The Hieroglyphics of Space

Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis

Neil Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134638710
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

'Spatial images', wrote the German cultural theorist, Siegfried Kracauer, 'are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself.' But how exactly are these spatial images to be deciphered?
Hieroglyphics of Space addresses this question with a series of insightful essays on some of the great metropolitan centres of the world. From political interpretations to gendered analyses, from methods of mapping to filmic representations, and from studies in consumption to economic surveys, the volume offers a range of strategies for reading and experiencing the modern metropolis.

Part I

The legible metropolis

1 The metropolis as text

Otto Wagner and Vienna’s ‘Second Renaissance’

David Frisby

The metropolis as text

The notion of the city, its streets, its architecture, its populace, as a text is to be found in various forms in the work of many writers since at least the nineteenth century.¹ In particular, the conception of the city as text rests upon a number of presuppositions. Amongst these is that the city possesses features of textuality – at the basic level, a potentially decipherable constellation of signs and symbols. In its most basic form, a language is presupposed, a system of hieroglyphics. The city as text presupposes a reader or readers. Although since Baudelaire the reader has often been identified with the figure of the flâneur² (and much more rarely the flâneuse), it should be recognised that readership is stratified, partly on the basis of access to the text (mediated by power relations in the city), but certainly according to gender, social class, ethnicity, generation, etc. In turn, the city as text presupposes legibility in principle. This may not necessarily be at the present time but in the future (Walter Benjamin speaks of ‘the coming to legibility’ of the nineteenth century in our own century, for example).³ Again to follow Benjamin, legibility in principle does not exclude erroneous readings (where the object – in this case, the city as text – is ‘riddled with error’).⁴

In order to identify some of the problems and themes that emerge from the conception of the city as text, it may be fruitful to review a number of the ways in which the city as text has been discussed. The examples chosen are all associated with writers who are also concerned with the delineation of features of modernity. This is not a fortuitous connection. Rather, a case can be made for assuming that the activity of reading the city as text itself emerges out of a desire to know and to analyse that which is new in the modern metropolis. The metropolis since the mid-nineteenth century at least has been one of the crucial sites of modernity – to be explored as a result of its quantitative and qualitative transformation. The interest in reading the metropolis may be documentary, poetic, political, social, etc.

For Baudelaire, for example, the modern metropolis was the site of modernity, and associated with the transitory, fleeting and fortuitous elements of existence within it. The features of modernity within the modern metropolis require interpretation and representation – by ‘the painter of modern life’ – insofar as they are represented symbolically. When Baudelaire declares that ‘Man traverses a forest of symbols that look back at him with a familiar regard’, then this implies that although human beings have created this forest of symbols, they are not thereby necessarily immediately intelligible.⁵ Indeed, Baudelaire’s conception of modernity as the transitory, the fleeting and the fortuitous also implies the discontinuous or disintegrating experience of time as transitory, space as fleeting, and causality as replaced by the fortuitous and the arbitrary. It is the task of the painter of modern life to capture the fleeting beauty of these dimensions of metropolitan modernity that nonetheless contain elements of ‘the eternal and the immutable’.⁶

This transitory dimension of modern metropolitan experience is more broadly accentuated in Marx’s analysis of modernity, with its focus upon the revolutionary new destruction of the past, the ever new destruction of the present, and the ever same reproduction of the ‘socially necessary illusion’ of the commodity form as the barrier to a qualitatively new future.⁷ Although Marx spends too little time analysing the modern metropolis, the features of modernity that he outlines do nonetheless have relevance for reading the city as text. The destruction of the past in the metropolis is one of the central themes in the dispute surrounding the emergence of a new discipline of Städtebau in the late nineteenth century. In particular, the volumes by Camillo Sitte and Joseph Stübben published in 1889⁸ and 1890⁹ respectively are both responding – negatively in the case of Sitte – to Baron Haussmann’s earlier transformation of Paris and its ‘creative destruction’.¹⁰ The destruction of the present takes the form of the accumulation of urban capital and the necessary increasing circulation of capital and commodities in the metropolis. The destruction and reconfiguration of the built environment that is implied in these processes have important implications for the constraints imposed upon metropolitan architecture, to maximise output of units and, where appropriate, to cheapen such units (as in the rental barracks [Mietskaserne]). In turn, the commodified (and the non-commodified) built forms are also given a representative, symbolic value in material and social hieroglyphics. As Marx remarks in the context of the commodity form – but also applicable to the non-commodified built form that owes its existence to the political production and reproduction of the built form – ‘Value does not have its description branded on its forehead. Rather, it transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic.’¹¹ In terms of the discussion here, the implication is that metropolitan architecture reveals constellations of hieroglyphics that require to be read.

If Marx did not spend sufficient time on the analysis of metropolitan modernity, the same cannot be said of the early Futurists, for whom the modern city was not merely the epitome of modernity but also one of the crucial showcases of modern technology. For Marinetti, the new configuration of everyday technologies both transforms the modes in which we experience the modern metropolis and creates new sets of entities in the urban landscape that require to be read. Writing in 1913, Marinetti notes that:

Whoever today makes use of the telegraph, the telephone, the gramophone, the train, the bicycle, the motorbike, the ocean liner, the airship, the airplane, the cinema, the major daily newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world) does not think of the fact that these diverse types of communication, transport and information exercise a decisive influence upon a person’s mind.¹²

What Marinetti does not mention here in this context is the dramatic increase in the street furniture and the plethora of things, signs and other entities that are produced for the modern metropolis and the increased circulation of its traffic and its individuals. One of the tasks of the new discipline of Städtebau (city planning) was not merely to facilitate the creation of this new system of objects but also to read its significance. In a quite fundamental manner, the alignment of streets, the provisions for categories of traffic, the furniture of this street exterieur all serve to condition not merely how we perceive the city and its streets but also our bodily movement and deportment within them.¹³

It remained for others to raise some of the issues involved in reading this increasingly complex text of the modern metropolis. In his volume Spazieren in Berlin,¹⁴ Franz Hessel – with whom Benjamin had originally embarked upon writing a couple of short articles on the Parisian arcades – quite explicitly operates with a notion of the city as text to be read by the flâneur. Hessel views the activity of the flâneur as follows:

Flânerie is a kind of reading of the street, in which human faces, shop windows, cafe terraces, street cars, automobiles and trees become a wealth of equally valid letters of the alphabet that together result in words, sentences and pages of an ever-new book. Hessel, however is less interested in the syntax and semantics of the city’s signifiers than in the images themselves. Despite the dangers of flânerie, he assumes that the city as text can be read immediately by the flâneur.¹⁵

This assumption is not made by Hessel’s contemporary, Siegfried Kracauer. Trained as an architect himself, Kracauer does not merely relate to the city as text, as a labyrinth of often fragmentary signs, but also raises the problem of deciphering the metropolitan text as a constellation of images. The city as text must be read in such a way as to uncover or reveal what is hidden. For Kracauer, ‘spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image is deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself.’¹⁶ Elsewhere, Kracauer distinguishes two types of spatial images that are to be deciphered. The fact is ‘consciously formed’ and to be found in plans and guidebooks. The second are ‘fortuitous creations’ – configurations of buildings, streets and figures which the individual confronts.¹⁷ Both contribute in different ways to our knowledge of the city, although it is the second type that is merely likely to reveal ‘the basis of social reality’. This knowledge is not directly available but mediated through the images themselves: ‘Knowledge of cities is bound up with the deciphering of their dream-like expressive images.’¹⁸ In a more positivistic reading of the city, Wagner’s critique of historicist façades led him to denounce their ‘dream’ as ‘a lie’.

The city as dream ‘text’ was already developed by Louis Aragon in his Paris Peasant, exploring the decaying world of the Parisian arcade in the 1920s.¹⁹ There Aragon declares that ‘our cities are peopled with unrecognized sphynxes’²⁰ whose significance remains to be read. Although drawing initially upon Aragon, it was in fact Walter Benjamin who most fully explored the possibility of reading the city as text, as well as drawing attention to intertext-uality in this context. If the city is a text, then the reflexive possibility can be posited of the text possessing affinities with the city: ‘that which is written is like a city, to which the words are a thousand gateways’.²¹ Although there are many instances of Benjamin reading the contemporary city in One Way Street,²² Moscow Diaries ²³ and els...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: The Legible Metropolis
• Part II: The Political Metropolis
• Part III: The Gendered Metropolis
• Part IV: The Representational Metropolis
• Part V: The Filmic Metropolis
• Part VI: The Economic Metropolis