Architecture, Modernity, and Dwelling
Benjamin’s high esteem for modern architecture has to do above all with the
metaphorical qualities that he discerns in it. Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich made a
deep impression on him.^104 Giedion’s use of the terms Durchdringungand trans-
parency to describe the architecture of the New Building appealed to him consider-
ably, as did the idea that the structure played the part of the unconscious. In addition
to this, as we learn from the footnotes in the Passagenwerk, he was familiar with
Adolf Behne’s Neues Wohnen, Neues Bauenand Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme.^105 As
mentioned above, he frequently referred to Adolf Loos. In view of all this, it is some-
what surprising that he did not discuss the important activities in the field of public-
sector housing that took place in the second half of the 1920s in Germany. As far as
I know, there is not a word in his work about Das Neue Frankfurtor the activities of
Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut in Berlin. Nor does Benjamin discuss the work of
Hannes Meyer, the architect who went furthest along the road that he pointed to in
“Erfahrung und Armut.”^106 His idea about the role of architecture as the prototype of
a new sort of art reception was therefore not verified against the practice of his con-
temporaries.
What is more, the radical thesis that he argues for with reference to literature
in “The Author as Producer” is not explored in terms of its relevance for architecture.
This thesis states that the hallmark of a progressive author is not so much the sub-
jects he deals with as the way that he operates in production relations: a progressive
author is one who transforms the hierarchical relation between readers, publishers,
and writers and who educates the public in adulthood, so that the roles of reader and
writer eventually end up being interchangeable. With respect to architecture this
theme would be taken up later by Manfredo Tafuri and his colleagues of the Venice
School, but Benjamin himself did not back up this claim in any detail anywhere in
his work.
Benjamin’s attitude toward the new architecture can in the end most appro-
priately be qualified as ambivalent—here too his ambivalence is a product of the tri-
adic structure of his thought. Some passages in his work lend themselves to
interpretation as a straightforward plea for a cold and ascetic architecture, appropri-
ate to the new barbarism and therefore representing an adequate response to the
omnipresent poverty of experience. In other writings his tone is more one of mourn-
ing. When, in his essay “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” he comes to de-
scribe the bourgeois interior, with its excess of knickknacks and furnishings—the
interior that was familiar to him from his childhood^107 —he clearly betrays a nostalgia
for this nineteenth-century form of dwelling, however much that manner of dwelling
may be out-of-date and illusory. The prevailing tone here is one of the work of mourn-
ing (Trauerarbeit) that describes the withering of dwelling in order to rescue as much
as possible of those elements that recall the original paradisiacal dwelling, the
mother’s womb. Elsewhere in his work another perspective prevails that focuses at-
tention on the revolutionary potential concealed in the “decayed” form of dwelling.
3
Reflections in a Mirror