German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity by Mitchell Schwarzer

Review by: Frederic J. Schwartz

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 96-97
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians
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 Standing Soldiers,KneelingSlaves is an
important and innovative work that will
surely gain a wide scholarly audience
among historians, art historians, and stu-
dents of material culture. Myhope is that it
will also gain the wider readership its mes-
sage deserves among the civic leaders who
shape public policy and the general citi-
zenry who both inherit and build the pub-
lic monuments that guide public memory.
Though the story Savage traces is often
Mitchell Schwarzer
GERMANARCIHIECTURAL
THEORYAND
THE SEARCHFOR MODERN IDENTITY
New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995, xiv + 364 pp. $74.95 (cloth).
ISBN 0-521-48150-3.
"No systematic account of German nine-
teenth-century architectural theory has as
yet been published," wrote the late Hanno-
Walter Kruft in 1985. Mitchell Schwarzer
does not claim to have written such an
account, but GermanArchitectural Theoryand
theSearchfor ModernIdentityis the only book
to cover that wide and varied terrain;and if
not "systematic,"it is at least an ambitious
synthesis of a kind and scope rarely at-
tempted in contemporary scholarship.
Schwarzer contributes to the project of
looking back beyond the early decades of
the twentieth century to find serious and
productive confrontations of architectural
thought and modernity, a project that has
to date centered on the figures of Otto
Wagner and Gottfried Semper and on the
important translations published by the
Getty Center. His book is a salutarycorrec-
tive to an image that has prevailed since
the days of Giedion and Pevsner-that of
the dusty nineteenth century with its anti-
quarian debates, its ornaments sold by the
yard, its irresolution in the face of modern
materials, and its deeply suspect national-
ism. (It is indeed remarkablehow resilient
this caricature has proved: its currency has
long outlived that of the heroic narrative
of architectural modernism it served to
shore up.)
Schwarzer's thesis is that the debates
central to nineteenth-century German ar-
chitectural theory--over historicism, poly-
96 JSAH / 58:1, MARCH 1999
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a discouraging one, his message is ulti-
mately hopeful. By understanding how we
have defined our past and our present
through the lasting medium of public
sculpture, we can imagine how we can
shape, and perhaps redeem our future.
The long view Savage provides lends poi-
gnant power to an event that took place
within a year of the book's publication-
the unveiling on 12 July 1998 of the Afri-
can American CivilWarMemorial in Wash-
MODERNISM
chromy, classicaland Gothic structure and
ornament-were, in themselves, modern
phenomena. The argument may not be
surprising,but it is elaboratedwith determi-
nation and erudition. Schwarzer works
hard to establish the changing contempo-
rary valences of historical consciousness,
and he is attuned to the contradictions in
architectural thought as well as the com-
plex of crises they signaled. Most impor-
tantly (though at times a bit too allusively,
perhaps), he calls attention to a refrain
heard in many forms in the writings he
surveys, one he defines as doubt over the
validity of the kind of knowledge embod-
ied in architecturaltheory. The failure "to
devise a system for architectural knowl-
edge as a replacement for faith in classi-
cism" (173), he asserts, accounts for the
pattern of sharp but ultimately ambivalent
rejections that characterize the relation of
turn-of-the-centurytheory to the rich body
of thought it inherited. This is perhaps the
most interesting line of thought in a book
that seeks to establish a continuity of con-
cerns between the eras of historicism and
modernism while respecting the historical
specificity of ideas that later "turned into
modern theories of architecture" (xiv).
The book is organized thematically,
though the final chapter, looking at the
situation in architectural theory before
World War I, gives the book a chronologi-
cal thrust; it also echoes the narratives
sketched out in preceding chapters. Since
Schwarzer'sgoal is to rewrite the history of
a century known mainly for its debate over
style,he is wise to dispense with this issue in
his first chapter. His exposition here works
at two levels. First, it is a survey of the
associations and "affiliations" that in-
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ington, D.C. In this 11-foot bronze
monument, three life-size black soldiers
stand to commemorate the 200,000 black
men who fought for the Union. Having
traveled from California to witness the un-
veiling, one seventy-six-year-old descen-
dant of a black infantryman proclaimed,
"We'refinally becoming a part of history."
Catherine W. Bishir
NorthCarolina
StateHistoricPreservationOffice
formed allegiancesto the Greekand Gothic
revivalsearly in the century and, later on,
to the Italian and German Renaissances
and to neo-Baroque. Second, and more
subtly,it tracesthe changing terms bywhich
such allegiances were defended. The Ber-
lin architecturalhistorian Alois Hirt serves
as a pivotal figure: he accepted the Greek
ideal as a matter of dogma but sought to
ground this dogma empirically. Heinrich
Hfibsch is introduced not merely for giv-
ing a name to the debate (in his text of
1828, In WhatStyleShould WeBuild?), but
because the focus of his own answer on
function, structure, and contemporary
needs was paradigmatic of nineteenth-
century German discussions of the issue.
Schwarzer argues that the historicist de-
bates had within them the seeds of their
own dissolution: as the terms of the de-
bates changed, the grounds for the de-
fense of any style as style were steadily
eliminated.
The second chapter looks at how archi-
tectural theory sought to assimilate ad-
vances in industry; the focus is on the
applied arts as a testing ground for the
relation of form to new technologies. Again
Schwarzeroffers, one could say, a binocu-
lar view: he looks at the many positive
approaches to machine production at the
same time as he calls attention to a shift
from monumental architectureto the envi-
ronment of the domestic consumer as the
locus of cultural change. He proposes that
the road to the more famously affirmative
moments of early modernism was paved by
an important strain of historicist thought
that accepted machine production as a
valid tool for providing the middle class
with the sorts of goods previouslyreserved
for the aristocracy.Schwarzercontinues to
revise received truths in his chapter on
nationalism, tracing the increasing variet-
ies and inflections of nationalism as de-
bates moved away from a simple opposi-
tion between international classicism and
national medievalism. As new references
points emerged-the international exhibi-
tions, the fascination with (in Stefan Muth-
esius's phrase) the "English model," and
the experience of urban growth-posi-
tions became correspondingly complex
and nuanced.
In his chapter on "Freedomand Tecton-
ics," Schwarzer searches for a common
denominator in accounts of architectural
form that amount to the highpoints of
nineteenth-century theory, from Schinkel,
through Semper and Botticher, to Riegl.
Rather than simply contrasting differing
positions, Schwarzer describes a common
problematic, one he terms "tectonics,"
which concerns the relation of structure to
expression. He shows how stances that
could be described as "functionalism" or
"structural realism" could not develop in
the context of ideas that insisted on the
irreducibly artistic aspect of architecture,
that could not conceive of necessity with-
out its dialectic correlative of freedom or
of constructional technology without its
symbolic mediation through form.
The coda of the book, "Unity and
Schism at the Turn of the Century,"super-
imposes the terms of the tectonics debate
onto the discussions surrounding the Ju-
gendstil and the German Werkbund.If the
poles of real and ideal, or order and indi-
vidual subjectivity,could not be reconciled,
should they not instead simply be given
their own domains? A certain strain of
psychological aesthetics that informed the
Jugendstil offered a way to answer this
question in the negative and to pursue the
traditional philosophical goals of architec-
tural theory. The radically affirmative an-
swer sawinstead a separation of instrumen-
tal modernity (which would encompass
most design tasks) and an ideal or indi-
vidual realm of art. Like Massimo Cacciari
and Beatriz Colomina, Schwarzer makes
Adolf Loos the mouthpiece of the accep-
tance of fragmentation as the modern con-
dition and of schism as architecture's only
sensible response.
On Schwarzer's own terms, this argu-
ment (like the others he presents) is con-
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vincing. It performs the great service of
rendering "modern" positions explicable
in terms of the development of ideas pre-
ceding them. But it also reveals the nature
of Schwarzer's intellectual concerns, and
these need to be articulated more clearly
than they are in this book. A passage from
the conclusion provides a clue: "I see the
nineteenth-century architectural dis-
courses," we read, "as both crucial reflec-
tions of their own age and undeniable
influences on the age that would follow"
(261). This is the formula of a very tradi-
tional sort of historiography,one that reads
cultural phenomena as a "reflection" of
an age and that sees these manifestations
as emerging in a continuous fashion out of
those that preceded them in their own
realm. It is a mode into which this book,
seemingly against its own grain, inexorably
slips. To be sure, Schwarzer is concerned
to place architecturaltheory in the specific-
ity of its historical context, but his treat-
ment of that context is revealing.The com-
plexities of German political history, the
formation of modern states,and the chang-
ing institutional contexts in which build-
ings were built and theories published-all
are identified incisively, but they are rel-
egated to a brief and impacted introduc-
tion; they are made the background to the
story Schwarzer tells, a story that consists
of events unfolding in a narrow realm
unproblematically defined as "architec-
tural theory." These "contextual" matters
are not made players in the narrative
but serve only to frame it; they are treated
only to the extent that they are thematized
by the writers in an area of culture that
might not be considered autonomous by
the author but is nonetheless treated as
such.
And thus the schizophrenic aspect of
this book. The work is thoroughly tradi-
tional in the way it constructs its object of
study,yet the vocabulary deployed raises a
very different set of expectations. Schwar-
zer talks, for example, of "discourse," yet
discourses are not adequately defined in
terms of the relation of internal structure,
institutional grounding, and the material
conditions that allow for utterances that
give this concept its explanatory force. At-
tention to these matters would have re-
vealed that architectural theory in the age
of Schinkel was something very different
from that in the age of, say, Loos, taking
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place within a vastlydifferent set of institu-
tions and venues, and concerning objects
constructed very differently. The implica-
tions here are twofold. First, the changing
institutional context of writing about archi-
tecture (from academic treatise to, say,gov-
ernment report,legislativeargument,peda-
gogical program or article in the bourgeois
press) had a profound effect on the con-
tents of those theories. And, second, it
problematizesthe notion central to Schwar-
zer's argument, that of a single "institution
of architecturaltheory" (28).
Schwarzeralso writes about "commod-
ity society,""reification,""difference," "to-
talization," "episteme," and other terms
of contemporary theory, but he does so
without doing the background work that
would allow the deployment of such termi-
nology to have any sort of conceptual edge
within the parameters of this study. And
what of "identity"?Despite the centrality
of this issue in recent work in the humani-
ties and cultural studies, Schwarzer's no-
tion is not defined or explored but instead
simply assumed. In the end, one is left
wondering how well his careful arguments
are served by the tendency to translate
historicalmaterialinto current criticalcon-
cerns that developed in very different his-
torical contexts. Schwarzer is most effec-
tivewhen guiding us through the intricacies
of theories on their own terms; he is best
when he bucks the trends of contempo-
rary historiography. There is no reason
that he should not have the courage of his
convictions.
These criticisms, however, need to be
weighed against the book's contributions.
It is a commonplace of recent critical and
theoretically informed art and architec-
tural history to attack the blindnesses of
the "standard accounts," yet it must be
said that if GermanArchitectural Theoryand
the Searchfor ModernIdentitylooks, in the
end, suspiciously like one of those stan-
dards, then we are lucky to have it. This
kind of work is every bit as necessary as it is
problematic. It is testimony to the depth of
Schwarzer'sresearch and the ambition of
his synthesis that this book will be both a
valuable source for historians of nine-
teenth-century architecture and a chal-
lenge to those who wonder if such a history
should not be written differently.
- FredericJ. Schwartz
UniversityCollegeLondon
BOOKS 97