The anxiety of the architect; Black utopia in Manhattan

Abstract

This article explores the uncanny in the metropolis as an aesthetic phenomenon in two parallel levels. On one side in the theoretical corpus developed by Anthony Vidler, Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter, Ernst Bloch and Mike Davis, who analyze the urban phobias and scars, the anxiety of the citizen (and the architect) and the theory of black utopia. On the other side in the plane of the collective imagination of the same category by focusing on the case of Manhattan, as a ritual scenario of the insurrection against the metropolis experimented by various names of the Radical architecture