In his work The Architectural Uncanny, Vidler draws on the theoretical aspects of the uncanny and grounds them within the domain of architecture. He suggests that:
Architecture has been intimately linked to the notion of the uncanny since the end of the eighteenth century. At one level, the house has provided a site for endless representations of haunting, doubling, dismembering, and other terrors in literature and art. At another level, the labyrinthine spaces of the modern city have been constructed as the sources of modern anxiety, from revolution and epidemic to phobia and alienation.
Vidler suggests that architecture is memetic in nature, a projection of mankind’s phobias. It is therefore the architecture itself, whether the house or the city, which gives rise to feelings of terror. It is the physical nature of architecture which engages the uncanny, “for if the theoretical elaboration of the uncanny helps us to interpret the conditions of modern estrangement, the special characteristics of architecture and urbanism as arts of spatial definition allow us to advance the argument into the domain of the tangible.” Perhaps even more troubling, is that the cause of the terror comes not from an outside source but rather from within the confines of inhabitable space.
—Amanda Bingham Solomon, Haunting the Imagination: The Haunted House as a Figure of Dark Space in American Culture