Adorno’s “Urbanism and Societal Order” and the State of Rebuilding West Germany, 1949

Abstract

Less than a month after his return to Frankfurt in the winter of 1949, Theodor Adorno gave a lecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt at the invitation of the urban designer Karl Gruber. Titled “Urbanism and Societal Order,” the lecture is noteworthy as one of the very few Adorno texts that addresses architecture. It might be considered a minor text if not for the fact that each issue Adorno raised in it has a corollary in the early postwar practice and discourse of architecture in West Germany. The qualities of urban beauty, the legitimacy of historical and historicizing urban fabric, the nature of housing worthy of a free citizenry, the importance of self-determinacy and participation in the planning of cities: these are among the topics that Adorno’s text interrogates. Each consideration is discussed relative to specific contemporaneous texts, debates, and projects by the architects who ultimately rebuilt West Germany’s cities.