Walter Benjamin: ambling through the city of a mind, Part 1

 

By Jacob Voorthuis

 

Preface:

How to use this text:

 

How should we understand this course?

Purpose in architecture

This, however, is not the place to elaborate on these generators.

 

Even so, when a need is fulfilled, you will have discovered that each detail, each element making up the complex programme of a building or city fabric has its purpose.

 

And the purpose of each element determines the way that detail has been fashioned. The sum of these details then multiplies into the overall effect.

 

In this way architecture is made up of a myriad of purposes and strategies to answer those purposes, from the smallest into the largest, vaguest and most intangible.

 

The course “philosophies in architecture” tries to concentrate on vision, without wanting to trivialise or ignore the technical aspects of architecture: after all the vision, the design, can only be revealed in technology.

The smallest are the outer layers and hold together the core…

And so, the process of architectural design slaloms between vision and technology.

 

Philosophy is a tool whereby we analyse our place and purpose in the world.

 

Our sense of place determines, or modifies our sense of purpose: what we decide to do and why we do it.

 

These in turn determine how we do it: at that point the four generators of architecture lock into place.

 

This course then explores the no-man’s land that one has to get through in order to decide how to interpret the four generators of architecture.

 

The purpose of that large picture is to draw a finger through the water and give direction to all the decisions that follow in its wake.

 

In the end the text becomes an assembly of memories, which then merge into an overall impression of what I have read.

 

In a sense I want to force your understanding, by taking a short cut, I have divided this once fluid text into a series of short paragraphs.

 

Introduction

Look at the picture, study it closely. It is by Paul Klee and is entitled “A Leaf from the Book of Cities”, 1928 Paul Klee (1879-1940) was a Swiss artist and engraver who taught at the Bauhaus in Germany. He  used to characterise his paintings and etchings as “taking a line for a walk”


 A rectangle, an imagined receptacle for the fragments of the universe we imagine, in portrait format.


In set theory in mathematics the rectangle represents the universal set which contains all elements that are being considered in any discussion, c.f. M.F. Triola, Mathematics and the Modern World, Menlo Park, Calif., 2nd ed. 1978, p. 27. The chinese use the square as a syumbol of the universe.

This picture is the portrait of a city: an image, imagined.

The rectangle is divided into three horizontal sections.

The top section is demarcated by two thick, horizontal lines, which sandwich a black circle.

Below are various busy lines, roughly divided into two large sections by a broad band of lines resembling the stretcher bond pattern of a brick wall.

What happens within these two separated sections is difficult to describe.

The scratchy lines and patterns look like hieroglyphs or cuneiform writing

At the same time they resemble variations on the primordial house as a child might draw them.

Others resemble large apartment blocks with infinite subdivisions

Others again look like the beginnings of a complex organigram of some mute, Kafkaesque institution. Others look like honeycombs, or look as if they represent the logo of some business.

There is more text, more significant tissue here, but this will have to do.

We are told it is A Leaf from the Book of Cities.

In the first instance this title reminds me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

And indeed the texture of the lines of Paul Klee’s print is as complex as all the layers of the city of Venice as described by Calvino, superimposed upon one sheet of paper.

 

Like Calvino’s book, Klee’s picture has a more prophetic resonance; it interferes with the future of cities.

There are lots of definitions for cities. Good ones, inadequate ones, political ones but all of them subscribe to the idea that the city is our greatest artifact: our most glorious and inglorious creation.

 

At the same time cities are “artificial” in a very narrow sense of the word.

In making the city we mostly behave, not as conscious artists, but as termites, doing our thing blindly, instinctively, unstoppably.

And as such, the city is not only our artifact, the shell of what we are, but also and at the same time a representation of what we are and the society we uphold

 

Part 1

 

What’s the point?

Benjamin’s thinking

The objective of this unit is to explore a few themes in the thinking of Walter Benjamin.

 

Many of these themes can be read into Klee’s painting

I want to focus especially on that aspect of Benjamin’s thinking that might help us in the understanding of the purpose of architecture and the nature of the city.

With the ability to describe what we experience, we may arrive at the possibility of analysis.

And with analysis comes the power to transform our attitude to design.

First of all I want to introduce Walter Benjamin through some of his thoughts and insights.

Then I shall try to find a way to interpret his writings and embroider on some of his insights with reference to architecture.

The leading principle in this search is the idea of description as a normative agent. What do I mean by that?
Quite simply that by using certain words to describe things, you have already started pushing your thinking into a certain direction.
And that direction starts establishing the rules for your design.

Description is a way of recreating the object we see, in our vision of its potential. And what do I mean by that? Essentially, the same: The words you use to describe something opens the way to finding potential uses for that object.


For this reason, it is useful to brainstorm for words, which might fit a particular concept or object.

Then I would like to look at Benjamin’s treatment of cities and stop to look at a number of ideas in some depth, but that is in part 2 & 3.

The unit ends simply with an invitation to read some of Benjamin’s descriptions.

Born in Berlin in 1892, Benjamin was a tragic figure: a Jew in an increasingly anti-Semitic Germany.

As the son of a prosperous art-dealer he was not prepared for the confusing days ahead.

He had wanted to spend a quiet life buried in a university. The German government, however, refused to pay Jewish lecturers. He would have had to become a private lecturer, funded by his family.

That would have presented no problem under normal circumstances but his father had lost much of his business during the years of hyperinflation that set in after the First World War.

Benjamin had to support himself.

To do this he was ill equipped.

Legend has it that he was extraordinarily clumsy, a problem that had irritated his mother beyond endurance during his youth and which seemed to predestine him for a career in thought and contemplation.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Benjamin fled to Paris where he continued to write reviews and articles all the while working on his magnum opus “Das Passagenwerk”. When the Germans entered France in 1940, he wanted to escape to Spain.

On the French-Spanish Border the Spanish authorities informed him that he and the others in his group would have to be handed over to the Gestapo.

He committed suicide that night.

It was 1940.

Hearing of his suicide, the Spanish authorities felt guilty, relented and let the others across the border. His suicide, a lonely act of despair, had useful consequences.

Who was Walter Benjamin?

And more to the point, what is he to us?

Primarily he was someone who was able to look. He could “see” with great resolution.

His thought is poetically provoking, with which I mean that his interpretation of the everyday changes the goalposts of our expectations.

His writing forces you to look at problems and events in a different light, from a different angle, at a different scale….

His analysis of what he looks at is rich as well as incisive, but his writing does not obey the strictures of scholarly persuasion and rigid classification.

He is a poet in prose.

He undermines the landscape we think we are so familiar with by substituting new landmarks for old.

In this way Benjamin forces us to acknowledge features which, veiled by the ordinary, needed to be made visible.

And when we begin to see what we think he is showing us, he tells us that it is precisely the veil of the everyday, the veil itself, that is so full and rich in possibilities. In order to try to understand the surprise and astonishment his observations often provoke in people, try and take a good look at the following picture. It is not by him, but it is a picture made in Germany during the first world war….

 

What are the elements that make this picture so powerful? Is it the house that has had its floor removed and been transformed into a precisely defined trench, which carves the room up into such a strange geometry and dictates very precise movements, in an otherwise normal space?
Is it the soldiers all lined up within the darkness of their shelter pointing their guns at the source of light?
Is it the association of the above with the geometry of a church and the strange emblematic resonance the picture acquires because of this?
Have I missed something?

Benjamin removes the distortions we have grown accustomed to and substitutes these for new distortions.

That allows you, for good or bad, to develop fresh strategies to approach your own problems and your own interpretation of events.

Above all, what is special about Benjamin is his ability to relate the objects, forms and events surrounding us, to our spiritual life.

In his essay on The task of a translator he reveals something of his attitude to artifacts and their relationship to our spiritual life.

He opens the essay with the following words:

In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful....
Art posits man’s physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no symphony for the listener...
What does a work ‘say’? What does it communicate? It tells very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information.

So what is art about then?

And if a literary work does not state or impart information, then what is a translator to do?

How can a translator do more than simply translate the information given in one language into another?
What is the essential quality of a work of art?

And what about architecture, which likes to think of itself as a useful thing; are we to simply dismiss the people we build for, our clients?
What does a building say?

Well, before we get all upset, let’s approach this thing with a bit of system.

Let’s see how far his proposition gets us. And in order to do that let’s divide it up a bit:

…in the appreciation of a work of art…consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful.

To understand this proposition we must take a detour and get rid of some of our dearly held assumptions that would otherwise get in the way.

For example, it might be useful within the present context to analyse the self in relation to the other.

Why? Simply because the receiver of your work of art is not who you expect him to be, not the person you invited to the party.

He is his own man: don’t pretend to know him, he will not like it: he wants to discover art for himself.

It might also prove useful to look at the idea of art in relation to its famous rival science.

This “pair” of oppositions would appear to play an important role in the quotation just given.

Let’s start with the division between science and art.

Both Art and Science have the same project, which is to keep us occupied in the hope that we can penetrate the universe with understanding.

That is not a controversial statement.

Science, perhaps concentrates on trying to isolate and define simple elements with which it then tries to reconstruct the complex structure of reality; its truths, wonderful and great as they are, are never more than fragments confined in formulas where predictability is the key.

Art approaches reality the other way around. Art represents the imagining of the unfathomable by reflection; its truths are never more than hopes.

Art expresses life in creations and re-creations.

It understands life by making more of it, more layers.

Science expresses life in beautiful formulas, which it has found by looking at life closely.

It understands life by uncovering what is hidden

Reflection approaches the object by comparison, conjunction, disjunction and metaphor.

It only sees things by way of substituting tentatively what it sees for what it has already grasped elsewhere.

Analysis, on the other hand, has great difficulty grasping the whole…

Science and art are siblings. Sometimes playing well together, at other times involved in a childish tug of wag

In this sense the relationship between art and science is not one of diametrical opposition.
They form a pair, with all the ambiguous dependencies and desires for independency that such a helpless coexistence implies.
Where one penetrates and pioneers, the other consolidates and furnishes connections to the wider whole. Where one has taken on a task, the other completes it.

Science could not exist without art, without the thing that art does, which is to hypothesise freely and creatively about reality.

Science needs that creative principle. Similarly art disintegrates without the paradigm, conditions and methods set and provided by science.

Architecture is irrevocably lost without either.

Architecture is not half art or half science; its symmetry makes up a whole and not just a sum of two halves.

Its purpose lies in playing with the elements that have been put at its disposal

But how does the designer gain access to this full range of possibilities?

And how does he or she select what is right and appropriate to the task in hand?

 

The good designer studies a particular problem, moving constantly from the detail to the whole and back again. Moving constantly between the various levels of purpose to create an overall strategy

Picture him or her hunched over a book or drawing, imagine the tunnelled concentration that connects the eyes to the screen of the computer. Then, suddenly, the architect sits back, expands, stretches and allows this detailed study, these microscopic observations and various fragments to connect to a full and generous view of the world.

It is at this point that the relationship between your “self” and “society at large” becomes interesting.

It is not that you develop an altruistic consideration for the other that guarantees success, it is the realisation that there is a way in which your objectives and those of society need not be at odds, without even relinquishing an atom of your sense of independence and individuality.

HOW?

Paradoxically, when you keep on learning actively, you yourself become the fullest representative of the other. The fullest that is accessible to you at any rate.

By absorbing and learning from the thought and observations of others, by struggling with them and finding your own place in that learning by going to see for yourself you can begin to use your own deepening and widening perspective to find a sustainable and generous way forward where both similarity and difference have their use.

By fulfilling the self in the most generous way possible, by learning and listening with an open and generous mind, your self begins to work for humanity and even the world at large.

Not from a misguided sympathy for the other, but in a more simple mechanistic way. If everything has a useful place, then make sure that place is well-provided for.

Understanding is the creation of space for the self and the other.

It is in your interest to be good at what you want to do, but it is also, and for the same reason, in the interest of society that you are good at what you do, whatever that may be.

And the latter is only your concern to the extent that you enjoy being good at something.

If being a good architect is your purpose, then good architecture is what you want to make.

This requires a different agenda to becoming a rich architect or becoming a social success.

It is that simple.

The architect, to be a good architect, does what an architect does, well.

Now that is a circular argument. Or is it? Well it may be, but it is not strange that it should be circular.

It is circular only in the sense that you state from the start what you want the end result to be. The circularity consists in the fact that you want your hopes and your achievements to meet at the end of your life.

But that shouldn’t preclude surprises and happy serendipity

Serendipity a note: ser·en·dip·i·ty (sèr´en-dîp¹î-tê) noun
The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

[From the characters in the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, who made such discoveries, from Persian Sarandìp, Sri Lanka, from Arabic Sarandìb.]
— ser´en·dip¹i·tous adjective
— ser´en·dip¹i·tous·ly adverb

Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for coining the word serendipity. In one of his 3,000 or more letters, on which his literary reputation primarily rests, and specifically in a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Perhaps the word itself came to him by serendipity. Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of “a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of . . . One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper], who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's [Edward Hyde], found out the marriage of the Duke of York [later James II] and Mrs. Hyde [Anne Hyde, Clarendon's daughter], by the respect with which her mother [Frances Aylesbury Hyde] treated her at table.”
Excerpted from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition  © 1996

Even so, what does good mean here? Can we define this doing well in such a way that we do not merely say something circular and do more than say: “well here’s an example of good architecture”.

 

Are examples of specific instances of good architecture too sensitive to context to allow simple transplantation?

 

Here’s one:

Here’s another…

 

To learn from great architects, you do not concentrate solely on what they do, but the way they do it.

And having truly understood the principles and the procedures that create the artefact, you break free, and do what you want to do.

That is essential

Louis Kahn is the man to read on this score

His thinking is pure poetry

 

Cedric Price is another.

 

Similarly, to learn from great ideas, like those offered in philosophy, you don’t just humiliate the grand metaphors and similes with which philosophers explain the world, by transliterating them into banal references. Such an architecture is little more than an obscure game of trivial pursuit, a bit like an architectural cross word puzzle. No! You take up their challenge, by discovering their reality.

 

Mind you such games, when done well, can -in the right place & for the right reasons- produce some stunningly dynamic architecture

You have to try to excavate the reality that the metaphor unfolds and use that to inform the process of design.

 

Real originality does not worry about difference and distinction, it worries about whether something is truly possessed & enjoyed.

The statement, in words or stones, may have been uttered by someone else first, but the question is not whether it was done before, but whether it is convincing; do you believe it? Does it reflect you? Is it yours by virtue of the struggle you have undertaken to make it yours?

 

When looking at great architecture, we want to perhaps begin by trying to pin down the kind of things the architect did and thought about in order to make great architecture.

 

Question: “So, what is great architecture?”

Answer: “Great architecture is architecture that is called great. By you.”

Your feeling about the answer: “Oh…That is absurd.”

 

But not quite as absurd as all that. Marcel Duchamp had convincingly argued that he had the right to call anything he liked “art” and so he put a urinal on a pedestal, signed it, and called it art.

Try and contradict him. You cannot;
at least not without mistaking a simple definition for a value judgment.

The point is that greatness as a value judgment reaches a crescendo in only one way, by being pointed out and argued convincingly.

There are no short cuts.

The funny thing is, is that Duchamp managed to convince many, including me….

 

But we might get a little further than this by returning to the idea that the architect is part of the world he inhabits; that the self, without merging into indistinctiveness, is not necessarily a contradiction to the society it belongs to.

 

The architect can use the self as a representative for the other as a vehicle for the great.

Great architecture takes the needs, desires and the potential of the user, client and passer-by as the leading principles of its creativity.

Not because it has consideration for the other, but:

because the other is useful in the pursuit of itself.

Usefulness and purpose in architecture are primal instruments in the design process.

The best architecture marries the full purpose of the architect to the full purpose of the client, the user, the city-dweller and society at large.

That requires imagination, empathy, conviction and learning.

If the architect sees his client or the public as his enemy, then that is what they become.

An enemy is an intellectual construct.

With enemies, the process of design becomes one of reconciliation.
Conflict is then an aspect of perspective a trick of appearance, a useful game

The appearance of conflict is useful, because it means that there is a problem to be solved.

Great architecture is always more than a mere reconciliation of apparently conflicting issues.

Once resolved, the issues it addresses work together to transcend their initial purpose to create a space which humanity can fill in its wish to expand its view

It is where the disparate elements do not just tolerate each other but where they complement each other’s varying functions and purposes

I am tempted to put a picture of the Parthenon here, but I won’t (even though I think it would be appropriate). Instead, I’ll put in something better.

 

Your design should be based on the assumption that the reader, client, user, passer-by is capable of expanding into your work, to achieve fullness within it.

It requires the architect to use limitations to his purpose rather than see them as obstacles.

 

Limitations are what the architect should love most.

Some of the best architecture in both Jamaica and Holland, for example, came from the preoccupation with low-cost housing: how to achieve a certain degree of generosity with severely limited financial means; how to build houses where people of little means can achieve their dignity.

Mind you, when low cost housing goes wrong, it can go very very wrong.

The infinite wealth of architecture comes from the careful and purposeful modulation, combination and configuration of a relatively limited set of elements.

 

When you design a museum, for instance you design something for memories to come to light. A good museum is a museum that does what it does, well. And if it does it well, you as architect have been fulfiled. Therefore, your greatest purpose is to fulfil the purpose of the museum. You study light, you study display, you study conservation, you study the context in which the object will appear, you study the function of a museum in society and you study your own relation to all these things.

In fulfilling the purpose of the museum, you fulfil the purpose of architecture

by fulfilling the purpose of architecture you fulfil the purpose of the architect

and by fulfilling the purpose of the architect, you fulfil your own purpose

and by fulfilling  your own purpose you fulfil the purpose of society.

The best example of the way this process works is the game of brainstorming, brainstorming has only one rule: never reject just someone else’s contribution to the brainstorming session, rather: try to find how it fits in to the picture.

 

Therefore, when Benjamin says that the poem is not for the reader, he means that it is for that which lies in between the writer and the reader, the thing that pulls and pushes between the reader and the writer: the poem.

The great poet is the writer of great poetry.

 

Great poetry inhabits that space where relationships, communication and growth become possible, moral growth, aesthetic growth, and metaphysical growth.

 

This is a functionalism in a full sense: the architect uses the needs, desires and potential of the user, the client and the passer-by as the creative principle in his own fulfilment as a good architect.

 

Can we get anywhere nearer to translating this ethical or attitudinal concept of the good architect to something more specific? Can we point at something and “say that is good?” And can we then use that as a model?

 

Yes, but on the understanding that using it as a model, does not simply mean buying and putting on the same clothes as the model. You will need to do more than that in order to look good.

 

Well, let’s put it this way: Just as love can quickly and wildly switch to hate so is greatness conceptually very close to disaster.

But we must also be wary of examples and precedents.

By all means reinvent the wheel while you are learning. But by the time you are designing you should be using the wheel and perfecting it or the vehicle around it.

 

There is so much scope for brilliant architecture, it transcends any narrow criterion.

Even so, we should explore the problem a little further. Let’s go back to Walter Benjamin A great work of art, Benjamin argues elsewhere, has an aura.

The closer we come to defining what good art is, what that aura consists of, the further that element of greatness appears to recede into the skin of the object admired.

What actually happens is that in understanding one level, in removing one veil, in pealing off one layer of the onion, we are simply presented with the next and so on, ad infinitum.

 

If we are still happy to be guided by the concept of beauty as being that to which we aspire, then we can visit Benjamin again Beauty, Benjamin defines as that which remains true to its essential nature only when veiled. What does that mean?

 

Is Benjamin saying that life is like an onion, an infinite layering of veils?

I think so, each veil achieves a certain autonomy as a version of reality, which comes into being at a particular scale, or against a particular background.

 

We can get close to beauty if we try to get close to life.
 
But this has its dangers.

Getting close to life reveals the next scale of observation, reveals a new reality, in the distance.

Getting close to life broadens and changes the background, makes things appear different: it’s a dangerous life

That is also a form of progress.

Mind you, it is a helpless and mysteriously unhelpful progress which does not take us further unless we stand open to its message, which, paradoxically is not much different to the messages of wisdom from sources as old as Buddha, Confucius, Solomon and Socrates.

 

But then, we do not ask to perform life, we are thrown into life. In the same way we are thrown into art.

Here is Walter Benjamin again:

The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. (..) The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. And indeed is not the continued life of works of art far easier to recognise than the continual life of animal species? The history of the great works of art tells us about their antecedents, their realisation in the age of the artist, their potentially eternal afterlife in the succeeding generations. Where this last manifests itself it is called fame.

A translation then, is a form of sustenance, an active furtherance of life, an aspect of fame.

 

Here we get a clue to the purpose of the work of art and perhaps that of the architect.

 

It is not for the receiver, even if the work of art is received by him.

If a work of art suits the receiver he will drink of it voluntarily.

If it is good art, he will want to be immersed in the work, he will make it his own by expanding his ability to conceptualise his condition and fit the work.

He will give it life, by using it as a reference point in his own life, thereby owning it and wandering or wondering at its depth.

In his enjoyment he will want to remember.

In this sense a worthy fame is no empty foolishness, it is the sign of fulfilment.

All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance. The end of life is to express its nature, to represent its significance. (that was Benjamin)

That is not a revelation of God’s hidden purpose; Benjamin does not know God’s hidden purpose. It is simply the conclusion of his looking around.

Great buildings when read well, express the full nature of life.

That is the basis upon which they can be enjoyed.

Great buildings simply express that nature in a great way. They allow us to get closer to the next scale of observation at which a new veil expresses a larger conception.

 

The nature of life is complex and paradoxical. It opens the possibilities of an ugly building being great, simply because it expresses the nature of ugliness, and ugliness is an aspect of life.

Maybe if we try to fathom the purpose of ugliness, that ugliness will fade away by becoming appropriate. If we analyse the ugliness maybe we will see beauties.

Good architecture is conceptually large and generous and can take many forms. Good architecture grows from the warp and woof of a strong leading vision tying together a thorough awareness of the many issues and intricate mechanisms at work in the self, society and the environment.

 

It meets these challenges creatively and critically and expands society within a clear and generous vision.

 

It plays:

 

This conceptual largesse and this playing, will, in turn, give society the room and the desire to fill the building out in its attempt to rise to the widened purpose it offers, which, surely, is to give everyone and everything a place:

 

The end of part 1