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Benjamin, Mies and the Architectural Image Lutz Robbers

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Benjamin, Mies and the Architectural Image Lutz Robbers 27 Without Pictorial Detour: Benjamin, Mies and the Architectural Image Lutz Robbers ‘Radical knowledge’ of architecture: Giedion [the book] incites.’2 The book appears to mirror the and Linfert very same dynamic, relational properties of the new In 1929 Benjamin sends a letter to the architectural architecture allowing for the anthropological-materi- historian and chief advocate of the modernist move- alist modes of experience Benjamin was interested ment in architecture Sigfried Giedion. Previously, in. Like dreams, deliria, or images, Giedion’s illus- Giedion had sent Benjamin a complimentary copy trated book – and modernist architecture for that of his freshly published Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen matter – embodied a ‘radical knowledge’ allowing in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928) in which he a mode of retroactive historical thinking to become argues that nineteenth century utilitarian construc- palpable which ‘enlightened tradition through the tions such as the Pont Transbordeur in Marseille present.’3 were unconsciously created manifestations of new architecture which no longer could be understood The realisation that a book like Bauen in through its material and formal properties but rather Frankreich spelled out an innovative historical as a dematerialised, dynamic field of ‘floating rela- method by connecting the ‘unconsciously’ erected tions and interpenetrations.’1 These engineering iron constructions with the 1920s architectural structures are presented by Giedion as a ‘prehis- avant-garde and simultaneously acting as a shock- tory’ of a new architectural space which, according inducing agent capable of shaking up the dormant to him, would eventually manifest itself in Le modern subject can be regarded as a methodolog- Corbusier’s designs from the 1920s. It was up to ical blueprint for Benjamin’s later writings, especially the architect’s genius to plant the ‘kernel’ (keimhaft) The Arcades Project.4 Benjamin was straight- of the new conception of space to be ‘awakened’ in forward about the credit that was due to Giedion buildings like the Cité Frugès in Pessac. as well as to Gotthold Meyer’s work Eisenbauten: in 1929 he called them ‘prolegomena to any future In his letter Benjamin acknowledges that he was historical materialist history of architecture’.5 The ‘electrified’ after reading only a few passages of illustrated book, through both its argument and its Giedion’s work. Not merely did Bauen in Frankreich animating, bodily effect, now functioned – like the literally ‘spark’ an interest in the subject of archi- architecture it refers to – as an awakening machine tecture as it was put forward by Giedion; it was to render active ‘a not-yet-conscious knowledge of the book itself, by exerting ‘the most immediate’ what has been’.6 impact, which had set Benjamin in an animated state he wanted to render operative: ‘I deliberately Later, in the text fragments Benjamin assembles write to you while I can still control the movement it from 1935 onwards for The Arcades Project, Giedion 18 Constellation of Awakening: Benjamin and Architecture | Spring / Summer 2016 | 27–50 28 figures prominently in convolute N – ‘On the Theory in fact are, it is safe to say that Benjamin presents an of Knowledge, Theory of Progress’, the very section ‘image-based epistemology’, as Sigrid Weigel puts in which Benjamin outlines the objectives of his it.11 Yet, Benjamin never dissociates the epistemic work, namely to establish modes of awakening as charge of the image from the question of language. a historical method in order to dissolve ‘“mythology” He emphasises that the knowledge generated into the space of history’.7 Montage was predes- through the image has a locus which is language. tined to help overcome the central problem of The very first entry of convolute N makes clear that historical materialism: the idea of progress. Through the image is always accompanied by a text, ‘the the analysis of ‘the small individual moment’ one long roll of thunder that follows’.12 Knowledge only was to discover the ‘crystal of the total event’ and becomes manifest when expressed in language. replace progress with actualisation.8 Benjamin cites Benjamin pushes the idea of a coupling of image Giedion twice; first, he presents the latter’s method and language even further by arguing that it is ‘the for ‘writing’ architectural history as the model for his image that is read’ that carries the ‘imprint of the own undertaking: perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded’.13 just as Giedion teaches us to read off the basic features of today’s architecture in the buildings erected around If we assume that the radical knowledge 1850, we, in turn, would recognise today’s life, today’s Benjamin discovered in or through Giedion’s Bauen forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost in Frankreich exemplified his epistemology – based forms of an epoch.9 on the link between image and language – we can ask how images of and texts on architecture are Secondly, Benjamin regards the photographic read. Could it be that the architectural image has a images printed in Bauen in Frankreich taken from distinctive role in his theory of knowledge? Judging ‘within’ the ‘air-flooded’ iron construction such as the from a review Benjamin writes in 1933 of an essay Eiffel Tower or the Pont Transbordeur not only as entitled Die Grundlagen der Architekturzeichnung representative of the ‘basic aesthetic experience of by art historian and fellow critic at the Frankfurter today’s building’ hitherto reserved for workers and Zeitung Carl Linfert such an assumption appears engineers but, what is more, as a model for a philos- plausible.14 opher, ‘autonomous and free of vertigo’. [fig. 1] Benjamin’s discovery in 1931 of illustrations of Benjamin then introduces the infamous defini- eighteenth century French architectural drawings tion of the ‘image’ in order to substantiate the new in Linfert’s essay struck a chord with him. Again historical method. Rejecting the metaphor of light as Benjamin is awestruck. In a letter he writes in the the medium for illuminating the present through the same year he tells Linfert about being thrilled by past – or vice versa – it is the image ‘wherein what the subject – which, he admits, had been foreign has been comes together in a flash with the now to to him. ‘Even before I started reading the text’, form a constellation. In other words, image is dialec- Benjamin writes, ‘I was confronted with the thinnest, tics at a standstill.’10 The ‘electric’ charge Benjamin most exciting air emanating from the illustrations.’15 received when first reading Bauen in Frankreich Linfert’s writing on architectural drawings appears suggest that Giedion’s book operated like such an to have sparked a sense of congeniality that lead to image, forming flash-like constellations of simul- a vivid exchange of letters and at least one meeting. taneity of the non-simultaneous. Without trying to In his review entitled Strenge Kunstwissenschaft enter into the debate about what ‘dialectical images’ Benjamin expresses his enthusiasm about the 29 Fig. 1: Photograph with captions from Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2000). 30 attention Linfert devotes to the ‘marginal case’ and homogeneous ‘painterly-pictorial sight’ (maler- (Grenzfall) of the architectural drawing.16 The oper- isch-bildmässigen Anblick) which, according to ative, non-reproducing character of the image and Linfert, is based on the strict laws of linear perspec- its immediate agency are stressed in the review: tive.20 Architectural drawings perform ‘a visual circling around the building (visuelles Kreisen um As regards the images themselves, one cannot das Bauwerk) which is only changing in perspective say that they re-produce architecture. They produce and as a representational image, not architectur- it in the first place, a production which less often ally’.21 Drawing architecture, the design process benefits the reality of architectural planning than it itself, is also a visual process of making images, does dreams. One sees, to take a few examples, but in contrast to painterly images, it is indifferent to Babel’s heraldic, ostentatious portals, the fairy-tale the viewer and his/her defined point of view in front castles which Delajoue has conjured into a shell, of the pictorial space. Architectural apperception Meissonier’s knickknack architecture, Boullée’s (Architekturanschauung), Linfert claims, escapes conception of a library that looks like a train station, the analysing, rational gaze, just like architectural and Juvara’s ideal views that look like glances into drawings escape the representational regime. the warehouse of a building dealer: a completely new Instead, these drawings are always ‘pre-construed’ and untouched world of images, which Baudelaire (vorgedeutet) or ‘pre-drawn’ (vorgezeichnet). would have ranked higher than all painting.17 [fig. 2] They do not mirror as Abbilder (objective pictures) an established image of the real but are rather Architectural drawings, ‘the peculiar imaginary constructive and projective, they anticipate the world of architecture’, are different from paint- object to be built. erly representations of buildings and cities.18 The defining characteristic of the architectural drawing The gain of pictorial quality hence necessarily is that ‘it does not take a pictorial detour’ (keinen leads to loss in architectural quality. While architec- Bildumweg zu kennen). ture and the painterly images
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