ABSTRACT
What Freud documented and attempted to explain in 1919 was a category of modern Industrial Age experience. This chapter looks at a few instances of twentieth-century works, from the realm of literature as well as architecture, that sought to subvert the uncanny's power to disassociate information from meaning. Architecture began with the first constructions that exceeded pure necessity and developed in parallel and at pace with early civilization; as a marker of identity, its evolution slowed with the invention of the printing press; it stagnated after the difficult but socially fulfilling concepts of Language, Nature, and Desire lost currency to the conceptually easier pragmatism of Progress and Productivity; and, in the information age, lost all legibility when architects attempted to overcome the populace's boredom with Modernity by manufacturing difference for the sake of faster consumption ultimately rooted in familiar or didactic external representations and communicative of nothing.
