Walter Benjamin and

Architecture

The essays compiled in this book explore aspects of Walter Benjamin’s discourse that
have contributed to the formation of contemporary architectural theories.
Issues such as technology and history have been considered central to the very
modernity of architecture, but Benjamin’s reflection on these subjects has elevated the
discussion to a critical level. The contributors in this book consider his ideas in the context
of digitalization of architecture where one’s perception of the object is transformed beyond
its auratic dimension. They cover the early modernist infatuation with the machine, but
also the current use of electronic technologies, which has reached the point where the
very technologies themselves determine the processes of design and the final form.
This book proposes that Benjamin’s anthropological approach to the histor-
icity of architecture should be considered as a major way out of historicism and the
inclination to gauge the contemporaneity of architecture in association with technological
progress.
This book was published as a special issue of Architectural Theory Review.

Gevork Hartoonian is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra.

He has practised architecture and taught at several universities in America, including
Columbia University and the Pratt Institute. He is a member of the editorial group of
Architectural Theory Review. His most recently published book is Crisis of the Object
(Routledge, 2006). A Korean edition of his Ontology of Construction (Cambridge University
Press, 1994) is scheduled for 2010.
Walter Benjamin and
Architecture

Edited by Gevork Hartoonian

First published 2010
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2010 selection and editorial matter, Gevork Hartoonian; individual chapters, the
contributors

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Walter Benjamin and architecture / edited by Gevork Hartoonian.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1 Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940. 2. Architecture, Modern—20th century. I. Benjamin,
Walter, 1892–1940. II. Hartoonian, Gevork.
B3209.B584W335 2010
720.1—dc22

ISBN 0-203-86592-8 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-48292-5 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-86592-8 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-48292-9 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-86592-7 (ebk)
Contents

List of illustration credits vi

List of contributors viii

Introduction 1
GEVORK HARTOONIAN

1 Manfredo Tafuri and the age of historical representation 5

ANDREW LEACH

2 Looking backward, looking forward: delightful delays 23

GEVORK HARTOONIAN

3 Porosity at the edge: working through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Naples’ 39

ANDREW BENJAMIN

4 From Baldwin’s Paris to Benjamin’s: the architectonics of race and

sexuality in Giovanni’s Room 51
MAGDALENA J. ZABOROWSKA

5 Architecture under the gaze of photography: Benjamin’s actuality and

consequences 75
NADIR LAHIJI

6 The techno-aesthetics of shock: Mario Sironi and the Exhibition of the Fascist
Revolution (1932) 93
LIBERO ANDREOTTI

7 Mimesis 123
NEIL LEACH

8 Daniel among the philosophers: the Jewish Museum, Berlin, and

architecture after Auschwitz 137
TERRY SMITH

9 Portbou and two grains of wheat: in remembrance of Walter Benjamin 161

RENÉE TOBE

Index 175
Illustration credits

4.1 Le Corbusier (From Jeanneret-Gris, Charles Edouard – Beistegui Apartment.)

4.2 Les Halles (Adoc-photos, Art Resource, New York.)
4.3 Les Halles (CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Art
Resource, New York.)
6.1 Sironi, political illustration, 1934 (From Fabio Benzi and Andrea Sironi
(1988), Sironi Illustratore, Rome: De Luca, p. 226.)
6.2 Sironi, Paesaggio Urbano, 1921 (From Claudia Gianferrari ed. (1988),
Mario Sironi, Paesaggi urbani, Milan: Mazzotta, p. 60.)
6.3 Palazzo delle Esposizioni temporary façade (left) and Via Nazionale
on 28 October 1932 (right) (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi (1933),
Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, p. 67.)
6.4 Sironi and Muzio, Italian Pavilion, facade of the Press Section,
Barcelona 1929 (From Emily Braun (2000), Mario Sironi and Italian
Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 146.)
6.5 Sironi and Muzio, Sezione Arti Grafiche at the Villa Reale in Monza,
Salone d’Onore (left) and overall plan (right) (From Andrea Sironi ed.
(2004), Sironi, La Grande Decorazione, Milan: Electa, p. 193.)
6.6 EFR, Main Floor Plan, with Sironi’s rooms P through S (From Dino
Alfieri and Luigi Freddi (1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista,
Bergamo, p. 38.)
6.7 Libera and de Renzi, EFR temporary façade, plan and elevation (left),
guards at the entrance (right) (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi
(1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, p. 35.)
6.8 Terragni, Sala O, view from the entrance (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi
Freddi (1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, p. 67.)
6.9 Konstantin Melnikov, USSR pavilion, Paris 1925 (left), and Gustav
Klutsis, poster 1930 (right) (From Frederick Starr (1992), Il padiglione
di Melnikov a Parigi 1925, Rome: Officina, p. 70; and (1992) The Great
Utopia: Russian avant-garde 1915–1932, Catalogue of the exhibition
held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.)
6.10 Terragni, Sala O photomontage (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi
(1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, p. 67.)
 Illustration credits

6.11 Terragni, study for Sala O (Reproduced by kind permission of Emilio

Terragni, Terragni archives, Como.)
6.12 Sironi, view of Room P from the entrance vestibule (From Dino Alfieri
and Luigi Freddi (1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, p. 67.)
6.13 Sironi, three studies for Room P (Courtesy Andrea Sironi and
Claudia Gianferrari. From Andrea Sironi ed. (2004), Sironi, La Grande
Decorazione, Milan: Electa, p. 79.)
6.14 The Roman salute (Source unknown.)
6.15 Sironi, Sintesi della Guerra Mondiale (1918) (left) and Ernst Mach,
photograph of a bullet in flight (1880s) (right) (From Fabio Benzi and
Andrea Sironi (1988), Sironi Illustratore, Rome: De Luca, Tavola XVIII;
Illustrazione per Il Montello, 20 Sept. 1918.)
6.16 Sironi, The End of the Liberal Era and the Ascent of Fascism, Room
P (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi (1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione
Fascista, Bergamo, pp. 194–5.)
6.17 Sironi, entrance to Room Q with Sironi standing on the left (left) and
Room Q, Roman warriors (right) (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi
(1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, p. 205.)
6.18 Sironi, Salone d’Onore, view from the entrance (From Dino Alfieri and
Luigi Freddi (1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, pp. 212–13.)
6.19 Sironi, Salone d’Onore, entrance and exit (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi
Freddi (1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, pp. 214–15.)
6.20 Sironi, Galleria dei Fasci (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi (1933),
Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, p. 218.)
6.21 Libera and Valente, Shrine of the Martyrs (From Dino Alfieri and Luigi
Freddi (1933), Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Bergamo, p. 230.)

(Figures 6.1, 6.2, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.12, 6.13, 6.14, 6.16, 6.17, 6.18, 6.19, 6.20 and 6.21 are
from Libero Andreotti’s (2004) Triennale Exhibition Catalogue, Mario Sironi La Grande
Decorazione, Milan, Electa. Most of these appeared originally in the catalogue of the
Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution published in Italy in 1933. Figures 6.3, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9,
6.10 are from the 1933 catalogue and were used previously in Libero Andreotti’s (1992),
‘The aesthetics of war: the exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’, Journal of Architectural
Education, February.)

9.1 Looking down monument towards the sea (© Renée Tobe, 2008)
9.2 Viewing platform and horizon (© Renée Tobe, 2008)
9.3 Ascending the monument (© Renée Tobe, 2008)

vii
Contributors

Libero Andreotti is Professor of Architecture and Resident Director of the Georgia Tech
Paris Program at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette. He
is author of Le Grand Jeu à Venir: écrits situationnistes sur la ville (Editions la Villette,
2007), and editor, with Xavier Costa, of Situationists: Art, Politics, Urbanism and of
Theory of the Derived and Other Situationist Writings on the City (Barcelona: ACTAR,
1996). His articles on the history of European architecture and on the avant-garde move-
ments after the Second World War have appeared in October, Lotus International, JAE,
Architectural Theory Review, Japan Architect, Built Environment, Design Studies, 32,
and Architecture and Idea.

Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory and Philosophical Aesthetics in the

Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Australia. His most recent book is Style and Time:
Essays on the Politics of Appearance (Northwestern University Press, 2006).

Gevork Hartoonian is Associate Professor of Architecture in architectural history and

theory at the University of Canberra, Australia. His most recent book is Crisis of the
Object: The Architecture of Theatricality (Routledge, 2006). He has served in the editor-
ial group of Architectural Theory Review since 2002. A Korean edition of his Ontology
of Construction (Cambridge University Press 1994) is due for early 2010.

Nadir Lahiji is an architect, educator and a critical theorist. He holds a PhD in architec-
tural theory and history from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-editor of the
anthology of critical and theoretical essays, Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture
(Princeton Architectural Press, 1997). His recent publications include essays in
Architecture Theory Review, Built Environment, Journal of Architectural Education,
AA Files, and Any. He has taught in a number of institutions, including the University
of Pennsylvania, Penn State University, Georgia Tech, Pratt Institute, University of
Cincinnati, Drexel University, and the Lebanese American University.

Andrew Leach is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Architecture at the

University of Queensland, Australia. Among his publications are Shifting Views (UQP,
2008), edited with Antony Moulis and Nicole Sully, and Manfredo Tafuri (A&S, 2007).
With Paul Walker he edits Fabrications: JSAHANZ.
 Contributors

Neil Leach is an architect and theorist. He is currently Professor of Architectural Theory at

the University of Brighton, UK. He has taught in a number of American and European
schools of architecture. His recent publications include The Politics of Space (Routledge,
forthcoming), Camouflage (MIT Press, 2006), Forget Heidegger (Paideia, 2006), China
(Map Office, 2004), Millennium Culture (Ellipsis, 1999) and The Anaesthetics of
Architecture (MIT Press, 1999). He has also been co-curator of the Fast Forward>>
exhibition at the Beijing Biennial 2004, the Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies
exhibition at the Beijing Biennial 2006, and the (Im)material Processes: New Digital
Techniques for Architecture exhibition at the Beijing Biennial 2008. He is currently
working on a monograph, Deleuze and New Scientific Thinking.

Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History
and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also a Visiting Professor in the
Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney. During 2001–2
he was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, and in 2007–8
the GlaxoSmithKlein Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Research Centre,
Raleigh-Durham. From 1994 to 2001 he was Power Professor of Contemporary Art
and Director of the Power Institute, Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of
Sydney. His recent publications include Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design
in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art,
vol. 1, The Nineteenth Century: Landscape, Colony and Nation, vol. 2, The Twentieth
Century: Modernism and Aboriginality (Craftsman House, 2002); and The Architecture
of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006). In 1996 he was elected a Fellow
of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Membré Titulaire of the Comité
International d’Histoire de l’Art.

Renée Tobe is an architect and artist who has exhibited her work internationally. She is
Senior Lecturer at the Lincoln School of Architecture, UK. She studied architecture at
the Architectural Association and has a PhD in History and Theory of Architecture from
Cambridge University. Her research describes architecture in film, graphic novels, and
television. Recent publications include ‘Modernist Noir’ in Perspectives, 15(4) and ‘Plato
and Hegel Stay Home’ in arq, 11(1).

Magdalena J. Zaborowska is Associate Professor in the Program in American Culture

and the Center for Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor, USA. She has published widely on Baldwin, including James Baldwin’s
Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Duke University Press, 2009); ‘Racing Transatlantic
Passages: James Baldwin’s African “America” and Immigrant Studies’, Cultural
Psychology of Immigrants, ed. Ramaswami Mahalingam (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006);
‘Mapping Transcultural Masculinities: James Baldwin’s Innocents Abroad, or Giovanni’s
Room Revisited’, Other Americans, Other Americas: the politics and poetics of multi-
culturalism, ed. Magdalena J. Zaborowska (Aarhus University Press, 1998), as well as
entries on Baldwin and his works in The Literary Encyclopedia.

ix
Introduction
Gevork Hartoonian

The collected essays in this book wish to make a modest claim: even though some have
called for the end of ‘history’ and ‘theory’, Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre is still of interest as far
as the historicity of modern architecture is concerned. Though this claim might also apply
to a few other philosophers of the last century, Benjamin’s case remains unique. Consider
this: in the last two decades, architects and scholars have read and re-read essays of many
thinkers wishing to shed some light on the contemporaneity of architecture. Still many
have not given up the attempt to ‘fold’, ‘deconstruct’ and ‘phenomenologise’ architecture,
not only in seminar rooms but also in the abyss of design studios. There is something in
Benjamin’s work that remains unattainable to pragmatic ends. Yes, in the present trendy
and exhausted mood of ‘philosophy applied to architecture’, he has survived.
But, was not his ‘survival’ pronounced a long time ago when he mapped
The Arcades Project, itself an incomplete project? To say that his work is ‘incomplete’
demands teasing out two issues. The entirety of Benjamin’s work and life is analogous to
the claim that modernity should be seen as an incomplete project, to paraphrase Jurgen
Habermas’ prophecy that nowadays has gained more currency than when it was pro-
nounced. It seems Benjamin took the task upon himself to plot the scenario of a play, or
rather a game, that was never played out fully. And yet from the present standpoint, the
images, and insights grafted onto most of what he spelled out, represent nothing short of
what might be called ‘ruin’ in the future. Ruin indeed if one takes his speculation seriously
(and why not?) that each epoch dreams that which is to follow in images welded to ele-
ments from prehistory. And yet, his reflection on many issues, including the metropolis,
the exhibition value of the work of art, the loss of aura, and the relation of masses to the
media and politics stand today like a timeless edifice.
My generation of architects in the Anglo-Saxon world came to know the
architectonic implications of Benjamin’s writings mostly through translation of Manfredo
Tafuri’s Teorie e storia dell’architettura. Since then three tropes have remained indispensi-
ble to any critical rethinking of architecture: the concept of the loss of aura, the impact of
technology on the modernity of artefacts, and phantasmagoria as the main characteristic
of the landscape of modernity. The last two perhaps are the most tangible ones today
when globalisation of capital and the information industry has brushed aside the old dis-
tinction between the urban and the rural. This territorial transformation has inaugurated
a fertile domain for architects to think ‘construction’, a concept welded to Benjamin’s
Gevork Hartoonian

work, anew. As far as the project of modernity is concerned, one might claim that con-
struction is centred on technological transformation. And yet, Benjamin’s reflections on
the Werkbund’s debate, and the idea of the Nue Sachlichkeit, is of interest today when
technification of architecture has pushed the art of building to the domain of phantas-
magoria of commodity fetishism. What is involved here is not of a technical nature, but
Benjamin’s concept of history.
If the Promethean and forward looking vision of progress is suspended mo-
mentarily, then the rubble of the history might disclose something different. This is not to
lament for the return of the bygone past, but to problematise the now of the present,
and rework utopias that had to be submitted to the ashes of history, if capitalism had to
survive.
What, then, has all this to do with architecture today? Perhaps not a recipe for
architects. And, yet, the very idea of differentiating the contingencies of late capitalism
from the incomplete project of modernity prompts rethinking architecture beyond the
current rush to digital design. If there is any lesson to learn from Benjamin it should be
of the following nature: how to demystify technology in a situation when dualities such
as nature/art and culture/technique do not hold strongly. This is of significance mainly
because the very idea of challenging these dualities was the theoretical underpinning
of the historical avant-garde. At a speculative level, however, it is possible to claim that
Benjamin was aware of the futility of subscribing to any grand narratives, including the
project of modernity. Aloof from the extreme ideas formulated by the left and right wing
politics of the mid-1930s, he chose to navigate in the realm of solitude to be captured
posthumously in whatever the adjective ‘Marxist-Rabbi’ might mean today. The contribu-
tors to this volume might not agree with the entirety of these short introductory remarks;
a disagreement that is the very reason of each one’s contribution to further understanding
of ‘Walter Benjamin and architecture’.
Starting with Walter Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk, Andrew Leach demonstrates
the ways which Tafuri applies Benjamin’s analogy of magician-surgeon, painter-operator
to the culture of modern architecture. He then offers a second reading to render the ana-
logy available to broader historical phenomena. In tracking Benjamin’s presence in Tafuri’s
œuvre Leach articulates the translation from the status of the art work in the mechan-
ical era (Benjamin) to the status of historical knowledge in an age wherein architecture
draws identity, according to Tafuri, from precisely the abstractions offered by historical
fabrications. Focusing on the idea of construction discussed by Walter Benjamin in various
occasions, Gevork Hartoonian’s essay re-formulates the problematic relationship between
architecture and technology, a theme essential for architecture’s entry into the age of
modernization. And this in conjunction to contemporary architecture’s return to themes
such as roofing and wrapping, which were essential to Gottfried Semper’s discourse on
the tectonics.
Andrew Benjamin presents a reading of Benjamin’s ‘Naples’ wherein ‘porosity’
becomes the concept through which it may be possible to rework the nature of boarder.
To shed a critical light on the question concerning architectural theory, especially the one

2
 Introduction

in which digital and the political can be interarticulated, Andrew Benjamin works through
Benjamin’s text in order to further this project. In The Arcades Project (1927-40), Walter
Benjamin celebrates the covered passage as a structural symbol of the ‘capital of the
nineteenth century.’ Reading Benjamin through James Baldwin in our own troubled cen-
tury helps us, Magdalena Zaborowska writes, to see how the histories of transatlantic
slavery, colonialism, and ethnic genocides shaped American and Western stories, spaces,
and selves.
Nadir Lahiji suggests that against the current technologies of ‘virtualization’ and
assimilation of architecture to media image industry, this essay turns to Walter Benjamin’s
notion of media and speculates on the relation between building and photography – as the
old new media – to advance the possibility of viewing architecture as a form of ‘media’
in organization of perception. From a psychoanalytical reading of the notion of ‘photog-
raphy,’ the argument proceeds with the Benjaminian thesis that at the beginning of our
modernity, ‘photography’ is the foundation for the constitution of the psychic origin of
technology. Drawing from the Exhibition of Fascist Revolution, 1932, Libero Andreotti
takes the experience of ‘shock’ as the key to decipher, not so much the surface mean-
ings of Mario Sironi’s work, which are altogether predictable, but its mode of operation,
its ‘secret architecture,’ about which we can say that, like Baudelaire, it displays ‘a high
degree of conscious planning.’ The implied notion of camouflage is, according to Neil
Leach, the desire to feel connected. His essay analyses the desire to find our place in the
world through Benjamin’s theory of mimesis.
The importance of Walter Benjamin’s thinking to Daniel Libeskind’s design
process as he developed the Jewish Museum, Berlin, is noted by a number of writers
as well as the architect himself. Terry Smith’s essay demonstrates that it was a set of
Benjamin’s core concepts that enabled Libeskind to find a solution, not only to the prob-
lem for architecture set by Adorno, but also that set by Heidegger. The philosophical and
therefore architectural originality of the Jewish Museum, Berlin––as Andrew Benjamin has
also recognized––lies here. A phenomenological description of Dani Karavan’s monument
for Benjamin in Portbou, a small town at the border of France and Spain, where Benjamin
ended his life, sets Renée Tobe’s journey through which one touches on Benjamin’s friend-
ship and written correspondence with Gershom Scholem, as well as collecting its relation
to creation and creativity. At Portbou, and with Tobe, we follow Benjamin’s advice and
ponder, linger, collecting information.

3
Chapter 1

Manfredo Tafuri and

the age of historical
representation
Andrew Leach

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

of analysis that deliberately avoids assuaging that same crisis from the most theoretical
of both their studies on modernity available to Tafuri (in Italian) by the late 1960s, including
books on contemporary thought, art, symbolism, music, aesthetics and phenomenology
that were in print ahead of his work on Teorie e storia. Tafuri’s reading and adaptation of
Benjamin’s essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936) to the larger disciplinary ques-
tions he faced in his theorization of historiography and its practice translates Benjamin’s
position into a setting altogether different from that in which Benjamin first formulated his
ideas.2 In Teorie e storia, Tafuri extends Benjamin’s theory of modern art and architecture’s
place therein well beyond the limits explicitly asserted by Benjamin himself, recasting the
Benjaminian ‘crisis of the object’ as a problem integral to a cultural development that Tafuri
later describes as an ‘era of representation’.3

Tafuri and Benjamin

Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk is much less a referent or methodological source – as we
might understand Adorno’s function for Tafuri – than an analogy by which Tafuri parallels
Benjamin’s history of the relationship between art and technology in the modern age with
the history of architecture qua architecture. In other words, where Benjamin pinpoints
the mechanisms through which the loss of art’s aura leads to the reclassification of the
traditional high arts as acquisitions and (subsequently) extensions of technological and
institutional evolution, Tafuri restates the terms of Benjamin’s essay in order to explain the
problem of history in contemporary architecture as something systemic to the epistemo-
logical and cultural structures of architecture as an art form, but specifically as an art form
that has origins bound tightly to the practice of historical representation. In turn, the first
instances of history’s appearance in architecture, paralleling the terms of its crisis, occur
in the Renaissance. And the Renaissance, by definition, is – in a temporal sense, at least
– an era in which aura, originality and creative authority are at stake; so, too, is its cultural
authority as (simultaneously) the reincarnation and inheritance of an ancient golden age.
Benjamin’s writing became well known in Italy following the publication in
1962 of a collection of essays entitled Angelus Novus. Although Tafuri had limited access
to Benjamin’s work in its Italian translation from that time, his analysis of Das Kunstwerk
(Ital. ed. 1966) in Teorie e storia (written 1966–7) is the first instance where he cites the
Berliner.4 On the basis of the evidence that follows, we might deduce a close affinity with
this essay that Tafuri did not share with Benjamin’s writing as it appeared in the earlier
volume, or with other work that appeared in the later L’Opera d’arte. Given that Teorie e
storia is principally concerned with the tools and tasks of historiographical practice – the
practice of writing history – Benjamin’s entry into the Tafurian bibliography is extremely
specific. Tafuri dedicates the first two chapters of Teorie e storia to the historical precon-
ditions of architecture’s crisis, which he associates (following the title of his first chapter)
with an eclipse of history. Central to his account is the architectural object and its historical
relation to material and metaphysical precedent since the fifteenth century; both themes
pay tribute to Benjamin’s terms, if not his theses.

6
 Manfredo Tafuri and the age of historical representation

Teorie e storia advances the argument, largely implicit, that the changes in art-
istic and intellectual culture marking the beginning of the Tuscan Renaissance result in a
set of concepts informing architecture’s temporality and intellectual structure from that
moment forwards: distinctions between past, present and future; the ideological tools
that separate utopia from reality; and the mechanisms that bridge an idealized past and a
real present, a real past and an idealized present, an idealized present and idealized future
(crossing a corrupt present), and so on. As we shall soon see, these concepts are inextric-
able from the way that Tafuri appears to understand the implications of Das Kunstwerk,
and underpin many of his claims pertaining to the historian’s tools and tasks.
Reading the relevant passages in the most straightforward manner: when Tafuri
invokes Benjamin from time to time over the two decades following his first citation, the
basic terms of his reference rarely stray far from his initial reading of this essay – with the
important exception (which we will leave for another occasion) of his analysis of Borromini
through Benjamin’s book on German baroque drama, which is doubtless influenced by
Cacciari. Consequently, when Tafuri makes fleeting reference to Benjamin in Architettura
contemporanea, La sfera e il labirinto and Storia dell’architettura italiana, 1944–85, and in
his essay ‘The Main Lines of the Great Theoretical Debate over Architecture and Urban
Planning, 1960–77’, he stays close to such issues as the commodification of the object
and the status of the ‘author’ and ‘aura’, all relative to ‘the historical problem’.5
Yet while Benjamin offers much to Tafuri’s historical understanding of archi-
tectural phenomena in the age of mechanical reproducibility, his immediate importance
to the architectural historian lies in his contribution to a definition of the long modern era,
the aforementioned age of historical representation. Tafuri treats this general classification
consistently from Teorie e storia to Ricerca del rinascimento, and this in its most abstract
form remains a constant in his theorization of history and historiography.
If the objective of Teorie e storia, then, is a critico-historical analysis of the
place of history in architectural culture, its time frame is, in the sense outlined above,
Benjaminian: modernity as the era of historical representation.
Tafuri writes his account of architecture’s crisis – a concept that he later
concedes verges on overuse – in a deliberately inflammatory style that exaggerates (or
provokes, depending on one’s perspective) the perceived crisis rather than calming its
recognizable symptoms. The book formalizes Tafuri’s position that the role of historical
analysis is the identification of historical problems and their origins, not the more prophetic
function of imagining their solution or the instrumental task of understanding the nature of
their fulfilment. He bluntly holds his disciplinary fathers responsible for the current state
of affairs, blaming it upon their lack of attention to the conditions that he, via Benjamin,
diagnoses. Their fault, he suggests, is ignorance, a failure to properly understand the
nature of the historian’s standing in relation to architectural production. Their chief mis-
take is to interpret these two practices as coincident, supplementary, an error that simply
exacerbates the crisis of both history and the object, as Tafuri defines it therein. The
widespread tendency to encourage the availability of historical knowledge to architectural
practice is a fundamental target of Tafuri’s book: from the adoption of abstract values to

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the quotation of and deference to concrete exemplars to the enactment of a blatant formal
historicism.
Whatever motivations we might assign Tafuri in singling out the faults of
individual historians, and however keenly we sense the deformations that he makes bet-
ween reading Benjamin and deploying his terms, it is important that we keep in mind that
Benjamin remains at the centre of this discussion. Whether he is a hostage or a willing
aid is a judgement better, for the moment, suspended.

The historian and the architect

Chapter One of Teorie e storia, ‘L’architettura moderna e l’eclissi della storia’ (‘Modern
Architecture and the Eclipse of History’), follows the history of historical representation
through an account of the development of architectural theory spanning from the fifteenth
to the twentieth century. The principal theme of this analysis is the availability of historical
knowledge to the intellectualization of architecture as an art. Tafuri draws extensively on
the modest but diverse body of his own publications to date, a ‘library’ that bridges his
career as an architect and his fledging, deeply polemical, first attempts at historical writ-
ing on modern architecture and on works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If
in places Tafuri appears too aggressive, too explicit in targeting colleagues and academic
friends, it may be a result of his easy insertion of these earlier pieces (or their attitude)
into Teorie e storia, these essays and books conveying Tafuri’s often heavy-handed claim
for a seat at the academic table. Setting this observation aside, while his architectural his-
tories inform the generous scope of Teorie e storia, they are clearly made to reflect upon
the standing of the architectural work in his definition of an artistic and cultural crisis. At
the same time, he exposes the nature of the analysis of these crises conducted thus far
as constituting part of the problem.
Teorie e storia therefore concerns not only the contemporary limitations of
architecture and its understanding of its own past; by implication, the book returns Tafuri’s
historian’s scepticism to his own earlier practice and judgements. This dialectical under-
standing of the past – operating between empathy and antipathy with respect of the
architect – is essential to the problem of architectural history as conducted by historians
trained first as architects.
As a starting point, then, it is useful to accept that Teorie e storia concerns the
relationship between two practices and two figures between which Tafuri artificially dis-
tinguishes: between architectural production (however defined) and the critico-historical
analysis of that production, intellectual and material; and thus between the architect-
theoretician and the critic-historian.
In conceiving of architecture as a production, and considering that the con-
ditions of that production implicate both the history and historiography of architecture,
Tafuri’s ‘eclipse of history’ corresponds to Benjamin’s ‘crisis of the object’. Benjamin
observes that the mechanization of artistic production generates an irrecoverable dis-
tance between the artwork’s essence and its representation, enacting, from the end of
the nineteenth century, a destruction of that essence by new technologies of production.