The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (original) (raw)
Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer
German Studies Review, 1994
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 call posthumanism, can be detected within the work of these figures. Posthumanism is the consciousness and conscious response, whether with applause, resignation, or regret. to the threatened norm of psychological autonomomy and individualism. Each of these architects produced a body of work that delineates precise social agendas as well as aesthetic preferences and offers architectures that would be adequate to the posthumanist social orders envisioned. The study draws on established and emergent analyses in critical theory, in particular those of the Frankfurt School and of certain poststructuralist thinkers. It attempts to demonstrate that many of the experiments by these architects previously relegated by the critical-historical establishment to reductive versions of functionalism or Sachlichkeit can be more fruitfully explained within a framework of positions indicative of the changed status of the subject and the ways the subject is variously constituted by the different architectures.
2019
The relations between literature and architecture are so complex that, from an epistemological and methodological perspective, a great variety of approaches can be adopted in order to study them. And, actually, the rather chaotic bibliography that already exists on the mapping of those relations is a reflection of this complexity, crystallized variously within the fields of architectural theory, urban theory, semiotics, and literary theory. Firstly, sometimes authors from the discipline of architectural theory use expressions such as "architecture as a language", or "architecture as a (literary) text" or "the city as text", to create a kind of loose "analogy" between the two disciplinary fields. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of textual poetics or narratology, we can find similar, vague metaphors such as "narrative as a space", "narrative spaces", "the space of language", the "architecture of the text", or even "textual space". There seems to be another, second, family of approaches, that tends to establish a parallelism or a quasi-structural correspondence between space and narrativity, architecture and narrative, or building and narrativity, that goes beyond mere metaphors. The cases of Philippe Hamon's studies on the French realist novel or of Paul Ricoeur's famous article on "architecture and narrativity" immediately come to mind. In this paper I will argue that there is another, third, epistemological possibility of relating literature and architecture that is deeper, more significant, and may prove rather fruitful if we would wish to extract design or creative principles from such a comparative procedure. I would like to call such an approach a functionalstructural correlation that focuses on the roles and the conceptual content of the elements used to construct the above relation. The aim of the paper is to outline this possibility by organizing and typifying the bibliographical field under three distinct epistemological models usually at work when investigating the relation between literature and architecture, or between narrativity and space. Those models are conceived of as ideal types, in Max Weber's sense. In the exposition, I will specifically analyse the spatial literary theories of Gérard Genette, Elrud Ibsch, Genealogy and Prehistory of the Relations between Space and Narrative/ Language Postmodern theory played a major role in revisiting the problem of the relation between architecture and language, long after the early discussions and musings about the "architecture parlante" of the 18th century. Charles Jencks, George Baird, and Geoffrey Broadbent were some of the protagonists of those debates during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This era was exactly the heyday of semiology or semiotics. What Jencks and others tried to do is simply copy and transfer some models from linguistic and semiotic theory into architectural discourse. Jencks's argument in favour of a triple articulation (form-function-technic) of architecture, in direct relation to the famous semiological triangle developed by Ogden and Richards, is such an attempt (Jencks and Baird, 1969: pp. 13-17). And despite Gillo Dorfles's hesitation on the epistemological validity of such transfers, due to the complexity and "stereognostic" texture of architectural codes and their irreducibility to those of common spoken languages, people like Broadbent and even Christian Norberg-Schulz went on. They wanted to investigate how meaning was created by architecture, how signifiers were related to signifieds, how material buildings created "symbol-milieus" (according to Norberg-Schulz's catchy phrase) (Jencks and Baird, 1969, pp. 40-48, 51-56, 223-226), and they wanted to know whether architecture is a language or speech, following Saussure's famous dualism (Terzoglou 2018, pp. 121-123). The quest for meaningful form was a kind of heroic dimension of postmodernism, despite the fact that the protagonists themselves were supposed to nurture suspicion towards "grand narratives". This fervour attracted the attention of famous semioticians such as Umberto Eco, who started addressing the specific problems of a semiotics of architecture. Eco significantly added a flavour of scientificity to the whole debate. In his article on the architectural column, he claimed architecture's double function, the signified one being types of possible functions, but, most importantly, introduced the problem of the specificity of architecture as a discipline. The fact that when addressing spatial contexts we have a mixture of synchronic and diachronic "languages", an array of hybrid morphological and historical features that persist in time, makes the semiotic analysis of architecture not an easy task (Eco 1972, pp. 98, 113-115). My point of view, developed in a recent article, is that facing architecture, if we aspire to adequately analyse it from a semiotic perspective, we have to adopt an interdisciplinary methodological stance, merging literary theory, modal narratology, architectural theory, urban theory, and semiology, at the least (Terzoglou 2018: pp. 123-124). Juri Lotman's idea of a "semiotic continuum" could be useful for such an endeavour. Moreover, Lotman introduces the concept of "the space of the semiosphere" (2005, pp. 206-208), which is diachronic, related to cultural memory, and therefore more relevant to architecture, which addresses, basically, social values, cultural hierarchies, existential distinctions, and collective memory, through the articulation of space within a temporal continuum or framework. Note Ideal Type Two: Critical Epistemological Models There seems to be a different family of approaches, a second ideal type that articulates the relation between space and narrativity, architecture and narrativity, or building and language. This second type tends to establish a parallelism beyond mere, vague metaphors: a kind of quasi-structural correspondence between the two disciplines, architecture and linguistics, or architectural theory and literary theory. I claim that this second type of relations is based on an external comparison between two fields of inquiry, based, however, on abstract concepts. This comparison is no longer a collation but a sort of abstract but strict analogy or correspondence, making use of expressions based on "like", "such. .. as", or "between" to institute a parallelism or homology among distinct disciplinary frameworks. I would like to call such approaches, from an epistemological perspective, critical or representational conceptualisms. "Critical" because they transcend mere empiricist epistemologies using only vague metaphors, "representational" because they tend to assume a kind of one-to-one correspondence between the elements comprising each discipline, and, "conceptualism" in order to account for the fact that this family of models actually makes use of concepts in the articulation of the comparison between the disciplinary matrices at hand. Therefore, if I could compare the second ideal type with the first, the differences are striking, but, however, there is one, common element in both of them: the relation between the two parts of the comparison, architecture and language, or space and narrativity, is always assumed to be external. That is, it is presupposed that those disciplines are already readymade entities, so to speak, and then they come into contact or dialogue. To give some examples of this second ideal type, I will briefly analyse the major works and articles by Gérard Genette, Philippe Hamon, and Paul Ricoeur. Genette, in his 1966 article on the relation between space and language, already notes that "il y a toujours de l'espace dans le langage.. .. Tout notre langage est tissé d'espace " (Genette 1966, p. 107) [there is always space within language.. .. All our language's tissue is spatial]. Since language spatializes itself (1966, p. 108), we would expect why poets such as Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Proust, Claudel, and Char are obviously fascinated by place and space, claims Genette (1969: p. 44). Therefore, in his other seminal text from Figures II, on "Literature and Space", published in 1969, Genette tries to unravel the complex relation between the two concepts. The interesting feature of this article is that it somehow avoids the pitfalls of the general and vague metaphors pervading the 1966 article, inaugurating a methodology resembling ideal type two. Genette asks the crucial question of whether "space" is only one "subject" of literature among others, therefore just an object of representation for the temporal mode of existence of literary narrative (Genette 1969: pp. 43-44). If that were the case, then space would be something passive and external, and literature would only speak about space, in a kind of empiricist
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
original draft unpublished 3/26/2012 Architecture concretizes an idea usually attributed to the genius of the architect, guided as the circumstances may be through design committees, expectant inhabitants, and hopeful beholders. Being a characteristically interdisciplinary field, Architecture invites our various academic disciplines through the shared burdens of concept, technical construction, and openended use to examine buildings through language, philosophy, and history regarding architecture as art and provide our critique. Engaging objects in the manner of various disciplines such as Richard Rorty with language in Philosophy, Michel Fried in art history, and
ARCHITECTURE AS A CONNECTION BETWEEN LOCUS, THE OBJECT AND THE SUBJECT
Juan Navarro Baldeweg’s architecture is unmistakably permeated by his plastic work; these pages invite us to dive into these contaminating relationships between the different disciplines which he works on. In his architecture, Navarro tries to make evident, beyond the necessary objectification of its own physical limits, the relations between architecture and place –a pre-existence–, the inhabitant –a subject– and in which way the latter’s perception of architecture –a phenomenology– determines how it should be understood. Juan Navarro is one of those exceptions that take us back to the times of Humanism because of his versatile production and the way in which a trans-disciplinary relationships network is woven enriching all his work and, particularly, his architecture. It cannot be understood without having a notion of these nested relationships between the different constellations of his production.
Idea and freedom : the search for form in classical architecture and the Modern Movement
1989
The utopian idealization of a rational order of things as it has been expressed by Modem Movement architecture can be exposed due to the openness in the principles of knowledge intrinsic in the isolation of reason from metaphysics accomplished by Modernity. In fact, the development of criticism and theory in architecture constitutes an expression of the Modem situation. This thesis aims to a critique of Modem Movement architecture in the light of Classical architecture. The issue of political knowledge as it stands within the historicity of each architecture is established as the context through which Classical and Modem Movement architectures are approached and related to each other. " Classical architecture enjoyed existence within the universal and immutable, semihuman and semi-divine order of the polls. Metaphysics embraced reason, while living in the polls essentially implied reasoned interaction between the citizens on this ground. The autonomy as well as the unity of arc...
The Historiography of Modern Architecture: Twenty-five Years Later
2015
Why reopen Panayotis Tournikiotis’ The Historiography of Modern Architecture? What for? There are two basic reasons for which Tournikiotis’ study is still a useful research tool after 25 years: first, for the historians he covers, it provides the reader with interesting references for further study; and, second, for the study of history and how it is written. In his last chapter, Tournikiotis tries to point out the lessons offered by his discussion on the histories. He emphasizes repeatedly how each history presents modern architecture and how each one tries to design the architecture of the present or even the future. Does this hold true for historiography as well? Is this book, as a discussion on nine different histories, projecting what historiography should be in the future? What is Tournikiotis’ real proposal? The aim of this study is to present how several authors have revisited the history and historiography of modern architecture after Tournikiotis’ dissertation (defended in 1988), especially after its publication in English in 1999. This essay has two main objectives: first, to reconsider the impact of Tournikiotis’ Historiography on further studies of the matter; and, second, to provide a bibliography, as complete as possible. The Historiography of Modern Architecture is a perfect manual for initiating students in the study of the histories of modern architecture. To try to ‘complete’ it, discussing what has been written since, seems like a small addition to what should be considered as a compulsory starting point for every study of architectural historiography.