep structure of the uncanny in a more than analogical way, demonstral- ing a disquieting slippage between what seems homely and whiat iswrnom ee ie io _ TEES tedues bag definitive wnitely"Av srculated theoretically by read, the un- caine imluh rooted by exymglogy and wage nthe environ snot the domes or the hemlichthereby opening up problems Tridenty around the self the other the body ad its absence: hence its force in interpreting the relations between the psyche and the dwelling, the body and the house, the individual and the metropolis, Linked by fivud to the death drive, to fear of castration, 10 the imponsble deine tren to the womb, the uncanny has been i — ess Comvesponding spatialiy that touches all aspects of Socal life. Tortus the plane wh, following the lead of teary and psy- cheanaltc eric after Lagan and Dgcra, a number of contem uo aees ave siop tndnin a th wm dy of seraciy ands discontent in projet that aempe deliberately on aad need Adi Bladen verona he nonae Such pets sume acigelrlgopcepeserved fr Iteratare “i ecaltouphtin their cla BENE Tndions of erage se cnscugh shitetual and urban form. Abough powers in Ihe fee of eetual homeletnes, thelr different versions of a spat deat BLAS sncanny nevertheless articulate ways in which architecture works with feapect tothe dedomesticated subject. As analytical diagrams ofthe crabodied gave constructed by a prosthetic architecture, they press the notion of theoretical discourse in architecture to its Kimits atthe Same time forcing politcal discourse to reformulate its paradigms of spatial analysis. Tn the following book, {have not atempted an exhaustive historical or theoretical treatment of the subject; nor have I constructed or pplied any comprehensive theory of the uncanny based on pheno- tmenology, negative daleccs,or psychoanalysis, Rather Ihave chosen Spproaches that seem relevant tothe interpretation of contemporary buildings and projects provoked by the resurgent interest in the tincanny asa metaphor for a fundamentally unlivable modern con- Uliion, In this tense the book is at once historical, serving to situate Contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition, and theo- Feta, investigating the dificult relationships between politics, social thought, and archivecural design in an era when the realities of urban existence and the ideals of the neo-avantgarde have never seemed so far apart. Preface Part I is concerned with the uncanny as a literary, aesthetic, philo sophical, and psychoanalytical concept from Schelling to Freud Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny provides a theoretical starting point for a discussion of the genre of the uncanny tale among nine feenth- and twentieth-century authors, including Freud’s own favor: ite example, E, T. A. Hoffmann. 1 trace the history of the spatial tuncanny as it develops out of the aesthetic of the sublime to its full ‘exploitation in the numerous “haunted houses” of the romantic pe riod imagined by Victor Hugo, Thomas De Quincey, Charles Nodier, and Herman Melville, Melville's reflection on the secret recesses of domesticity leads to a discussion of the role of the uncanny in the fantasies of burial and return that were inseparable from the histor- ical and archaeological slf-consciousness of the nineteenth century. “The uncanniness of archacology i its excavation of sites from Pom peii to Troy, supplied a guiding metaphor for Freud in his devet opment of psychoanalysis, and provided the incentive for his disquisition on the fear of being buried alive, a test case in his psy choanalytical study of the uncanny as a peculiar kind of fear, pos tioned between real terror and faint anxiety. Tinged with late nineteenth-century nostalgia, as evoked by the melancholic reveries of Walter Pater, the uncanny became an equally powerful trope for imaging the “lost” birthplace, against the deracinated home of post industrial society, in the writings of critics of modernity from Gaston Bachelard to Martin Heidegger. These themes offer a conceptual starting point for the examination of a number of contemporary architectural and urban projects tht implicitly or explicitly pose the question of the unhomely in modern ‘culture, In part II 1 examine the complex and shifting relations between buildings and bodies, structures and sites, chat have chai acterized the attempt to destabilize the conventions of traditional architecture in recent years, with reference to the critical theories of estrangement, linguistic indeterminacy, and representation that have served as vehicles for avant-garde architectural experiment. Here the {question of the unhomely becomes particularized, embodied in ar- chitectural forms that seek to express the precarious‘ relationship * between psychological afc physical home; Freud's analysis of the tuncanny effects of dismembered bodies is especially redolent for the interpretation of an architectural fragmentation that rejects the tra- ditional embodiment of anthropomorphic projection in built form.a, founded by Wolf has programmatically questioned the traditional verties of architecture through neocon- ‘iructivise forms expressly designed to challenge the notion of the ‘tester bourgeois Heinlchket by means of the demotior?of the classical body ‘From its privileged place in architectural theory and practice. Co ceived through a design process that resembles a kind of automatic ryinemeen writing, Coop Himmelblau’s projects attempt to recuperate anim LLat} mediate connection between body language and space, the uncon-