Without Pictorial Detour: Benjamin, Mies and the Architectural Image

Authors

  • Lutz Robbers RWTH Aachen University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.10.1.976

Abstract

It can be argued that architectural knowledge was of crucial importance to Walter Benjamin for elaborating his version of an anthropological historical materialism. Between 1929 and 1931 he encounters two publications on architectural history which had a decisive impact on his ensuing works: Sigfried Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928) and Carl Linfert’s Die Grundlagen der Architekturzeichnung (1931). It can be argued that both works played a role in affirming, if not developing his historical method of awakening the dreaming collective into a ‘now of recognisability,’ a method which one can argue is based on a specific image-based epistemology. Especially the architectural image, whether in the form of a printed drawing, photographic illustration, or an actual built object, appears to have been crucial for placing the history of media technologies (architecture being one of these media) in a constellation with the ‘archaic symbol-worlds of mythologies.’ If architecture is, as Benjamin claims in his initial notes for The Arcades Project, ‘the most important testimony to latent “mythology,”’ the architectural image might very well be the agent that causes the moment of awakening, the instance when a constellation between technology and ancient symbol worlds is formed. In the second part of this essay, I will attempt to elaborate such a designation for the specificity of the architectural image by analysing a number of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s drawings and collages from the 1920s as architectural images in the Benjaminian sense.

Author Biography

Lutz Robbers, RWTH Aachen University

Lutz Robbers holds a Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. He has taught at the RWTH Aachen, the Bauhaus-University Weimar, Columbia University and Princeton and has held research positions at the IKKM Weimar, the London School of Economics’ ‘Cities Programme’ and the German Forum of Art History in Paris. He serves as managing editor of the journal Candide – Journal for Architectural Knowledge. Ross Lipton was recently rewarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship Grant to study at the IFK (Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften) in Austria for the 2016/2017 academic year.

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Published

2016-04-18

Issue

Issue # 18 | Spring / Summer 2016 | Constellation of Awakening: Benjamin and Architecture

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Article

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