Description

A new edition of this extensive visual analysis of horror tropes and their architectural analogues

 

Horror in Architecture presents an unflinching look at how horror genre tropes manifest in the built environment. Spanning the realms of art, design, literature, and film, this newly revised and expanded edition compiles examples from all areas of popular culture to form a visual anthology of the architectural uncanny.

Rooted in the Romantic and Gothic treatment of horror as a serious aesthetic category, Horror in Architecture establishes incisive links between contemporary horror media and its parallel traits found in various architectural designs. Through chapters dedicated to distorted and monstrous buildings, abandoned spaces, extremes of scale, and other structural peculiarities, and featuring new essays on insurgent natures, blobs, and architectural puppets, this volume brings together diverse architectural anomalies and shows how their unsettling effects deepen our fascination with the unreal.

Intended for both horror fans and students of visual culture, Horror in Architecture turns a unique lens on the relationship between the human body and the artificial landscapes it inhabits. Extensively illustrated with photographs, film stills, and diagrams, this book retrieves horror from the cultural fringes and demonstrates how its attributes permeate the modern condition and the material world.

About the Author

Joshua Comaroff is assistant professor in the urban studies program at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

Ong Ker-Shing is associate professor in practice in the Department of Architecture at National University of Singapore.

Praise For…

"Deeply researched, packed with detail, and bold in scope and imagination, this intriguing book is ultimately about temporality and culture. It brings an impressive array of sources to bear on the future-present and the future-past as key categories of political and aesthetic critique."—Achille Mbembe, philosopher, author of On the Postcolony

"This densely packed book busts the genre of horror wide open, substituting slow-building dread with breakneck mesmerism. Like Walter Benjamin’s magical, if precarious, balance of opposites, Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing lay bare horror’s grasp over almost all aspects of architectural production and representation while nevertheless leaving us with the glimmer of a possible way forward."—Sarah M. Whiting, Harvard Graduate School of Design

"This book is wise, challenging, and wonderful in its shameless celebration of the sublime qualities of horror. To see this subject discussed in relation to architecture is truly a discovery."—Sjón, author of The Blue Fox