On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought

On the Ruins of Babel Series editor: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Cornell University Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought publishes new English- language books in literary studies, criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history pertaining to the German-speaking world, as well as translations of important German-language works. Signale construes “modern” in the broad- est terms: the series covers topics ranging from the early modern period to the present. Signale books are published under a joint imprint of Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library in electronic and print formats. Please see http://signale.cornell.edu/. On the Ruins of Babel Architectural Metaphor in German Thought Daniel L. Purdy A Signale Book Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Ithaca, New York Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library gratefully acknowledge the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the publication of this volume. Copyright © 2011 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2011 by Cornell University Press and Cornell University Library Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Purdy, Daniel L. On the ruins of Babel : architectural metaphor in German thought / Daniel L. Purdy. p. cm. — (Signale : modern German letters, cultures, and thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-7676-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Architecture and philosophy— Germany—History. 2. Philosophy, German—History. 3. Architecture and literature—Germany—History. 4. German literature—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.) NA2500.P797 2011 720.1— dc22 2011012711 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Bettina The story of Babel is usually told backwards—the many languages spoken around the tower were not a punishment, they were a delight. Any construction site in the world is fi lled with men who speak differently from one another, yet they always manage to understand each other after a few days together. If a great king calls a large workforce together, it will surely include men from different corners of his kingdom. Upon fi rst hearing them speak, an outsider might imagine that they had no means of understanding one another, but this is clearly the opinion of someone immersed in just one language, someone like a priest, who spends all his days reading the scriptures of his one holy language. In the practical world of moving heavy stones and raising broad foundations, all languages are understood by everyone. In a fl ash the man lifting a wide, awkward bundle into a cart understands what the driver is telling him. The crane operator knows what the laborers below him need lifted. He hears them speaking and without worry picks up the right object. The words rise up to him like a song he understands but cannot write down. Only the priest who comes to visit the site, to judge the tower and the king who commands its construction, is confused. Only he hears chaos. And so when the king dies, and the work is left undone, the priest tells the story from the outside as if the many languages fl owing into one another were a mark of sin, rather than a wonder. Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Decline of the Classical Orders 14 2. Science or Art? Architecture’s Place within the Disciplines 29 3. Architecture in Kant’s Thought: The Metaphor’s Genealogy 53 4. How Much Architecture Is in Kant’s Architectonic of Pure Reason? 107 5. The House of Memory: Architectural Technologies of the Self 146 6. Goethe’s Architectural Epiphanies 162 7. The Building in Bildung: Goethe, Palladio, and the Architectural Media 193 8. Goethe and the Disappointing Site: Buildings That Do Not Live Up to Their Images 212 9. Gothic Deconstruction: Hegel, Libeskind, and the Avant-Garde 232 10. Benjamin’s Mythic Architecture 261 Bibliography 295 Index 311 Acknowledgments My apprenticeship in architecture has taken a decade. Many have helped me along the way. Professor Ulrich Schütte at the University of Marburg was a generous guide. I would like to thank Professor Fritz Neumeyer at the Technical Univer- sity, Berlin for agreeing to sponsor my research. Generous funding came through a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, as well as through summer research grants from the Pennsylvania State University Institute for Arts and Hu- manities, the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, and a Maria Sibylla Merian fellowship from the University of Erfurt. The Staatsbibliothek Berlin, the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar, the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, the Universitätsbib- liothek TU Berlin, and the Universitätsbibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin were invaluable. My architecture colleagues aided me immensely. Many thanks to Ute Poerschke and Nick Deinhardt for showing me around Berlin, and to Bret Peters, Donald Kunze, Michael Mussotter, and Sandra Staub for conversations in Pennsylvania. Chris Rzomp intrepidly majored in German and architecture, making it seem per- fectly natural to write in both fi elds. Simon Richter, Ken Calhoon, Ed Dimend- berg, and Caroline van Eck offered insightful recommendations to further the book along. I am most grateful to Peter Hohendahl, for mentoring the manuscript. Kizer Walker at Cornell University Library was very helpful at the crucial stages. Many thanks to Marian Rogers for her judicious expertise editing the manuscript. x Acknowledgments This book originated with my parents: my mother, Doris Purdy, taught me German, and my father, Gregory Purdy, taught me the lessons of New York City architecture. My years working for his construction company led me to wonder in college, just how much architecture is there in Kant’s architectonic of pure reason? Gregory Pritchard and Jim Barefi eld at Wake Forest University instilled in me that happy liberal arts belief in the unity of knowledge. Germaine Bree was the fi rst person to speak the phrase “we intellectuals” in my direction. Bettina Brandt has been a wonder throughout it all. Without her kind intelli- gence and love, I could never have fi nished this book. Noah and Vera have danced in, around, and through the book. On the Ruins of Babel Introduction The compact between buildings and their inhabitants has long been ruled by the fantasy that houses have, at least on an abstract level, the formal appearance of human beings. The classical tradition, defi ned by Vitruvius and elaborated from the Renaissance onward, stressed the comparison in order to establish a canon of beauty in buildings and bodies—both were meant to be smooth, symmetrical, and balanced in their proportions and the distribution of their working parts. Modern, industrial buildings do not always adhere to this ancient canon, for today the bond between buildings and humans has become even more complex, often ignoring the composition of the body as an organic whole. The old terms have become words to describe not just fl esh and bones, but also states of mind. Hence over the centuries, architectural discourse has produced some of the most important metaphors to rep- resent the inner life of humans. “Ground,” “structure,” “support,” and “balance” describe emotional relations as much as they do the construction of buildings. The proliferation of architectural terms beyond the already broad range of Renaissance cosmology, and their infi ltration into the psychological and epistemological language of modern consciousness, have meant that buildings have come to mirror our inner states so completely and so quietly that we are hard put to separate our own identities from theirs. More than once have the construction, occupation, and demolition of a building been understood in terms parallel to the life of a person. Indeed, as Mark Wigley remarks, the trauma of watching the World Trade 2 On the Ruins of Babel Center collapse was due in part to this imaginary association: “This sense that our buildings are our witnesses depends on a kind of kinship between body and building. Not only should buildings protect and last longer than bodies, they must be themselves a kind of body: a surrogate body, a super-body with a face, a facade that watches us.”1 The mythic repercussions of the World Trade Center’s destruction stem from this empathetic identifi cation between buildings and humans. In this book, I explain how this analogy fl ows in two directions: not only are buildings often designed to appear human, but subjectivity is often described in the language of architecture. The tradition of describing inner states with architectural terms can be traced back to the New Testament, where parables in the Gospels and images in Paul’s epistles encouraged the believer to compare his own faith with a house of prayer. Christianity taught explicitly that faith in the Trinity replaced the Old Testament concern for building the temple in Jerusalem. In this book, I seek to demonstrate that modern philosophers, beginning with Descartes and Leibniz, running through Kant, Goethe, and Hegel, and fi nally settling on Freud and Benjamin, provided further, more detailed, secular formulations of architectural subjectivity. This book will also show that the borrowings between architecture and philosophy moved not just from one discourse to the other but were an interchange, so that what one discipline gave to the other was later reapplied to the donor discourse as a seem- ingly external validation of its own terms. As the fi rst chapters argue, eighteenth- century philosophy’s reliance on architecture to describe inner life came full circle as these new structures of subjectivity were incorporated into the Enlightenment’s empathy-driven theories of architectural good taste.

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