Benjamin for Architects

Brian Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136846359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Walter Benjamin has become a decisive reference point for a whole range of critical disciplines, as he constructed a unique and provocative synthesis of aesthetics, politics and philosophy.

Examining Benjamin's contributions to cultural criticism in relation to the works of Max Ernst, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, this book also situates Benjamin's work within more recent developments in architecture and urbanism.

This is a concise, coherent account of the relevance of Walter Benjamin's writings to architects, locating Benjamin's critical work within the context of contemporary architecture and urbanism.

CHAPTER 1
Metropolitanism and Method

Childhood images

In ‘Berlin Childhood around 1900’ Benjamin remarks: ‘the images of my metropolitan childhood perhaps are capable, at their core, of preforming later historical experience’ (Benjamin 2002: 344). Only a writer as attuned to the particularities of his material environment as Benjamin could qualify so profound an experience by a tentative ‘perhaps’. As we shall see, the idea that historical experience (both for the individual and collectively) is made possible through images attached to material objects comes to dominate Benjamin’s thinking increasingly over the course of his life. Undoubtedly, this idea is intimately connected with a heightened sense of the precariousness of those material places in which the writer had grown up as a child and inhabited as a mature man.

In this opening chapter we will consider the metropolitan sites that shaped Benjamin’s experience and thinking. In a way that would come to be explicitly stated in his late writings, for Benjamin biography is essentially topography: the writing of a life inextricably tied up with writing about the places of that life. The writings on cities, however, should not be considered as merely personal documents. Crucially, they are also documents of a metropolitan experience that writers of literature and theory had struggled to articulate for over 100 years before Benjamin’s own attempts. The unprecedented growth of cities across industrially developed nations in the nineteenth century had given rise to equally unprecedented social dynamics. In addition to his finely tuned metropolitan sensibility, Benjamin was intimately acquainted with modern urban history, literature and theory. Ultimately, he came to see his own personal development in light of collective social and political conditions stemming from the modern history of the city. Benjamin addresses this history at a time when one of the pioneering figures of European architectural modernism, Le Corbusier, could insist on the dramatic alternative: ‘architecture or revolution’.

For Benjamin biography is essentially topography: the writing of a life inextricably tied up with writing about the places of that life.

Before considering the series of essays Benjamin published on various cities in the 1920s, it is necessary to gain a provisional sense of his theoretical methodology. Benjamin was far removed from being a wide-eyed, naive recorder of urban impressions. Instead, his writings on cities are motivated by a profound desire for personal and collective redemption and expressed in a richly allusive style made possible by his intimate and comprehensive acquaintance with literature and theory. Following notions found in the work of such influential literary contemporaries as Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke and Marcel Proust, Benjamin proceeds on the premise that, for the writer, redemption requires working through childhood memories (see Rochlitz 1996: 181–7). The basic idea here is that of ‘preformation’ mentioned in the opening citation. Recollecting childhood for Benjamin means attempting to find the meaning of one’s present situation in light of a promise implicitly expressed in former years. In a word, memory becomes the primary space of historical meaning. While this may appear initially as an exclusively personal and subjective process, in view of the fact that Benjamin grasps memories as essentially connected to the material environment, recollection in fact has intrinsically social and historical dimensions. Recollecting one’s childhood home, for example, will be differently coloured depending on whether the actual physical structure survives the child’s transition into adulthood. Physical survival, however, is only one factor in recollection. The styles, furnishings and surroundings of the childhood home are also of central significance. As we shall see, Benjamin was particularly sensitive to processes of decay and obsolescence within the physical environment. In his mature work in the 1930s he came to analyse this process in terms of the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism. Early modernist architecture also focused on the phenomenon of obsolescence and attempted to confront it by overcoming the nineteenth-century preoccupation with styles. Such a solution could not be adequate from Benjamin’s perspective, as generating distinctive styles is an imperative of commodity production in conjunction with mass advertising. While modernist architecture could not, therefore, offer Benjamin an adequate material solution to the problem of obsolescence, it nevertheless contained a utopian impulse of great value. This impulse will be considered in Chapter 4.

Benjamin was particularly sensitive to processes of decay and obsolescence within the physical environment. In his mature work in the 1930s he came to analyse this process in terms of the Marxian notion of commodity fetishism.

Following collaborative work with his friend Franz Hessel translating Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Benjamin offered his first published reflections on its author in the 1929 essay ‘On the Image of Proust’. Here Benjamin remarks: ‘It took Proust to make the nineteenth century ripe for memoirs. What before him had been a period devoid of tension now became a force field in which later writers aroused multifarious currents’ (Benjamin 1999a: 240). Notions that preoccupied Benjamin at the time find their way into this essay: the idea of coming to terms with modern history through comedy rather than tragedy; the reality of the nineteenth century as a ‘satanic fairyland’; and a concept of history as a two-sided dialectic of melancholic and rejuvenating recollection. Benjamin relates Proust’s work to the second side of that dialectic and speaks of an ‘elegiac idea of happiness … which for Proust transforms existence into a preserve of memory’ (239). As the title of Proust’s great work makes clear, the author’s primary concern relates to time. The early episodes of In Search of Lost Time depict childhood experiences of dream and recollection and thus point to two instances of image consciousness. Proust’s notion of the image is ultimately related to time experienced as a kind of density, as something object-like, rather than as a neutral measure of events. As Benjamin remarks:

The eternity which Proust opens to view is intertwined time, not boundless time. His true interest is in the passage of time in its most real – that is, intertwined – form, and this passage nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without (244).

The key significance of the Proust essay to Benjamin’s thinking is encapsulated in a simple formula: ‘Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection [Nicht Reflexion – Vergegenwärtigung ist Prousts Verfahren]’ (ibid., see also Benjamin 1991: 320). The German term translated as ‘actualization’ – Vergegenwärtigung – means literally ‘to make present’. Thus, in Proust’s writing the image acts so as to bring past experience into the present. It does this ‘in a flash’ (blitzhaft): ‘Proust has brought off the monstrous feat of letting the whole world age in an instant’ (Benjamin 1999a: 244). The achievement of the image is accordingly ‘to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost mental awareness [Geistesgegenwart]’ (ibid.). As opposed to the daydreams that inhabit the landscape of fairy tales, the literary image is thus a function of concentration and presence of mind. In a word, such images redeem a life by rendering the past critically meaningful in the living present.

As is clear across many of Benjamin’s writings, his encounter with Proust is as much an attempt to clarify his own experience as it is an exercise in sophisticated interpretation and appreciation. Benjamin’s attempts to recollect his own childhood should thus be viewed in light of his reflections on Proust. These reflections establish two methodological principles that structure the development of Benjamin’s thinking: first, that the meaning of the present is latent within the past; and, second, that this meaning can only be made explicit through recollecting the material environment in which past experience is embedded. The more precise meaning of this process of recovery can be clarified by considering Benjamin’s writings on cities.

Berlin

In many respects Benjamin enjoyed near perfect conditions for a child growing up in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century. His parents both came from financially secure upper-middle-class families and after their marriage they maintained a stable position. Walter was the first born, with a brother and sister following him. The portrayal of ‘Berlin Childhood around 1900’ (written 1932–4 and revised in 1938) begins with a sense of protective seclusion offered by the courtyard onto which his family’s apartment looked. As Benjamin points out in ‘Berlin Chronicle’ (completed in 1932), his family history in Berlin stretched back only as far as his grandparents, who had originally settled in the city in the mid-nineteenth century. For the young Benjamin, however, this limited history was sufficient to endue his maternal grandmother’s apartment with ‘the almost immemorial feeling of bourgeois security’ (Benjamin 2002: 369). In ‘Berlin Childhood’ Benjamin alludes to his particular attraction to the loggia of his grandmother’s apartment. This is significant in view of Benjamin’s obsessive interest in the Paris arcades that came to dominate the last decade-and-a-half of his life. The description of the loggia contains clues for understanding this connection:

The most important of these secluded rooms [in my grandmother’s apartment] was for me the loggia. This may have been because it was more modestly furnished and hence less appreciated by the adults, or because muted street noise would carry up there, or because it offered me a view of the courtyard with porters, children, and organ grinders. At any rate, it was the voices more than the forms that one noticed from the loggia … Sunday – which the other rooms, as though worn out, could never quite retain, for it seeped right through them – Sunday was contained in the loggia alone, which looked out onto the courtyard, with its rails for hanging carpets, and out onto other loggias; and no vibration of the burden of bells, with which the Church of the Twelve Apostles and St Matthew’s would load it, ever slipped off, but all remained stored up in it till evening (Benjamin 2002: 371).

Benjamin’s account offers pertinent starting points for coming to appreciate his experience of buildings and the built environment more generally. The form and function of the loggia stand out from those of other rooms of the nineteenth-century European middle-class apartment. This is primarily in view of the fact that it is the one place where the outside penetrates the inside to any significant degree. Benjamin is clearly describing a fully covered rather than open loggia, which would be obviously less suited to the climate of northern Europe. Two senses are privileged in the loggia: sight and hearing. In terms of sight, it offers the best opportunities for viewing the courtyard with its ‘genteel’ activities and parade of characters. Presumably the use of glass was more conspicuous and intense in the loggia than in other rooms, which were more concerned to distract attention away from the world beyond the apartment.

It is the aural qualities of the room, however, that are most emphasized. In particular, the way in which the sound of the church bells gathers and settles in the loggia makes a powerful impression. It is worthwhile noting that, in the earlier ‘Berlin Chronicle’, Benjamin draws attention to his poor visual sense and speaks of ‘a gaze that appears to see not a third of what it takes in’ (Benjamin 2002: 596). This limited vision, together with a poor sense of direction, combined to produce what he calls there ‘a period of impotence before the city’ (ibid.). In an important sense, therefore, Benjamin’s biography describes the construction of a map not meant for the eye. It is important to bear this in mind when appreciating his attempt to come to terms with the metropolitan condition. Though he grew up in the metropolis he clearly did not feel equal to it in childhood. Only in Paris, as we shall see, did Benjamin’s optical limitations finally give way to a positive, more

Benjamin’s biography describes the construction of a map not meant for the eye. It is important to bear this in mind when appreciating his attempt to come to terms with the metropolitan condition. Though he grew up in the metropolis he clearly did not feel equal to it in childhood.

visceral rapport with the urban environment. This achievement can be seen as foreshadowed by the child’s affinity with the loggia.

The text most intimately connected with Benjamin’s move from Berlin to Paris is One-Way Street. Written between 1923 and 1926 but not published until 1928, One-Way Street immediately stands out on account of its formal novelty. Arranged into short fragments bearing ambiguous titles drawn from everyday advertisements and signs, here Benjamin for the first time puts his technique of montage to work as a new mode of theoretical writing. An extended section called ‘Imperial Panorama’ is made up of some of the earliest composed material. The first clue for interpreting this part of the text is offered by the title. The Kaiserpanorama or Imperial Panorama was constructed in Berlin in the early 1870s and situated within an arcade (see Buck-Morss 1989: 82–92). For a small charge it offered the public the opportunity of individually viewing photographic images of distant sites and cities. Viewers were situated around the machine, thus facing each other while remaining individually absorbed in enjoyment of the images displayed. Benjamin writes in ‘Berlin Childhood’ of visiting it as a young boy and relates his experience of the anxiety induced when a bell rang announcing an imminent change of picture.

Whereas his later writings on the German metropolis have a more elegiac tone, ‘Imperial ...

Table of contents

• Thinkers for Architects
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Metropolitanism and Method
• CHAPTER 2 Radicalism and Revolution
• CHAPTER 3 Modernism and Memory
• CHAPTER 4 Utopianism and Utility
• CHAPTER 5 Participation and Politics
• CHAPTER 6 Benjamin’s Memorial
• Bibliography
• Index