Goethe on Architecture

Attributed to Erwin von Steinbach. Sketch “B” of Strasbourg Cathedral. Reprinted from Marcel Aubert, The Art of the High Gothic Era, 1965. 6 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.6 by guest on 29 September 2021 Beyond the Paradigm of Representation: Goethe on Architecture DOROTHEA E. VON MÜCKE On German Architecture is Goethe’s brief, well-known 1772 pamphlet celebrating Strasbourg Cathedral and its architect, Erwin von Steinbach. Scholars generally interpret the pamphlet by placing it within the context of the rediscovery of the Gothic, the Sturm und Drang cult of original genius, and a generation of young poets asserting the independence of their “German” art from the ruling French para - digms of taste. Although these contextualizations are not wrong, they miss a key point about the specificity, newness, and importance of On German Architectur e: its contribution to aesthetic theory. Several factors set Goethe’s essay apart from the general eighteenth-century interest in the Gothic revival. Goethe is not interested in the Gothic cathedral as an actual building with specific purposes. Instead, he discusses the cathedral as if it were a work of art, and explores its powerful effects on the subjectivity of the beholder. The innovative thrust of Goethe’s essay must be sought in the way archi - tecture rather than painting or poetry allows him to discuss the effects of a work of art. In this respect the brief pamphlet far exceeds its various contexts and becomes legible as an important contribution to aesthetic theory, asserting a pro - found paradigm change in the arts. Goethe turns to architecture as the model object of art when art is no longer to be considered primarily a matter of represen - tation. At stake in this essay from 1772, as well as in Goethe’s later essay “On Architecture” from 1795, is the programmatic exploration of aesthetic experience through architecture as a medium of emphatic presence. Both On German Architecture and “On Architecture” consider the effects of architecture on the beholder. The earlier piece focuses on the subjectivity of the beholder; the latter on the beholder’s sense of embodiment. To reconfigure the function of art, Goethe introduces architecture as an art that is situated in three- dimensional space and bound up with a particular place. The polemical turn against the then-reigning representational paradigm becomes even more evident Grey Room 35, Spring 2009, pp. 6–27. © 2009 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.6 by guest on 29 September 2021 in a review of the work of the well-known art critic and philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer, which Goethe wrote around the same time as On German Architecture . Sulzer’s work must not be viewed primarily in terms of its theoretical insight but rather as a repository of what were then considered generally accepted truths about art and aesthetic experience. Like many works of its time, going back to Charles Batteux, Abbé Jean-Baptiste du Bos, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Sulzer’s work also compares and contrasts the sister arts. It seeks their common purpose and function in their vaguely defined ability to encourage the refinement of sensuality. Goethe’s review characterizes Sulzer’s attempt to find this common denominator as ultimately a trivializing, even distorting, enterprise: Was läßt sich durch solche Philosophie nicht verbinden? Malerei und Tanzkunst, Beredsamkeit und Baukunst, Dichtkunst und Bildhauerei, alle aus einem Loche, durch das magische Licht eines philosophischen Lämpgens auf die weiße Wand gezaubert, tanzen sie im Wunderschein buntfarbig auf und nieder, und die verzückten Zuschauer frohlocken sich fast außer Atem. 1 Everything can be related to anything with the aid of that philosophy. Painting and dance, rhetoric and architecture, poetry and sculpture, all of them will be projected onto a white wall through a tiny hole, by the magical light of the lamp of philosophy. All colorful in this miraculous glow, they will dance up and down, and the ecstatic onlookers will be almost out of breath with enthusiasm. Goethe’s critique takes aim at “the philosophy” enabling Sulzer’s comparison of the arts; that is, at the theoretical framework and underlying set of distinctions that produce the kind of thought Sulzer and his cohort of comparative art critics engaged in. To a certain extent Goethe’s critical insight can be compared to Foucault’s The Order of Things , which also links the eighteenth-century episteme of repre - sentation with a specific technique of observation, the table. 2 Thus Goethe char - acterizes the paradigm underlying Sulzer’s “philosophy” as a technical apparatus, a hybrid of a camera obscura and a magic lantern capable of producing illusionary tableaux for its captive audience. 3 Both of the technologies combined in this hybrid project images with the aid of light, producing fleeting, flat images that cannot capture any of the three-dimensional features and embodied realities of sculpture, architecture, or dance. Goethe argues that Sulzer’s methodology crucially distorts the three-dimensional arts. He supports this point by aligning the actual objects of Sulzer’s comparison, in each case contrasting an art form that can be subsumed under the rubric of rep - 8 Grey Room 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.6 by guest on 29 September 2021 resentation with a nonmimetic form situated in concrete space. In each pair— painting and dance, rhetoric and architecture, poetry and sculpture—the first art form works with a repertory of signs that signify an intended but existentially absent reality, which means that if they are imitated or copied by being projected onto a wall nothing essential is lost. In contrast, dance, architecture, and sculpture are emphatically three-dimensional. They exist as originals—unique, present—not as conglomerations of signs referring to something absent. This aesthetics of emphatic presence becomes programmatic as the prestige and value of the arts of architec - ture, sculpture, and dance increase. 4 Architecture as Art Edward Young’s enormously influential “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759) celebrates a heroic artist figure, one capable of creating original works, by comparing him to a magician whose work cannot be codified in rules and there - fore cannot be copied. Young contrasts the magician with the accomplished tech - nician: “A Genius differs from a good Understanding, as a Magician from a good Architect; That raises his structure by means invisible; This by the skilful use of common tools.” 5 Goethe’s programmatic choice of architecture as the model object of art also participates in a discourse of original genius, only with the architect substituted for the magician or genius. In On German Architecture Goethe takes up the discourse of original genius by criticizing the then-influential architectural theorist Marc Antoine Laugier. Laugier had attempted to use functionalist princi - ples to resolve debates over architectural taste and style, famously invoking Vitruvius’s primal hut. According to Goethe, however, Laugier would never be able to do justice to the artistic genius of a true architect: “Schädlicher als Beispiele sind dem Genius Prinzipien. ”6 (To the genius, principles are even more detrimen - tal than paradigms.) Continuing his attack on Laugier, Goethe writes, Was soll uns das, du neufranzösischer philosophierender Kenner, dass der erste zum Bedürfnis erfindsame Mensch, vier Stämme einrammelte, vier Stangen drüber verband, und Äste und Moos drauf deckte? Daraus entscheidest du das gehörige unsrer heurigen Bedürfnisse, eben als wenn du dein neues Babylon, mit einfältigem Patriarchalischem Hausvatersinn regieren wolltest. (112) You neo-French, philosophizing connoisseur, what is the point of invoking the fact that driven by need the first inventive human being must have rammed four posts into the soil, connected them with four poles, and covered the whole construct with branches and moss? Based on this you want to judge von Mücke | Beyond the Paradigm of Representation: Goethe on Architecture 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2009.1.35.6 by guest on 29 September 2021 today’s needs. This is just the same as if you wanted to rule your new Babylon with the simple patriarchal wisdom of those times. When Goethe makes fun of Laugier’s “simple patriarchal wisdom,” he targets the attempt to derive aesthetic principles from common, everyday uses and aesthetic form from primitive, archaic function. One might think of the architect as a mere engineer or builder who has to meet well-defined needs. For the builder, form is dictated by function. By contrast, according to Goethe the architect as true artist and genius finds the form of his work by allowing himself to be inspired by the confusing, seemingly infinite multiplicity of forms in nature; that is, by a manifold of natural forms that appears confusing but has its own harmonic order and design. Goethe illustrates the contrast between the functionally oriented engineer and the genius inspired by nature: Eure Gebäude stellen euch also Flächen dar, die, je weiter sie sich ausbreiten, je kühner sie gen Himmel steigen, mit desto unerträglicherer Einförmigkeit die Seele unterdrücken müssen! Wohl! wenn uns der Genius nicht zu Hülfe käme, der Erwinen von Steinbach eingab: Vermannigfaltige die ungeheure Mauer,

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