The DeaTh anD Life of The ToTaL Work of arThenry van de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept

Carsten Ruhl, Chris Dähne,

Rixt Hoekstra (Eds.)

The SyMboLiC DiMenSion beTWeen naTure anD arTifaCT 117The Woodland Cemetery in StockholmCarlotta Torricelli

The CreaTiVe DeSTruCTion of The ToTaL Work of arT 128From Hegel to Wagner and BeyondWolfram Bergande

inSuLar uTopiaS? 146Henry van de Velde, Peter Zumthor, and the Gesamtkunstwerk Ole W. Fischer

The noTion of The ToTaL Work of arT anD iTaLian buiLDing CuLTure afTer WorLD War ii 164Silvia Malcovati

Can The iMMigranT Speak? 179Autonomy and Participation in IBA 1984/87Esra Akcan

The CriTiCaL arabeSque 195On Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague (1990) Regine Prange

aCuTe aeSTheTiCS 217Anke Finger

arChiTeCTureS To be inhaLeD 226Constructing the EphemeralÁkos Moravánszky

The geSaMTkunSTWerk in The age of Terror 243Esther da Costa Meyer

inTroDuCTion 7Carsten Ruhl, Rixt Hoekstra, Chris Dähne

froM ToTaL DeSign To ToTaL Theory 12Carsten Ruhl

eDuCaTing The geSaMTkunSTWerk 24Henry van de Velde and Art School Reform in Germany, 1900–14Katherine Kuenzli

a CoLLiSion of WorLDS 41Art and Commerce in the Age of Henry van de VeldeJohn V. Maciuika

exiSTenzMiniMuM aS geSaMTkunSTWerk 63Robin Schuldenfrei

panS, arT, anD arChiTeCTure 79Theo van Doesburg and the Question of the “Aesthetic Unity of All the Arts”Matthias Noell

geSaMTkunSTWerk anD genDer 94From Domesticity to Branding and Back AgainKathleen James-Chakraborty

expreSSing poLiTiCS in urban pLanning 105Two Projects by Herman Sörgel for Munich between the Monarchy and RepublicRainer Schützeichel

7

This volume collects the lectures that were held during the 12th International Bau-haus Colloquium, organized April 2013 in Weimar at the Bauhaus-Universität. While the focus of this book is on the contributions of the invited speakers in the so-called plenum, we have also included some examples of the presentations held by young scientists in the workshops.The 12th International Bauhaus Colloquium took the 150th birthday of the Belgian architect, artist, and designer Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) as an opportunity to ask for modern conceptions of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Work of Art) in the twentieth century, and its impact on current architectural discourse. As such, this colloquium was dedicated to an important aspect of the Bauhaus’s history, and to a key element of the modern conception of architecture in general. In addition, con-nections were made to a larger discourse involving current discussions about the experience of image and space, immersion, mediality, aura, and authenticity, which were viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective. The Bauhaus Colloquium is the oldest and most renowned conference on archi-tectural theory and history in the German-speaking realm. The first Bauhaus Col-loquium was organized in 1976, during the years of the GDR regime in Eastern Germany. It was an outcome of the debate by scholars, architects, and the Socialist

inTroDuCTionCarsten Ruhl, Rixt Hoekstra, Chris Dähne

13

froM ToTaL DeSign To ToTaL Theory

Everyday life in this post-apocalyptic society is dominated by the elaborate rules of court life. Accordingly, its members dress in remarkable costumes and veil their as-pirations in subtle rhetoric. This play of simulatio and dissimulatio serves as a means to correspond to the dictator’s expectations, while simultaneously competing with other courtiers in terms of social reputation. An important highlight for Panem is the Hunger Games, an event in which the participants—the so-called tributes—must fight to the death in an outdoor arena controlled by the Capitol, until only one individual remains. Moreover, this spectacle is captured in a television show hosted by a famous en-tertainer and supplemented with documentation on the former games. All of this occurs in the arena, which evokes the Roman Empire and its gladiator fights. Yet different from the monumental arenas the Romans erected for panem et circenses, Panem’s arenas have no specific architectural shape. Instead, they are made up of mountains, woods, and deserts populated by dangerous animals and permanently plagued by natural catastrophes. While the tributes struggle to survive, the dictator and his team act as stage direc-tors. Through the use of hidden cameras, they are informed about events in the arena; when the entertainment value of the games is threatened by a lack of action, they also intervene—for example, when a day goes by without the death of at least one of the tributes. To prevent the show from such deadly boredom, dangerous animals are released to hunt the remaining tributes, who are generally surrounded by a world solely dedicated to killing them. Nevertheless, while the tributes are steadily confronted with the regime’s perverse plans, they are also aware of being observed by a mass audience expecting a spectacular setting, convincing actors, and dramatic action. In this respect, there are some tributes who are more convincing than others: for instance, Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of the story. She falls in love with Peeta, one of her competitors, though one day he may possibly kill her. The audience is enormously thrilled by this ambivalent relationship, and Katniss knows that the popularity of her character could ultimately help her to survive. In short, acting, entertaining, and performing become a question of death or life.But what is the point here? Why start a discourse on the legacy of the total work of art by referring to a novel that at first sight scarcely has anything to do with this topic? Well, first of all because it once more reminds us that acting, more than anything else, is indispensable for the maintenance of a regime. In The Hunger Games, the regime’s decline begins with an unforeseen deviation from the games’ storyboard. Through an unprecedented act of provocation, Katniss forces the re-gime to accept two winners instead of one. She and Peeta decide to commit suicide

panem et Circenses

In 2008, the American writer Suzanne Collins published a remarkable science fic-tion novel called The Hunger Games.1 The protagonist of the novel is sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, a dystopia created after the destruction of the United States of America by unknown powers. Panem’s most important city is the Capitol—a highly advanced metropolis that ex-ercises political control over the rest of the country. In contrast to the “old” country, Panem is ruled by a dictator and no longer has a democratic constitution.

Carsten Ruhl

12 From Total Design to Total Theory

16 From Total Design to Total Theory 17

the Arts), he stresses the fact that with the idea of an all-encompassing art—the so-called Verfransungsprozess—any critical distance to the existing society has been lost.13 Quite the contrary: it turned into an aesthetic formalism that no longer al-lows for resistance to the ruling political forces. Thus, the philosopher Boris Groys was no longer willing to accept the Gesamtkunstwerk as a harmless idea exclusively

ing by the extinction of its critical distance towards reality. What is striking in this context is the fact that Rebentisch avoids using the term Gesamtkunstwerk, though it contains a paradox crucial to any reflection on the relationship between art and politics. On one side, it expresses the artist’s aspiration for total autonomy, while at the same time fostering the dissolution of art itself. For once it has reached its point of perfection, the Gesamtkunstwerk inevitably turns into a Gesamtwirklichkeit, as Odo Marquard stated on the occasion of the legendary exhibition “Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk.”10 Thus, it serves as a means to equate political differences in favour of an all-embracing identity—represented, reproduced, and embodied by an authoritative stage director as introduced in Craig’s theater reforms and Collin’s dystopian novel.

Dictators and artists

However, this phenomenon is by no means restricted to modern theater or dysto-pian novels. Quite the contrary: reality is more telling in this respect than any fic-tional story ever could be. From Italian fascism to the German National Socialists, from Franco’s regime in Spain to Stalin’s Soviet Republic and current totalitarian states, total design serves as a means to identify the will of the people with the will of the dictator. For this purpose, numerous forms of manifestations and spectacles are conceived that display reality as something supernatural. In 1936, for example, Adolf Hitler commissioned Albert Speer to design a monumental light dome con-sisting of 152 floodlights for the regime’s public functions at the Nazi party rally grounds in Nürnberg (Figure 1); and with 200,000 participants, it must have had an intimidating effect. But above all, it could be regarded as the realization of mod-ern art’s unfulfilled desire for a total work as it was imagined for instance in the visionary monuments of early modernism. Well acquainted with the avant-garde’s dream of a state run solely by the artist, modern dictators became anxious to intro-duce themselves as artists. For instance, Hitler was frequently presented as an ar-chitect addicted to the totalitarian design of the Third Reich (Figure 2). In a special edition of the magazine Illustrierter Beobachter entitled “Adolf Hitler—A Man and His People,” Hitler even acts as a trained architect, though he never was.11 We see him sitting or standing in front of a drawing table covered with a great number of plans, while his assistants—Troost and Speer—are carefully listening to the leader’s threatening promise: “Germany shall become more beautiful.” However, taking this all into account, Walter Benjamin regarded fascism as a fatal “aesthetization of political life.”12 From here, it was only a short step to Adorno’s general critique on the Gesamtkunstwerk. In “Die Kunst und die Künste” (Art and

1 Albert Speer: Lichtdom (light dome), Nazi party rally grounds in Nürnberg, September 1936.

2 Adolf Hitler—Deutschland soll schöner werden!

24 Educating the Gesamtkunstwerk 25

the court city. The establishment of the Nietzsche Archive related to a larger proj-ect to create a “New Weimar” that would build on Weimar classicism.1 Through the contributions of Goethe and Schiller, Weimar’s golden age had been devoted above all to literature and drama. Franz Liszt’s arrival in 1848 marked the second period of cultural greatness and demonstrated the vitality of music. The New Wei-mar as Kessler conceived it would foreground the visual arts, which he conceived in relationship to a Gesamtkunstwerk. Weimar would supersede Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth as a site of cultural and national regeneration, Kessler reasoned. Upon arriving in Weimar, van de Velde immediately set to work on his twofold mis-sion by founding an Applied Arts Seminar where he could work closely with the Grand Duchy’s manufacturers. He also renovated the Nietzsche Archive building to create spaces for a library and a salon devoted to poetry readings and musical performances.2 However distinct van de Velde’s practical and aesthetic spheres of action might seem, they were united by Nietzsche’s idea of Lebenskunst, which Jugendstil artists defined as a kind of “self-willing” or “self-constitution” that fuses science and art, theoretical knowledge and embodied creation.3 Nietzsche referred to the self as a sculptor, craftsman, and productive form-giver. The self thus constituted is not es-sential or fixed, but is always in the act of becoming. Nietzsche emphasized the im-portance of experience and experiment and insisted on the value of education. One must “learn life,” Nietzsche argued, as one “learns a handicraft,” through doing and constant practice. Breaking down boundaries between art and life, Nietzsche’s Lebenskunst takes a variety of forms ranging from body movements and dress to everyday objects, according to Jugendstil artists. Whatever shape it takes, Leben-skunst’s contribution to life is unwaveringly positive. Artists such as van de Velde sought to realize Nietzsche’s dictum that “every art, every philosophy should be seen as a remedy and a stimulant in the service of a growing, affirmative life.”4 Whereas Nietzsche had defined Lebenskunst through his writings and musical compositions, Kessler and van de Velde sought to complete what the philosopher had left unfinished by lending Lebenskunst tangible, visual form through a series of Gesamtkunstwerke that incorporated literature, music, and—most importantly for Kessler and van de Velde—the visual arts. Hired by the Grand Duke in 1903 to direct Weimar’s Grand Ducal Museum of Art and Applied Art, Kessler envisioned coordinating the curricula of the Grand Duchy’s Arts Schools with museum exhibi-tions and theater and musical performances to create a vibrant and living artistic culture. To this end, he supported the Nietzsche Archive’s programming and pub-lications and sought to institute a summer theater festival. Van de Velde played a leading role in all these endeavors, counseling Kessler on painting purchases,

Henry van de Velde arrived in Weimar in 1902 with two distinct missions. The first assignment, given to him by Wilhelm Ernst, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, was above all practical. The Grand Duke hired van de Velde to serve as Artistic Advisor to the Grand Duchy with the aim of improving the quality of local manufacturing. Through design, Wilhelm Ernst sought to modernize his Duchy’s traditional and provincial manufacturing sector. Van de Velde received the second task from Count Harry Kessler, who worked behind the scenes to bring the artist to Weimar. A few years previously, Kessler had invested his per-sonal fortune in moving the ailing Friedrich Nietzsche and his personal archive to

Katherine Kuenzli

eDuCaTing The geSaMTkunSTWerkhenry van de Velde and art School reform in germany, 1900–14

eDuCaTing The geSaMTkunSTWerk

42 A Collision of Worlds 43

1 Wertheim department store “Kopfbau” and Leipziger Strasse façade by Alfred Messel, 1897–1904, view from Leipziger Platz with Prussian Ministry of Commerce and Industry at right, approximately 1912.

2 Peter Behrens, view of living room in Wertheim department store home interiors exhibition, 1905.

The Department of Domestic Art and the State Trades Office, inaugurated in the seemingly disparate settings of a privately owned department store and a state min-istry, in fact shared a similar purpose: to educate producers and consumers alike about the social, economic, and cultural value of a tastefully designed, properly furnished German home. To a degree previously unseen in German history, the German home in the early years of the twentieth century assumed new cultural meanings and symbolic significance as a site of economic, political, artistic, and social intervention. The widespread and energetic focus on providing new designs, furnishings, and products for the German home around 1900 would influence cultural production in Germany in ways that would be felt for decades to come. Looking backward in time, this intense focus also reflected larger processes that had been transforming German society for decades. These processes included a rapidly increasing national population, unprecedented urbanization and economic growth, and massive organizational changes and restructuring in such economic spheres as the crafts, industrial manufacturing, advertising and distribution, and the retail industry. By no means static, these processes were also influenced by re-form-oriented groups, including, among them, the late nineteenth-century Move-ment for Artistic Education, the Dürerbund (founded 1902), the Association for Homeland Protection (Bund Heimatschutz, founded 1904), and the Deutscher Werkbund (founded 1907). The focus on the German artistic home and the cultivation of a consciously middle-class German consumer identity, I contend, was closely linked to the efforts of a wide variety of Wilhelmine institutions to adapt to the dizzying conditions of twentieth-century Wilhelmine capitalist modernity. As numerous contemporaries and later historians of the period after 1900 note, the creation and securing of markets for Germany’s domestic products was an important motivating factor for the focus on domestic goods and interior furnishings. Yet this was far from the only issue at stake. The organization of new systems for designing and outfitting the home reflected a variety of middle- and upper-middle-class German attitudes toward the “masses” as consumers and citizens; toward the role of businesses and government in shaping an economy increasingly shifting in the direction of large enterprise, mass production, and mass consumption; and toward the role of artists, design associations, and even department stores as self-appointed educators of the modern German consumer. For this reason, a comparison of the Wertheim store’s new home interior displays to the Commerce Ministry schools’ emphasis on the design of integrated domestic spaces offers insights into the variety of forces that were shaping early twentieth-century German industrial, commercial, and artistic culture in new and profound ways.

68 Existenzminimum as Gesamtkunstwerk 69

This paring down to essentials has important social repercussions in Meyer’s for-mulation. “Because of the standardization of his needs as regards housing, food, and mental sustenance,” Meyer argues, “the semi-nomad of our modern produc-

tive system has the benefit of freedom of movement, economies, simplification and relaxation,” while “the degree of our standardization is an index of our com-munal productive system.”18 The result, Meyer suggests, is “true community.” This proposed outcome—community achieved through the provision of all basic needs within a single unit intended to ease a condition of heightened mobility—is a simi-lar effect to what later occurred among the occupants of the Isokon Flats; it would be echoed in numerous modernists’ designs, from the 1930s well into the postwar period, including Archigram’s propositions for fully serviced, completely nomadic, plug-in units. Other texts published in same period, such as the Czech Karel Teige’s 1932 book The Minimum Dwelling, show how widespread the issue was. He defined the “mini-mum dwelling” as “the central problem of modern architecture and the battle cry of today’s architectural avant-garde … it sheds light on a situation that has reached a point requiring the radical reform and modernization of housing.”19 Like Hannes Meyer, Teige saw in “embryonic form a new conception in the culture of dwell-ing” linking architectural form to social content, whereby “particular types of small apartments, such as those with a live-in kitchen, a small kitchen, or a living room

2 Hannes Meyer, “Co-op Interior,” 1926.

with a cooking nook,” were “not simply commensurate variants and alternatives”—rather each corresponded “to a different lifestyle and a different social content” and represented “a manifestation of a different cultural level and a different socially determined world.”20 Teige and Meyer both believed they were effecting political change by refuting bourgeois individualism absolutely—they, like other modern architects, believed that carefully designed spaces would allow for a new kind of society to emerge—but they, and others, were, effectively, simply creating another way of thinking about design that could and would be appropriated by the middle and upper classes. Gropius’s architectural office had also been working on the issue just before his emigration in 1934 (although in a vein more directed towards solving needs prag-matically through modern means, without the strong political convictions behind Meyer or Teige’s assessment of mass housing and production). In an unpublished manuscript titled “Minimal Dwelling and Tower Block” (1934), Gropius advo-cated a reduction in floor space in part achieved by increasing the window size so that the overall room size could be decreased. He summed up with a call for an “objective minimum and a standard dwelling unit.”21 In collaboration with Franz Möller, a former employee who had emigrated to Buenos Aires, he proposed the “Gropius Standard,” a small, one-bedroom unit.22 Existenzminimum as a problem for both architects and planners was also discussed collectively in professionalized environments. For example, the second CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) met in Frankfurt in 1929, taking up as its theme “Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum,” the problem of the minimal dwelling. There, important protagonists of the modern movement offered solutions. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, promoted “standardization, industri-alization, and taylorization,” while Frankfurt architect and city planner Ernst May appealed for affordable rental units “just satisfying the material and mental needs of their occupants.”23 Gropius, lecturing at the congress on the “Sociological Foundations of the Mini-mum Dwelling,” described a process in which households were splitting up into smaller units and called for a commensurate increase in the number of ever-smaller, self-contained dwelling units.24 He also acknowledged the inherent difficulties in getting the populace to embrace architects’ and planners’ new proposals for liv-ing, noting that the modern industrial population of the city originated from the countryside. These new urban dwellers, he lamented, lived as yet in a reduced form in the city, retaining earlier “primitive demands upon life,” rather than adhering to “the totality of the new form of life.”25 Like Meyer and Teige, Gropius believed that modern life might be transformed through mass production, standardization,

94 Gesamtkunstwerk and Gender 95

In 1895, the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde participated in an exhibition mount-ed in Paris by Siegfried Bing, which gave the name to the style Art Nouveau.1 Van de Velde was the key figure in introducing the whiplash curves already popular in Brussels to Paris, where they became the face of the fin-de-siècle. Five years later, the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his artist wife Margaret Mac-Donald Mackinstosh contributed a room to the annual exhibition of the Vienna Secession.2 This reinforced the more rectilinear direction the Jugendstil was taking there and exposed them to the work of Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann. Van de Velde and the Mackintoshes would thus seem to be at polar opposites of the design

geSaMTkunSTWerk anD genDer from Domesticity to branding and back again

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

geSaMTkunSTWerk anD genDer

reforms that swept across Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. Yet if one turns away from the details of form to the way that art functioned within a rapidly changing society, similarities emerge that point to the way in which the emergence of the Gesamtkunstwerk in German-speaking Europe was linked as well to the British Arts and Crafts movement and to the increased importance of what we now know as branding.Both van de Velde and Mackintosh were involved with healthy eating as a mani-festation of social and aesthetic reform. In 1898, van de Velde was responsible for what the National Gallery of Art website terms “a comprehensive design program,

1 Eisentropon poster, Henry van de Velde, 1898.

124 The Symbolic Dimension between Nature and Artifact 125

a moment of reflection before returning to daily life. The symbolic nature of the individual elements is very strong, even the choice of the terms that define the in-dividual spaces as moments of a secular and universal liturgy. This project, for its grace, simplicity, and the lyrical atmosphere that encompasses all the elements, has assumed many of the characters that would soon become signs of recognition of the experience of Nordic Classicism.22

The epiphany of the Sacred place

The project by Lewerentz and Stubelius shows many affinities with the one that would soon be conceived for the Chapel of the Resurrection23 in the Woodland Cemetery of Stockholm. Here Lewerentz envisioned a so-called chapel of passage, meaning that the death is not an end point but rather a gateway toward a new di-mension. In the project for the Chapel of the Resurrection, the temple represented the principal of order that was in a state of tension with the dark and changeable face of nature. This tension between a craving for order and the uncontaminated forest (the Urskog, representing the original background) produced an effect of estrangement. Lewerentz decides to reveal the presence of the sacred place with one single image, one icon: “from far away, in the middle of Nordic pinewood is glimpsed a vision of a temple of classical antiquity, as a revelation and promise of something rather more perfect, beyond the earthly.”24

Going closer to the building, following the Way of the Seven Wells that connects the Meditation Grove to the Chapel of the Resurrection, we discover that the im-age of the temple is just a part of a more complex composition: the column-born entrance hall is a free-standing enclosure from the chapel, and is placed slightly diagonally in relation to it. That is, the image of the temple is a single word, isolated and independent, which acts as a medium to create a tension across the itinerary. In this way, Lewerentz creates two completely autonomous worlds: a volume defined by a wall system and a hall based on a trilitic system. The whole building itself “acts as the ‘gateway’ or ‘door’ between two realms”25 and the entrance portal has a com-pletely different character from the exit passage. After the ceremony, the funeral procession would continue through a door opposite to the entrance. The mourners would not turn back on the same path by which they had come, but rather would rejoin life through an unbroken sequence of movement.

needed to understand it. Therefore, architecture superimposes images on reality that are the media to reveal that death is not an end point, but a passage between two realms. Thus, architecture itself acts as a door. Along a gentle slope, crossed by a long lake, a high and narrow building is set. At the end of the entry stairway, visitors find themselves in a high, dark, and introverted space: the Place of Death. From here, through two semicircular ramps, they pass under the choir and organ loft, to arrive at a long, narrow room: the Room of Life. The route then continues outdoor toward the Colombarium, to end in the Temple of Memory. From here, the mourners can walk toward the Wood of Memories, to collect themselves in

3 The mound with the Meditation Grove and the Chapel of the Resurrection.

146 Insular Utopias? 147

prologue: The gesamtkunstwerk Then and now…

The instrumentalization of the Gesamtkunstwerk1 as a point of resistance against the ever progressing modernization of society goes back already to Richard Wag-ner. He proposed the unity of art—at least on the level of perception, if not on the level of production—in opposition to the fragmentation of capitalist division of labor. And it is the same romantic notion underlying the theory of Henry van de Velde, who puts forward the claim for a synthesis of the arts against a contemporary urban civilization, which seemed to him disintegrated and cha-otic. Symptomatic of its decline would be the division of the arts into various disciplines and their separation from life. This culture critique resonates in Peter Zumthor’s houses and writings: again he positions synthesis, unity, and authentic-

inSuLar uTopiaS?henry van de Velde, peter zumthor, and the gesamtkunstwerk

Ole W. Fischer

ity against postmodern overkill of images and fragmentation. And not for nothing Zumthor’s all-encompassing design is primarily present in indoor spaces—like the Thermal Bath in Vals—similar to van de Velde’s meticulously crafted Ge-samtkunstwerk interiors.If van de Velde turns against the mechanical reproduction of historic objects and styles, then Zumthor rallies against the untrustworthiness of the things close to us, against fakeness, irony, quotation, medialization, and digital simulation of our second (reflexive?) modernity. While van de Velde constructs for modern man a shelter against the “ugliness” and “amorality” of contemporaneous society with ab-stract references of nature and psychological “lines of force,” aiming for a renewed “Greek serenity” and “harmony,” it is Zumthor who searches to create “things” of an implicitness that transcends to meditative spirituality against the all too banal experiences of everyday life. This ethical impetus of both architects asks for some consideration: the aim for a synthesis of the arts under exclusion of all so-called disruptive effects, even if restricted on the limited range of the interior, carries the allegation of control and totality (if not to say totalitarianism). Or at least the accu-sation of reactionary retreat into the inner self, if we follow Walter Benjamin’s cari-cature of the Art Nouveau interior as the last refuge of bourgeois interiority.2 And how should one understand the rhetoric of authenticity, authorship, and hand-crafted quality? Or the heavily evoked return to the (anonymous) origins, to im-mediacy and to sensuality? Especially when hyper-modern technology is deployed to achieve these effects: van de Velde uses visible iron trusses as well as reinforced concrete and experiments with electrical light fixtures integrated into ceilings and furniture. Zumthor operates with the most advanced building technology (as seen in the Kunsthaus Bregenz with its free span concrete floors, and the light design by Zumthobel blurring between “natural” and “artificial”), as well as custom-made structural designs or high-tech material solutions, in order to stage sensual atmo-spheres, where the means disappear behind the searched for effects respectively are sublated and transcended.If Wagner had already envisioned the Gesamtkunstwerk as a unification of the arts in the music drama (in the footsteps of Attic tragedy) in connection with an alternative, communitarian social order—what do the two architects say about their political aspirations? Shall one read their holistic designed spaces as politi-cal reactionary, as Benjamin and other Marxian critics have suspected, as insular phantasies of well-to-do individuals, which actually hinder social change? Or shall one interpret these designs as islands of utopia, built to prove that alternative ways of life as much as alternative practices are possible, even within the given societal conditions?

160 Insular Utopias? 161

of the reactionary Weimar court and the conservative Weimar bourgeoisie, at least in the eyes of van de Velde and Count Kessler. The Archive was meant to be a space of the new area—modernity—and at the same time hoist the cult of Goethe with its own petard: to proclaim the aesthetic superiority of the philosopher on the hill, over the classicist poet in the valley. And maybe it is not a coincidence that the Fin-ish architect Sigurd Frosterus, who collaborated with van de Velde in Weimar at the time, compared the “atmosphere” of the Nietzsche-Archive with the “alpenglow” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.If these intentions are legible, what about the achieved effects of these Gesamt-kunstwerk interiors? Are these constructions of insular difference able to act criti-cally on society and sustain a lasting agency, or is the project of an artistic avant-garde operating with total works of art—with or without Wagnerian undertones—falsified and even counterproductive? Adorno’s criticism of Wagner’s mysticism is legendary,14 but in this context, the position of the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri seems more revealing. Informed by the critical theory of Adorno and French structuralism, Tafuri discusses the proposition of a “Neo-Avant-Garde” forming in the early 1970s. These architects (mainly “The New York Five” around Peter Eisenman, but in general the whole formalistic approach of postmodern ar-chitecture), Tafuri argues, exercise artistic finger exercises and “language games” of refined singular master pieces, but have given up the historic project of a critique and/or change of society by the means of architecture and urban design, in stark difference to the historic avant-gardes of the 1920s. Even if the window of op-portunity has closed and the political and economic situation changed, architects (of the 1970s) would have to address pragmatically the contemporary problems of capitalist society by solving questions of organization and distribution, that is, of a prototypical nature. Instead of the unfulfilled promise of enlightenment for free-dom, participation, and self-determination (or autonomy), which translates into an architecture of the people beyond the churches and palaces of the elite, the liability to total control of the refined singular object (and we are free to include: of the architectonic Gesamtkunstwerk) ends in absolute arbitrariness and randomness. Or put differently, with a detour to Adorno’s and Horckheimer’s reading of the sexual excesses of Marquis de Sade in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: the excess of rational control—of the formal elements of architecture and of its discourses by author-architects—would be the necessary condition (and not the opposite) for absolute libertinage and opportunistic optionality, if not to say insignificance: L’architecture dans le Boudoir.15

4 Henry van de Velde, Haus Hohe Pappeln, Ehringsdorf near Weimar, 1907–08, entry façade.

5 Henry van de Velde, Haus Hohe Pappeln, Ehringsdorf near Weimar, 1907–08, salon.

170 The Notion of the Total Work of Art and Italian Building Culture after World War II 171

actually uses the German term (Umwelt)—is the primary task of architecture. Van de Velde had complied with this by establishing “from the smallest to the largest … the relationship between life lived and the tangible objects needed for the extension of the physical and spiritual capacity of our experience.” Besides the images and the words, one must provide “a convincing reality for new ideas: … which must hold true every hour in every gesture of individual and social life.”29

This higher goal, the construction of reality itself, was enough for Rogers to absolve van de Velde of the highly aestheticizing tones in many of his writings and some of his works. Because van de Velde wants to be “neither aesthetic nor utilitarian. ‘Beauty for beauty’s sake’ is not part of his notion—nor is the thought that “every-thing which is perfectly useful is necessarily beautiful,” as some of his contempo-raries believed. In this regard, how Rogers interpreted the theory of empathy is also interesting; namely, in a very concrete and anti-abstract sense of rational observa-tion and of personal sympathy overlapping with the things. The dialectic between “abstraction and empathy” presented by Worringer describes rather precisely the extremes of the Italian architectural debate in these years, which oscillates between rationalism and organic architecture, between autonomy and contextuality. And Rogers evidently shares van de Velde’s position, inasmuch as he attaches great value to being able to reach the same results “in very different ways”: not only through the abstraction of “an inorganic and dead line,” as Worringer contends, but also the opposite, “through an organic and living concept of it.”30 It was no coincidence that Rogers also includes three texts by van de Velde in his issue: “Amo” from 1907, “La Voie Sacrée” (The Sacred Way) from 1933, and “Die Linie” (The Line) from 1910, which is translated into Italian for the first time. “Amo” is an emphatic avowal of the affirmation of life, entirely in the spirit of Nietzschean-Dionysian vitalism. The second text offers a balance of his own ex-periences. According to Rogers, the third essay—about the line—represents van de Velde’s most profound contribution with respect to the situation of his time, a successful synthesis of the rational approach and personal sensibility, of classicism and expressionism. One must keep just a few quotes from “Die Linie” in mind to understand this assessment.

Thus in the first line we see only an expression of vitality and excitement, childlike joy, wholehearted passion. … The ability to draw lines comes in addition and enroots itself, and in the drunkenness of the recognition of this ability, people first had to be driven to demand from the line a sensuality similar to that of the dance, the struggle, the caress. … Rhythm bestows the line with ornamental character! … The lines of the new architecture … are the lines of the engineer.31

henry van de Velde

The monographic issue on van de Velde is compiled and edited mainly by Rogers himself. It begins with his long editorial “Henry van de Velde o dell’evoluzione” (Henry van de Velde, or the evolution), which immediately identifies the funda-mental approach to the reader27—namely, to recognize the history of an epoch in the direct life experiences of an artist, and thus to derive chapters in the history of modern architecture from the interpretation of Henry van de Velde: “In his long life”—Rogers writes—“the most important artistic movements of a century mold him, imbue his spirit, affect him, derive from him, or are devised by him: Natural-ism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Rationalism, and maybe even a little Surrealism.”28 According to Rogers, influencing the “environment”—Rogers

2 Casabella-Continuità 237 (March 1960), monographic issue dedicated to Henry van de Velde.

188 Can the Immigrant Speak? 189

the contrast between the corridors that led to Barış family’s flat and the interior was indeed striking. After moving to Berlin, this was the cheapest flat the Hous-ing Office provided for a family of their size and budget. I went unattended, but the apartment seemed always ready for visitors, in an aesthetically unified way that Gesamtkunstwerk supporters would approve.Fatma remembered in minutest detail the apartment’s condition before they moved

4 Barış’s Unit in Building at Block 1 for IBA 1984/87 (architect: Oswald Mathias Ungers).

5 Karaçizmeli’s Unit in Bonjour Tristesse housing for IBA 1984/87 (architect: Alvaro Siza).

The Super did not let any children play in the courtyard, anyone speak loud or come late to the apartment. We collected signatures to have him removed, but now we live in complete chaos.” Residents fault each other but many of the controversies result from the building’s design and dimensions, now nicknamed Asihaus (anti-social building).22 The fact that kids played football in this small courtyard and frequently broke windows on all of the encircling walls was a constant source of controversy, even though the building was commissioned for migrant families with many kids and IBA otherwise was proud of the ample playgrounds inside perimeter blocks. While some enjoyed grilling on the sixth-floor terraces, others just across com-plained that the smoke directly entered their apartment due to proximity. When friendly neighbors enjoyed talking to each other from one window to another across the courtyard, night shifters who tried to sleep during the day wished the blocks were not so close to each other. Ungers, much like the fictional architect of Loos’s “poor rich man,” stated that he would not like it if users changed and violated his designs.23 However, acting on one’s private space seems one of the few remaining possible acts of harmless subver-sion. Even though alterations were not anticipated in Asihaus, residents did leave their marks on the building much beyond usual repair and maintenance. For one,

3 Oswald Mathias Ungers, Axonometric Drawing for Building at Block 1.

202 The Critical Arabesque 203

The challenge for our consideration, however, is that nature, as a form-defining creative power in its infinite wealth, by no means brings forth a structural or mean-ingful totality, but only ever cites this, albeit with pathos. Godard admittedly uses the modernist idea of a “development of art into life,” which was also propagated beyond van de Velde’s conception of a new ornamentation, in order to represent the Nouvelle Vague ambition to resurrect and reform cinema by liberating it from the fictional plot continuum of the Hollywood film and by developing a documen-tary and essayistic quality.25 The previously commented, sobering rebirth of pensive Roger in the guise of cool businessman Richard showed that Godard does not revere this myth, but construes it as a service to the capitalist enterprise (of the com-pany Torlato-Favrini and of the cinema). The birth of the entrepreneurial subject Richard Lennox from Lake Geneva26 is likely to have constituted an attack on the author ideal of the Nouvelle Vague, yet the movement was based, as can be read in Francois Truffaut’s article “Une certaine tendance du cinéma francaise” (1954), on a reliance on the creative force of the director as an author who no longer just imple-ments prescribed stories from the script, but recreates them instead (récréer).27 The demand that the director, for the purpose of cultivating a personal signature, must help fashion all the sectors and stages of the film production himself can be read as a continuation of Becce’s hope, cited at the outset, for a director who is the creator of a total work of art. So in the image of the arabesque, Godard cites the total artistic impetus of the Nouvelle Vague and reveals its system-stabilizing effect. At the same time, the arabesque principle of cinematic form serves as a moment of disturbance that un-dermines the option of totality. Godard develops the arabesque as a critical form by establishing it as an order of (“painterly”) surface positioned against the nar-rative space of the romance, which is absolutely laid out in van de Velde’s cited examples of nature’s “draftsmanship.” From the beginning, as already described, nature appears as an autonomous power and activity, so very much so that Mor-gan has rightly pointed out that its grandeur is tamed to the benefit of beauty, but nature plainly always remains a product of human activity. In the beautiful order of nature that is cultivated to the arabesque, it must be added, however, that the film reflects itself as an image-producing machine—more specifically, it exhibits its “negative” actions, which Godard represents in the temporal quality of the context, which is defined primarily through the editing: much more distinctly than paint-ing, film constitutes itself through the boundary of the image; it must incessantly remain accountable for the chosen view and how it is modified through tracking shots and pans; it must consciously manage the boundaries between the shots. This structural conditionality of the film image, that it is contingent upon its boundary,

Have Not (1944). Richard, unlike Roger, knows the answer to the question of the dead bee. With a dignified speech, Elena dismisses the staff, the actual producers of the cinematic total work of art, and drives away with Richard—an image com-monly used by Godard for the imaginary journey that the feature film offers, at the exclusion of all real social conditions, to its viewers.22

The arabesque as Motif and Cinematic form

Originally a decorative motif used to frame jewelry, the autonomized arabesque in romantic and neo-Romantic total works of art testifies to the existence of a form that emerges from the innermost forces of nature itself. In this sense, Henry van de Velde had based his vision of a synthesis of the arts on a philosophy of the line as “transferred gesture[s].”23 He referred back to primitive techniques, to which he attributes an immediate expressive power that is comparable to nature as an artist:

Psychic forces led the hand armed with primitive tools—bones or stone—just as natural forces bend the tip of the blade of grass to Earth, where it draws small circles in the sand. Natural forces shook the rock, which, upon falling, left behind visible traces on the surfaces it hit; natural forces created those capricious, fleeting arabesques in moving water.24

Godard makes reference to this tradition of modern “natural” ornaments, and in-deed not only in the image of glistening, rippling water surfaces that are filmed decidedly in such a way that sharply contoured biomorphic patterns emerge. The arabesque, in its art theoretical importance as an aesthetic form that—as Runge and Schlegel have shown us—is in keeping with the fullness of being and directed against historical imagery and the linear narrative of the novel, is both subject and agent of the film Nouvelle Vague.

2 Shot from Nouvelle Vague: Arabesques in the moving water.

226 Architectures to be Inhaled 227

The demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis with a controlled explosion in 1972 announced, according to Charles Jencks, the “death of modern architecture.”1 The big bang was the salute in the funeral of modern architecture and at the same time, the starting shot for the postmodern movement. The pho-tograph published in his popular book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977) showed the tumbling fourteen-story slabs of the estate disappearing in a thick gray cloud of debris. In the aftermath of the collapse of the concrete blocks, hundreds of thousand of the inhabitants of neighboring areas inhaled the at mos-phere containing pulverized concrete, fiberglass, and asbestos. Jencks proposed that architects should learn from the failure, and understand architecture as lan-guage and use visual metaphors to make architecture communicate. However, the “arsenal of communicational means” that he proposed in his book has since lost its appeal. But in the meantime, other pulverized buildings have entered the digestive and respiratory system of humankind, and we carry the codes of modernity inside our bodies or even genes.The Pruitt-Igoe housing estate became an object of architectural history in the pre-cise moment when it ceased to exist physically, underlining that atmospheric events determine our perception of epochs more than concrete constructs. They seem to contradict the more than 2,000-year-old dictum of firmitas (firmness, solidity),

arChiTeCTureS To be inhaLeDConstructing the ephemeral

Ákos Moravánszky

one of the three virtues of good architecture as formulated by Vitruvius. But long before the Pruitt-Igoe explosion, architectural theorists such as Gottfried Semper had started to look at the evolution of “technical and tectonic arts”2 as a liberation from primary, directly material-bound forms.

The haze of the Carnival Candles

Gottfried Semper’s evocation of Karnevalskerzendunst, the “haze of the carnival candles” as the “true atmosphere of art” sounds like a call for liberation from the material-tied firmitas of Vitruvian theory. Semper emphasized the interplay between between reality and illusion in a frequently quoted footnote in his magnum opus, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetic): “The spirit of the masks breathes in Shakespeare’s drama. We meet the humor of masks and the haze of can-dles, the carnival spirit … in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.”3 Semper seemed to echo his friend Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk—however, in contrast to Wagner, he moved beyond the singular artwork to emphasize the integration of arts under the guidance of architecture, which was exemplified for Semper less by the musical drama than by the architectural monument. In his essay “Vorläufige Be-merkungen über vielfarbige Architektur und Skulptur bei den Alten” (Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity, 1838), Semper used his favorite metaphor of the textile, as a networked, interwoven way of cultural production when he commented that “formerly all the fine arts cooperated closely on monuments of every kind, harmoniously and powerfully assisting one another, woven into a well-proportioned whole.”4

For Wagner, it was the flowing, evolving character of music that helped it to over-come the burden of materiality. Semper, too, spoke of the need of annihilating the material in the work of art: “The destruction of reality of the material, is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaningful symbol, as an autonomous human creation.”5 This liberation from matter resulted in an interest for theatricality and for mimetic strategies, as put forward in the concept of Stoffwechsel (metabolism or material transformation). The “haze of the carnival candles,” a mixture of hot air and smoke that scatters light and obscures the clarity of vision, is a modern dream of returning to an earlier, less intellectual, more material state of consciousness. It was described by Friedrich Nietzsche as the “haze of the unhistorical” in his essay “Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben” (The Use and Abuse of History for Life), the second of his four Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), published in 1874:

240 Architectures to be Inhaled 241

Space, a term that entered architectural theory only in the late nineteenth century in connection with theories of visual perception, became in the twentieth century a milieu of social relations and a container of noise, congestion, and pollution, and is today a projection screen for dreams about the Alpine sublime, tropical fecun-dity, or bodily dissolution. Tracing the historic development of an idea that was long unrecognized because of the hegemony of Vitruvian values, immateriality is an ambiguous development, both as a counter-proposal to the digital production of images and as a further step to the total technical control of the environment and the disengagement with social world. That would be the ominous side of the Gesamkunstwerk legacy—the haze of the carnival candles, but not as the half-light of the theater, where we are aware of our presence as spectators, but something we inhale to blur our sense of judgment.

notes1 Charles A. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1977) 9. 2 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthtetics. A Handbook for Technicians, Artists, and

Friends of the Arts, transl. by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004).

3 Ibid., p. 438f. “Maskenlaune athmet in Shakespears Dramen; Maskenlaune und Kerzenduft, Karnevalsstimmung (…) trifft uns in Mozarts Don Juan entgegen; den auch die Musik bedarf (des) Wirklichkeit vernichtenden Mittels …,” in Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik, Bd. 1: Die textile Kunst (Frankfurt am Main 1860, Reprint Mittenwald: Mäander, 1977) 232.

4 Gottfried Semper, “Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity (1834),” in Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, transl. by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 51. “…dass einst alle bildenden Künste in inniger Verbindung zusammenwirkten und an Monumenten aller Art in ein ebenmässiges Ganzes verwebt, harmonisch und kräftig in-einander griffen…” Gottfried Semper, “Vorläufige Bemerkungen über vielfarbige Architektur und Skulptur bei den Alten,” in Semper, Kleine Schriften (Mittenwald: Mäander, 1979) 223.

5 Semper, Style, 439. “Vernichtung der Realität, des Stofflichen, ist nothwendig, wo die Form als bedeutungsvolles Symbol als selbstständige Schöpfung des Menschen hervortreten soll,” 232.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, transl. by R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),

Dissolving utopias

The New York-based office of Diller + Scofidio created an ephemeral structure as part of the Schweizer Landesausstellung—Swiss National Expo 2002 in Yverdon-les-Bains over the Lake Neuchâtel. Originally “Cloud Machine,” then renamed Blur Building, it was a 65 x 100-meter-deep and 25-meter-tall lightweight metal framework that sprayed a fine mist of filtered lake water from 31,500 high-pressure nozzles with tiny apertures only 120 microns in diameter. A “smart weather system” measured the temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, processing the data in a computer that regulated the water pressure to adjust the cloud to the changing climatic conditions. Walking down the long ramp from the shore, visitors arrived on a large open-air platform at the center of the fog, where the only sound to be heard was the sizzle of the pulsing water nozzles. Observed from the shore, their bodies dissolved increasingly in the fog. There was a bar they could visit inside the cloud, to taste different brands of mineral water from all around the world.47 Like Zumthor’s Swiss Pavillon, the Blur Building sought to question the usual spec-tacles of the national exhibition, offering literally “nothing to see.” But still it was “spectacular”: along with Jean Nouvel’s rusty Monolith, which was very much solid and object-like, the Blur was the most successful and memorable (non-)building of the Expo. However, like the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate thirty-two years before, the Blur Building was blown up on May 24, 2004. As if it were cloud that kept the iron skeleton stiff, a “soulless” carcass lay on the shore of the Lake Neuchatel display-ing the bent armature of the Blur. The observer had to realize that there is striking difference between the relationship of building and atmosphere in the work of Zumthor, Rahm, and Diller + Scofidio. While in Zumthor’s case the term “atmo-sphere” is used as a scenography using light and material textures guided by his per-sonal recollections of concrete situations, Philippe Rahm acts as a scientist, working exactly on the displacement of the concept of space from subjective perception. The images he uses to explain his projects are not much more than notations to a program, whose visual aspects are secondary. The “blur” by Diller + Scofidio is blurring the boundaries between the aesthetic experience of the atmospheric inte-rior and conceptual art. It is exactly the coexistence of the metal construction that conjures nineteenth-century images of technical progress (Jules Verne’s machines) and the ephemeral immateriality of the released atmospheric place that fascinated the visitors. The intentional “imperfection” of the control system (a programmed delay between measuring and adjusting the nozzles) distinguishes this project from both the control of the architect on the perfect artifact, executed with utmost care, as well as from the utopia of control of human nature through technology.

4 Diller + Scofidio, The Blur Building at the Swiss National Expo 2002 in Yverdon-Les-Bains.