Horror in Architecture 1 130
Horror in Architecture 1 130
Horror in Architecture 1 130
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ARCHITECTURE
Joshua Comaroff
& Ong Ker-Shing
HORROR IN ARCHITECTURE
Introduction
Sublime Horror 7
Deviance Anatomy 24
Horror in Architecture 31
The Redemption of Horror 44
Typologies Of Horror
Postscript 208
Notes 217
Introduction
7
Sublime Horror
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2. John Isaacs, Let The Golden Age Begin, 2004, wax, polyester, paint,
70 x 70 x 70 cm 3. John Isaacs, Everyone S Talking About Jesus, 2005,
wax, epoxy resin, polystyrene, 200 x 150 x 150 cm
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Deviant Anatomy
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Horror in Architecture
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tectonic; slab edges run into soffits, into walls and eaves
and parapets without delineation. Even the color of the
windows conspires to minimize their contrast with the
exterior plasterwork. At the same time, its accumulation
of layers (glazing, grillwork, and curtains) downplays
transparency.
It is an1using, moreover, to note that this bi-polarity
extends into the landscape at the street. In front of an eye-
catching feature wall, the manic house offers a colorful
presentation of grass and variegated shrubs. The depressive
garden is dun-colored and stunted. It seems appropriate,
likewise, that the gray workmanlike convenience of a
public wiring box would stand just this side of the party
wall. In all senses its image is one of defeat; its neighbor,
one of triumphalism.
The irony of the "warring" double is this: as each half
strains for self-expression, it appears ever more bound by
circumstance. The breakaway semi only emphasizes the
originary bond with its conjoined twin, the albatross of its
entanglements and attachments. In fact, the most effective
dissembling done by the semi-detached house is in its
original European form, where both sides cooperate in the
illusion of a single large house. In this version, the party
wall has no expression on the outside. Much like those
London "apart-ments" that are lodged within ambiguous
envelopes, these borrow the greatness of the larger structure
while being deliberately evasive about their own extents.
The illusion of wealth is sustained, paradoxically, through
the hiding of the individual.
Some of the best English examples were clever
enou~h to present the double-home not as a mirroring, but
as a single, eccentrically disposed composition of bays and
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setbacks, turrets and secondary masses. Although each half
is given an equal allotment of floor area, their organizations
vary to reinforce the illusion of dissymmetry. The two sides
diverge, but the effect is entirely opposite: the dissimilar
halves mask the double behind a rangy architectural
composition. This might be called a "schizoid" semi, in
which one home is quietly, internally sheared into two
discrete entities-and as such perhaps fits better in the
category of the Trojan Horse (below).
The conjoined house is not a conventional beauty;
certainly, it lacks the excessive beauty of other unheimlicl,
doubles. But it is nonetheless grist for some interesting
compositional possibilities. There may be a broken, buried
or latent reflection. Mirroring is here interesting precisely
when it becomes inexact. Elements remain recognizable
in their shared origins-but they are subject to inversions,
contradictions, inappropriate embellishments and skillful
deceptions.
The potential interest of this condition is realized in
projects such as the House House, designed by Johnston
Mark.lee for a site in Inner Mongolia. As with Moneo 's
Kursaal, the building skillfully refuses resolution: this time,
into either single or double. Its degree of integration
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This recalls, again, our notion of the horrible
n1ultiple as both one and many, freak and exemplar,
individual and type. As "1nonstrous singularity" and" case,"
as well as the intimation of an emergent new order. Twins
and clones challenge notions of conformity by copying too
immediately,too aggressively,
and too well; their replication and
consanguinity becon1es, itself, a potentially destabilizing
kind of deviance.
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Vaucanson and Thomas Edison-were described as a "new
Pron1echeus" for assembling automata out of cloth, feathers,
fur, and mechanical parcs.4 Public concern consumed these
objects. The French predictably focused upon Vaucanson's
replication of the duck's digestion. If peristalsis could be
produced, \vould not cogitation follow?
By later (and earlier) standards, the image of
Frankenstein looks coherent. His form is still human, his
pieces largely proportionate. In most films, his body does
not look mismatched so much as pale and cadaverous,
scarred and clunky. Others have done much worse in
pushing the limits of the singular anatomy. The bizarre
iterations of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), for
example, limns the limits of biomorphic possibility. In its
gestational phases, it is so garbled as to be non-functioning.
During a canine phase, the alien is a limping sack, a heavily
veined scrotum with vestigial limbs and arachnid legs.
Hand-like appendages and a dog's face grow out of its top.
These components clearly hail from creatures of differing
kingdoms-hairy, human, or invertebrate.
Hieronymous Bosch and Franyois Rabelais
pioneered such nightmares in the medium of carnival
grotesque, imagining a polymorphy of obscene and
bestial combinations. These built upon folk tradition, the
wild excesses described by M.M. Bakhtin. Sanctioned
transgressions included the interpolation of human and
animal anatomies, honorifics lent to fauna, and double-
images of religious personages and their wild avatars.
Here, the body is not singular, but a collective.
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It is a disgusting little society, one in which the members
are awkwardly or inimically related. In the most sanguine
reading, this "social body" suggests an uneasy democracy.
It recalls Chantal Mouffe's "agonistic" demos, a kind of
unstable compact in which the constituents are unified
only through a re-staging of their difference. It likewise
echoes the rabble of Aristotle's Politics.All the limbs \Vish
to move in different directions. Here also, in dismal form, is
Bruno Latour's famous "parliament of nature."
A more recent version explores the violence of
the human-machine interface. This is the staple of Japanese
body horror, of films such as Machine Girl (2008) and
Shinya Tsukamoto's cult Tetsuo the Iron Man (1989). In
these, severed limbs are replaced with working machinery
and weapons, and bodily cavities are filled with gears,
pumps and pistons. Quentin Tarantino covered this genre
in "Death Proof," a segment of the Grindhouse film (2007).
Here, a machine gun stands in the place of a severed
leg. As in the Asian precedents, the inserted element is
not prosthetic: it does not attempt to replace a missing
anatomical member so much as to in1pose an awkward and
dangerous substitute. Here,juxtaposition of flesh and metal
creates a sort of weaponized pornography. This imagery
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1 and 2., Housing block and post office for the Eigen Haard
Association, Amsterdam 3. Fritz Hoger, Chilehaus, Hamburg
91
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Incontinent Object
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Former Stasi listening stations, Teufelsberg, Germany
131