1.

Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Glass Architecture II, 1921-22, oil on cardboard

Detlef
The

Mertins
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Walter

and Enticing Benjamin

Threatening
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Prehistory:
Glass

Utopia

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DetlefMertins is an architect, historian, andcriticteachingat the University of Toronto.

Concrete
Consider a detail, or, more accurately,severalrelateddetails, from WalterBenjamin'sreadingof modern architectureand its historicaloriginsin the iron and glass constructionsof nineteenth-centuryParisianarcades,exhibitionhalls, and department stores.So "electrified" was Benjaminby his firstglimpse into SigfriedGiedion's 1928 Building in France:Buildingin Bauen in Iron,Buildingin Concrete(Bauen in Frankreich: Eisen. Bauen in Eisenbeton)that he immediatelyput it down again until he "wasmore in touch with my own investigations"- referringin all probability to his well-knownArcades Project.But when he returnedto Giedion's book shortlytherethe last secafter,he began readingit backward. Furthermore, of reinforced tion, depicting the architectural concrete, history so impressedhim that before turningto the restof the book, which concerned iron construction,he wroteGiedion an immensely complimentaryletter and suggestedthat perhapsthey might meet in Parisduringthe spring.'Given the strategic of modernity,this importanceof iron for Benjamin'sprehistory enthusiasmfor concrete is quite surprising, as is this apparent lack of interestin Giedion's genealogyof iron morphologies. But consider a furtherdetail. Four months afterwriting his letter to Giedion, Benjamin published a short text describing his admirationfor several "booksthat have remained alive," including Alfred Gotthold Meyer's 1907 Iron Constructions While acknowledgingGiedion's book within (Eisenbauten).2 his tribute to Meyer, Benjamin gives pride of place to the earlier study, which predatedthe major developments in
7

Assemblage 29: 6-23 ? 1996 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

K A

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assemblage 29

FRANCE

1915

2. Le Corbusier,Dom-ino skeletal frame, 1914, as published in Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, 1928

Fig. 87. LECORBUSIER.Ferroconcrete Skeleton Frame for the Housing Settlement "Domino" 1915 C. develops the new housing function from the ferroconcreteskeleton frame with a thrusting boldness that has enriched all of architecture. From the elements of concrete pillars Corbusier develops the suspended, open house and bestows on it a previously unknown, exhilarating lightness.

concrete but attended confidently to the role of construction in bringing into existence new conditions for building, dwelling, and spatial experience. For Benjamin, This bookcontinuesto astonishus thanks to the farsightedness withwhichthe lawsof technicalconstruction, which through the and identidwellingbecomethe lawsof life itself,wererecognized fied withuncompromising at the beginningof the century. clarity But what makes so exceptional book is the assurance Meyer's ... withwhich it succeedsagainand againin situating the ironconstruction of the nineteenthcenturywithinthe contextof the hisof building,of the house itself.[Meyer's and toryand prehistory Giedion'sbooks]areprolegomena to anyfuturehistorical materialist history of architecture.' Where Meyer had recognized that the future of iron would be bound up with reinforcedconcrete, it remainedfor Giedion to tell the storyof how this new kind of "stone"had developed technically and how the greatarchitect-constructors August and Le Corbusierhad turned it into the Perret,Tony Gamrnier, privilegedmedium for materializingnew formsof life during the firstdecades of the twentieth century.Accordingto Giedion, where the earliergenerationhad successfullyaddressedthe importanceof utilitarianbuildings, it was the task of the currentgeneration,among whom he recognized Le Corbusieras leader, "totake the problem of dwelling from individualdilettantismand pseudo-handicraft productioninto the realm of industrialstandardization throughthe most precise comprehensionof living functions."Beginning with the propositionthat the house must be thoroughlybathed in air, Le Corbusier'sdistinctiveachievement as Giedion portrays spareconcrete constructioninto a new having reinterpreted form of dwelling, an "eternallyopen house" - his concrete Dom-ino skeleton, whose applicabilityhe had demonstrated in his housing estate in Pessac-Bordeaux, France, of 1924-27. Giedion presentsLe Corbusier'shousing project,as the architect himself did, as following from Tony Garnier'sdramatic utopian vision for a new kind of city - his light, loose, and limber Cit6 Industrielleof 1904. In the "fantastic expansion" of cubic houses in that growsout of the cellular arrangements gardensettings,Giedion "feelsthe connection between rationality and vision which the emerging age delineates perhaps most sharply."4 Coming to the defense of the Pessac housing, often accused of being "asthin as paper,"Giedion explains that "the solid
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4. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Still Life for Pavilion de I'Esprit Nouveau, 1924, oil on canvas, published by Giedion in Building in France

volume is eaten away wherever possible with cubes of air and rows of windows suddenly passing into the sky." Elaborating on the revolutionary implications, he writes, Corbusier's houses are neither spatial nor plastic: air flows through them! Air becomes a constituent factor! Neither space nor plastic form counts, only RELATION and INTERPENETRATION! There is only a single, indivisible space. The shells fall away between interior and exterior. Yes, Corbusier's houses seem thin as paper. They remind us, if you will, of the fragile wall paintings of Pompeii. What they express in reality, however, coincides completely with the will expressed in all of abstractpainting. We should not compare them to paper and to Pompeii but point to Cubist paintings, in which things are seen in a floating transparency,and to the Purist [Charles-Edouard]Jeanneret himself, who as architect has assumed the name Le Corbusier. In his Peinture moderne . . . he likes to assure us that he has deliberately chosen only the most ordinarybottles and glasses, that is, the most uninteresting objects, for his pictures so as not to detract attention from the painting. But the historian does not see this choice as accidental. For him the significance of this choice lies in the preference for floating, transparentobjects whose contours flow weightlessly into each other. He points from the pictures to the architecture. Not only in photos but also in reality do the edges of houses

blur. There arises - as with certain lighting conditions in snowy landscapes - that dematerialization of solid demarcation that distinguishes neither rise nor fall and that graduallyproduces the feeling of walking in clouds.5 It was enthusiastic prose such as this, about the new abstractly technological domestic architecture - hovering open cubes of air capable of engendering in architecture the effect of paintings in which transparent interpenetrating glass objects generate an unprecedented spatial liquidity - that so "electrified" Benjamin at a time when he was preparing his essay on surrealism, published just two weeks before he wrote to Giedion.6 And it was in this essay that he first invoked the houses of Le Corbusier, along with those of the Dutch functionalist J. J. P. Oud, as helping to organize a new physis that would realize the utopia envisioned by the humorist Paul Scheerbart in his

Glass Architecture of 1914.7 (Glasarchitektur)

Glass
In Scheerbart's fantasy treatise the material and technological inventions of his time are projected into a future architecture as the precondition for a new "glass culture" that would "completely transform humanity."' Sharing the implicit envi9

assemblage 29

ronmental determinism thatmarked various turn-of-themovements for the reform of life, society,andthe century meansof production, Scheerbart beginshis accountof the transformative of glasswalls, anthropologically potential steelandconcretestructures, electriclighting,heatingand metalchairs, vacuumcleaners, cars,aircoolingsystems, architecture that"ifwe craft,andfloating by suggesting wantourcultureto riseto a higherlevel,we areobliged,for betteror worse,to changeourarchitecture."9 If the current culturehasgrownfroman environment of closedrooms, then a new culture,radically distinctfromentrenched thatthe closedcharacter be removed traditions, requires fromthe roomsin whichpeoplelive.Andthiscan onlybe achievedby introducing "which lets in glassarchitecture, the lightof the sun,the moon,andthe stars, not merely a fewwindows, but through wall, through everypossible whichwill be madeentirely of glass- of coloredglass." The book's one hundred elevensections- written in a almostpositivistic andtechnicallanguage straightforward, - outlinethe architectural characteristics of a futureutoheirto the extraordinary piathatwouldbe the legitimate technicalinnovations of the nineteenthcentury. In his essayexamining the achievements andweaknesses of was concerned with what surrealism, Benjamin principally he called"thecrisisof the intellectual . . . [and]the humanisticconceptof freedom."'0 He argues thatthe revoluhad failed not in its efforts to tionary intelligensia only overthrow the ruleof the bourgeoisie; it hadevenfailedto makecontactwiththe proletarian masses. Rather than the intellectual's of perpetuate conception contemplation as a revolutionary intellectual force,he suggests resituating workin the sphereof images,whichhe wouldlatertheorize in termsof the distracted classconsciousness of the proletariat. the to Consequently, essayattempts pull whatBenillumination fromthe jamincallsthe trickof profane surrealist notion of as poetic, contemplative experience life to the utmost limits of To correct pushing possibility. the surrealists' romantic Benjamin "pernicious prejudices," draws on Scheerbart's visionof glassarchitecture, both and directly indirectly. If the Frenchliterati standat the headof a powerful intellectual stream,intoxicatedby poetic reverie,Benjamin in-

scribeshimself as an outside observerwho standsin the valley, able from there to gauge the energies of the movement and to calculate where, along this intellectual current,to install his power station.Seizing on Andre Breton'sability to transform the profaneinto illumination, Benjamin seeks to generatea materialistic,anthropologicalkind of inspiration.Breton,Benjamin recounts,"wasthe firstto perceive the revolutionary energies that appearin the 'outmoded,'the firstiron constructions, the firstfactorybuildings, the earliestphotos, the objects that have begun to be extinct."No one before had "perceived how destitution - not only social but architectonic,the poverty of interiors,enslavedand enslavingobjects - can be into revolutionary nihilism. . . [can be suddenly transformed converted]into revolutionary experience, if not action .. the immense forces of 'atmosphere'concealed in [bringing] these things to the point of explosion."" Earlyiron constructions attractedBenjamin'sinterestfor their potentialto transform into a revolutionary nihilism capable of fulfilling the dream of a culture. utopian glass The chemically explosive quality of profane illumination is linked to what Benjamin considered a radical theory of freedom. For the surrealistsare, he writes, "the firstto liquidate the sclerotic liberal-moral-humanistic ideal of freedom, because they are convinced that 'freedom, which on this earth can only be bought with a thousand of the hardestsacrifices, must be enjoyed unrestrictedlyin its fullness without any kind of pragmaticcalculation, as long as it lasts.""'2 While this antihumanist of freedom as moments sharing conception of hard-wonliberation ratherthan as a new stable order, Benjamin remains careful to distance his ideas of profane illumination and revolutionaryexperience from what he calls the surrealists' "inadequate,undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication."He takes issue with their "histrionicor fanatical stresson the mysteriousside of the mysterious,"and contrastsApollinaire's"impetuous"and "overheatedembrace of the uncomprehended miracle of machines" to the "wellventilated utopias of Scheerbart." To transform the contemplativecrucible of surrealist writing into a fully revolutionary thermodynamics,Benjamin presents the "curious" dialectics of intoxication,whose structure,it In additionto seems, is homologous with that of "revolution." the opium eater,the dreamer,and the ecstatic, he claims that
10

Mertins

the reader,the loiterer,and the flaneur are also types of illuminati. Moreover,he speculatesthat all ecstasyin one world is perhaps"humiliatingsobrietyin that complementaryto it."Anxious to step "intoa world that bordersnot only on tombs of the Sacred Heartor altarsto the Virgin, but also on the morning before a battle or aftera victory,"he counters the delights of the BoulevardBonne-Nouvelle in Breton'sNadja with the thought that "livingin a glass house [like living with the doors open] would be a revolutionary virtue par excellence ... an intoxication,a moral exhibitionAnd in replyto Breton'sproposiism, that we badly need.""' tion that "mankind's strugglefor liberationin its simplest form. . . remainsthe only cause worthsaving," revolutionary successful in weldBenjamin asks,"butare [the surrealists] ing this experience of freedom to the other revolutionary experience that we have to acknowledgebecause it has been ours, the constructive,dictatorialside of revolution?In short, have they bound revoltto revolution?How are we to imagine an existence oriented solely towardBoulevardBonneNouvelle, in rooms by Le Corbusierand Oud?"'4 - rooms that Benjamin understoodas materializingScheerbart's rationalistdream, as containing tracesof utopia. At this point, Benjamin notes that "to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution - this is the project about which surrealismcircles in all its books and enterprises." To bind destruction and construction - enthusiasm and rationality - into a dialectic would be, as Benjamin comments in his notes for the ArcadesProject, "to encompass both Breton and Le Corbusier - that would mean drawingthe spirit of present-dayFrance like a bow from which knowlHere, he edge of the moment hits the center of the heart.""' imagines the conjoining of these extremes as an instrument of cognition - a bow with which to shoot to "the center of the heart"- capable of producing what he elsewhere calls "the Now of recognizability"in which every particular epoch, past and present, reveals itself as "alwaysalso 'things as they alwayshave been.'""6Theidea of combining extreme rationalityand extreme fantasywas both a topos in writingsthat took engineering as the paradigmfor the new architectureand key to the shocking cognitive effects of dadaistmontage. The critic and historian Franz Roh, like Giedion a student of Heinrich Wdlfflin, described montage in 1925 as a precarioussynthesis of the two most important

tendencies in modern visual culture: "extremefantasywith extreme sobriety [Niichternheit].""'7 Alfred Meyer wrote of the "formativefantasy"of calculated engineering, "here more while the combination of ratioreason, there more fantasy";"8 in and vision Garnier's Cit6 Industrielleled Giedion to nality preferthe more lasting effects of engineering to the momentaryrush of cocaine.19 While Benjamin's dialectics of extreme polar opposites is not to be found in Scheerbart,there is a curious double-sidedness to his portraitof modern technology as both rationaland enchanting - similar to Meyer's introduction of the Crystal Palace of 1851 by imagining a children's fable "of iron giants and glass maidens"and his suggestion that the glass pavilion at the ParisWorld's Fair of 1900 was a fairytale come true.20 In Glass Architecture, a text so dry that it is hard to read from beginning to end, Scheerbartinterspersespractical suggestions and technical informationwith momentaryrevelations about the "marvellouseffects"of Tiffany glass;the "splendour of glass palaces"with gardenspaved in stone and majolica tiles that rivalArabiangardens;and the potential of producing "glassbrilliants [the size] of pumpkins,"because "primitive people and children are enrapturedby colored glass." And in a passagethat combines the critical perspectiveof cultural theory, the pleasure of the fantasist,and the indefatigable experimentalismof the inspired inventor, he writes, We arenot at the end of a culturalperiod- but at the beginning. We still haveextraordinary marvels to expectfromtechnicsand whichshouldnot be forgotten. This oughtto give us chemistry, constantencouragement. Unsplinterable glassshouldbe mentionedhere,in which a celluloidsheet is placedbetweentwo sheetsof glassand joinsthem together.2' In Scheerbart'sutopian dream, then, the rationalityof technology and the enchantment of art coincide in a new paradigm of technological organicitymarkedby the image of a glass milieu that would, according to the poet, extend the psychological effects of Gothic stained glass and Babylonian glass ampullae to all realms of life, making homes into cathedralswith the same "peculiarinfluence" that was already known to the priestsof ancient Babylon and Syria.Through this secularization of spiritualexperience, "a composed and settled nation"will emerge, blissful and healthy, its every desire alreadyfulfilled.22
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assemblage 29

Expression
Benjamin'sreadingof modern architecturethrough Scheerbart's glass lens may seem surprisingto studentsof twentieth-centuryarchitecture.Architecturalhistorianshave tended to associateScheerbartexclusivelywith Bruno Taut and his CrystalChain circle of the chaotic period at the close of World War I: expressionistfantasiesof utopian cities among the mountains, exuberantlycolored buildings radiatingecstasy,concrete flowing formlessly,and steel suspended magiAnd, of course, Taut's privilegedrelationshipwith cally.23 Scheerbartwas markedby his dedication of his Class House at the 1914 Werkbundexhibition in Cologne to Scheerbartand Scheerbart's reciprocaldedication of his book Glass Architectureto Taut.24With its fountain streaminginside an ecstatic interiorof colored glass, encased like a precious seed in an outer shell of glass block, Taut'spavilion was to be a symbol in the full Romanticsense of the term - for the renewalof organic"society. Taut'sfriend the critic Adolf Behne had vision a leading role in likewise, in 1919, given Scheerbart's what he hoped would be the "returnof art,"criticizing European humanism, valorizingpoverty,and advocatingthe return to primitivismthroughwhich the creativepowerof the masses would awaken.25In so doing, Behne championedTaut, and to a lesser extentWalterGropius,as the architectswho promised to fulfill Scheerbart's vision. During the 1920s, it became chararchitectural modernismin Germany acteristicof progressive of that premoderncommunity, to strivefor the restoration order,and harmonythat had been shatteredby industrialization and metropolitanization, not by rejectingtechnology,but ratherby (re)turningto nature - to the primitiveand originary - throughthe most advancedbuilding science and technology set in the open landscapesof the Germangardencities, exemam Main. plified by the Siedlungen of Berlin and Frankfurt desire to fuse technic The implication of the expressionist and organicwas not lost on Benjamin, whose readingof Scheerbart,like his readingof many others, involvedtransWhile Benjamin used formativeextensionsand rewritings. vision of glass architecturein waysthat contribScheerbart's to his theoryof modern culture, he never uted strategically referredto Taut or to those preoccupationswith the properties of color, reflection, and luminositythat Taut took from Scheerbart.Benjamin was, in fact, antagonistictowardexpres12

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7. Design drawing for the train station in Stuttgart by the firm Breest & Co., Berlin, presented by Mies van der Rohe in his article "IndustrialBuilding," G 3 (June 1924)

sionism whose organicisthubrishe associatedwith fascism.26 Where Behne considered architectslike Taut capable of restoringthe full unity of an organic society through industry, Benjamin considered the physiognomyof a redeemed future to remain radicallyunthinkablefrom what was alreadyat hand. As he cautioned in concluding a review of Lesabendioof 1913, "asteroid-novel" Scheerbart's that Artis not the forumforutopia.If it nevertheless appears of artthe definitivewordcould be spoken fromthe perspective this aboutthis book,becauseit is so full of humor,it is precisely humorthatexceedsthe domainof artand makesthe workinto a is of spirit.The continuedexistenceof thattestimony testimony not eternaland is not groundedin itself,but will be sublated of which it is eviinto thatgreater (some)thing[dasGrbszere] dence. Of thatgreater (some)thing- the fulfillmentof Utopia - one cannotspeak,only bearwitness.27

Gestaltung
Benjamin considered not Taut, but Le Corbusier, Oud, Adolf Loos, and the architects of the Bauhaus as those who were "realizing"Scheerbart'sideas in what he took to be the most extreme rationalistand antiorganicarchitecture: an architecturewithout "art," governed by the spirit of pure with the Consistent polemical statementsof engineering. the architects themselves, Benjamin understoodtheir buildings to have realized the latent potential of industrialmeans of construction and new synthetic materials(glass, iron, and concrete) finally liberated from the false bourgeois Kultur that had imposed the forms of previous historical epochs onto the "new,"enveloping them in myth throughout the nineteenth century. While unexpected, Benjamin's interpretationof glass architecture was not so much a misreadingof late-1920s modern

architectureby an outsiderfrom the literaryworld. Rather, mixhis association in the mid-1920s with the extraordinary the around ture of "elementarist" avant-gardists magazine G of glass may have given him an insight into the after-history architecturethat historianshave generally overlooked.The magazine itself, produced through the studios of filmmaker Hans Richter (who was principal editor) and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (who contributedfinancing as well as articles and projects),assembled evidence of a new culture characterizedby the multi-facetednotion of elementaryGestaltung (form giving), which bridged a diverse array artisticresearch,cut across disciplines, of postexpressionist and broke the barrierbetween art and engineering. Founded by Richter and Viking Eggling, the original circle consisted of Hans Arp, TristanTzara, Ludwig Hilberseimer,and Theo van Doesburg, but soon expanded to include Mies, El Lissitzky, Werner Griff, Noam Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, Frederick Kiesler, Georg Grosz, Man Ray, Walter Benjamin, and Raoul Hausmann - embracing dadaistsand neoplasticists, constructivistsand surrealists.Benjamin'stranslationof Tzara'sshort essay "Photography from the Other Side" apin issue the third (June 1924) peared together with Mies's call for a more effective embrace of industrializationfor building through the invention of improvedsynthetic materialsand the reorganizationof the tradesto combine factoryproduction of partsand on-site assemblythat would realize the potential of rational"montage"fabrication.28 Consider, as well, that as late as 1926, in an article on the properties,potentials, and technical development of glass construction, Walter Gropius linked his newly completed Bauhaus building at Dessau to Scheerbart'svision when he wrote that "glassarchitecture,which was just a poetic utopia not long ago, now becomes realityunconstrained."29 In the previousyear, van Doesburg, too, had written of the signifi13

assemblage 29

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cance of glass for bringing the new architecturalimage into harmony with the new needs and tempo of life, mentioning Gropius but singling out Loos and Kiesler in Austriaand Mies in Germany as being "among the architectswho, engrossed in the taskof their times, try to innovate architecture in essence and in construction"leading the way to a new architecturethat will be "light,open, clear and, above all, Then again, van Doesburg'sprogramfor his temporary.""3 design of the House of an Artistfor L once Rosenbergin 1923 navigateda Scheerbartianpath between Le Corbusier's purism and Taut's utopian fantasyof "alpine architecture." "Youratelier,"he writes Rosenberg, It musthavean mustbe like a glasscoveror like an emptycrystal. It mustalso a constant absolutepurity, light,a clearatmosphere. be white.The palettemustbe of glass.Yourpencil sharp,rectanfreeof dustand as clean as an operating gularand hard,always laboratakea betterlessonfromdoctors' scalpel.One can certainly The latterarecagesthatstink ateliers. toriesthanfrompainters' like sickapes. of mountains3,000 Yourateliermusthavethe cold atmosphere metershigh;eternalsnowmustlie there.Cold killsthe microbes.31 Gropius himself had collaboratedwith Taut and Behne, both before and afterthe war, had called architecture"the crystal14

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8. Corneliusvan Eesteren and Theo van Doesburg, House of an Artist, 1923, view of the model

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10. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, K VII, 1922, oil on canvas

had admired line expressionof man's noblest thoughts,"32 and enjoyed Scheerbart'swritings,"full of wisdom and He had also, beauty,"and recommended them to friends.33 in 1919, hired Lyonel Feininger as one of the firstmasters of the Bauhaus on the recommendation of Behne, who considered Feininger's paintings to be exemplaryof his conflation of cubism and Scheerbart'sutopianism, the ultimate realization of which would be architectural.While Feininger's medievalizing crystallinewoodcut for the first programof Gropius'sBauhaus is well known, it should also be noted that Feininger's crystallinepaintings and the transparent "glassarchitecture"paintings of Moholy-Nagy were displayed in the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923 together with Gropius'sprismaticblocks for industrializedhousing rendered on a Feiningeresque landscape. This show signaled the celebrated "turn"of the Bauhaus from an expressionistelementarism to the functionalist constructivismfor which it became most known (Gropius's "synthesisof art and technology"), a turn markedmost directly by the departureof Johannes Itten and the arrivalof Moholy-Nagy, who adopted the persona of the artist-asengineer as well as the cause of glass architecture. In the immediately preceding years, Moholy-Nagy had deliberately realigned his workwith KasimirMalevich's crystalline

11. Walter Gropius,project for an industriallyproduced housing settlement for the Bauhaus, Weimaram Horn, 1922, shown at the first Bauhausexhibition, Weimar, 1923

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suprematistpaintings, on the one hand, and Behne's programmaticwritingsfor a future cubist glass architecture, on the other. Beginning with the painting titled Glass which firstappearedon the front page of the Architecture, celebratoryissue of MA (1 May 1922), Moholy developed a distinctive preoccupation with transparencyinvolving a complicated play of planes showing through one another, first in paintings, then photograms,lithographs,photographs,photocollages, stage sets, and films, as well as in his Light-SpaceModulatorof 1922-30.34 In 1929, Moholy concluded the summarystatement of his Bauhaus pedawith a portraitof the gogy, Von Material zu Architektur, This "architecture." dematerialized transparent emergent series of images includes the same close-up of the Bauhaus at Dessau that Gropius had used for his 1926 "Glasbau" article and culminates in a negative multiple-exposure photographby Jan Kamman of the Van Nelle Factoryin Rotterdam(Brinkmann& van der Vlugt, architects),which Moholy describes as "the illusion of spatial interpenetra-

tion, such as only the next generation will possibly experience in reality - as glass architecture.""35 According to OskarSchlemmer, the influence of Berlin dada on Gropius'sturn in 1923 should also not be disregarded;36 nor, we might add, should van Doesburg'salter ego as a dadaist,nor the enthusiasm of the entire dada circle for Scheerbart.The dadaists,too, had admired Scheerbart'swritings, having formed themselves as a separategroup out of the milieu of HerwathWalden's magazine Der Sturm,which had consistentlybrought Scheerbart'swritingsto the artistic community of Berlin before and during the war. In fact, the dadaistsconsidered themselves to be the "diaperedchildren" of a new age and Scheerbartto be their spiritualfather.37 Hannah Hach had an extensive Scheerbartlibrary.Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baaderrenamed the Club Dada in March 1919 in homage to Scheerbartas the Club zur blauen Milchstrasse.The philosophers most associatedwith dada, Anselm Ruest and Salomo Friedlinder, contributed consider-

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tioned againstthe misinterpretationof Scheerbartby expressionist architects,signaling a posthumanistline of researchin the direction of Benjamin's later readingsof dada and glass By 1920 Raoul Hausmann'sconception of the architecture.39 New Man shifted from puppets to engineers as he began to portrayconstructorsand technical drawings,practicalityand conventionality as a means to achieve a "synthesisof spirit In his "In and matter,"which he called "Pr6sentismus."40 Praise of the Conventional" of 1922 he opposed the fantasyof with "the fantasyof the technician, the constructor "artistes" of machines ... the scientific experimentor... the watchmaker, welder or locomotive engineer."41

Poverty
In Benjamin's essay of 1933, "Experienceand Poverty," glass architectureassumes the characteristicsof a revolutionary surface for a new subjectivity- an austere and slick surface on which it is hard to leave traces, accumulate commodities, or form habits.42 It becomes a metaphor, perhapsan instrument, for Benjamin seeking to think the possibilityof beginning again at the beginning, as a potential of the catastrophic yet cleansing devastationof something like a war. The promise of modernity, for Benjamin, writing on the eve of Hitler's proclamation of the Third Reich, is to be found, paradoxically, in the most abhorrentmanifestationsof inhumanity, in the impoverishmentof experience brought on by the development of technology. With the prospect of war once again on everyone'slips, Benjamin chose to revisitthe experience of the Great War:the firstwar of technology and the war that was to end all wars. He did so in orderto argue that this "monstrousunfolding of technology,"with its capacity to destroyentire cities and erase all traces of the past, has brought to mankind "a wholly new impoverishment,"a kind of barbarismwhose destructivenesshad a positive moment, eliminating "the dreadfulmishmash of styles and worldviews in the last century"to create a tabula rasaon which humanity is once more free of "human experience in general,"able to begin living again at the beginning. Where the expressionists had sought, afterthe devastationof World War I, to renew the bourgeois ideal of organic and transcendentalexperience, Benjamin took this unprecedented destructionas an opening for the workingmasses to be liberated from experience alto-

13. Raoul Hausmann, Jelz6illom.s (Fantastic architecture), 1919, published in MA 7, nos. 5-6 (1922)

ably to the interest in Scheerbartafterthe war. Even the "dadaarchitect"Ludwig Hilberseimer wrote about him. While the expressionistshad invested their hope for the renewal of organic wholeness in the figure of the New Man, whose deep inwardnesswas to provide the strength for a reconciliation with a troubled, fragmented,and uncertain modern world, the dadaistsrejected such transcendental and intoxicating subjectivityand reworkedthe New Man into an inorganic, historicallyand materiallycontingent figure who "carriespandemonium within himself.., for or In photocollages, against which no one can do anything.""38 and constructive montages, assemblages techniques developed in opposition to the media of painting and sculpture - they portrayedthe new subjectivityas internalizing contradiction (rationality-fantasy; and living order-disorder) the of a born of nature but paradox through technology cast And it. recast themseemingly against playfully,they selves into fictional personae to reenact satiricallyand critically the relationship of self to the structuresof society and culture. As early as September 1919, Hilberseimer cau-

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gether, from preconceived cultural ideals, as a child longs to be freed of the received "experience"of adults. These children of modernity"yearnfor an environment in which they can bring their poverty - the outwardand ultimately their inwardimpoverishmentas well - to such a pure and clear validitythat something decent will come out of it." Thus the erasureof "experience"(Erfahrung)as something passed on had become necessaryfor the possibilityof "experience" (Erblebnis)as something lived - the elimination of But, for Benjamin, historyfor the openness of historicity.43 in effort to restore the any experience organic sense remains under conditions of the problematic capitalismwhose them to the myth-makingapparatussimply appropriates service of a false naturalism,concealing the disquieting truthsabout capitalism in the process, just as the auratic experience of objects has been corrupted.Without relinquishing hope for the returnof experience, organicity,and aura, but also without pretense to depict it or create it, Benjamin adopted a radicallyantiorganicperspectiveaimed at workingthrough the problematicsof capitalism, industry and the technological environment that they were producing. As he indicates in the notes for the ArcadesProject, "The redemption of an epoch assumes the structureof an awakening, thoroughlygoverned by artifice. Only with artifice, and not without it, do we free ourselvesfrom the realm of dreams."44 Passing in his text from the battlefield to modern architecture, Benjamin proposesa kind of "traceless" living in a technologized environment that had realized itself fully, that is, transparently, its physiognomyno longer deformed to harboringsecrets. This image of glass links destruction and construction indissolublyand drawstogether the houses of modern architecture,a poem by Bertolt Brecht, and portraitsof a new posthumanistsubject figured interengineers, and prolechangeably as children, barbarians, tariat.Citing the refrain,"Erasethe traces!"from the firstof Brecht'spoems in From a Readerfor Those Who Live in Cities of 1930, Benjamin writes, "Thatwas something for which Scheerbartwith his glass and the Bauhaus with its steel have opened the way:they have created spaces in - spaces that, together which it is difficult to leave traces"45

with telescopes, airplanes,and rockets,were the precondition for transformingthe humanity of the past into "new creatures, worthyof notice and affection."Brecht'spoem providesa vivid image of a keen desire to escape bourgeois subjectivity. In order not to be caught, controlled, or denounced in the modern metropolis of industrialcapitalism, in orderto slip past the codification of identity by friends, parents,habits, repeatedthoughts, and photographsBrecht suggeststaking cues from how the fugitive erasesthe traces of his life. If you meetyourparents in Hamburg or elsewhere Passthem like strangers, turnthe corner,don'trecognizethem Pull the hat theygaveyou overyourface, and Do not, o do not, showyourface Rather Erasethe traces! Whatever you say,don'tsayit twice If you findyourideasin anyoneelse, disownthem. The manwho hasn'tsignedanything, who has left no picture Who wasnot there,who saidnothing: Howcan theycatchhim? Erasethe traces!46 In his essayon the impoverishedpoet of the Second Empire in Paris,Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin elaboratesthe problem of the bourgeoisie whose social system extends control ever further,promptingthem to seek refuge in the privacyof their homes, where they become asocial and constitutionally resistantto control. For Baudelaire, however, the interior providesno refuge. Fleeing his creditors,he roves about continuously in the city that had long since ceased to be home to the leisurely flaneur.47 For Benjamin's revolutionarysubjects, erasing one's traces could become a paradigmaticform of resistingthe growing networkof social controls and, at the same time, playing at a modernityyet to come, just as children playing a game will alwaysbegin again at the beginning as if for the firsttime.48 The bourgeois citizen, by contrast, encased in the domestic interiorwith its accumulation of knick-knacks and habits, like the commodity whose utility is shrouded by myth, remained burdened with the hidden secrets of capitalistexploitation:alienation, poverty,and the maniacal empathy of commodities. Benjamin's reworkingof Scheerbart'sharmonious utopia into an image of glass as

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living without traces offershope for workingthrough these problematicsat precisely the moment when the optimism of the Weimar republic, in its architectureas in its politics, was eclipsed by the rise of fascism. From the dadaiststo Brecht via the elementarism identified in G, Benjamin takes us into a milieu in which the tracelessnessof the fugitive becomes an image for a groundless ground on which collective dreams pass into realityfree of the resistanceof history,culture, and matter.

4:!W

Traces
In addition to nurturingthe phantasmagoriaof commodity fetishism, fashion, and entertainment, what interestedBenjamin about the Parisianarcadeswas that in them iron - a fully artificialbuilding material - made its appearancefor the firsttime in the historyof architecture,having been developed in greenhouses, workshops,and industrialstructures. It was through the "functionalnature"of iron that the constructiveprinciple began its domination of architecture,"markingthe shift within it from art to engineering, decoratorto constructor,representationto presentation - a shift that had by Benjamin's time alreadyentailed over a century of battles. For him that century was characterized by its deficientreception of technology,49 by the production of images in which the old continues to intermingle with the new, "wishfulfantasies"in which "the collective seeks both to preserveand to transfigurethe inchoateness of the social product and the deficiencies in the social system of production."These wish-fulfillingimages (which is how Freud had characterizeddreams) tend to direct the visual imagination "backto the primeval past,"thus linking their power of prophecy (for that which is to follow appearsfirst in the images of dreams)to elements from prehistory,that is, of a classless society."Intimationsof a classless society, archived in the collective unconscious, mingle with the new "to produce the utopia that has left its traces in thousands of configurationsof life, from permanent buildings to fleeting fashions.'"50 While the arcadeshad inspired the architecturalform of Charles Fourier'sutopian community (the phalansterywas imagined to be a city of arcades), Benjamin emphasizes
14. Passage du Caire, Paris,as published in Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk

that Fourier'sutopia was a "reactionary modification"of the arcades into dwellings:simply "the colourful idyll of Biedermeier"inserted into the austere, formal world of the Empire - a clear demonstrationof how images in the collective consciousness intermix old and new. Benjamin's conception of the dream-consciousnessof the collective revolves around the problems and potentials that such interminglings pose for the passagefrom the prehistoryof modernityto a fully revolutionarystate of redemption - to the returnof that origins, of prehistoryin its other sense as Ur-history, where leaves no For traces. the dream likewise paradise living has a double sense, referringnot only to utopias but also to the historical nightmare of capitalism from which it is necessaryto awaken. For Benjamin, its essence is not any latent meaning or idealist form, but rather,is constituted by the dreamwork. While Benjamin seems in some ways to concur with Max Weber's analysisof how Enlightenment rationality had "disenchanted"the world, he also recognizes that the modern world is not yet free of myth, for things produced as commodities under the conditions of alienated labor are enveloped by false mythologies, evident in advertisements, fashion, and architecture:"Capitalismis a naturalphenomenon with which a new dream-sleepcame over Europe, and in it, a reactivationof mythic powers."5' These myths, as Georg Lukics had pointed out, gave the world of reified com-

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modities the appearanceand statusof "nature"- a second To nature that occluded the original as it exploited it.52 awakenfrom the bad dream of capitalistphantasmagoria, to dissolve mythology into the space of historywas Benjamin's primarymotive for the ArcadesProject, which he thought of - in terms similar to the workof dreamsand dream analysis - as his Passagenarbeit,or work of passage.53 The historical materialistin Benjamin considered awakenand thought that while utopian ing to occur in stages54 projectionssuch as those of Fourier or Scheerbart,as well as the workof architects,would necessarilyremain deficient manifestationsof the utopian impulse - the pulse of the originarystrugglingto free itself from history - they could, nevertheless,be understoodas moving in the direction of such freedom through history(towardthe Now of recognizability),through developments in the forces of production that - without forethought,let alone overt politics - "reducedthe wish symbols of the previous centuryto rubble even before the monuments representing them had crumbled."This development of the forces of production in the nineteenth century had formsfromart,as the sciences[had] constructive emancipated in the sixteenth. Architecture fromphilosophy freedthemselves of The reproduction makesa startas constructional engineering. itselfto creationprepares follows.Fantasy naturein photography is subjectto art.Literature as commercial becomepractical in the feuilleton.55 montage In every sphere, the naturalistconventions of bourgeois art were displaced by the paradigmof technology and construction.And it was construction that in the nineteenth century served the role of the subconscious, as Benjamin quotes from Giedion's Bauen in Frankreich.56To be more precise, Benjamin's citation from Giedion should be read with his commentary in the ArcadesProject where he attempts to reworkGiedion's thesis as follows: "Shouldn'tone rathersubstitute [forthe unconscious]: 'the role of the bodily processes'on which 'artistic'architecturewould then lie like dreamssupportedby the scaffoldingof physiological Construction - bauen - then, as a kind of processes?"57 direct bodily production of labor, a potentially unmediated, collective physiological event in which dream-conscious-

ness comes to realizationas "tracesin thousands of configurations of life." Construction whose rationalityprogressively whose physiognomybecomes inapproachestransparency, an index of necessarymaterialand social causes, as creasingly in the of production, pursuingtheir own forces developments technical logic, bring about the ruination of bourgeois culture and society. "Itis," Benjamin writes, "the peculiar prop(as erty of technical forms [technischeGestaltungsformen] that their progress opposed to artisticforms [Kunstformen]) and their success are proportionateto the transparencyof their social content. (Whence glass architecture.)""8And elsewhere, "One can formulate the problem for the new art this way:When and how will the form worlds of the mechanical, in film, in the building of machines, in the new physics, etc., rise up without our help and overwhelm us, make us aware of that which is naturalabout it?"59 Benjamin describes the arcadesand bourgeois interiors,the exhibitions and panoramasof the nineteenth century as the "residuesof a dream world"at the beginning of the bourgeois epoch, as productsof bourgeois class consciousness. They became a focus of his study, for in them he thought it was possible to glimpse the true face of prehistory."Forus," he notes, "the enticing and threateningface of prehistory [Urgeschichte]becomes clear in the beginnings of technology, in the dwelling style of the nineteenth century;in that which lies closer to our time, it has not yet revealed itself."60 In the thousands of configurationsof life, in the technology and dwelling style of his own time - in other words, in the residues of the collective dreamworldat the beginning of the proletarianepoch, at the beginning of the epoch of modern architecture - prehistoryhad not yet revealed itself.

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Notes
1. The letter from Walter Benjamin to Sigfried Giedion, 15 February 1929 is published in Sokratis Georgiadis'sintroduction to the English edition of Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich: Bauen in Eisen. Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig and Berlin: Klinkhardt& Biermann, 1928), trans. J. Duncan Berryas Building in France:Building in Iron, Building in Concrete (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the Study of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 53. 2. See Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Eisenbauten (Esslingen: Paul Neff, 1907). 3. Walter Benjamin, "Bticher, die lebendig geblieben sind," in Gesammelte Schriften (hereafter CS), 6 vols. (Frankfurtam Main: SuhrkampVerlag, 1972-), 3:170 (my translationunless otherwise noted). 4. Giedion, Building in France, 167. 5. Ibid., 169. 6. Benjamin copied the beginning of this citation in his notes for the Arcades Project. See Walter BenCS 5: jamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 533 (M 3a, 3). 7. Paul Scheerbart,Glass Architecture, trans. James Palmes (New York:Praeger, 1972), 74. Several authors have explored Benjamin's reception of Scheerbart, most notably, Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin'sPassages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholso (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995), chap. 6, "GlassArchitecture," 147-72; John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomiesof Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chap. 4, "Owning Up to the

Povertyof Experience: Benjamin and Weimar Modernism," 156205; and Hubert Bir, Natur und Gesellschaft bei Scheerbart: Genese und Implikationeneiner Kulturutopie(Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag, 1972). See also Detlef Mertins, "Playingat Modernity," in Toys and the Modernist Tradition (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1993), 7-16. It was Gershom Scholem who introduced Benjamin to Scheerbart on the occasion of Benjamin's wedding to Dora Sophie Kellner in 1917. Scholem recounts, "I was a great admirer and collector of the writings of Paul Scheerbart, and as a wedding present I gave them my favorite books, Scheerbart'sutopian novel Lesabendio, which is set on the planetoid Pallas and, with Alfred Kubin's drawings,presents a world in which the 'essential' human qualities have undergone complete transformation.This was the beginning of Benjamin's conversion to Scheerbart;three years later he made this book the subject of a major essay, 'Der wahre Politiker' [The true politician], which unfortunately has not been preserved" (Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Storyof a Friendship [New York:Schocken Books,

York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1978),177-92;"DerSurrealismus: Die letzteMomentaufnahme der in GS 2: europaischen Intelligenz," (1) 295-310. 11. Ibid.,189.

38). 1981],

8. Scheerbart,Glass Architecture, 137 (my translationfrom the German edition, Glasarchitektur [Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1971]). 9. Ibid., 25. 10. Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,"in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,Autobiographical Writings,ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New

York:Praeger,1960), Kenneth A Frampton,ModernArchitecture: Critical History(London:Thames & Hudson, 1980), and William Curtis, ModernArchitecture since 1900 (Oxford:Phaidon, 1982), have been consistentwith the more specialized 12. Ibid. treatmentsof Bruno Taut by Gustav Pehnt, RosemaryHaag Bletter,and 13. Anthony Vidlerhaspointedto lain BoydWhyte, all of which stress the complexrelationship between the link between Scheerbartand thisimageof Benjamin's andthat Taut. While Whyte'sBrunoTaut and for offered by Bretonin Nadja:"As the Architecture of Activism(Camme, I continueto inhabit myglass bridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, house,whereone can see at every 1982) acknowledgesthe dadaists'adhourwho is comingto visitme, whereeverything thatis suspended mirationof Scheerbart(p. 180), this fromthe ceilingsandwallsholdson receives only minor mention. SimiwhereI rest as if by enchantment, larly, Regine Prange'srecent Das Bruno at nighton a bed of glasswithglass Kristallineals Kunstsymbol: sheets,wherewhoI am will appear Taut und Paul Klee (Hildescheim: to me, sooneror later,engraved on Georg Olms, 1991) does not discuss dada, but providesa referenceto a diamond." See Anthony Vidler, in The ArchitecLudwig Hilberseimer'sessayon "Transparency," Scheerbart(see note 39 below). turalUncanny: in theModEssays ernUnhomely Mass.: 24. See Rosemarie Haag Bletter, (Cambridge, The MITPress,1992),218. "Paul Scheerbartand Expressionist Architecture,"VIA 8 (1986): 12714. Benjamin, "Surrealism," 180, 35, as well as her more extended 181, 189. treatment in Bruno Taut and Paul 15. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Scheerbart'sVision: Utopian Aspects CS 5:573 (N la, 5). Architecof German Expressionist ture (Ph.D. diss., Columbia 16. Ibid.,580 (N 4, 1). University, 1973). Scheerbart's 17. FranzRoh,Nachcorrespondence with Taut from Expressionismus. Magischer December 1913 to February 1914 Realismus: Probleme derneuesten is published in Paul Scheerbart, Malerei Europaischen (Leipzig: 70 Trillionen Weltgrisse: Eine Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925),46. Biographie in Briefen 1889-1915, 18. Meyer, Eisenbauten, 48, 4. ed. Mechthild Rausch (Berlin: Argon, 1992), 458-68. 19. Giedion,Building in France, 25. Adolf Behne, Die Wiederkehr 83, 77. der Kunst (Berlin: KurtWolff 20. Meyer, 54, 153. Eisenbauten, Verlag, 1919). 21. Scheerbart, ClassArchitecture, 26. See Walter Benjamin, "Karl 44, 47, 66, 73. in Reflections,239-73; CS Krauss," 22. Ibid.,72. 2: (1) 334-67.

23. Many historical includsurveys, andDeBanham, ingReyner Theory Machine signin theFirst Age(New

27. Walter Benjamin, "Paul Scheerbart:Lesab6ndio,"in CS 2:

(2) 618-20.

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28. C: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung - HerausgeberHans Richter 1923-1926, ed. Marion von Hofacker (Munich: Der Kern, 1986). Cf. Werner Griff, "Oberdie sogenannteG-Gruppe,"Werkund Zeit 11 (1962): 3-5; idem, "Concerning the So-called G Group," with introduction by Howard Dearstyne,Art Journal23, no. 3 (Spring 1964): 280-82; and Raoul Hausmann, "More on Group 'G'," Art Journal24, no. 4 (Summer 1965): 350-51. See also Hans Richter, "Dr. Walter Benjamin," in K6pfeund Hinterk6pfe(Zurich: Der Arche, 1967), 87-88. 29. Walter Gropius, "Glasbau," Die Bauzeitung 23 (1926): 20, 15962; reprinted in HartmutProbstand Christian Schidlich, eds., Walter Gropius, vol. 3, Ausgewaiihlte Schriften (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1988), 103-6. 30. Theo van Doesburg, "Vernieuwingspogingender Ooostenrijksche en Duitsche architectuur,"Het Bouwbedrijf2, no. 6 (June 1925): 225-27; idem, "The Significance of Glass: Toward TransparentStructures,"in Theo van Doesburg on EuropeanArchitecture:Complete Essays fromHet Bouwbedrijf1924-31, trans. Charlotte I. Loeb and ArthurL. Leob (Basel: Birkhiuser, 1990), 63-69. 31. Quoted in A. Elzas, "Theo van Doesburg,"De 8 en Opbouw 6 (1935): 174; cited by Nancy Troy, The De Stijl Environment(Cambridge, Mass.:The MIT Press, 1983), 106 (her translation). 32. Walter Gropius in an untitled pamphlet on the occasion of the Exhibition for Unknown Architects organized by the Arbeitsrat ffir Kunst in 1919. 33. Letter from Walter Gropius to Hermann Finsterlin, 17 April 1919;

cited in Marcel Fransciscono, Walter Gropiusand the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar:The Ideals and ArtisticTheoriesof its Founding Years(Chicago: Universityof Illinois, 1971), 124, 156. 34. For a fuller account of Moholy-Nagy'srelationshipto the disembodied utopia of Adolf Behne and the work of his "glass architecture period,"see Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), 22-27. 35. Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (1929; reprint, Mainz: Florian Kupferberg,1968), 236. The captions read "Walter Gropius 1926: The Bauhaus in Dessau";"Constructionof the skeleton for a planetarium of the Zeiss Works:A new phase in grasping space: a formation of people in a suspended transparentnet, like a formation of airplanes in the From ether";and "'Architecture': two superimposed photographs (negative) emerges an illusion of spatial interpenetration,such as only the next generation will possibly experience in reality - as glass architecture." 36. Oskar Schlemmer, "The Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar, 1923," in Hans. M. Wingler, The BauhaHus: Weimar,Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, trans.Wolfgang Jabsand Basil Gilbert (Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 1969), 65-66. 37. For an account of Club Dada as a "Scheerbart society,"see Hanne Bergius,Das Lachen Dadas: Die BerlinerDadaisten und ihre Aktionen(Giessen:AnabasVerlag, 1989), 42-47. Much of this confusion stems from the ambiguityof as an arthistorical "expressionism" category,which Paul Fechner's book Der Expressionismus (Munich: R. Piper, 1914) broughtinto usage

to designatea broadarrayof modern painting, distinguishedonly from cubism and futurism.Thus, when HerwathWalden called Scheerbart "the firstexpressionist" (see "Paul Der Sturm6 [1915]: Scheerbart," 96), he establisheda line of interpretation that remainedunaffectedby the subsequentformationof Berlin dadaand its claim to the legacy of Scheerbart. 38. Richard Huelsenbeck, "Der neue Mensch," Neue Jugend 1 (1917): 2. 39. Ludwig Hilberseimer, "Paul Scheerbartund die Architekten," Das Kunstblatt3, no. 9 (September 1919): 271-73. In his review of ArthurKorn'sClas im Bau und als of 1926 and Cebrauchsgegenstand KonradWerner Schulze's Clas in derArchitektur der Cegenwartof 1929, Hilberseimer reiteratedhis rationalistinterpretationof Scheerbart'svisionaryutopia and claimed that it had anticipated the widespreaduse of construction in glass by the late 1920s. See Ludwig Hilberseimer, "GlasArchitektur," Die Form (1929): 521-22. Posthumanism in architecturewas first identified and analyzed by K. Michael Hays, Modernismand the PosthumanistSubject:The Architecture of Hannes Meyerand Ludwig Hilberseimer(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992). 40. Raoul Hausmann, in Raoul "Pr6sentismus," Hausmann: Texte bis 1933, ed. Michael Erlhoff (Munich: Texte + Kritik,1982), 2: 25-26. 41. Raoul Hausmann, "Lob des Konventionellen," in ibid., 49. 42. Walter Benjamin, "Erfahrung und Armut,"in CS 2: (1) 213-19. 43. At the same time, Benjamin insists consistently on the concrete-

ness of historicity, explaining in the that what distinPassagen-Werk guishes his notion of images from "the 'essences' of phenomenology is their historic index (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue historyfor phenomenology abstractly,through 'historicity.')"(CS 5: [N 3, 1]). 44. Ibid., 234 (G 1, 7). 45. Benjamin, "Erfahrungund Armut,"217. 46. Bertolt Brecht, "Ten Poems from a Readerfor Those Who Live in Cities," in BertoltBrechtPoems, ed. John Willett and Ralph Mannheim (London: Eyre Methuen Ltd., 1976), 131-50; Bertolt Brecht, "Ausdem Lesebuch ftir Stidtebewohner," in Versuche,vol. 2 (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1930). 47. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire:A LyricPoet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. HarryZohn (London: Verso, 1976), 47; GS 1: (2) 511-604. 48. Ibid. For a fuller treatment of Benjamin's writingson toys, play, and new beginnings, see Mertins, "Playing at Modernity." 49. See, for instance, Walter Benjamin, "EduardFuchs, Collector and Historian,"in One-WayStreet and Other Writings,trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kinsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 358. 50. Walter Benjamin, "Paris,Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in Reflections, 147-48; "Paris,die Hauptin CS stadtdes XIX. Jahrhunderts," 5: 45-60.

CS 5:494(Kla, 8).

51. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk,

52. Georg Lukaics,"Reificationand the Consciousness of the Proletariat," in Historyand Class Consciousness (1922; Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1971).

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53. Richard Sieburth makes the distinction between Passagenwerk and Passagenarbeitin "Benjamin the Scrivener,"in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics,History,ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1983), 26. 54. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, CS 5: 490 (K 1, 1). 55. Benjamin, "Surrealism,"161. 56. Giedion, Building in France, 3. 57. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, CS 5: 494 (K la, 9). 58. Ibid., 581 (N 4, 6). Walter Benjamin, "N [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]," in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), 58. 59. Ibid., 500 (K 3a, 2). 60. Ibid., 496 (K 2a, 1).

Material zu Architektur (Mainz: Florian Kupferberg,1968). 14. Photographby Germaine Krull. From Walter Benjamin, Cesammelte Schriften,vol. 5, Das (Frankfurtam Main: Passagen-Werk SuhrkampVerlag, 1982).

Figure Credits
1, 3, 7, 13. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. 2. Getty Center for the Historyof Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica. 4. Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris. 5. Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur (Folkwang: Hosenic, 1919). 6. Jahrbuchdes Deutschen Werkbundes,1915. 8. L'Architecture vivante 2 (1925). 9. National Gallery of Art, Washington. 10. Tate Gallery, London. 11. Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin. 12. Photographsby Gotthard Itting, Schottwerke, and Jan Kamman. From L~iszl6Moholy-Nagy, Von

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