Architecture Post Mortem by Brott Simone Dr Bertolini David Dr Kunze Donald Professor & David Bertolin & Simone Brott

Author:Brott, Simone, Dr, Bertolini, David, Dr, Kunze, Donald, Professor & David Bertolin & Simone Brott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

7

Progress: Re-Building the Ruins of Architecture

Gevork Hartoonian

PAST PERFECT

In a letter dated February 1929, Walter Benjamin acknowledged the receipt of Sigfried Giedion’s book, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (1928), praising the historian’s intellectual capacity for “uncovering the tradition by observing the present.”1 For Benjamin, the business of criticism was a kind of “excavation” in the sense of “mining—taking something out of the earth—but in this case, more accurately, also ‘bringing to light’….”2 The word “uncovering” endows Giedion with the skills of an archaeologist, a person adept at recovering what is beneath the dirt, or at recovering times past, as is the case with the historian’s attempt to unpack the historicity of architecture.3 According to Benjamin, “vision” is central to the historian’s search for that which should be rescued. But what is this vision? Is it the historian’s intellect, the breadth of knowledge and information he/she has accumulated through observation and collection of facts and figures? Or is it a worldview, “the philosophy of history,” a subject Benjamin took on himself almost a decade after writing to Giedion.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to present a comprehensive reading of Walter Benjamin’s text entitled “On the Philosophy of History.”4 However, revisiting his seminal essay, I will attempt to map the architectonic implications of the idea of ruin and ruination in late capitalism. Central to my discussion is the notion of time. The temporality implied in history demands distinguishing the ruins of the past from the wreckage left by the storm of progress. Whereas the aestheticization of ruins of the past is part of humanity’s awareness of the concept of history, buildings in late capitalism immediately fall into the ruins of forgetfulness. This chapter argues that the image-oriented spectacle permeating contemporary everyday-life does two dialectically related things. Firstly, it turns architecture into a parergon supplementing the wreckage of capitalism. Secondly, having lost much of its symbolic and functional purpose, contemporary architecture cuts its umbilical cord with the Humanist totalization of themes such as monument, ruin, and ornament.

Written in the late 1930s, Benjamin’s text is a montage of fragments, each addressing issues central to his concept of history. It unpacks strategies that are central to a materialist approach to historiography; relevant to my argument here are concepts such as image, progress, and time. While these concepts are reiterated throughout Benjamin’s text, their iconological connotation can be pursued in fragment nine. The fragment starts with Gerhard Scholem’s poem entitled Greetings from the Angelus, which was composed for Benjamin’s twenty-ninth birthday. The poem was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting named Angelus Novus, a version of which Scholem had hanging in his Munich apartment. It reads:

My wing is ready for flight,

I would like to turn back.

If I stayed everliving time,

I’d still have little luck.5

This is how Benjamin pictured the angel of history: eyes wide open and wings spread, his face turned to the past where “we perceive a chain of events,” [my italic] and the angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage.

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