11

Visual Vertigo, Phantasmagoric Physiognomies: Joseph Roth and

Walter Benjamin on the Visual Experience of Architecture
Stefan Koller

They kept their huts. Some wrote their names above it by three years: that of Walter Benjamin’s The
their doors and began trading in soap, shoe laces, Arcades Project, begun in Parisian exile in 1933 and
onions, leather. They returned from the wild and tragic published posthumously.3 Both texts begin life in
expanses of fortune hunters to the sad modesty of the snippet and end up as albums (where a textual
small scale shopkeepers. In the meantime their huts, ‘album’ denotes the contingent, and partly arbitrary,
originally built for the occupancy of a mere handful of termination point of an author’s own re-arrange-
months, remained in place for many a year, and stabi- ment of extant textual fragments, much like a photo
lised their transitory redundancy into a characteristic album).4 Both fasten on a shared vocabulary: ‘We
local couleur. – The huts remind one of exhibited stills find early contributions to the physiognomy of the
in film studios, of primitive illustrations on book covers crowd in Engels and Poe. The crowd is the veil
to Californian tales, of hallucinations. It appears to through which the flâneur sees the customary city as
me (who knows several large districts of industry) phantasmagoria.’5 The flâneur’s phantasmagorias,
that nowhere else do sober businesses bear such Benjamin adds, are of space, not time – a pun on the
phantasmagoric physiognomies. Here, capitalism word Raum, which can mean both space and room,
exuberates into expressionism. (Roth, 1930) 1 more particularly an interior room inside a house.6
His Arcades Project, we will see, associates such
This origin myth of (at the time) new towns in Polish interiority with boundless phantasmagoria – and will
Galicia reaches us from the pen of one Joseph associate both with our perceptual experience of
Roth. Better known for his later novels, above all the modern city, at once ‘customary’ and estranged.
the 1932 Radetzky March, Roth sustained himself Both texts, finally, attempt a coming to terms, visu-
in the 1920s by regular dispatches from the Austrian ally and verbally, with new urbanisms – an attempt
ex-realm’s frontiers. Presented in the format of that shall occupy me across most of what follows.
newspaper reports published in the Frankfurter For perception, and its representation in text, is a
Zeitung (the above quote being an excerpt), Roth’s focal point of Benjamin’s interest in the urban fabric
journalistic texts dispatched from Paris to Brody of nineteenth century Paris – a city he beheld with
soon celebrated a life of their own, reappearing in the the feverish, estranged sensitivity Heinrich Heine
author’s 1930 collection Panoptikum: Gestalten und brought to London a century earlier.
Kulissen (Panopticon: figures and stage props). 2

What helps Benjamin and Roth ‘come to terms’

The visuality of Roth’s miniature prose in with the modern city is accomplished not simply via
Panopticon – that of the travelling onlooker, moving an accidentally shared language, or a shared set
by train, and writing home – may help put into of observations such as the similarity of modern
clearer relief a much larger text, separated from department stores to greenhouses.7 Rather, and not
18

Constellation of Awakening: Benjamin and Architecture | Spring / Summer 2016 | 11–26

 12

coincidentally, they operate on shared key concepts, short, impressionistic travel report or Reportage,
and view the urban fabric through the lenses of made famous by Heine in the German feuilletons
expressionism, physiognomy, and phantasmagoria. a century earlier (we return to Heine below). For
It is these concepts my paper aims to clarify above that form of conjuring up an image would now suffer
all. As this requires close attention to the authors from the growing competition by regular (some-
who (re)introduced these concepts to architecture, times weekly) newsreels in an increasing number
and as I have to concentrate my efforts on those of cinemas with footage from around the world, with
of whom Benjamin is the benefactor rather than such glorious titles as Weltschau (a survey or pano-
the interlocutor, my own text is less an analysis of rama of the entire world). Roth heavily critiqued the
Benjamin’s than an opening towards its re-reading. visual overload of (or clumsy handling of ‘the uncon-
It proposes to view The Arcades Project both as a scious’ in) cinema at the hands of inept film makers,
rather strange optical corrective to more customary and lamented the visual fatigue suffered in cinemas’
(say, historians’) forms of writing employed to bring overly decorated and over-commercialised interiors
yesteryear’s architecture into clearer focus – and as (points that will play a heavy role in The Arcades
less of a departure from modernist (historical) writing Project, as we shall see).9 Nonetheless, Roth
on architecture, from Hildebrand to Ozenfant, than perfectly understood how the moving image, with
that text’s own physiognomy would have us believe. its spatiotemporal proximity to worlds both near
and far, would soon replace, be the ‘triumphant
Panopticon competitor’ over, journalistic writing such as his
‘Panopticon’: Steering wonderfully clear of own. (A point with considerable contemporary reso-
Benthamite reverberations, the title of Roth’s book nance, provided we instantiate ‘moving image’ not
seems to indicate the width and fleeting nature of the by cinema but internet.)
imagery reported and conjured by his texts, imagery
from places far and near to the German speaking Observe how, in our opening quote, Roth likens
peoples in Central Europe. But the title also shows, the picturesque charm of the transitory huts to
at times, the phenomena reported, as preoccupied what one can find on book covers to Californian
with splendid things seen in kaleidoscopic fashion, stories – or, he adds, in hallucinations. The conti-
throwing new light on the very phenomenon of nuity of Roth’s analogies from conventional text
visual experience itself. Thus, one text collected based media to vertigo is suggestive of the means
in Panopticon, entitled ‘Remarks on Sound Film’, by which Roth intends to solve the challenge to
ponders the addition of sound to hitherto silent film. textual media. The solution’s groping for vertigo,
Roth remarks on the strange three-dimensionality of which more below, strikes at the heart of much
and nearness (to the viewer) of recorded spoken narrative paucity Roth detected in contemporary
sound, in voice and noise, compared to the remote film making. He writes of one such director (the
flatness of the projected image – an image that, Roth other target of his scorn being Fritz Lang),
adds, would now need its own technological innova-
tion to bring it back to life, or at least, to a vividness In an age without cinema, a Richard Oswald would
equal to that of sound. For sonority, or voice, is now have become a connoisseur of images, a collector,
‘the triumphant competitor of the image.’8 constructor of painting galleries, a stage prop deco-
rator with artistic pretensions. In the eye of this
It is nearly impossible to not extend Roth’s diag- beholder we find the happenings (Geschehen) of the
nosis to the very medium he uses to report it – the world, not its soul.10
 13

The challenge from the (auditorially enhanced) supplement (exegetically, as it were), the built
moving image brings up the question of how to edifice, specifically the Gothic cathedral.12 For the
amplify, at a technological (mechanic, corporeal) challenge now is to measure architecture itself in
level, the conjuring power of the text, to make it the terms of its imaginary (imaginative and image-
equal of cinematic impression, just as the silent film conjuring) power, provided we indulge (momentarily
image had to reinvent itself to be(come) the equal of at least) the idea to see it as competitor, and not just
recorded sonority. The key lies in expression (even as supplement, to other forms of image, such as
expressionism), not impression, if the opening text, sound, and projected image. Benjamin’s key
passage is to be believed – that is, not in recording idea here, it seems, is to rethink architecture in ways
someone else’s experience (Erfahrung), namely not too dissimilar to how his text rethinks textuality.
the author’s, but in invigorating a lived experience And the guiding idea for both, isolated in Benjamin’s
(Erlebnis) in the reader. Only thus can we avoid writings but anticipated by Roth in his 1920s writ-
the dullness of sheer happenings(Geschehen) and ings, is that of ‘physiognomy’: to interpret buildings,
their duller yet repetition, or re-enactment, on page as it were, in terms of surfaces, façades in terms
or screen. And this brings us to Benjamin in three of faces (the two are etymologically connected for
regards. a reason), and faces in terms of character – per-
sona, the ‘sounding through’ of a presence behind,

First, contemporary ‘poverty of experience’, and traversing across the physical boundaries of,
Benjamin tells us, designates less a yearning for a mask. At one remove, the idea is to give the text
new experiences (Erfahrung) than a liberation from its own (distinctive, unmistakable) physiognomy,
(our constantly having to make) them.11 Secondly, insofar as an (increasingly fragmented) autho-
Benjamin’s Arcades Project is a project in rein- rial voice can use text as a mask for the author’s
venting the composition of text to endow it with own persona.13 Whether this contest, or conten-
new powers of the imagination – of imagination tion, between architecture and text ends in triumph
as, quite literally, the conjuring up (the expressing for either one (and if so, in what kind of triumph)
and not just impressing) of images from else- remains to be seen.
where, ou-topos, to relate us to remote places,
geographically, historically, intellectually. Thirdly, Physiognomy
the challenge of text to become the equal of the The notion of physiognomy in- and outside archi-
moving image – perhaps by becoming in moments tecture designates a project with considerable
itself a moving image – brings us from Roth’s diag- prehistory and problems. So when Benjamin, and
nostic worry, of one medium being the triumphant his main source on the subject, Sigfried Giedion, tap
competitor over another, directly to architecture into that notion so as to confront and render legible
quite generally, and to Benjamin’s engagement with the buildings of the nineteenth century, they ipso
it more specifically, as something to be captured in facto inherit (and have to come up with responses
his own text. to) those problems. More particularly, their chal-
lenge is to see nineteenth century buildings in terms
In particular, we are brought to an overused of their faciality and persona, a challenge that is
quotation from another arch-Parisian text discussed twofold.
by Benjamin in The Arcades Project: Victor Hugo’s
1831 Notre-Dame de Paris, and its worry that For one, the buildings to be examined – here
the printed book would supplant, and not simply Benjamin squarely rests on Giedion – are no longer
 14

the aesthetically elite projects of Beaux Arts archi- out, wreaks havoc with anything but the most
tects, but factory halls (already explored for their simplistic of architecture, since we must understand
architectural potential by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in its elements and surfaces as already animated.
1826), train stations, construction bridges, railways, Something as elementary as the rounded as
and more. So the object of study shifts, as does opposed to pointed arch,17 he says,
the medium by which we study it. The photograph
replaces the craftsman’s master plan (both beautiful permits a much freer application [...] and a more mani-
and precise), and replaces the rendering in water- fold characterization of the building; the minutest of
colours, with its perspective accentuating the scenic deviations of forms and relations, as is the case in
quality of the aesthetic object. But the change of the formation of the human face, suffice to give the
(documentary) medium from one to another runs building a wholly different demeanour. By the rounded
deeper than this: the photograph serves Giedion arch [...] architectural expression can nearly be
as his argument. He says from the beginning how elevated to physiognomic freedom.18
the shown photos serve as proxy for, not simply
quotations of text, but the very ‘argument’ such Semper’s use of ‘freedom’ (juxtaposed to a deli-
quotations would (co-)compose in a conventional cate ‘nearly’) is elusive. His phrasing leaves it open
monograph – thus Giedion’s (in)famous ‘Preface whether architectural expression attains freedom
to the Hurried Reader’ in his 1928 book Bauen in from physiognomic constraints – or rather attains
Frankfreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton a particularly liberated physiognomy. (And in
(Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in either case, what does architecture thereby gain?)
Ferro-Concrete).14 This, too, closes the gap from Equally intriguing is Semper’s explicit connection
Giedion to Benjamin, as it explains the physiognomy of physiognomy to character(isation) – a connec-
that the latter’s text would assume. It is a physiog- tion that will presently occupy us considerably. As
nomy at least partly rooted in contemporary writing to his passage’s more immediate concern, I shall
on architecture, most importantly that of Ozenfant not here dive into the vast and rich literature on
(whom Benjamin ostensibly read, and quotes from) animated architecture, and refer, in place of much
and Jeanneret in their 1920s papers in L’Esprit else, to Alina Payne’s study on the moving wall,
nouveau, writing likewise driven in its argumentation as made famous in Jakob Burckhardt’s and Alois
by photographs of buildings.15 Moreover, some of Riegl’s inquiries of Baroque architecture.19 The
these photographs were deliberately tampered with reason to not dive into this literature is the stylistic
to better complement the authors’ rhetorical goals irrelevance of, and remoteness from, its objects of
in the text, and doubly so in the album that would study to those of Benjamin’s and Giedion’s studies.
literally incorporate these papers in the manner The challenge is to exploit, and redeploy, this way
that Benjamin would later ‘incorporate’ Giedion: Le of decoding animated visuality in objects very
Corbusier’s Vers une architecture.16 remote from Baroque palaces and museums, or
even Gothic cathedrals, and bring it to the appar-
Secondly, the project to bring physiognomy to ently sterile, solid, resting, and unmoved structure
the study of buildings – their faces, façades, and of iron construction. Therein lies the real challenge
demeanour – has faced a stock objection since at for Giedion, and consequently for Benjamin in his
least the mid nineteenth century. (Thus the second difficult ‘Chapter F’ on iron construction.
challenge.) Physiognomy itself is (typically taken
to connote) a study of the face arrested in motion. How to bring physiognomy, a method of deci-
This, architect and theorist Gottfried Semper points phering arrested features, to the apparently
 15

arrested features of modern construction? Our clue that give the origin of those expressions, bringing into
comes from Roth. Anticipating his own self-imposed view the direct relation between expression and char-
exile to Paris in the 1930s, he dedicates a section acter, [one should call it] theoretical physiognomics.21
in his 1927 book The Wandering Jews to the (espe-
cially Eastern European) Jewish communities and The inclusion of a distinctly athletic personality might
exiles in the city, and writes: ‘they have it easy in seem initially odd. Benjamin mentions the distinctly
Paris. Their physiognomy does not give them away. ‘bodily physiognomy’, describing advocacy lawyers’
Their lively (lebhaft) natures do not stand out. Their ‘muscular emphasis in their rhetoric’.22 Here, ‘bodily’
humour meets that of the French half way.’ 20
The does not attach to ‘physiognomy’ as a pleonasm but
genius of Roth’s exposition here is that the last two qualifies it as a kind.
sentences are meant as a gloss, and not an expan-
sion, on the phrase ‘their physiognomy’. That is, we As for Lavater, his entire undertaking (described
are so used to think of physiognomy as a study of above) is premised primarily on
arrested facial features alone, of the curvature of
noses and (minute alterations in the) pigmentation what reason tells us, sc. that each thing in the world
of the skin, that we forget that the term, as originally has an outward and inner side to it, which stand in an
introduced, included things such as people’s lively exact relation to each other[,] so that each thing – for
natures and their distinct senses of humour. The this reason, as it is what it is, and not some other
founder of physiognomy, Johann Caspar Lavater, thing – has something to it, wherein we can discern
explains this in 1772 as follows: what distinctness sets it apart from all other things.23

Physiognomics is the science of recognizing men’s The last line explains why Roth sees fit to say
character (not the accidentia), in the widest sense that, in Paris at least, the physiognomy of Eastern
of that term, from their exterior. Physiognomy in Jews – with all that entails – does not have them
this widest sense would accordingly designate all stand out as much. They are not singled out for
outwardly recognizable features of the human body attention, a point that held immense cultural and
and the motions of the same, insofar as these permit political significance for Roth who, first exiled to
recognition of human character. Given how many Paris, would later and prematurely die in the city, a
diverse [kinds of] characters one man can have simul- year before its fall to the Nazis.
taneously, that is, given how we can study man from
so many points of view, then one and the same man In terms of method, the ‘exact relation’ Lavater
has thus many kinds of physiognomies. Accordingly, presupposes is (what he later calls) a ‘perfect
physiognomics comprehends all characters of a man congruency (or correspondence) between man’s
which surmount to his complete total character, and soul and his body’. Due to that relation, the various
studies the physiological, temperamental, medical, inner states of men, the variety of their souls, corre-
physical, intellectual, moral, habitual, athletic, social or spond to and correlate with an equinumerous variety
interpersonal character, and many more. The actual of bodies and outward appearances.24 Lavater
(simple or composite) expression of each of these himself was not slow to apply this to a study and
characters in the human body, or in man’s exterior as systematisation of the arts, and of motifs in art. And
such, is the concern of physiognomics. Insofar as it Hegel’s efforts to discredit the idea (and its use in
seeks to recognise character from its corresponding art history) notwithstanding, by the 1880s Heinrich
expression, one should call it empirical physiogno- Wölfflin  –  Giedion’s mentor  –  uses Lavater to
mics; and insofar as it concerns itself with the causes develop the foundations for a theory of architectural
 16

styles. Daniela Bohde, who has recently written a the term’s origin in Cicero’s work on rhetoric, the
monograph on (inter alia) the connection of Wölfflin
to Lavater, writes, ‘if the relation between built ethical branch of decorum also affected architecture,
corpus and human bodies was the main theme in for [Cicero’s] injunctions to seemly social behaviour
Wölfflin’s early writings, then he later focused on were transferable to a theory of representation of
the visual perception of art and architecture.’ This
25
social structures through built form. [...] At its origin,
bears repeating: physiognomy is first and foremost the Greek term prepon (Latin decorum) qualified the
a project about, as opposed to a project enlisting, relationship between appearance and the carrier of
the visual perception of architecture, specifically of that appearance – that is, between that which is visible
architectural body. But what separates this project and meet’s the viewer’s eye and inner being.29
from other inquiries into architecture visuality? The
major concern, ever since Lavater, is the correlation So the fixation of architectural physiognomy on
of (visual) characteristics with character, and we the human body was fatal in two regards: first, it
saw the same in Semper. Wölfflin’s task now was interpreted the outward features in a metaphorical
to isolate what in Schinkel’s writings had remained rather than literal manner (as being man-like), and
intractable: the ascription of character to buildings. 26
secondly, it restricted the character expressed by
That ascription had figured just as centrally, and buildings’ overt features to mental states of humans,
mystifyingly, in French architecture theory (espe- such as grief or elation. In short, it replaced the full
cially Boffrand, Blondel, Boulleé, and Viollet-le-Duc) reach of a budding discipline with the limited interest
and had, as in Wölfflin, formed part of a larger of a single idea.30
project – that of a developing a physiognomy of
architectural styles.27 But the reason this was a dead corner was not
simply the restriction of its point of reference (and
The problem, for all of these architects and comparison) to a single body, moreover a non-
certainly for Wölfflin, was an unhelpful fixation on architectural one (the human adult). Much worse,
the physiognomy of the human body and on human it understood that one body, and consequently
bodily proprioception – to decode, via these, our the buildings it studied, in the most reductionist,
visual experience of architecture. This restricted a physicalist sense possible, and narrowed Lavater’s
potentially interesting inquiry, of a physiognomy of original project to what its author had rather
architecture, to the most superficial of anthropomor- disparagingly called anatomical physiognomics. A
phic observations and claims, as when to buildings contemporary reviewer of Bohde fails to see her
would be attributed, not a distinct character of their rehabilitation of physiognomy for what it is, and
own, but a character that could only be described instead takes her to task for confusing the notion
metaphorically, as the mood or physical bearing (which so obviously should be restricted to a study
of a human being.28 One of many trajectories shut of facial features alone) for a fully generalised sense
down here was the application of Lavater’s presup- of morphology.31 In actual fact, it is neither.
position, of a one-one correspondence between
inner character and its outward configuration, to The point of Wölfflin’s appropriation of Lavater
his long list of the varieties of character, especially is rather its very continuity with Semper’s attempts
to moral character. And that omission is surprising to port comparative morphology, familiar from the
given how, unlike the other arts, architecture had biological sciences, into architecture – and then drive
started its theoretical life in Vitruvius, specifically his such attempts towards a study of architectural char-
requirement that a building have decorum. Given acter, as per Semper’s own remarks earlier.32 For
 17

physiognomy (-ics, in Lavater’s parlance) operates quotes, with little enthusiasm, in The Arcades
on a more restricted set of shapes than morphology, Project.35 Our task, Benjamin signals, is to over-
but not because it by definition only deals with facial come this restricted individuation of buildings – of
features. Rather, it occupies itself with those, and built bodies whose character an architectural physi-
only those, features relevant to the study of char- ognomy needs to render intelligible – as closed
acter. A morphological study of Gothic cathedrals physical systems. To do this, he reverses the direc-
may legitimately focus on features they share with tion of the gaze: it is not our voluntary perception of
Romanesque structures: a physiognomic study buildings, technologically enhanced or not, but their
cannot. (When Roth subtitles Panopticon a study sensory overwhelming us, that reinstates a proper
of Gestalten, he has in mind shapes or features ontology of buildings, and in turn makes possible,
indicative of character. His work is thus one of phys- by furnishing rich enough data and ‘input’ for, a
iognomy rather than morphology.) As if to remind physiognomy of architecture.
his readers of this essentialist focus required for the
perceptual study of architectonic form and body, It is also here that the present paper departs most
Carl Boetticher selects, for his 1852 Die Tektonik sharply from Detlef Mertins’s work on Benjamin,
der Hellenen (Tectonics of the Hellenes), a motto entitled (in part) ‘Using Architecture as Optical
that is basically a variation on Lavater’s congruency Instrument’.36 Where I see Benjamin pursuing
thesis between body and soul: ‘The form of the body architecture as itself an optical corrective, Mertins
is the mirror of its very essence (Wesen) – pene- regards buildings as optical instruments controlled
trate one and you shall have unlocked the other.’ 33
by human subjects – in the manner one operates
Such ‘penetration’ largely depends on the viability of a telescope, with a static, controlled, and dead
one’s philosophy, not so much of form and essence, object at the other end of one’s lens. Buildings’
as of architectonic body disclosed in perception. own capacity for shock and vertigo (on which
Here, Giedion’s frustration in having to deal with the more shortly) is here suppressed. Buildings are
limitations of the physiognomic project in Wölfflin optical tools only, in Mertins, insofar as they furnish
is palpable. But it falls on Benjamin to actually us with platforms from which to view new urban
overcome them. To do so, like Roth before him, vistas (a point I return to below). Finally, it is ulti-
Benjamin reverses the central flaws of architec- mately not buildings, but their capture in new forms
tural physiognomy thus far, particularly Boetticher’s. of photography discussed by Benjamin,37 that for
First, the built environment becomes, not an exten- Mertins affords us an alternate and unsettling view
sion (or remote representation) of the human body, of reality.38 More importantly, photos help convey
but an autonomous entity capable of challenge and ‘the immediacy of lived experience’39 because they
threat to human sensitivity. Secondly, the body of reveal
the built is never just physical, anatomical, where
sterile geometric descriptions purport the tectonic the physiognomic aspects of visual worlds which dwell
structure of buildings. For Boetticher, a Greek in the smallest things, meaningful yet covert enough
temple is foremost a calibrated system of static to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which,
(horizontal and vertical) forces; the forces explain enlarged and capable of formulation, make the differ-
the static whole (in balance) which they compose, ence between technology and magic visible as a
analogous to how the position of a table top rela- thoroughly historical value.40
tive to the floor is explained by the length of the
legs that support it, and vice versa.34 This is also While Benjamin’s interest in photography (whether
Boetticher’s take on iron construction that Benjamin or not of architecture) is undoubtedly fascinating in
 18

its own right, its relevance to our stated goal – to isolates the phenomena, and still requires that we
unearth Benjamin’s peculiar (optical) take on the need to isolate the moving aspect of building itself,
urban fabric – is at best indirect. Let us therefore not of its tenants, the functions it houses, and so on.
return to our earlier challenge. And here, I think we can see Benjamin’s creative
genius – in bringing out (analogous to, if differently
How can we bring physiognomy to bear on the nuanced than Roth) the mobility of architecture, the
apparently arrested features of modern construc- vividness of the images it evokes, in more indirect
tion? For Roth, it meant to expand the term to all and elusive senses. To this, we turn next.
varieties of character, including moral character,
and a wide variety of character’s indicators (char- Vertigo
acteristics). Writing of novel urban venues to enable Traversing a city from a pedestrian angle, we can
women to exercise physically, Roth detects get immersed in representations, and we can deci-
pher these – from street signs, to objects displayed
a relation to modern dance: [the human body] renders in arcades – in utterly cinematic terms. The close
itself subservient to the laws of space [Raum], [its] mechanical connection of the visual impressions
movement becomes architecture and not only stays one gathers on a train ride, to the rapid progres-
[a mere concern for matters like] hygiene. [...] Such sion of film stills to make for an animated sequence,
venues are of immeasurable social and moral value. 41
is well documented, as is the potential of either to
produce vertigo in its onlookers:
Observe Roth’s ground- and category-breaking
claim: the dancers literally become architecture. One can imagine that a contemporary of Charles the
This can be read as a metaphorical re-description Great does not essentially differ in biological constitu-
of what the dancers do. Or, it can be read as a quite tion from a person today. But it is easily conceivable,
literal statement, requiring, as it does, an expanded that the environmental conditions of a metropolis – with
understanding of architecture, as something that its violent noise peaks, air pollution, hectic (com)
includes and not merely facilitates movement. This motions – would be deadly to him. Schivelbuch, in his
expansion re-opens the project of architecture’s book on the history of the Eisenbahn (iron railway),
physiognomy, and connects that project to archi- mentions how the first travellers by train regularly
tectural phenomena legitimately characterised as fell into deep sleep, since the rapidity of impressions
holding, in Roth’s phrase, ‘an immeasurable social created by the landscape exploded the pacing of visu-
and moral value’. ality (of episodes of seeing) they were used to. The
senses (the entire biological constitution of man) need
For Benjamin, too, physiognomy needs enrich- to come up with a response to changes in the social-
ment by attention to the very feature that initially historical world, so that man can live and remain
seems to threaten its prospect: it is thus married alive.43
with an interest in movement itself, so as to break
out of the restriction to the physically arrested Similar reports can be found in Heine’s 1827 travel
body. Hence, when Giedion and Benjamin study reports from London, with the important difference
architecture, they are always already interested that Heine does not single out the damaging impact
in movement, and places of movement, or of of metropolitan life on the senses, but on senti-
places facilitating movement or other ‘transitory mentality – that is, not on biological man, but on
purposes’ of others (of machines, such as trains, cultivated man:
and of peoples, across platforms).42 But that merely
 19

I’ve beheld the strangest things this world can reveal to the slumbers of a dreaming city, since it is the city
to an inquiring mind / I’ve seen them and remain at as much as ourselves that needs to be re-awakened
a loss / In my memory still lies this petrified forest of for a new dawn. The text, however, does not accom-
houses / And in its midst a stream of human faces with plish this immense task in opposition to the objects’
all their varied passions/ all their horrid haste of love, visual prowess, but in full complicity with them. After
of hunger, and of hate / [...] This barren seriousness all, only then can the two become competitors.
in all things, this colossal monotony /this mechanical
motion, this weariness of joy itself – / It chokes imagi- If vertigo of this type animates Benjamin’s text,
nation / and tears the heart asunder.44 how can it unlock (make vivid, re-endow with move-
ment) built objects with such vertigo? One way
‘Send a philosopher to London’, Heine concludes, architectonic objects provide visual vertigo is by
‘for all you hold dear, don’t ever send a poet’, having quite literally providing a platform from which one
no doubt in mind a philosopher with the cool ratio of can get unprecedented vistas. Thus one of the
Kant, as opposed to the delicate, immensely fragile most frequently discussed buildings in Benjamin’s
senses of a Hölderlin. The devastation of the urban chapter ‘F’, the Eiffel Tower,47 quickly acquired the
on human sensitivity is total for Heine, as it is for added function of two platforms from which to obtain
Schivelbuch’s travellers. In both cases, devasta- urban vistas from a vantage point of unprecedented
tion’s entry point is the senses. For they, particularly height.48 Its four steel cage ‘columns’ serve only one
vision, operate at both junctures – nature and purpose other than erecting the radio transmission
culture. For now, let us stay with the (quasi)biolog- point at its peak – they house interior staircases
ical restriction on vision, and see how to recuperate (and later, elevators) to move the would be subjects
vision’s intactness from the assault it suffers from to their vistas. Quite literally, then, architecture
new urbanism.45 serves as point of movement and mobility in two
senses: first, it transports people along a position
If we stick to the travellers falling into deep in space (vertically, in a tower, or horizontally, on a
sleep, then it is vertigo of this kind that, I think, bridge), and secondly, it provides sites of vista from
Benjamin’s inquiry is after. (It is certainly the metric which to behold the environs. Architecture here puts
by which Roth measures the disruptive potential into mise en scène its own contemplation and spec-
of urban visual phenomena. Berlin’s verbal-visu- tacle. A deeper, less literal, sense of architecture’s
ally agitated election posters cannot ‘interrupt the vertigo, however, lies elsewhere – on the inside of
cold, precise rhythm of this town’, as ‘only a very architecture.
suggestive image of strong suddenness penetrates
the retina of the type of man who only knows work Boundless interiority
and leisure.’) One loses one’s senses after having
46
If iron railways can overwhelm us to the point of
them overwhelmed rather than dulled; and one loses unconsciousness, of falling into deep sleep and
consciousness after having one’s mind too deeply uneasy dreams, the same holds for modern iron
perturbed. On writing then rests the urgent task of constructions more generally, once we pay more
recuperating one’s senses. The text, in particular, attention to the specific interiors of such buildings.
is there to re-orient our own sensuality, and to For here Benjamin’s preoccupation with the exteri-
understand the very objects that gave us distress, orization of built and artifactual interiors emerges,
overpowered us, became the competitors ‘trium- interiors like that of museums or suitcases (the felt
phant over’ our dormancy. It is here, of course, that lined etui).
Benjamin’s text explicitly connects us, his readers,
 20

The domestic interior moves outside. It is as though to the hallucinatory’.54 Given how interiors are not
the bourgeois were so sure of his prosperity that he merely ‘receptacles of things, but also the support
is careless of the façade, and can exclaim: My house, of affects’, some of them are perfectly suited to
no matter where you choose to cut into it, is façade. 49
furnish Benjamin with the consummate ‘theory of
phantasmagoria, enabling him to chart an inter-
The very continuity of interiority on a building’s pretation of complex relationships between object
exterior licenses Benjamin, and us, to read, as it and spectator.’55 Particularly in the arcades’ display
were, the exterior as a quasi-interior, as if ‘the inte- areas of luxurious commodities, those fetishes of
rior and exterior were reflecting each other.’50 This the worlds of fashion and design, human sensitivity
is all Benjamin’s analysis requires to appropriate encounters the fantastic, the exotic, the elusive, and
Lavater’s foundational principle for the project of the overwhelming. If this seems again a change of
physiognomy to get underway – the correlation, topic (we move from buildings to objects displayed
and congruence, of inner character with outward in buildings), we have to remember that boundless
appearance. Recall the importance of façade to interiorisation all but secures that the transition, not
the project of (architectural) physiognomy, given simply from outside to inside, but from building to
how it is the building’s face or exterior demeanour; displayed object, has been rendered seamless.
accordingly, the totalisation of interiority on the Just as Roth’s female dancers became architecture,
built exterior and its demeanour (the appearance Benjamin’s displayed commodities do not simply
of façade no matter where you cut or intersect a bestow their phenomenal, hallucinatory, qualities on
building) acquires a special significance. Benjamin their display areas, but rather share these qualities
himself locates ‘the physiognomy of the arcade’ in with built interiority. They, and it, are now one and
Baudelaire’s observation that he could have passed the same, are or have become architecture. Since
the arcade’s ‘enchanting haunt so often’ without iron construction’s totalising interiorisation has
having suspected crossing its entrance: bound- no corresponding element in Giedion’s analysis,
less interiority, like a vaulted maze with no exit.51 Benjamin is justly critical of his main source, and
He adds later, ‘The interest of the panorama is in writes,
seeing the true city – the city indoors. What stands
within the windowless house is the true. Moreover, Attempt to develop Giedion’s thesis. ‘In the nineteenth
the arcade, too, is a windowless house.’52 Despite century’, he writes, ‘construction plays the role of the
the ubiquity of glass panels, none of them function subconscious.’ Wouldn’t it be better to say, ‘the role of
as windows, that is, provide visual access to a world bodily processes’ around which ‘artistic’ architectures
outside the arcade. The exterior world is similarly gather, like dreams around the framework of physi-
shut out (visually) in the museum, which ‘appears ological processes?56
as an interior magnified on a giant scale’.53 You can
cut the house any way you want. You will always Benjamin rejects the idea of construction and archi-
find façade, but never – an outside. tecture, of unconscious and surface, as two neatly
delineated strata, such that either one of these
It is in the interior where the phenomenological could be teased out with comparable ease in the
qualities raised above – the visual vertigo, the hallu- analysis of an architecture historian’s like Giedion.57
cinatory and imaginative power of architecture, on Such an analysis would require no recourse to the
which its enigmatic physiognomy rests – emerge, metaphysical, the transcendental, the religious: it
and range in degrees of intensity ‘from the banal could dispense, in fact, with theology. Negate that,
 21

and Benjamin’s own orientation moves into clear improvement on his distinguished predecessors
focus. Since the two strata cannot be separated, (not to mention, successors) in architectural non-
and the exterior vertigo of the architectural mantle materialism will look considerably less impressive,
(whose inside and outside we can no longer sepa- however.
rate) disrupts us visually and spiritually, nothing less
than a spiritual, theological reading is required to The enigma and the cipher
bring it into focus, and ‘come to terms’ with it. Benjamin’s Arcades Project rests on the shoulders
of giants, certainly where its interest in architec-

Benjamin’s reorientation towards the spiritual ture is concerned. He quotes and, to the delight of
further explains the messianic habitus he brings posterity, subverts the likes of Boetticher, Kaufmann,
to his texts. For him, that habitus, the messianic and Giedion, and thereby brings to fruition the long
as such, must extend to the order of the profane, frustrated project of architecture’s own physiog-
that is, the order of things The Arcades Project nomy. At the same time, some stark omissions put
imbues with such significant mythology. It is, as a damper on the project’s originality. By jumping
Benjamin puts it in his 1929 Theological-Political from Boetticher’s essay in the 1840s directly to
Fragment, this order which actually explains (as Meyer’s 1907 monograph on iron, Benjamin falls
much as it is explained by) the messianic impulse, into the same trap as Giedion in overlooking the
and actually beckons the coming (the nearing, das intervening decades of discussion in Germany on
Nähern) of the messiah, and with it, redemption. For iron construction and its relation to architectonic
The Arcades Project, that beckoning is precisely form.62 Like Giedion, Benjamin omits any reference
grounded in material reality: ‘each epoch’, and to Adolf Hildebrand’s introduction of ‘Wirkungsform’,
with it the architecture of each epoch, ‘not merely of form as psychological effect, as a third element to
dreams the next but dreamingly pushes towards complement Boetticher’s limited dyad of core form
awakening.’ 58
The messiah’s task then becomes and art form.63 Presenting himself as the first thinker
to quicken that ‘nearing’, and concomitantly his to imbue Boetticher’s dyad with the psychology of
own. For him, mythological reality is thus intimately the unconscious, Benjamin is able to re-invent the
linked to material reality, of which architecture and wheel, and dress it in the verbal garb of unprece-
fashion furnish the collective unconscious – a reality dented mystery – that of secular mythology. 64
that historic materialism, 59
requiring for its success
attention to ‘things spiritual and refined’, can only Harder to place, however, is the absence of any
comprehend by enlisting ‘the services of theology’.60 nod to Joseph Roth, Benjamin’s colleague at the
The task for The Arcades Project thus became to Frankfurter Zeitung. Unlike Roth, who published
render tangible this reality of everyday material sixty-five texts for the newspaper in his first three
objects – the dormant mythology of the profane. years alone, Benjamin barely landed twenty such
texts in his lifetime.65 Beyond quantity, Roth attained
This move (its attendant modification of historic the status of a much sought after star critic as well
materialism) would cost Benjamin dear among as (soon thereafter) the paper’s go-to person for
his Marxist friends, including Adorno. 61
But it puts French culture – Benjamin’s self-professed if under-
into sharp relief Benjamin’s improvement on those solicited area of expertise.66 Benjamin held Roth in
who, like Giedion and Boetticher, now look like high esteem for his Frankfurter Zeitung texts, and
crude materialists lacking a developed sense for would sometimes make notes from them for his
‘things spiritual and refined’. Benjamin’s purported own use; but he held little personal regard for their
 22

author.67 Neither did Roth care much for Benjamin, That situation is all but reversed today. Muddled
and their relation in the shared years of exile in thought, clumsy prose, and the restraint of a glutton
Paris was accordingly muted, not to say cold.68 As when faced with the most ragged of theories:
Jews fleeing Westward, both despaired when Nazi such ingredients make for the perennially grateful
Germany set out to destroy their chosen refuge of candidate at the university seminar, the learned
civilization: the capital of the nineteenth century. monograph, the feuilleton feature.72 All the better
Their premature deaths are the result of that despair that Benjamin’s texts led quiet lives of desperation,
and sixteen months apart to the day. Roth’s tomb
69
and needed rescuing by academia, editorialising,
stone in Paris reads, écrivain autrichien – mort à and institutionalisation. All the better that that suit-
Paris en exil, and has now become part of the city’s case holding these texts was so nearly vanquished
endlessly inscribed fabric. in the Pyrenees.

Neither of them was capable of, much less Roth held no such enigma: he must remain a
interested in, sustained dialogue with the other. cipher. His texts defied and defeated editorialising
A summary of their hypothetical exchanges is of the barest minimum, even by their very own
thus as impossible as it is pointless. And yet the author, much less another. Panopticon contains
final physiognomy their textual albums assumed neither introduction nor references to prior publi-
may provide a fragment to a larger explanation, cation. Its presence in The Arcades Project would
as to Roth’s absence in The Arcades Project – a have, both trivially and fatally, made for a different
rather odd absence, given how many of Roth’s book: the very shock Benjamin’s textual montage
Frankfurter Zeitung texts look like crib sheets to so eminently desired to provoke, would have rico-
that vast volume. A contemporary reader of Roth’s
70
cheted on itself.73
Wandering Jews puts it thus:
Notes
Again and again – with one neat phrase – Roth puts I thank Harry Mallgrave and August Sarnitz for comments
anxieties into words that it took others whole books to and help on details. I also wish to record a much older debt
communicate, and then, only vaguely. Not even the to Ritchie Robertson who provided one-on-one tutorials on
magnificent Kafka comes close to a tidy phrase of Kafka, and then supervised my undergraduate thesis on
self-condemnation such as this, referring to the deraci- Kafka and philosophy. Robertson saw a beginning, where
nated Western Jew, with his ‘secret perversities, his I barely glimpsed the fullness of his learning, on Austro-
cringing before the law, his well-bred hat held in his German literature, and ‘The Jewish Question’ within.
anxious hand’. 71

1. Joseph Roth, Panoptikum: Gestalten und Kulissen

Roth is to Benjamin what in the English language (Munich: Knorr und Hirth, 1930; repr. Amsterdam:
Kipling is to Orwell. Doomed to success, able to Allert de Lange,1976), 90. All translations in this paper
make a forceful point concisely, without having are my own, unless otherwise noted.
to cite (much less think by recourse to) the theo- 2. Roth’s journalistic output comprises several thousand
retical crutches of others: Roth’s texts exuded a pages, some of them now collected in Joseph Roth,
maddening ease, and could not but exert an influ- Das Journalistische Werk (hereafter cited as JW), 3
ence on his contemporaries Benjamin was simply vols., ed. Klaus Westermann (Cologne: Kippenheuer
denied. & Witsch, 1989–1991). Roth’s urbane journalism
belongs in the Viennese tradition of Alfred Polgar and
 23

Adolf Loos. Texts like Roth’s 1929 ‘Architektur’ (JW Hugo’s book (specifically its take on the Paris Stock
vol. 2, 115–116), 1930 review of Werner Hegemann’s Exchange) in The Arcades Project F6a,1.
Steinernes Berlin (JW vol. 3, 228–230), or ‘Die sani- 13. This is explored in, and used to great effect by, Michel
erte Stadt’ (JW vol. 2, 3–4) are indiscernible from a Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
Loos text. 14. Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankfreich, Bauen in
3. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt &
Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). Biermann, 1928).
All references are to this edition (under the work’s 15. For instance, in The Arcades Project, section F8,2.
customary English title The Arcades Project) and by 16. On the text’s photographic argument and manipula-
customary section and paragraph numbers, except for tions, see Jean Louis Cohen, ‘Introduction’, in Le
the work’s introduction. Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who arrived at the final text Publications, 2008); on its textual argument, and the
of his 1953 Philosophical Investigations in just this transition to album(hood), see Stefan Koller, The Birth
manner, concludes: ‘Thus this book is really only an of Ethics from the Spirit of Tectonics, TU Delft PhD
album.’ See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Thesis, 2015, chap. 6.
Untersuchungen, translated by Elizabeth Anscombe 17. That is, in Romanic as opposed to Gothic architecture.
as Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Benjamin opens chapter F in The Arcades Project with
Blackwell, 1953, reissued 1986), p. vii. a similarly basic contrast, that of arched to trabeated
5. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 54, italics added. vaults (F1,1).
6. Ibid., 57. 18. Gottfried Semper, Kleine Schriften, ed. Manfred and
7. Roth, ‘Das Warenhaus und das Denkmal’, Frankfurter Hans Semper (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1884), 461. For
Zeitung 12 January 1928 (JW vol. 2, 810), Cf. Roth, discussion and an alternative translation, see Harry
‘Das ganz große Warenhaus’, Münchner Neueste Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper. Architect of the
Nachrichten 8 Sept 1929 (JW vol. 3, 81–84). Benjamin, Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Arcades Project, F4,2. Press, 1996), 357.
8. Roth, Panopticon, 97. 19. Alina Payne, ‘Living Stones, Crying Walls: The Dangers
9. Cf. Roth, JW vol. 2, 256–258. Cf. JW vol. 2, 130–131 of Enlivenment in Architecture from Renaissance putti
on ‘the unconscious in film’, and JW vol. 2, 61–62 on to Warburg’s Nachleben’, in: Caroline van Eck et al.
the contrasting aesthetics of German and American (eds.), The Secret Lives of Artworks. Exploring the
posters advertising films. Boundaries between Art and Life (Leiden: Leiden
10. Roth, ‘Zwei Filmsenationen’, Frankfurter Zeitung 12 University Press, 2014) 308–339.
March 1924 (JW vol. 2, 90). By contrast, Roth lauds 20. Joseph Roth, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Berlin: Die
Chaplin’s and Lindner’s sense of pacing in their works Schmiede, 1927; reprinted Cologne: Kippenheuer &
(JW vol. 2, 258). Witsch, 1985), 54.
11.
Benjamin, 1933 essay ‘Erfahrung und Armut’, 21. Johann Caspar Lavater, Von der Physiognomik
reprinted in Benjamin, Illuminationen. Ausgewählte (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben, 1772). Chap. 3, italics
Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977). (mostly) mine.
12.
The relevant passage is excerpted in Vittorio 22. Benjamin, Arcades Project, F5,2.
Lampugnani et al. (ed.), Von der Stadt der Aufklärung 23. Lavater, Physiognomik , chap. 4. The interjection
zur Metropole des industriellen Zeitalters. Anthologie seemingly recalls a quip from Bishop Butler used
zum Städtebau, 2 vols. (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, to great effect in John Locke’s chapter on personal
2008), Volume 1, 354–360. Benjamin discusses identity in his 1690 Essay Concerning Humane
 24

Understanding. However, there is no evidence that 32. Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und
Lavater read Butler or Locke. tektonischen Künsten (Munich: Friedrich Bruckmann,
24. Ibid. 1860, 1863), 2 vols.
25. Daniela Bohde, Kunstgeschichte als physiognomische 33. Carl Boetticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen. Erster
Wissenschaft. Kritik einer Denkfigur der 1920er bis Band, Erstes Buch: Einleitung und Dorika (Potsdam:
1940er Jahre (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012), 59. Ferdinand Riegel, 1852), frontispiece.
26. For Schinkel’s use of ‘character’, see especially the 34. For this reading of Boetticher’s analysis on trabeated
concluding pages of his ‘Gedanken und Bemerkungen architecture, and for that analysis’s shortcomings
über Kunst im Allgemeinen’, posthumously published compared to Hübsch’s and Semper’s, see my Birth of
as part of his 1863 Nachlass; reprinted in Marcel Ethics from the Spirit of Tectonics, chap. 8.
Reich-Ranicki (ed.), Die Deutsche Literatur. Der 35. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 45 and F1,1.
Kanon. Essays. Band 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel 36. Detlef Mertins, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Tectonic
Verlag, 2006) 597–623. Unconscious: Using Architecture as Optical
27. Bohde, Kunstgeschichte, 62. Instrument’, in Alex Coles (ed.), The Optic of Walter
28. This stance survives to the present day in Roger Benjamin (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999),
Scruton’s aesthetics of architecture and music. Our 196–221.
only way to understand these nonfigurative arts, for 37. See Benjamin, Arcades Project, 48–49.
Scruton, is to attribute to them, metaphorically and in 38. Mertins, ‘Tectonic Unconscious’, 207.
a mode of quasi-pretense, human mental states. This 39. Ibid., 214. I invite readers to compare this para-
alone, he says, accounts for these arts’ representa- graph, and its (about to be quoted) attendant quote
tional excess over their material presence as sound from Benjamin, to Footprint’s Call for Papers for
and body. For a critical assessment, see Robert Grant, ‘Constellation of Awakening’: ‘With regard to the archi-
‘Music, Metaphor, and Society: Some thoughts on tectural theory Benjamin engaged directly with the
Scruton’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 71 tectonic tradition, especially the work of Boetticher. He
(2012), 177–207. posited the tectonic unconscious and the deployment
29. Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian of optical instruments as crucial for understanding
Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University the development which architecture carried from
Press, 1999), 56. the luxus capitalist forms of commodity.’ Observe
30. For a modern history of that idea, see Joseph Rykwert, also the Call’s references to ‘expressive character’
The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture and Benjamin’s ‘physiognomic’ method. Accessed
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Roger Scruton’s 21 June 2015. https://www.h-net.org/announce/show.
review of the book is in sympathy with its main concern cgi?ID=223137.
(cf. n28) but exasperated by its methodology. See 40. Walter Benjamin, ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’,
Roger Scruton, ‘Palpitating Stones’, London Review reprinted in Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge. Band II.2
of Books 19.7 (1997), 13. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 368–385,
31. Stefan Diebitz, ‘Daniela Bohde: Kunstgeschichte excerpt translated by Mertins, ‘Tectonic Unconscious’,
als physiognomische Wissenschaft. Kritik einer 214.
Denkfigur der 1920er bis 1940 Jahre, Akademie 41. Roth, ‘Körperliche Erziehung der Frau’, Frankfurter
Verlag 2012’. Accessed 22 June 2015. http://www. Zeitung 26 March 1925 (JW vol. 2, 370).
portalkunstgeschichte.de/meldung/daniela_bohde__ 42. Benjamin, Arcades Project, F2,9.
kunstgeschichte_als_physiognomische_wissen- 43. Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Geschichte und
schaft__kritik_einer_denkfigur_der_1920er_ Eigensinn (Vol. 1, Enstehung der industriellen Disziplin
bis_1940_jahre__akademie_verlag_2012-5404.html. aus Trennung und Enteignung), orig. 1972, re-issued
 25

in 1993 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp: ), 19–20n4. 56. Benjamin, Arcades Project, K1a,7.
44.
Heine’s (much longer) original is reprinted in 57. Cf. Teyssot, ‘Dream House’, 97.
Lampugnani, Von der Stadt der Aufklärung, vol. 2, 58. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 59.
714–718. 59. Ibid., K1,5.
45. In some philosophical systems, this very distinc- 60. See Benjamin’s 1939–40 essay ‘Über den Begriff der
tion of the biological and the cultural is misplaced Geschichte’, reprinted in Kleine Prosa. Baudelaire-
of course. Gibson, for one, regards the distinction a Übertragungen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
major source of confusion in visual studies. For the 1972).
point’s careful application to architecture, see Andrej 61. Alexander Kluge, Die Lücke, die der Teufel läßt,
Radman, Gibsonism: Ecologies of Architecture (TU (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 890–891, with
Delft Doctoral Thesis, 2012). 891n13.
46. Roth, ‘Wahlkampf in Berlin’, Frankfurter Zeitung 29 62. See Harry Francis Mallgrave, ‘The fragility of history’,
April 1924 (JW vol. 2, 169). in Henrik Karge (ed.), Gottfried Semper. Dresden
47. Benjamin, Arcades Project, F4a,2 to F4a,4 and F5a,7 und Europa (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2004),
and F8,2. 338. Among other failings, Benjamin (F3,7) inherits
48. Benjamin, Arcades Project, F3,5 on the ‘magnificent Boetticher’s limited understanding of tectonics as a
urban views opened up by new constructions in iron’. term restricted to wooden (or quasi-wooden) construc-
See further Mertins, ‘Tectonic Unconscious’, 206 and tion. Contrast Semper on tectonics, as discussed in
212. chap. 8 of my Birth of Ethics.
49. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 53 and L1,5. 63. Adolf Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der
50. Georges Teyssot, ‘Traumhaus.  L’intérieur comme bildenden Kunst (Strassburg: Heitz & Mündel,
innervation du collectif’ (in Spielraum: Walter Benjamin 1893) – a key text for later studies, such as Wilhelm
et l’architecture, ed. Libero Andreotti, Paris: Éditions Worringer’s. Limitations of place prevented a fuller
de La Villette, 2011, 21–49); revised and translated consideration of these texts.
as ‘The Dream House’, in: Teyssot, A Topology of 64. A point of historiographical distortion inherited by
Everyday Objects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, those who take Benjamin’s attestations at face value,
2013), 85–86. My paper’s present section quotes the like Jean-Louis Cohen, The Future of Architecture
standard English translation of The Arcades Project Since 1889 (London: Phaidon, 2012), 23 ff.
that Teyssot explicitly relies on. For a more literal 65. Jean-Michiel Palmier, Le chiffonier, l’Ange et le Petit
translation of key passages from Benjamin’s contested Bossu. Esthétique et politique chez Walter Benjamin
‘Konvolute 1’ on the interior (Arcades Project I1,1 to (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 2006); translated by
I8,3), see now: Cornelia Klinger, ‘Interior Spaces and Florent Perrier as Walter Benjamin: Lumpensammler,
Other Playgrounds of Inwardness’, in August Sarnitz Engel, and bucklicht Männlein (Frankfurt am Main:
and Inge Scholz-Strasser (eds.), Private Utopia. Suhrkamp, 2009), 929n14.
Cultural Setting of the Interior in the 19th and 20th 66. Palmier, Walter Benjamin: Lumpensammler, 929n14
Century (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 89–90, 90n3, and 926.
92n6. Klinger’s discussion of those passages’ relation 67. Ibid., 961. One example (ibid., 929n14) is Benjamin’s
to architecture came to my notice too late. private reflections in his diary on Roth’s report on
51. Benjamin, Arcades Project, A12,4. Moscow (later reprinted in Panopticon); see Benjamin,
52. Ibid., Q2a,7. Fragmente vermischten Inhalts. Autobiographische
53. Ibid., L1a,2. Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 310ff.
54. Cf. Teyssot, ‘Dream House’, 104. 68. Palmier, Walter Benjamin: Lumpensammler, 573n365.
55. Ibid., 117. 69. Stéphane Symons, Walter Benjamin: Presence of
 26

Mind, Failure to Comprehend (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill

NV, 2013), 151.
70. Especially Roth’s texts on the modern department
store (n7), with their mention of the glasshouse,
commodity fetish, human appetite, vertigo, dream, its
failed attempt at hubris. Or this: The Arcades Project
claims that the cultural core of early nineteenth century
France (the Empire period) was born ‘in the undignified
company of small scale shop owners’, of Krämer: in a
‘würdelos[e] Krämergesellschaft’ (Benjamin, Arcades
Project, F5,2). Panopticon (my opening quote, n1):
the phantasmagoria lurking behind modern industrial
districts was born from ‘the sad modesty of small scale
shopkeepers’, of Krämer.
71. Erica Bell, ‘An elegy of love and tears, shame and
foreboding’ [review of Joseph Roth, Wandering
Jews, translation by Michael Hofmann, Norton &
Company 2001]. Accessed 25 June 2015. http://
www.amazon.com/review/R3V68AQ8SR4JD9/
ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=039332270X
72. Ably satirised in Roth (JW vol. 3, 229).

Biography
Stefan Koller, BA.Hons. BPhil. Oxon., PhD cum laude TU
Delft with The Birth of Ethics from the Spirit of Tectonics.
Gibbs Prize in Philosophy, Duns Scotus Prize in Medieval
Philosophy, Exhibitioner Award, Scatcherd European
Award, and more; all from the University of Oxford.
Business Group Member of the International Society for
the Philosophy of Architecture. Co-founder and co-editor of
Architecture Philosophy, an international journal to simul-
taneously pursue standards of research excellence and
integrity in architecture and philosophy. Former Assistant
Director of the 3TU Center for Ethics and Technology.
Koller’s research specialises in the philosophy of architec-
ture and nineteenth century German architecture theory.