Unfinished: Uncanny Lessons from the Basement
Subterranean spaces are spooky. Dungeons, bunkers, catacombs, trenches, mines, graves, and caves harbor danger and decay. The underground is the realm of demons, monsters, zombies, ghosts, and serial killers. The underworld is full of death, fear, and violence.
The shadowy status of the basement was famously articulated by Gaston Bachelard in the 1950s. The cellar was “first and foremost the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.”[1] While Bachelard focused on the metaphoric and psychological, the basement’s threats are also physical and environmental. They include the dirt and water that surrounds them, and the radon they harbor. They also include the invisible ideas and things that thrive in its darkness. Violence and death for one. Mold for another. For Bachelard these untamable urges and atmospheres were inescapable. Bringing them into the light doesn’t eradicate them. Their presence always threatens to return, and often does.
Alternatively, the cellar can be useful, even fun. Wine cellars, root cellars, basement canning kitchens, and underground cool air chambers nourish and comfort. In film and television, the basement is where suburban teenagers hang out and make out, right under the noses over their would-be parental overlords. What “lives” in the basement may be fear, punishment, and violence, but it is also sustenance, storage, and sex (Figure 1).
Figure 1. “A 4-H Club member storing the food canned from the vegetables grown in her garden, Rockbridge County, Va.” Photograph from Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, c. 1942. Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Physically, these real and imagined environments are often semi-finished. They are populated with uncovered floors, unclad walls, and inconsistent lighting. Boilers, pipes, ductwork, air handlers, water heaters, sump pumps, utility sinks, washing machines, workbenches are out in the open hidden. They’re where the structures and systems that enable architecture to “work” are hidden away. They are messy. They are marginal. They are purposely incomplete. To extend Bachelard’s metaphor, they are the place where the unconscious of architecture dwells in its natural state.
Undesigned, “as found,” unfinished basements betray a shadowy sensibility: sometimes scary, sometimes silly, but always ambiguous. In a world in which opacity and obfuscation threaten clarity and truth, might that sensibility help, paradoxically, to shed light? Do the raw, ad hoc arrangements and gloomy atmospheres found in cellars and unfinished basements offer a way of seeing that more direct, vivid, and transparent spaces do not? Sometimes, it takes ghosts and teenagers and basements to see the light (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Basement set from A Quiet Place, dir. John Krasinski, Paramount Pictures, 2018.
Indeed, the qualities found in basements have occasionally climbed out from the unconscious realm of the cellar to haunt the seemingly rational, above-ground levels of our literal and figural houses. The unfinished basement’s utilitarian ethic, unkempt beauty, and shadowy aesthetic appears, for instance, in the early domestic work of Frank Gehry, while “circular construction” practices—making use of everything in the proverbial cellar—shape the contemporary work of Dennis Maher. Both architects’ work suggests the basement as a model of designing, building, and living that is at once direct and indefinite, efficient and symbolic, straightforward and spectral.
If Bachelard and pop culture accepted the basement for what it is, modern architects did not. Le Corbusier described the underground as dirty, dark, dank and still. It was also where dirty jobs took place: where coal was burned, garbage rotted, rodents roamed, and servants performed menial tasks. Upstairs Downstairs, the basement reinforced the division of the classes. Hence his goal of replacing this unhygienic and unjust space with a well-lit, well-ventilated roof garden. His ban on basements was a plea to expose that which hid in the dark. Diseases and moisture, yes, but also the ghosts that haunted the present, including obsolete ways of building, thinking, seeing, and living. Better to be free of the basement once and for all.
If Modernism’s response to the ideas and forces that thrived in the basement was to eradicate it, the suburban solution, at least in the United States, was to finish it. That is, to eradicate the physical and emotional dangers of the cellar by hiding its dark and damp qualities behind more finished materials and ideas found in the rest of a house. Clad it in paneling, ceiling tiles, and carpeting. Flood it with florescent light. Program it with workshops, dens, and bars. These often-do-it-yourself improvements now have given way to today’s even more refined “man-caves” and home theaters (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Basement set from That ‘70s Show, season 1, episode 24, “Hyde Moves In,” dir. David Trainer, July 19, 1999, Fox Television.
I grew up experiencing both the unfinished and (semi)finished versions of the suburban American basement. One half of my cellar was wood-paneled, dropped-ceilinged, and semi-finished, complete with an old couch, remnant carpets, outgrown toys, and a television set. We called it the “den.” The other side had a cement sink, a washer and dryer, a vintage refrigerator and chest freezer, a furnace, and a hot water heater. It had a tile floor, exposed rafters, and plenty of wooden shelves. We called it the “basement.” Both contrasted with the “cellar” in the rented, small-town, vaguely Craftsman house of my grandparents, with its dim lighting, dirt floor, and exposed foundations, where my grandmother sometimes cooked, when she had company or took on a large task such as canning or making pies (it was fitted with a stove and refrigerator). It was unfinished but it was cool and spacious—and sustained us. It was also a space that children were not meant to go.
I only went down a few times and always felt unwanted and intimidated. We kids feared ghosts. There was certainly death—in the fruits, vegetables, and animals she used (many of which were picked live from local gardens, farms, and orchards). Perhaps that’s another reason she cooked there. Not just to keep cool and to confine messy sights and smells, but to keep the unknown, the irrational, and the dead in their place. What found its way upstairs was delicious, not scary.
By the 1970s, though, at least some architects decided to confront the subterranean. Chief among them was Frank Gehry. In his residential commissions of the late 1970s and early 1980s he experimented with the unfinished sensibility of the basement, even as he never got the opportunity to design one (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Kitchen in Gehry House, Santa Monica, Calif., 1978, Frank O. Gehry and Associates. Courtesy Frank O. Gehry and Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2017.M.66).
Exposing structure was long a hallmark of modernist houses in California, from the Schindler House in the 1920s to the Case Study houses built between the late 1940s and early 1960s. These boasted delicately detailed structures that were meant to be seen. Gehry, however, embraced the messiness of conventional American construction systems, a method of building that was always intended to be invisible. An inventory of materials that he exposed in his own house, in Santa Monica, as well as the Spiller House and the Indiana Avenue Houses in nearby Venice, includes exposed wood studs and beams, unpainted plywood, drywall sheets spackled but not painted, and corrugated metal.
While all these materials—like the asphalt floor tiles and shingles and chain-link fencing he also used—came directly off the shelf, there was nothing straightforward about the buildings he assembled from them. The used-as-found elements, textures, colors, and geometries produced an irregular, incomplete effect. In this they echoed the idiosyncratic aspects of semi-finished basements. They were anything but anonymous or indifferent. They seemed to have been created by a series of uncoordinated choices rather than a single overarching plan. Their rough poetry was not one of things being presented as simply as they could be. They were not minimal nor efficient. They were raw and unfinished. It was hard to tell if these houses were in the middle of being demolished, already in ruin, or if they were waiting for the contractor to come back to finish them off.
Meanwhile, when Gehry brought the ad hoc basement aesthetic above ground, he transformed it with large windows and skylights (Figure 5). These are not modernism’s sun-soaked hygienic interiors. Neither are they dark dungeons. Instead, they cleverly combine the clarity and brightness of the aboveground with the shadows of the underworld. Gehry says as much when he describes the designing of the iconic rotated cube window in his kitchen:
I fantasized that when I closed in the box (the old house) there were ghosts in the house that would try to creep out, and this window was a cubist ghost. I became fascinated with that idea and started making models of windows that looked like the ghost of Cubism was trying to crawl out.[2]
Figure 5. Interior, Indiana Street Project, Los Angeles, Calif., 1981, Frank O. Gehry and Associates. Courtesy Tim Street-Porter.
Distinct from heavy, monumental buildings made from concrete and steel, Gehry’s work of this period embodied a different temporality. It was in a state of becoming and change. It appeared as if it would never be finished.
The emphasis on impermanence and the possibility of reconfiguration (if not reincarnation) has been taken up in more recent decades by architects interested in the circular construction economy. While the ethos of this practice is one of efficiency, especially in terms of energy used in the construction process, its ideology also accommodates ghosts. That is, the continued presence of things thought to be dead. In in recycling and “upcycling” discarded matter, the facture and history of these materials remains present in their new uses. As with Gehry’s houses, the ghosts of houses past remain in houses present.
This attitude is foregrounded in the work of Dennis Maher. His poetic repurposing of old building materials and other refuse evokes the aesthetic of the basement as it walks a fine line between the critique, celebration, fetishization, and reinvention of throwaway culture. In his own Fargo House, he removes, reassembles, and juxtaposes found materials—including the structure of the house itself—to produce a labyrinth of spaces and surfaces. Likewise, his Assembly House—a deconsecrated church repurposed as a community arts institution and a “continuously evolving architectural dreamworld”—is under constant renovation as new materials, projects, and people cycle in and out. The articulation of structure of the original neo-Gothic building and Maher’s framed-but-unclad stud walls is particularly evident. The contrast between new wood framing and flakeboard surfaces, on the one hand, and the church’s brick and gothic stonework, on the other present as-found things in two very different ways (Figure 6).
“The qualities found in basements have occasionally climbed out from the unconscious realm of the cellar to haunt the seemingly rational, above-ground levels of our literal and figural houses.”
Figure 6. Wardrobe Room, The Fargo House, Buffalo, N.Y., 2009-present, Dennis Maher. Courtesy Dennis Maher Studio.
By design, neither of Maher’s projects will ever be finished. Things are always being added and subtracted. At first glance both look like places for unapologetic hoarders. A closer look reveals that the piles of construction-industry flotsam and jetsam are intentional: debris that Maher has messily aggregated. It also shows that these building do not recycle materials, but stories and spirits. What returns in this circular economy is less embodied energy than history. But history is perpetuated not as a burden to be adhered to as in restorations but as a source to simultaneously move away from and towards. In these ways, Maher’s work manifests both the physicality and ethos of the basement. His spaces are raw and incomplete, where work gets done and where elements left for dead are resurrected and turned into new ad hoc, shadowy, and sometimes dangerous spaces (Figure 7).
Figure 7. The Assembly House Building, Arts Library, Dennis Maher and Assembly House 150 with John Zissovici and Ethan Davis, 2017. Photograph by David Schalliol.
Maher’s and Gehry’s unfinished, uncanny architecture embraces the messy and unfinished culture that is contemporary America. By exposing the elements of conventional construction, revealing physical and economic structures like ephemerality, and incorporating found and other ordinary materials, it harnesses the incompleteness and flexibility of the cellar, transforming it into something novel that is at once legible and obscure. Long live the basement, real and imagined.
Citation
David Salomon, “Unfinished: Uncanny Lessons from the Basement,” PLATFORM, July 21, 2025
Notes
[1] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 18.
[2] Rosemarie Haag Bletter, Coosje van Bruggen, Mildred S Friedman, and Frank GEHRY, The Architecture of Frank Gehry (New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 1986), 42-43.
