Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (original) (raw)
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The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer
1990
A history of modem architecture can follow two distinct paths. First is the path of the object: an analysis of the historical origins of the things and events themselves. Second is the path of the subject: an analysis of the more intangible and shifting historicity of the concepts and categories by which we attempt to understand objects and events. This study analyzes the reciprocity of subject/object relations in modern architecture. Subjectivity constitutes the categories of possible experience, objectivity is what is experienced; and architecture resides in the both domains. The particular dialectic of subject and object treated here is that which emerges in the buildings, projects, and writings of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, each of whom, in different ways, brings himself face-to-face with the threatening problems posed by modernity to bourgeois humanism and the sovereignty of its modes of artistic production and reception. My thesis is that a perceptual shift, which I...
Oase, 2006
Criticism is always an affront, and its only justification lies in its usefulness, in making its object available to just response.' We are now emerging from a hyper-theorised, hyper-eritical episode in architecture. Whether you call it deconstruction, postmodernism, or some other thing, it was a period when architectural discourse and academe spun off on a self-referential tangent that often seemed to bear little relation to architectural practice. This was a moment dominated by North American academics and schools of thought, and Diane Ghirardo has described the years between 1970 and 2000 as 'three decades of theoretical delirium in which poeticising reflection passed for theory ... thirty years of trying on and discarding borrowed theories with all the rapidity of a commodified consumer at an outlet sale'. 2 Within all this, it seems fair to say that the influence of Peter Eisenman was ever-present. For him, architecture was (and indeed continues to be) inextricably tied to philosophy via deconstruction, and inextricably tied to criticism through the concepts of autonomy and resistance. He argues that there is a 'possible inherent criticality that is unique to architecture', where 'criticality can be understood as the striving or the will to perform or manifest architecture's outonorny'." Eisenman's concern is nothing less than the 'survival of the discipline' of architecture per se. Such criticism embodies a resistance to or a negation of commodity culture, and is thus the late inheritor of a Marxist-inflected, Frankfurt-school cultural critique. During the height of this time, the prefix 'critical' took on a talismanic character; employed as a kind of charm, it was used to both preempt and ward off a whole range of (sometimes contradictory) accusations: of commodification, of irrelevance, of empty formal experimentation, of the submission to spectacle and fashion, and so on. But if this oncedominant position can be described as 'criticality' (or 'critical architecture', these terms will be used interchangeably throughout this essay), it has been explicitly challenged, in recent years, by the new guard of the 'post-eritical'. Now that the tide of high theory has passed, and criticality has been left desiccated, high on the salty shores of architectural discourse, it is the post-critical that has come scuttling forth to scavenge, and to take its place. In the present furore that surrounds this new, post-eritical condition, it is possible to observe several important confusions about what the 'post-eritical' might actually be, and what it might mean. It is at once a generational wrangle among American
The Judge is Not an Operator: Historiography, Criticality, and Architectural Criticism
OASE, 2006
Criticism is always an affront, and its only justification lies in its usefulness, in making its object available to just response.' We are now emerging from a hyper-theorised, hyper-eritical episode in architecture. Whether you call it deconstruction, postmodernism, or some other thing, it was a period when architectural discourse and academe spun off on a self-referential tangent that often seemed to bear little relation to architectural practice. This was a moment dominated by North American academics and schools of thought, and Diane Ghirardo has described the years between 1970 and 2000 as 'three decades of theoretical delirium in which poeticising reflection passed for theory ... thirty years of trying on and discarding borrowed theories with all the rapidity of a commodified consumer at an outlet sale'. 2 Within all this, it seems fair to say that the influence of Peter Eisenman was ever-present. For him, architecture was (and indeed continues to be) inextricably tied to philosophy via deconstruction, and inextricably tied to criticism through the concepts of autonomy and resistance. He argues that there is a 'possible inherent criticality that is unique to architecture', where 'criticality can be understood as the striving or the will to perform or manifest architecture's outonorny'." Eisenman's concern is nothing less than the 'survival of the discipline' of architecture per se. Such criticism embodies a resistance to or a negation of commodity culture, and is thus the late inheritor of a Marxist-inflected, Frankfurt-school cultural critique. During the height of this time, the prefix 'critical' took on a talismanic character; employed as a kind of charm, it was used to both preempt and ward off a whole range of (sometimes contradictory) accusations: of commodification, of irrelevance, of empty formal experimentation, of the submission to spectacle and fashion, and so on. But if this oncedominant position can be described as 'criticality' (or 'critical architecture', these terms will be used interchangeably throughout this essay), it has been explicitly challenged, in recent years, by the new guard of the 'post-eritical'. Now that the tide of high theory has passed, and criticality has been left desiccated, high on the salty shores of architectural discourse, it is the post-critical that has come scuttling forth to scavenge, and to take its place. In the present furore that surrounds this new, post-eritical condition, it is possible to observe several important confusions about what the 'post-eritical' might actually be, and what it might mean. It is at once a generational wrangle among American
Understanding Architecture: Critique after the Post-Modern moment and Gadamer's hermeneutic
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Since the so-called »type-debate« at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne – on individual versus standardized types – the discussion about turning Function into Form has been an important topic in Architectural Theory. The aim of this contribution is to trace the historic shifts in the relationship between Function and Form: First, how Functional Thinking was turned into an Art Form; second, how Functional Analysis was applied to design and production processes; third, how Architectural Function was used as a social or political argument. A comparison of the different aspects of the relationship between Function and Form may not only shed new light on the creative process in Modern Architecture. Looking at the historic shifts driving this re-evaluation of values – from Art to Science and Politics – may also serve as a stepstone towards a new poetic rethinking of the relationship of Function and Form that contemporary values may require.