research

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.

The aim of this paper is to construct a relational and multiscalar analytical framework through which architecture can be understood as a cultural fact.

This Master’s Thesis analyses the architectural practice of DOGMA through the aesthetic category of the uncanny. Drawing on a theoretical genealogy of the uncanny in modern culture, it develops a conceptual framework to examine how three architectural mechanisms – elimination, repetition and codification – produce distance, unease and the suspension of interpretation.