On House and Home Part 6: the city as home and the architectural uncanny

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)

On House and Home Part 5: Le Corbusier and the ocularization of domestic space

Le Corbusier’s famous statement, “a house is a machine for living in…” (Rybczynski, P. 173) is a quintessential modernist call to break with the past. While during the 18th and 19th centuries there was rapid development of urban technologies, particularly with the introduction of electricity on a large scale to the urban environment, the appearance of the home didn’t change very much. The new technologies of the home were absorbed and assimilated into the interior design fashions of the day. By conceiving of the house as a machine and furniture as equipment, Corbu continued the scientistic agenda of increasing rationilization of the home with his designs emphasizing increasing the efficiency of the house: the appearance of domestic interiors would no longer be dictated by the fashions of decor. His focus was on standardizing the construction methods of building houses so as to be more efficient, although without a similar concern for the work of the housekeeper. US interior design on the other hand continued its concern with the customization of domestic interiors to suite the needs of the inhabitants, and particularly the homemaker. Ellen Richards wrote: “…the house as a home is merely outer clothing, which should fit as an overcoat should, without wrinkles and creases that show their ready-made character….” She saw the home as clothing, where individual need determined the structure, technology and layout of the home. The home as Bachelard’s ‘shell,’ conceived as an extension of the person who designs and manages it. The ‘touch’ of the homemaker determining personal standards rather than technological standards, or rather, the order and design of the home was imposed from within rather than without, or externally by manufacturing and economic concerns at the forefront. In Richards’ conception the home is adapted around the needs of its inhabitants, whereas Corbu saw “…the house as a mass-produced object…to which the individual should adapt…”(Rybczynski, P. 190)

Corbu’s rationalization was an ocular one: the eye was central to his notion of architecture and human experience. Continuing in the Enlightenment tradition he equated seeing with knowledge, creation, imagination and invention. Consequently the window was a prime concern of his. The house became a frame for an exterior view with the deployment of windows delineating the possibilities of seeing outward. The function of the window changed from one of providing light and ventilation, to being the equivalent of a lens, with the house becoming a camera (which etymologically means ‘chamber’). The home becomes a photographic apparatus and a “…system for taking pictures…[becoming] a mechanism for classification…. The view from the house is a categorical view. (Colomina, P. 311) The house as framing device ‘domesticates’ the exterior view through categorization. “To inhabit means to employ that system.” (Colomina, P. 323) The house has become a montage, a series of views ‘choreographed’ by the movement of its inhabitants. Each visitor to a house creates their own ‘storyboard’ in moving about the interior space. One can even see this bias in Corbu’s drawings where a disembodied eye dwarfs the ‘person’ in the landscape. This shows an ocularcentric and cinematic conception of architecture from a disembodied, omniscient viewpoint: the perspective of the ‘panorama,’ and De Certeau’s view of New York city from the top of a skyscraper. This is the moving crane shot in cinematography. This is a desensorializing of the home. Sight displaces site: the opposite of what Bachelard, Heidegger, Bourdieu, and De Certeau insist on when discussing our habitation of spaces of the home and city. Giordana Bruno, in her book Atlas of Emotion also insists on a move back from sight to the site as a lived experience, with the texture of the situated, the mundane, and the here and now. 

The exterior view has become part of the interior design. Windows as frames interrogate the distinction between inside and outside, between private and public, and “…the relation between domestic space and spectacle.” (Colomina, P. 319) The view enters the home through the central frame of the picture window in Ethel Wilson’s short story Window. (P. 196) The view through the framing ‘screen’ of the picture window inscribes (as Colomina might say) the spectacle of the outside onto the interior: both the physical architectural interior and the psychological interior of Mr.Willy, the inhabitant. “The exterior world…becomes artifice; like the air, it has been conditioned, landscaped – it becomes a landscape.” (Colomina, P. 319) In an interesting transformation Wilson’s picture window with a view becomes a mirror at night: a reversal, a doubling, and a locus for the uncanny as the psychological interior of Mr. Willy is projected outward and backward onto the screen of the window/mirror. It reflects Willy’s interior state back to himself turning his home, his shell, into a temporary heterotopia. Willy is present in the real space of his home, but at the same time has his domestic and personal interiors reflected back. The familiar becomes strange,disembodied, and ultimately, unhomely.  At the same time, Willy’s domestic space is projected outward through the picture window to the public, who, in the person of the patiently waiting burglar, gazes into Willy’s interior making him vulnerable. Public and private, outside and inside are comingled and indicate possible challenges to urban living.