Benjamin for Architects

THINKERS FOR ARCHITECTS

Benjamin

for

Architects

Brian Elliott

In the quarter century since the publication of his Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin has become a decisive reference point for a whole range of critical disciplines. Benjamin constructed a unique and provocative synthesis of aesthetics, politics and philosophy. This volume of the Thinkers for Architects series assesses the significance of Benjamin’s writings for architectural theory and practice.

Starting with the intertwining of life and work within Benjamin’s writings on European cities, this book examines Benjamin’s contributions to cultural criticism in relation to the works of Max Ernst, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion and situates Benjamin’s work within more recent developments in architecture and urbanism.

This book is a concise, coherent account of the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s writings to architects, considering figures of modern art and architecture in detail, and locating Benjamin’s critical work within the context of contemporary architecture and urbanism.

Brian Elliott currently teaches philosophy at Oregon State and Portland State University. His recent book Constructing Community (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010) is an exploration of three contemporary theories of community in light of currently influential approaches to urban development across liberal democracies.

Thinkers for Architects

Series Editor: Adam Sharr, Newcastle University, UK

Editorial board
Jonathan A. Hale, University of Nottingham, UK
Hilde Heynen, KU Leuven, Netherlands
David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Architects have often looked to philosophers and theorists from beyond the discipline for design inspiration or in search of a critical framework for practice. This original series offers quick, clear introductions to key thinkers who have written about architecture and whose work can yield insights for designers.

Deleuze and Guattari for Architects
Andrew Ballantyne

Heidegger for Architects
Adam Sharr

Irigaray for Architects
Peg Rawes

Bhabha for Architects
Felipe Hernández

Bourdieu for Architects
Helena Webster

Benjamin for Architects
Brian Elliott

Derrida for Architects
Richard Coyne

Merleau-Ponty for Architects
Jonathan Hale

THINKERS FOR ARCHITECTS

Benjamin
for
Architects

Brian Elliott

Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2011
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

The right of Brian Elliott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Elliott, Brian, 1969–
Benjamin for architects/Brian Elliott.
p. cm. – (Thinkers for architects; 6)
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940. 2. Architecture—Philosophy. I. Title.
B3209.B584E45 2010
720.1–dc22

2010027629

ISBN 0-203-83387-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-55814-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-55815-0 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-83387-2 (ebk)

For Gabrielle – my guide through the labyrinth

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1

1 Metropolitanism and Method 11
Childhood images 11
Berlin 15
Naples 21
Moscow 26
Architectural montage 29

2 Radicalism and Revolution 35
Benjamin and surrealism 35
The Arcades Project and modern architecture 40
The dialectic of technology and nature 48
Regressive and progressive reactions to modern technology 52
Architectural modernism and the politics of form 57

3 Modernism and Memory 60
Modernity and modernism 60
The domestic interior as social sanctuary 66
Exorcizing the accursed interior 69
From individual dwelling to collective housing 74
The image of the city 78

4 Utopianism and Utility 85
The politics of utopia 85
The utopian dimension of the Paris arcades 91
Utopia and the dialectical image 97
Architecture and utopia 102

5 Participation and Politics 109
The politics of participation 109
Architectural modernism and participation 115
The Situationist International and an urbanism of play 122
A counter-monumental architecture of remembrance 128

6 Benjamin’s Memorial 133

Bibliography 138
Index 145

Series Editor’s Preface

Adam Sharr

Architects have often looked to thinkers in philosophy and theory for design ideas, or in search of a critical framework for practice. Yet architects and students of architecture can struggle to navigate thinkers’ writings. It can be daunting to approach original texts with little appreciation of their contexts. And existing introductions seldom explore architectural material in any detail.

This original series offers clear, quick and accurate introductions to key thinkers who have written about architecture. Each book summarises what a thinker has to offer for architects. It locates their architectural thinking in the body of their work, introduces significant books and essays, helps decode terms and provides quick reference for further reading. If you find philosophical and theoretical writing about architecture difficult, or just don’t know where to begin, this series will be indispensable.

Books in the Thinkers for Architects series come out of architecture. They pursue architectural modes of understanding, aiming to introduce a thinker to an architectural audience. Each thinker has a unique and distinctive ethos, and the structure of each book derives from the character at its focus. The thinkers explored are prodigious writers and any short introduction can only address a fraction of their work. Each author – an architect or an architectural critic – has focussed on a selection of a thinker’s writings which they judge most relevant to designers and interpreters of architecture. Inevitably, much will be left out.

These books will be the first point of reference, rather than the last word, about a particular thinker for architects. It is hoped that they will encourage you to read further; offering an incentive to delve deeper into the original writings of a particular thinker.

The Thinkers for Architects series has proved highly successful, expanding now to eight volumes dealing with familiar cultural figures whose writings have

influenced architectural designers, critics and commentators in distinctive and important ways. Books explore the work of: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari; Martin Heidegger; Luce Irigaray; Homi Bhabha; Pierre Bourdieu, Walter Benjamin; Jacques Derrida and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The series continues to expand, addressing an increasingly rich diversity of contemporary thinkers who have something to say to architects.

Adam Sharr is Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Principal of Adam Sharr Architects and Editor (with Richard Weston) of arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Cambridge University Press’ international architecture journal. His books include Heidegger for Architects.

x SERIES EDITOR'S PREFACE

Acknowledgements

I have been afforded many opportunities to teach and present my ideas on Benjamin and architecture in recent years. A seminar on visual studies at Istanbul Bilgi University was made possible by the director of the cultural studies programme there, Ferda Keskin. My thanks to the graduate students at Bilgi for their enthusiasm and rigour. Also from that time my participation in Istanbul Fragmented, organized by Ipek Akpinar at Istanbul Technical University, allowed me to present my own excavations of the arcades of that city. At University College Dublin collaborations with Hugh Campbell, Douglas Smith and Gillian Pye building bridges between the humanities and architecture were an inspiration.

Since moving to the United States, the support of Andrew Cutrofello and Rob Gould has been essential and is much appreciated. Thanks to Brook Muller at the University of Oregon for providing comments on a first draft of the first three chapters. I owe a debt of gratitude also to Adam Sharr, the series editor, for having faith in the project. I thank Georgina Johnson-Cook at Routledge for her courteous and efficient help with getting the manuscript through to production.

Finally, the greatest thanks go to my wife, Gabrielle. She is my reason for being here and, in the words of Rilke, Hiersein ist herrlich.

Eugene, Oregon
Spring 2010

xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Introduction

Why should an architectural practitioner or educator be interested in the work of the German Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin? After all, by the time of his tragic death in 1940 Benjamin’s published work – primarily as a literary critic – was known only to very restricted circles of European intellectuals. Unlike his contemporary Martin Heidegger, he had produced no groundbreaking philosophical study that resonated within academia and beyond. He had not been active in the early days of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in the 1920s and had in fact even failed in the rather modest ambition of becoming a university professor. Worse still, Benjamin devoted – many of his close friends at the time would have said ‘wasted’ – the final decade-and-a-half of his life on a project concerned with nineteenth-century Paris that set no material limits and proposed no clear theoretical goals.

And yet Benjamin is undoubtedly one of the thinkers on architecture and the urban condition of the twentieth century. Engagement with Benjamin’s thinking has a number of things to offer the architectural practitioner and student: profound and nuanced reflections on modernity and modernism; detailed analyses of the social and political impact of the built environment; consideration of architecture as a crucial medium and repository for the intersection of personal and shared cultural memory; a sense of the politically and historically charged nature of meaning carried by the built environment. Above all, Benjamin’s thinking raises the question of intergenerational justice and responsibility in architecture. With so much talk of sustainable approaches in architecture, Benjamin’s concern for intergenerational justice is timely and of genuine relevance.

Benjamin is undoubtedly one of the thinkers on architecture

and the urban condition of the twentieth century.

Above all, Benjamin’s thinking raises the question of intergenerational justice and responsibility in architecture.

With so much talk of sustainable approaches in architecture, Benjamin’s concern for intergenerational justice is timely and of genuine relevance.

While never an official member of the Institute of Social Research, Benjamin was financially supported by it and published some of his most important studies in its journal during the last few years of his life. Founded in Frankfurt in 1923, the Institute was initially inspired by Georg Lukács’ Marxist work History and Class Consciousness to pursue the goal of bringing philosophical inquiry together with empirical social research. Following an important essay by Max Horkheimer around the time of his assuming the role of director in 1930, the Frankfurt School’s shared approach became known as ‘Critical Theory’.

Benjamin fits into the Critical Theory frame in spirit if not to the letter, in so far as he offers analyses of modern culture that contest prevailing, socially conservative interpretations. To cite one example, Benjamin’s insights into the potentially emancipating effects of modern technology anticipate by several decades the idea of a possible society of collective, aesthetic play popularized by the Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s. During Benjamin’s lifetime, however, the most influential individuals in the Frankfurt School, Theodore Adorno and Horkheimer, expressed profound misgivings about his approach and, in particular, his theoretical methodology. To judge by the intensity of academic interest in Benjamin in recent decades, his unwillingness to fall into line with the theoretical orthodoxy pressed upon him by Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School has been vindicated. What is often startling about Benjamin’s writing is how fresh and contemporary it seems. Unlike much twentieth-century theory, Benjamin’s thinking still seems capable of pointing the way to the future, rather than back to a situation that has long since ceased to concern us.

2 INTRODUCTION

What is often startling about Benjamin’s writing is how fresh and contemporary it seems. Unlike much twentieth-century theory, Benjamin’s thinking still seems capable of pointing the way to the future, rather than back to a situation that has long since ceased to concern us.

From his writings on cities such as Berlin, Moscow and Naples in the mid-1920s through to his obsessive reconstruction of Paris during the Second Empire in the last decade of his life, Benjamin’s abiding preoccupation remained the social and cultural impact of modern urbanization. The range of sources culled for his mature work on Paris was astonishing: the poetry of Baudelaire and his contemporaries, the writings of Marx and Engels and earlier utopian socialists, nineteenth-century historians, city guides and biographies and a vast array of materials on the fashions and ephemera of everyday culture. In addition, Benjamin was a close observer of the artistic avant-garde in Paris in his own time, paying particular attention to the significance of the surrealist group that formed around André Breton in the early 1920s. Above all, he drew inspiration from the pioneering urban sociology of Georg Simmel’s 1903 essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in pursuing the question of the social effects of modern urbanization. Whereas Simmel accentuated the nervous exhaustion of the metropolitan ‘blasé’ character, Benjamin tended to read the urban environment with an eye for its socially transformative, revolutionary potential. While Benjamin’s preoccupation with nineteenth-century Paris can seem rather remote from the core concerns of contemporary architecture, it should be borne in mind that his ultimate goal was to reconstruct the material and cultural conditions of the birth of modern urban life. In a word, Benjamin’s underlying task was a genealogy of urbanization. All roads of this genealogy led back to the unparalleled urban renewal of Paris orchestrated by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s.

3 INTRODUCTION

Benjamin’s underlying task was a genealogy of urbanization.

Haussmann’s urban experiment would set in train further efforts at large-scale redevelopment throughout Europe and beyond. Here we find the model for all subsequent efforts to engineer society through modern construction. Benjamin, examining these developments several generations later, is gripped with the task of thinking through this seminal event in modernity. Rather than calmly distanced art-historical reconstruction, Benjamin’s work on the Passagen-Werk, or Arcades Project (truly a work in progress in every sense of the term), was driven by an increasing sense of social and political urgency. He was convinced, as were the leading advocates of architectural modernism in the 1920s, that the only way forward lay in exploiting rather than suppressing the industrial technology pioneered in the nineteenth century. But if the body of modernity was its material technological innovations, its spirit drew from deeper sources.

Like his contemporary and friend Ernst Bloch, Benjamin was convinced that nineteenth-century modernity and twentieth-century modernism were driven by collective utopian wish-images: largely unconscious desires for social harmony and reconciliation. Understanding modern architecture, therefore, could never be reduced to giving functional accounts of material applications and the economies of scale made possible by standardized production. Beyond any functionalist-expressionist dichotomy, Benjamin understands modern

Taking stock of the contemporary situation, it seems that the exhaustion of postmodern alternatives has led to a reassessment of what came before the ‘post’: the question of the meaning of modernism has returned. There could be no better guide to help us address this question than Walter Benjamin.

architecture as equally material-functional and symbolic-utopian. Taking stock of the contemporary situation, it seems that the exhaustion of postmodern alternatives has led to a reassessment of what came before the ‘post’: the question of the meaning of modernism has returned. There could be no better guide to help us address this question than Walter Benjamin.

Between April and July 2006, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London staged the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939. The following year the slightly modified exhibition transferred to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. What was striking about what was described by the Corcoran as ‘the largest and most comprehensive exhibition on the subject ever staged in America’ was the clear focus on everyday material culture and architectural design, as opposed to the more orthodox preoccupation with the visual arts, particularly painting. The V&A online description – in a distinctly modernist tenor – accentuates the continued presence of modernism:

At the beginning of the twenty-first century our relationship to Modernism is complex. The built environment that we live in today was largely shaped by Modernism. The buildings we inhabit, the chairs we sit on, the graphic design that surrounds us have all been created by the aesthetics and the ideology of Modernist design. We live in an era that still identifies itself in terms of Modernism, as post-Modernist or even post-post-Modernist (www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1331_modernism).

This characterization of modernism, not so much in terms of great individuals or even the bewildering array of -isms, but rather as something that is written into everyday material culture in a largely implicit manner, is profoundly in accord with Benjamin’s sense of it. One of the key tasks of this book will be to draw out the complexity of Benjamin’s appreciation of modernism in light of its continued relevance to contemporary architectural and intellectual culture.

The approach of this book is broadly thematic, though it also follows a loose chronological order. While the discussion covers a variety of periods and texts, the focus is for the most part on Benjamin’s mature thinking from the 1930s.

Any consideration of Benjamin’s relevance to architecture will draw heavily on the Arcades Project (AP). Benjamin’s best-known works – such as his essay ‘The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility’ – can be adequately understood only through familiarity with the AP. This gives rise to a major problem: the AP is an intentionally fragmentary text consciously constructed following the methods of modern film montage. In addition, it is largely made up of material from other sources and only a small proportion of the text actually originates from Benjamin. Adorno complained in letters to his friend of Benjamin’s obstinate desire to refrain from explicit theoretical construction.

While acknowledging the genuine reasons for Benjamin’s restraint in this regard, it is also true that a theory of architecture and urban experience can only be drawn from Benjamin’s thinking through extrapolation and construction. Any such construction will resemble the reconstruction of a crime scene, bringing together seemingly circumstantial evidence into a compelling and coherent narrative.

While not suppressing the eclecticism of Benjamin’s thinking, the attempt has been made here to identify a core idea with respect to architecture. This is the shift from bourgeois dwelling to modernist housing. The idea is found repeatedly in a variety of Benjamin’s writings from the early 1930s across both published and unpublished sources. It appears to articulate a personal experience stemming from Benjamin’s childhood, an experience that in various ways prefigured and coloured his later encounters with urban environments. But the shift from dwelling to housing was also something many of Benjamin’s intellectual contemporaries would have recognized as a part of their tenuous position as a class. The subtitle

While not suppressing the eclecticism of Benjamin’s thinking,

the attempt has been made here to identify a core idea with respect to architecture. This is the shift from bourgeois dwelling to modernist housing.

6 INTRODUCTION

of Benjamin’s 1929 essay on surrealism refers to the movement as ‘the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’. Accordingly, the decay of dwelling can be seen as a crisis affecting the social existence of the intellectual class, a class to which artists and architects also belonged. Finally, the shift can be taken to refer to the explicit task of architectural modernism to replace the stiflingly decorated refuge of the Victorian bourgeois home with the stripped-down simplicity of the ‘machine-house’. This would represent the effective reconciliation of humanity with the products of industrial technology, thereby ending the reactionary opposition to such technology as inherently dehumanizing.

The decay of dwelling can be seen as a crisis affecting the social existence of the intellectual class, a class to which artists and architects also belonged.

In accordance with the centrality accorded to the shift from dwelling to housing in Benjamin’s thinking, Chapter 1 begins with his autobiographical recollections of the domestic interiors of his sheltered, upper-middle-class childhood and moves on to consider his writings on cities such as Naples and Moscow, encountered as a young man. Whereas in Naples Benjamin grasps the openness of a Mediterranean working-class culture as an antidote to northern European domestic isolation, in Moscow he confronts a metropolis under the full force of revolutionary modernist reconstruction. Clearly opposed to the valorization of pre-industrial, rural dwelling found in a thinker such as Heidegger, Benjamin affirms the progressive social potential of architectural modernism. Here the sweeping away of the excessive furnishings of the bourgeois domestic interior of the nineteenth century is seen as producing an exhilarating sense of social and moral emancipation. The liberated interiors of modernist architectural design allow for an effective manner of exorcizing the nightmares of nineteenth-century history.

After exploring Benjamin’s move towards a version of revolutionary Marxism in Chapter 2, the modernist liberation of the built environment is explored through

Clearly opposed to the valorization of pre-industrial, rural dwelling found in a thinker such as Heidegger, Benjamin affirms the progressive social potential of architectural modernism. ... The liberated interiors of modernist architectural design allow for an effective manner of exorcizing the nightmares of nineteenth-century history.

tensions between surrealism and purism in Chapter 3. Tying in with the work of Manfredo Tafuri from the 1970s and more recent studies by the urban sociologist David Harvey, Chapter 4 focuses on the utopian dimension of modern architecture. Rejecting the heroic characterization of the artist/architect as solitary genius, Benjamin invites us to consider the products of architectural design as manifestations of collective visions of the good life. While Benjamin is under no illusions about how compromised such visions become under capitalist economic conditions, he insists that traces of collective utopian projections can always be found by genuine efforts to think through architectural plans and realizations. In Chapter 5 the contribution of Benjamin’s thinking to the problem of public participation in architecture is examined. While the explicit ideology of architectural modernism has often been regarded as authoritarian and essentially opposed to popular participation, Benjamin tends to read it against the grain of this ideology. What makes Benjamin’s engagement with modern architecture genuine and productive is the fact that he does not see it as reducible to its ideological function.

Benjamin’s dialectical appreciation of architecture stands equally opposed to any reductive environment determinism or non-materialist idealism. In theory at least this would align Benjamin with contemporary approaches to urban ecology. But Benjamin ties revolutionary social change to valid artistic and constructive

activity. In his famous text ‘On the Concept of History’ he strongly defends the revolutionary demand and thus sets against Le Corbusier’s implacable disjunction ‘Architecture or Revolution’ the conjunction ‘Architecture and Revolution’. In more specific terms, Benjamin’s thinking can be understood to address the question of architectural agency. This question, which arose most insistently and conspicuously within professional architecture under the conditions of world economic crisis in the 1970s, is implicitly in play in all of Benjamin’s writings on art and the urban condition. His own positive vision of artistic production – articulated most clearly in the essay ‘The Author as Producer’ – involves the breakdown of any strict division between producer and consumer. Cashing this thought out in relation to architecture, it points to a situation in which all members of a community actively contribute in some way to the conditions of their own housing. Such an approach appears to be in tune with a contemporary sensibility that is increasingly shaped by a concern for small-scale communities and regional sustainability. While Benjamin’s writings are obviously not the place to look for specific proposals for grassroots community housing, he can help us to think through the full implications of the modernist revolution in construction that was spearheaded by architects, as well as the anti- and postmodernist alternatives of more recent decades. Prefiguring later ‘psychogeographical’ approaches to the urban environment in the 1960s, Benjamin offers a street-level perspective of the city to balance the psychological abstraction and distance induced by computer modelling and the architectural studio.

Prefiguring later ‘psychogeographical’ approaches to the urban environment in the 1960s, Benjamin offers a street-level perspective of the city to balance the psychological abstraction and distance induced by computer modelling and the architectural studio.

In sum, anyone concerned with architecture in all its historical, cultural, social, and political significance and complexity cannot fail to learn much of contemporary relevance from studying the work of Walter Benjamin. His analyses of modern cities and of seminal modernist movements, along with his ideas of intergenerational justice, the social effects of modern technology and the progressive potential of modern construction, all give his writings a contemporary resonance which is unsurpassed among twentieth-century European thinkers. If, as Jürgen Habermas insisted in the 1980s, modernity is an ‘unfinished project’, no thinker is better equipped than Benjamin to offer the contemporary architect the means to engage with and articulate a condition of modernity that is yet to have run its course.

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