Anthony Vidler, in his book The Architectural Uncanny, takes Freud’s notions of the uncanny, or unheimlich (unhomely), from the domain of the self and the home, out into the city as a whole. He investigates the notion of the city as home and its more fearful aspects. Vidler refers to the experience of reading a ‘scary’ novel (Hoffman, Poe etc.) in the cosy comfort of one’s own home as a vicarious experience of the dangerous “…only intensified by shifts in media.” (Vidler, P. 3) The contrast between the secure home and the “…fearful invasion of an alien presence…” (P. 3) is a manifestation of the return of the repressed as a replica of the inner self.
Quoting Benjamin, Vidler identifies the uncanny as “…born out of the rise of the great cities.” The big city is a ‘post-anthropomorphic’ place. It transgresses human scale and can only be apprehended as an abstract idea from a privileged, panoramic point of view. The only way to “…preserve a sense of individual security…” (Vidler, P. 4) is to conceive of the city as a purely geometrical place from an abstract ‘above.’ It isn’t possible to maintain this sense of security from ground level, where a pervading sense of anxiety and uncertainty prevail in our daily practices. Local customs and localized behaviour become marginalized: custom becomes estranged and uncanny, and subsumed to the panoptic centrality of power, politics, and culture. We move from a transformation of the village, the community, to the post-anthropomorphism of Bemjamin’s great city. In De Certeau’s term the ‘tour’ of the village community becomes the ‘map’ needed to apprehend the city. The “…act of passing by…” (De Certeau, P. 97)is replace by the totalizing surveillance of the panoptic city. Space becomes abstracted from activity. The city becomes ‘other’ as it becomes merely geometric space rather than inhabited space.
Where the village is clearly created by, and connected to, the individuals and families who comprise the community, the big city has lost this connection to the agency of its inhabitants. The big city has, rather, developed its own agency and agenda, severed from its inhabitants who are now subjects of the city’s agency and not the opposite. So while the village is heimlich the city is distinctly unheimlich. This unhomeliness may be seen as a psychoanalytical and aesthetic response to the ‘shock of the modern’ compounded by the events of WWII. (Vidler, P. 9) By extension we can look at our contemporary situation as a response to globalization compounded by the 9/11 attack and other atrocities. The global community has becoming distinctly unheimlich, has become the mirror reflecting our double. We feel an unease at the return of the repressed animosity toward the other and the possibility of our own barbaric impulses surfacing.
The “…conspicuous austerity…”(Rybczynski, P. 197) of the modernist interior may be seen as an adjunct process that supports the development of the unhomely in domestic spaces. Modernist architecture valorizes the visual while desensorializing architectural space. The needs of the dwelling inhabitant are displaced to make visual, geometric space primary. This seems to be part and parcel of the modernist urge to reduce to essences. Reacting to fin-de-siecle excess and driven by the triumverate of science, technology, and commerce, there is an escalation of the ‘cult of utility’ begun in the Enlightenment, where utilitarian instrumental value becomes the greatest value. We can see the culmination of this in Le Corbusier’s zeal for standardization in architectural production, where the individual must conform to the space of the home (a hermit crab model) as opposed to the individual shaping his/her own space (Bachelard’s bird’s nest model).
So how can the big city become homely? How can we regain the heimlich from the panopticon? De Certeau’s notions of walking in the city may give some indication of possible tactics to regain the homeliness of the village within the big city. Perhaps the homely can be regained, at least partially, by the “…forest of gestures…”(De Certeau, P. 102) of individual spatial practices. De Certeau focusses his attention on ‘ground level’ lived experience.
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates, makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place…under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City.”(De Certeau, P. 103)
While for Freud, the uncanny is “…to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream.” (Vidler, P. 7) for Bachelard and De Certeau “…the memorable is that which can be dreamed about a place.” The unreality of the dream is not necessarily abject, but may be liberating. The space of the daydream, and the spatial practices of individuals are a move toward recognizing the ‘other.’ “To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other.” (De Certeau, P. 110) To daydream is to be subsumed by otherness and to open to the freedom of the imagination to generate meaning. The unhomely may be seen as an impetus to an aesthetic and embodied engagement with our world. “Estrangement from the world…is a moment of art.” (Vidler, P. 8 quoting Benjamin)
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