Dreadful Architecture: Zones of Horror in Alien and Lee Bontecou’s Wall Sculptures

Abstract

Architects have long held that visual encounters with designed spaces bring viewers into new worlds and generate new sensations and attitudes. As Peter Kraftl and Peter Adey write, ‘spaces are made in an ongoing, contingent sense, in styles that are not only symbolic, but more than representational – haptic, performative, material, and affective.’ Designed spaces interact with and affect the bodies they come in contact with; in short, they generate affect, including horror. By examining two very different types of built worlds – namely Lee Bontecou’s mixed-media wall-mounted sculptures (1959–1966) and the Nostromo set of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) – the author explores how visual encounters with the horror of the void unveil horror’s operation as a non-narrative zone of intensity. These examples reveal the differences between horror and fear, dread, and disgust (affects typically evoked by horror narratives) and horror’s independence from narrative and even figuration.

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