Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Claire Zimmerman

Reviewed work(s):
Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig
Hilberseimer by K. Michael Hays
Source: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp.
216-219
Published by: Society of Architectural Historians
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/991493
Accessed: 01/11/2008 13:18

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for that matter, any other standard Califor-
nia house type). Frankwas no doubt influ-
enced by American housing trends-he
often alluded to them in his writings and
lectures-but he also drew from other
building traditions, including the Italian
Renaissance villa, and to argue for a spe-
cific source as Welzig does is not only to
indulge in empty speculation but also to
miss much about his eclectic and highly
personal design approach. While he bor-
rowed from a wide array of sources
throughout his career,Frankalwayssought
to extract their underlying principles, in
the process recasting and combining them
in new ways so that they became quite
distinctivelyhis own. It is this design modus,
much more than any specific sources, that
ultimately reveals the most about his work.
In the end, Frank'smessage concerned
the possibilities of recovering the freedom
and spontaneity that he believed modern-
ism had lost, while still leaving a place for
the personal and the sentimental. Welzig's
book provides a helpful survey of Frank's
architectonic work, but it falls well short in
many other respects. His buildings and
projects, if probed further, still have much
more to tell us.
- If Hays refuses to construct the edifice of
Christopher Long
Universityof Texasat Austin
K. Michael Hays
MODERNISMAND THE POSTHUMANIST
SUBJECT:THE ARCHIECTURE OF
HANES MEYER AND LUDWIG
HLBERSEIMER
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
1992, 336 pp. $16.95 (paper).
ISBN 0-262-58141-8.
Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer
have long been underemphasized in the
study of modern architecture. In Meyer's
case, this is partly due to his embrace of
both radical political rhetoric and avant-
garde architectural practice, in contrast to
contemporaries like Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe and WalterGropius,who successfully
harnessed progressive rhetoric to politi-
cally neutral architectural practices. Lud-
wig Hilberseimer, on the other hand, re-
mains literally "in the shadow of Mies," as
a recent collection of essays suggests. In
1992 K Michael Hays examined the ca-
reers of Hilberseimer and Meyer,enunciat-
216 JSAH / 58:2, JUNE 1999
ing their "posthumanist"practices, to rein-
corporate them into modern architectural
history and delineate an alternative model
for future architectural investigation. The
book addresses an issue of perennial inter-
est to architectural history: the relation-
ship between critic and architect, between
texts and buildings. It explicitly confronts
ManfredoTafuri'scritiqueof operativecriti-
cism, as practiced by Sigfried Giedion,
Henry-RussellHitchcock, Bruno Zevi, and
others.
Any reader wading into Modernismand
the PosthumanistSubject:The Architecture of
HannesMeyerandLudwigHilberseimershould
go lightly clad but well equipped. The
stream of Hays's language is dense, navi-
gable only with the help of a series of texts,
volumes that bear the names of critics,
philosophers, and social analysts.They fig-
ure prominently in Hays's project, some-
times more prominently than Hilbersei-
mer and Meyer, who provide the pretext
for Hays'shighly motivated argument for a
critical and historical reconfiguration in
architecture. The book calls our attention
to this reconfiguration-whether as a bold,
creative assemblage of critical texts, or as a
liberal, selective appropriation of evidence.
scholarly history (with one major excep-
tion, at least), that is his clearlystated inten-
tion, not a side effect of his critical project.
Instead, he theorizes a phase of modern
architecture anew and offers a deconstruc-
tion of its subsequent historiography. His
book aligns itself with critical theory since
1968 (more or less) and with Frankfurt
School theorists, and purports to militate
against disciplinaryspecialization.
Thus, while Hays'swritingis often dense
and difficult, his agenda is clear. Introduc-
tory and concluding sections clarify the
author's aims: first, to recover the ne-
glected work of two architects, and to do so
through "the deconstruction of the hu-
manist tradition based on a radicalization
of the texts of modern thinkers such as
Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud"
(280); and, second, to propose these mo-
dalities as a template for future critical and
architectural practice, as "these seem to
constitute a potent startingpoint for return-
ing contemporary architecture to its social
engagements" (283). Hays's ambition is
partially responsible for the difficult lan-
guage of this book and the brevity with
which complex theoretical arguments are
made, and both these conditions are exac-
erbated by the dearth of other secondary
(and primary) material available on his
subjects.
Hays's introductory forthrightness re-
quires qualification. Through his opening
discussion of Manfredo Tafuriand Sigfried
Giedion, he addresses operative criticism
as defined in Tafuri's Teorie e storia
(Rome/Bari, 1968) and else-
dell'architettura
where, which exposed the close relation-
ship between architectural practice and
history, and targeted architectural histori-
ans who work to shape the present: "Opera-
tive criticism is thus an ideological crit-
icism...: it substitutes preexisting value
judgments intended for immediate action,
for analytical rigor" (182). While Tafuri's
primary target was perhaps Zevi, neverthe-
less he identified Giedion as well. Reject-
ing Tafuri's negativity, Hays understands
operative history as opportunity. He uses
Giedion's Space,TimeandArchitecture (Cam-
bridge,1941) to make this case. Later, ac-
knowledging the general instrumentality
of history writing, Hays suggests that the
historian-criticembrace this potential as a
positive feature of the practice. From this
point, Hays's book assumes the character
of a polemic. He defends his position in
several ways: by indicating the neglect of
his subjects and pinpointing some of its
causes;by presenting a contemporary criti-
cal method that he heartily believes in; by
picking up the banner of Marxist aca-
demic and intellectual practice in America;
by appealing to the authority of his Frank-
furt School sources. Whether he really an-
swersTafuri'scriticismsis less clear; rather,
Hays is quick to condemn the hidden in-
strumentalityof "a limited field of affirma-
tive formal connoisseurship" (312), which
he identifies as traditionalarchitecturalhis-
tory, and which he seeks to deconstruct in
this book.
In discussing Giedion's work, Hays sets
the parameters of his own: to combine
Giedion's operative practice with "a criti-
cal reversal of his humanist privileging of
subject over object" (20). The theme of
outmoded subjectivityrepeats throughout
this book, with the related concept of post-
humanism: "the conscious response,
whether with applause or regret, to the
dissolution of psychological autonomy and
individualism brought by technological
 modernization... a mobilization of aes-
thetic practices to effect a shift awayfrom
the humanist concept of subjectivityand
its presumptions about originality,univer-
sality,and authority" (6). Hays agrees with
Tafuri that industrial capitalism displaced
traditional (premodern) models of archi-
tecturalproduction and representationthat
nevertheless failed to disappear. Thus, ar-
chitecture in industrialized society must
respond to the prevailingproductivemodes
of late capitalism, not from any aesthetic
imperative,but because architectureis liter-
ally and theoretically produced by indus-
try. In order to recapture political and
historical relevance, it must register the
effect of capitalism while maintaining a
critical relation to its ground. While Hays
maintains that Giedion did not fully em-
brace this necessary shift, nevertheless he
was one of the few to absorb and reflect its
conditions. While on the one hand willing
to dismiss Giedion's "rigidly historicist or
rigidly formalist" thesis, Hays starts from
what he sees as the wrongheaded conclu-
sions of a rightheaded approach: "Alterna-
tive, posthumanist subject positions can be
detected within the very formal logic of
modern space-time simultaneity and
mechanization extolled by Giedion, sub-
ject positions that, in their contradiction
and disunity, provide concrete challenges
to his conception of the self as a homoge-
neous and consistent whole" (13). Hays
does not see Giedion as a posthumanist
critic, but as one who unconsciously re-
flected the same critical challenges that
Hays now proposes to solve.
The Giedion-Tafurinexus is important.
From Giedion Hays draws his fervent, al-
most modernist faith in the power of archi-
tecture to change society. Like Tafuri he
hopes to respond to the historical and
intellectual mandate of Marx. But these
two opposed historical projects can only be
resolved through Hays's unhesitatingly se-
lective dialectical appropriation of both.
Hays fashions his own third term of history
making: operative and Marxistat the same
time. His insistence on this combination
has obvious problems. While constituting a
clearly declared program (in this case, per-
haps a sheep in wolfs clothing), it also
depends utterly on Hays's declared belief:
"It seems doubtful to me that a critical
theory, history, or practice that forgets, as
humanism does, the theories, histo-
ries, or cultural politics that overdetermine
architecture's production, use, and even
its understanding, will ever succeed in con-
structing conditions and subjectivitiestruly
human" (288). Hays'struly human subjec-
tivitiesare left undefined and uncontested.
Elsewhere Hays follows Fredric
Jameson's formulation for transcoding (or
mediation), a critical method bringing po-
tentially distant but related historical phe-
nomena together. This method of critical
analysis differs notably from that used in
his introduction. It is one that Hays still
supports, judging from a recent publica-
tion, where he defines mediation as "the
production of relationships between for-
mal analyses of a work of architecture and
its social ground or context (however non-
synchronous these sometimes may
be) ... in such a wayas to show the work of
architecture as having some autonomous
force with which it could also be seen as
negating, distorting,repressing,compensat-
ing for, and even producing, as well as
reproducing, that context" (K. Michael
Hays, ed., ArchitectureTheorySince 1968
[Cambridge, Mass.,1998], x). This particu-
lar critical notion is important for the im-
portation of texts into Modernismand the
PosthumanistSubject. WhileJameson's trans-
coding may license highly selective analysis
responsible to its own necessarilyhermetic
it
terms, provides Hays with a way to con-
nect his subjects to a wider discourse, from
a disciplinaryand a historical point of view.
This is perhaps a critical issue for architec-
tural history, and while the method does
not work at every point, there are many
instances where it does.
The book is laid out symmetrically
around a central hinge. Introduction and
conclusion deal with the parameters of the
critical project. These flank sections on
Hilberseimer and Meyer;in the middle of
the book a single chapter brings the two
architects together. With the exception of
this chapter, also organized sequentially,
rather than comparatively,the two figures
in this book hardly touch. Hays's organiza-
tion is elegant: with Meyer, he deals with
building in the modern period and affilia-
tions between polemic and construction,
and with Hilberseimer, he addresses prob-
lems of urban organization and metropoli-
tan planning. But the structure must be
ideologically important. Why else to sepa-
rate discussions of two figures who knew
each other, worked together at the Bau-
haus, and shared common interests out-
side of architecture, and certainly within
it? While it has a designer's elegance, the
organization creates logistical problems.
Hays introduces conclusions at the end of
his discussion of Meyer (on the 1926
League of Nations competition) that may
belong in an earlier chapter. And about
the competition, Hays writes, "It is diffi-
cult, then, to read the building system as
representational in any traditional, mi-
metic sense" (154-155). This contrastswith
his conclusion only pages before, that "no
part of Meyer's work can be said to be
nonrepresentational in any but a reductive
sense" (146). While these points are poten-
tially reconcilable, their close proximity
and apparent contradiction are distracting
for the reader.
The juxtaposition of Meyer and Hilber-
seimer also has a didactic purpose. Meyer's
posthumanist celebration of the loss of the
centered individual (reflective of a particu-
lar historical moment that Hays contrasts
to the writingsof Georg Simmel and Georg
Lukacs) was essentially consumed by Hil-
berseimer's revived, dehumanized, but in-
flated version of Alois Riegl's Kunstwollen.
Hays writes of Hilberseimer's Der Wile zur
Architektur: "The very concept of the sub-
ject is thus prized loose from the embod-
ied individual and catapulted into some
ontological sphere, and there the Kunstwol-
len,suitablyambiguous, can play its totaliz-
ing role" (272-273). For Hays this concept
hinges on the notion of authority:". .. what
I have been describing illustrates the way
authority is revalidated, however unwit-
tingly,by intellectuals operating by rational
consent to articulate, maintain, or elabo-
rate some prior idea or world view" (277).
One can see Hays'spoint here through the
work of Mies, whose late projects reactivate
an old idea of archetypal form produced
through the mechanisms of a highly indus-
trializedbuilding industry,nevertheless tak-
ing many formal cues from a nineteenth-
century classicizing typology. These kinds
of projects assumed center stage in the
postwar,largely American construction of
modernist orthodoxy, skewing the histori-
cal record of the prewarGerman period in
favor of Mies and Gropius and awayfrom
Meyer'sMarxistwork. By contrast, Meyer's
challenge to the notion of authority was
neutralized in the historicalrecord of archi-
BOOKS 217
 tecture in the Western world (he fared
little better in the Soviet Union, as his
radical stance soon fell afoul of Stalinism).
Hays neglects Meyer's political ideology as
a possibly analogous authoritative struc-
ture, concentrating instead on the "relent-
less practice of negation" in his work as a
positiverecommendation for modern prac-
tice, after Bertholt Brecht.
Hays attempts to rescue Meyer from
historical neglect. Deserving of a salvage
operation, Meyer took up many of the
battle cries of 1920s avant-gardearchitec-
tural practice and attempted to carry them
toward a logical conclusion. The impor-
tance of his work at the Bauhaus has been
obscured by the two heavies that pressed in
on him from either side: Mies belittled
Meyer'seffort; Gropius later vilified Meyer
and his work in a published letter to Tomas
Maldonado on openly personal grounds.
More to the point, it seems that Meyer has
yet to receive historical attention akin to
that given him by his peers. His impor-
tance in Germany in the 1920s is nowhere
reflected in the historical record since. But
if Hays is acting as the historical savior of
Hannes Meyer,he has picked a strange way
to do it. His book could not be called a
model of accessibility;it lacks enough infor-
mation on Meyer, and the first two chap-
ters following Hays's introduction are the
least accessible, most speculative, least-well-
supported parts of his argument. Hays's
insistence on a lengthy comparison of the
interiors of Adolf Loos with Meyer'sCo-op
Zimmer,a kind of temporary ("nomadic")
installation of an existenz-minimum dwelling
represented only in a single photograph
(and, as Hays points out, as a photograph),
is troubling. The subject here is really Mey-
er's important 1926 publication, "Die neue
Welt" (Werk13:7 July 1926]), in which the
photograph of Co-op Zimmer (Die
Wohnung)appeared. HayscritiquesLoosian
interiority through the counterproposal of
Meyer's triumphant exteriority, as her-
alded in "Die neue Welt," where Meyer
welcomed the loss of the very bourgeois
interioritythat Loos wastryingto accommo-
date. Hays'smaneuverhere is hard to follow
and his criticism of Loos unconvincing.
In this chapter and the next, dense
theoretical discussions stand before analy-
sis. This procedure is the opposite of how
Rosalind Kraussoften lures one into com-
plex, theoretical texts with a lucidly written
218 JSAH/ 58:2,JUNE 1999
descriptive introduction. She knows that
the first act of reading, to be memorable
(and thereby absorbed), involves an act of
surrender to the text. For Hays, the text
begins with an act of repulsion, pushing
the reader awaywith a baldly asserted theo-
retical conclusion. So, chapter one, sen-
tence two: "Meyer's Co-op work marks a
fault line in the development of modern
architecture, a cleft in cultural space across
which would be played the dialectic of
formal paradigms already defined by the
avant-garde and the altogether different
perceptual conventions of mass technologi-
cal society" (25). This authorial aggressive-
ness (the wolfs clothing) sets readers back;
many don't make it as far as chapters three
and four (from my unofficial survey),which
are a pleasure to read. There, Hays com-
bines his theoretical-criticalagenda with a
close analysisof two of Meyer'smost impor-
tant projects:the Petersschule in Basel (un-
built) and the ADGB officers' training
school in Bernau (built). The former, as a
series of mute, functionally determined
building volumes with mass-producedtech-
nical apparatuses parasiticallyhung from
the outside, sounds like an architectural
version of Raoul Haussmann's TheSpiritof
Our Time (1921). Hays relates ("trans-
codes") the Petersschule to Gilles Deleu-
ze's abstractmachine, illustratinghis anach-
ronistic method at its most creative. Hays's
description actually evokes the Bernau
school, as compromised as one finds it
today: "Meyerintensifies the raw material-
ity of the thing-the glaring brightness,
the hardness, the smell, the taste-and
thrusts the experience of that thing, previ-
ously indifferent and unimaginably exter-
nal, toward the subject with unpadded
harshness" (111).
In his discussion of Meyer's "Die neue
Welt," Hays excludes local context, mak-
ing little reference to related publications
in the 1920s. Yet one illustration, a reprint
from Meyer showing a sample of books on
modern architecture from his own library,
shows the value he placed on not being a
unique figure, on being one of a collec-
tive-a "brigade" in pursuit of the mod-
ern. Presenting Meyer throughout as a mis-
understood pioneer runs counter to Hays's
expressed intention and threatens the cred-
ibility of his well-articulated program. If
committed to a theoretical reinstatement
of Meyer,why separate him from the discur-
sive world he operated within? Why con-
sider Meyer an individual agent? Where
are his fellow fighters, those who also went
to the Soviet Union for the same reasons?
Where, for instance, is Ernst May?And of
critics, where is Adolf Behne, closely con-
nected to Hannes Meyer on the ADGB
commission and elsewhere (perhaps even
more so to Ludwig Hilberseimer)? In
Hays'sdiscussion of Dada influences, what
were the specific connections between Mey-
er's early Co-op projects and Dada and
Constructivist artists? And where is the
background, clearly important to Meyer's
production, on his interest in psychology,
already emerging in Switzerland, and an
area of interest to theorists of modernism
like Giedion and Behne (not to mention
Hays himself)? The answer to these ques-
tions lies in Hays'sconstruction of a theory
of modernism around the work of Hilber-
seimer and Meyer. Such a construction
organizes only the information needed for
theory construction. Nevertheless, this par-
ticular theorization calls out for firmer evi-
dentiary foundations. We simply don't
know enough about Meyer, or, for that
matter, Hilberseimer. Here Hays has been
his own worst enemy, in that his project is
unnecessarily obscured by relativelyminor
deficiencies. Thus, with only marginally
more illustrationsand text to situate Meyer
and familiarize the reader with his prac-
tice, this analysis might have been signifi-
cantly more compelling, its impact also
proportionately wider.
The same complaint does not, however,
arise over the chapters on Hilberseimer.
While Hilberseimer's theoretical research
on city form was mostly pursued individu-
ally (at least in Germany), whether in criti-
cal texts or drawings, he was also in con-
stant dialogue with artists and architects
through hisjournalistic activities.Hays pro-
vides an excellent discussion of these two
modes of production in relation to one
another and to critics such as Simmel,
Kracauer,and Bloch. LackingMeyer'srevo-
lutionary passion, Hilberseimer analyzed
city form and buildings as units of the
metropolis. Hays, similarlyless passionate,
explicates Hilberseimer's early produc-
tion. Thus, in response to Richard Pom-
mer's impatient treatment in In theShadow
of Mies (Chicago, 1988), Hays writes: "My
point is... to insist that aesthetic prefer-
ences in se can no longer be the basis of an
interpretationof Hilberseimer" (324). This
point is important, as it has been over-
looked in spite ofHilberseimer's open dec-
laration in his Groszstadtarchitektur (Stutt-
gart, 1927), also quoted by Hays: "The
chaos of the city of today can be opposed
only by attempts at theoretical systematiza-
tion" (251). Hays then analyzes Hilbersei-
mer's urban proposals within the context
of his fascinating written production as
architect and as art critic for Sozialistische
Monatshefte and otherjournals.
Hays's linkage of writings and design
projects throughout this book is insightful.
In Hilberseimer's case this demands close
textual and visual analysis and less po-
lemic. Hays'sdense and difficult analysisof
Hilberseimer's art criticism, and his
Wohnstadt (1923) and Hochhausstadt (1924),
is one of the most impressive sections of
the book, in particularthe use of Hilbersei-
mer's writings on Expressionism and Ber-
lin Dada to elucidate his theoretical city
projects. While Hilberseimer embraced a
Dionysian primitivismin art making, it was
not that of the German Expressionistsbut
rather the destructive primitivismof Dada,
followed by a thus purified Constructivism.
The traces of both Dada and Constructiv-
ism read clearly in Hilberseimer's build-
ings. While the 1986 issue of Rassegnadedi-
cated to Hilberseimer covered some of this
terrain, no other scholar has taken up the
challenge of elucidating Hilberseimer's
drawings through his writings. Hays's dis-
cussion opens up an elusive and retiring
figure and one of the least understood
mysteries of his production-and under-
scores the close relation between artists
and architects in the Weimar period. Here
Hays hits the critical project at his best:
changing our perception of the material to
bring it into focus and relevance.
In addition to discussionsof Hilberseim-
er's philosophical coordinates, as a close
follower of both Nietzsche and Riegl, Hays
explains Hilberseimer's work with refer-
ence to Baudrillardiansimulation. Indeed,
Hilberseimer's drawings do read as archi-
tectural simulacra, their status as render-
ings more real than their potential to be
buildings. This is Hilberseimer's drawing
technique in tandem with his theoretical
aim. The drawings prove Hays's (and Hil-
berseimer's) claim: no windows fill the
blank holes of building facades, no particu-
lars of site demarcate their meeting with
the ground, no flashing or coping medi-
ates their intersection with the sky, and
almost no specifics of program manifest
themselves on building exteriors. Hays's
discussion of these projects seems predi-
cated on their status as drawings. And yet
the drawings themselves are never the fo-
cus of discussion. Similarly,Meyer's drawn
production exceeded his built work signifi-
cantly. It would seem that Hays's analysis
could only have been substantiated by a
discussion of the role of representation
(two-dimensional) in the theoretical con-
struction attempted by both. But this criti-
cism constitutes another kind of interpre-
tive anachronism of the sort that Hays
openly practices, as the study of drawings
per se has emerged most insistently in the
years since Hays began his work.
Finally,this book polemically targets ar-
chitects and architecture students, faring
badly next to Giedion's Space, Time and
Architecture (written when Giedion was lec-
turing at Harvard, where Hays now
teaches). Giedion's polemics were laid out
with a graphic clarity-literally-that made
his text work so well for his architectural
audience. Hays might be said to have lost
his two obvious potential audiences. Archi-
tectural historians have trouble forgiving
him his creative, operative method; archi-
tects cannot follow his densely argued text.
This book is perhaps really addressed to its
own highly specialized audience: the archi-
tecturalcritic/historian, often firstan archi-
tect and then a Ph.D. There are probably
more of these in training now than when
Hays was writing, partly as a function of
his work. Should we see Hays as inaugurat-
ing a period of candidly (or not) operative
history in North American architecture?
Like him, these younger critic/historians
will not teach in departments of art history,
but in architectural schools, where it
will presumably be their goal to try to
shape the future of practice. This would
indeed be an embrace of the project of
Giedion. Have we been down this road
before?
- Claire Zimmerman
CityUniversityof New York

EUROPE FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

David Howarth
IMAGESOF RULE:ART ANDPOLmTICS
IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE,
1485-1649
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1997, xv + 323 pp.,
94 illus. $19.95 (paper).
ISBN 0-520-90992-3.
David Howarth is one of the liveliest art
historians now writing on sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century British art. Working
at the intersection of art history, history,
and cultural studies, he has charted the
collecting activitiesof Thomas Howard,earl
of Arundel, and the visual culture of the
Caroline court. His new book, Images of
Rule: Art and Politicsin the English Renais-
sance, 1485-1649, offers neither a study of
connoisseurship nor a survey of familiar
names and works in Tudor and Stuart art
history, but something altogether more in-
teresting, a study of the forms and activities
used to express political power: the palace,
the church, the portrait, the tomb, and the
art collecting. While the Caroline court
has often been singled out for attention,
Howarth is concerned to show Stuartconti-
nuities with the early Tudors. He repeat-
edly returns to the connections between
the artistic patronage of Henry VIII and
Charles I, and between the work of Hol-
bein and Van Dyck. Within each chapter
he providescase studies of individualworks,
some well known, like the Banqueting
House, others less well known, such as
Inigo Jones's unbuilt Court of Star Cham-
ber and the earl of Strafford'smonumen-
tal mansion built at Jigginstown, Ireland,
in the 1630s.
Howarth'smethodology is historicaland
iconographic, although he candidly ad-
mits that the question of how well Renais-
sance emblems were understood by view-
ers remains open. Drawing on Michael
Baxandall, he describes "English Renais-
sance artefacts whatever they may be-

BOOKS 219