Notes: The Architectural Uncanny

Anthony Vidler, 1994. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Revised ed. Edition. The MIT Press.

Red - Definitions 

>'Something is uncanny- that is how it begins. But at the same time one must search for that remoter 'something', which is already close to hand.'

Ernst Bloch, 'A philosophical view of the detective novel' 

>A contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the screened trompe l'oeil (deceive the eye) of simulated space, in, that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture, this sensibility had its roots and draws commonplaces from a long but essentially modern tradition. 

p.3

>'the uncanny, in this sense, might be characterised as the quintessential bourgeois (belonging to or characteristic of the middle class) 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.' 

p.4

>'A whole history remains to be written of spaces- which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural)- from the great strategies of geo-politics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the classroom to the design of hospitals, passing via economic and political instillations.'

Michael Foucault - 'The Eye of Power'

> 'Architecture, oscillating (going back and forth) between the endless play of formal images and the economic determinism of property and space allocations, has uneasily responded to this condition' 

p.190