Architecture and Modernity: A Critique

Author: Hilde Heynen
Year: 1999 (MIT Press)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/heynen-1999.md

Summary

Heynen confronts the modern movement's "naive and unbalanced" concept of modernity with the critical theories of the Frankfurt School, asking how architecture relates to modernity, modernization, and dwelling. She distinguishes concepts of modernity (programmatic vs. transitory; pastoral vs. counterpastoral) and reads key figures — Giedion and Das Neue Frankfurt (pastoral modernism), Loos, Benjamin, Bloch, the Venice School (Tafuri, Cacciari, Dal Co), Constant's New Babylon, and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory — to articulate how architecture might be both involved in and critical of modernity, through the concept of mimesis.

Key Claims

• Modernity, modernization, modernism: modernization = the socioeconomic process; modernity = the experienced condition of modern life ("a rupture with tradition"); modernism = the cultural/artistic responses. "Modernity is ... the element that mediates between a process of socioeconomic development known as modernization and subjective responses to it."
• Programmatic vs. transitory, pastoral vs. counterpastoral: programmatic modernity is a project of progress/emancipation (Habermas's "incomplete project"); transitory modernity stresses the transient/fugitive (Baudelaire, Baudrillard — modernity coinciding with fashion); pastoral modernism denies contradictions (Le Corbusier's "new spirit"); counterpastoral stresses "irreconcilable fissures" (the SI's "criminal" artistic activity).
• Dwelling fades into the distance: modernity as "homelessness" (Berger et al.). Heidegger's Building Dwelling Thinking — building as letting-dwell, the fourfold — and Cacciari's reading: "Non-dwelling is the essential characteristic of life in the metropolis" / "the home is past, it no longer is." Adorno: "Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible ... it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home."
• Critical moderns: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory — art's "dual character" (socially fabricated and autonomous) generates resistance; mimesis as a critical similarity/negativity that lets architecture articulate modernity's contradictions. Case studies: Libeskind's Jewish Museum (Berlin), Koolhaas's Zeebrugge Sea Terminal.
• Venice School / negative thought: Tafuri, Cacciari, Dal Co hold that "every attempt at synthesis, every attempt to create a unified culture, is ideological and therefore false," disclaiming architecture's capacity to contribute to emancipation.
• New Babylon as antinomy: Constant's project, meant as "a quasi-realistic but critical alternative," "soon turned out to be just an illusory image of a postrevolutionary society" — illuminating "the antinomies that are evoked by the striving for a critical architecture."

Connections

Concepts: Dwelling · Critical Architecture · Everyday Life · New Babylon · Ideology
Authors: Hilde Heynen · Manfredo Tafuri · Martin Heidegger
Debates: Critical vs. Projective · Formal vs. Material Utopianism
Related source notes: The Fate of Critical Architecture (synthesis) · Building Dwelling Thinking (Heidegger)

Direct Quotes

"[T]he experience of modernity involves a rupture with tradition and has a profound impact on ways of life and daily habits."

"Non-dwelling is the essential characteristic of life in the metropolis" / "the home is past, it no longer is." (Cacciari)

"Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible ... It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home." (Adorno)

"[A]rchitecture has the capacity to articulate in a very specific way the contradictions and ambiguities that modern life confronts us with."

Open Questions

• Can architecture be at once "complicit with modernity" and "so cynical as to foreclose any possibility for critique"? Heynen's mimesis is offered as a path between these traps — does it hold?