{"id":18196,"date":"2016-06-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2977"},"modified":"2016-06-16T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-16T00:00:00","slug":"homelessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/06\/homelessness\/","title":{"rendered":"Homelessness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A<\/span>nthony Vidler (The Architectural Uncanny<\/em><\/a>), homelessness has been a leading trope for characterizing the modern world.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Marx in 1844: \u201cWe have said . . . that man is regressing to the cave dwelling, etc.\u2014but he is regressing to it in an estranged, malignant form. The savage in his cave\u2014a natural element which freely offers itself for his use and protection\u2014feels himself no more than a stranger, or rather feels as much at home as a fish in water. But the cellar-dwelling of the poor man is a hostile element, \u2018a dwelling which remains an alien power and only gives itself up to him insofar as he gives up to it his own blood and sweat\u2019\u2014a dwelling which he cannot regard as his own hearth\u2014where he might at last exclaim: \u2018Here I am at home\u2019\u2014but where instead he fines himself in someone else\u2019s house<\/em>, in the house of a stranger who always watches him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent\u201d (quoted 5).<\/p>\n

The city was the place of placelessness, where the familiar and the stable were eliminated. Benjamin Constant noticed it already in the early 19th century: \u201cIndividuals, lost in an isolation from nature, strangers to the place of their birth, without contact with the past, living only in a rapid present, and thrown down like atoms on an immense and leveled plain, are detached from a fatherland that they see nowhere\u201d (quoted 4).<\/p>\n

And Vidler\u2019s summary of Freud\u2019s essay on \u201cThe Uncanny\u201d: \u201cFor Freud, \u2018unhomeliness\u2019 was more than a simple sense of not belonging; it was the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream. . . . Themes of anxiety and dread, provoked by a real or imagined sense of \u2018unhomeliness,\u2019 seemed particularly appropriate to a moment when, as Freud noted in 1915, the entire \u2018homeland\u2019 of Europe, cradle and apparently secure house of western civilization, was in the process of barbaric regression. . . . The site of the uncanny was no longer confined to the house or the city, but more properly extended to the no man\u2019s land between the trenches, or the fields of ruins left after bombardment\u201d (7).<\/p>\n

And Heidegger: \u201cattempting to trace the roots of precarious dwelling and exhibiting a profound nostalgia for the premodern, [Heidegger\u2019s] later writings have formed the basis for a veritable discourse on dwelling that has been taken up by latter-day phenomenologists and postmodernist alike. This coincidence of the sensibility of exile, intellectual and existential, with the forced nomadism and lived homelessness of the Depression only reinforced the growing feeling that modern man was, essentially and fundamentally, rootless: \u2018Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world,\u2019 wrote Heidegger in his celebrated \u2018Letter of Humanism\u2019 in 1947\u201d (8).<\/p>\n

Architecture has been the \u201chome\u201d of modern homelessness\u2014\u201cfirst in the house, haunted or not, that pretends to afford the utmost security while opening itself to the secret intrusion of terror, and then in the city, where what was once walled and intimate, the confirmation of community . . . has been rendered strange by the spatial incursions of modernity\u201d (11). He sees this expressed in the \u201cdismemberment\u201d of modern architecture, the detachment of architecture from the human standards that had guided it since Vitruvius. Burke dismissed the analogy: \u201cnothing could be more unaccountably whimsical, than for an architect to model his performance by the human figure, since no two things can have less resemblance or analogy, than a man, and a house or a temple\u201d (72). He sees das Unheimliche<\/em> in the de-facement, the elimination of facades, in modernist architecture. In these and other ways, Vidler argues, the art of home-design came to embody the unhomely of modern life.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony Vidler (The Architectural Uncanny), homelessness has been a leading trope for characterizing the modern world. Here\u2019s Marx in 1844: \u201cWe have said . . . that man is regressing to the cave dwelling, etc.\u2014but he is regressing to it in an estranged, malignant form. The savage in his cave\u2014a natural element which freely offers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[895,653,1594],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-modernity","category-uncanny"],"yoast_head":"\nHomelessness<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Anthony Vidler (The Architectural Uncanny), homelessness has been a leading trope for characterizing the modern world.Here's Marx in 1844: \u201cWe have said .\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/06\/homelessness\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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