Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

but for this gesture. In his analyses of specific artworks—his particular interest was modern literature and serious music—the p ...

191 sible revolutionary social developments. He also does not share Benjamin’s belief in the progressive character of the new re ...

that determine their condition. In Adorno’s opinion one can speak of a Verblen- dungszusammenhang—people are blinded by the idea ...

193 ity is of course much more complicated. It is statements of this kind that have led Adorno’s critics to accuse him of being ...

For Heidegger the Greek temple is an appropriate vehicle for clarifying his ideas on art precisely because mimesis in the sense ...

195 tending to be another, and that results in confusion and a disguising of truth. For the same reason actors are also not welc ...

explore the theme of mimesis in any depth—he apparently understands it in a Pla- tonic sense and sees mimesis as a secondary fig ...

197 Greek) and the problem of the proper (oikeios) is self-evident. According to Wigley, it has everything to do with the fact t ...

fectly. The dream of a perfect autonomy is constantly threatened by the confusing plurality that mimesis represents. It is, in o ...

199 verting every intentional critical reaction into an impulse that supports the system through the game of fashion.^107 But ev ...

the design process at which an architect is purely and simply occupied with archi- tecture—with giving form to space. In the few ...

201 art and the associating of its critical character with its artistic content has often only served as an ideological mask for ...

4 Architecture as Critique of Modernity 87 86 Daniel Libeskind, extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum, ground- f ...

203 As visitors follow the zigzag pattern through the museum as dictated by the layout of the building, they are re- peatedly co ...

4 Architecture as Critique of Modernity 90 89 Daniel Libeskind, extension of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum, undergrou ...

205 present. This suggests that the building is subordinate to the old Berlin Museum, a suggestion that is straightaway contradi ...

an endless list of names, dates of birth, and presumed dates and places of death. Fi- nally, there is a fourth theme—Benjamin’s ...

207 of the new museum. Unlike a classi- cal site layout plan, what is involved here is not any rational explanation based on the ...

in history, a hole that swallows up all rhetoric of progress, but which is invisible to the naked eye. This invisibility is tran ...

209 doesn’t form a “monument” to the Holocaust—a monument with a clearly defined fixed meaning that may give our memories an exc ...