Stone, steel, glass: Constructions of time within European modernity

Stone, steel, glass: Constructions of time within European modernity

Christina Lynne Svendsen

Language: English

Pages: 303

ISBN: 2:00179032

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The epistemological and philosophical power of Walter Benjamin's "dialectical image at a standstill" comes from the fact that it crosses abstract thought with visual images or even material objects. My dissertation seeks to take this methodology of Benjamin's seriously by using architecture as the material substance against which to read his philosophical account of modernity. He described the Arcades Project Adorno as a project in Geschichtsphilosophie, even though superficially his convolutes have to do with mundane objects from the nineteenth century such as catacombs, arcades, mirrors, ironwork, and Art Nouveau. However, Geschichtsphilosophie refers not only to the study of the past, but more broadly to a philosophy of time in its human scope.

I have chosen four building typologies that act as models for the new awareness of time in the twentieth century. My study opens with chronologically layered buildings, examining these structures as models for submerged, forgotten, unofficial, or unconscious memories. However, modernity is a time of anxiety over rupture with the past. My second chapter therefore investigates conscious memory: modem monuments that carefully designed sites for the experiential transmission of history. Meanwhile, modernity also incites us to forget -- to become emancipated from the past. My third chapter explores the appeal of glass: an artificial substance that is attractive because it is so smooth and hard that it is nearly impossible to leave a permanent trace on it. However, the glass house is not just liberating but disorienting. By contrast, sudden catastrophic ruins, the focus of my final chapter, embed the viewer in the full web of fourth-dimensional time, past and future Sudden ruins are often elided in the usual Romantic discourse, which relates ruins to the past and gradual erosion. By contrast, my study shows that sudden ruins break open a fissure that can reveal a glimpse of a future previously unimaginable according to habitual ways of predicting or planning it. Indeed they have a "weak prophetic power" in a secular age; they connect us to posterity and make visible a larger and more meaningful temporal context for our lives than simply the present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

etymology of ichnology reveals architecture as an art of making marks - first marks where walls will go, and later walls as marks traced on the earth, threedimensional inscriptions. While it would be easy to suggest here that building is therefore a type of writing, one performed collectively by groups of individuals and societies on their territories and topci, this strikes me as potentially reductive. Instead, I would suggest that building and writing are subsets of die same more general

deciphered in terms of a historical or personal past, or an orthodox interpretation, is missing. One can have a significant experience with an incomplete object even when it's a mute site, seen by a viewer who doesn't have all the information, or a personal connection to it. Therefore the object of an aesthetics of incompletion and of a post-Freudian QniffiiemEtbock doesn't have to be a city of antiquity like Rome, Athens, and Troy, as important as they were for Freud and as easily as they lend

of the past. Another powerful unintentional monument, which will connect various characters in the final volume of A la redxnhe du tenps perdu without their knowledge, are the ruined, bombed-out houses that Marcel strolls past with M. de Charlus on an outer boulevard in Paris, during the First World War. 43 Alois Riegl, GesammdteAifiatze (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1995), pp. 149-150. 51 Pour peu que la lave de quelque Vesuve allemand (leurs pieces de marine ne sont pas moins terribles qu'un

and philosophical power of Walter Benjamin's "dialectical image at a standstill" comes from the fact that it crosses abstract thought with visual images or even material objects. My dissertation seeks to take this methodology of Benjamin's seriously by using architecture as the material substance against which to read his philosophical account of modernity. He described the Arcades Project to Adomo as a project in Gesdnchtsphilosophie, even though superficially his convolutes have to do with

decor that foster, in Benjamin's words, "Gewohnheiten, die mehr dem Intirieur, in welchem [der Bewohner] lebt, als ihm selber gerecht werden," unlike die environments created by 54 Armstrong, p 13. 55 McLintock, The Uncanny, p. 162. 170 Scheerbart, who houses his characters or "Mitbiirger - in standesgemafien Quartieren... in verschiebbaren beweglichen Glaushausern wie Loos und Le Corbusier sie inzwischen auffiihrten."56 Still, glass windows and fixtures, because they flashily disrupt the

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