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.Anthony Vidler is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. His most recent book is Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime.
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"An important resource for all garden historians... a wonderful book." Penelope Hobhouse , Garden Writer, Historian, and Designer
"Brilliant.... Anthony Vidler is a conceptual conjurer offormidable skill." J. Mordaunt Crook , New York TimesBook Review
"A magisterially handsome - and enormously absorbing - collection of essays crossing centuries and continents." PW Forecasts, Best Books of 1991 "A monumental and brilliantly illustrated physical and intellectual history of gardens since the Renaissance that belongs in every serious library; invaluable to every student of the overwhelming role of architecture in even the smallest garden." Henry Mitchell , Garden Columnist, The Washington Post
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When an alliterated one-liner just won't do...,
By Hethur Suval (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Paperback)
"Brilliant...Anthony Vidler is a conceptual conjurer of formidable skill." - J. Mordaunt Crook, New York Times Book Review"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. These essays are at once historical and theoretical, opening up the complex and difficult reltionships between politics, social thought and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the avant-garde have never seemed so far apart." "Anthony Vidler has proved himself among the most lucid of contemporary architectural historians,always writing with vigor and clarity, and allying perception with structure...There is wit, intelligence, and a host of shrewd observations." - Peter Blundell Jones, Architectural Review
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The contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the screened trompe l'oeil of simulated space, in, that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture, this sensibility has its roots and draws its commonplaces from a long but essentially modern tradition. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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