Who's Afraid of Ludwig Hilberseimer?

Abstract

The metropolis as imagined by Ludwig Hilberseimer has long served as the quintessential example of the urban dystopia. In reconsidering Hilberseimer's Groszstadt the vacant, haunted qualities of his city that are so often criticized will instead become a point of departure for exploring the “spectral” potentials of the metropolis. This reading will demonstrate the irrational qualities of this rationalist project, and how it reveals a deeply ambivalent and critical attitude towards utopian urbanism and the role of the city in capitalism.

Notes

1. Hilberseimer became a strong critic of his early work beginning in 1959, when his approach to the city took a decidedly humanist turn. In a 1959 interview Hilberseimer said of his 1924 Hochhausstadt: “It is more a city for corpses than for living people.” “Profile: Ludwig K. Hilberseimer,” Der Aufbau 14 (March 1959): 107–10. In 1963 Hilberseimer continues to do penance in Entfaltung einer Planungsidee, in which he reflects on his life work, stating “I had to discover that man is more important than technics. This purpose of technic is to serve man not rule him. My ideas, therefore, had to change, and I began to think of his human environment.” Originally written in English. (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein [Bauwelt Fundamente 6], 1963), 147. Hilbersimer's postwar work was criticized several times in the pages of Progressive Architecture from 1945 through 1957 as being too “abstract.” The Hochhausstadt came under attack by Peter Blake in Form Follows Fiasco (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977) and by Josef Paul Kleihues, “Zeile oder Block?” Neue Heimat, no. 11 (1978): 29. In 1984 Joseph Rykwert described the project as “barren, gloomy, and menacing.” Joseph Rykwert, “Die Stadt unter dem Strich: Eine Bilanz,” Modelle für eine Stadt (Berlin: Schriftenreihe zur Internationalen Bauaustellung Berlin, 1984), 126. The Hochhausstadt was also attacked by contemporary critics like the Berlin art historian Max Deri (“When one sees these constructions, blood may congeal, and marrow freeze in [the] bones”). Max Deri, “Novembergruppe,” Berliner Zeitung am Abend, Beiblatt, June 6, 1925. Hugo Häring stated that he was “appalled” by Hilberseimer's results. Hugo Häring, “Zwei Städte,” Die Form 1 (1926): 172–75. For criticism before 1981 see David Spaeth, Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer: An Annotated Bibliography and Chronology (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981). Deri and Häring are cited in Richard Pommer, In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer: Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1988).

Nevertheless, just as Hilberseimer's project was being discredited it was “rediscovered” by leftist Italian critics and historians in the 1960s, including Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti, Giorgio Grassi, Aldo Rossi, and Marco de Michaelis. See, for instance, Rassenga no. 27, “Ludwig Hilberseimer 1885/1967” (Sept. 1986). Italian translations of Hilberseimer's books began appearing in the 1960s, beginning with Un' Idea di Piano, trans. Sonia Gessner (Venice: Marsilio, 1967).

2. Quoted in Richard Pommer, In the Shadow of Mies (note 1), 17. The major English-language monograph on Hilberseimer shows clear disdain for its subject, which is already evident in its title. English-language scholarship on Hilberseimer has been comparatively sparse, though that may change with the recent publication of a translation of Groszstadtarchitektur. Metropolisarchitecture and Selected Essays (New York: GSAPP Books, 2012).

3. The significance of Hilberseimer's work as a diagrammatic representation of capitalism and an accomplished example of rational architecture was similarly defended by Italian architects and historians in the 1960s, especially Manfredo Tafuri. Recently, perhaps related to scholarship on the neo-rational architecture of the 1970s, new assessments of Hilberseimer's work have begun to emerge. See, e.g., Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Architecture for Barbarians: Ludwig Hilberseimer and the Rise of the Generic City,” AA Files 63 (2011): 3-18.

4. The “homely,” in one definition quoted by Freud, is a place “free from ghostly influences.” Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 225. For more on architecture and the uncanny, see Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

5. Freud is describing Otto Rank's concept of the “double.” Freud, “Uncanny” (note 4), 235.

6. The role of the spectral in postmodern architecture, especially in relationship to utopia, has recently been examined in Reinhold Martin's Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). While in Hilberseimer's city a premonition of spectral capitalism is evident, in Martin's postmodernism it is fully manifest, appearing architecturally both in the “hollow” facades of neo-rationalist architecture, and in the mirrored curtain walls of corporate architecture. According to Martin, “the eternal return of repressed utopian future, haunts postmodernism and to some extent defines it” (xxi). The formal language of Ludwig Hilberseimer was appropriated by several neo-rationalist architects, including Aldo Rossi and Oswald Mathias Ungers, whose work is discussed in Martin's book.

7. Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 245–58.

8. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Penguin Books, 1988 [1982])

9. Groszstadtarchitektur is a 108-page illustrated book that is in some ways more about Architektur than the Stadt. The first 20 pages are devoted to the subject of the “Großstadt” and “Städtebau” (city planning). The rest of the book is organized by different architectural typologies (housing, commercial buildings, high-rise buildings, industrial buildings, etc.), which are discussed in relationship to the metropolis. It is only in the last pages (in a section called “Groszstadtarchitektur”) that Hilberseimer returns again to the city itself. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1927). All translations from this book are mine.

10. Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (note 9), 1.

11. Ibid., 1–2.

12. “Dematerialization” is a broad term that can be applied in several spheres. In economics it refers to the substitution of physical objects or money by abstract monetary instruments like credit or electronic transfers of funds. In architecture it is most often used metaphorically to describe glass, but it has also been used to characterize the turn to conceptual architectural practices in the 1970s. See Bernard Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox” (1975) in K. Michael Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 218–28. This meaning is likely borrowed from art criticism: Lucy Lippard used the term to describe conceptual art practices that “dematerialized” the “art object” by placing emphasis on concept or process. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 [1973]).

13. Marx plays with the similar-sounding words “ständisch” and “stehend.” “Ständisch” refers to the traditional notion of “Stand”—class, position, or rank. “Stehend” means “standing.” Thus the phrase translates literally into the slightly less poetic “all that is class-based and standing vaporizes.” In other words, the old corporative order based on privilege dissolves in the mechanism of industrial production itself (i.e., steam).

14. According to Berman, this destructive change would also dissolve the city: “the pathos of all bourgeois monuments is that their material strength and solidity actually count for nothing and carry no weight at all, and that they are blown away like frail reeds by the very forces of capitalist development that they celebrate.” Berman, All That Is Solid (note 8), 99.

15. A similar reading was proposed by Manfredo Tafuri. In Tafuri's reading, the architectural object in Hilberseimer's work is “completely dissolved,” and the architect is no longer the “producer of objects” but an organizer of cycles of production. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia la Penta (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 104–08.

16. Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (note 9), 18.

17. Ibid., 19.

18. Ibid.

19. Bruno Taut, Die Auflösung der Städte; oder, die Erde eine Gute Wohnung (Hagen: Folkwang, 1920).

20. Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (note 9), 20.

21. Ibid.

22. Markus Kilian, Großstadtarchitektur und New City: Eine Planungsmethodische Untersuchung der Stadtplanungsmodelle Ludwig Hilberseimers, Doctoral dissertation, Universität Karlsruhe (Technische Hochschule), 2002.

23. Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Valori Plastici,” in Sozialistische Monatshefte (1921), Jg. 27, Bd. II, 629–30. My translation.

24. In a review of Otto Dix's work just several months later Hilberseimer is less enthusiastic about the Valori Plastici paintings, and specifically criticizes their “historicism” and “artificial antiquation.” “Berliner Ausstellungen,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (1921), Jg. 27, Bd. II, 1001.

25. This lack of color is, according to Hilberseimer, entirely deliberate and befitting of the modern city after Expressionism: “The haze that floats over every city chases away color and makes the base color of all cities an indeterminate grey.” Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (note 9), 102.

26. Hilberseimer's bare mask-like facades can be compared to his criticism of the “classicist game of masks” in the “dummy facades” of American architects like McKim, Mead & White and Daniel Burnham. He regarded this architecture as the architectural expression of the “growing trustification and monopolization of production” and the “change from industrial to financial economy” (“Amerikanische Architektur,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (1926), Jg. 32, 276. My translation.

27. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994), 8.

28. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 221–22.

29. An example is Hans Richter's 1927 film Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast), which Hilberseimer was likely familiar with. Richter, who was a friend of Hilberseimer's, used primitive special effects like stop-motion and reversal of the film to produce an abstract narrative of inanimate objects including clocks and hats that move according to their own will, and against that of the humans that surround them.

30. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (1888; London: Penguin Books, 1967), 218.

31. Derrida, Specters (note 27), 3.

32. Reinhold Martin describes ghosts in terms of “boundary problems”: as figures of projection that “rearrange” the past, present, and future but also as bridges between spaces that exist and those that do not. Utopian projection is thus tied to the concept of the spectral. Martin, Utopia's Ghost (note 6), 147–49.

33. This is also suggested in the irrepressible classicism of Hilberseimer's urban schemes. This is especially apparent in his early architectural drawings, which resemble the Heimatstil of Heinrich Tessenow. Hilberseimer was also influenced by the neoclassical architecture of his teacher Josef Durm. See Pommer, In the Shadow of Mies (note 1), 22.

34. Derrida, Specters (note 27), 48.

35. K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 180.

36. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (Piscataway, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1993 [1925]). Similar treatises were also written in Germany at the time, describing a crisis in the effectiveness of democratically-elected governments. See Bruce Robbins, “Introduction: The Public as Phantom,” in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

37. Lippmann, Phantom Public (note 36), 4–5.

38. Ibid., 32.

39. The term is derived from both Lippmann and Jürgen Habermas's “public sphere.” See Robbins, The Phantom Public Sphere (note 26); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

40. Robbins, Phantom Public Sphere (note 26).

41. Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (note 9).

42. Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject (note 35).

43. Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (note 9), 98.

44. Wieland Schmied, “Neue Sachlichkeit and the German Realism of the Twenties,” in Neue Sachlichkeit and German Realism of the Twenties: Hayward Gallery, London, 11 November 1978–14 January 1979 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978).

45. Compare this to Hilberseimer's writing on Constructivism: “The machine makes possible the most exact execution, and thus corresponds completely to the compositions of the present, which strive for the most unveiled clarity. Exceptional objectivity, mathematical clarity, geometric rigor, and exact constructiveness are not only technical but also eminent artistic problems. They make up what is truly significant in our epoch.” Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Konstruktuvismus” (1922), Sozialistische Monatshefte Jg. 28, Bd. II, 831-832. My translation.

46. A term he uses in reference to Hannes Meyer's work. Hays, Modernism (note 25), 155.

47. Here Krauss is commenting on LeWitt and his contemporaries. Krauss, “LeWitt” (note 7), 258.

48. Hilberseimer, Groszstadtarchitektur (note 9), 100.

49. Ibid., 98.

50. Hays, Modernism (note 25), 196.

51. Ibid., 245.

52. According to Kilian, Hilberseimer “is probably the only significant urban planner of classical modernism who concerned himself intensively and professionally with art theory and art criticism at the beginning of his career as a planner.” Kilian, Großstadtarchitektur (note 22), 13.

53. The term seems to have traveled between art and architecture several times. However, Hermann Muthesius is generally credited with the earliest uses of the term “Sachlichkeit” in 1902. See Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

54. Ibid., 9. Mention of the exhibition does not seem to appear in Hilberseimer's reviews. Hilberseimer also began to focus less on art during this time.

55. In a version of the show in Essen work by de Chirico was also included. Dennis Crockett, German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder, 1918–1924 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).

56. Franz Roh, Nach-expressionismus; Magischer Realismus: Probleme der Neuesten Europäischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1925).

57. Quoted in Günter Herzog, Anton Räderscheidt (Cologne: Dumont, 1991), 24.

58. Quoted in Herzog, Räderscheidt (note 57), 20.

59. Neue Sachlichkeit, by contrast, was described by Ernst Bloch as representing a “hatred of imagination” and “hostility to utopia.” Bloch saw the movement as regressive: “the fascination of the formal rigidity still corresponds to the delight of capital when it is establishing itself.” Quoted in Emilio Bertonati, “Neue Sachlichkeit in a Wider Cultural Context,” German Realism of the Twenties: The Artist as Social Critic (Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1980), 58.

60. Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Von der Wirkung des Krieges auf die Kunst,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (1923) Jg. 29, 730-732. 731. Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Dix,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (1924) Jg. 30, 66.

61. Sergiusz Michalski, Neue Sachlichkeit (Cologne: Taschen, 1992), 13. My translation.

62. Beate Reese, “Zeitnah Weltfern,” in Zeitnah Weltfern: Bilder der Neuen Sachlichkeit (Würzburg: Städtische Galerie Würzburg, 1998), 10.

63. By 1924 Hilberseimer was critical of what he saw as the descent of the avant-garde art into kitsch. For instance: “No poster, no bar, no cinema or theater without Expressionism or Constructivism. It seems as if purity is perceived to be boring. One thus escapes behind all manner of decoration, dabbles in mysticism and primitivism.” Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Kitsch,” Sozialistische Monatshefte (1925): 781. Or: “Today the square is the object of kitschification. At least some do it with taste; most out of the banal need to have been a part of it. From the Bauhaus to the smallest ‘revolutionary' want-to-be painter today everything is done as a square.” Ludwig Hilberseimer, “Raumgestaltung” (1924), Jg. 30, 65–66.

64. Hilberseimer, “Valori Plastici” (note 23), 629.

65. Räderscheidt was included both in Hartlaub's Mannheim exhibition and in Roh's book. He was for some time a member of a Cologne group with a fabulously blasé name—“Stupid”—that also included Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Heinrich Hoerle, and Wilhelm Fick. Räderscheidt was later influenced by the work of Max Ernst, de Chirico, and Carrà.

66. Juan José Lahuerta, who also wrote on de Chirico, makes an interesting comparison between the paintings of Räderscheidt and a photograph of Hilberseimer's 1927 house in the Weißenhofsiedlung, The photograph similarly showing a figure from behind in the abstract, blank composition of walls making up Hilberseimer's house. See Juan José Lahuerta, 1927: La Abstracción Necesaria en el Arte y la Arquitectura Europeos de Entreguerras (Barcelona: Anthropos, Editorial del Hombre, 1989). Manfredo Tafuri included an image of Räderscheidt's “Begegnung” (1921) in The Sphere and the Labyrinth, comparing the “empty sign” in the work of Aldo Rossi with that of the “oneiric realism” of Neue Sachlichkeit. The Räderscheidt painting is placed in comparison with a photo of Rossi's residential block in the Gallatrese 2 Quarter in Milan (1970–73). See Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth (note 28), 273.

67. I have not come across evidence of mutual awareness between Hilberseimer and Räderscheidt, though it is likely considering Hilberseimer's activities as an art critic.

68. Willi Wolfradt, in 1928. Quoted in Herzog, Räderscheidt (note 57), 27. My translation.

69. Ibid., 29. My translation.

70. Photographer August Sander's famous studies of universal human typologies in Weimar society had included several photographs of Anton Räderscheidt. He appears much as the figures in his paintings—alone on the strangely empty streets of Cologne, stiffly standing in a suit, coat, and hat.

71. Herzog, Räderscheidt (note 57), 26–27.