Product Information
Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally unhomely modern condition.The Architectural Uncanny presents an engaging and original series of meditations on issues and figures that are at the heart of the most pressing debates surrounding architecture today. Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally unhomely modern condition. The essays are at once historical-serving to situate contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition and theoretical-opening up the complex and difficult relationships between politics, social thought, and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the neo-avant-garde have never seemed so far apart. Vidler, one of the deftest and surest critics of the contemporary scene, explores aspects of architecture through notions of the uncanny as they have been developed in literature, philosophy, and psychology from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. He interprets the unsettling qualities of today's architecture-its fragmented neo-constructivist forms reminiscent of dismembered bodies, its seeing walls replicating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions - in the light of modern reflection on questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness. Focusing on the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, and Ricardo Scofidio, as well as theorists of the urban condition, Vidler delineates the problems and paradoxes associated with the subject of domesticity.Product Identifiers
PublisherMIT Press LTD
ISBN-139780262720182
eBay Product ID (ePID)89129770
Product Key Features
Number of Pages274 Pages
Publication NameThe Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year1994
TypeTextbook
Subject AreaSocial Services
AuthorAnthony Vidler
SeriesThe Mit Press
Dimensions
Item Height229 mm
Item Weight454 g
Additional Product Features
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited States
Title_AuthorAnthony Vidler