Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

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CHOICE Review

The "architectural" of Princeton's Vidler is not the architectural of the hard-hat job site. It is the architectural occasionally academic debate of critics and designers who link contemporary architecture to literature, philosophy, and psychology as these in turn try to deal with the uncanny, which Vidler calls a metaphor "for a fundamentally unlivable modern condition." The preface clearly states the content of the 15 essays. They deal with the psychological, philosophical, aesthetic, and literary aspects of the uncanny and "unhomely" Vidler's word starting with 19th-century thinking. The second part examines the relations between buildings characteristic of the shifting of conventions of traditional architecture. A third group of essays deals with the city as a place of anxiety and attempts to think beyond the simplistic solutions of modern urbanism. In its erudition and incisiveness The Architectural Uncanny is a tour de force hard to cover in a short review. The academic users most likely to benefit from Vidler would be architectural historians, critics, and the literate and advanced students in architecture interested in its theoretical aspects. P. J. Mitarachi; Boston Architectural Center