Horror in Architecture

The central argument of Horror in Architecture, when it was first published in 2013, was that “unprecedented” moments—and transitional ones—create monsters.1 This substantially new edition of our study attempts to expand and sharpen an exploration of this process: of how interesting times make interesting buildings. It is a fascinating and difficult subject, and not an easy one to wrangle into anything resembling a conventional academic work. A book that links horror to architecture, and to industrial modernity, affective history, and creatures from speculative film and fiction, should perhaps be condemned outright as monstrous. This is an inherent danger of interdisciplinary writing, which often runs afoul of differing fields’ biases and emphases. Among architects and architectural theorists, the fundamental importance of buildings, as sites of life and as thingsin-the-world, can be assumed. When we published a “crossover” study that was to be read by literary historians, genre fans, writers, and artists, we quickly saw the limits of this assumption.