Uncanny

Definition

The uncanny (das Unheimliche, the "unhomely") names the disturbing experience of the familiar turning strange — the homely (heimlich) collapsing into its opposite. Rooted in the romantic sublime and the nineteenth-century haunted house, it was theorized by Freud (1919) as the "return of the repressed": "everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light" (Schelling). For architecture, the uncanny is potent because it captures the modern condition of estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness — the dark double of the dwelling-tradition's affirmation of being-at-home. Vidler's key claim is that the uncanny is not a property of any building 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."

Key Thinkers

• Anthony Vidler — the architectural uncanny: the unhomely as the modern condition; the haunted house, the metropolis, and contemporary architecture's exploitation of estrangement.
• Martin Heidegger — the unheimlich as the fundamental condition of anxiety; "homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world."
• Gaston Bachelard — the nostalgic, "oneiric house" against which the unhomely is posed.
• Theodor Adorno — "estrangement from the world is a moment of art"; the uncanny as the secret movement of modern art.
• Lee Edelman — the uncanny's built site: the men's room as "an uncanny space" where the heimlich television "turns unheimlich"; the uncanny as "a distinctive type of 'home-sickness'" and a "toppling of the walls… of the imaginary architecture of a self" (1996/2006). See mens-room.
• Georges Teyssot — the self-reflection register: the fogged mirror where "the self disappears" in its own breath, and Igitur searching "in vain in 'the mirror turned into boredom'" — the uncanny of the withheld double (1996/2006). See mirror.
• Anne Troutman — the domestic fear register: the literary inheritance ("the house Edgar Allan Poe built: the one in which someone has been buried behind the wall, alive"); the unknown dwelling "in these hollow walls" of the ordinary house; the desired home co-present with the feared one — "The primal shelter is also the site of primal fears" (1997/2006). See hidden-spaces, fear.

Related Concepts

• Dwelling — the uncanny is the unhomely double of being-at-home; the slippage between the two is the uncanny's core.
• Warped Space — the psychological and aesthetic distortion of space as projection of the anxious subject; the uncanny's extension to the metropolis.
• Heterotopia — the counter-site that disturbs the syntax of space, sharing the uncanny's logic of otherness.
• Atmosphere — the felt, pre-intellectual impression of place; the uncanny as its disturbing, unhomely register.
• Embodiment — the body as the locus of the uncanny's doubling, dismemberment, and estrangement.
• The Men's Room — the uncanny's most literal room-type: the bathroom "never to be conceptualized as a room wherein life could be lived," in which the living-room television becomes unhomely.
• The Double — the uncanny's primary figure, theorized in the same 1919 essay: the double first "a preservation against extinction," then "the uncanny harbinger of death"; built in mirrors, statues, portraits and death masks.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Being and Time (Heidegger 1927) — the ontological foundation of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) as "not-being-at-home"; anxiety reveals Dasein as individualized, thrown, facing the "nothing" of the world. "In anxiety one feels 'uncanny'… 'not-being-at-home' [das Nichtzuhause-sein]" (§40, H. 186).
• The Architectural Uncanny (Vidler 1992)
• Warped Space (Vidler 2000)
• Troubles in Theory Part VI: From Utopia to Heterotopia (Vidler 2008)
• Deleuze and Space (Buchanan & Lambert eds. 2005) — the "any-space-whatever" and the "Outside" as forms of the unhomely
• Freud for Architects (Abell 2020) — the psychoanalytic foundation of the uncanny; Freud's "return of the repressed" as the mechanism by which the familiar turns strange; the uncanny as the dark double of the homely.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — the intimate counter-melody: Rilke's frightful house ("Oh night without objects. Oh window muffled on the outside… Oh silence in the stair-well, silence in the adjoining rooms, silence up there, on the ceiling") assailed by frights — and re-peopled by intimacy: "the mother comes back to watch over her child, as she once did… Limitless night ceases to be empty space" (p. 24). The homely/unhomely slippage shown from inside the homely.
• Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the invited revenant: the receptive child (see aesthetic-body) does not merely suffer the unhomely — he fetches it home. Pater's Florian listens to neighbours' voices telling of the sick woman "who 'had seen one of the dead sitting beside her'" and "then brings the ghostly figure into his own space so that the revenant sits 'beside him in the reveries of his broken sleep'" (p. 70) — the permeable domestic interior admitting death as a bedfellow, the uncanny domesticated at the child's own invitation rather than returning unbidden (Freud's "return of the repressed" inverted into willed hospitality).
• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — the transit register of the unhomely: the waiting room occupies "an uncanny position within the larger scheme of the building"; as the station is "assembled and disassembled into a melancholic – and somewhat comic – character," the concourse and waiting rooms "appear unfamiliar and unhomely." The uncanny here is technological nostalgia inverted: "The grand notions of progress, moment, and technology have become an uncanny room for temporary occupation and a place to wait" — the golden-age travel interior surviving as an uncanny room "for women who wait," its clock and paneled walls now strange. A case for Vidler's thesis that uncanny qualities are invested from time to time: the room is unhomely precisely where progress has passed it by. See waiting-room, liminality.
• Spatial seductions (Meninato 2018) — the tableau's uncanny agglomeration: Kienholz's Portable War Memorial gives the viewer "an uncanny agglomeration of domestic furniture, consumer advertisements, and political posters, all elements coexisting next to a banal and prosaic lounge space" — the uncanny produced not by architecture's estrangement of the subject but by the tableau's displacement of ordinary objects into impossible company (war propaganda beside a Coca-Cola vending machine and a leashed dog). The register extends Vidler's thesis: uncanny qualities invested, from time to time, by arrangement — here to expose "the perverse and perhaps indispensable side of American wars abroad." See tableau, readymade.
• Men's Room (Edelman 1996/2006) — the uncanny's built case: the restaurant television above the urinal, whose "association with the heimlich turns unheimlich in the bathroom, which is never to be conceptualized as a room wherein life could be lived" (p. 107); the Freudian gloss — the uncanny as the experience in which the subject "senses himself unexpectedly observed and all at once starts to view himself through the eyes of another person or thing that seems, improperly and unnaturally, to usurp his subjectivity," its trouble manifesting "in a troubling… of the gaze" (p. 107); "The uncanny, then, might be understood as a distinctive type of 'home-sickness'… that occasions a nostalgic longing for the sense of safety that 'home' once assured" (p. 107) — "a toppling of the walls within which the subject has been constructed and through which he has realized the imaginary architecture of a self" (p. 107); and the diagnosis: "the men's room is an uncanny space where the gaze of the symbolic order sees male bodies into social meaning" (p. 108). The claim sharpens Vidler's (uncanny qualities are invested, not inherent): here they are invested by a television, of all things — and the investment reveals the room's constitutive unhomeliness. See mens-room, gaze.
• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the uncanny's doubling machinery, housed in Freud's own office: the double of "'The "Uncanny"'" first "a preservation against extinction," then "the uncanny harbinger of death" (SE 17: 235, quoted p. 118); "For Freud, every self-reflection reveals a death mask, every mirror image a spectral double" (p. 118); and Borch-Jacobsen's Lacanian mirror world — "a sort of immense museum peopled with immobile 'statues,' 'images' of stone, and hieratic 'forms'" — as "the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich" (p. 119): the mirror world itself, not merely a room in it, as the site of the unhomely. See the-double, mirror.
• Towards a Feminist Poetics: Infection in the Sentence (Gilbert & Gubar 1979/2006) — the haunted-house register, gendered: Gilman's rented "ancestral mansion" becomes uncanny as the wallpaper's meaning permeates it — "the terrifying implications of both the paper and the figure imprisoned behind the paper begin to permeate - that is, to haunt - the rented ancestral mansion in which she and her husband are immured"; "The 'yellow smell' of the paper 'creeps all over the house,' drenching every room in its subtle aroma of decay" (p. 123). The haunting is not a repressed past returning (Freud) but a present oppression made atmospheric: the room's own decorative surface — the sulphurous paper, ancient, smoldering, "'unclean' as the oppressive structures of the society in which she finds herself" — fills the house with the smell of its own confinement. And the double at the haunting's center is the occupant herself: the madwoman in the attic as the literalization of the type Gilbert and Gubar's book titles. See the-madwoman, the-double, felicitous-space.
• Boredom and Bedroom (Teyssot 1996/2006) — the self-reflection register: the uncanny produced by the interior's own optical apparatus, in two scenes. The fogged mirror: "as the individual approaches the self reflected upon the glass, the mirror fogs with one's own breath. The self disappears; an attempt is made to wipe the mirror, yet one cannot help breathing. The image is blurred by a covering mist" (p. 346) — the familiar (one's own face, one's own breath) turning strange at the moment of self-recognition, the occupant unable to see himself for the life that fogs the glass. And Igitur's glass: "As he dies, Igitur searches for himself in vain in 'the mirror turned into boredom'" (p. 347) — the mirror as the site where the self is sought and not found, boredom's "pure time" filling the place of the image. The register extends the double's logic: here the spectral double is not seen (Fuss & Sanders) but withheld — the uncanniness of the emptying mirror. See mirror, the-double, aesthetic-boredom.
• Inside Fear: Secret Places and Hidden Spaces in Dwellings (Troutman 1997/2006) — the domestic fear register, the uncanny lodged in the ordinary house rather than visiting it from outside. The literary inheritance — "Though I passionately wish for calm nourishing warmth and spaciousness, 'the promise of home,' I am irredeemably caught in the house Edgar Allan Poe built: the one in which someone has been buried behind the wall, alive" (p. 356) — the buried-alive topos inside the wished-for home. The hollow walls — "In these hollow walls dwells the unknown, the in-between, the impossible, the unseen" (p. 358) — the uncanny as the house's own peripheral content, not an event that befalls it. And the hidden spaces as the uncanny's address: "Wishes, dreams, fantasies, fears, desires are the inhabitants of the internal boundaries of our everyday environment: the place of the other, the imagined, the double, the dream" (p. 357) — where Vidler's uncanny is a mental state invested in buildings from time to time, Troutman's is the dwelling's standing condition, tested nightly in its peripheral rooms. See hidden-spaces, fear, the-double.
• source-notes/garofalo-khan-2018-sensorial-interior-landscapes
• source-notes/treadwell-2018-oceanic-interiorities

Open Questions

• Can the uncanny function as a critical instrument for architecture, or does its exploitation risk becoming mere "decoration or caricature" that trivializes real homelessness?
• How does the uncanny relate to the wiki's Atmosphere and Dwelling concepts — is the unhomely the dark double of the homely dwelling that Heidegger, Norberg-Schulz, and Pallasmaa affirm?