The uncanny as a vehicle for architectural design offers a means of addressing
memory and constructing identity, or a national body, that simultaneously con-
jures yet negates history: with(out) memory. Rather than entering into the binary
opposition between memory and amnesia, between the fabrication of history and
an equally fi ctitious severance from the past, between conservation and develop-
ment, the uncanny offers a means of constituting identity that is simultaneously
both while being neither. It destabilizes the imagined unity of self as it places
exteriority at the center of the self, the interior. The foreigner comes from within;
the other is actually another—another you.
The uncanny emerges as a toxic debris or viral outgrowth of Enlightenment
rationality: the dissolution of religious communities and the subsequent emer-
gence of modern nation-states based on the imaginary logic of identifi cation.
Thus, the crisis of identity and self began on the site of the Berlin Schloßplatz in
1871 with the Unifi cation of Germany. It has more recently manifested itself on the
site through the current restoration of the Stadtschloss (obsessive remembering)
and the construction of the now demolished Palace of the Republic (active forget-
ting). In a historicist era obsessed with memory and palimpsest-like layers, how
can architecture engage with sites of contested memory without severing the past
in totality, or relying on an assumed collective memory and a stable historic archi-
tectural language/signifi cation? The uncanny sets forth the instability of Identity. It
offers an alternative to the series of placating substitutions, of the Lacanian
objet
petit a
, which has continuously haunted the site