On the Miniature, the Modern, the Metropolis

Abstract

“Whoever leads a solitary life and yet now and then wants to attach himself somewhere,” relates a short text from Franz Kafk a’s collection Contemplation, “will not be able to manage for long without a window looking on to the street.”1 Two decades aft er Kafk a— same language, diff erent locale— Walter Benjamin refl ects in Berlin Childhood around 1900 that nothing has fortifi ed his “own memory so profoundly as gazing into courtyards, one of whose dark loggias, shaded by blinds in the summer, was for [him] the cradle in which the city laid its new citizen.”2 Exactly one century aft er the publication of Baudelaire’s prose poem “Windows,” whose setup resonates with the scene in Kafk a’s text, the section titled “Paysage” in Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia laments the lack of expression of American streets— and the particular form of perception they produce: “what the hurrying eye has seen merely from the car it cannot retain, and the vanishing landscape leaves no more traces behind than it bears upon itself.”3 As I read through these diff erent small texts, they appear to speak to each other, in their attachment to built environment, through perceptual frames that recall the rectangular shape of a pho-