Publisher

Vol 10 No 1 (2016)
Issue # 18 | Spring / Summer 2016 | Constellation of Awakening: Benjamin and Architecture
In Das Passagen-Werk Benjamin cites a letter from Marx to Ruge, ‘the reform of consciousness consists solely in [...] the awakening of the world from its dream about itself.’ This idea of awakening recurs in Benjamin’s methodological considerations and his many metaphors during the final thirteen years of his life. Benjamin set himself the pedagogical task of awakening ‘the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.’ His ambition was to develop the art of citing without quotation marks, a concept intimately related to that of montage.
The importance of architectural theory for Benjamin is most evident in his last work. From his writings on Berlin childhood, his essay on Moscow and Naples, Benjamin’s interest in urban topography can be seen to develop into a full analysis of the city, by developing a method which he refers to as physiognomic and in which, inspired by contemporary surrealist practise, the method of montage becomes critical for his showing how the ‘now of recognition’ in the image opens the historical to awareness, and constitutes the reality of history. He cites Giedion and sees his own work as engaged in a similar task: ‘just as Giedion teaches us to read off the basic features of today’s architecture in the buildings erected around 1850,’ Benjamin writes, ‘we in turn would recognise today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary lost forms of that epoch.’
It was a matter of immediate concern for Benjamin to examine the secondary, the excluded. By a displacement of the angle of vision a positive element would emerge, something different from that previously signified. History is in the nuance, the dialectical contrast as revealed in Benjamin’s Parisian studies of the expressive character of the earliest industrial architecture, machines, department stores and advertisements. Nevertheless, as is clear from his note of the comment from Max Raphael’s Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, Benjamin reproaches Marx for not having advanced along this way in the full measure of the possibilities of historical materialism.
Issue's editors: Patrick Healy and Andrej Radman

Vol 10 No 1 (2016)
Issue # 18 | Spring / Summer 2016 | Constellation of Awakening: Benjamin and Architecture
In Das Passagen-Werk Benjamin cites a letter from Marx to Ruge, ‘the reform of consciousness consists solely in [...] the awakening of the world from its dream about itself.’ This idea of awakening recurs in Benjamin’s methodological considerations and his many metaphors during the final thirteen years of his life. Benjamin set himself the pedagogical task of awakening ‘the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.’ His ambition was to develop the art of citing without quotation marks, a concept intimately related to that of montage.
The importance of architectural theory for Benjamin is most evident in his last work. From his writings on Berlin childhood, his essay on Moscow and Naples, Benjamin’s interest in urban topography can be seen to develop into a full analysis of the city, by developing a method which he refers to as physiognomic and in which, inspired by contemporary surrealist practise, the method of montage becomes critical for his showing how the ‘now of recognition’ in the image opens the historical to awareness, and constitutes the reality of history. He cites Giedion and sees his own work as engaged in a similar task: ‘just as Giedion teaches us to read off the basic features of today’s architecture in the buildings erected around 1850,’ Benjamin writes, ‘we in turn would recognise today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary lost forms of that epoch.’
It was a matter of immediate concern for Benjamin to examine the secondary, the excluded. By a displacement of the angle of vision a positive element would emerge, something different from that previously signified. History is in the nuance, the dialectical contrast as revealed in Benjamin’s Parisian studies of the expressive character of the earliest industrial architecture, machines, department stores and advertisements. Nevertheless, as is clear from his note of the comment from Max Raphael’s Proudhon, Marx, Picasso, Benjamin reproaches Marx for not having advanced along this way in the full measure of the possibilities of historical materialism.
Issue's editors: Patrick Healy and Andrej Radman
Editorial
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Footprint 18 investigates the following issues: what Benjamin understands by the ‘constellation of awakening’, how he conceptualises ‘dialectical images’, his deployment of montage, his refusal of a conception of either progress or decline, and his undertaking to show that the images belong not only to a particular time but attain legibility only at a particular time. Famously, according to Benjamin, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. With regard to the architectural theory Benjamin engaged directly with the tectonic tradition, especially the work of Bötticher. He posited the tectonic unconscious and the deployment of optical instruments as crucial for understanding the development which architecture carried from the luxus capitalist forms of commodity. In light of technical innovations in iron and glass, it expressed a form of projective dream work of the architectural around material realisations as products of the industrial revolution, with long consequences for the future.
Footprint 18 investigates the following issues: what Benjamin understands by the ‘constellation of awakening’, how he conceptualises ‘dialectical images’, his deployment of montage, his refusal of a conception of either progress or decline, and his undertaking to show that the images belong not only to a particular time but attain legibility only at a particular time. Famously, according to Benjamin, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. With regard to the architectural theory Benjamin engaged directly with the tectonic tradition, especially the work of Bötticher. He posited the tectonic unconscious and the deployment of optical instruments as crucial for understanding the development which architecture carried from the luxus capitalist forms of commodity. In light of technical innovations in iron and glass, it expressed a form of projective dream work of the architectural around material realisations...
Footprint 18 investigates the following issues: what Benjamin understands by the ‘constellation of awakening’, how he conceptualises ‘dialectical images’, his deployment of montage, his refusal of a conception of either progress or decline, and his undertaking to show that the images...
Patrick Healy, Andrej Radman1-10
Article
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This paper scrutinises Benjamin’s interest in the urban fabric of nineteenth century Paris, and compares it to contemporary writings on Paris and on (more generally) new forms of urbanism in the journalistic work of Joseph Roth. It argues that both authors come to terms with the modern city through a shared set of observations and concepts, particularly the concepts of ‘expressionism’, ‘physiognomy’, and ‘phantasmagoria’. The paper clarifies how Roth and other writers in (or immediately before) the 1920s developed such concepts, and how Benjamin’s The Arcades Project builds on these writers. It shows that Benjamin’s specific contribution to this body of literature is the invention of a secular mythology, with a clear application to architecture in Benjamin’s focus on the ‘boundless interiorisation’ of glass and iron construction. The paper concludes that Benjamin’s contribution to architecture is considerable when compared to the materialist orientation of his main sources in The Arcades Project (especially Boetticher and Giedion), but that the purported improvements on Benjamin’s distinguished predecessors of architectural non-materialism are by comparison less impressive.
This paper scrutinises Benjamin’s interest in the urban fabric of nineteenth century Paris, and compares it to contemporary writings on Paris and on (more generally) new forms of urbanism in the journalistic work of Joseph Roth. It argues that both authors come to terms with the modern city through a shared set of observations and concepts, particularly the concepts of ‘expressionism’, ‘physiognomy’, and ‘phantasmagoria’. The paper clarifies how Roth and other writers in (or immediately before) the 1920s developed such concepts, and how Benjamin’s The Arcades Project builds on these writers. It shows that Benjamin’s specific contribution to this body of literature is the invention of a secular mythology, with a clear application to architecture in Benjamin’s focus on the ‘boundless interiorisation’ of glass and iron construction. The paper concludes that Benjamin’s contribution to architecture is considerable when compared to the materialist...
This paper scrutinises Benjamin’s interest in the urban fabric of nineteenth century Paris, and compares it to contemporary writings on Paris and on (more generally) new forms of urbanism in the journalistic work of Joseph Roth. It argues that both authors come to terms with the modern city...
Stefan Koller11-26 -
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.
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...
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:...
Lutz Robbers27-50 -
This article presents the result of research on the influence of Walter Benjamin’s thinking in the work of Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931–1997). In present-day architectural criticism, Aldo Rossi’s oeuvre still constitutes a rich subject for discussion because of its resistance to easy pinpointing, even if Rossi himself explained his theories and methods of design on numerous occasions. In his writings, among these A Scientific Autobiography, Rossi quotes from a collection of Benjamin’s memoirs: Berlin Childhood around 1900. The architect believes that these short prose pieces express better than anything else what he himself had not been able to explain in his writing. In this paper I intend to show the poignancy of the words Rossi referred to and the implications they had on his architecture by offering close comparisons of Benjamin’s and Rossi’s autobiographical writings. In addition, this study examines how one of Rossi’s most famous architectural artefacts, the ossuary of San Cataldo cemetery at Modena, can be viewed as a coalescence of a Benjaminian thought-image, thereby fortifying the philosopher’s presence in modern architecture.
This article presents the result of research on the influence of Walter Benjamin’s thinking in the work of Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931–1997). In present-day architectural criticism, Aldo Rossi’s oeuvre still constitutes a rich subject for discussion because of its resistance to easy pinpointing, even if Rossi himself explained his theories and methods of design on numerous occasions. In his writings, among these A Scientific Autobiography, Rossi quotes from a collection of Benjamin’s memoirs: Berlin Childhood around 1900. The architect believes that these short prose pieces express better than anything else what he himself had not been able to explain in his writing. In this paper I intend to show the poignancy of the words Rossi referred to and the implications they had on his architecture by offering close comparisons of Benjamin’s and Rossi’s autobiographical writings. In addition, this study examines how one of Rossi’s most famous...
This article presents the result of research on the influence of Walter Benjamin’s thinking in the work of Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931–1997). In present-day architectural criticism, Aldo Rossi’s oeuvre still constitutes a rich subject for discussion because of its resistance to...
Jolien Paeleman51-64 -
Dialectical images are at the core of the methods suggested by two books written four decades apart yet published around the same time. The Arcades Project (first published as Das Passagen-Werk in 1981) and Delirious New York (1978) use images to critique established modes of historical interpretation. Each proposes a methodology of historical speculation based on the interpretation of fragmentary visual phenomena. Both construct alternative historical narratives about the impact of technology, mass culture and economy on the city. This essay contrasts and compares the similarities and differences between the respective authors’ treatments of the nineteenth century arcade and the Manhattan skyscraper to examine how the strategies and definitions suggested by Benjamin and Koolhaas address the function of images as tools for critical architectural analysis and knowledge.
Dialectical images are at the core of the methods suggested by two books written four decades apart yet published around the same time. The Arcades Project (first published as Das Passagen-Werk in 1981) and Delirious New York (1978) use images to critique established modes of historical interpretation. Each proposes a methodology of historical speculation based on the interpretation of fragmentary visual phenomena. Both construct alternative historical narratives about the impact of technology, mass culture and economy on the city. This essay contrasts and compares the similarities and differences between the respective authors’ treatments of the nineteenth century arcade and the Manhattan skyscraper to examine how the strategies and definitions suggested by Benjamin and Koolhaas address the function of images as tools for critical architectural analysis and knowledge.
Dialectical images are at the core of the methods suggested by two books written four decades apart yet published around the same time. The Arcades Project (first published as Das Passagen-Werk in 1981) and Delirious New York (1978) use images to critique established...
Frances Hsu65-74 -
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes the architectural expression of nineteenth century Paris as a dialectical manifestation of backwards-looking historicism and the dawn of modern industrial production (in the form of cast iron and mass produced plate glass). Yet in the same text, Benjamin refers to the dialectical image as occurring within the medium of written language. In this paper, I will first discuss the textuality of the dialectical image as it emerges from Benjamin’s discussion of allegorical and symbolic images in his Trauerspiel study and the ‘wish symbol’ in The Arcades Project. I will then discuss the ‘textual reductionism’ implicit in Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image, in which the dense pluralities of urban space are reduced to a finite script to be pieced together through Benjamin’s constructivist method of historical observation. The textuality of the dialectical image will be elaborated on by discussing it in relation to the practice of translation. This discussion will be further contextualised by discussing a cadre of German/Austrian planners and architects who attempted to translate architectural idioms between cultural identities in Kemalist Era Turkey. The article concludes with a short recapitulation on the dialectical image as both an object of scrutiny and a method of observation, one which also takes into consideration the specific historicity of the observer.
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes the architectural expression of nineteenth century Paris as a dialectical manifestation of backwards-looking historicism and the dawn of modern industrial production (in the form of cast iron and mass produced plate glass). Yet in the same text, Benjamin refers to the dialectical image as occurring within the medium of written language. In this paper, I will first discuss the textuality of the dialectical image as it emerges from Benjamin’s discussion of allegorical and symbolic images in his Trauerspiel study and the ‘wish symbol’ in The Arcades Project. I will then discuss the ‘textual reductionism’ implicit in Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image, in which the dense pluralities of urban space are reduced to a finite script to be pieced together through Benjamin’s constructivist method of historical observation. The textuality of the dialectical image will be elaborated on by...
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes the architectural expression of nineteenth century Paris as a dialectical manifestation of backwards-looking historicism and the dawn of modern industrial production (in the form of cast iron and mass produced plate glass). Yet in the...
Ross Lipton75-90 -
Walter Benjamin’s concept of historical materialism is considered as a practice of media archaeology invented through literary montage and photo philosophy. The Arcades Project that facilitated this new research methodology involving a mobile archive. The main case involving architectural theory considers how Benjamin redeployed Sigfried Giedion and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Building in France as a media environment, drawing upon its layout design, photo illustrations and textual systems. In terms of his urban writing, a reading of ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ considers how the diagram contributes to Benjamin’s archaeological methods, as a theory to generate site writing. Benjamin’s mode of media archaeology is then employed to map the arcades architecture onto the train stations and libraries in Berlin and Paris, sites that informed The Arcades Project. The final section assembles a set of citations as ‘Revolutionary Climatology’, thought-images as flashes of red lightning.
Walter Benjamin’s concept of historical materialism is considered as a practice of media archaeology invented through literary montage and photo philosophy. The Arcades Project that facilitated this new research methodology involving a mobile archive. The main case involving architectural theory considers how Benjamin redeployed Sigfried Giedion and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Building in France as a media environment, drawing upon its layout design, photo illustrations and textual systems. In terms of his urban writing, a reading of ‘A Berlin Chronicle’ considers how the diagram contributes to Benjamin’s archaeological methods, as a theory to generate site writing. Benjamin’s mode of media archaeology is then employed to map the arcades architecture onto the train stations and libraries in Berlin and Paris, sites that informed The Arcades Project. The final section assembles a set of citations as ‘Revolutionary Climatology’,...
Walter Benjamin’s concept of historical materialism is considered as a practice of media archaeology invented through literary montage and photo philosophy. The Arcades Project that facilitated this new research methodology involving a mobile archive. The main case involving...
Sarah K. Stanley91-108
Review article
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This review article argues that Benjamin’s project to construct a political explanation of the surrounding cultural world in developed capitalist societies, raised to a source of knowledge about the historical truth, finds an unmatched case of study in the contemporary ruinous urban nature of Budapest. Departing from the park of statues Memento Park, some urban features of the city are examined in the light of Benjamin’s semantics of the fragment to try to answer whether these thoughts apply to the discarded material world of our time. Could the already-there in Budapest provide a motivational basis for a reconstruction of the surrounding material world from the fragments of the past? The local phenomenon of romkocsma is addressed to wonder whether re-use of ruins could house this emancipatory potential or serve the interests of the hegemonic groups and the contemporary dominant discourse.
This review article argues that Benjamin’s project to construct a political explanation of the surrounding cultural world in developed capitalist societies, raised to a source of knowledge about the historical truth, finds an unmatched case of study in the contemporary ruinous urban nature of Budapest. Departing from the park of statues Memento Park, some urban features of the city are examined in the light of Benjamin’s semantics of the fragment to try to answer whether these thoughts apply to the discarded material world of our time. Could the already-there in Budapest provide a motivational basis for a reconstruction of the surrounding material world from the fragments of the past? The local phenomenon of romkocsma is addressed to wonder whether re-use of ruins could house this emancipatory potential or serve the interests of the hegemonic groups and the contemporary dominant discourse.
This review article argues that Benjamin’s project to construct a political explanation of the surrounding cultural world in developed capitalist societies, raised to a source of knowledge about the historical truth, finds an unmatched case of study in the contemporary ruinous urban nature...
Rodrigo Rieiro Díaz109-120 -
This review article probes a conceptual duality that can be recognized as central to two of Benjamin’s essays on cities: his essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),’ and his autobiographical text Berlin Childhood around 1900. On the one hand, Benjamin renders numerous analyses and descriptions of buildings and experiences that present themselves as absolute and internally unified, giving the impression of being autonomous and immutable. On the other hand, Benjamin interrogates objects and perceptions that present themselves as transient and in flux and are therefore experienced as contingent and incomplete. These latter objects and perceptions derive their significance from something that is inevitably external.
This review article probes a conceptual duality that can be recognized as central to two of Benjamin’s essays on cities: his essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),’ and his autobiographical text Berlin Childhood around 1900. On the one hand, Benjamin renders numerous analyses and descriptions of buildings and experiences that present themselves as absolute and internally unified, giving the impression of being autonomous and immutable. On the other hand, Benjamin interrogates objects and perceptions that present themselves as transient and in flux and are therefore experienced as contingent and incomplete. These latter objects and perceptions derive their significance from something that is inevitably external.
This review article probes a conceptual duality that can be recognized as central to two of Benjamin’s essays on cities: his essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (Exposé of 1935),’ and his autobiographical text Berlin Childhood around 1900. On the one hand,...
Stéphane Symons121-128 -
Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of his experiences of the city, specifically Paris, as a forest informs this review article in considering what conditions within the contemporary metropolis of London might reflect such an experience. Benjamin describes ‘losing oneself’ in the city as a skill that the wanderer can develop as opposed to simply getting lost. Through the direct experience of the studio, Witherford Watson Mann Architect’s proposals for the Bankside Urban Forest in south London is used as a means to explore the themes Benjamin opens up. Bankside’s ‘urban interior’ was a place we lost ourselves in the way Benjamin describes, becoming alert to a series of particular conditions that grow out of the area’s deep structure. By starting with what we encountered we developed a counter-intuitive framework for re-imagining the district’s public spaces and the life these could support. This raises the question of how we should intervene in city making within such districts. Benjamin’s metaphor challenges the conventional commercial models for developing our cities and suggests that other models need to be created.
Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of his experiences of the city, specifically Paris, as a forest informs this review article in considering what conditions within the contemporary metropolis of London might reflect such an experience. Benjamin describes ‘losing oneself’ in the city as a skill that the wanderer can develop as opposed to simply getting lost. Through the direct experience of the studio, Witherford Watson Mann Architect’s proposals for the Bankside Urban Forest in south London is used as a means to explore the themes Benjamin opens up. Bankside’s ‘urban interior’ was a place we lost ourselves in the way Benjamin describes, becoming alert to a series of particular conditions that grow out of the area’s deep structure. By starting with what we encountered we developed a counter-intuitive framework for re-imagining the district’s public spaces and the life these could support. This raises the question of how we should intervene in city making within such...
Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of his experiences of the city, specifically Paris, as a forest informs this review article in considering what conditions within the contemporary metropolis of London might reflect such an experience. Benjamin describes ‘losing oneself’ in the city as a skill...
Stephen Michael Witherford129-140