Horror and Architecture
Architecture can provoke deep unease and even revulsion. Why? What fundamental chords are being triggered?
One may interpret – in a reductive way – a number of architectural movements as deliberate rejections of preceding orders. The Gothic was a rejection of the Romanesque and the classical a revival of ancient orders to replace the Gothic. The Neo-Gothic architecture of the Georgian and Victorian ages was a repudiation of the hegemony of Classicism, typified by the Palladianism. Art Nouveau may be the most categorical assertion of abnormal architectural values: the organic over the artificial, the fluid over the stable, the exaggerated curve over the geometrical curve, the asymmetrical over the symmetrical, its extravagant verticality and excessive detail. Art Nouveau represents the triumph of the illogical and irrational and a defiance of liberalist materialist progressivism (as found in linear conceptions of stylistic evolution), albeit through its own liberalist creed: breaking rather than developing tradition, prioritising originality, playfulness and perversity. In that respect, Art Nouveau is the prime medium of horror in architecture.
Are buildings deliberately made to unsettle? Well, certain buildings definitely are. The architecture of Daniel Libeskind in his Jewish Museum (2001) is intentionally unsettling, meant to make us experience a feeling of dislocation equivalent to that of the Jewish diaspora, as seen by Libeskind. Architecture that flaunts the established norms - as typified by Art Nouveau’s provocation - can be a strategy to assert new values or simply as a fashion to which ambitious architects (and patrons) wish to attach themselves. Sometimes absurdity is involuntary and the product of mismatching abilities, capacities, systems and expectations. It can be accidental.
Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing (in Horror in Architecture: The Reanimated Edition, 2023, University of Minnesota Press) describe horror as a means of conveying the sublime, which confounds reason and elicits in the subject a feeling of wonder and fear. They go on to observe that horror is nowadays discredited and low status, the province of pulp fiction and formulaic films, and no longer considered a means of powerful expression but rather one of titillation driven by commercial imperatives.
Body horror is a good analogy to our responses to deviant architecture. Our sense of normality is determined by our understanding of reality as conditioned by the bodies we see around us. Deviation from the norm induces horror and pity, in that order. Any deviation is antithetical to normalcy. (For a greater insight into this concept, it is worth reading John Wyndham’s novel The Chrysalids, which depicts a society founded on a purity doctrine based on an elevated sense of normalcy and purity.) The book addresses causes of architectural transgression including doubles, exquisite corpses (the hybrid), partial vacancy, reflexivity, incontinent objects, homunculism and gigantism, distortion and disproportion, blobs and other topics.