The Fracture of the Familiar

The Uncanny and the Contemporary Reconfiguration of Beauty

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between beauty and the uncanny - unheimlich - in contemporary architecture. It argues that certain forms of beauty are produced through a controlled fracture of the familiar: buildings retain their legibility and their elements remain recognisable, while the usual relationships between form, use, body and meaning are altered. Through a brief genealogy of the uncanny and of abstraction, followed by an analysis of Adolf Loos, Pezo von Ellrichshausen and DOGMA, the article identifies a series of mechanisms through which architectural order becomes detached from the experience it was traditionally expected to stabilise. The uncanny thus appears not as the destruction of order, but as an internal condition of a form of beauty grounded in the tension between recognition and instability.