Brand New Tafuri: some timely notes on the imaging of spatial demands

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Brand New Tafuri: some timely notes on the imaging of spatial demandsJon Goodbun

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Yet it was the city, from whose reality the avant

garde drew its very existence, which was the

real proving ground for all its proposals

Modern Architecture I (p. 110)Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co

This piece is proposed as notes on the experience of

globalised capital as our current spatial condition. It

is hoped that these can be assembled into coherent

images, with the help of an active reader. One suchimage might be a response to Frederic Jameson’s

thesis regarding the possibility of a Lefebvrian

counter to the ‘structural pessimism’ of Manfredo

Tafuri. An expansion of his practice of ‘Ideological

Criticism’ into the spatial experiences of subjectivi-ties beyond that of Tafuri’s ‘shocked, bourgeois,

humanist subject’ might generate an architectural

knowledge capable of formulating the historically

correct spatial demands, or questions, ‘for our time’.

It is suggested that such a knowledge would consti-tute an ‘experience’ based theory of modern archi-

tectural communication, and that such a knowledge

would be based in part on a return to and rework-

ing of the ‘theories of empathy’, that Adrian Forty

has shown to be so fundamentally constitutive of themodernist modalities of Form, Space, Image and

Surface (which continue to be active in the ways by

which capitalism produces reality). This paper dis-

cusses the possibility of extending these theories so

as to ground a ‘body’-based relationship to the spaceof commodity-driven informational �ows.

Although not exclusively, I will be working

through three projects in particular:

i: Nox Architects, Fresh Water eXpo Pavilion(1998).

ii: Erich Mendelsohn’s Berlin Expressionist ‘Adver-

tising Architecture’ building works (1917–29).

iii: Bruno Taut’s utopian architectural ‘screen-

plays’ around the theme ‘Alpine Architecture’(1917–19).

Initially understanding the employments of the

term avant-garde within the work of Tafuri, the

architectural material itself will ask questions of thisconcept, including the extent to which it might

continue to be usefully active. It will do so by

reestablishing both the rational and non-rational

management of images in the metropolis as one of

the central ‘tasks’ of modern architecture, and‘experience’ as one of the critical terms through

which it is thought. At a time when the commodity-

based globalisation of cultural space presents us

with environmental health hazards too toxic to

quantify (the environmental problems of cheapmass housing and hygiene, having been ‘solved’, or

at least acknowledged as susceptible to, and gener-

ative of, architectural knowledge and analysis), it is

hoped that a number of inadequately theorised

contemporary architectural positions – more usefulexamples including for example ‘Hypersurface’ and

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The Journalof ArchitectureVolume 6Summer 2001

Brand New Tafuri: some timely noteson the imaging of spatial demands

Jon Goodbun School of Architecture, University of Westminster,

London, NW1 5LS, UK

© 2001 The Journal of Architecture 1360–2365 / DOI 10.1080/13602360110048186

Downloaded By: [University of Westminster] At: 00:38 29 December 2010

‘Brand Space’ – might be radicalised through theirexpansion and historical repositioning as properly

modernist and avant gardist concerns. That is to

say, how can ‘questions that can be asked archi-

tecturally’ help in the social elaboration of ‘spatial

demands’, and a more generally democraticcosmology of objects and images in space.

We have repeatedly stressed . . . how much

working with degraded materials, with refuse

and fragments extracted from the banality of

everyday life, is an integral part of the tradi-tion of modern art: a magical act of trans-

forming the formless into aesthetic objects

through which the artist realises the longed-

for repatriation in the world of things. It is no

wonder then, that the most strongly felt condi-tion, today, belongs to those who realise that,

in order to salvage speci�c values for architec-

ture, the only course is to make use of ‘battle

fragments’, that is, to redeploy what has been

discarded on the battle�eld that has witnessedthe defeat of the avant garde. Thus the new

‘knights of purity’ advance onto the scene of

the present debate brandishing as banners the

fragments of a utopia that they themselves

cannot confront head-on. (Manfredo Tafuri,L’architecture dans la boudoir, p. 267, The

Sphere and the Labyrinth, 1980.)

There is an increasing body of architectural work that

might be described by the condition: Complex

Surface-Compound Image. This work has beenrecently most popularly characterised by Stephen

Perrella as ‘Hypersurface’. However, such a term and

theory are currently insuf�cient, in so far as they have

not proved capable of providing more than a broad

classi�cation – unable as yet to generate the toolsnecessary to describe and critically evaluate its object.

With this in mind, it is useful I think to consider in

what ways this condition is better understood as a

reworking and extension of some aspects of a long,

if at times marginal, line of modernist architecturalenquiry. The main ‘traits’ that have characterised this

particular genealogy of architectural knowledge

might initially be understood as variously:

A: Dif�cult Form:

i: Complex Curved Surfaces (including Gaudi,Finsterlin, Mendelsohn, Scharoun, Otto, Lynn,

Nox)

ii. Fractured, Fragmented Surfaces (including

Taut, Van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, Scharoun,

Constant, Price, Eisenman, Libeskind)iii: ‘Popular’, ‘Populist’ and ‘Outsider’ Structures

(including Watts Towers, Fairs, Circus, Casinos,

entertainment industry based environments

and experiences, retail environments and expe-

riences, branded environments).

B Images Integrated into Building-Object-Event:

i: Images Compounded into Surfaces (including

Advertising Signage, Mendelsohn, Nasdaq –

Times Square, Nox, Fascist Architecture)ii: Images Built Out of Object (including Themed

Environments, Experience Environments, Enter-

tainment Environments, Taut, Archigram, Fat,

Constant, Price, Libeskind, Nox, Garden Cities)

iii: ‘Popular’, ‘Utopian’ and ‘Outsider’ Projec-tions (including Watts Towers, Taut, Piranesi,

branded environments, Situationist dérives,

Social Condensers)

iv: Gesamtkunstwerk.

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Brand New Tafuri: some timely notes on the imaging of

spatial demandsJon Goodbun


The Nox Water Pavilion (Fig. 1) clearly exhibits anumber of the above conditions, and it does so in

some sophisticated ways. Conceived in part as a

�uid dynamics experiment, it is a properly cyber-

netic building, in that it ‘images’ itself through aseries of sensors, relays and ‘effects’ – from sheets

of water to data projections, that feed back, trig-

gering each other. The individual visitor is able to

‘interact’ with the building with more or less visible

results. But even with no visitor, it will continueplaying out never repeated sequences of events,

endlessly feeding back on itself. It is in this sense

incomplete and incompletable, and as such occu-

pies an utopian temporality. This temporality is

experienced as a particular speed of vision. As thebuilding intervenes in its own reproduction, partic-

ular types of image-event sequence tend to occur.

It is images of these sequences, as somewhat time-lapsed photographs, that are often reproduced

publicly, within the architectural and other media.

Images of this kind have a long history within archi-

tectural representation. They normally tell youwhere to stand, in this case they tell you how

quickly to move and how long to look.

It is, very much, a computer-generated building.

And not only in the sense of the programme

described above, but more importantly in terms ofits experience. It is trying to recreate the experience

of a virtual space, of a particular type of computer-

imaging software. Indeed, it is through its

foregrounding of the active experience of the

inhabitant, the buildings’ interfaces with the bodyof the visitor, that we can best understand the

demands made by this architecture.

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Figure 1. Nox

Architects, FreshH2O

eXPO Pavilion (1997).

(Photograph Karin

Jaschke.)

157



with practice and training, the movements ofthe prosthesis can become second nature,

regardless of whether it is �esh, wood or – a

little more complex – metal, as in the case of

the car. That is the secret of the animation prin-

ciple: the body’s inner phantom has an irre-pressible tendency to expand, to integrate

every suf�ciently responsive prosthesis into its

motor system, its repertoire of movements,

and make it run smoothly . . . the body forms

itself by action, constantly organising and reorganising itself motorically and cognitively

to keep ‘in form.’ (Lars Spuybroek, Motor

Geometry, AD Hypersurface Architecture,

p. 49.)

The Nox Water Pavilion is best understood as aprosthetic device. It is also an image-producing

machine, which creates and exists within an internal

economy of image, form and space. The occupant

expands into and wears it, generating an empathic

relationship to information, �gured as form – itallows information to be felt or experienced as

form. By doing so, the occupant ‘temporarily’

completes the work, and in the process asks ques-

tions of experience.

Experience, it is curious to note, does not havean entry in Raymond Williams’ ‘Keywords’.1 This is

perhaps surprising given the complex relationship

this concept has with a number of terms central to

modernist critical thought, not least: alienation,

consciousness, subjectivity, perception. Experienceis that which is more than the (possibility of)

recording of the entire mass of perceptual data that

engulf any individual. It is often understood as the

agency by which subjectivity is constructed, and yet

simultaneously is only meaningful when under-stood through some notion of subjectivity. Within

much Marxist theory, for example, experience is

that which might allow any individual or class to

strive towards self-consciousness, and yet is

also that which is unavailable, that which is sogrotesquely restricted under capital. In much recent

post-colonial and feminist theory, there is a similar

sense in which the possibility of the subaltern artic-

ulating their experience is the central concern.

Experience then, should be understood as aneminently spatial concept, in that there is a

distancing action within it: it is something located

deep within the individual, and yet is simultaneously

super-individual. Again, it requires an extended,

sensuous bodily surface, but is not the sum ofimpressions thereby received. Similarly, it is the basis

of any ‘history’, as well as itself of course being

subject to historical development. Walter Benjamin

has noted ‘since the end of the last century, philos-

ophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold ofthe “true” experience as opposed to the kind that

manifests itself in the standardised, denatured life

of the civilised masses [. . . and yet] Experience is

indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence

as well as private life.’2

One of the thinkers Benjamin refers to here is

Georg Simmel, whose urban sociological studies

understood clearly the spatial component of the

individual’s experience of society: ‘the city is not a

spatial entity with sociological consequences, but asociological entity that is formed spatially’.3

For Simmel then, the metropolis provided the

particular conditions in which the ‘space’ of

concrete experience (super-individual ‘society’) and

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the ‘space’ of inner experience (individual subject)are translated (almost in the mathematical sense,

that is to say ‘mapped’) onto each other. And this

is one of the senses in which we can begin to

understand the objects of this other modernist

genealogy: as a store of transformation matricesbetween inner and concrete experience.

The spatial separation that occurs between inner

and concrete experience, the �gurations of which

we will look for within the metropolis, might also

be understood as repeated within the psychic spaceof the metropolitan individual.4 Simmel describes

how the intensity of nervous stimulation that the

metropolitan individual is subjected to leads to

the emergence of the ‘blasé’ attitude. This is best

understood as the ‘growth’ of an ‘extra organ’, a‘distancing organ’ in the psychological switch from

emotional to rational thought that occurs as a

defensive mechanism in the individual against

living through a ‘kaleidoscope equipped with

consciousness’.5 Just as commodi�cation ‘hollowsout’ objects, the blasé stance empties experience.6

For Walter Benjamin, in a move clearly indebted

to Simmel, this is the basis of the differentiation

between two different forms of experience:

‘Erlebnis’ and ‘Erfahrung’.the greater the share of shock factor in

particular impressions, the more constantly

consciousness has to be alert as a screen

against stimuli; the more ef�ciently it does so,

the less do these impressions enter experience(Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of

a certain hour of one’s life (Erlebnis).7

Benjamin goes on to equate ‘Erfahrung’ with

‘aura’, and the ‘experience’ of the worker with that

of the passer-by in the crowd, as increasingly‘Erlebnis’. Elsewhere in the essay he states:

The unskilled worker is the one most deeply

degraded by the drill of the machines. His work

has been sealed off from experience; practice

counts for nothing there.8

We have here a conception of the metropolis, and

‘space’, as being in a dynamic complex with society

and the individual. For these writers, social estrange-

ment or alienation was identi�ed as a characteristi c

‘form’ of modern metropolitan life,9 and was under-stood as a similarly complex mixture of spatial and

psychological conditions. David Frisby has observed

that Simmel understands ‘agoraphobia’ as just such

a spatial and psychological condition, in his descrip-

tion of the ‘blasé’ condition – the bombardment ofthe senses with nervous stimulation results in an

activity of mental ‘spacings’: ‘rapid oscillation

between two characteristic moods of urban life: the

over close identi�cation with things, and, alterna-

tively, too great a distance from them.’10

Wilhelm Worringer, a contemporary of Simmel,

also theorised a form of space sickness, or

Platzangst. And it is through Worringer that we can

form a link between the sociological and aesthetic

developments of ‘space’, as a function of experi-ence and alienation.11 In ‘Abstraction and Empathy’

of 1908, Worringer develops the position of

contemporary German aesthetic theory, which he

characterises as that which ‘proceeds from the

behaviour of the contemplating subject’ and whichtakes ‘the broad general name of the theory of

empathy’.12

Empathy Theory can be understood in its most

basic formulation as: ‘aesthetic enjoyment is objec-

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ti�ed self-enjoyment’.13 This process requires twocomponents; �rst, the sensuous ‘object’ (although

there is a sense in which it is not yet an object),14

and the subjective apperceptive activity (although

the subject too remains ‘under construction’, as it

were). However, the act of apperception itself hastwo compartments, referred to as ‘inner motion’,

which are ‘felt’ as expansion and contraction. The

‘expansion’ relates to the extension of self (‘inner

vision’) to embrace the ‘object’. Contraction then

occurs in the effort to ‘delimit what I have thusapprehended and extract it, as an entity, from its

surroundings’.15

Crucially then, we have here the basic model of

the sensuous object which makes demands upon

the subject to activate itself in the construction ofeach other16 – ‘this apperception is therefore not

random and arbitrary, but necessarily bound up with

the object’.17 For the German psychologist, Theodor

Lipps, the extent to which the demands the object

makes are found to be in correspondence with the‘needs’ of self-activation in the subject, the more

‘positive’ the empathy (and hence beautiful the

object). Negative empathy (i.e. for Lipps, ugly),

being an ‘opposition’ between the needs of self-

activation and the demands of the object.For Worzinger, the problem with this as it stands

is that it ‘is inapplicable to wide tracts of art history’.

In particular, it is seen as inappropriate for those

periods with a tendency to abstraction (as opposed

to ‘naturalism’), and it is this that provides the basisfor his extension: replacing the terms of the ‘posi-

tive empathy – negative empathy’ opposition with

‘empathy – abstraction’.

just as the urge to empathy . . . �nds its grati-

�cation in the beauty of the organic, so theurge to abstraction �nds its beauty in the life

denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in gen-

eral terms, in all abstract law and necessity.18

Worringer understands these urges as the effect of

‘peoples’ feeling about the world, in their psychicattitude towards the cosmos’; that is to say,

remembering Simmel, it is the product of the rela-

tionship between inner and concrete experience.

Worringer continues:

whereas the urge to empathy is a happypantheistic relationship of con�dence between

man and the phenomena of the outside world,

the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a

great inner unrest inspired in man by the

phenomena of the outside world. . . . Wemight describe this state as an immense spiri-

tual dread of space (platzangst)’.19

Finally, in a move that suggests a concept of space

that is both aesthetic and sociological (as a func-

tion of experience and alienation), Worringer statesthat this ‘dualism of aesthetic experience’ must be

thought through ‘the need for self-alienation ’:

in the urge to abstraction the intensity of the

self alienative impulse is incomparably greater

and more consistent. Here it is not charac-terised, as in the need for empathy, by an urge

to alienate oneself from individual being. But

as an urge to seek deliverance from the fortu-

itousness of humanity as a whole, from the

seeming arbitrariness of organic existence ingeneral, in the contemplation of something

necessary and irrefragable.20

We have seen then two related ways in which alien-

ation, or estrangement, has been understood as

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estrangement from society (Simmel), as estrange-ment from experience (Simmel, Benjamin), but also

estrangement from self in order to experience

(Worringer).

Alienation in Marxist theory is developed

primarily through its understanding of the historicaldevelopment of labour and production (whereas

we might say Simmel developed alienation through

an historical development of consumption and

exchange).21 In the part of its analysis based in

labour value, alienation is seen as an effect of (ora sign analogous to) the extraction of surplus value:

the difference between value given by the worker

through labour, and that returned through wage –

literally the worker is alienated from his/her own

production. This is closely related to another under-standing which pertains to the organisation of

work, where the worker is alienated from his/her

own sense of productive activity.

Yet another signi�cant way to think alienation is

as man estranged from nature, and from his ‘essen-tial’ nature. Again in Marxist thought this is a nature

that man produces (by processes of objecti�cation

not unrelated to those of Worringer above), but is

then alienated from.22

The fetishisation of objects is in Marx a processthat follows from alienation. Put simply, alienation

is felt, and perceived as a loss. Reconciliation with

those objects taken from the worker in the form

of surplus value is then desired. And this is the

commodi�cation of reality. Michael W. Jenningsdescribes the situation:

commodities even in their singularity wield

an extrasensory power capable of subverting

human rational and spiritual capacities.

Abstracted from their original context as aproduct of human labour, such commodities

take on, for Marx, a power fully analogous to

that of the religious fetish. When they work

together in networks, the commodities that

arise under industrial capitalism ‘talk to eachother,’ shaping a totalising environment that

has come to be analysed under the designa-

tion of second nature. That second nature is

not nature itself, but a manmade environment

that appears to be natural while remainingwholly illusory. Humans move through such

networks of commodities as through a phan-

tasmagoria, unable to exert control over them-

selves or over their environment.23

If, following Jennings’ reading of Marx, we understand the metropolis as a second nature (or

alienated nature), then a task of this other

genealogy of architectural knowledge is to

develop, paradoxically, an ‘organic naturalism’ or

Romanticism of alienated nature. As such it can act as both ‘empathy’ and ‘abstraction’, but in

different systems: abstraction with reality, empathy

with phantasmagoria. And as such can deal

with both ‘the revolt of the objects’ so keenly felt

by the historic avant garde, and with ‘the revolt of the images’ that dominates contemporary

experience.

The Nox Water pavilion is engaged in a renewed

questioning of precisely these conditions, through

the terms of avant garde experience. It is immersedin the technology of the reproduction of images. It

understands that the mechanisation of vision

hugely increased the ‘social’ component of vision.

And once it is popularly understood to be cultur-

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ally constructed, questions can be asked of it – suchas its temporality. In a basic way, something like

time-lapse photography is able to ‘�gure’ forms

within experience, such as generated through

traf�c. And once ‘shown’, these �gures can be

‘reactivated’ in the experience of the viewer.There is a double use of empathy going on here.

On the one hand, as a mode of consumption,

empathy provides a model whereby we can under-

stand experience as being deposited in the object

(almost, as it were, for safe keeping). What begins

to happen, however, is rather like Lacan’s �oatingtin can, the object does begin to look back, and

in a sense take on the characteristics of a subject.

And to the extent to which it occupies a subject

position, it might be said to be able to empathise

with its own essential nature – the metropolis.One signi�cant pre�guration of such a condition

is Erich Mendelsohn’s department store architecture

(Figs 2 and 3), described by Adolf Behne as Reklame

Architektur – Advertising Architecture. In this work,

Mendelsohn poses a series of questions that can be

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Figure 2. Erich

Mendelsohn,

Construction

Barrier (incorporating

shops, of�ces and

extended advertising

surfaces) for Galeries

Lafayette, Potsdamer

Platz, Berlin (1928).

(Photograph Arthur

Köster.)

162




asked architecturall y, regarding the relative status of

‘commodities’, as being both ‘objects’ and ‘images’.

In so doing, there is a simultaneous questioning ofthe commodity status of architecture. These ques-

tions are formulated through a development of the

building as an information surface. Incorporating

store signage, lighting, and commodity vitrines

(projecting exterior image and interior object) as awork of ‘assemblage’, across and through ‘persua-

sive form’, he positions architecture as a commu-

nicative system within communicative systems. As a

commodity amongst commodities, talking to each

other. In a number of important ways, this is a

continuation of the ‘Werkbund’ concern that archi-

tecture ‘manage’ all the other ‘visible’ communica-

tive systems in the city – signage, text, advertising,etc. – as a form of ‘gesamtkunstwerk’.

This ‘ecstasy of communication’, the commodi�-

cation of reality, is exactly the subject matter of

the avant garde: the chaotic circulation structures

of commodities, ‘talking to each other’, �gured asmetropolis.

spatial images [raumbilder] are the dreams of

society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of these

images can be deciphered, one �nds the basis

of social reality.24

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Figure 3. Erich

Mendelsohn, Einstein

Tower, Potsdam

(1917–21).

(Photograph Jon

Goodbun.)

163



Erich Mendelsohn was closely associated with the

Berlin Expressionist and Dadaist architects linked

with Bruno Taut and the ‘Arbeitsrat für Kunst (AFK)’– The Arts Soviet. For Taut the primary purpose of

architectural practice was both the projection and

the actual construction of spatial images which

�gure as a discourse on metropolis, the dreams of

society (Fig. 4).Finding himself in an economy crippled by

war and unable to support building activity, Taut

occupied his time from late 1918 to 1920 with the

publication of four mystical-utopian architectural

treatises, before continuing with the proper work

of rationalised reconstruction, starting in a series of

social housing and garden city projects from 1921onwards. Such at least, is the history of modernism

as disseminated not only by Giedeon, Hitchcock

and Johnson,25 but later Tafuri as well.26 Of these

four treatises, it is the pair ‘Alpine Architektur’

and ‘Die Au�ösung der Städte’ (The Dissolution/Withering away of the Cities), subtitled ‘the way to

Alpine Architecture’, that I will brie�y focus on here.

This work is presented as cartoon screenplays, with

an appendix of texts (Marxist, Anarchist and

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Figure 4. Bruno

Taut, Alpine

Architecture (1919).

164




Romantic) which form the conceptual site of theproject.27 Projecting urban images where there is an

understanding of ‘the city’ and ‘the state’ as a func-

tion of the relationship between ‘the town’ and ‘the

country’, social and political questions regarding

the state are presented as spatial problems, andtherefore in some sense open to architectural

analysis.

In Marxist thought, the state arises out of and is

alienated from society, as a product of the irrecon-

cilability of class contradictions, and ultimately takesthe form of ‘special bodies of armed men which

have prisons etc at their command’. In its ideology

however it represents itself as through a ‘camera

obscura’, as an organ for the reconciliation of class

antagonisms. It is simultaneously an effect of thedivision of town and country,28 that is, it is an

antagonism that unfolds ‘in space’.

Within Taut’s projects a mystical-irrationalit y

�ows. There is a complex relationship between

town and country, rational and irrational. It is acomplex that makes interesting his concept of

garden city, in that such a formulation would seem

to be an architectural �gure that in some way is

able to deal with the irrational. That is, the

imported ‘nature’ of garden cities should be under-stood as allegorical (site) for the irrational. It

‘dissolves’ the distinction between architecture and

its ground, between town and country, and crucially

here, between ‘nature’ and ‘arti�ce’. It does so as

a ‘social form’, played out in ‘space’.Frederic Jameson has suggested that it is this very

imageability of the experience of the city, that offers

the capacity for ‘political experience’ (Fig. 5).29

Alienation here is a function of the capability of the

metropolitan subject to form ‘maps’ that describea relationship with the city – as alienated nature.

In a related sense, Robin Evans has asked if we

might respond to

our own collective, constructive activity . . . by

altering the subtle mental balance [of spatialexperience], not as a private affair, but as

something that could be externalised . . . more

than an act of vengeance against what we

dislike, and more than a relieving delirium, but

worked out between consciousness andobjects in the same way that classical space

was.30

Tafuri understood architecture both as a commu-

nicative system, and as the site of all communica-

tive systems (as urbanism).Modern Urbanism – in as much as it is a

utopian attempt to preserve a form for the city,

or, rather, to preserve a principle of form within

the dynamics of urban structures – has not

been able to realise its models. And yet withinurban structures the whole contribution of the

historical avant-garde lives on with a particular

pregnancy. The city as an advertising and

self-advertising structure, as an ensemble of

channels of communication, becomes a sort ofmachine emitting incessant messages: indeter-

minacy itself is given speci�c form, and offered

as the only determinateness possible for the

city as a whole. In this way form is given to

the attempt to make the language of devel-opment live, to make it a concrete experience

of everyday life.31

We have here a description of the city as an open

set of communicating systems or economies. We

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are not simply talking here of ‘objects’, but are

including all spatial practices, events, images,

�nances, etc. Architecture is then seen to occupy

a particular condition, in that it is able to �gurethese systems spatially – both as actual objects,

and as images: as cognitive maps. These maps,

however, should be understood not as some kind

of totalising key, but rather as a series of ‘allegor-

ical’ devices in the sense understood by Benjaminand Brecht – non representational and fragmented.

Understood as a series of cabalistic runes, these

forms endlessly signify momentarily other commu-

nicative systems. The utopia of it is that the subject

reaches a state of communicative ecstasy whereboth subject and object dissolve in a sea of commu-

nicative spatial practices.

Adrift in such an environment, it is necessary to

ground an understanding of our contemporary

cultural space within a speci�cally historical under-

standing of experience. What interests us here is a

properly historical, experiencing body, one suf�-

ciently sensitive to recognise the different qualitiesof various spatial practices – not simply as so many

things to do with your legs, arms, eyes, etc, but as

activities that constantly restructure our cognitive

maps of ourselves, and our society. By doing so, it

might be possible to move beyond the confusedmixture that characterises much contemporary

architectural thought: the self-indulgent formal

obscurity (often generated out of a misinherited

rationalist discourse) of Hypersurface, and the polit-

ical complacency of Brandspace. And it mightgenerate a practice capable of articulating archi-

tectural demands of the complex political relation-

ships that exist between geometric, psychological

and social space.

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Figure 5. Hans

Scharoun,

Philharmonie,

Berlin, (1956–63).

Alpine Architecture

(Photograph Jon

Goodbun.)

166




Notes and references1. Raymond Williams does, however, mention it brie�y

in relation to ‘Empirical’: ‘Experience, in one main

sense, was until C18 interchangeable with experiment

from the common rootword experiri, L–to try, to put

to the test. Experience, from the present participle,

became not only a conscious test or trial but a

consciousness of what had been tested and tried, and

thence a consciousness of an effect or state.’

Raymond Williams, Keywords (Glasgow, 1976), p. 99.

2. Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,

Illuminations (1955), (Fontana, London, 1970),

p. 153.

3. Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Space, quoted in

David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, p. 77.

4. David Frisby has observed that Simmel employs

‘agoraphobia’ in just such a manner in his description

of the ‘blasé’ condition – the bombardment of the

senses with nervous stimulation results in an activity

of mental ‘spacings’: ‘rapid oscillation between two

characteristic moods of urban life: the over-close iden-

ti�cation with things, and, alternatively, too great a

distance from them’ quoted in Anthony Vidler, Spatial

Estrangement in Simmel and Kracauer, New German

Critique 54, (Fall, 1991), p. 37.

5. P. 171, Walter Benjamin quoting Baudelaire: Walter

Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Illumina-

tions (1955), (Fontana, London, 1970).

6. In a similar sense, ‘All the pervasive organisation of

experience by the bourgeois public sphere and its

media apparatus prevents not only the articulation of

new modes of experience but the experience itself. If

there is a potential for alternative forms of experience,

they can appear only negatively in the text, in its gaps

and ruptures’.

7. Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,

Illuminations (1955), (Fontana, London, 1970), p. 159.

8. Ibid., p. 172.

9. The following for example, ‘Simmel was promoting

sociology as a science of forms’, Adrian Forty, Words

and Buildings, T+H (2000), p. 167.

10. Anthony Vidler, Spatial Estrangement in Simmel and

Kracauer, New German Critique 54, (Fall, 1991), p.

37.

11. See Michael Jennings, Against Expressionism, in

Invisible Cathedrals – Expressionist Art History of

Wilhelm Worringer, edited by Neil H. Donahue. In his

essay Jennings emphasises Worringer’s position as

between that of Riegl and Benjamin.

12. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908),

(IUO, NYC, 1980), p. 4. Worringer states that Theodor

Lipps provides the comprehensive version of Empathy

Theory referred to.

13. Ibid., p. 5.

14. Worringer quotes Lipps, Aesthetics ‘the form of an

object is always its being formed by me’, ibid., p. 5.

15. Ibid., p. 5.

16. Worringer notes that ‘In addition . . . every line, by

virtue of its direction and shape, makes all sorts of

special demands on me’. Ibid., p. 5.

17. Ibid., p. 7.

18. Ibid., p. 4.

19. Ibid., p. 15.

20. Ibid., pp. 23–4.

21. ‘Simmel’s economy is then based not in production

but in exchange and consumption’ Iain Borden, Space

Beyond, The Journal of Architecture, Winter 1997,

p. 316.

22. In general see Raymond Williams, Keywords. ‘In Marx

. . . man creates himself by creating his world, but in

class-society is alienated from this essential nature by

speci�c forms of alienation in the division of labour’.

P. 31.

23. Michael W. Jennings, Neil H. Donahue, (ed.), Invisible

Cathedrals – The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm

Worringer (Penn State University, 1995), p. 92.

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24. Siegfried Kracauer, Frankfurter Zeitung, 17.5.1930.

Quoted in Anthony Vidler, Spatial Estrangement in

Simmel and Kracauer, New German Critique 54 (Fall,

1991), p. 37.

25. Figures such as Reyner Banham and more recently

Rosemarie Bletter have noted the discrepancy

between the canonic modernist histories (Seigfrid

Giedeon’s Space Time and Architecture and Russell

Hitchcock/Philip Johnson’s Functionalist Architecture)

and earlier treatises, particularly from Germany in

the 1920s such as Adolf Behne’s Der Moderne

Zweckbau and Bruno Taut’s Moderne Architektur. The

latter are characterised by a broad inclusiveness, the

former by a tendency to minimise the importance of

Expressionism.

26. Tafuri describes Taut’s publishing during this period as

‘the last dying gasps of late romanticism in a climate

of frustrated messianic expectations’, p. 155, Modern

Architecture (with Dal Co).

27. Quoted texts include Nietzsche, Kropotkin, Rousseau,

Scheerbart, Marx, Engels, Lenin and the constitution

of the Soviet Union.

28. The greatest division of material and mental labour is

the separation of town and country. The antagonism

between town and country begins with the transition

from barbarism to civilisation, from tribe to State,

from locality to nation, and runs through the whole

history of civilisation to the present day. The existence

of the town implies, at the same time, the necessity

of administration, police, taxes, etc; in short, of the

municipality, and thus politics in general. Here

�rst became manifest the division of the population

into two great classes, which is directly based upon

the division of labour and on the instruments of

production. Marx, K. ‘The German Ideology, the Marx

Engles Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York:

W.W. Norton & Co, 1978), p.176.

29. ‘the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to polit-

ical experience as the analogous incapacity to map

spatially is for urban experience. It follows that

an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is an

integral part of any socialist political project.’ Frederic

Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, p. 353. Frederic

Jameson describes his interest in understanding Kevin

Lynch’s work on urbanism and cognitive mapping (in

particular the metropolitan experience as one of oscil-

lation between immediate sensory perception, and

the mental ‘image’ of the city [or, to use Slmmel,

between concrete and inner experience]), as a ‘spatial

analogue’ of Althusser’s model of ideology – ‘the

imagery representation of the subject’s relationship to

his or her real conditions of existence’.

30. Robin Evans, The Projective Cast (MIT, Cambridge,

MA. 1995, p. 353.

31. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (1973),

(MIT, 1992), p. 167.

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Brand New Tafuri: some timely notes on the imaging of spatial demands

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