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This year promises to be a good one for architecture, in part because
exhibitions on Henri Labrouste and Le Corbusier are coming to the
Museum of Modern Art, and because Log will mark its tenth anniver-
sary with a September conference, called ln Pursuit of Architecture,
also at MoMA. Together these events represent architectural thinking
and practice across three centuries. On March 28, MoMA will stage
a Labrouste symposium to explore how aspects of his 19th-century
work are relevant in the 21st. One of those surely needs to be the cre-
ation of ennobling public space in the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve
and the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, which opened the doors of
knowledge to all French citizens, a society then in the throes of radi-
cal change.
The role of architecture in the making of cities is a subject of
constant debate. Thisis particularly 50 in Berlin, which was the focus
of the Achtung Berlin symposium at the Yale School of Architecture
in mid February. Addressing an overflow audience, historian Kurt
Forster spoke of his "adult love for Berlin," and how a city grows in-
creasjngly attractive as we recognize its faults. Perhaps here he meant
its dark side. Certainly the Berlin of national socialism, of post-World
War II destrU/;tion and occupation, and then of Cold War division,
was unique in the 20th century. But as Rem Koolhaas later pointed
out (via satellite), the fall in 1989 of the wall dividing a democratic
government from a communist one was also the beginning of the
1055 ofBerlin's very aura. Once the barrier between the Brandenburg
Gate and the Tiergarten was toppled, two vast public spaces were re-
united, and city planners went to work transforming Potsdamer Platz
with corporate logos and Pariser platz with oflicious national embas-
sies. For when the people of Berlin, East and West, climbed the Berlin
Wall, they also struck down ideology. Twenty-four years later, Berlin
is a city seemingly striving for a populist equilibrium. As the ongoing
Humboldt Forum project attests, architecture in Berlin no longer has
symbolic powerj rebuilding the historic baroque Berliner Stadtschloss
on the site of the former GDR's glazed Palast der Republik strips Ber-
lin not only of its divided history, but also of the possibilities of a new
architectural symbol going forward.
There were no conclusions to be had at the Berlin conference,
nor should there have been. Cities are perpetual works in progress,
both overcoming and succumbing to the architectures and popula-
tions that constitute their being. Today the challenge is the politically
correct, populist urban thinking, which, in its ambition to be all
things to all people, teeters on producing a banality worse than bore-
dom. Too often this process only leads to the usual private develop-
ment of homogenized landscapes for a "heterogeneous" population,
bundled into 50 many glazed towers and brick bungalows as to lose its
differences. Is that really a city we can love? - CD
Log 27 Copyright 2013 Anyone Corporation. Ali Rights Reserved.
ISSN: 1547-4690. ISBN: 978-0-98l6491-5-1. Printed in USA. Log is published
three times a year hy Anyone Corporation, a nonprofit corporation in the State ofNew
York with editorial and business oflices at 41 West 25th Street, 11th Boor, New York, NY
10010. Subscripcion for 1 issues: $l6 US; $40 CAN/ MEX; $72 Internacional. Distributed
by Ubiquity CUS) and Idea Books C worldwide). Single issues are $15 plus shipping. The
opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the protagonists or of the board of
the Anyone Corporation. Send inquiries, letters, and submissions to log@anycorp.com.
Log
WINTERjSPRING 2013
Marc .Anglil
& Car:; Sirei.r
Pier Vittorio .Aureli
Tom Daniell
Malal? Helmy
Timothy Hyde
Tom Kovac
Chri.rtoph a. Kumpu.rch
Marl? Morri.r
Emmanuel Petit
Franoi.r Roche
julieRo.re
Peter Trummer
Mechtild Widrich
Lebbeu.r Wood.r
Hajime Yat.rul?a
General Ob.rervation.r:
Cover Stor:;:
27
87
111
21
105
67
43
137
128
10
97
59
51
81
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31
Observations on architecture and the contemporary city
Cingapura: Cities in Circulation
The Theology of Tabula Rasa: Walter Benjamin and
Architecture in the Age of Precarity
"Nothing Serious"
The stupid matter, or, some thoughts that rhyme and don't
Piles, Puddles, and other Architectural Irritants
100YC [100-Year City]
The First and the Last
Two Hundred and Eighty-Eight Lines
Projects for the Post-Ironic City
Le pari(s) de BKK
Hong Kong's Shifting Grounds
The City as an Object: Thoughts on the Form of the City
Spatial Implications of the Monument to Freeedom and
Unity in Leipzig
Light Pavilion
Urban Project as Thought Experiment
On urban models 42 On SimCity 50
On hugeness 58 On orientation 80
On micro-housing 96
Maribor Mutations
Postcard image: Hernan Diaz Alonso / Xefirotarch, 2012.
10. Artemy Magun, "The Work ofLeisure:
The Figure of Emp'Y Time in the Poetics of
Holderlin and Mandelshtam," MLNl18.S
( 2003): 11S2- 1176. Project MUSE,]anuary
2013. See muse.jhu.edu.
11. Ali, "Sons ofBeaches."
12. "Georges Bataille, a reader of Sade:
On cnjoyment as an expression of force,"
Iodepaper.pdf.
MALAK HELMY IS AN ARTIST BASED
lN CAIRO. lN 2011 SHE WORKED
lN ALEXANDRIA ON A SERIES OF
PROJECTS CALLED RECORDS FROM THE
EXCITED STATE, AN ONGOING ANALYSIS
OF THE BIOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL
RHYTHMS OF A SITE OF LEISURE ON
THE EGYPTIAN COAST.
and being - a pause of l o k ~ d time, a caesura - a pause in a
rhythm on the threshold of which meaning is produced. ln
this caesura one comes to know themselves amidst this being
outside of time - in a momentary pause - it is the source of
labor, the birth of meaning.
10
And he who then becomes
Maestro can control that meaning.
handed the baton, lik-e a Maestro, to wave and direct the tempo,
rhythm, nuances, and dynamics of Eppt's politicai orchestra that
plays to an 8J-million strong theatre.
11
8. FORCE (AN EXALTATION)
ln this sense of being overwhelmed with the stream of energy,
united with nature's principIe, one encounters enjoyment on
the brink of the disappearance of their subject into this force.
t is perhaps the experience of the sublime in which the subject
is overwnelmed by an objectj it - the subject - dissolves and
becomes one with the object in a force of exaltation. ln this
world of relations, to enjoy is not a transitive verb, he says, in
which one enjoys the other or the thing, it is another relation,
it is beingpossessed by the force that creates enjoyment, the
pleasure of disappearing into the stream of the indifferent,
inhuman object, of a unified stream that is shared and contin-
ues, that always was, and that commandsY
110
Pier Vittorio Aureli
The Theology
of Tabula Rasa:
Walter Benjalllin
And Architecture in
The Age of Precarity
Since the 2007 economic recession, the culture of architecture
has witnessed the rise of activism and participatory practices.
with the 1990s avant-garde architects on the decline of po-
liticaI correctness, we are witnessing a new wave of socially
concerned architecture. Symposiums, exhibitions, biennials,
magazines, and journals have amplified this phenomenon by
promoting new ways of practicing architecture that invest
design with a social and politicaI missiono The new genera-
tion of young architects feels the urge to focus not on aes-
thetic and formal concerns, but on the improvement of our
urban condition. ln conferences and discussions about ar-
chitecture one often hears the lament that in the past twenty
years architects have overindulged in useless formal acrobat-
ics and irrelevant theoretical discussions and shown little
responsibility toward issues such as public space, housing,
and other "socially oriented" topics. paradoxically, while the
recession is forcing many people to live in very precarious
conditions, many young, socially concerned architects see
the crisis as an opportunity for their creative acts. The crisis
is "forcing" the architectural discipline to be more inventive,
more disposable, more astute in finding adhoc solutions for
our crumbling urban condition.
lndeed, there is a serious link between crisis and creativity.
The human is distinct from other species precisely because
of its creative impulse. This impulse is triggered by humans'
lack of specialized instincts and permanent inner feeling of
not being at home. This requires humans to adapt to their
environmental situations, even the most hostile. The creative
act is thus the act of "making a world," that is, making
acceptable our own living conditions in any given situation.
111
1. See Stefano Boeri, Farepiu con meno:
ideeper riprogettare i'Italia ( MiIan: II
Saggiatore, 2012).
This kind of creativity is precisely what capitalism has
seized as its main labor-power. From industrial to postin-
dustrial production, the infinite resourcefulness of the
creative subject is the fundamentallabor-subjectivity
exploited by capital. Economic crises and recessions are
moments in which this infinite resourcefulness, the urge
to adapt to new (and often more adverse) conditions, is
radicalIy augmented. ln this context popular slogans such
as "Doing more with less,,,1 recently laynched by a famous
"engaged" Italian architect-cum-politician in order to
promote anticonsumerist culture, are involuntarily ironic
when used to define our new postrecession ethos. Doing
morewith less is precisely what capital demands from us:
morf productivity and less welfare, more creativity and
less social security, because creativity becomes more produc-
tive when our "given" conditions grow harder and more
unstable. The new socially oriented architectural activism
poses a dilemma that cannot be avoided. Are these new
practices addressing the possibility of radical change or
are they simply confirming, and to a certain extent subli-
mating, the most regressive effects of the crisis? It is useful
to approach this dilemma through Walter Benjamin's ethical
project, which has found its most radical formulation in
two short essays: "The Destructive Character" and
"Experience and Poverty."
1.
ln 1931 Walter Benjamin wrote a short piece titled "The
Destructive Character." This smalI Denk.bild was written in
one of the worst periods in German and European history:
after the crisis of 1929, when European fascism was on the
rise. Benjamin writes:
It cou/d happen to Iomeone look.ing back. over hiI life that he real-
ized that almoIt ali the deeper obligationI he had endured in iu
courIe originated in people who everyone agreed had the traiu of
a ((deItructive character." He would Itumble on thiI fact one day,
perhapI by chance, and the heavier the Ihock. dealt to him, the
better hiI chanceI of repreIenting the dutructive character.
The dutructive character k.nowI only one watchword: mak.e
room. And only one activity: clearing away. HiI need for freIh
air and open pace iI Itronger than any hatred.
The dutructive character iI young and cheerful. For deItroy-
ing rejuvenateI, becauIe it clearI awt{)' the traceI of our own age;
it cheerI, becaUIe everything cleared away meanI to the de-
Itroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of hiI own
112
Log27
2. Walter Benjamin, "The Destructive
Character," in Walter Benjamin: SeJected
WritingI, Volume 2, pari 2, 19J1- 19J4, ed.
Michael W. Jennings et ai , trans. Rodney
Livingstone ( Cambridge: The Belknap Press
ofHarvard University Press, 200S), 541.
l. See Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin
( London: Reaktion Books, 2007).
condition. Really, only the inIight into how radically the world iI
Iimplified when tuted for iu worthineu for deItruction leadI to
JUch an Apolionian image of the deItroyer. ThiI iI the great bond
embracing and unifying ali that exiIu. It iI a Iight that aifordI
the deItructive character a pectacle of deeput harmony.
The dutructive character iI alwaYI blithely at work.. It iI
Nature that dictatu hiI tempo, indirectly at leaIt, for he mUIt
forutall her. OtherwiIe Ihe will tak.e over the deItruction herIelf
The dutructive character Ieu no image hovering before
him. He haI few needI, and the leaIt of them iI to k.now what will
replace what haI been dutroyed. FirIt of ali, for a moment at
leaIt, empty pace - the place where the thing Itood or the victim
lived. Someone iI JUre to be found who needI thiI pace without
occupying it.
2
To a certain extent "The Destructive Character" can be
read as a paradoxical ode to the sarne aggressive forces
- capitalism and fascism - that would threaten the life of
people, and especialIy the working class, in the 1930s. If the
1910s and '20s saw the revolutionary forces of socialism
and communism challenge the hegemony of capitalism, the
1930s were a period of restoration of capital through fascist
repression in Europe and the advancement of welfare state
politics in the USo This project would culminate in a final
blow to workers: the 1939 pact of nonaggression between
Hitler and Stalin. Benjamin's destructive character is thus
an image of the destructive impetus that would force many
lives - including his own - to be uprooted and annihilated.
The essay is thus autobiographical: it refers to the increas-
ingly precarious life of its author, who, unable to secure a
stable professional position, earned his living by writing
occasional pieces for journals, newspapers, and radio
programs. On top of this he endured an excruciating divorce
from his wife, the forced separation from his son Stefan, the
ending of his tormented relationship with Asja Lacis, and
constant changes of domicile.
l
This last seems to have been
one of the fundamental traits of Benjamin's life. Indeed,
there is no other intelIectual, not even in the drama ti c
decades of the 1930s and '40s - when milIions of people
were forced to move from their place of origin - who
changed address so frequently.
The beginning of the short essay clearly points to a
situation in which the destructive character is personified
by unbenevolent figures: those to whom we endure alI our
deeper obligationI. With such a statement Benjamin makes
clear that the source of the destructive character is not a
113 Log27
I
I
4. Sec Tamara Tagliacozzo, "Catastrofc,
distruzionc, rcdenzione. Sionismo e
messianismo apocalittico in Gershom
Scholem," in Le vie della distruzione.
A partire da II carattere distruttivo di
Walter Benjamin, ed. Seminario di Studi
Benjaminiani (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2010).
liberating force, but an oppressive one. And yet for Benjamin
it is precisely the sudden realization - the shock - that our
life depends on forces that are in essence destructive that
introduces us to the use of such forces for our own sake.
This is a fundamental point in the way Benjamin categorizes
destruction. Unlike the art of building, which from Vitruvius
to Alberti is identified not just as a technical expertise but
also as having ethical and moral value,par.r de.rtruen.r refers
to annihilating forces and thus to the 1055 of any value, of
any stable point of reference. ln spit of Benjamin's early
taste for romanticism, and later for the hopeless pessimism
of German baroque drama, he seems to have no illusion
about the destructive character the destructive character can
ovJy be embraced by accepting it as a force inherited from
'(hose who threaten our existence in the most fundamental
way. There is no doubt that, albeit within a materialist
dimension, "The Destructive Character" can be read as the
cusp of Benjamin's apocalyptic messianism, a "negative" that
evolves throughout his entire oeuvre, as well as in German
Judaism in general. Commenting on the 1930 edition of
Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, Benjamin's friend
Gershom Scholem, a theologian, remarked that the theory
of catastrophes implied by apocalyptic messianism breathed
fresh air into the tradition of Judaic theology in the 19205.
4
The awareness of a looming catastrophe supported the idea
that there was always a potential for destruction within the
historical time of the secular world. For Scholem, redemp-
tion was both a liberating force and a destructive one, and
this issue was precisely what many Jewish theologians had
tried to avoid. Such theological desire for destruction was
echoed if not inspired by the politicaI, social, and economic
reality of the Weimar Republic, the turbulence and instabil-
ity of which was for Benjamin mirrored in the hopeless
atmospheres of the German baroque drama, the acid sarcasm
of Dadaism, and the desperate subjectivity of expressionismo
And yet, at the time of "The Destructive Character" Benjamin
was no longer indulgent of the melancholic character of the
protagonists of baroque drama or the anarchism of artistic
avant-gardes such as Surrealism and Dadaism. After having
analyzed in pa.r.ragenwerk the archaeology of his contempo-
rary capitalist metropolis, Benjamin saw no room for roman-
tic rebellion. The destructive character, the will to destroy
established forms and values, had to be organized as the
struggle of the proletariat against capitalismo lndeed,
through his observations on Paris, Benjamin discovered the
114 Log27
). See Walter Benjamin, The Arcader
Projea, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap
Press ofHarvard University Press, 1999).
nexus that binds together technology, urban form, and
capitalistic power, and noted that in the 19th century the
arcades introduced a new architecture made of the most
advanced materiaIs and forms. For Benjamin these crass and
valueless commercial spaces had the potential to threaten
the reassuring Gemtlichkeit of bourgeois domesticity. Even
the urban form imposed on Paris by the reactionary Baron
Haussmann after the revolution of 1848 was, for Benjamin,
the appearance of a new and radical urban experience.
Haussmann's dramatically new circulation system of
boulevards gradually replaced the old medieval topography
of Paris with a landscape of endless runs of the sarne kind of
facade. Even if these transformations were advanced to
counter the threat of another revolution C which eventually
occurred in 1871), the ruthless character of Haussmann's
urban operations had the effect, as Benjamin noted, of
disorienting the bourgeoisie's trust in their own city.) Yet, in
Benjamin's opinion the dreamlike scenario in which these
disruptive urban transformations took place had preserved
the capital from being annihilated by its own destructive
power. Seen from the vantage point of 20th-century Berlin,
Paris, the capital of the 19th century, was interpreted by
Benjamin as both a warning and a chance. When Benjamin
was writing "The Destructive Character," Berlin was a city
of both cultural emancipation and regressive social condi-
tions. Benjamin saw Berlin as both the city where new
experimental urban projects were being developed by a
radical city planner like Martin Wagner - who, with Bruno
Taut, designed the Hufeisensiedlung, the first
in Berlin Britz - and the "stony" city, harshly criticized by
Werner Hegemann, where inhumane housing conditions such
as those manifested in the infamous rental houses - the
Mietka.rerne - affected the majority of the urban proletariat.
Confronted with this contradictory landscape, Benjamin
saw Berlin as the place in which the destructive character
of modern urban experience could be radicalized in the
form of a tabula rasa - a messianic]etztzeit - that would
turn the brutal forces of capitalist development against
themselves in the form of a proletarian revolution rising up
from the most reified human subjectivity. For its own sake,
this revolution had to assume the disenchanted and cheerful
spirit of the destructive character and turn it against the
powers from which it originated.
A fundamental point of reference for Benjamin's tabula
rasa was the literary work of Paul Scheerbart and the theater
115
Log27
6. Se< Paul Scheerbart, GlaIarchitek.tur
(Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1914).
7. Sec Benjamin, "Bert Brecht," in Selected
Writingr, Volume 2,part 1, 1927-19JO, 165-71.
of Bertolt Brecht. ln very different ways Scheerbart and
Brecht attacked the most enduring values of bourgeois
culture. ln 1914 Scheerbart published G/asarchitektur, a
treatise on architecture centered on the idea that the whole
built world could be transformed into a landscape of total
transparency.6 With this book Scheerbart attacked the
bourgeois interior, the fixed architecture of the 19th-cen-
tury apartment in which the ruling class had cultivated its
idea of domestic comfort. Scheerbart's ide a of building
architecture in transparent materiality was motivated not
only by a desire for transparency per se, but also by the idea
that the character of the domestic interior should be
completely indifferent to the life of its inhabitants. ln a
of glass, traditional dwelling was made impos-
sible because the inhabitants would not be able to leave
traces on tle glass. ln this way domestic space would be
freed from the burden of personal identity and would allow
inhabitants to always start their daily existence afresh.
Scheerbart's architecture can be considered a tabula
rasa insofar as it intended to remove any ornament, any
superHuous object, and to reduce domestic space to its bare
essence of empty and transparent spaces. Ris ide a of total
transparency and removal of any sense of interiority is also
reHected in the protagonists of his novels. As Benjamin
noted, Scheerbart's fiction was populated by figures devoid
of any psychological characteristics, completely transparent
in their thoughts and intentions. Moreover, their positive
relationship with technology allowed them to be completely
free of natural resources. Scheerbart thus showed Benjamin
the possibility of a completely constructed and artificial
world in which any myth of nature was erased and technol-
ogy, rather than producing the phantasmagoricallandscape
of the Parisian arcades, gave form to a straightforward,
objective urban condition. For Benjamin the science fiction
aspect in Scheerbart's literary work was the result of the
naive amazement with which he described the achievements
of new building techniques. Benjamin also saw this quality
in the theater of Brecht. Like Scheerbart's architecture,
Brecht's theater was devoid of psychology and completely
invested in the actions of its protagonists. For Benjamin,
the target of Brecht's destructive character was the ide a of
artistic creativity, the alibi through which art and literature
had always been removed from the broader world of
material production.
7
By destroying any sense of psycho-
logical refinement in his plot, Brecht made his dramas
116 Log27
8. For one of the most accurate and
interesting discussions of the genesis of Le
Corbusier's Maison Dom-ino, sec Adolf
Max Vogt, Le Corburier, The Nob/e Savage
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
available as pedagogical devices at the service of participa-
tory spectatorship. ln both Scheerbart's books and Brecht's
theater, Benjamin found the possibility for a "sober"
language that was appropriate to his goal: the invocation
of a messianic revelation from within the most extreme
experiences of modernity.
2.
Two radical architectural proposals express the sober lan-
guage of tabula rasa that Benjamin invoked in his text: Le
Corbusier's Maison Dom-ino of 1914, and Rannes Meyer's
Co-op Zimmer (Room) of 1924. A peculiar characteristic
of these two proposals is that they were invested in the scale
of the house but they addressed the city at large. Maison
Dom-ino and Co-op Zimmer are arguably the two most
radical housing projects conceived in the first decades of the
20th century, and though it is not certain whether Benjamin
ever saw them, it is not difficult to imagine that this kind of
architecture would fit his invocation of inhabitable space as
"empty space."
Developed between 1912 and 1916, Le Corbusier's
Dom-ino model gained momentum at the beginning of
World War I when the destruction of villages in Belgium
and France made clear that housing would be a high
priority for many European governments after the war.
Le Corbusier sought to seize this as the opportunity to
promote large-scale reform of housing conditions, thus
making clear the link between destruction and uncertainty
and the possibility for establishing new living conditions.
For Le Corbusier, the Dom-ino model was not only a
house, but also the place of social reproduction and the
center of architecture's radical reinvention. ln order to
give physical form to his new vision, he developed a
structural skeleton composed of horizontal slabs and
pi/otis, which left the completion of any internal partitions
and finishings to the building's inhabitant. This reduction
of architectural form to structure is the crucial aspect of
the Dom-ino mode!. ln this reinvented context, architec-
ture becomes mere framework, and the most important
consequence of this model - its success and diffusion in
architecture are indisputable - is the elimination of walls
and facade as fundamental creators of architectural space.
of course, facade and walls still exist in the Dom-ino
model, but their presence is always relative to the adhoc
use or situation.
8
117 Log27
LE CORBUSlER, MAlSON DOM- INO, 1914. lmportantly, Maison Dom-ino was the first time that
the technique of the free plan, which was used strictly for
utilitarian buildings such as factories and storehouses, was
used for a house. The free plan consists of an unobstructed
space in which only structure remains. The concept of the
free plan is to accommodate whatever programs or activities
are needed. The technology of the free plan was developed
with the rise of industrialization in order to contain the
fast changing modes of production, both material produc-
tion, like the Fordist assembly line, and immaterial pro-
duction, like office space. ln free-plan factories and offices,
interior space is literally emptied out of traditional architec-
tural elements such as ornament and interior partitions,
and reduced to a tabula rasa of open-ended floors punctu-
ated by slim columns.
The logic of the free plan was motivated by the need to
contain the ethos of industrial labor and its ever-changing
spatiallogic. The generic nature of such space addresses pre-
cisely the deepest anthropological condition of man reduced
to the basic properties of his species: a lack of specialized in-
stincts, which results in human unpredictability in terms of
actions and reactions. The more this aspect of human nature
becomes the essence of the labor force exploited by capital,
the more space must become neutral in order to contain any
unforeseeable condition.
118 Log27
HANNEs MEYER, Co- op ZIMMER, 1926.
9. See Ludwig Hilberseimer,
Metropolisarchitecture, trans. and ed.
Richard Anderson (New York: GSAPP
Souree Books, 2012).
ln the Maison Dom-ino this reality is exposed in a
degree zero of architectural form: the load-bearing struc-
ture. Here the tabula rasa of industrial production finally
conquered domestic space, de facto destroying any sense of
interiority and opening the house to any interpretation.
From the perspective of the social and politicaI emancipa-
tion of workers, Maison Dom-ino showed both the promise
and the threat of new building techniques. The Dom-ino
model was an unprecedented flexible building system
capable of producing unforeseen spatial arrangements for
its inhabitants, but as the Dom-ino model proliferated, that
flexibility and adaptation became an apparatus of social and
politicaI controI. Le Corbusier's goal for the Dom-ino system
was to link the design of the housing unit with the develop-
ment of the city as a whole. This concept was unprecedented.
lf city planning manuaIs such as Camillo Sitte's City Planning
According to Arti.rtic Principle.r, or Reinhard Baumeister's Town
Exten.rion.r conceived the design of cities as a composition of
urban blocks, squares, streets, and monuments, Le Corbusier
was the first to conceive of city making as departing from
the basic housing unit. This principIe was later theorized by
Ludwig Hilberseimer in his book Gro.rz.rtadtarchitek.tur,
where he wrote that the design of cities must address the
two extreme poles of urban development: the individual cell
and the overall urban circulation system.
9
ln Le Corbusier's
119 Log27
10. See Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria S.
Giudici, platon Issaias, "From Dom-ino to
Polikaloikia," DomUI 962 ( Oclober 2012).
model the link between the single domestic unit and the
totality of the city is ma de even stronger by the way in
which the Dom-ino model was to be produced. While the
steel form needed for the concrete was to be prefabricated,
the concrete itself would be poured in SitlL This construction
method combined the logic of industrial mass production
and unskilled labor to accomplish these simple operations.
The radically simple architecture of the Dom-ino model
was thus not only the result of the logic of the open plan,
but also reflected the subjectivity of its builder-inhabitants,
who are forced to build by "starting from scratch" with
few means and readymade techniques.
While Le Corbusier failed to put the Dom-ino model
int'l. ~ ~ c t i c e its implicit logic is today ubiquitous in housing
construction systems that combine the formal procedures
of steel-renforced concrete and the "informality" of
do-it-yourself building practices. For this reason, despite
the tabula rasa effect that destroyed the 19th-century
domestic interior so hated by Benjamin, the Dom-ino model
established a new idea of private property that is no longer
represented by the "traces" left by the inhabitants' abun-
dance of furniture and interior decoration so typical of the
19th-century bourgeois house. ln the Dom-ino model
private property is represented by the possibility of self-
construction, which automatically makes the inhabitant
the owner of her/his house. As history has shown, this
model has often been applied to tame and control subjects
by allowing them to build their homes in the cheapest way
possible, thus turning them into small entrepreneurs of
their respective households.
10
Here again the Dom-ino
model was, at the time of its conception, both a promise
and a threat. lts promise of a new beginning for an emanci-
pated form of life was threatened by the possibility of
turning the construction of the basic frame itself into a
vehicle for what Benjamin feared the most: the enduring
logic of private property, which was embedded in the very
constructive logic of the Dom-ino mode!. The Dom-ino is
thus the most radical example of how, from the very
beginning of modern architecture, the design of the city
was proposed from within the micropolitics of the individ-
ual unit.
For this reason it is interesting to counter Le Corbusier's
Dom-ino with another radical architectural model: Hannes
Meyer's Co-op Zimmer. Like the Dom-ino model, the
Co-op Zimmer was also proposed as an ide a of the city
120 Log27
11. On lhe Co-Op Zimmer, see Hilde
Heynen, "Leaving Traces: Anonymiry
in the Modern House," in Penny Sparke,
Anne Massey, Trevor Keeble, and Brendan
Martin, eds. , Designing the Modern Interior:
From the YictorianI to Tod4Y ( Oxford: Berg,
2009), m.
developed from its most basic component: the roomY Co-op
Zimmer is made by two blank walls and a nondescript floor.
This architectural framework emphasizes the emptiness of
the room and gives importance to the very few interior
objects. Whereas the emptiness of the Dom-ino suggested
further development, Co-op Zimmer, with its spartan
furnishings, suggests a limit to development precisely
because the presence of the few interior objects is enough.
Unlike Maison Dom-ino, in the Co-op Zimmer the tabula
rasa is not meant to be occupied by further architecture,
furniture, or objects. Rather than instigate a strategy of
property, the Co-op Zimmer suggests a way of life beyond
property. Clearly visible inside the room is a gramophone,
its curvy shape in stark contrast with the blankness of the
room, and a case of jars containing unidentiflable sub-
stances. These "superfluous" objects, even more than the
bed and the folded chair hanging on the wall, evoke a sense
of ephemeral inhabitation driven not only by necessity but
also by choice. The incongruous presence of the gramo-
phone suggests that, contrary to the basic architecture of
Maison Dom-ino, where everything is dictated by the logic
of bare life, the minimal dwelling of the Co-op Zimmer is
not only driven by necessity, but is also the outcome of a
deliberate form of life chosen by the inhabitant. This in turn
questions the very principIe of contemporary forms of life:
the ide a of the house as private property. ln the Co-op
Zimmer the "enduring obligations" that the inhabitants of
the modern metropolis owe to the destructive character of
capital, and which comprise the inhabitants' precarious life,
are turned into a form of living liberated from the oppres-
sive forces of ownership, property, and objects. Thus the
Co-op Zimmer seems to fully accomplish the mandate of
the destructive character. As Benjamin wrote, "The destruc-
tive character knows only one watchword: make room.
And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air
and open space is stronger than any hatred."
Meyer proposed the Co-op Zimmer as a solution for
an increasingly mobile population. At the time of his project,
a large part of the population in big cities like Berlin was
frequently forced to change homes because of the extreme
precarity of the economic situation. Meyer, like Benjamin
would in the 1930s, forced himself to see in this new condi-
tion the possibility for a form of life uprooted from the
sense of possession represented by the domestic interior.
The latter is reduced to an empty space, which makes clear
121 Log27
12. Benjamin, "Moscow," in Se/ected
Writillgr, ro/ume 2, part 1,1927-1910, 22-46.
that permanent occupation is impossible. Meyer's design
seems to address the sarne living conditions that Benjamin
recorded with sober sympathy during his visit to Moscow in
1926. Contrary to the petty bourgeois house and the "com-
pleteness" it manifested with items such as pictures that
cover walIs, cushions on the sofa, and ornaments filIing the
mantelpiece, the houses in Moscow were made up of bare
rooms sparsely furnished. "Weekly the furniture in the
bare rooms is rearrangedj this is the only luxury indulged
in with them, and at the sarne time a radical means of
expelIing 'coziness' - along with the melancholy with
which it is paid for - from the house. People can bear to
exist in it because they are estranged from it by their way of
life.)?heir dwelIing place is the office, the club, the street.,,12
Once the private room is reduced to a minimum, people can
fulIy engag in colIective life. The destructive character that
originated in the sense of precarity and impermanence of
places like Berlin and Moscow in the 1920s becomes the
possibility of constantly starting anew, a form of life that
sees life itself (and not architecture) as a constant reinven-
tion, a perennialIy unfinished projecto Arguably, while the
potential inhabitant of the Dom-ino house may be the
working class turned small-owner-entrepreneur of his own
household, the inhabitant of the Co-op Zimmer is the
city-dwelIer turned ascetic. ln the Co-op Zimmer there is
no need for further development, and the inhabitant can
focus on her/ his ars vivendi, which is the very object of
ascetic practices.
l.
As in the case of the destructive character, the tabula rasa
effect of both Maison Dom-ino and the Co-op Zimmer is
first produced by conditions that are far beyond the decision
of the author (the architect or the inhabitant). These proj-
ects make clear that the destruction of bourgeois interiority
and the rise of the bare forms of modern architecture were
due to the rise of capital and its new forms of production.
As Benjamin wrote in "The Author as Producer," the author
can only decide his/ her position within the forces of pro-
duction. And yet, as in Benjamin's case, capital's destructive
character is, in these two projects, ma de manifest with an
unprecedented intensity that itself becomes liberating. ln
these two projects architecture is liberated by design, by the
architect's pretension to shape everything according to his
creative genius. It is not difficult to see how the two projects
122 Log27
H. Benj amin, "Experience and Poverty," in
Selected Writillgr, ro/ume 2, part 2,731-36.
14. Ibid., 732.
embody the ethical project Benjamin developed. ln both Le
Corbusier's Maison Dom-ino and Meyer's Co-op Zimmer,
the architects are not filIing the emptiness they have cre-
ated with another kind of interior, another style, another
interpretation of space. These two projects are simply empo
pace whose contents wilI exist only in a state of constant
uncertainty, always about to disappear, to be removed, to be
thrown away. And yet, while the Dom- ino aims to root the
subject in the conditions of home ownership, Meyer's room
suggests the opposite scenario: here human subjectivity is
finalIy liberated from the comfort of interiority and can
shape itself according to a deliberate form of life no longer
mediated by designo
But who is the subject of this tabula rasa, who is the in-
habitant of this perennialIy empty space? perhaps the answer
to this question is offered by the text that must be read as
pendant to "The Destructive Character": "Experience and
poverty."ll Here Benjamin focuses on the ethos of modernity
in which human experience itself is no longer transmissible
within the epic narratives of the pasto For Benjamin, poverty
of experience does not imply personal poverty, or even an
ascetic restraint from the abundance of things and ideas
that a capitalistic society produces. On the contrary,
poverty of experience is precisely the effect of this abun-
dance. Inundated by alI sorts of information, stories, and
beliefs "the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been
spread among people, or rather has swamped them en-
tirely" as Benjamin put it - we can no longer trust the
depth and richness of human experience. Living in a
context of constant cognitive stimulation, what we experi-
ence is no longer effectively communicable.
If in the past lived experience was transmissible through
the "long-winded eloquence" of proverbs and charismatic
narratives, the impact of modernity on the soldiers who
survived War World I made communicable experience
impossible. For Benjamin the new poverty of human experi-
ence produced a new subjectivity, which he defined as barba-
rism. Benjamin celebrated the new barbarians, because
within the tabula rasa of their impoverished experience they
could find the possibility "to make a new start j to make a little
go a long wayj to begin with little and build up further.,,14 It is
interesting to note that Benjamin associates the new barbar-
ians with constructors who, with very few means - a crude
statement or simple observation, like Descartes's icastic
statement, "I think, therefore Iam" - are able to build a new
123
Log27
15. See Riccardo Di Segni, "I testi: Tor
e Talmud," in Uana Bahbout, Dario
Gentili, and Tamara Tagliacozzo, eds. , II
MeuianUmo Ebraico ( Florence: Giuntina,
2009), 9- 16.
state of things. And indeed, among artists and writers, new
barbarians who assume the "positive energy" of tabula
rasa, there are also architects like Adolf Loos. According to
Benjamin, Loos's opposition to the nostalgic longing for past
styles was the only approach that would turn the negative
energies of an impoverished world into a positive "construc-
tive energy." Here it is interesting to note how Benjamin,
facing the reality of impoverished experience, takes the
same position on the apocalyptic energy of the destructive
character. Impoverished experience is d;:-e outcome of the
most "horrific" forces at stake in modern society at the
beginning of the 20th century. Benjamin makes every effort
to avoid any idealization of them. Moreover, he makes clear
that ~ a t has been lost - the art of experience - was
something great, something that ennobled human nature.
And yet it is precisely the decision to seize upon the poverty
of experience as a tabula rasa that transforms its negativity
into a possibility, the possibility to create a sudden rupture
through which a new condition can be established.
ln the appropriation and reorientation of the cata-
strophic impact of the destructive character and impover-
ished experience, one can see Benjamin's understanding
of the messianic within class politics. At the beginning
of the 1930s, especialIy after his encounter with Brecht,
Benjamin was very oriented toward materialism, and both
"Experience and Poverty" and "The Author as Producer"
seem clearly to point in this direction. Yet it was precisely
at this point that Benjamin's politicaI theology - his long-
ing for a sudden and messianic redemption - seemed
to intensify in his work, until the climax of the "Theses
on History." Unlike in Christianity, in the Judaic tradition
redemption means the advent of social and politicaI justice,
like the liberation of the people of Israel from their foreign
oppressor. This concept refers specificalIy to the liberation
of Jews from their slavery under Egyptian rule, and in
this context the messiah is someone sent by God to liberate
the people of Israe1.
1S
ln hard times, the figure of the
messiah and the concept of redemption are conceived
as the sudden overthrow of the social and politicaI status
quo. Since the 1920s Gershom Scholem had maintained
a strong separation between the Zionist project of libera-
tion put forward by the people of Israel and the religious
dimension of messianic salvation, and Benjamin linked the
latter to his historical materialist approach. The destructive
character too can be seen as precisely the moment in which
124 Log27
a catastrophic event corresponds to the possibility of
salvation.
This movement from catastrophe to salvation is also
evident in the last part of "Experience and Poverty," where
Benjamin makes clear that it is precisely the loss of human-
ity that represents a possibility for humanity' s redemption.
Yet Benjamin situated this movement of loss and salvation
not as a general redemption of humankind but as materialist
politics for the oppressed class. The idea of a sudden ending
of the status quo evoked by messianic salvation was thought
by Benjamin to be instrumental to the oppressed class,
because such a sudden stoppage was a fundamental critique
of capital's deus ex machina: the idea of history as linear
time, as progress toward the better. Benjamin knew the
story about the Communards, who, when they took Paris
in 1871, first shot out the clocks. This gesture made clear
that the first enemy of those oppressed by capital is the idea
of historical time as a linear development. Through theol-
ogy, Benjamin entered the very materialist core of capital-
istic oppression, that is, the unconditional belief that we
are destined to be part of the unstoppable development of
our means of production - technology, science, and alI the
forms of social and politicaI injustice that the development
of our productive (and reproductive) apparatus has histori-
calIy always triggered.
4 .
Here lies the decisive point on the theology of tabula rasa
and its relationship to the activist impetus in architecture
that is resurfacing in our own historical time. The activist
and participatory practices that are so popular today are the
latest iteration of a reformist syndrome whose pathology is
to preserve social and politicaI conditions as they are. For ex-
ample, much of the design rhetoric on sustainability is based
on the dilemma between survival or extinction. Confronted
with such a dilemma, which focuses on the bare state of the
nature of humanity, the culture of architecture is forcefully
invited to do something, to be responsible, to find a solution.
ln other words, the rhetoric of sustainability eliminates a
priori any possibility of a negative response. Within such
rhetoric we are condemned to optimismo
This positive attitude often coincides with the a priori
acceptance of the given conditions that, as we have seen,
force us "to do more with less," to rely on the possibility
of our adaptation to any given condition in order to accept
125
Log27
any condition. The history of urbanism and architecture
has taught us that very often the idea of a better world is a
deceptive way to preserve the same world in which we live.
This condition was once embodied in the top-down "gen-
erosity" of the welfare state, which granted its citizens the
right to housing and the right to free education. This gener-
osity was triggered by the rebellious stance of the working
class toward capitalismo The more the workers threatened
capital, the more capital - through the state - was forced
to grant workers welfare to integrate thm with its social
bonds. Such a dialectical process suggests that the conflicting
nature of an organized working class that threatened capital
was the source of capital's "generosity" toward the whole
of Once the working class no longer represented a
as has happened in the last forty years of the neolib-
eral economy, capital would dismiss its social democratic
tendency. lronically, the rise of activism and participation
complements the dismissal of the top-down welfare state.
The self-help, adhoc approach promoted by architect-
activists is perfectly complementary to the ide a that citizens
are no longer guaranteed the basic infrastructure for living.
Aestheticizing the self-help living conditions of poor people
squatting in buildings becomes an attractive option when
there is no social housing. And yet even more problematic
is that participatory practices attempt to compensate for this
situation with strategies that see our increasingly precarious
life as something normal, even creative. What these practices
seem to prefigure is an ethos in which a forceful normal-
ity is restored and, to use Benjamin's words "exception has
become the rule."
The ethical project advanced by Walter Benjamin in the
essays discussed here puts forward a radically alternative
position. The theology of tabula rasa implies that we are no
!onger expected to do something; rather, we should make
room, we should create the space for something else to hap-
This act of making space (rather than creating some-
thing) requires the gesture of stoppage and sta!:ting
jrom scratch. The energy for such a gesture will come Eot
from the invocation of some metaphysical void, but from
the very sense of vacancy that inhabits our postrecession
urban landscape.lnstead of solving this vacancy, we need
to invent a new architecturallanguage that, in the sarne
powerful way as Meyer's Co-op Zimmer, will give radical
form to this vacancy without filling i.!: Such an architectural
I nguage will have as its main goal not the restoration of
126 Log27
PIER VITTORIO AURELI IS AN
ARCHITECT ANO EOUCATOR. HE
TEACHES AT THE ARCHITECTURAL
ASSOCIATION ANO WORKS WITH
HIS PRACTICE DOGMA.
good values, nor will it give to our increasingly precarious
city a pleasant image. Rather, this language will hold the
Eomise of salvation and redemption, as it is already latently
embedded in a condition where we really have nothing to -
lose, because surely we will1?.0ssess nothing: Only then will
the destructive character no longer be the force to which we
endure our deepest obligations, but rather the possibility of
starting anew, starting something truly different.
127