Walter Benjamin and Architecture

Gevork Hartoonian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415482929
• eBook ISBN: 9781135233747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

The essays compiled in this book explore aspects of Walter Benjamin's discourse that have contributed to the formation of contemporary architectural theories.

Issues such as technology and history have been considered central to the very modernity of architecture, but Benjamin's reflection on these subjects has elevated the discussion to a critical level. The contributors in this book consider Walter Benjamin's ideas in the context of digitalization of architecture where it is the very technique itself that determines the processes of design and the final form.

This book was published as a special issue of Architectural Theory Review.

Chapter 1
Manfredo Tafuri and the age of historical representation

Andrew Leach

Manfredo Tafuri’s 1968 book Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Theories and History of Architecture) offers a wide-ranging analysis of the historian’s method and responsibilities in architectural culture. Teorie e storia contains a profound examination of the status and actuality of historical knowledge in the modern era, from the ‘rise’ of humanism to the ‘fall’ of the modern movement.¹ The language and style of this analysis in Teorie e storia quickly yields – within months of its first publication – to another vocabulary and a new set of named objectives following Tafuri’s move north from Rome and Palermo to Venice and his exchange of one political and cultural context for another. As a work preceding his full integration with the Veneto political discussion conducted by the group that Tafuri entered upon his assumption of duties in 1968 at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, in the Istituto di Storia dell’Architettura, it operates as an intellectual bridge: a reflection on his intellectual life to date, and a programmatic document against which we can read the initial trajectory of the research and teaching of Tafuri and his colleagues in Venice from the end of that decade. Indeed, understanding the bearing of Teorie e storia upon the Istituto and its activities from 1968 is essential to an appreciation of his conduct as a historian, not simply at this moment at the end of the 1960s, but in his adherence to an enduring principle.

The very broad points of Tafuri’s argument in this book are indebted to both Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Tafuri wholeheartedly imports Benjamin’s and Adorno’s diagnoses of a cultural crisis stemming from the nineteenth century and culminating in the inter-bellum artistic avant-garde, along with their individual ongoing searches for a ‘style’ of analysis that deliberately avoids assuaging that same crisis from the most theoretical of both their studies on modernity available to Tafuri (in Italian) by the late 1960s, including books on contemporary thought, art, symbolism, music, aesthetics and phenomenology that were in print ahead of his work on Teorie e storia. Tafuri’s reading and adaptation of Benjamin’s essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936) to the larger disciplinary questions he faced in his theorization of historiography and its practice translates Benjamin’s position into a setting altogether different from that in which Benjamin first formulated his ideas.² In Teorie e storia, Tafuri extends Benjamin’s theory of modern art and architecture’s place therein well beyond the limits explicitly asserted by Benjamin himself, recasting the Benjaminian ‘crisis of the object’ as a problem integral to a cultural development that Tafuri later describes as an ‘era of representation’.³

Tafuri and Benjamin

Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk is much less a referent or methodological source – as we might understand Adorno’s function for Tafuri – than an analogy by which Tafuri parallels Benjamin’s history of the relationship between art and technology in the modern age with the history of architecture qua architecture. In other words, where Benjamin pinpoints the mechanisms through which the loss of art’s aura leads to the reclassification of the traditional high arts as acquisitions and (subsequently) extensions of technological and institutional evolution, Tafuri restates the terms of Benjamin’s essay in order to explain the problem of history in contemporary architecture as something systemic to the epistemological and cultural structures of architecture as an art form, but specifically as an art form that has origins bound tightly to the practice of historical representation. In turn, the first instances of history’s appearance in architecture, paralleling the terms of its crisis, occur in the Renaissance. And the Renaissance, by definition, is – in a temporal sense, at least – an era in which aura, originality and creative authority are at stake; so, too, is its cultural authority as (simultaneously) the reincarnation and inheritance of an ancient golden age.

Benjamin’s writing became well known in Italy following the publication in 1962 of a collection of essays entitled Angelus Novus. Although Tafuri had limited access to Benjamin’s work in its Italian translation from that time, his analysis of Das Kunstwerk (Ital. ed. 1966) in Teorie e storia (written 1966–7) is the first instance where he cites the Berliner.⁴ On the basis of the evidence that follows, we might deduce a close affinity with this essay that Tafuri did not share with Benjamin’s writing as it appeared in the earlier volume, or with other work that appeared in the later L’Opera d’arte. Given that Teorie e storia is principally concerned with the tools and tasks of historiographical practice – the practice of writing history – Benjamin’s entry into the Tafurian bibliography is extremely specific. Tafuri dedicates the first two chapters of Teorie e storia to the historical preconditions of architecture’s crisis, which he associates (following the title of his first chapter) with an eclipse of history. Central to his account is the architectural object and its historical relation to material and metaphysical precedent since the fifteenth century; both themes pay tribute to Benjamin’s terms, if not his theses.

Teorie e storia advances the argument, largely implicit, that the changes in artistic and intellectual culture marking the beginning of the Tuscan Renaissance result in a set of concepts informing architecture’s temporality and intellectual structure from that moment forwards: distinctions between past, present and future; the ideological tools that separate utopia from reality; and the mechanisms that bridge an idealized past and a real present, a real past and an idealized present, an idealized present and idealized future (crossing a corrupt present), and so on. As we shall soon see, these concepts are inextricable from the way that Tafuri appears to understand the implications of Das Kunstwerk, and underpin many of his claims pertaining to the historian’s tools and tasks.

Reading the relevant passages in the most straightforward manner: when Tafuri invokes Benjamin from time to time over the two decades following his first citation, the basic terms of his reference rarely stray far from his initial reading of this essay – with the important exception (which we will leave for another occasion) of his analysis of Borromini through Benjamin’s book on German baroque drama, which is doubtless influenced by Cacciari. Consequently, when Tafuri makes fleeting reference to Benjamin in Architettura contemporanea, La sfera e il labirinto and Storia dell’architettura italiana, 1944–85, and in his essay ‘The Main Lines of the Great Theoretical Debate over Architecture and Urban Planning, 1960–77’, he stays close to such issues as the commodification of the object and the status of the ‘author’ and ‘aura’, all relative to ‘the historical problem’.⁵

Yet while Benjamin offers much to Tafuri’s historical understanding of architectural phenomena in the age of mechanical reproducibility, his immediate importance to the architectural historian lies in his contribution to a definition of the long modern era, the aforementioned age of historical representation. Tafuri treats this general classification consistently from Teorie e storia to Ricerca del rinascimento, and this in its most abstract form remains a constant in his theorization of history and historiography.

If the objective of Teorie e storia, then, is a critico-historical analysis of the place of history in architectural culture, its time frame is, in the sense outlined above, Benjaminian: modernity as the era of historical representation.

Tafuri writes his account of architecture’s crisis – a concept that he later concedes verges on overuse – in a deliberately inflammatory style that exaggerates (or provokes, depending on one’s perspective) the perceived crisis rather than calming its recognizable symptoms. The book formalizes Tafuri’s position that the role of historical analysis is the identification of historical problems and their origins, not the more prophetic function of imagining their solution or the instrumental task of understanding the nature of their fulfilment. He bluntly holds his disciplinary fathers responsible for the current state of affairs, blaming it upon their lack of attention to the conditions that he, via Benjamin, diagnoses. Their fault, he suggests, is ignorance, a failure to properly understand the nature of the historian’s standing in relation to architectural production. Their chief mistake is to interpret these two practices as coincident, supplementary, an error that simply exacerbates the crisis of both history and the object, as Tafuri defines it therein. The widespread tendency to encourage the availability of historical knowledge to architectural practice is a fundamental target of Tafuri’s book: from the adoption of abstract values to the quotation of and deference to concrete exemplars to the enactment of a blatant formal historicism.

Whatever motivations we might assign Tafuri in singling out the faults of individual historians, and however keenly we sense the deformations that he makes between reading Benjamin and deploying his terms, it is important that we keep in mind that Benjamin remains at the centre of this discussion. Whether he is a hostage or a willing aid is a judgement better, for the moment, suspended.

The historian and the architect

Chapter One of Teorie e storia, ‘L’architettura moderna e l’eclissi della storia’ (‘Modern Architecture and the Eclipse of History’), follows the history of historical representation through an account of the development of architectural theory spanning from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The principal theme of this analysis is the availability of historical knowledge to the intellectualization of architecture as an art. Tafuri draws extensively on the modest but diverse body of his own publications to date, a ‘library’ that bridges his career as an architect and his fledging, deeply polemical, first attempts at historical writing on modern architecture and on works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If in places Tafuri appears too aggressive, too explicit in targeting colleagues and academic friends, it may be a result of his easy insertion of these earlier pieces (or their attitude) into Teorie e storia, these essays and books conveying Tafuri’s often heavy-handed claim for a seat at the academic table. Setting this observation aside, while his architectural histories inform the generous scope of Teorie e storia, they are clearly made to reflect upon the standing of the architectural work in his definition of an artistic and cultural crisis. At the same time, he exposes the nature of the analysis of these crises conducted thus far as constituting part of the problem.

Teorie e storia therefore concerns not only the contemporary limitations of architecture and its understanding of its own past; by implication, the book returns Tafuri’s historian’s scepticism to his own earlier practice and judgements. This dialectical understanding of the past – operating between empathy and antipathy with respect of the architect – is essential to the problem of architectural history as conducted by historians trained first as architects.

As a starting point, then, it is useful to accept that Teorie e storia concerns the relationship between two practices and two figures between which Tafuri artificially distinguishes: between architectural production (however defined) and the critico-historical analysis of that production, intellectual and material; and thus between the architecttheoretician and the critic-historian.

In conceiving of architecture as a production, and considering that the conditions of that production implicate both the history and historiography of architecture, Tafuri’s ‘eclipse of history’ corresponds to Benjamin’s ‘crisis of the object’. Benjamin observes that the mechanization of artistic production generates an irrecoverable distance between the artwork’s essence and its representation, enacting, from the end of the nineteenth century, a destruction of that essence by new technologies of production. Tafuri mirrors this position by suggesting that the devices by which historical knowledge is incorporated into the intellectualization of architectural production make it increasingly difficult to distinguish historical knowledge from contemporary critical knowledge (which includes knowledge of history) and ideas pertaining to the future (loosely understood as utopian) that are built into projective architectural practice. Consequently, history, like the aura, is neutralized in the modern age, eclipsed by the mechanisms and imperatives of production.

Tafuri disagrees with Benjamin on the origins of these critical catalysts. For Benjamin, they spring from industrialization and the new way of seeing ushered in with the modern world and the nineteenth century growth of...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Manfredo Tafuri and the age of historical representation
• Chapter 2 Looking backward, looking forward
• Chapter 3 Porosity at the edge
• Chapter 4 From Baldwin’s Paris to Benjamin’s
• Chapter 5 Architecture under the gaze of photography
• Chapter 6 The techno-aesthetics of shock
• Chapter 7 Mimesis
• Chapter 8 Daniel among the philosophers
• Chapter 9 Portbou and two grains of wheat
• Index