Aureli

Architecture for Barbarians: Ludwig Hilberseimer and the Rise of the Generic CityAuthor(s): Pier Vittorio AureliSource: AA Files, No. 63 (2011), pp. 3-18Published by: Architectural Association School of ArchitectureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41337471 .Accessed: 22/02/2015 23:39

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Architectural Association School of Architecture is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to AA Files.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.59.131.240 on Sun, 22 Feb 2015 23:39:18 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Architecture for

Barbarians

Ludwig Hilberseimer and

the Rise of the Generic City

Pier Vittorio Aureli

George Grosz, Grey Day, 1921

Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin


In his controversial pamphlet, Rmischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (1923), the political theorist Carl Schmitt argued that economic reasoning is incapable of any cultural, visual or political representation because ultimately it is simply what it does. Unlike categories such as god, the people, the state, the public, freedom or equality, any ideas about the economy arising out of technical data are unrepresentable and instead appear only as a matter of facts. According to Schmitt, in a world dominated by the mechanistic flow of production, there is no possibility of establishing any condition of value or charisma. In contrast to other traditions of representation - such as those practised by the church or the monarchy, whose expertise is based on meta- physical and transcendental values (identifying a representative who or what) - the abstraction of the modern factory is incapable of being represented. To support this he cited the example of the Soviet republic, which had to use obsolete emblems to signify work - such as the hammer and the sickle - in order to find a representative symbol for communism, despite the fact that these seemed obviously anachro- nistic when seen alongside Lenin's own definition of communism as 'soviet + electrifica- tion'.1 For Schmitt, the very impossibility of representation in an industrial society becomes the fertile ground for value-free aesthetic expressions - once the agency of representation has collapsed, any figuration or symbolism becomes merely superficial, disconnected from the infinitesimal and ever-changing universe of technological precision.

With the rise of industrialisation, therefore, and its expanding tenets of production, circulation, consumption and the efficient division of labour, it was no surprise that art and architecture were no longer considered persuasive representations of some transcendental message, but only realities in themselves. These realities were dictated by their form, space, mass and movement - in other words, by their most generic, visible properties. In capitalistic production the generic is not the default result of its various forces, but more fundamentally the raw material of those actual forces. And so as Paolo Virno would have it, capitalism puts to work the most generic faculties of the human species, like its capacity to move, to adapt to any environment, to speak, to remember, to abstract, to cooperate with others - that is, human nature without qualities.

Within the history of architecture there is no more drastic representation of the generic ethos of capitalistic production and the urban consequences of economic reasoning than the work of Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885-1967). It is worth stating from the outset, however, that here the term representation is introduced paradoxi- cally. Indeed, as Schmitt has led us to believe, the

4

The man who hasn 4 signed anything, who has left no picture

Who was not there, who said nothing: How can they catch him?

Erase the traces! Bertoldi Brecht, poem from the

Reader for Those Who Live in Cities, 1930

fundamental principle of economic mastery is to exclude any convincing process of representation. At the core of his project, Hilberseimer saw the reduction of architecture and the arts to their immanent generic properties not just as the mechanical consequence of the ethos of capitalistic production, but as a potentially proactive attempt to provide an aesthetic, a pedagogical value and a social form - that is, to contain such an ethos. As such, his work - encompassing not just his designs but his articles and books - fundamentally represents (in all senses of the word) the industrial metropolis precisely because it removes any depiction that is not the most generic. On numerous occasions Hilberseimer stated that the general and the typical constitute the only architectural criteria in the modern metropolis.2 This statement, however, should not be understood as a polemical plea for functional simplicity and the standardisation of material compo- nents. Rather, his argument was rooted in a much more profound understanding of the physical and cultural form of the metropolis. Over the following pages I would like to recon- struct Hilberseimer's understanding of the capitalistic metropolis by embracing the totality of its project (rather than through the entirety of his projects - an archival undertaking that is desperately required, given the scarce literature available on such a key protagonist of twentieth- century architecture).3 And so the totality of Hilberseimer's project is evoked here by reinterpreting its theoretical premises as they were manifested during the German period of his work, and in light of today's awareness that the generic is no longer the epiphany of a new urban reality but the accomplished condition of our civilisation.4

The term generic comes from the Greek genus , meaning 'race', 'kind' or 'species', and from the verbs 'generating' and 'producing'. It refers to an undifferentiated common quality that appears prior to that of the individual. Generic is thus both what is common and what is coming-into-being, what is potential. It is for this reason that the generic is a fundamental category of capitalist production. If capitalism is first of all the management of production, and not simply production perse , then what is at stake is not only what is being produced but also the very potential for production (as much as

what allows that potential - that is, the circulation of consumption, or even the social in its most disguised aspect).

The process by which the generic becomes an explicit attribute of capitalistic production is the process of abstraction. In the Grundrisse Karl Marx describes abstraction as both a method of political economy and a concrete reality that permeates the ethos of capitalism. According to Marx abstraction is a positive thing, a concrete reality. Categories such as labour and production are abstract because they do not refer to one particular moment of their manifestation but instead constitute general frameworks that determine economic relations. For Marx abstractions such as 'labour in general' express the ethos of a society in which individuals move easily from one job to another, indifferent to the kind of work they do. In this way, the most simple abstraction - labour as a generic faculty - stripped of its artisan-like character, becomes the most advanced means of capital. As Franc- esco Marnilo has demonstrated, the more work is reduced to its generic essence as labour sans phrase , the more the spatial apparatus that is meant to extract surplus value from labour embodies the barest condition of possibility. This minimal condition is what in architecture we call the typical plan , a reduction of architecture to its most essential, universal structural system, and the figure that postulates the indifference of the building structure towards its spatial and distributive organisation. Such a plan serves the purpose of making the subject's experience of place as if simultaneous with other places. This is made possible through a spatial organisation that implies interaction rather then self-sufficiency, which in turn allows for the coexistence of qualitatively different elements within an overall 'collage-like totality'.5 Infinitely reproducible, by virtue of its simple layout and indifference towards any context, the typical plan became the architectural apparatus of the factory - the place of work par excellence. And just as labour itself is a generic and ubiquitous condition informing all aspects of social life, then the apparatus of the typical plan soon spread out from the factory to underpin the whole building system of the city. As I will argue over the following pages, the spatial logic of typical plan is what constitutes Hilberseimer's (and Mies's) idea of architecture.

Groszstadt Architektur (1927), Hilberseimer's most important book, can be understood as one of the very few attempts to theorise the city in relation to its role as a concentration of capital and workers. Though many of its examples and case studies were already outdated by the time Hilberseimer moved to the United States in the late 1930s, the premise of the book in many ways indicates the meaning and direction of all of Hilberseimer's work. The book itself is organised into ten chapters. The first two are devoted

AA FILES 63


to the reality of the Groszstadt as an unprecedented urban formation driven by capital, while the last section details a general idea of architecture conceived in response to this new urban condition. The chapters in between can be understood as an atlas of the most important programmes for the new capitalist city, address- ing, in succession, housing, commercial building, skyscrapers, galleries and theatres, stations and airports, industrial buildings and, finally, the differences between traditional artisanal construction techniques and the contemporary building industry.

Though Groszstadt Architektur is essentially a city planning manual, each programme is illustrated by a careful selection of projects - built and unbuilt - that Hilberseimer presents as exemplary for the modern metropolis. The selection is rather eclectic in terms of its style and language, ranging from Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine to Adolf Loos's terraced houses, from Frank Lloyd Wright's Lexington Terraces to Anton Brenner's apartment block in Rauch- fangkehrergasse, from Mies van der Rohe's 1923 design for an office building to Henry van der Velde's Werkbund theatre. But nevertheless there is a common thread running throughout: notably, the appropriateness of the buildings to their programmatic and structural purpose. Compared to Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture , published fouryears earlier, Hilberseimer's book is not so much a manifesto for a new architecture as a realist compendium of architectural solutions for the problems then confronting the metropolis. The ordering of the chapters and the selection of the various projects reflect an attempt to illustrate the most obvious typologies of the totalising space of industrial production, encompassing not only industrial buildings such as factories but also housing, offices and theatres. In this way, implicit to the study is a critique of the existing city focused not on its purpose but in how such purpose had not been answered by an adequate project. For Hilberseimer the new city - the Groszstadt - requires an overall structural, economic and spatial plan that goes beyond the scale of the traditional city. For this reason, he places great emphasis on both the problem of the individual cell (or room or apartment) and on traffic circulation, since it is precisely by linking these two extreme scales that it becomes possible to define the strategic scale of the urban project.

Above all Hilberseimer argued that the Groszstadt was the product of economic development and the natural consequence of modern industry. Accordingly, the modern metropolis was fundamentally different from the traditional city, which had never experienced industrial production on such a massive and totalising scale. What is interesting about this claim is that in making it Hilberseimer broke with the tradition of urban theorists like Joseph

AA FILES 63

Stbben, Reinhard Baumeisterand Camillo Sitte, who all emphasised the continuity of urban design, from the modern period all the way back to antiquity. There was, however, one important, perhaps unlikely, precedent for Hilberseimer's conception of the modern metropolis as distinct from anything that had come before it: Otto Wagner's ideas about planning. Despite the obvious disparities in their architectural styles, the similarity of their approach to the city is striking. Only in their politics do the two architects really diverge.

In 19 1 1 Wagner had published his own pamphlet - significantly also titled Die Gro- szstadt -devoted to the three main aspects of urban design: the cityscape, the planning of the city and the economic foundations of the modern metropolis.6 With this small book Wagner attacked a kind of palliative approach to urban design, and one based on historical precedents and a purely morphological approach to the city - an approach that reached its apogee with Sitte's Der Stadtbau (1889).7 Instead, Wagner advocated a 'realist' attitude and an urban model that would take into account not only the large-scale form of the metropolis, but also its social and economic structures. Before Hilberseimer, Wagner was therefore the very first architect to view the city as the result of economic processes, and whose form needed to be radically re-imagined. He recognised, for example, that the city's fundamental asset was no longer the building, but rather the dynamism of the traffic systems whose logic shaped the urban form. Another innovative aspect of Wagner's project for the city was his emphasis on economic management. The city, he argued, offered a kind of investment opportunity where, as in Haussmann's Paris, expenditure on public spaces could be recouped from the appreciation of private land values.8 As a result, Wagner attempted to subsume the individuality of the building into a predefined planning principle. This approach had already been anticipated by Wagner's plan for greater Vienna in 1893, which proposed an unlimited expansion of the city fuelled by the concentration of capital. This Groszstadt was to be divided by radial roads into distinct districts, each containing between 100,000 and 150,000 inhabitants. Residential and public facilities were distributed uniformly throughout with a generic gridiron; the effect of which was that apart from its central monumental axis, this Groszstadt was read only as an infinite carpet of urbanisation formed by anonymous buildings, blocks and streets - an anonymity of urban form made explicit by the economic and managerial condition of the city. Anticipating Schmitt' s scepticism about the possibility of representing an economic process, Wagner seems to suggest that the impact of urban economics reduces the city to a non-descript place of

human association where the sole design principles are to manage traffic circulation and structure financial investment.

This approach is best illustrated by the renderings for the plan for Vienna. If Wagner' s most renowned buildings have the reputation of being tours deforce of decoration, then his Groszstadt in contrast is stripped bare and revealed in its utmost use-value dimension. In particular, one can see how the overall plan is rendered through a graphic minimalism that reduces the city form to a radial circulation system superimposed over the topography of its site. Another striking image features a bird's-eye perspective of the new central park in what was imagined as Vienna's 22nd district. In this drawing the city appears as a vast field of urbanisation made up of the endless repetition of generic buildings. For Wagner, a fundamental attribute of the Groszstadt had to embrace the social anonymity of its environment, best expressed by an architectural and urban form made of straight lines, pure volumes and elemental compositions.

Ironically, the best individual exemplar of Wagner's Groszstadt was later to be found in a building designed by a fierce critic of Wagner's over-decorated style: the Villa Moller (1927-28) by Adolf Loos, an architect Hilberseimer hugely admired. Loos' house is defined by the opposition between its rich articulated interior and the radical simplicity of its exterior. The building's facade seems to confirm Wagner's idea of the Groszstadt while its rooms create the illusion of a more articulated and personalised space: the Raumplan. It was the simplicity of the Villa Moller's outward appearance that resonated most powerfully with Hilberseimer's elementa- rist architecture; its mute volumes offered as the most appropriate mirrored reflection of the urban anonymity that surrounded it. Hilber- seimer's only change to its design would have been to have erased any opposition, so that its interior spoke to the same, resigned feelings of placelessness as its external form and silhouette.

For both Wagner and Hilberseimer, then, the modern city is the outcome of the concentration of capital and the scientific and technical innovations this triggers. The international nature of capital (by this time, already defined by Marx), means that the modern city is also subject to globalising influences, or as Hilberseimer put it, 'The big city is the product of the capitalistic omnipotence, a symbol of its anonymity, an urban type whose social, economic and psycho- logical characteristics give to its inhabitants the most radical social proximity, and greater isolation. Everything that is local and individual is overwhelmed by the city's vertiginous and frantic development. In terms of their main characteristics, big cities located in different parts of the world resemble each other.'9 This sameness, or generic quality, forms the main

5


starting point for Hilberseimer's metropolis - ideas presented in the last chapter of Groszstadt Architektur ; which itself had already been separately published a fewyears earlier in the form of a small pamphlet titled Grossstadtbaut- en. In this small book Hilberseimer stated that there are three fundamental fields in which to advance the architecture of the modern city: housing, commerce and the factory. For Hilberseimer all three types were crucially enabled by the plan, with the individual building volume and the form of its elevation conceived as a direct consequence of the plan - that is, forms and facades are extrusions. Any other formal manipulation is for Hilberseimer redundant. As a result, the volumes are consistently cubic and elemental, and their surfaces are evenly covered with openings, so that rather than being 'negatives' on the facades, the windows constitute a uniform pattern that reinforces the building's generic appearance. Here Hilberseimer is appropriating the spatial logic of industrial buildings - a logic strictly deter- mined by the plan - and applying it to a domestic typology. Yet like Mies, he never actually designed a factory (the ultimate manifestation of the typical plan). Instead he focused his design speculations exclusively on housing and offices, effectively extending the architecture of production from the factory, as the place of material production, to the entire city seen as the totality of capitalist production.

In this regard, one of the most striking projects illustrated by Hilberseimer in Grossstadtbauten is his competition entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower. This competition can be considered a turning point in the architecture of the high-rise, signifyingthe moment when it ceased to be approached as an adaptation of monumental precedents and was recognised instead as a new type on its own, and one that required its own distinctive organisation. The brief had called for a headquarters building that was efficient and at the same time iconic. Accordingly, many of the resulting entries emphasised the uniqueness of their proposals, but Hilberseimer's design - submitted retro- spectively, after the competition deadline - addressed the brief as the rigorous application of the architecture of the typical plan.

If the typical plan was already the staple of many American high-rise buildings, what made Hilberseimer's entry novel was that the elevation also reflected the uniformity of the plan. Indeed, the correspondence between the plan and the elevation of the Chicago Tribune seems to develop from a precedent - Albert Kahn's Highland Park Factory in Detroit (1908) - analysed in Hilberseimer's book on the use of concrete, Beton als Gestalter.10 We will consider later the implications of Hilberseimer's translation of an architecture for material production into an architecture for immaterial

6

production, such as a newspaper headquarters, but for now it is important to note how the same approach to the elevation can be found in other projects by Hilberseimer, such as a proposal for a Boarding House (1922) and the Fabrikbau (1926), a mixed-use building that combines housing and commercial spaces in a single block. The only surviving plan of the Fabrikbau presents a square comprised of four detached slabs of varying heights. While these height differences maximise the insulation of the building, the uniformity of both plan and facade does not reflect the diversity of the programme - a concealment made even more striking by Hilberseimer's use not only of the same construction techniques for production spaces and residential spaces, but also the same forms. One could argue that this indifference of form towards what it contains is the outcome of the very logic of the typical plan, in which (as we have seen) architecture as fixed capital is deployed in order to harness and organise in the most rational way the worker's generic capacity for production. This indifference towards living and working, and the transfer of the spatial and formal framework of the factory to office space and housing, also seems to parallel the increasing industrialisation of white-collar work. If material production implied the isolation of factory facilities from other zones of the city, immaterial production implied the combination of living and working in the same place. Hilberseimer's project thus made explicit a condition in which labour loses its specific attributes and becomes generic by taking on any aspect of the city.

Moreover, compared to material production, where the choreography of the assembly line dictates a predictable occupation of space and reduces workers to silent controllers, immaterial production creates an increasingly flexible pattern of human association and exchange. Confronted with this more open workplace scenario, in which the predictability of the machine is replaced with the unpredictability of human behaviour, the architectural apparatus deployed to harness production must necessar- ily strive towards a zero degree of formal and spatial articulation. Theoretical projects such as Hilberseimer's Chicago Tribune Tower or Fabrikbau and Mies van der Rohe's office building of 1923 address precisely this defacto industrialisation of white-collar work and the consequent integration of the whole city, with its programmes of living, commerce and production, into the same generic system.

But before analysing the implications of this scenario it is important to note that Hilber- seimer's commitment to a single, typical design system, and even to architecture and urban planning as a whole, was always coloured by his political allegiances. A frequent contributor to the social democratic monthly Socialistische

Monatshefte , for which he acted as resident art critic, Hilberseimer, unlike Mies, was never shy in aligning his work as an architect to the politics of the German Social Democratic Party. Founded in the 1870s, the spd's great innovation was to impose the discipline of a mass party on what were then relatively dispersed unions and industrial societies, in the process gaining bargaining power for the German working class. This strategy was possible largely because it emerged in parallel with the increased scale of workers' movements and oppositional groups, challenging the authority of Bismarck's imperialism. In spite of the reputation and militaristic ambitions of the Machstaat, Bismarck's newly unified German empire was in the words of Friedrich Naumann, a 'republic founded on labour'.11 And it was precisely this foundational class, once mobilised through the SPD into a political party - the only one of its kind in Europe at the time - that soon developed the clout to influence state policy on the organisation of labour. This political pressure quickly forced a dramatic development of Germany's industrial sector in the period immediately following the 1871 proclamation of the Second Reich. In the space of a few decades Berlin, the new capital of this Reich, was also transformed, casting off its previous incarnation as a Prussian garrison town to become an advanced global metropolis, alongside cities like London and New York. Much of this growth was based on the development of Berlin's tertiary or service sector, with the transition from the Wilhelmine period to Weimar Berlin seeing the emergence of a whole new type of industrial worker, the Kopfarbeiter , or 'brain-worker', the forerunner of the contemporary knowledge-worker.12

Deployed in the political party, the State bureaucratic apparatus, the private corporation and the nascent 'cultural' industry, these brain-workers became a key asset of the advanced political economy. And it was precisely this increasing professionalisation of intellectual life that led philosophers like Martin Heidegger to be so radically sceptical about the very nature of the public sphere - no longer the autonomous arena of political discussion and confrontation, but rather, more fundamentally, a space of production. So intellectual functions, once embodied in the solitary and economically disinterested individual, became with white- collarwork, merely another segment of the industrial wage system. However, because of the lack of traditional attributes of class representation in Germany at that time, the economic conditions of the Kopfarbeiter were actually inferior to those of the Facharbeiter or skilled worker. Nonetheless, by the 1920s, the Kopfarbe- iter had become the central component in the organisation of labour in Berlin. As Sergio Bologna has noted, a register of the prevalence of this new urban worker during the Weimar

AA FILES 63


Ludwig Hilberseimer, Berlin Development Project, Friedrichstadt District: Office and Commercial Buildings, 1928

The Art Institute of Chicago


Ludwig Hilberseimer, Chicago Tribune competition entry, 1922

Ryerson & Burnham Archives, the Art Institute of Chicago


period is illustrated by the fact that there were some 20 daily newspapers in Berlin, indicating a substantial publishing industry whose workers were in large part journalists, editors, writers and designers. The transformation of this labour force would significantly alter class structures in Germany and, especially in 1920s Berlin, would bring home to working-class movements such as the trades unions and the spd the rising importance of the Mittelstand or middle-class as a key component of the political struggles of Weimar Germany.

Returning to Hilberseimer, it is against this political backdrop that we have to consider his two most important theoretical projects, the Hochhausstadt or High-Rise City (1925) and the Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung{ 1928), a proposal for the development of a tertiary and commercial district in the centre of Berlin. Hilber- seimer' s first projects for the city, published in 1919, had focused on common typologies such as the urban villa, theatre, station, market and town hall.13 All are characterised by an elementa- rist composition that seems to put into practice his theoretical writings on art, and specifically the thesis that any idea or intention had to be expressed in the simplest, most direct way possible so as to avoid the distortions of the creative process. Here, form reveals its potential to address the reality of the industrialised world, which according to Hilberseimer is less and less available to the value-free manipulations of the creative genius. Simplicity of form is thus for Hilberseimer not a retreat from reality, but rather the most realistic means to approach the complexity of the city whose social, political and economic forms elude the pretensions of unrestricted creativity.

This attitude is especially apparent in the projects presented in Grossstadtbauten and above all in his design for a Trabantenstadt , or Satellite City, of 1925, which reveals Hilber- seimer' s approach to city planning as an attempt to find an overall relationship between the large-scale planning of the system and the architectural unit or housing block. The answer for Hilberseimer was the Zeilenbau or terraced block, the defining typology within an overall city plan that developed further the decentral- ised ideas of not just Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin but also Ernst May. The two long sides of the Zeilenbau consist of thin mid-rise slabs oriented north-south to optimise daylight in the living spaces, while the two short sides, containing the commercial facilities, are arranged along the east-west streets and are low-rise to keep the block open. The result is a much more compact town form than either the English garden cities or the planned medieval cities, such as Montpazier in France, that Hilberseimer would later study (and that Richard Pommer has proposed as a direct precedent).14 An interesting aspect of the block

AA FILES 63

design is that its form is coherent both with the overall form of the town - a rectangle that results from the simple multiplication of the block - and with the logic of the interior of the residential units. Following the linear configuration of the thin slabs, the various rooms of the apartments are distributed in a linear way. By introducing a small atrium, Hilberseimer also removes a classic topos of the traditional apartment - the corridor. These two devices create a highly flexible apartment in which the different rooms can potentially merge into larger spaces. Much of the furniture is built in, a technique that was inspired by American hotel rooms and the cabins of transatlantic shipping liners. The bedrooms, Schlafkabine , are also like a ship's cabin in that they are just large enough to sleep in.

Through the design of these Existenzmini- mum bedrooms and walls that incorporated furniture, it is clear that Hilberseimer understood the inhabitants of his city as nomads, unencumbered by heavy possessions and able to move wherever their work took them. The domestic space was therefore not so much a space to dwell as a place to simply inhabit for a while, like a hotel room. At the other end of the scale, Hilberseimer imagined the satellite city as a system of residential units - a city of housing {Wohnstadt) - surrounding the city of work Arbeitsstadt ). The whole system would be connected by railway lines - the city as organic Grosssiedlung. Juxtaposing the architectural and the planning solutions of his proposal, Hilber- seimer formulates what would be the corner- stone of his approach: the project of the city requires the design of the two opposite scales of the individual living unit and the general urban plan. The building - the architectural object - is thus subordinate to, if not subsumed by, these scales, with its form strictly dependent on the rules governing the micro- and macro-forms of the city. Yet what is new and exceptional about this integrative approach is that it does not imply the total design of the city, as was common in turn-of-the-century urban planning.

Instead of detailed plans, Hilberseimer also presents only a few strategic drawings. What's more, these drawings are assumed to be abstractions and thus liable to modification when applied to a specific project. For Hilber- seimer, this abstraction of the plan is not a withdrawal from the chaos of the metropolis, but rather the only possible means to address the extent of its problems, whose vastness eludes the scale of the traditional forms of the city - the individual block, the neighbourhood, the district. Apparent in a number of his writings, from both the German and American periods

Overleaf: Ludwig Hilberseimer, High-Rise City, perspective view looking north-south, 1924


of his life, Hilberseimer believed that in order to define the project for the modern metropolis, one had first to abstract the reality of the city to a set of problems, from which it would then be possible to define architectural and urban principles. Hence abstraction is for Hilber- seimer not a priori , but rather an attempt to reach an overall understanding of the manifold reality of the metropolis.

The most famous project of Hilberseimer's German period was not, however, the Satellite City, but its successor, the High-Rise City for one million inhabitants - a project that can be seen as both an evolution and contradiction of the premises of its forerunner. It is an evolution because it further radicalises the integrative approach, focusing on the two extreme scales of the city - the single cell and the overall urban plan. And it is a contradiction because it is formulated as a critique of the horizontal expansion of the city and, more significantly, of its separation into two distinct zones for working and living. Published in Gr oszstadt Architektur in 1924, the High-Rise City develops out of the Zeilenbau typology of the Satellite City, but with the vital difference that living and working space are integrated within each block. Offices and shops are contained on the lower level, in a five-storey plinth, while the apartments rise above them, in 15-storey slabs. This initial scheme makes no provision for factories, which seems to confirm that Hilberseimer saw labour in the metropolis as increasingly tertiary, involving the production of services rather than goods. As our contemporary post-zoning, post-Fordist metropolis demonstrates, these are the only conditions of labour that allow the integration of working and living spaces in the same place. Thus Hilberseimer's High-Rise City was the first urban plan to be based on a service economy, which was precisely the economy that was emerging in Berlin at that time.

Describing his project in Groszstadt Architektur , Hilberseimer draws a contrast with Le Corbusier's own City for Three Million Inhabitants (1922).15 While he praises Le Corbusier's intention to offer an abstract, general model for the city, rather than just ad-hoc solutions, he criticises the rationale underpinning the plan. According to Hilber- seimer, Le Corbusier's proposal to increase the population density in the city centre while simultaneously maintaining a vast open ground plane as the base for high-rise towers - the so-called Cartesian skyscrapers - was based on false assumptions, as it collapsed together the densities of working areas and residential areas while proposing a strict separation of the two. The result was an imbalanced spatial organisation that failed to address what Hilberseimer saw as the fundamental issue of the contemporary metropolis: circulation and mobility. If Le Corbusier's city is still in effect a composition

9


/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']


of different city districts, functional zones and different typologies, then Hilberseimer's is fundamentally a system that overcomes the separation of zones and functions and organises the city as an overall isotropic condition.

There is, however, an even more radical difference between Hilberseimer's and Le Corbusier's conceptions of the city, which concerns the very understanding of urban form and its relationship with architecture. In his proposal Le Corbusier seems to arrange different building types according to the figures of classical architecture: for example, the space between the Cartesian skyscrapers evokes the spatiality of the typical Parisian classicist square; the long, set-back blocks mimic the layout of the Palace of Versailles; the Immeuble Villa reinterprets the communitarian form of the abbey cloister; and the form of the main train and air terminal at the city centre suggests the outline of Michelangelo's plan for St Peter's in Rome.16 Moreover, Le Corbusier clearly uses diverse building typologies, moving from the monumental in the centre to the more suburban at the periphery, whereas Hilberseimer uses only one building type - a hybrid of blocks and slabs in which all civic activities, from production to living to commerce, are superimposed rather than zoned in different locations. Thus the form of the city emerges from the repetition of a single element or type, and reflects the logic of the most conventional geometry possible - that of the grid. The circulation system of the High-Rise City, then, is uniformly extended in all directions by the superimposition of train tracks, metro lines, trams, roads and pedestrian streets into a kind of tartan pattern. For Hilberseimer, typological diversification no longer seems to be an issue.

The slabs of the High-Rise City are actually a radical development of the Zeilenbau typology already used in the plan for the Satellite City. Here, the hotel is adopted as a model for housing, a choice that seems to develop from his project for a Boarding House (1926), a high-rise residential building placed on a plinth containing communal facilities. 'Boarding' - the possibility of renting and sharing rooms rather than apartments - is interpreted by Hilberseimer as an emerging characteristic of the modern metropolis, in which the extreme mobility of workers calls for increasingly flexible living conditions. In the High-Rise City these conditions are not confined to special buildings but are developed as a mass phenomenon of the entire city. The hotel-like layout of the slabs, with their corridors flanked by rooms, makes clear the intention to go beyond the apartment and to think of the city project as starting from the most generic datum: the individual cell. Another crucial aspect is that with the exception of the general plan of the block, Hilberseimer does not specify the plan of the working spaces.

14

Accordingly, distributive zoning and diverse typologies disappear because the inhabitants of the High-Rise City live, work and move every- where. As a comparative analysis of two ideal cities, one can see that in Le Corbusier's hierarchical City for Three Million programmatic diversity is attained by means of formal alterna- tives, whereas in Hilberseimer's High-Rise City it is addressed by assembling all the elements of the city - domestic space, office space, roads, railway lines, etc - into one gridded composition that can be repeated ad infinitum. Form is no longer seen as representation but as process, stripped of any figurative or individualistic features, in order to perform in the most rational, uniform way. The city is reduced to its reproduc- tive conditions. Its image may seem frighteningly monolithic, but it also appears to be serene, because it has eliminated any formal anxiety through the radical deployment of a generic type.

The High-Rise City was published first in Grossstadtbauten in 1925 and again a year later in the journal G - Zeitschrift fr elementare Gestaltung.17 In these early publications, Hilberseimer uses the High-Rise City as a critique of contemporary approaches to city-planning. For example, in Grossstadtbauten the project is briefly introduced as a riposte to the phenomena of satellite towns and the unlimited horizontal expansion of the city. While in G the High-Rise City is mentioned in an article criticising an exhibition of American architecture organised in Berlin: Hilberseimer wants to draw a contrast with the way the utilitarian raison d'tre of much American architecture is concealed within buildings that are over-decorated or designed in the style of traditional architectures. Thus the High-Rise City is not only a means to counter the European trend to expand cities by decentralising residential areas (a trend that Hilberseimer himself had followed in his Satellite City project in 1924), but also an attempt to un-mask the very generic, abstract ethos of the city. This second attempt is clearly articulated, not so much in Hilberseimer's text, as in the very peculiar style of his drawings. These are neither futuristic, like Sant'Elia's drawings for his Citt Nuova, nor Utopian, in the mould of Bruno Taut's Alpine Architektur. Harsh, dry, almost dystopian, Hilberseimer's style of drawing - and the two famous single-point perspectives of the High-Rise City in particular - has been both a source of fascination and the major trigger for rejecting his entire oeuvre. Notwithstanding Hilberseimer's later dismissal of the High-Rise City, which in hindsight seemed to him 'more a necropolis than a metropolis',18 one could argue that the peculiar style of these drawings,

Previous : Ludwig Hilberseimer, High-Rise City, perspective view looking east-west, 1924


like his texts, is crucial for understanding the meaning of his design work.

But how exactly did Hilberseimer's architectural aesthetic develop? In the Weimar years one can trace his influences through his role in Berlin's flourishing publishing scene, writing on art and architecture for Der Einzige, Feuer and Das Kunstblatt- writings all characterised by their idealism and the obvious influence of Friedrich Nietzsche - as well as, most significantly, the avant-garde journal G and the spd periodical Sozialistische Monatshefte, where he was columnist from 1920 to 1933. As these articles make clear, he saw art criticism not as an end in itself but as part of a larger project which understood art as a vehicle for social and political emancipation. At first glance, Hilberseimer's choice of topics seems quite eclectic, ranging from the expressionist art of Max Pechstein to Paul Klee, from baroque to Dada, from twentieth-century classicism to constructivism. Yet together they trace not only a clear position within the arts, but also an emerging 'aesthetic project' that seems to implicitly support and motivate the 'style' of his architectural language.

As much as the subjects of his articles, Hilberseimer's art criticism is also distin- guished by the apparent avoidance of any polemic. Though he maintains a strong position that aligns him with the contemporary avant- garde, he is consistently analytical and reflective, rather than dismissive or celebratory. It is also through his writings on art that one can begin to understand his ideas about architecture. 'Form und Individuum' (Form and Individual), published in Der Einzige in 1919, spells out his key ideas, focusing on the potential of art to become an instrument of synthesis able to express the general character of society.19 In order to define this general character, Hilber- seimer used Alois Riegl's category of the Kunstwollen (Will to Art), which indicated the general impulse driving a particular moment of artistic production. Such impulses, according to Riegl, are contingent, that is, they develop in a specific historical period, but are independent from mimetic or technological concerns. Moreover, Kunstwollen transcends the differences between the arts and manifests itself as the totality of artistic activity. For Hilberseimer, then, it is not simply a category for reading art, but also, and above all, a concept for producing art in which the general is prioritised over the cult of individual expression. For this reason Hilberseimer advocates an artistic (and architectural) language reduced to the very essence of its material constitution. Only by reaching this zero degree is it able to represent and confront the conditions of its age.

In this regard it is interesting to note that another fundamental reference for Hilber- seimer's art criticism is the Nietzschean

AA FILES 63


distinction between Dyonisian and Apollonian culture. The Dionysian principle, as discussed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, and represented in the primitive form of Greek tragedy, is embodied by the collective and anonymous voice of the chorus, while the classic Apollonian tragedy is propelled by individual characters. It is thus from Nietzsche that Hilberseimer elaborates the concept of a generic, anonymous form as a primitive form, with the necessary force to confront its moment in history and reveal its material and spiritual dimensions. Kunstwollen , and the idea of the primitive in art, are therefore for Hilberseimer fundamental categories for framing the generic ethos of industrialisation and its consequences. From the point of view of Hilberseimer' s aesthetic project, the generic is thus transformed from a bio-political apparatus - the material and immaterial form of the capitalist city driven by the forces of production and profit speculation - to a cultural ethos in which the forces of industrialisation are tamed and reformed as a possible project for the social democratic city.

Hilberseimer's art historical and philosophi- cal references to social democracy in Riegl and Nietzsche also seem to chime with its political manifestation in Germany at that time, and in particular with the revisionist thesis of Eduard Bernstein, which states that the political is an act of mediation between two irreducible poles: the reality of necessity (ie, the 'natural' conditions of economy) and the realm of duty (ie, the collective will to socialism).20 There is an interesting correspondence here between Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen, as a collective will to art independent from material causes, and the Social Democratic belief in a will to socialism independent from the material conditions of the economy. In both cases the agency of will stands in direct relation to its material context - necessity - without being overcome by it. This line of reasoning allows Hilberseimer to gather clues from different, at times even conflicting, artistic sources, working towards a unified project. For example, as an art critic he praised both the abstract filmic language of Hans Richter' s Rhythmus 21 and the classicism of artists gathered within the Italian Valori Plastici movement, such as Giorgio De Chirico, Carlo Carr and Giorgio Morandi, whose return to more detached and archaic forms provided a counterpoint to the Futurists' one-sided celebration of the mechanical world and their apparent value-free play of forms present also in Cubism.21 Hilberseimer saw in the neo-classicism of De Chirico an unprecedented mix of archaisms, Renaissance figuration and references to the contemporary urban landscape. Similarly, he admired the satirical paintings of Georg Grosz, where the primitive and the archaic are completely reinvented within the aggressive setting of the contemporary metropolis. For

AA FILES 63

Hilberseimer, the use of perspective by De Chirico, Carr and Grosz also appeared to accentuate the strangeness of modern objects rather than bring them to a fabricated unity. Instead of stabilising the experience of the viewer, the use of perspective induces a sense the vertigo, with infinite runs of buildings and objects. It seems clear, then, that the use of perspective in Hilberseimer's drawings is profoundly indebted to these painters, whose work is suspended between abstraction and figuration, between caricature and realism.

At the same time what Hilberseimer emphasises in the work of De Chirico and Carr is the search for a common and general language transcending individual expression. This leads him, in a review written in the early 1920s, to link the neo-classicist tendency in painting with another movement that could be considered its opposite: constructivism,22 by reason of the correspondence between its artistic methods and the collective nature of industrial work. Once again, Hilberseimer is using the example of an artistic movement in order to highlight the search for a common language that would go beyond the problem of individual expression. Rather than take a position in terms of artistic style, he prefers to extrapolate from any proposal a potential contribution to his quest of an impersonal approach to form that would not confine itself to artistic movements but would instead reflect a growing awareness of the ethos of an increasingly industrialised and generic world.

Such a position is evident in Hilberseimer's critical appraisal of Dada and of abstract film, of which he was one of the earliest advocates, as Edward Dimendberg has noted.23 What Hilber- seimer appreciated in Richter's and Viking Eggeling's films, in particular, was the attempt to reduce filmic experience to an elemental language devoid of any naturalistic or mimetic connotations. According to him, this language would intensify the experience of polarity - the counter-posing of simple geomet- rical forms - as the ultimate basis of human perception, establishing the process by which the individual could create a possible unity of form out of a multiplicity of sensations. Such a remark is important because it explains how in Hilberseimer's approach to form, unity is not proposed as an a priori goal but as the outcome of an extremely differentiated context, sustained only by the general and the typical. Thus Hilberseimer's rigorous use of extremely simplified forms addresses precisely the intense multiplicity of the metropolitan experience. This is evident in his most important project for Berlin, Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung, 1930, which proposed a restructuring of the city centre. In contrast to the High-Rise City, this new intervention does not address housing but contains only tertiary and commercial space. It sits tightly

within the gridiron of Berlin Friedrichstadt, but overturns the logic of its closed block forms, proposing instead the same Zeilenbau type found in the satellite Trabantenstadt and the high-rise Hochhausstadt - an open block made of two parallel slabs placed on a plinth, which in this case contains only commercial spaces and exhibition halls - further elaborating on his slab proposal for the Chicago Tribune project as much as Mies's project for di Brohaus.

The Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung may be considered the summation of, or epilogue to, all Hilberseimer's previous projects. Moreover, unlike his proposal for the High-Rise City, this time Hilberseimer provided plans and eleva- tions as well as simply perspectives, so that it was possible to see in their precise spatial organisation the ideas he was putting forward. Among these, the clear, novel element of the scheme is his configuration of the plinth as a vast hypostyle hall containing a multitude of social activities ranging from fairs to exhibitions. This commercial-cultural element, missing from previous projects, reflects the importance of culture and spectacle in the metropolitan life of Berlin. Accordingly, cultural activities are no longer separated from the workplace, but completely integrated within it. A fundamental reference for this unprecedented solution was Hilberseimer's research for his book on Hallenbauten, which he was working on at this time and which was published in 1931. Hallenbauten are unobstructed, wide horizontal spaces suitable for a large variety of functions and programmes, and Hilberseimer's interest in them seems to pick up a discussion between Mies and Hugo Hring on the nature of space. Mies had criticised Hring' s organic functionalism, which in his hallways in particular Mies saw as resulting in one end narrower than the other, meaning the space became asymmetrical, with people only able to fully occupy one end. Instead, Mies proposed a 'universal space' - a large, free space in which the structure was reduced to a mini- mum, making it open to a range of unforeseen activities rather than being programmed for one specific function. Besides the Hallenbauten, it is clear that both Mies and Hilberseimer had in mind the architecture of the factory as a model for such unobstructed 'free' space (both were familiar with the architecture of Albert Kahn, who since the early 1900s, in his factories for Ford, had proposed a series of radical solutions using typical plans that were able to keep pace with accelerating advances in technology.

Kahn' s design for Highland Park plant in Detroit, in particular, was seen as the first architectural adoption of the assembly line, Henry Ford's own famously efficient system of production. As we have seen, Hilberseimer had reinterpreted elements of Highland Park in his proposal for the Chicago Tribune, shifting the emphasis from material to immaterial

15


Ludwig Hilberseimer, standing in front of a tower made of six of his 15-storey buildings from the Welfare City model, 1927



production. In the Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung, the appropriation of the Highland Park architecture is even more literal: the huge horizontal space of the factory now becomes the vast Halle for events, though the rigidity of the assembly line is replaced here by the functional and programmatic unpredictability of the universal space. The office space in the Berlin project is developed according to the same criteria, allowing for a variety of different spatial arrangements that are documented in a series of diagrams.

If, in the Chicago Tribune , the use of an open-ended system for office building was addressed with a proposal for one specific building, then in Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung, the architecture of the factory is repeated as the system for the entire city. Like the High-Rise City, this project also seems to challenge a scheme by Le Corbusier, in this case, the Plan Voisin (1925). Consisting of a group of 6o-storey Cartesian skyscrapers, the Plan Voisin represented the application of the central part of the City of Three Million to a specific site in Paris, north of the Seine. In contrast to the City for Three Million, however, the Plan Voisin is not conceived as an ex nihilo project, but gave an important and strategic role to the city's existing monuments, such as the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame and Eiffel Tower. There is a key sketch of the project that shows how the new intervention forms a kind of backdrop to these monuments, which are finally freed from the tight urban fabric. In a very similar way Hilberseimer conceived his Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung in direct relation to existing monuments in Berlin, such as the Gendarmenmarkt, with Schinkel's Schauspielhaus and the paired French and German cathedrals. In a photomontage and sketch of the project he clearly shows how the new intervention is focused on the complemen- tary relationship between the baroque and classicist forms of the existing architectures and the rigorous abstraction of the Zeilenbau slabs. Yet, like the High-Rise City, the scheme is both a homage to and a critique of Le Corbusier' s proposal for the new centre of Paris. The Plan Voisin implies a total reform of the urban layout, whereas the Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung respects the grid layout of Friedrichstadt, and simply doubles the size of the blocks and opens them up. Moreover, while Le Corbusier proposed a tertiary workplace made up mainly of office space, Hilberseimer conceived a much more nuanced environment in which work and leisure are mixed.

In order to understand the novelty of Hilberseimer's proposal, we need to return briefly to the particular social structures that prevailed in Germany and especially in Berlin at that time. As Sergio Bologna has remarked, during the years of the Great Depression (from 1929 on) the extremely atomised conditions of industrial labour triggered a process

AA FILES 63

of decentralisation - a phenomenon that would only happen in the late 1960s in most other industrialised countries. Rather than following the trend of large concentrations of factory workers, as in the Fordist mode of production, the labour force was scattered into smaller units, so as to tame the threat of a Bolshevik revolution and allow for more efficient control by the trades unions. Weimar Germany, and especially Berlin, can therefore be considered the birthplace of not only the very first mature manifestation of what has since come to be defined as post- Fordism, but also of another phenomenon typical of post-Fordism - the precarious worker.

Uncertainty in the labour market in Weimar Berlin had resulted in the constant mobility of workers, to the point where the space of work was no longer the traditional workplace, but rather the city itself with its constant array of possibilities. Hilberseimer's Halle seems to respond to this condition, being the architectural materialisation of just such a space of possibilities in which work is no longer conceived in the form of the clearly organised workplace, but as a latent condition invested in the space of the city in its totality. And the fundamental asset of this city as factory is not the machinic assembly line in the factory, but living labour- the workers themselves. In this context, the forms and spatial associations resulting from work become much less predictable. No longer formed by passive intellect subsumed by the linearity of the assembly, they now arise from an 'active' intellect seeking possibilities of work in all the manifestations of the city's kaleidoscopic environment. The only space that can accommodate (and harness) these conditions is the 'free' space of the Halle, that is an architecture with no further qualities beyond the simple delimitation of a generic space.

In this way, with the Vorschlag zur City-Bebau- ung Hilberseimer arrives at the very essence of his work, which is the proposal of an architectural language that is deprived of any specificity in order to respond to a city whose power is based exclusively on the power of labour and production. Yet as we have seen, Hilberseimer's understanding of labour, though never explicitly theorised, is expressed not in the traditional form of the workplace, but as a total condition that tends to subsume the entire space of city. It is true that after the Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung Hilberseimer would focus on more 'traditional' projects for housing, especially on the now- famous Mischsiedlung, a mixed-density housing development which was brought to an advanced state during his German period, and finally realised in Detroit in the 1950s with his project for Lafayette Park, undertaken in collaboration with Mies. Nonetheless, a concern with the all-subsuming nature of work, and its implications for the entire urban condition, is visible and even radicalised further in Hilberseimer's

subsequent research. In this work, his focus on the city as a whole is emphasised by his very specific graphic language, where the urban form and its architecture are abstracted as a pure circulatory system. The famous Hilberseimer 'ladder' - the settlement unit perfected in 1940 but already under development at the end of the 1920s - exemplifies a method of abstraction whereby the design of the city proceeds from the definition of its common denominator, namely the extensive circulation system which is the key asset of urban production.24 After moving to the United States in 1938 (to teach at iit, at the invitation of Mies), Hilberseimer would concentrate almost exclusively on the urban scale. The problem of architecture had effectively been eliminated during the German period: confronted with the increasing complexity of the Groszstadt , architectural form had 'melted into air', to use the famous image evoked by Marx and promulgated by Marshall Berman as the fundamental goal of modernity.25 And yet, underlying the silent 'extremism' of Hilberseimer's research is an implicit sugges- tion of the fundamental image of the contemporary city - an image hitherto hidden by the multiple images that since the beginning of the twentieth century have masked the real condition and the real purpose of the city, which is to put to work the body, the intellect and also the soul of the people inhabiting it.

This reductivism seems to be the reason why Hilberseimer has been repeatedly accused of having conceived the most inhuman city possible. To both his critics and his very few and timid supporters, Hilberseimer's project was only acceptable In the Shadow of Mies, to use the very sad (and profoundly unfair) title of the only monograph on his work available in English.26 And yet Hilberseimer's project was not conceived as a polemical manifesto, but rather as a realistic means to accommodate and reform the existing conditions of the metropolis - a metropolis shaped less by form and more by the ubiquity of urban space, with its increasingly ineffable trades and transactions. To advance such reform, Hilberseimer did not simply propose an alternative architectural style for the city, but used a combination of visual art, film, planning and architecture to set up the conditions for a radical subjectivity able to accept and absorb the reifying forces of the metropolis. These forces are clearly rendered as the impetus of the generic, the rise of the general not as an overarching harmonic whole, but as the coexistence of radically different phenomena that are linked together by the unstable totality of capitalistic production. Once this is taken into account, Hilberseimer's seemingly grey and dry architectural language appears neither as an act of negation, nor as a provocation, but rather as a critical project of the capitalistic Groszstadt- a representation, reflecting the

17


expansiveness of the urban condition as the destiny of human civilisation.

In pursuing this increasingly abstract and generic vision of the city Hilberseimer seems to confirm the architectural mandate set out by Walter Benjamin in 'Experience and Poverty', 1933. 27 in this text Benjamin reflected on what kind of cultural values the working class - the oppressed class - could ultimately rely on. He suggested that the only way to respond to the conditions of crisis facing the then crumbling Weimar republic - the devastation of the First World War, economic collapse, the subsuming of human subjectivity to the forces of capital and the rise of Hitler - was to embrace the tabula rasa promoted by the architects of the modern movement. Of course Benjamin knew very well that this erased landscape was not an innocent gesture of the avant-garde artist, but the product of capitalist forces to which the artist or architect could at least give a specific recognisable form.

And yet he praised architects like Loos or artists like Klee (both also admired by Hilberseimer) because they rejected the established values of art and instead embraced the rigour of those who, in a state of extreme necessity, operate within a strict economy of means. Benjamin called this new type of cultural producers 'barbarians' , indicating their facility with the rude, bare, uprooted language of an era that was incapable of relating its vicissitudes in the nuanced and epic terms of the old narratives. These barbarians were completely disenchanted about the present and at the same time totally committed to it.

For Benjamin, barbarians were also all the people who had no history or memory and who as a result had to learn the art of living in these bare places, because any attempt to leave traces is impossible in an environment made of the cold materials of the industrial age. Barbarians have no tradition (or have rejected it) and thus

can start again from nothing. The ethos of the tabula rasa is for Benjamin, then, the only salvation for those inhabitants of the city who, in the face of the increasing impoverishment of human experience, respond hysterically by substituting a surplus of (false) human experience consisting of 'yoga, chiromancy, vegetari- anism and any sort of spiritualism'.28 In place of this pathetic cultural resistance to the inhuman character of the metropolis, it is better to oppose - Benjamin suggests - a disenchanted acceptance of the real productive conditions of the city. In this sense Benjamin seems to speak for Hilberseimer's Groszstadt when he calls on us to realise that we have become 'poor of experience', that is lacking in humanity. Yet, as Benjamin wrote, it is sometimes precisely by accepting this extreme condition, by admitting that we have given up the last remnants of our old humanity, that we might one day regain it at a doubled rate of interest.

1. Carl Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und politische form (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1923), p 25.

2. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Groszstadt Architektur (Stuttgart: Julius Hofmann Verlag, 1927), pp 97-98.

3. Literature on Hilberseimer is scarce, especially when we consider the importance of his work. This essay does not aim to be an all-encompassing scholarly survey, but focuses only on a few projects which I consider the most speculative. For a broader view of his work see David Spaeth, Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer: An Annotated Bibliography and Chronology (New York: Garland, 1981). For the German period, see the monographic issues of the Italian journal Rassegna, no 27/3, September 1986. See also Richard Pommer, David Spaeth, Kevin Harrington (eds ),In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator, Planner (New York: Rizzoli, 1988). This volume is the only historical monographic study existing on Hilberseimer in English. Though it offers good historical insights and a survey of his work, it also rather underestimates Hilberseimer's contribution; a position clearly represented in the book's title. Another very important reading of Hilberseimer is offered by Michael Hays in his study on the post-humanist turn in modern architecture. See Michael Hays, Modernism and the Post-humanist Subject (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1992). More recently important contributions have been made by German architect Markus Kilian and Italian scholars Francesco Bruno and Francesca Scotti. See Markus Kilian, Grosstadtarchitektur und New City: Eine planungsmethodische Untersuchung der Stadtplanungsmodelle Ludwig Hilber seimers, PhD dissertation, Universitt Karlsruhe School of Architecture, available online at digbib. ubka.uni-karlsruhe.de/volltexte/ documents/1281; Francesco Bruno, Ludwig Hilberseimer: La costruzione

di una idea di citt. Il periodo Tedesco (Milan: Il Libraccio, 2008); Francesca Scotti, Ludwig Hilberseimer: Lo sviluppo di una idea di citt. Il periodo Americano (Milan: Il Libraccio, 2008). Hilber- seimer's American period has also been the subject of original and highly speculative readings by Albert Pope, Charles Waldheim and Caroline Constant. See Albert Pope, Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); Charles Waldheim (ed), Hilberseimer /Mies van der Rohe, Lafayette Park, Detroit (New York: Prestei 2004); and Caroline Constant, 'Hilberseimer and Caldwell: Merging Ideologies in the Lafayette Park Landscape', ibid, pp 95-111.

4. The expression 'generic city' was coined by Rem Koolhaas in his famous text of the same title. See Rem Koolhaas, 'The Generic City' in s,m,l,xl (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), pp 1239-57.

5. Christian Norberg-Schultz, 'Free Plan and Open Form', Places, no 2, 1983^5.

6. Otto Wagner, Die Grosstadt: Eine Studie uber diese von Otto Wagner (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1911).

7. Camillo Sitte, Der Stadtbau nach seinen knstlerischen Grundstzen. Ein Beitrag zur Lsung moderner Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien Vienna: 1909).

8. August Sarnitz, 'Realism Versus Verniedlichung: The Design of the Great City', in Harry Francis Mailgrave (ed), Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment ofModernity (Santa Monica, ca: Getty Center, 1988), pp 85-112.

9. Ludwig Hilberseimer Groszstadt Architektur, op cit, pp 7-8.

10. Ludwig Hilberseimer and Julius Vischer, Beton als Gestalter (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffman, 1928).

11. As quoted in Mario Tronti, Operai e Capitale (Rome: Derive Approdi, 2006), P254-

12. The rise o the Kopfarbeiter can be traced back to the very origin of the

intellectual within society. The common use of the term 'intellectual' to address a specific social group finds its origin in a famous public cause: the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s - in which a Jewish official, accused of betrayal by the French army, was believed to be the innocent victim of an anti-Semitic plot. Writers such as Emile Zola and artists such as Edouard Manet openly stated their support for Alfred Dreyfus. In reaction, the conservative press dismissed these figures as intellectueles. Since then the term has come to be applied to those figures who belong to the sphere of culture but whose work and beliefs were made explicit within a public space and whose influence could affect political issues. Intellectuals are thus cultural agents whose work and activities have a direct relationship with public affairs. From the epic appearance of Zola's J'accuse, the famous article of accusation against the establishment that had condemned Dreyfus, over the course of the twentieth century the intellectual publicity has become integral within the most crucial political and economic organisations of society. On the rise of the knowledge worker see Sergio Bologna, Ceti medi senza futuro ? Roma: Derive e Aoorodi. 2007).

13. Max Wagenfuhr, 'Architectonische Entwrfe von L Hilberseimer', Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, no 12, 1919.

14. Richard Pommer, "'More a Necropolis than a Metropolis", Ludwig Hilber- seimer's Highrise City and Modem City Planning', in Richard Pommer, David Spaeth and Kevin Harrington (eds), In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator and Urban Planner (Chicago, il: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1988), p 31.

15. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Groszstadt Architektur, op cit, pp 17-26.

16. Le Corbusier, 'Une Ville Contempo- raine', in Oeuvre Complete, igio-ig2g (Zurich: Les Editions d'architecture,

1964), pp 34-43. Gabriele Mastrigli has proposed a close reading of the 'classical' figures in Le Corbusier's Contemporary City for Three Million. See Gabriele Mastrigli, 'In Praise of Discontinuity, Or La Leon de Rome', in Berlage Institute, Power: Producing the Contemporary City (Rotterdam: nai, 2007), pp 113-124.

17. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Grosstadtbauten (Hannover: Appos Verlag, 1925), p 24; Ludwig Hilberseimer, 'Amerikanische Architektur', G-Zeitschriftfur gestaltende Arbeit, no 5, 1926, p 190.

18. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Entfaltung einer Plannungsidee (Berlin: Ullstein Bauwelt Fundamente, 1963), p 20.

19. See Ludwig Hilberseimer, 'Form und Individuum', Der Einzige, 03, 1919.

20. See Ludwig Hilberseimer, 'Valori Plastici', Sozialistiche Monatshefte, 23 May 1921, pp 629-30; Ludwig Hilberseimer, 'Neoklassizismus', Sozialistiche Monatshefte, 25 July 1922, pp 697-98; 'Konstruktivismus', Sozialistiche Monatshefte, 12 September 1922, pp 831-32.

21. Ludwig Hilberseimer, 'Bewegung- kunst', Sozialistiche Monatshefte, 23 May 1921, pp 467-68.

22. Ludwig Hilberseimer, 'Konstruktivismus', op cit.

23. Edward Dimendberg, 'Towards an Elemental Cinema: Film Aesthetic and Practice in G', in Detlef Mertins and Michael WJennings (eds), G : An Avant-garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design and Film ig23~ig26, trans. Steven Lindberg, Margareta Ingrid Christian (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), p 57.

24. See Albert Pope, Ladders, op cit. 25. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts

into Air (New York: Verso, 1982). 26. Richard Pommer et al, In the Shadow

of Mies, op cit. 27. Walter Benjamin, 'Experience and

Poverty', in Selected Writings, vol 11 (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), pp 731-36.

28. Ibid, p 732.

l8 AA FILES 63


Article Contentsp. [3]p. 4p. 5p. 6p. [7]p. [8]p. 9p. [10]p. [11]p. [12]p. [13]p. 14p. 15p. [16]p. 17p. 18

Issue Table of ContentsAA Files, No. 63 (2011), pp. 1-120Front MatterArchitecture for Barbarians: Ludwig Hilberseimer and the Rise of the Generic City [pp. 3-18]John Winter in conversation with Adrian Forty &Thomas Weaver [pp. 19-31]The Suburbanist [pp. 32-35]A Theatre of Insects, or How Nature Lost Her Morality [pp. 36-45]Journey to the North of Quebec: Understanding (McLuhan's) Media [pp. 46-55]The Ontology of the Fashion Model [pp. 56-69]The Problem of Stripes [pp. 70-73]Ideal Plans and Planning for Ideas: Toulouse-Le Mirail [pp. 74-86]On Gillespie, Kidd &Coia [pp. 87-89]Austerity and Architectural Derangement [pp. 90-96]The Locus Inside [pp. 97-99]On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing [pp. 100-103]Building Big, with no Regret [pp. 104-110]Mario Botta in conversation with Laurent Stalder [pp. 111-117][GOD &CO] [pp. 118-119]Back Matter

Date post:	20-Nov-2015
Category:	Documents
Upload:	yuchen
View:	21 times
Download:	1 times

Aureli

Documents