Ludwig Hilberseimer and Metropolisarchitecture: The Analogue, the Blasé Attitude, the Multitude

Cameron Mcewan

doi:10.3390/arts7040092

Abstract

This article close-reads Modernist architect Ludwig Hilberseimer’s early architectural projects, which employed a language of uniform fenestration, repetition and geometrically reduced typical forms, as embodying Georg Simmel’s blasé attitude in analogical form, and places this reading in relation to Aldo Rossi’s concept of the analogical city and the political theorist Paolo Virno’s notion of the multitude. The first part outlines the discourse around Simmel, Hilberseimer and Rossi to note salient connections between these figures, their thought and the process of modernization. The second part discusses Simmel’s and Hilberseimer’s readings of the metropolis and interprets Hilberseimer’s formal language as embodying the blasé attitude. The third part places Hilberseimer in dialogue with Rossi and interprets Rossi’s analogical city as inhabited by another of Simmel’s figures, the stranger. The article concludes by tracing a line from Simmel’s figures of the blasé and the stranger via Hilberseimer’s metropolis architecture and Rossi’s analogical city toward the contemporary multitude, a collective linguistic subject. In doing so Hilberseimer’s and Rossi’s grammar of the metropolis can be rethought in relation to contemporary subject positions as a critical project toward an architectural theory of the multitude pushing back against the increasingly individualised city and market urbanism prevalent today.

Highlights

In his canonical essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (Simmel [1903] 1971) the sociologist and philosopher of the city Georg Simmel extracted the principle characteristics of early twentieth-century metropolitan life: mechanisation, division of labour, multiplicity, pronounced differences, nervous energy, intensification of consciousness, intellectual character, abstraction, the levelling and exchangeability associated with the money economy
Updating Hilberseimer’s analysis of the metropolis as it coincided with Simmel’s blasé attitude and reading into the relationship between Rossi’s analogical city and the stranger, it is possible to speculate that a contemporary figure can be situated with the multitude—a collective linguistic subject, always mobile and “united [ . . . ] by ‘not feeling at home’” as Paolo Virno has said (Virno 2004, p. 34)
“Three Remarks Concerning the Multitude’s Subjectivity and Its Aesthetic Component,” Virno writes: “The metropolis is a linguistic formation, an environment that is above all constituted by objectivised discourse, by preconstructed code, and by materialised grammar” (Virno 2008, p. 33)

Summary

Introduction

In his canonical essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (Simmel [1903] 1971) the sociologist and philosopher of the city Georg Simmel extracted the principle characteristics of early twentieth-century metropolitan life: mechanisation, division of labour, multiplicity, pronounced differences, nervous energy, intensification of consciousness, intellectual character, abstraction, the levelling and exchangeability associated with the money economy. This article operates in relation to Hilberseimer and Simmel, yet in broader terms it links Hilberseimer’s metropolis architecture with Aldo Rossi’s analogical architecture, and Simmel’s blasé figure with the figure of the multitude in Virno’s thought. In the first part of this article, entitled “The Shock of the Metropolis,” I will briefly survey some of the ways in which the figures discussed here (Simmel, Hilberseimer, Rossi, Virno) and the salient ideas (metropolis, the blasé attitude, language, the analogue, multitude) are already discursively linked and the historical context within which the ideas took form. In my conclusion “Metropolis and Multitude” I briefly trace a line from Simmel’s figures of the blasé and the stranger to Hilberseimer’s metropolis architecture and Rossi’s analogical city, toward the figure of the contemporary multitude ( (Virno 2004, 2008); and more broadly (Hardt and Negri 2009; Marazzi 2011; Lazzarato 2014)). In doing so Hilberseimer’s and Rossi’s architectural grammar of the metropolis can be rethought in relation to contemporary subject positions as a critical project toward an architectural theory of the multitude and model to push back against the increasingly individualised city and market urbanism prevalent today (such as what is put forward by for instance (Schumacher 2015))

The Shock of the Metropolis

Metropolis Architecture

Analogical City

Conclusions