The Fracture of the Familiar

The Uncanny and the Contemporary Reconfiguration of Beauty

Abstract

This article examines how certain contemporary architectures reorganize the conditions of beauty through internal disturbances within systems that remain rational, legible, and operational. Against traditional conceptions that associated beauty with harmony, stability, and order, the text argues that much of contemporary sensibility arises precisely through calibrated forms of estrangement and perceptual instability. Through a brief historical genealogy and the analysis of architectures by Adolf Loos, Valerio Olgiati, DOGMA, and OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, the article frames the uncanny not as the destruction of order, but rather as an internal disturbance of still recognizable systems through which beauty acquires new intensity.