Architecture after God: Babel Resurgent 9783035625028, 9783035624991

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Architecture After God

Exploring Architecture Book Series Advisory Board: Reto Geiser (chair) Marc Armengaud Andrew Leach Catalina Mejía Moreno Matthias Noell Sara Stevens

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Kyle Dugdale Architecture After God Babel Resurgent

Birkhäuser Basel

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CONTENTS

Foreword Preface

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Introduction 10 1. Babel Resurgent 25 2. Architecture as Metaphor 73 105 3. The Claims of Antiquity upon Modernity 4. The Genesis of Architecture 137 5. The Tower and the Cathedral 177 6. The Master Builder 215 7. New Faith, New Architecture 253 287 8. Fabricated Glory 9. Death of the Architect 331 Conclusion 394 Bibliography 412 Image Credits 426 Index 432 Acknowledgments 436 About the Author 438 Imprint 440

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EXPLORING ARCHITECTURE

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This new series advances the study of architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design in their respective histories and as professional, conceptual, and intellectual practices. It offers novel and unexpected readings of buildings, analyses of disciplinary discourse and historiography, studies of architectural representation and media, and considerations of socioeconomic, historical, and political forces on cultural transformation. Its volumes encompass a broad spectrum of periods, regions, and themes, including distinctly cross-disciplinary subjects with close ties to architecture. With a focus on topics informed by contemporary discourses on architecture, landscape, and cities, we work with authors to share scholarship in architectural history that is original and rigorous, as well as engaging and accessible. Shaped by a peer-review process guided by an academic board and a world of accomplished experts, Exploring Architecture provides a platform to emerging authors and established scholars alike. The books in this series present serious research in a compelling voice to reach readers in architecture and its related fields. Despite the repeated forecast of its imminent obsolescence, the book remains with us. Its material presence and durability persist. It remains weighty, present, and arguably the most important medium for disseminating attentive scholarship on architecture both in its history and as a matter of thought. Our belief in the amalgamation of thorough academic inquiry, the careful design of books as physical objects, but also the expansion of their reach through open-access distribution form the foundation of Exploring Architecture. Architecture After God is the second volume in this series. Kyle Dugdale explores a fundamental modern ambivalence in God’s authority over architecture: on the one hand, the conception of God removed from a position of commanding authority, understood since the Enlightenment and amplified by Friedrich Nietzsche; and on the other, an “architecture according to God,” which sustains references to the biblical and theological in twentieth-century architecture. Staged in the shadowy interwar period in Germany, Architecture After God traces the implications of this metaphysi-

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Foreword

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cal upheaval for modern architecture and its attempts to create a new world. In doing so, Dugdale takes us on a journey, seamlessly crossing cultural and disciplinary boundaries from architecture into art, poetry, and literature, while narrating two intertwined stories that allude to attempts to recreate the world after God. The protagonist of one thread is the Tower of Babel, long understood as an architectural archetype, confronting the Word of God and the multiplicity of languages by which humans took back their own power. The other follows the Austrian painter and poet Uriel Birnbaum, whose stunning work has to date been largely overlooked by architecture, while being carefully anchored in the philosophical, historical, political, and theological contexts of its time. Birnbaum’s very personal approach to architecture takes its strength not only from history and art, but also from a deeply informed appreciation of the architectural discourses of his time. Reading against the historical image of the 1920s and ’30s as the setting for modernism’s rise, Dugdale offers an open account of what may have emerged from that moment, sometimes presaging, even, the advent of postmodernism. Architecture After God lays out an exceptional range of sources and materials, some that have not been accessible before (or only rarely), including many important German-language contributions alongside those that are more familiar—Bruno Taut, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—that the author introduces through unexpected lenses. Dugdale’s book is a careful and thrilling investigation in which much is unknown, and the rest is out of place. Marc Armengaud, Reto Geiser, Andrew Leach, Catalina Mejía Moreno, Matthias Noell, Sara Stevens

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PREFACE

The farsighted madman of Nietzsche’s Gay Science announced the death of God in 1882. But the discipline of architecture has been slow to recognize the larger implications of that announcement. This book assesses what is ultimately a vast expansion of the architect’s responsibility: the formidable project of re-creating the world after God. Such an assessment is no small task. It poses challenges that are historical, political, philosophical, and theological. In response, Architecture After God presents a series of overlapping stories that center on Germany during the period between the world wars but cast shadows far beyond. Skeptical of archi­ tecture’s metaphysical claims, it introduces new and sometimes unexpected protagonists—philosopher, fraud, visionary, tyrant— in dramatic demonstration of architecture’s broader entanglements. But its fabric is woven around two continuous threads: the f­ amiliar account of the Tower of Babel, an architecture that pre-empts the very notion of the death of God; and the less familiar story of its 1924 retelling in a slim volume by the artist Uriel Birnbaum. That architects should once have been interested in the Tower of Babel is doubtless unremarkable. What is surprising is that in the twentieth century—at the very moment when one might expect such archetypal figures to be fading from the pages of architectural influence, and in exactly those places where the anxieties of modernity play out with the greatest intensity—Babel reasserts itself with greater insistence than ever before. Often its presence is tied to a new consciousness of the absence of God from the narratives of modernity. And here the biblical account takes on a curiously modern cast—addressing problems that suddenly seem newly pertinent, read into the story of a culture that no longer seeks its security in the God of its earlier chapters but turns

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9 instead to the constructions of human ingenuity. Understood as a lesson applicable beyond the limits of its own narrative time and space, the Tower marks the predicament of the architect who must build in a self-consciously modern, godless world. This book approaches its subject from multiple directions. It surveys the plain of Babylon during its excavation at the start of the twentieth century and during its military occupation at the start of the twenty-first. It gazes upward at the soaring towers of New York City, the Babylon of the future. It studies the architectures of the book of Genesis, reading Babel both as culmination of architectonic ambition and as monument to its failure. It evaluates the redemptive promises of Expressionist fabrications in the years immediately after World War I, and the struggles over architecture’s future in the years leading up to World War II. It cites popular novels, hymns of praise to the architect, annotations in the margins of Hitler’s personal library, and manifestos drawn up by the patriarchs of the Bauhaus. It deals in architectural metaphor, utopian aspiration, geopolitical ambition, and a deepening dissatisfaction with the shape of an emerging modernity. It appraises modernity’s religiosity, a human construct to be understood in the image of architecture. And it returns repeatedly to the work of Uriel Birnbaum, a vivid articulation of preoccupations that have not yet been dismissed. Architecture After God is written for those who care about architecture. It addresses those who find themselves wishing for more than the discipline seems to offer, who struggle to reconcile its earlier chapters with its current narratives, who worry that something has been lost in the shift to what is conveniently labeled as modernity. It acknowledges that there is more to the assessment of modernism’s enduring legacy than has often been acknowledged. Its direct engagement with questions of architecture’s ends comes at a moment when many are painfully conscious of the discipline’s failures. But it also appeals to a broader audience: to all those whose consciousness of the structural insecurities of contemporary modernity might prove amenable to architectural exploration.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD

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INTRODUCTION

The relics have lost their power. They are precious objects, no doubt—laid out on long tables and guarded by surveillance cameras that hang conspicuously from the ceiling. Memories of an older world, they predate the architecture that now contains them. Many predate the institution that now owns them, and some predate the establishment of the nation. They are relics in another sense too. The relic, after all, is not only an artifact surviving from an earlier time, a thing left behind by history. The word has a more specific meaning. As an object of veneration, it is often an item associated with the death of a saint: a scrap of linen, a splinter of wood, a fragment of mortal remains—a physical reminder, that is, of the death of the sacred. Indeed, the objects on display in this crypt constitute a selection of architecture’s sacred texts, temporarily extracted from their more permanent resting place within the repositories of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. With one exception their identities are familiar, even canonical. And if architects have largely abandoned their faith in this canon, its influence lingers. It has proved difficult, after all, to identify compelling substitutes; modernity’s candidates for architectural beatification have not always survived closer scrutiny. But the authority of such relics is not what it was. Today they are approached with altogether different intentions. Each is now open to its most compelling spread, in a loosely chronological array that changes texture and color as it winds its way around the room. A small white tag is attached to each volume, the enigmatic minuscule of its call number an invitation to closer examination. GGnv90 bi521. It begins, as so often, with Vitruvius. On display is an edition inherited from the sixteenth century, the first printed

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0.1 The origins of architecture: Vitruvius, De ­architectura, Cesare Cesariano edition (1521).

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0.2 Architecturae laus, the praise of architecture: Alberti, De re aedificatoria, second edition (1512), detail.

0.3 Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung, second edition (1538).

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translation from the Latin into a modern tongue. ← Fig. 0.1 The black letters of the sacred text are surrounded by an even blacker commentary, with Vitruvian neglect made good by the addition of a vividly imagined woodcut that illustrates the construction of the primitive hut. Adjacent is a passage famous for associating the origins of architecture with the human capacity to see past immediate physical needs, and to contemplate, instead, the infinite—a passage familiar in a more recent translation, published at the very moment when the world was plunging into the chaos of World War I: Finding themselves naturally gifted beyond the other animals in not being obliged to walk with faces to the ground, but upright and gazing upon the splendour of the starry firmament . . . they began in that first assembly to construct shelters.1 The origins and ends of architecture are here tied as closely to metaphysics as to physics, measured against nothing less than the boundless space of the cosmos. Architecture, in other words, is understood to address not only the act of building, narrowly conceived, but also humanity’s place within the created order. The question of the identity of the original creator, the prime constructor, the ἀρχι-τέκτων, is central to the understanding of the role of the architect. Architecture as a discipline born of the contemplation of the infinite: this conception stands in uneasy tension with the boundedness of this heavily monitored subterranean space. But immediately adjacent lies a copy of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, second edition. Jp2 2w. From its opening page there emerges, in direct response to Vitruvius, the lordly figure of the modern architect, possessed of astonishing depths of knowledge and powers of creation, fully equal to the task set before him: Him I consider the architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, what-

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ever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man . . . To do this he must have an understanding and knowledge of all the highest and most noble disciplines.2 The publisher has added, in the margin, two words: ← Fig. 0.2 architecturae laus, “the glory of architecture.” In a refrain that builds across the centuries, the omniscient figure of the architect is deemed worthy of mankind’s praise: In view then of the delight and wonderful grace of his works, and of how indispensable they have proved, and in view of the benefit and convenience of his inventions, and their service to posterity, he should no doubt be accorded praise and respect, and be counted among those most deserving of mankind’s honor and recognition.3 This could serve as a eulogy for the next figure in the library’s hagiographic array: Andrea Palladio, frequently celebrated as history’s most influential architect. The “manifestations of his creative genius” are inscribed on the list of the world’s heritage, and it is to the sites of his veneration that other architects make their pilgrimage.4 He embodies, in other words, a high point in the reputation of the architect; and as such, he functions as a representative figure—a type. Significantly, he himself achieved recognition not, first, through his buildings, but rather through his printed books—these books. 1999  +66, JJaf42 P177 570Bw. In a staggering display of architectural wealth, equal to any medieval cathedral’s exposition of sacred objects, a first edition of Palladio’s Quattro libri dell’architettura lies alongside its first complete translation into English. Circulating around the room, the status of the architectural profession rises and falls with the passing centuries, its achievements measured against the vestiges of antiquity. All things are measured. And always, mortal man measures himself. 1971 Folio 561. To that end, Albrecht Dürer’s treatise on measurement, the Underweysung der Messung, presents a landmark of the impulse to measure other human beings. Historians of perspectival vision

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0.4 Modernolatria: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Futurismo, definizione,” ca. 1925.

0.5 Lyonel Feininger, Kathedrale, cover of Walter Gropius, Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar (1919).

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0.6 (left) Christus architectus coeli et terrae, from a 13th century manuscript Bible, reproduced in Bruno Adler, Utopia (1921), and (right) God the architect, also 13th century, from a companion volume now in Vienna.

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are familiar with his representation of a recumbent nude subjected to mathematical scrutiny through Alberti’s gridded veil. But the book is now open to a drawing of a different landmark upon which are inscribed, in letters scaled to compensate for the monument’s height, words beginning “das w gotes bleibt ewiglich”—the Word of God endures forever. ← Fig. 0.3 This is a monument to an older measure, now abandoned: the idea that humanity’s impermanent creations can be evaluated only against a more enduring standard, and that the limited ends of architecture can be understood only in reference to the endless space of the infinite. Indeed, humanity’s relationship to the constructed world is everywhere in question—as are the legitimate ends of the architectural discipline itself. 1999 455. Henry Wotton’s seventeenth-century Elements of Architecture, the first significant contribution to architectural theory in the English language, responds with its own disputed Vitruvian opening, still resonant today: “The end is to build well. Well building hath three Conditions. Commoditie, Firmenes, and Delight.” The conditions in this room are heavily weighted toward the production of delight. A group of students files in, descending in reverent silence from the Beinecke’s dimly lit entrance. They are instructed to look, but not touch: these relics are to be handled only after due initiation. This viewing is part of a broader induction into the mysteries of the university, a pilgrimage embedded within a more extensive rite of passage. These students are novices, newly admitted to the school of architecture, and the objects on display have been chosen to impress upon them, through personal experience, a lively appreciation for the textual heritage of their newly adopted discipline. That heritage is here presented in an unbroken extension from antiquity to the present. But the students’ sense of awe is most palpable in their confrontation with the artifacts of modernity, which register the accumulation of new authorities and new forms of devotion. GEN MSS 130. Not least among these are the papers of F. T. Marinetti, which include a draft of the first Futurist manifesto, proclaimed to the world in 1909. A document drawn from his Restricted Fragile Papers offers a genealogical tree for the

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early-twentieth-century avant-garde, its Futurist trunk towering over the surface of the earth and branching out into movements encompassing Creationism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and Expressionism. ← Fig. 0.4 This, too, is a tale of origins, tentatively dated to 1925. Below, the author provides a listing of the articles of Futurist belief. Among them, legible even to the reader ­without Italian, are the words “Contro città morte. Modernolatria.” The rejection of dead cities, and in the same breath, the worship of modernity. 1996  +82. Adjacent is a copy of the worshipper’s ­hymnbook: Marinetti’s 1932 Parole in libertà (Words in freedom), the high point of Futurist experiments in machine-age book­making, factory-produced on metal sheets. Word and image conspire with the design of the printed page, its material constituting its own manifesto, the word “duce”—leader—emblazoned beside the towering architectural fasces on the back of its slipcase. Despite its masterful design, the book provokes a lingering unease. 2009  +357. Next to it lies a more fragile manifesto, made to be read and then discarded: valuable today in part because it was originally designed to be disposable. This is the 1919 program of the Weimar Bauhaus, articulating the creed of a movement that transformed the world. The opening words of Walter Gropius’s statement of purpose speak again of architecture’s end, of the bulls­eye center of the Bauhaus curriculum: “The ultimate goal of all creative endeavor is building!”5 Its closing exhortation? “Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers as the crystal symbol of a new faith.”6 On the cover, ← Fig. 0.5 Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut illustration of the cathedral of that new faith rises toward heaven in an expression of unbridled upward aspiration. The Bauhaus manifesto registers a discernable shift in modernity’s architectural ambitions. That shift is accompanied by a noticeable tension that is legible in Bruno Adler’s 1921 Utopia, a mystical text reflecting a rather different strain of Bauhaus ­conviction. 2009 +364. Architectural analogy shapes its opening words: “We all carry within us a knowledge that has darkened

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0.7 Johannes Itten, Farbenkugel in 7 Lichtstufen und 12 Tönen (Color sphere in 7 light values and 12 tones), in Bruno Adler, Utopia (1921).

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0.8 El Lissitzky, (above) dust jacket for ­Arkhitektura: Raboty arkhitekturnogo fakul’teta Vkhutemasa, 1920–1927 (1927) and (top) The Constructor (Self-Portrait), 1924.

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and ­withered since we lost ourselves to this world. It is the ­knowledge of home, of a true reality. To see this with clarity is to ­ex­perience a moment of grace.”7 By way of reference, Adler provides an ­illuminated plate from a medieval Bible, entitled “Christ, architect of heaven and earth.” ← Fig. 0.6 To this he adds various contributions by Johannes Itten, lately arrived at the Bauhaus from Vienna. They articulate a critique of Western rationalism, tied to an interest in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West and a search for a spiritual response to the mechanized destruction of World War I.8 Laid out ­separately on the table is the polychromatic climax of a ­loose-leaf color chart, ← Fig. 0.7 saturated with metaphysical ­significance. It offers a silent rebuke to the more familiar black-and-white diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum, which was concentric on “Building” (Bau) and dated to 1923, the year of Itten’s ejection from the school. But what does this array of materials mean? It is hard to resist the allure of an implicit narrative that draws together the scattered legacies of architecture, dispersed across time and space. Architecture—as the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk might argue today—is presented as a means of comprehending the world, of making visible nothing less than a cosmic order. And in this fictional narrative, the architect is the prime mover. 2009  +208. Reinforcing this theme, a 1927 dust jacket by El Lissitzky presents a photomontage of the architect’s compass-wielding hand, ← Fig. 0.8 from a series of images that began with the disembodied hand of God and continued with his famous photomontage of 1924, “The Constructor (Self-Portrait).”9 The comparison between God and architect is here explicit, with the compass representing the rational architect’s technical competence and precision.10 2007  +84. In quick succession, the seven volumes of El Lissitzky’s 1935 Industriia sotsializma celebrate the glories of collaborative construction. They represent the high point of his bookmaking efforts, the work of an architect who was fully invested in the transformative capacities of his own creative endeavor. On the slip-cover, two champions of Soviet youth rejoice before the towering smokestacks of modernity’s technological triumph. “Вперед и выше!”—“Onward and Upward!”

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A gap—in space, in time, and also in confidence. The experience of World War II casts a shadow onto architectural optimism. Documents of postwar architecture are laid out for examination— but they struggle to overcome the darkness of humanity’s recent accomplishments. Utopian schemes issue new promises nonetheless, attempting to wipe away the accumulated constraints on architecture’s legitimate domain. 2009 Folio 18. In a burst of enthusiasm, the lithographs of Constant Nieuwenhuys’s 1963 New Babylon accompany a “Preamble to a New World,” celebrating architecture’s power to transform, and perhaps even to create ex nihilo. Ambitions are high: “New Babylon is the product of the creativity of the masses, based on the activation of the enormous creative potential which at the moment lies dormant and unexploited. . . . There will be a metamorphosis in morals and thinking . . . a new form of society will emerge.”11 Yet those words ring hollow. A sense of disaffection lingers even as the promises of modernity proliferate. 2007  +251. One item has been omitted. In the near corner, ­adjacent to Itten’s color chart, lies a slim book bound in faded blue linen, its cover slowly separating from its contents. A curator supplies the name of the author, Uriel Birnbaum, along with a title, Der Kaiser und der Architekt: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern. Vienna, 1924. The book is open to its final image, printed in deeply ­saturated color, its caption legible at the end of a list of fifty plates on the facing page. Significance aside, the list is curiously ­repetitive. Die grüne Stadt, die rote Stadt, die gelbe Stadt. Read aloud in broken German, the effect is incantatory. Die silberne Stadt, die goldene Stadt, die eiserne Stadt. The curator comments on the arresting beauty of the printed page, and suggests an ­allusion to the story of the Tower of Babel, a tale of destruction, an unhappy ending. Little else is said. A recent ­acquisition, the book is ­otherwise unknown, its author hardly a household name. It is an outlier to the longer narrative with which it is juxtaposed. And yet call number 2007  +251 wields a strange power. It claims the capacity to breathe new life into those other texts. It offers an approach to architecture that aims to extract itself from

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the mortalities of history through a focus on nothing less than ­eternity. But to return to those relics with an eye not to physical but to metaphysical significance is a daunting prospect: one for which this century is hardly well-equipped.

1 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 38. 2 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph R ­ yk­wert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Camb­ ridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 3. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 ICOMOS, “World Heritage List: Palladian Villas Advisory Board Evaluation” (1996), accessed July 1, 2022, http://whc.unesco. org/document/154086. See also Witold Rybczynski, The Perfect House (New York: Scribner, 2002), xvi, echoing Ada Louise Huxtable, “The Most Influential Architect in History,” New York Times, July 17, 1977. 5 Walter Gropius, Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar (Weimar: Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, 1919), 2, my translation. 6 Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” in The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, by Hans M. Wingler, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert, ed. Joseph Stein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 31, substituting as for like in “like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”

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Bruno Adler, ed., Utopia: Dokumente der Wirklichkeit (Weimar: Utopia Verlag, 1921), 9, my translation. 8 See Johannes Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus, trans. John Maass (New York: Reinhold, 1964), 11. 9 The jacket wraps Arkhitektura: Raboty arkhitekturnogo fakul’teta Vkhutemasa, 1920–1927 (Moscow: Izd-vo Vkhutemasa, 1927); see Nancy Lynn Perloff and Éva Forgács, Monuments of the Future: Designs by El Lissitzky (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1998), introduction. 10 See commentary on “The Constructor” in Margarita Tupitsyn, El Lissitzky: Experiments in Photography (New York: Houk Friedman, 1991), 26, and Nobert Lynton, Tatlin’s Tower: Monument to Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 169 and 247n32. 11 Constant Nieuwenhuys and Simon Vinkenoog, New Babylon: Ten Lithographs (Amsterdam: Galerie d’Eendt, 1963), 10.

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1. Babel Resurgent

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BABEL RESURGENT

Informed observers might reasonably expect the biblical figure of Babel to fade from the pages of the historical imagination as other narratives prove more compelling to the modern mind. But they would be wrong. Babylon is arguably more famous today than ever before. And its fame ties together what are often held to be quite disparate disciplines: among them architecture, philosophy, theology, and recent military history.

The Birth and Death of God The opening decades of the twenty-first century delivered a brief but glorious burst of architectural fame for the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Author of “the best-selling German book of philosophy since World War II,”1 Sloterdijk has a reputation for being both provocative and prolific, and his magnum opus, the massive Spheres trilogy, has now been translated into English in its entirety. This itself is a significant accomplishment: the book is variously described as expansive, monumental, even megalomaniac. But in recent years Sloterdijk has been at the very forefront of architects’ attentions. No less a figure than Bruno Latour has stated, without qualification, that Sloterdijk is the thinker of architecture.2 Why such philosophical enthusiasm on the part of the architectural discipline? For one, the focus of Sloterdijk’s thought is explicitly architectural. Beginning, in its opening pages, with the hypothesis that “life is a matter of form,”3 his Spheres trilogy is advertised as nothing less than the late-twentieth-century bookend to Heidegger’s Being and Time. It claims to supplement Heidegger’s analysis of time with a corresponding analysis of space, a category often overlooked within conventional thought.

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1.1 “Uriel Birnbaum, The Apparition of the Heavenly City (1921–22),” in Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. 2 (2014).

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Not one to undersell his work, Germany’s most commercially successful contemporary philosopher has described the trilogy as an attempt to articulate a theory that construes space as a key anthropological category, on the understanding that “humans are themselves an effect of the space they create.”4 It is no surprise that architects should be drawn to such philosophy, which so explicitly assigns to the space-maker a godlike responsibility for the shaping of humanity. Another explanation for his allure might lie in Sloterdijk’s capacity for the provocative use of illustrations: a capacity exercised in the pages of Spheres, where architectural images often predominate. The trilogy contains over six hundred illustrations, frequently unpredictable and unpredictably frequent, but always carefully deployed. If this is philosophy, it is illustrated philosophy—architecturally illustrated philosophy, to be precise. Those readers who lack the inclination to work their way through the five-inch thickness of text may prove more ready to scan the accompanying images; and if the conclusions drawn from such an approach should prove more suggestive than precise, that may not, perhaps, do too violent an injustice to the character of Sloterdijk’s argument. In fact the publisher contends that the book “includes a wide array of images . . . to offer a spatial and visual ‘parallel narrative.’”5 It is this parallel narrative that introduces the work of Uriel Birnbaum. Roughly three hundred pages into the second volume, there appears a thickly outlined drawing reproduced in black and white, ← Fig. 1.1 captioned “Uriel Birnbaum, The Apparition of the Heavenly City (1921–22).” The image is bisected on the diagonal by a massive structure that forms a dark, fully architectural m ­ ountainside, composed of stepped terraces, flat-roofed ­rectangular masses, arched openings, a vaulted roof, and a viaduct leading to an outlook tower. High up on a ledge stands a solitary figure, looking out over the void beyond. He raises one arm above his head, as if to shield himself against a startling apparition. And indeed, there appears before him a more distant structure, similar in some ways to that on which he stands, but brighter, rising from a substructure that might be interpreted as

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billowing rock, and crowned with a great dome. An expanding series of concentric rings radiates from its spherical outline, as if it were trans­mitting a message to which the figure in the foreground must react. Upon closer examination, Birnbaum’s appearance proves something of an enigma. There is no mention of him in the credits at the back of the volume, and there is no direct reference to him in the surrounding text. The reader must speculate as to Sloterdijk’s purposes in including the image. That said, the immediately preceding images establish the context within which one might begin to interpret this parallel narrative. Leafing backward through the pages of the book, they include: 298:

296:

294:

291:

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a plate from Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 world history, showing the domed Temple of Solomon at the center of Jerusalem’s concentric city walls, their towers overlooking the flatroofed structures within; Mark Tansey’s 1986 “Doubting Thomas,” its incredulous protagonist gazing in astonishment into the void before him; “Demonstratio De Turris ad Lunæ Cœlum exaltandæ, ἀδυναμίᾳ, sive impossibilitate,” the graphic demonstration, from Athanasius Kircher’s 1679 Turris Babel, that the Tower of Babel could never have reached the heavens; a 1547 etching by Cornelis Anthonisz showing the Tower of Babel at the moment of collapse, struck down by a sudden act of divine destruction; a late-nineteenth-century photograph of German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae’s monumental Lion Gate; the frontispiece of Johann Valentin Andreae’s 1619 Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio, published in the same year as his Turris Babel, showing the utopian city centered on a towering “templum cum prytaneo,” the reference to antiquity giving architectural expression to the symbolic home of a unified people;

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a model of the city of Babylon as exhibited at Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum, the Babylonian temple-tower rising in the background within its walled enclosure; a recent photograph of the city walls of Nineveh in modern Iraqi reconstruction; images from Hans Hollein’s 1964 “Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape” series, created at a moment when the Viennese architect had declared man to be master over infinite space; a 1664 drawing of a model of Noah’s Ark, built for the display of fireworks at the inauguration of Pope Innocent X; a 1975 press photograph of Vietnamese boat people afloat in the South China Sea; a fifteenth-century Lombard miniature of Saint Peter steering the barque of the church, with Christ at its center, and a group of text-wielding monks in the foreground facing a company of soldiers—the Word arrayed against the forces of violence; and last, or rather first, a fourteenth-century Flemish miniature of Noah’s Ark afloat upon the flood, its inhabitants safe within the vessel’s architectural enclosure.

The sources of these images may be eclectic; but they tie Birn­ baum’s drawing to a very specific set of associations. Those associations are broadly architectural, with the ­ physical ­dimensions of architecture related to the metaphysical dim­ en­ sions of human experience. As a group, they speak of ­containment and of protection from threatening space; of peri­ meter enclosure and of the definition of a center; of city walls and of city landmarks. Especially prominent is the figure of Babylon, with the tower of Babel in its midst. Babylon, the city and the tower: a city defined, according to the biblical account of Genesis 11, by a physical landmark that is in turn tied to metaphysical ambitions; a city legendary for its walls, a bulwark against the alienating space of the plain of Shinar. Babylon, city of cities, tower of ­towers.

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Although Sloterdijk’s text rarely addresses the accompanying images directly, their parallel narrative is legible. But the illustration by Uriel Birnbaum stands in a curious relationship to this narrative. Sloterdijk’s trilogy opens with a broad and familiar account of modernity’s peculiar anxieties: the emptiness of a newly infinite universe without a defining center, the loneliness of mortal existence in a world convinced “that there is nothing more to look for up there,” the coldness of a newfound freedom without clearly established boundaries, accompanied by the loss of perceived unity in an increasingly diverse culture.6 Taking tentative shape amid the Cartesian meditations of early modernity and rising to the surface in the wake of the Enlightenment, these seething anxieties are understood to have been churned by the currents of twentieth-century history before spreading out across contemporary global consciousness, feeding fears that appear repeatedly in ensuing chapters and find their most articulate expression in German: Raumangst, Weltangst, Todesangst—claustrophobia (literally, fear of space), fear of the world, fear of death. Again and again, the loss of center is tied to the corresponding absence of a defined perimeter: and these anxieties are articulated in geometric terms, understood through the metaphor of architectural form. The philosopher is already familiar with such anxieties: they were articulated in 1882 by the eloquent madman of Nietzsche’s Gay Science, to whom Sloterdijk refers in his opening pages. Like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk makes it clear that these anxieties are tied to the death of God, to modernity’s search for surrogates for what he describes as “traditional theological and cosmological narratives.”7 Indeed, the perceived need for such surrogates is the result of modernity’s conception of those narratives not as products of divine revelation but as human constructs: as structures that are best understood as forms of architecture, and that therefore, just like architecture, are susceptible to obsolescence. It is immediately clear that the architectural analogy exposes further dilemmas. These dilemmas apply, not least, to philosophy itself. Philosophers, too, have thought of themselves as designers of structures of consciousness that might replace those

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“traditional theological and cosmological narratives.” Descartes, drawing on antiquity’s prioritization of geometry, insists on the architectural character of his work: “Throughout my writings I have made it clear that my method imitates that of the architect.”8 Kant in turn insists that human reason itself “is by nature architectonic” in its desire to construct a viable system of cognition, while acknowledging in the same breath that since the material available “nowhere allows a first or a starting point that would serve absolutely as the foundation for its building, a completed edifice of cognition on such presuppositions is entirely impossible.”9 His own system is likewise articulated in architectural terms, as an “architectonic of pure reason”—albeit anticipating a critique of the viability of the project to build a “tower that would reach the heavens.”10 Sloterdijk, in reference to Hegel, writes of the erection of philosophy’s “sublime constructions,” having tied the opening sentence of the Spheres trilogy back to Plato’s insistence on the value of geometry to the philosopher.11 Why such architectural enthusiasm on the part of the discipline of philosophy? And is it justified? After all, these architectural comparisons lead to questions that call into doubt the fitness of such substitute constructs. “Well building hath three Conditions. Commoditie, Firmenes, and Delight.”12 If, for a moment, one were to accept Wotton’s 1624 assertion that the end of architecture is to build well, one might be inclined to require that philosophical structures meet the same conditions. Commoditie, Firmenes, and Delight. Commoditie is perhaps straightforward—the commitment to utility has a well-­ articulated legacy in philosophy as in architecture. But firmenes is more elusive. Relative durability can be established empirically over time; but the call for categorical assurance prompts examination not only of superstructural coherence but also of philo­ sophy’s foundation—and this is disputed ground. And delight? The demand that philosophy fulfil criteria of beauty is a heavy requirement—to quote Hegel, “the philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet”13—and there is perhaps room for doubt that consensus will be any easier to come by in philo­ sophy than in architecture or in other branches of poiesis.

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What is abundantly clear is that architecture offers a vocabulary through which to articulate the anxieties of a godless modernity. Indeed, the discipline seems tied both to the problem and to the solution—both to the articulation of those insecurities and to their proposed remediation. Just as literal architectures are expected to provide physical security, so metaphorical architectures are expected to provide metaphysical security. And in this respect, Sloterdijk’s method is clear. It is architecture—or, more precisely, the city—that occupies the central position in his grand investigation of humanity’s consciousness. The reader is referred to Spengler’s Decline of the West in support of a grand assessment: “World-history [Weltgeschichte] is urban history.”14 Mankind is a city-building animal, and the city is understood as the foremost material and symbolic expression of human achievement—an assertion of cultural autonomy, the context and model for the plausibility structures of subsequent intellectual effort.15 Spengler refers to the city as the “Urphänomen menschlichen Daseins”: the “prime phenomenon,” the archetypal expression, of human being.16 In order to appreciate its original impact, modern readers must put themselves unreservedly “in the place of the wonder-struck primitive who for the first time sees this mass of stone and wood set in the landscape.” Sloterdijk reiterates this imperative, describing “the amazement of an early human” who for the first time sees the massive city loom on the horizon with its walls and towers.17 Such archetypal thinking is deemed important: the return to origins is held to play a clarifying role, stripping away the mystifying accretions of subsequent world-history. The architectural reader is reminded of the still more basic role of the primitive hut in the narratives of architectural essentialism; but if the hut operates at the scale of the individual, it is the city that responds to larger demands. As Spengler puts it, the “peasant’s dwelling” is “the great symbol of settledness” and “the condition precedent” for all else; but what the hut is to the peasant, the city is to the man of culture.18 Where is this ur-city, this Ur-Stadt? It is tempting to look to the ancient city by the same name, once identified with the birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham, its earliest traces, dating

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to the prehistory of the fifth millennium, sealed by a layer of silt understood by archaeologists in the 1920s to have been deposited by the biblical Flood.19 In many regards, Ur fulfils the criteria rather well. The site is still dominated today by its great ziggurat, → Fig. 1.2 the best-preserved of all such monuments, a massive masonry structure faced with burnt bricks set in bitumen, completed in the twenty-first century BC by a king who promptly proclaimed himself a god. It is among the sources of the fragments that make up the ancient Sumerian text of the Eridu Genesis, which tells of the creation of man, the founding of the first cities, and the great flood—an account in which Nintur, the mother of mankind, calls mankind to abandon its nomadic existence in order to build cities.20 But in fact the focus of archetypal attention—for Sloterdijk as for so many others—is not the city of Ur. It lies instead further up the original course of the Euphrates. That focus is the city of Babylon.21 The clearest precedent is set by the text of the biblical Genesis, where prehistory may likewise be held to play a clarifying role. In traditional readings of the Torah, the ruin of Babel stands at a threshold between the end of prehistory and the beginning of history: the chapters of Genesis that precede it deal with humanity as a universal condition, with Adam—whose name in Hebrew means “man”—standing as a type for humanity; while the passage that follows plunges immediately into the specifics of Abrahamic genealogy and history.22 Standing at that threshold, Babylon represents the archetypal city, across multiple categories—political, urbanistic, technological, material, and linguistic. But there is a geometric difference between that archetype and the conditions of modernity. If, in the context of modernity’s peculiar anxieties, the loss of center is again and again tied to the corresponding absence of a defined perimeter, it may be observed that Babylon, the city and the tower, → Fig. 1.3 is defined precisely by its periphery and by its center.23 Sloterdijk’s popularity among architects may be attributed both to his provocative use of images and to the inherent attraction of a philosophy that assigns to the space-maker a godlike

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1.2, 1.3 (top) The ziggurat at Ur, partially restored, photo­graphed in 2009. In the foreground, a US military UH-60 Black Hawk. (bottom) Plan de la ville de Babylone selon Hérodote, et le P. Kircher, as published in 1730 by Augustin Calmet

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responsibility for the shaping of humanity. But he goes on to make an even bolder assertion, assigning to the architect a responsibility greater still than that of the shaping of humanity. He embeds within his text the staggering claim that architectural aspiration is ultimately responsible for the very conception of the JudeoChristian God. In other words, the architect bears responsibility for the shaping of God. How so? Adhering in this respect, at least, to modern orthodoxy, Sloterdijk understands both architecture and religion as human constructs, creative responses to the perceived needs of human being. And following well-established tradition, he advocates a return to origins in order to understand more clearly the nature of those needs. For him, as for others before him, this involves an appeal to that frequently rocked cradle of civilization, Mesopotamia. His argument, briefly stated in his text, may be recapitulated even more briefly as follows: In the context of Mesopotamian antiquity, both products of architecture and conceptions of God were obliged to expand in order to keep pace with an expanding global consciousness. Writing in the early days of the Roman empire, the geographer and historian Strabo marveled at the legendary height and breadth of Babylon’s walls, scaled such that four-horse chariots could easily pass one another along their ramparts. Such dimensions justified their inclusion among the Seven Wonders of the World.24 Archaeologists at the start of the twentieth century recorded city walls of a thickness of up to 72 feet.25 Writing in the twenty-first century, the philosopher Sloterdijk takes this one step further. He argues that the massive walls of early cities—like Babylon—cannot be explained by the practical requirements of military defense; they do not so much provide protection against increased threat from without, as provide perspective on an increasing complexity within. In other words, the walls supply a tangible sense of security for a rapidly globalizing urban culture, for a city speaking 20 different languages, honoring 50 different temples, worshiping at a thousand different altars. It is architecture that holds together a society that is otherwise increasingly

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disparate, a newly multicultural world that contrasts with what is assumed to have been a smaller, more coherent, more comprehensible earlier world-consciousness. The walls of the Mesopotamian city, that is, provide identity, unity and ontological security. And something similar might be said of the soaring ziggurat at its heart, with the tower understood as a counterpart to the city walls, the city defined both by its center and by its boundary condition. Moving rapidly onward, Sloterdijk turns his attention to the sixth-century Jewish exile into Babylonian captivity under Nebuchadnezzar. He imagines the experience of that exile, writing about the impact of the Babylonian “megalopolis” on the “observer from a small or small-thinking background.”26 The Jewish captive, here looking like a surrogate for primitive man, stands in openmouthed wonder before the towering architectural forms of the great metropolis, with its massive walls and its skyscraping tower. The Genesis account of Babel is in turn interpreted as a product of this encounter with a culture that has itself been confronted with “genuinely expansive dimensions, real diversity and provocative complexities.” But here comes the twist. The ambitions of Babylonian architecture have had to keep pace with that expansion of consciousness—witness both the city walls and the Babelic tower—but so, in its turn, must Jewish theology. In order to hold its own against the dimensions of Babylon, the biblical conception of the God of Abraham must expand into the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, universally sovereign God. That expanded conception of God subsequently enables, by Sloterdijk’s account, the development of monotheistic Western culture.27 By this logic, the architect might be said to be responsible for the birth of God. Yet the very credibility of this assertion also registers the death of God. The text of this part of Sloterdijk’s argument is accom­ panied by an image: an image that may be expected to offer a spatial and visual parallel narrative. That image is in fact the drawing by Uriel Birnbaum, ← Fig. 1.1 a drawing by an artist with an unmistakably Jewish name, showing an observer who stands upon a structure of massive, stepped terraces, looking out over

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the void and seeming to shield himself in astonishment from the vision of a towering walled city beyond. For Sloterdijk’s purposes this provides an illustration of a human subject placed at a height that is itself enabled by architecture, a height that offers, in turn, a new vision of the heavenly order—a heavenly city that at first glance seems directly comparable to human architecture. The divine, in other words, is here fashioned in the image of the human; it is in its essence a human construct, just like architecture; and to ­architecture it owes both its conception and its articulation. It is the architect who bears responsibility for the shaping of this God. This is a heavy responsibility, and one that might be expected to give pause to the architect who approaches Sloterdijk’s text with premature enthusiasm. But the juxtaposition of Sloterdijk’s text with Birnbaum’s drawing proves deceptive. For in fact Birnbaum’s parallel narrative represents an almost perfect inversion of Sloterdijk’s argument. The text from which his illustration is drawn might more readily be associated with Nietzsche’s report of the death of God than with Sloterdijk’s account of the birth of God.

Paris, Berlin, London, New York Sloterdijk is certainly not alone in his Babylonian interests. One might point to a wildly successful series of exhibitions held in 2008 and 2009, three staged in close collaboration, the fourth following hard on their heels.28 They were mounted in Paris, Berlin, London, and New York—sites appropriate in more ways than one—and were attended with hyperbolic enthusiasm and with all the necessary accoutrements of the modern museum spectacle. The Paris exhibition attracted 300,000 visitors, contributing to record-breaking attendance figures at the Louvre.29 Advertised with posters bearing an image of one of the striding enameled-brick lions that graced the walls of Babylon’s Processional Way under the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II, → Fig. 1.4 the exhibition

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was accompanied by an international symposium—“La Tour de Babylone”—and by lectures, readings, and special events. Public interest was boosted by a film aired on French television shortly after the exhibition’s opening, its images of Babylon’s tower and of the massive film set for D. W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance accompanied by appropriately scaled assertions. “Babylon is history’s first major international city with truly gigantic monuments.” . . . “Babylon is the cursed city, because it is the city that destroyed Jerusalem . . . in order to establish itself as a center of the world—but a center of the world inverted with respect to Jerusalem, therefore a center of the world of evil.”30 Such language evidently struck a chord with the modern urban public. The triumph of the German exhibition was assured by a massive, award-winning advertising campaign, capitalizing on that same notoriety. The citizens of Berlin were assaulted with the full barrage of modernity’s promotional strategies: → Fig. 1.5 billboards in public squares featuring luridly colored images of the Tower of Babel crashing to ruin in an altogether unbiblical act of divine retribution; street kiosks bearing the backlit bosoms of a half-naked woman, presumably the Whore of Babylon; and the snarling ceramic fangs of Nebuchadnezzar’s lion bared on subway platforms.31 The campaign ran under the headline ­babylon was not babel, drawing attention to contradictions between reality and myth. The publicity was effective: half a million visitors climbed the staircase of the Pergamonmuseum and walked through the Ishtar Gate. The exhibition was accompanied by a spectacular two-volume catalog suggesting a suitably binary division of history—Myth (280 pages) and Truth (heavier, at 648 pages), available alongside a more specialized book on the life of the archaeologist Robert Koldewey. London’s exhibition seemed more academic, drawing especially on the British Museum’s collection of clay tablets and cuneiform texts. It was attended by a more modest 1,400 visitors a day.32 But the show was far from dry. Its curators focused in particular on the Babylon of King Nebuchadnezzar—the Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel, the Jewish exile. Here too, architecture was amply represented, with a full-color scale model of the Processional Way,

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a rendition of the Etemenanki ziggurat—the Tower of Babel in its archaeologically correct reconstruction—and vivid paintings of the city on the Euphrates in its imagined one-time glory, the lush green roof of the Hanging Gardens’ constructed landscape beckoning in the middle distance. Visitors were reminded at every turn of Babel’s significance. Jonathan Jones, art critic for the Guardian, spoke in one of the newspaper’s “culture videos” of “a place often remembered as a city of evil and of sin,” noting that “because of the Bible, Babylon has been represented again and again in the most extraordinary, imaginative ways.” Standing before an array of sixteenth-century paintings, supplemented by more recent work, he added, in apparent contradiction of the premises of the Berlin exhibition: “It’s not a myth. The Tower of Babel is not a myth—it existed. Going right through European art, Western art, you have these images of the Tower of Babel, this fantastical thing; and those images actually contain a memory, a real memory, of one of the world’s oldest architectural forms, the ziggurat.”33 Again the public was regaled with those iconic lions: on the cover of the exhibition catalog, on the museum’s website, on hoardings propped up between Robert Smirke’s Ionic columns, → Fig. 1.6 on banners hung in Foster’s Great Court. These are well-trafficked creatures; Babylon’s lions can today be found not only in Paris, Berlin, London, and New York, but also in Munich, Gothenburg, Istanbul, Toronto, Chicago, Boston, Providence, and New Haven. But the British Museum departed from its collaborators’ precedent by drawing attention, toward the back of the exhibition, to more recent military developments at Babylon. The world of ancient art is evidently sensitive to contemporary politics. Visitors to the landmark exhibition in New York were greeted by a satellite image of the Middle East above the exhibition’s full title, Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium BC—its subtitle articulating a promise to unearth the origins of the contemporary global economy. New York City, in 2008, seemed to be examining the legacy of Babylon in strictly economic terms, with a preference for the all-seeing view from above. But other factors were clearly involved. A New York Times review drew attention to the preconditions underlying

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1.4, 1.5, 1.6 (top) Paris: Louvre, Babylone, 2008; poster. (middle) Berlin: Pergamonmuseum, ­Babylon: Mythos und Wahrheit, 2008; ­billboard and posters. (bottom) London: British Museum, Babylon: Myth and Reality, 2008–2009; hoarding.

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the exhibition: “It is the latest in the museum’s illustrious line of panoramic archaeological shows. . . . Of American institutions, only the Met has the resources to pull off such projects, which depend as much on diplomatic clout as on cash, and which always carry the risk that long-made plans will capsize on the shifting tides of international politics.”34 Indeed, similar observations might apply more broadly to the narratives surrounding Babylon itself. The striving for celebrity; the panoramic view; the seduction of archaeology; the appeal to origins; the implication of capital and of power; the uneasy tension between long-term ambition and the contingency of history: such themes find full expression in Babylon—their modern manifestations prefigured, perhaps, in the biblical account of Genesis.

Camp Babylon Indeed, the architecture of Babylon has fascinated the modern consciousness. At first this may seem counterintuitive. Would one not expect precisely the opposite? Babylon, Jerusalem, Niniveh, Ur . . . should not such sites have lost their grip on the modern imagination, as biblical texts have ceded authority to other, more modern narratives? Yet the fascination has endured, its fires fueled, not least, by familiar elements: religion and politics. In fact, quite aside from museum exhibitions, recent years have witnessed an astonishing surge in familiarity with the architecture of Mesopotamia. The mere statistics are overwhelming. In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, hundreds of thousands have travelled from around the globe to stand among the ruins of an ancient civilization. A generation of young men and women has gone on tour to destinations once unknown and inaccessible. Vast sums have been spent, and ambitious accounts crafted to meet the demands of an interested public. The reports are typically illustrated, their expressive powers located not in their verbal dexterity but in their graphic strength. The internet is bursting with such images; and if their photographic quality is

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1.7 (top) Specialist Samantha Ciaramitaro, US Soldiers Climbing the Ziggurat of Ur, 2010; (bottom) Jeff and Laurel Inside Babylon Ruins, 2003.

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1.8 Mappa mundi clay tablet, British Museum, 6th century BC.

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1.9, 1.10 (top) Babylon in 2004, Google Earth (­image ­contrast enhanced). (bottom) Enlarged detail of fig. 1.9.

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inconsistent, there is a striking uniformity not only in their colors but also in their composition. The pale ruins of architecture typically fill the background and periphery, with the center foreground occupied by military personnel. Armed with semi-automatic rifles and fully-automatic Canons, young soldiers climb the steps of the vast ziggurat at Ur, or pose among the shattered ruins of Babylon, boots resting on fragments of masonry half sunk in the dry sand. ← Fig. 1.7 Their uniforms and their affiliations are diverse—American, Polish, Salvadoran—the image captions themselves rehearsing a multiplicity of tongues. Text, more demanding and less descriptive than image, is often terse. Not infrequently, it makes reference to older, explicitly biblical accounts. Sometimes the language is apocalyptic in tone. Occasionally, it quotes excerpts from the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis. GPS ties such photographs to digital coordinates, anchoring them back to a specific time and place. Geotagging can be so precise that the US military limits its use, citing an incident in which a line of helicopters on an unidentified base in Iraq was destroyed by enemy fire shortly after soldiers had uploaded geotagged images to the internet.35 So photographs posted online must be stripped of metadata, uncoupling representation from geographic presence. This leaves room for error. Details can be entered manually, but the process demands no special expertise, whether geographic, historiographic, or architectural. So location tags are sometimes imprecise and occasionally downright misleading. A search for “Tower of Babel” on Google Maps defaults to a site in Babil Province, Iraq, rated at 4.3 stars; but until recently the accompanying image thumbnail, posted by a young Brazilian, offered an aerial photograph of a ziggurat in Iran. This would not be Babel’s first misidentification. That said, the quality of aerial imagery available for this part of Iraq is conspicuously good—rather better than the data for its false counterpart in Iran. In certain instances, such information is more precise than the products of more traditional cartography. This fact has caused difficulties—in 2007, intelligence sources reported that Iraqi insurgents were using Google Earth to plan attacks on military targets.36

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1.11 Saddam Hussein’s palace, Babylon: (top) upper-level ceiling, undated; (­bottom) exterior, photographed in 2012.

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Babylon, Google Earth, coordinates N 32°32’11”, E 44°25’15”. It is fitting that Google should pay special attention to this site: it is, after all, the center of the universe, according to a sixth-­ century mappa mundi now at the British Museum. ← Fig. 1.8 Scholars have speculated that a dot at the center of this map represents the ­ziggurat of Etemenanki, placing Babylon’s tower at the center of everything. The museum’s Babylon exhibition celebrated it as the oldest world map in existence.37 Google’s satellite data is newer: until quite recently, its imagery dated to October 7, 2004. ← Fig. 1.9 The unusually high level of satellite interest, that year, in the skies over Babylon, is perhaps tied to the appearance on Google Earth of the dark outlines of military helicopters on a site just east of the Ishtar Gate. ← Fig. 1.10 Babylon has long been a contested site. To be sure, the site possesses many attractions. To the west lies the slowly shifting course of the Euphrates. On its eastern banks, a spiral roadway winds its way up to what is, today, the site’s most distinctive landform: an artificial mound conceived in the 1980s to support a cable car system, never installed, that would elevate tourists over the flat landscape of antiquity. Today, it supports one of Saddam Hussein’s many palaces. It is one of three such mounds distributed around the site, once intended to bear the foundations of three such palaces, for father and sons.38 The project remains incomplete; only Saddam’s palace stands today. Its architecture is unremarkable, a confection of battered and buttressed masonry with apologetic round-arched openings, the detritus of mechanical equipment visible on its flat roof, its stepped massing sometimes compared, with considerable overstatement, to that of a ziggurat. ← Fig. 1.11 But the intent is clearly ambitious: the ruler commissioned his architects to design a building that would command the plain of Babylon, substituting for the absence of an earlier structure. A painting on the ceiling of a large bedroom on the top floor promotes that reading, offering a panorama of architectural monuments from the Babylonian past and the more recent Iraqi present—city wall, ziggurat, tower. This palace looks down onto another seat of power, Nebuchadnezzar’s Southern Palace—or rather, an archaeologically reckless reconstruction of that palace, again commissioned

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by Saddam Hussein. Nebuchadnezzar used 15 million bricks, many stamped, in his restoration of Babylon; Hussein, not to be outdone, was reported to have used 60 million.39 Each hundredth brick is duly stamped: “In the era of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the protector of Great Iraq and reproducer of its reawakening and the builder of its civilization.”40 The palace’s eastern edge flanks the Processional Way, now stripped of its lions, which once led to the Ishtar Gate, now absent; its northern edge traces the line of Babylon’s legendary city wall, object of antiquity’s wonder and of Sloterdijk’s speculation, now barely visible. But to the immediate south lies evidence of a more modern city, heavily protected on two sides by a wall of precast concrete barriers. Its muted colors are almost identical to those of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, its gridded structure more rigid, the surrounding earth scarred by the ruts of heavy vehicle traffic. In plan and in elevation, the staccato punctuation of its defensive wall is curiously similar to that of the ancient fortifications. → Fig. 1.12 But this is a more primitive architecture, an ephemeral, more mobile structure: a city of tents and huts. This is the First Marine Expeditionary Force Forward Combat Operations Center: Camp Babylon, Iraq. The juxtaposition of tents with masonry fortifications is not new to the landscape of Mesopotamia. A seventh-century relief, → Fig. 1.13 now in Berlin, shows similar tents arrayed in front of similarly crenelated masonry fortifications, and scholars have suggested that this too is the scene of a military camp set up in the shelter of more permanent city walls. In both contexts, solid masonry offers certain advantages over structures of stretched fabric. In official reports this area, known to archaeologists after the city’s Sumerian name as “Ka-Dingir-Ra” (Gate of the god), is typically referred to as “Tent City No. 1.” Occupied by American forces on April 21, 2003, one month into Operation Iraqi Freedom, the base was promptly dubbed Camp Babylon. The military stated that its decision to establish a base at Babylon was motivated by purely geographic factors; at other moments it was suggested that the site was occupied to protect it from looting. Both statements have been disputed.41 Be that as it may, the camp’s infrastructure grew into a 370-acre facility, squarely superimposed onto

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1.12, 1.13 (top) Camp Babylon, 2004. (bottom) Camp at Babylon, ca. 668–26.

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1.14 US Department of Defense “archaeology awareness” playing cards, 2007.

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the archaeological site. In the face of mounting outcry, command was officially transferred to a Polish-led international force in September 2003. In December 2004, the site was handed back to the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.42 Babylon’s significance was not lost on the soldiers. As noted by US Marine Chaplain (Lieutenant Commander) Thomas Webber of Leslie, Michigan, “The Corps loves their tradition, but now we’re walking through something that’s ten times older.”43 “You come over here and learn about history,” explained Marine Sergeant Michael Meisenhalder. “Everybody was looking forward to coming.”44 “I remember reading about this at school,” added Lance Corporal Jeromy Pilon. Army Sergeant Thomas Coleman was representative of many when he described Camp Babylon as “the biggest highlight of my tour.” Such enthusiasm extended beyond the ranks. A contractor to the US Combat Operations Intelligence Center opened his account of a visit to the site by stating: “I took a convoy to Al Hilla Camp Babylon. . . . I tried to make the most of my time by exploring the remains of the world’s most famous city.” In the captions to his online site photographs, he added, with only minor inaccuracies: “This is the entrance to the dig site. It is a 1/3 size replica of the original Ishtar Gate, which was destroyed, and pieces are on display in a reproduction in Germany.”45 No doubt this fascination contributed to the many photographs, and to the occasional desire to acquire a souvenir of the tour—a shard, a fragment of brick, a piece of Babylon. It was the same desire that once prompted Athanasius Kircher to display, in his museum in Rome, a genuine “brick from the Tower of Babel.” It was perhaps also this desire that eventually prompted the US Department of Defense to expand its training into new territory, issuing to its soldiers 50,000 decks of “archaeology awareness” playing cards. Developed under the supervision of a senior archaeologist, the cards were part of a larger educational program for soldiers preparing for deployment: a program that also included the development of online training modules, the printing of pocket field guides, and the construction of mock ruins at the military

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t­ raining facility of Fort Drum, New York, designed using “images of Mesopotamian archaeological properties.”46 Fort Drum archaeologist Laurie Rush explained that the aim was twofold: “to prevent unnecessary damage to ancient sites and to stem the illegal trade of artifacts in Iraq,” expressing the further hope that soldiers would know what to avoid when setting up gun installations.47 The cards met with an enthusiastic reception. Distributed by the Defense Department’s vigorously-named Cultural Heritage Action Group, and designed for a ninth-grade reading level, each suit corresponds to a theme: spades for historic sites and archaeological digs, hearts for “winning hearts and minds,” diamonds for artifacts and treasures, and, more mysteriously, clubs for heritage preservation. ← Fig. 1.14 On the face of each card, a photograph is accompanied by a caption bearing an appropriate exhortation. The six and seven of spades feature Department of Defense images of soldiers in full combat uniform pointing cameras at their targets. “Use your camera to document archaeological and historic sites.” “Taking pictures is good. Removing artifacts for souvenirs is not!” The ace of diamonds states, more pointedly: “Buying looted artifacts is forbidden. These objects will be confiscated if discovered.” Above this text is a photograph of an informal bazaar located at the gates of Camp Babylon, a favorite among soldiers. A sign in the photograph adds: “NO Selling Or Baying Of Any Artifact. They are All fak. Any One doing So Will be kicked Out of the Bazzar.” Thus far, the archaeologists’ strategies have been predictable. The nine of hearts raises the stakes. “The Bible’s Tower of Babel referred to a Mesopotamian ziggurat.” Above this statement, the designers supply a file photograph not of Etemenanki but of the ziggurat at Ur, contributed by the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Why Ur? No doubt it was chosen for its exceptional state of preservation, the massive bulk of masonry and the relentless ramped stairs clearly legible even at this scale. The site of Babylon offers no competition. Another surrogate for Babylon appears on the six of clubs, in the form of the Malwiya Tower, the ninth-century minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra. Its spiral ramp → Fig. 1.15 is frequently

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1.15 Minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, photographed in 2021.

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cited as the source for what remains the popular conception of the Tower of Babel’s form, reinforced by Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel paintings and by countless other reinterpretations.48 The spiral, a form that in concept, if not in practice, is potentially infinite, has always seemed appropriate to the ambitions of Babel. Understood as a stairway, the spiral also can be held to correspond well to the description found in Herodotus: In the middle of the sanctuary has been built a solid tower, a stade long and the same in width, which supports another tower, which in turn supports another, and so on: there are eight towers in all. A stairway has been constructed to wind its way up the outside of all the towers.49 In fact, the Malwiya Tower’s height is so prodigious that it overreaches the minaret’s practical demands, and is therefore not used to broadcast the call to prayer. It serves, instead, a symbolic role for what was once the largest mosque in the world. But it can support other functions too—it offers, after all, a commanding view from above. The US military attracted further criticism in 2005 when it was found that members of the 26th Infantry Regiment had set up sniper positions at the top of the tower, drawing rocket fire from insurgents and culminating in an explosion that damaged the top of the minaret.50 In response to protests from archaeologists, the Army defended itself by arguing that the minaret performed an essential protective function.51 The text on the six of clubs refers, of course, to a different form of protection. “Respect ruins wherever possible. They protect you and your cultural history.” But the set’s wild card adds a significant disclaimer: “These playing cards are intended as educational and informational tools. . . . All recommendations made in the cards for actions to be taken in the field are subject to Rules of Engagement.” Another branch of the Cultural Heritage Action Group offers satellite analysis of archaeological sites, to identify on behalf of military planners “significant cultural features on the ground that must be protected, consistent with Rules of Engagement.” The

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program’s descriptive text is quick to observe that analysis of the mission landscape may yield both archaeological and military benefits: “Such images may show archaeological finds, provide a better understanding of settlement locations for ­avoidance purposes, and also reveal insurgent locations, as advantageous fighting spots have changed little in thousands of years.”52 Babylon might be a case in point. Here too, the defenses of antiquity are intertwined with the military installations of modernity. East of the Ishtar Gate (full name “Ishtar is the one who defeats her enemies”), an ancient theatre is flanked by a series of inflatable fuel bladders.53 Nearer Nebuchadnezzar’s palace stands a bermed enclosure for the storage of ammunition. But the traces of recent history are scattered more broadly too. Distributed across the site are trenches dug by Iraqi forces as defensive firing positions in the run-up to the war, subsequently supplemented by their volumetric antithesis: wiremesh bastions lined with geotextiles and filled by coalition forces with earth transported by front loaders from unidentified sources. Trenches and bastions, negative and positive: the despair of the archaeologists. But neither trenches nor bastions were sufficient to guarantee the security desired by Babylon’s occupants. The site is also dotted with a series of military observation towers, elevated huts assembled from steel pipe, wood decking, sandbags, and wire mesh: a triumph of collaboration between Polish and Mongolian soldiers. Several such towers are located to the south of the tent city, in an area that is otherwise deserted. Almost invisible in aerial photographs, but betrayed by shadows cast upon the ground, they are typically located so as to take advantage of a slight rise in ground level, and command a panoramic view of what is otherwise an almost entirely flat landscape punctuated only by palm trees. Less than thirty feet tall, these rapidly deployed Babylonian towers look down on the site of the Tower of Babel. → Fig. 1.17 As it is, the square outline of the Etemenanki ziggurat is today best discerned from above—from a God’s-eye view: a dusky outline traced onto the surface of the ground. → Fig. 1.16 Certainly it does not present promising visual material for the

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1.16 Georg Gerster, Babylon Ziggurat, aerial ­photograph, 1973.

1.17 Elevated hut: a modern tower at Babylon, 2003–2004.

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front of a playing card. Pools of standing water define the line of its foundations and what was once the southerly projection of its staircase, the dark, rank greenery at its edges contrasting with the dryness of the surrounding terrain. It is an unprepossessing sight, rendered compelling only by the underlying narrative, the text substituting by necessity for the building. First constructed at an unknown point in the second millennium BC, the structure was originally dedicated to Marduk, Babylon’s patron god, who eventually rose to a position of prominence at the head of the Babylonian pan­theon—a position in harmony both with his city’s ascent to political dominance and, as Sloterdijk might observe, with his own architectural presence within that city. Aside from its religious and symbolic functions, the ziggurat could also perform a military role—the commanding view out over the flat Mesopotamian plain was strategically v ­ aluable—rendering the tower vulnerable to reprisals. Babylon was sacked by the armies of Sennacherib in 689 BC, and the ziggurat destroyed. Rebuilt in baked brick by Nebuchadnezzar, its brief and spectacular ascendancy lapsed into a long history of ruin that reads like a catalog of the predictable effects upon architecture of its enemies: time, the elements, material re-use, structural failure, political ambition, human mortality, war. Further damaged by Xerxes upon suppression of a Babylonian revolt in 484 BC, the site was finally levelled in 323 BC by the army of Alexander the Great in preparation for a reconstruction project that was cut short by Alexander’s death. Only the baked bricks of the foundation survived; in due course, these too were removed by local residents for re-use in the more pressing requirements of nearby residential construction. So it was that stagnant water seeped in to fill the gap left by the removal of the god from the landscape of Babylon. Today, satellite images reveal traces of the latest interventions. Trenches were cut adjacent to the tower’s footprint, intended not to advance the progress of archaeology but to impede the advance of armored vehicles. Lined with barbed wire, the disturbed earth yields, nonetheless, the remains of history: fragments of pottery and baked brick, some bearing an impression of the seal of Nebuchadnezzar.54 These trenches register most clearly

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on the aerial photographs, each one an open gash upon the surface of the earth. → Fig. 1.18 The trenches have now been deserted, to be refilled in due course, no doubt, by groundwater, by overgrowth, and by newly accumulating deposits. The coalition forces’ observation towers, on the other hand, are now used by Iraqi archaeological police to guard against looters. The site of the tower of Babel is being defended by new towers on the site of Babylon, a new architecture erected to preserve the traces of the old.55 Looting is, after all, a threat to the integrity of antiquity’s material fabric. And yet its relationship to the preservation of memory is complex. This fact is not lost on observers. According to the New York Times, “Iraqis will tell you that the major looting occurred in 1914, when the Germans who had been excavating the site hauled away the famous Ishtar Gate and other booty to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.”56 The influence of those alleged looters has been immense. The recent fascination with Babel and Babylon—of which Sloterdijk’s account is only a small part—is tied, after all, to the archaeological explorations of the architect Robert Koldewey, → Fig. 1.19 launched a hundred years earlier, in 1899. These explorations fed a resurgent interest in Babel during the early decades of the twentieth century, while providing materials for a newly ambiguous reinterpretation.

Koldewey The most recent account of Koldewey’s work, Auf dem Weg nach Babylon (On the way to Babylon) was published to coincide with the Babylon exhibition in Berlin. It was itself the product of a symposium held on the occasion of an earlier exhibition, also in Berlin, attended by a special delegation from Iraq.57 But the road between Babylon and Berlin was already well travelled. Koldewey’s 1912 account is prefaced with the following, almost casual, statement:

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1.18 (top) Koldewey, Google, Camp Babylon: ­Koldewey’s 1912 site plan superimposed onto Google Earth 2004 satellite imagery, red-lined to indicate anti-tank trenches ­adjacent to the footprint of Etemenanki, 2010 report to the US Department of State; (bottom) John Russell, aerial photograph of Etemenanki site, 2004.

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1.19, 1.20 (top) Robert Koldewey in the storeroom at Babylon, 1914. (bottom) “Bring your tail-coat”: 1898 ­telegram informing Koldewey that the architect is to appear before the Kaiser prior to his departure for Babylon.

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The excavations were commenced on March 26, 1899, on the east side of the Kasr to the north of the Ishtar Gate. At my first stay in Babylon, June 3–4, 1887, and again on my second visit, December 29–31, 1897, I saw a number of fragments of enamelled brick reliefs, of which I took several with me to Berlin.58 Koldewey’s preface goes on to acknowledge the patronage of His Majesty the Emperor of Germany Kaiser Wilhelm II, ← Fig. 1.20 and the financial support of the German Oriental Society, founded in 1898. Those “fragments of enamelled brick reliefs,” along with many subsequent shipments, were incorporated into the imperial collection of Western Asiatic antiquities, first established in 1899; and they eventually found their way to a purpose-built wing of the Pergamonmuseum. If Koldewey’s timing seems unusually auspicious, one might note that his work at Babylon coincided with Germany’s desire to establish a national collection of antiquities that might rival those of Britain and of France. The archaeological opportunities exploited by the German Oriental Society were also connected to the identification of German oil interests along the line of the Berlin to Baghdad railway, largely funded by the German Empire, and itself a cause of friction with British and French governments in the run-up to 1914. The railway’s proposed extension to Basra ran past the site of Babylon. Koldewey’s explorations were indeed well timed; yet his was by no means the first modern study of Babylon. Throughout the nineteenth century, a steady stream of individuals and groups had offered speculative interpretations of the site, encompassing wildly varying degrees of precision, elaboration and visibility. During the earlier part of the century, visitors had included John Macdonald Kineir, Claudius James Rich, Sir Robert Ker Porter, and Colonel Henry Rawlinson. Henry Layard had excavated on behalf of the British Museum in 1850–51. Fulgence Fresnel had directed the state-sponsored French Expédition scientifique en Mésopotamie from 1852 to 1854.59 An 1879–82 campaign, again on behalf of the British Museum, was entrusted to Hormuzd Rassam, an Iraqi who had previously worked for Layard. And in 1888, J. P. Peters, a Yale

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graduate who had also studied in Berlin, briefly considered launching an American mission to Babylon. Notwithstanding occasional bouts of rigorous research, these explorations were often marked both by confusion and by impressive feats of speculative imagination, advancing competing theories as to the location and identity of the various sites described in Babylon’s textual histories. There was disagreement not only on the location of Babylon’s defining tower but also on the line of its legendary boundary walls: although this was accepted to have been, at one time, the world’s largest city, there was massive disagreement as to its articulation and extent. Attempts to reconcile archaeological remains with the written texts and fragments of antiquity—Herodotus, Ctesias, Aristotle, Cleitarchus, Berossus, Philo, Diodorus, Strabo, Josephus, Quintus Curtius, Arrian—were conspicuously unsuccessful.60 The Tower of Babel itself was identified with remains at sites including Borsippa (Birs Nimrud, the tower of Nimrod), Dur-Kurigalzu (Aqar Quf ), and the mound of Babil, among others.61 There was little in the way of systematic excavation; instead, these studies had the effect of depositing further layers of obfuscation onto the Tower’s existing false identities. Koldewey’s intervention, in contrast, was groundbreaking in more ways than one. Conditions were ideal for his enterprise, funded both by the Kaiser and by wealthy captains of industry. The excavation took full advantage of Germany’s highly developed archaeological technologies, noted for their rigorous scientific precision and for their unusually careful recording methods— enhanced not only by photography but also by the prior architectural training of many of the participants.62 As a young man, Koldewey (1855–1925) had studied architecture in Berlin, Munich and Vienna; and although he soon found himself drawn not to new construction but to old, his primary interest always remained architectural. He and his team produced spectacular drawings— plans, sections, elevations, perspectival renderings—that served both to document what was found to be present and to re-imagine what was deemed absent. The contrast between these two modes—documentary and imaginative—was sometimes extreme, and never more so than

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1.21, 1.22 (top) Friedrich Wetzel, site plan of ­Etemenanki precinct, 1910. (bottom) Robert Koldewey, Etemenanki reconstruction drawing, 1918. This drawing was in part the result of a misinterpretation of ancient inscriptions: Koldewey over­ estimated the relative dimensions of the tower’s upper levels, prompting a reconstruction with minimal setbacks and thus a massive and compelling monumentality.

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in the case of the ruins of the Tower of Babel. What proved, in fact, to be the real site of the Etemenanki temple-tower was first tentatively identified in 1901; but it was not until 1913, when groundwater levels were sufficiently low, that the conjecture could be confirmed. The connection might have been made rather earlier, since the British Museum, the Louvre, and the University Museum in Philadelphia had from the 1880s onward been in possession of cuneiform inscriptions that could have identified the site. These took the form of small, profusely inscribed clay barrel cylinders, deposited in the building foundations, according to standard Babylonian practice, for the very purpose of reminding posterity of the building’s origins. In this case, they recorded the ziggurat’s construction, and had in fact been found on the site of Etemenanki by locals quarrying brick. But they reached the international antiquities market without provenance—serving to validate, no doubt, the warning on the ace of diamonds against the trafficking of undocumented artifacts.63 Instead, a 1910 plan of the site, drawn by a member of Koldewey’s team, shows the as-yet unexcavated ruins of Eteme­ nanki. The character of its remains is distinctly unpromising in comparison to other elements on the site. ← Fig. 1.21 The drawing resorts to modeling conventions that are not architectural but topographic: contour lines suggesting rude, misshapen mounds of earth, comparing unfavorably to the sharply articulated outlines of the surrounding precinct. In contrast, Koldewey’s monumental pen-and-ink drawings of a reconstructed Etemenanki ziggurat are among the monument’s most compelling representations. ← Fig. 1.22 Although still inaccurate, they are the first modern images powerful enough to begin to displace in the popular imagination the sixteenth-century inaccuracies of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel spirals in Rotterdam and Vienna. But Koldewey’s team also offered three-dimensional reconstructions: the products of its modelling skills can still be seen in Berlin today. And the archaeologists’ ambitions did not end with scale models in painted cardboard. Although completed only after Koldewey’s death, the rebuilding in Berlin of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate and Processional Way was itself an enterprise of stupendous

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scale—“perhaps the most complex and impressive architectural reconstruction in the history of archaeology.”64 A shipment of 400 crates, containing approximately 100,000 glazed brick fragments, reached Berlin in 1903; an additional 300,000 fragments would eventually find their way back to Germany via the BaghdadBasra railway. After a meticulous process of chemical preservation, the fragments were painstakingly reassembled into compositions that would come to be their museum’s greatest attraction, built out to the maximum dimensions that could be accommodated within the building’s architectural constraints.65 Opening to the public in 1930, this resurgent architecture emerged in time to influence the rising generation of Germany’s architects. Albert Speer and his circle can be counted among the growing number of devotees of Babylon’s historical reconstruction—and massive ambition.66 Saddam Hussein’s later reconstruction at Babylon, itself informed, ironically, by the structure in Berlin, is rather smaller.67 Indeed, the excavation itself was a colossal project, ­organized much along the lines of a construction site—albeit for a form of construction that was subtractive rather than additive. Massive quantities of material were removed with the help of a network of double-rail site tracks. → Fig. 1.23 The project extended over the span of 18 years, employing an army of laborers numbering in the hundreds at any given moment. One of the architects who worked with Koldewey at Babylon would later write in his obituary that “Koldewey took on the most gigantic task that any excavator ever assumed—to dig up Babylon. No comparable task remains for any one else.”68 Not since Alexander the Great’s soldiers dismantled the remains of Etemenanki had the site seen concerted efforts at such a scale, nor would it again be occupied by such a well-­ marshalled force until the establishment of Camp Babylon.69 Like Alexander, Koldewey was forced to abandon his enterprise. Although he rarely returned to Berlin during the period of excavation, preferring to remain on site at Babylon, his eventual retreat to Germany was precipitated by the approach in 1917 of the British Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force, advancing toward Baghdad from the south. His plans remained incomplete, cut short by war. He never returned to Babylon, and he died in 1925.

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1.23 The view from above: (top) the start of ­Koldewey’s excavations around the Ishtar Gate, showing the deployment of the site railway, 1902; and (bottom) progress of ­excavations south of Etemenanki, ca. 1911.

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But he had already done more than enough to ignite public fascination for Babylon’s architecture. Or perhaps one might speak more accurately of fueling an already established fascination. After all, it is clear that dreams of Babylon in general—and of Babel in particular—were far from absent from the architectural imaginations of the nineteenth century, whether in Europe or, for that matter, in America. Examples are plentiful. One need only glance at ticket sales for the thousands who lined up in London to see John Martin’s Fall of Babylon, or recall the passage of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris in which the motif of Babel acts as metaphor for the triumph of the book over the edifice. In his fresco for the stairwell of Berlin’s Neues Museum, Wilhelm von Kaulbach presented the Tower as one of six critical turning points in humanity’s cultural history, and in speaking to his students John Ruskin painted Babel as a monument to mankind’s most exuberant pride, as the archetype of all towers, and as a marker of architecture’s supreme capacity to perpetuate memory. One may find allusions to Babel in accounts of the Nineveh Court at London’s Crystal Palace and in Charles Burton’s proposal to reconfigure the Palace into a tower of astonishing height; conversely, Babel was invoked in protests against the construction of the Eiffel Tower. And throngs attended Imre Kiralfy’s Fall of Babylon, “The Grandest, Historic, Biblical, Dramatic and Musical Spectacle Ever Seen,” one thousand performers strong—Babylon rebuilt on Staten Island and later touring with the Barnum and Bailey Circus.70 Indeed, Babylon was far from absent from the nineteenth-­century imagination. And already there were stirrings of the idea that Babel could be interpreted as a paradigm that might be positive rather than negative, suggestive rather than cautionary. But it was the early twentieth century that saw the most dramatic resurgence of Babylon.

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Elements of this text were developed in Kyle Dugdale, “Die Materielle Richtung der Utopieen: Uriel Birnbaum’s Contribution to Sloterdijk’s Spheres,” in “Architecture and Utopia,” ed. Nathaniel Coleman, special issue, Utopian Studies 25, no. 1 (2014): 194–216; “City of God: On the Longing for Architectonic Perfection,” in The Individual and Utopia: A Multidisciplinary Study of Humanity and Perfection, ed. Cameron Ellis and Clint Jones (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 179–99; “They Too Were Silent,” Perspecta 48, Amnesia (2015): 108–17; and Babel’s Present (Basel: Standpunkte, 2016).

1

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Min­nea­ polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), described in “Peter Sloterdijk,” Semio­text(e), accessed July 1, 2020, http://­ semiotexte.com/. 2 Bruno Latour, “The Space of Controversies: An Interview with Bruno Latour,” New Geographies 0 (2008): 124. 3 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, trans. Wieland Hoban, vol. 1, Bubbles: Microspherology (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2011), 10. 4 Peter Sloterdijk, “Spheres Theory: Talk­ ing to Myself about the Poetics of Space,” Harvard Design Magazine 30 (Spring/ Summer 2009): 127. 5 “Bubbles: Spheres Volume I,” Semiotext(e), accessed July 1, 2020, http://semiotexte. com/. 6 Sloterdijk, Spheres, 1:25. 7 Ibid. 8 For this statement in context, see the reply by Descartes to the seventh set of objections to his Meditations on First Philosophy: In Which Are Demonstrated the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul, in René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 366. 9 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 502. 10 Ibid., 691–701, 627. 11 Sloterdijk, Spheres, 1:56. 12 Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (London, 1624), 1. 13 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “The ‘Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism’ (Berne, 1796),” trans. H. S. Harris, in Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770–1801, by H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 511.

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68 14 See Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, vol. 2, Perspectives of World-History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928), 90, quoted at Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, trans. Wieland Hoban, vol. 2, Globes: Macrospherology (South Pasadena, CA: Semio­ text(e), 2014), 250–51. The formulation “World-history is urban history” is drawn from Spengler’s table of contents. 15 Sloterdijk, Spheres, 2:292–93. 16 Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:90. 17 Sloterdijk, Spheres, 2:252. 18 Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:90. 19 C. Leonard Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees: A Record of Seven Years of Excavation (London: Ernest Benn, 1929), 21–30. Woolley’s identification of Ur as Abraham’s birthplace has been disputed. There is also no etymological link between the prefix “Ur” and the name Ur. 20 For an account of the reign of the god-king Shulgi see H. W. F. Saggs, Babylonians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 85–90. For the Eridu Genesis see Thorkild Jacobsen, The Harps that Once . . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 145–50. 21 Woolley states that “the Ziggurat of Babylon, which in Hebrew tradition became the Tower of Babel, now entirely destroyed, . . . was but a repetition on a larger scale of the Ziggurat at Ur” (Woolley, Ur of the Chaldees, 119). 22 See W. Gunther Plaut and David E. S. Stein, eds., The Torah: A Modern Commentary, rev. ed. (New York: Union for Reform Judaism, 2006), 69–70, 77–78, 82–83. 23 Sloterdijk also cites another long-standing object of architects’ fascination, Noah’s Ark (Spheres, 2:237–49), understood as a vessel of primarily symbolic significance in the textual narratives of human consciousness (“Whoever wants to find the ark must be able to read,” 242). He applies its narrative to the social structures of modernity, in which self-contained subcultures navigate the unrelenting flood of contemporary complexity. Appealing to Nietzsche’s Gay Science, he turns to the paragraph (“In the horizon of the infinite”) that immediately precedes the more celebrated account of the madman, to assert that today even the hope of dry land is gone (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 119). 24 Strabo, Geography 16.1.5.

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Babel Resurgent 25 Robert Koldewey, Das wieder erstehende Babylon: Die bisherigen Ergebnisse der deutschen Ausgrabungen (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1913), v. 26 Sloterdijk, Spheres, 2:288. 27 Ibid., 2:306. 28 For the catalogs, see Béatrice André-Salvini, ed., Babylone (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2008); Babylon: Mythos und Wahrheit, vol. 1, Mythos, ed. Moritz Wullen and Günther Schauerte, and vol. 2, Wahrheit, ed. Joachim Marzahn and Günther Schauerte (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2008); Irving L. Finkel and Michael J. Seymour, eds., Babylon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Joan Aruz, Kim Benzel, and Jean M. Evans, eds., Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium BC (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 29 “Record de fréquentation pour le Louvre,” Le Parisien, September 1, 2009. 30 Promotional material for “B . . . comme Babylone” (2007, 52 minutes), written by Christine Tomas and directed by Bernard George, produced by the Louvre with Editions Montparnasse and Les Films du Tambour de Soie, accessed January 22, 2013, http://www.editionsmontparnasse. fr/, my translation. 31 The images drew on a 1547 etching by Cornelis Anthonisz, “The Fall of the Tower of Babel” (at Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett), on a detail of one of the sixth-century lion reliefs from the Processional Way (also in Berlin), and on a film still from Douglas Gordon’s 2006 “Black and White (Babylon).” 32 “Exhibition and Museum Attendance Figures 2009,” The Art Newspaper 212 (April 2010): 23–30. 33 Jonathan Jones, “Babylon at the British Museum: ‘The Tower of Babel is not a Myth,’” Guardian, November 19, 2008, accessed January 29, 2013, http://www. guardian.co.uk/. 34 Holland Cotter, “Global Exchange, Early Version,” New York Times, November 20, 2008. 35 Cheryl Rodewig, “Geotagging Poses Security Risks,” Army.mil: The Official Homepage of the United States Army, March 7, 2012, accessed July 1, 2022, https://www. army.mil/. 36 Thomas Harding, “Terrorists ‘use Google maps to hit UK troops,’” Daily Telegraph, January 13, 2007. 37 Julian E. Reade, “Disappearance and Rediscovery,” in Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 17, and Irving L. Finkel and Michael J. Seymour, Babylon: City of

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Wonders (London: British Museum Press, 2008), 67. Uday Hussein served as publisher of Iraq’s most influential newspaper, Babel; his younger brother Qusay was heir apparent. See Roberto Parapetti, “Babylon 1978–2008: A Chronicle of Events in the Ancient Site,” Mesopotamia 43 (2008): 134. See Michael Roaf, Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (Arlington, VA: Stonehenge Press, 1992), 199, and Chris Scarre, “An Oasis Hanging in the Balance,” Times (London), August 3, 1991. John E. Curtis, “The Site of Babylon Today,” in Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 213. See, for example, the assertion that the “transformation of Babylon into a military base must be seen as putting the seal on a victory, as it had been for Cyrus and Alexander,” at Parapetti, “Babylon 1978– 2008,” 135. For a summary analysis by the Keeper of the Department of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum, see John E. Curtis, “The Present Condition of Babylon,” in Babylon: Wissenskultur in Orient und Okzident, ed. Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, Margarete van Ess, and Joachim Marzahn (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 3–17. Marni McEntee, “Marines Encounter History in Babylon,” Stars and Stripes, June 6, 2003, accessed July 1, 2022, https:// www.stripes.com/. Juliana Gittler, “Babylon an Oasis for Troops,” Stars and Stripes, July 9, 2003, accessed July 1, 2022, https://www.stripes. com/. Daniel Taxson, “The Lost City of Babylon,” Dan in the Desert (blog), September 2, 2004, accessed July 1, 2022, http:// www.taxson.net/. Laurie Rush, “Dealing the Heritage Hand: Establishing a United States Department of Defense Cultural Property Protection Program for Global Operations,” in Archaeology, Cultural Property, and the Military, ed. Laurie Rush (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 90. For images of Fort Drum, see Laurie Rush, In-­­Theater Cultural Resources Training Assets: Construction Specifications (Fort Drum, NY: Department of Defense, 2006). For the training module on Iraq (its opening page headed by an image of the site of Babylon), see Department of Defense CENTCOM Historical/Cultural Advisory Group, Cultural Property Training Resource: Iraq (2010), accessed July 1, 2020, https://www.cemml.colostate.edu/.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 47 Victoria Schlesinger, “Desert Solitaire,” Archaeology (Archaeological Institute of America) 60, no. 4 ( July/August 2007): 9. 48 See Johann Kräftner, “Der Babylonische Turm—ein Archetyp abendländischen Bauens,” in Der Turmbau zu Babel, ed. Wilfried Seipel, vol. 1, Der babylonische Turm in der historischen Überlieferung, der Archäologie und der Kunst (Milan: Skira, 2003), 87–94. 49 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 79. 50 Anne Barnard, “Atop Spiral Minaret, Army Sniper Teams Take Aim,” Boston Globe, January 28, 2005. See also “Ancient Minaret Damaged in Iraq,” BBC News, April 1, 2005, accessed July 1, 2022, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/. 51 On the interaction between military and archaeological interests, see the report by the International Law Advisor to the Office of The Judge Advocate General, Geoffrey S. Corn, “Snipers in the Minaret—What Is the Rule? The Law of War and the Protection of Cultural Property: A Complex Equation,” The Army Lawyer ( July 2005): 28–40. 52 “Satellite Imagery Analysis: CCHAG Specialists Pinpoint Cultural and Archaeological Sites and Subsurface Remains Using Satellite and Infrared Technology,” Combat Command Cultural Heritage Action Group, accessed January 17, 2013, http://cchag.org/. 53 Joachim Marzahn, “Koldewey’s Babylon,” in Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 50. 54 John Malcolm Russell, Report on Damage to the Site of Babylon, Iraq, Cultural Heritage Center, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Department of State (2010), 492. 55 See Joris D. Kila, “The Role of NATO and Civil Military Affairs,” in Antiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection After the Iraq War, ed. Lawrence Rothfield (Plymouth: AltaMira Press, 2008), 184. Kila argues (186) that better communication among coalition forces could have minimized the ruin of Babylon. 56 Neil MacFarquhar, “Hussein’s Babylon: A Beloved Atrocity,” New York Times, August 19, 2003. 57 Ralf-B. Wartke, ed., Auf dem Weg nach Babylon: Robert Koldewey—Ein Archäologenleben (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2008), 5. 58 Robert Koldewey, The Excavations at Babylon, trans. Agnes S. Johns (London: Macmillan, 1914), vi.

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70 59 Julian E. Reade, “Nineteenth-Century Exploration and Interpretation,” in Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 34–35. 60 Julian E. Reade, “Early Travellers on the Wonders: Suggested Sites,” in Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 112–17. 61 Andrew George, “The Truth About Etemenanki, the Ziggurat of Babylon,” in Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 126. 62 Maria Gabriella Micale and Davide Nadali, “‘Layer by Layer . . .’ Of Digging and Drawing: The Genealogy of an Idea,” in Proceedings of the 51st Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, ed. Robert D. Biggs, Jennie Myers, and Martha T. Roth (Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2008), 405–14. 63 See Richard S. Ellis, Foundation Deposits in Ancient Mesopotamia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). For more on the Etemenanki cylinders, see George, “The Truth About Etemenanki,” 128–29. 64 Michael Seymour, “Robert Koldewey and the Babylon Excavations,” in Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 43. 65 See Ernst Walter Andrae and Rainer Michael Boehmer, Bilder eines Ausgräbers: Die Orientbilder von Walter Andrae 1898–1919, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Mann, 1992), 34, 40, and Beate Salje, “Robert Koldewey und das Vorderasiatische Museum Berlin,” in Wartke, Auf dem Weg nach Babylon, 140–41. 66 Anthony Vidler, “The Space of History: Modern Museums from Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier,” in The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts, ed. Michaela Giebelhausen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 178. 67 See Maria Gabriella Micale, “European Images of the Ancient Near East at the Beginnings of the Twentieth Century,” in Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archaeology in the Lights of Its History, ed. Nathan Schlanger and Jarl Nordbladh (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 191–204. 68 Oscar Reuther, quoted in C. W. Ceram [Kurt Wilhelm Marek], The March of Archaeolog y, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), 225. 69 Strabo notes that Alexander intended to repair the ziggurat; “but it would have been a large task and would have required a long time (for merely the clearing away of the mound was a task for ten thousand men for two months), so that he could not finish what he had attempted; for immediately the king was overtaken by disease and death” (Strabo, Geography, trans.

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Horace Leonard Jones, vol. 7 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930], 199). 70 See Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), 178–79; Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris [1831], trans. Isabel F. Hapgood, 2 vols. (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1888), 1:191–206; Dan Karlholm, Art of Illusion: The Representation of Art History in Nineteenth-Century Germany and Beyond (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 235–45; John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, 1849), 164, and Lectures on Architecture and Painting (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1854), 39–42; Austen Henry Layard, The Nineveh Court in the Crystal Palace (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854), 7–38, and Charles Burton, “Proposal for the Conversion of the Great Exhibition Building into a Prospect Tower 1,000 Feet High,” The Builder 10, no. 482 (1852): 280–81; Ernest Meissonier et al., “Les artistes contre la tour Eiffel,” Le Temps, February 14, 1887; and Burke O. Long, “The Circus,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture, ed. John F. A. Sawyer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 365–80.

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2. Architecture as ­Metaphor

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ARCHITECTURE AS METAPHOR

Uriel Birnbaum Late in 1939, shortly after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, the English scholar C. S. Lewis preached a sermon at Oxford in which he addressed the value of academic learning during a time of crisis. The scholar, he argued, is a man who has lived in many times and in many places; such a man “is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village.” He is “in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”1 Uriel Birnbaum was such a man. He lived in many places, both geographically and intellectually. Perhaps it is also true to say that he lived in more than one time. He was born in 1894 and came of age during a period when the emerging twentieth century had not yet confronted its peculiar demons. But when they made their appearance, he was—for better and for worse—well positioned to recognize them. His own experience was cosmopolitan and politically informed, and as a young man he was shaped by three quite different worlds: the once-­thriving Jewish culture of Austro-Hungarian Galicia, a region which stretched from Auschwitz in the west to Czernowitz in the east; the expanding metropolis of Berlin, capital of the German Empire, during the years of rapid change that preceded World War I; and the deeply cultured city of Vienna during the period of reckoning that followed. His story is thus fully steeped in the long ferment of the years leading up to World War II. But his intellectual formation was also shaped by older and more distant intellectual traditions. The youngest of three sons, Uriel was born in Vienna to Jewish parents of strongly intellectual inclinations, possessed of modest material means but considerable cultural capital. His

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75 father, Nathan Birnbaum, was descended from a prominent line of Eastern European scholars and rabbis, and was himself an author and public figure. Convener in 1908 of the world’s first Yiddish language conference, he had coined the term “Zionism,” and was for many years one of its leading voices—even though he later abandoned its ambitions and turned instead toward Jewish Orthodoxy.2 This shift away from temporal and territorial goals cannot have gone unnoticed by his children.3 Uriel’s eldest brother Solomon studied architecture between 1910 and 1912 at the Technische Hochschule Wien, where Richard Neutra and Ernst Freud (son of Sigmund) were among his fellow students; but he eventually abandoned the discipline for a career in palaeography, filling the world’s first chair in Yiddish at the University of Hamburg. In 1933, he moved to the University of London, where he contributed to the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls before emigrating to Canada.4 The middle son Menachem, artistically inclined but largely self-taught, made his career as an editor, illustrator, and caricaturist, based in Berlin from 1911 onward. With just one year separating him from his younger brother Uriel, the two siblings had much in common. Menachem moved to the Netherlands in 1933 but was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and is believed to have died at Auschwitz in 1944. Uriel himself grew up in Vienna and in Czernowitz, the “Vienna of the East,” at the farthest edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He showed an early aptitude for drawing and for writing, and kept abreast of contemporary developments in politics, literature, and art. In 1911, aged 17, he moved with his family to Berlin, where he remained until the outbreak of war in 1914. This was a Berlin of imperial ambition and cosmopolitan anxiety, of rapid growth and restless tension, with a desire to become a Weltstadt, a world city powerful enough to compete with other world cities, a city of the future. It was a city of floating Zeppelins and of blazing electricity. It was the city of Peter Behrens’s new AEG turbine factory, temple to modernity and power. It was also home to others who were invested in the architectural future of Germany—from Franz Pfemfert, promoter of

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Expressionism and editor of the literary-political magazine Die Aktion, to Bruno Taut, whose work during this period culminated in his plans for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition. Yet Birnbaum’s autobiographical notes suggest that he spent a good portion of his Berlin years in the city’s libraries, reading broadly: archaeology, art history, astronomy; the Nibelungenlied, Dante, Dostoyevsky. He was particularly fascinated by antiquity, and his reading list provides evidence not only of the period’s fascination for the Orient, but also of the influences that would shape his own later work—among them, Augustine’s Confessions and City of God.5 Berlin, during this period, was more obviously a city of man. Besides reading, Birnbaum was also writing, and drawing. In 1912, he joined his elder siblings in establishing a commercial graphic art studio: the Birnbaum Brothers Atelier. → Fig. 2.1 Solomon had recently cut short his architectural studies at the Technische Hochschule Wien, but neither Uriel nor Menachem possessed much formal training in design. Uriel enrolled briefly at the Berlin Secession under Konrad von Kardorff.6 But surviving examples of sketches from these years → Fig. 2.2 do not suggest any obvious sympathies between his still tentative experiments and the established style of his teacher; and in the end, Uriel, like his brother, remained primarily self-taught. His later accounts claim indifference to the commercial graphic art business. “I was not particularly interested, and instead devoted myself entirely to books, to museums, and to solitary walks. During my Berlin years, it was among the forests and lakes of the surrounding area, among the museum collections, and in the great public libraries that I felt at home. . . . During those three years of almost uninterrupted reading, I acquired a foundation of knowledge upon which to build my subsequent work.”7 To which museum collections does this refer? Birnbaum had a particular fascination for Egyptology, and this interest would doubtless have taken him to the Neues Museum; but just a block away, at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, were the materials that had already reached Berlin from Babylon. → Fig. 2.3 The fact that Uriel’s brother Solomon would eventually resume his studies not

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2.1, 2.2 (top) Stamp for Atelier Brüder Birnbaum graphic art studio, Berlin, December 1913. (middle and bottom) Uriel Birnbaum, untitled sketch, ­undated, and self-portrait in pen and ink, marked “12/3 1913, midnight,” both in pen and ink, and both drawn on the ­reverse of cancelled address cards: details.

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2.3 Babylon in Berlin: the installation of the ­Department of the Ancient Near East ­collection at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin, between 1904 and 1929.

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at a school of architecture but in a department of oriental ­studies— after wartime service he studied at the universities of Vienna, Zurich, Berlin und Würzburg—would suggest a family interest in Berlin’s growing collection of Babylonian artifacts. Certainly Uriel would have had the opportunity to acquaint himself with recent archaeological developments. Having grown up in Vienna, he would have been familiar with Bruegel’s Tower of Babel at the Kunsthistorisches Museum; but the fruits of more recent explorations were now closer at hand than ever before. Babylon, after all, had reached Berlin; indeed, Birnbaum’s years in Germany ­coincided with one of Koldewey’s periodic return visits from the field.8 Alongside his dismissal of the commercial graphic work of these years, Birnbaum would later express dissatisfaction with his concurrent experiments in writing and drawing—which proved unable to alleviate a discomfort that hung over his metropolitan experience. “The city of Berlin was entirely dissimilar to my beloved native city of Vienna. I found it to be oppressive. And the aimless longing of youth tormented me. I drew and I wrote . . . but it did not help.” And yet this experience was formative for his later fascinations. “From that period there emerged fantastical drawings, partly architectural, in which the style of my later cycles was already taking shape.”9 This is among the first references to architecture in the work of Uriel Birnbaum. He was not, himself, an architect; and yet architecture played an important role in his thinking. He dealt not only with the work of architecture as a built object, but also with unbuilt architecture, the architecture of the imagination. And he dealt especially with architecture as a discipline of metaphorical, even metaphysical significance. That is, Birnbaum understood architecture as a symbol for other, less singularly physical, concerns. But he was also painfully conscious that metaphors have a way of shaping reality, for better or for worse. One of Birnbaum’s designs from this period is a 1912 book cover for “The Story of the City of Brass,” one of the tales in One Thousand and One Nights.10 The design is undeveloped, and it is

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unclear whether it was produced for a specific commission; but the particulars of the book itself are interesting. It tells of an archaeological expedition that loses its way in the desert, before stumbling unexpectedly upon various abandoned architectures: first, a spectacular but empty palace; and second, an architecturally astonishing walled city of brass, “a city than which eyes had not beheld any greater. Its pavilions were lofty, and its domes were shining; . . . its trees were fruitful, and its gardens bore ripe produce. It was a city with impenetrable gates, empty, still, without a voice.”11 But the city of brass is resonant with metaphorical significance. Its architecture supports an allegorical reading—it registers, quite literally, the transience of mortal existence. An inscription on a tomb in the palace bears the following words: In the name of God, the Eternal, the Everlasting throughout all ages; in the name of God, who begetteth not, and who is not begotten, and unto whom there is none like: in the name of God, the Mighty and Powerful: in the name of the Living who dieth not. . . . O thou who arrivest at this place, be admonished by the misfortunes and calamities that thou beholdest, and be not deceived by the world and its beauty, and its falsity and calumny, and its fallacy and finery; for it is a flatterer, a cheat, a traitor. Its things are borrowed, and it will take the loan from the borrower: and it is like the confused visions of the sleeper, and the dream of the dreamer. . . . These are the characteristics of the world: confide not therefore in it, nor incline to it; for it will betray him who dependeth upon it.12 Another inscription elaborates on this theme: O son of Adam, how heedless art thou of the case of him who hath been before thee! Thy years and age have diverted thee from considering him. Knowest thou not that the cup of death will be filled for thee, and that in a short time thou wilt drink it? Look then to thyself before entering thy grave.

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Where are those who possessed the countries and abased the servants of God and led armies? Death hath come upon them; and God is the terminator of delights and the separator of companions and the devastator of flourishing dwellings; so He hath transported them from the amplitude of palaces to the straitness of the graves.13 The story records further inscriptions, all reinforcing a similar message: The Emir Musa paused, extolling the perfection of God (whose name be exalted!), and his holiness, and con­templating the beauty of that palace, and its strong construction, and its wonderful fabrication in the most beautiful form and with the firmest architecture; and most of its decoration was in ultramarine. Around it were inscribed these verses: Consider what thou beholdest, O man; and be on thy guard before thou departest; And prepare good provision, that thou mayest enjoy it; for every dweller in a house shall depart. Consider a people who decorated their abodes, and in the dust have become pledged for their actions. They built; but their buildings availed not: and treasured; but their wealth did not save them when the term had expired.14 It is above all a story of the failure of human endeavor, and of “a vanished potentate’s futile—and in the end ludicrous—efforts to resist mortality.”15 The City of Brass, named for its towers, is “a paradigm of misdirected efforts at transcending the limits of humanity.”16 The world’s glories crumble to dust; only God is everlasting, and worthy of worship. And—significantly—this lesson is most easily learned through an examination of its architecture. It is not altogether surprising to discover that during this same period, Birnbaum reported a growing commitment to a

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different form of reading. “At home, in the meantime, I read the Bible—at one point I read almost nothing else for half a year.”17 → Fig. 2.4 This “eager Bible-reading” (eifriges Bibellesen) was in turn tied to a growing dissatisfaction with the conditions of modernity, both political and intellectual. Birnbaum understood contemporary culture as being informed by an overly simplistic mechanistic-materialist positivism built upon a substructure of unfounded self-confidence—a worldview (Weltanschauung) that in turn informed what he described as an aspiration to world dominance (Weltherrschaft). In his dissatisfaction Birnbaum was not alone: there were many others, not least among the Expressionists, who might have sympathized with his frustrations; but for him this dissatisfaction—which may be compared with the experience of the young Augustine—fueled an inner turmoil that in due course prompted an oath of allegiance not to the city of man but to the city of God. Birnbaum’s dissatisfaction, in other words, prompted a turn to the God of Israel. His notes suggest that he was unpersuaded by intimations of the death of that God. Instead, in 1913 he announced his conversion to a traditional Jewish faith. “After many years of being influenced by a preoccupation with materialist-­monistic science, a quick progression, through inner turmoil, toward Jewish-oriented belief in God. Became a believer overnight in 1913.”18 At first glance Birnbaum’s biblical enthusiasm and subsequent conversion might be assumed to run counter to the enthusiasms of his generation and of his age more broadly. But the announcement of his conversion compares favorably to the obligatory accounts of transformative revelations, hallucinations, visions, and mountaintop experiences of so many artists and architects in and around the circles of Expressionism: Hermann Obrist, Wenzel Hablik, Otto Bartning, Erich Mendelsohn, Hermann Finsterlin.19 They, too, expressed a disillusionment with materialism and positivism. And yet, if Birnbaum’s experience was similar in kind, it was different in orientation. In his case the conversion was a turn to religious orthodoxy: the vision of the heavenly city served not as a prompt to the design of structures on earth, but as a reminder of the glory of a transcendent God.

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It is clear that Uriel was influenced by his father’s thought; yet in some regards he was altogether independent. A series of pen and ink drawings, dating to 1924, includes parallel portraits of father and son; → Fig. 2.5 and upon comparison of the two images it is immediately clear that the clean-shaven, bareheaded son did not adopt the full measure of his father’s Orthodoxy.20 Indeed, the image of the polished, urbane European is supported by photographs from all stages of Uriel’s life. Yet Uriel Birnbaum was neither stereotypically orthodox nor typically modern. This had consequences; later accounts would describe him as a man rejected both by religious and by irreligious circles. It is also worth noting that during the early decades of the twentieth century, arguments about the nature and authority of the biblical text were not unconnected to the ongoing excavations in Babylon. This was admittedly not the main interest of the lead excavator. Koldewey’s years in Babylon contributed to his growing reputation as a man who was highly respected but also capable of being uncooperative, and he took care to protect his project from the meddling of divergent interests back in Berlin.21 He also possessed a sense of humor that could be wielded with aplomb against colleagues and visitors: he was quite willing to provide, for the more orthodox among his guests, site tours of Babylon that came complete with visits to the remains of the fiery furnace and lion’s den made famous by Daniel.22 Babylon’s biblical fame was, after all, of ambivalent value. On the one hand, it was a primary reason for public interest in his enterprise. It provided the impetus for a constant stream of publicity—witness the multiple editions of Koldewey’s publications.23 His discoveries contributed credible information to what was already a vigorous scholarly interest in Assyrian and Babylonian research, whether textual, legal, linguistic, cultural, political, agricultural, artistic, economic, or religious: an interest in a civilization that seemed, usefully, to rival the authority of Greece and Rome.24 On the other hand, Babylon was also available for exploitation in the service of other causes. Back in Berlin the Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch, co-founder of the German Oriental Society,

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2.4 “Eager Bible-reading” (eifriges Bibel­lesen): Uriel Birnbaum’s Bible.

2.5 His father’s son: Uriel Birnbaum, self-­ portrait and portrait of Nathan Birnbaum, 1924.

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gave a series of lectures, from early 1903 onward, that formed the basis of what would come to be known as the “Babel and Bible” debate. Delitzsch had spent four months on the site of Babylon during 1902,25 and his first lecture was given to the German Oriental Society itself, with Kaiser Wilhelm in attendance; at the emperor’s request it was repeated at Berlin’s imperial palace a few weeks later, and further lectures followed the next year.26 The controversy grew at each repetition. The debate centered, in part, around a confrontation between building and text, between revelations uncovered by contemporary archaeological research and those contained in Hebrew scripture. The authority of modern scientific research was marshalled in service of the one against the other—and this time, in contradiction of Victor Hugo’s famous prediction that the book would kill the building, architecture seemed to have the upper hand. Delitzsch’s second lecture concluded with the following appeal: Let us not blindly adhere to antiquated, scientifically disproved dogmas, even perhaps out of fear, lest our belief in God and genuine piety thereby suffer injury. We consider everything earthly as in an active state of flux; standing still is synonymous with death. We gaze there at the mighty, pulsating power, with which the German Reformation serves great nations of the earth in every aspect of human work and human progress! However even the Reformation is only a stage upon the way to the goal of truth, which has been placed before us by God and in God. To that end we strive in humility, but with all the means of free scientific investigation, cheerfully declaring our allegiance to the further development of religion, which has been seen from the high watch-tower with eagle glance and proclaimed as the lively slogan for the whole world.27 The premises underlying this appeal may be compared to more recent invocations of Babylon by Peter Sloterdijk. Despite the required reference to a “belief in God,” the phrase “further development of religion,” echoing similar language used by Kaiser

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Wilhelm himself weeks earlier, interprets religion as a human construct capable of modern design improvements. This is in essence a distinctly modern worldview, sharply contrasted to the premise that underlies the inscription reproduced in Dürer’s sixteenth-century Underweysung der Messung: “The Word of God endures forever.” ← Fig. 0.3 Indeed, Delitzsch suggests in his final sentence that this worldview is itself enabled by an elevated vantage point—by the view from the tower. It is a disconcerting view. One might glance at the solitary figure in the drawing reproduced within Sloterdijk’s narrative, ← Fig. 1.1 captioned “Uriel Birnbaum, The Apparition of the Heavenly City (1921–22).” Well might that figure, high up on the ledge of a structure of his own design, raise his arm above his head as he looks out over the void beyond, as if shielding himself from some startling apparition. Within Sloterdijk’s text that drawing accompanies the claim that architectural aspiration is ultimately responsible for the very conception of the Judeo-Christian God. Delitzsch, too, argues that a return to Mesopotamian origins serves a clarifying function, stripping away misconceptions about the nature of the Judaeo-Christian God. In his case, too, Babylonian antiquity is marshalled in support of an argument that modern conceptions of God must expand in order to keep pace with an expanding global awareness. And it is the work of Koldewey, the architect and archaeologist, that provides the pretext for that expanded conception of God. Here too, even if unwittingly, the architect bears responsibility for the shaping of God. Delitzsch’s increasingly bold assertions culminated in the publication in 1920 and 1921 of Die große Täuschung (The great deception), two volumes whose title designated the Hebrew Old Testament an unreliable historical record.28 By this stage, the author’s anti-Semitism was clear; in publishing the book, “Delitzsch added his voice to those in Germany who sought to eradicate all things Jewish.”29 But in 1914, all of this was yet to come. Germany plunged into a more immediate conflict, and the outbreak of war marked the end of Birnbaum’s time in Berlin. With regard to temporal authority, he remained throughout his life a firm believer in the

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legitimacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; and he signed up for military service with some enthusiasm, like many among the Expressionists—serving first as an official in Vienna, then as an infantryman, decorated for bravery in the field, promoted to platoon leader, then sergeant, then lieutenant.30 In fact the period of the war proved to be one of considerable artistic productivity, with a particular focus on architecture; Birnbaum’s notes suggest sustained explorations, mentioning the completion in 1916 of an unpublished ink wash cycle entitled “Die Gebäude” (The buildings) and the production in 1917–18 of “a few hundred” sketches of cities—some likely exhibited later in 1918 at the Vienna Secession.31 The titles of these sketches, gathered in the Uriel Birnbaum archive in Potsdam, suggest that they sub­sequently formed the basis for the illustrations to one of his most striking books, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, developed in 1920–21. After serving on the Russian front, Birnbaum ended up, like many others, at Isonzo; one imagines Hablik, Mendelsohn and Birnbaum on one side of the trenches, Antonio Sant’Elia on the other, all furiously sketching dream cities. The year 1916 saw an exhibition of 65 pieces in Vienna’s Kunstsalon Heller, 1917 the inclusion of 14 drawings in an exhibition of Austrian art in Stockholm, and early 1918 the display of 21 drawings in the spring exhibition of the Vienna Secession. And Birnbaum also kept reading and writing; between 1915 and 1916, several of his poems were published in Die Aktion; and a poem entitled “Geschichte” (History) was included in the 1917 Aktionsbuch. His subsequent correspondence makes it clear that at this point he was already acquainted with the work, and enthusiasms, of contemporary Expressionists such as Hablik. In 1917, Birnbaum was severely wounded in action, leading to the amputation of his left leg. But a slow recovery allowed time for more dedicated artistic endeavor; and while in hospital he also fell in love with his (Catholic) nurse, Rosa Grieb, whom he later married. Returning to Vienna after the war as an invalid and a decorated hero, he embarked on a period of furious production, contrib-

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uting to a brief flowering within Jewish culture of the book arts, of which Der Kaiser und der Architekt might be seen as a culmination. He mounted exhibitions in the Wiener Zeitkunst gallery in 1919 (310 pieces) and again in 1924 (300 pieces), with another exhibition in Czernowitz in 1923. His wartime experiences provided the material for his most successful book of poetry, In Gottes Krieg (In God’s war), published in 1921 and illustrated in a style reminiscent of Scheerbart; for this he was awarded, in 1923, Austria’s top literary award, the Bauernfeld Prize. Around the time of his 1919 Wiener Zeitkunst exhibition, he had already published an essay entitled Gläubige Kunst (Faithful art), in which he weighed the preoccupations of Expressionism against what he identified as the valid ends of art.32 He mailed copies of both of these texts to Thomas Mann in 1921, prompting an exchange of correspondence to which this account must return in greater detail. It is hard to keep up with Birnbaum’s production during these years. In 1921, he published two collections of lithographs: the cataclysmic Weltuntergang (End of the world)—a counterpart of sorts to Taut’s Weltbaumeister—and Das Buch Jona (The book of Jonah) in collaboration with calligrapher Julius Zimpel, nephew of Gustav Klimt. He also published Albom, a collection of portraits of Yiddish authors and of characters in their works. The year 1924 saw the publication of three further volumes, heavily illustrated, all with the same publisher, who promptly went out of business that same year: Der Seelen-Spiegel (Mirror of the soul), a book of 120 caricatures; Moses, a profusely illustrated re-telling of the biblical story; and, most significantly, Der Kaiser und der Architekt. That book, too, is in some regards biblical. But its story is also architectural. And it is clear that once again, architecture is here understood as a metaphor—as representative of broader concerns. What is its story?

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Der Kaiser und der Architekt The world is at peace; the years of fighting are long past, and war has given way to prosperity. Even the poor experience only modest need. Under the reign of a young emperor, the world seems almost utopic; and yet . . . In the city of the emperor there lives an architect. He is a great and successful artist; but he is also proud, an agitator with a thinly-veiled contempt for his emperor, dismissive of the very idea of his sovereign’s authority. One night the young emperor has a dream. In his dream he sees a sumptuously beautiful heavenly city. It is small, and yet infinite in its smallness: a city of towering walls and glowing colors, crowned with an immense golden dome. The vision fills the emperor with a deep, overflowing joy. Waking from this dream, he longs for its return—but in vain. Sleepless nights give way to dreamless sleep. He consults his doctor and his priest; but the doctor cannot prescribe a remedy and the priest cannot produce a city. The emperor wastes away in sorrow and longing. Suddenly he remembers his architect—and sends for him, filled with new hope. The architect is admitted to the palace. Although dressed in his formal tail-coat, he stands there in silent contempt. He barely listens to his emperor’s description of the dream; he understands only that he, the architect, is to build a city: a city of high towers, crowned with a great dome. Ever eager for commissions, his imagination is already overflowing with fantastical schemes. Locating a suitable site on a sheer and massive mountain, he plunges into furious production. Not long after, he presents his drawings to his patron. Unaccustomed to architectural conventions, the emperor is unable to read the drawings; and instead, the condescending architect provides a quick color sketch. Despite outward similarities, the emperor does not recognize in this design the city of his dream; but he attributes this to his own inexperience and grants permission to proceed.

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A massive building campaign ensues, marshalling armies of laborers who approach their work with an enthusiasm born of love for their emperor. The site is overrun by machinery, scaffolding, cranes, tracks, dust, and noise. Longing to see the emerging city, the emperor visits the site, and is confronted by walls towering to dizzying heights, fantastical machineries, workers beyond number—and in the midst of it all, the heroic figure of the architect. The emperor is troubled, for none of this—the effort, the dust, the sweat, the noise—corresponds to the tenderly fragrant peace of which he had dreamed. Although filled with misgivings, he says nothing, determining to reserve judgement until the city is complete. Finally, the work is finished. In eager anticipation, the emperor returns to the site. But he recognizes straight away that the effort was in vain. The traces of the workers’ toil testify to the project’s failure. The city is certainly beautiful—indeed, its beauty is astonishing—but it is not the city of his dream. It is a beautiful earthly city, but it is not the heavenly city for which he longs. Angered by the emperor’s disappointment, the architect vows to build a second city, and, if need be, a third and a fourth and a fifth, until he has delivered on the emperor’s dream. Again he searches for a site; again he selects a mountain crest; again there is dust and there is noise. Filled with renewed hope, the emperor is determined not to inspect this new site until the work is complete, so that no consciousness of toil and sweat might disturb his first impression. But his patience proves insufficient, and he travels to inspect the city while it is still taking shape. It is being built of vast blocks of white marble; the serenity of shimmering colonnades and the shining whiteness of great terraces beneath a brilliant blue sky fill him with anticipation. Upon the city’s completion the emperor returns. The memory of his dream has by now begun to fade; and yet he recognizes instantly that this is no equal for the heavenly city. This city is clean and chaste, and it fills him with a sense of contentment. But he is aware that it was not this that formed the object of his long-

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ing, but rather something else, something that he cannot explain even to himself, something that was not only beautiful and quiet and pure, but also grave and wild. He thanks his architect but admits that this is not the fulfilment of his dream. Emperor and architect go their separate ways; and the emperor surrenders to abject longing. Defiant, the architect insists that he can build his young emperor’s dream. He swears that he can translate even the impossible into reality. He begins work on a third city—without troubling to inform his patron. The emperor is aware of this; but he does not stop the work. Instead, he waits, conceiving of his patience as an act of devotion which God might reward with success. Only upon the announcement of the city’s completion does he travel to inspect it. It is a walled city, built on the far northern sea under a cloud-white sky. Smooth, unpunctured, dizzyingly high walls are folded into countless angles and corners. This great city possesses a tragic dignity and a grave strength. But this too is insufficient. Something else dwelled in the heavenly city, something higher, something ineffable. The emperor returns once again to his palace. Furious, the architect is convinced that his entire lifetime’s achievements will be called into question if he proves unequal to this task. In mounting defiance, he builds a fourth city. The emperor’s expectations for this city are low; but he visits nonetheless. Set on a hill, the city’s exterior seems, at first, to be formless—even nondescript. But upon entering, the emperor is immediately struck by the logic of the architect’s creation. It is a city of steep steps and endless stairways, rising and falling between soaring white walls, crossing and extending toward apparently endless prospects, alive with light and shadow. The emperor recognizes that the city of his dream bore a similar trait of inner expansiveness contained within minimal dimensions. And yet there it was a miracle; here it is a mere trick of ingenuity. He remains unsatisfied. This time the architect laughs. The emperor’s opinion means nothing to him. He is building for himself, measuring each new city against the picture of a celestial city that his eyes have not

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seen, but that his intuition deems worthy of the most passionate longing. He himself recognizes that the city of steps is insufficient. And he proceeds immediately to the execution of a fifth city. It is a city of inhabited bridges: again beautiful in its own way, but unequal to the vision, and again rejected even by the architect, who is now driven not by the emperor’s sorrowful longing, but by his own defiant ambition. He creates a steeply stacked island city on a barren rock far out in the ocean, the open sea surging around its lowermost structures, the uppermost peak rising high above like the point of a spear. This, too, fails to satisfy. He builds a grey city, of low, compressed houses overlooked by great towers, designed in quiet memory of old, long-abandoned styles. It is beautiful; it is evocative; but it is not quite right. The next city is white—deliberately, scandalously white—but its gentle beauty is unequal to that of a heavenly city. The next scheme is dark, wild, low-slung: a heavy purple, born of hatred for the emperor and resentment of the architect’s own failures. It is great and powerful; but it, too, is unequal to the dream. The tenth city is composed of green, distorted forms. The eleventh is red, enclosed within a tapering wall, its buildings towering upward toward its center such that the entire city resembles an enormous pyramid. The next is a noble scheme in yellow, built on a great bay; a further city is blue, with an immense dome crowning the severe mass of a palace at its center; the next is black—a massive square tower rising into the sky from among an indistinguishable throng of houses. And, to follow, a multicolored city: wild, grotesque, and beautiful—but no heavenly city. The architect abandons experiments in form and color in favor of research into new materials, enlisting substances that have never before been used for building. This kindles a renewed hope. He builds a city of porcelain, for which he must assemble new factories. At the same time he develops facilities for the production of giant crystals of artificial quartz for the construction of the next city. Both are extraordinary; but neither is successful. The architect retreats with resentment into his glass-walled studio; and the emperor, imagining him to have given up, is sorrowful and yet relieved, considering it better to live in despair

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than to intoxicate himself with expectations that are forever being dashed. But the architect will not admit defeat. Afraid that his own death will thwart his ambitions, he is driven to ever wilder exertion. He plans half a dozen cities at once, in the hope that just one of them might measure up to the dream; and having been disappointed by stone and by earth, he decides to experiment with metals. At this news the emperor is torn between joy and fear, weariness and hope. But he grants permission to proceed, places at the architect’s disposal all his treasures, and levies additional taxes on his people. And the architect establishes more factories: foundries, smelting furnaces, glassworks, rolling mills. Both architect and emperor are by now older. The emperor has grown detached and distant from the life of his people, the realization of his dream his only hope. Years pass; but the architect, ever unsatisfied, does not call for an inspection; instead, he builds ever new and ever different cities, devising ever more singular schemes, constructing towering mountains of ever more gigantic buildings. Unable to wait any longer, the emperor sets out on a tour. It is an extraordinary journey. Old and bitter, he sees nothing of the plight of his people, who have been ruined by their emperor’s fantastic architectural appetite. His subjects have become, for him, mere phantoms—he has no eye for the realities of this world; what is real is the image of the heavenly city that still stands in his mind, sharp and radiant. The cities that he encounters are astonishing. A city of heavy lead, a city of sharply articulated brass, a city of ornate silver. A city of gold, that has cost the lives of entire peoples; a city of iron, set high upon a rock, enclosed within a sheer rectangular wall. A city of mother-of-pearl, rising to the heavens in precise yet fluid forms. A nested city of glass, into which the emperor’s gaze sinks as into the ocean. A city that lies beneath a monstrous super­structure from which is suspended a dazzling artificial light. A black city composed of cubic stone, entirely enclosed by a kaleidoscopic roof of continuously shifting colored glass. There is something in its constant change that reminds the emperor of the heavenly city—but there it was in earnest, here it is a mere

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game; that was sacred, this a mere performance. He sees another city, a city of gems in the shape of a crown, for which his own coffers have been plundered. There is something here, too, that reminds him of the heavenly city’s splendor; but again he moves on. He sees a great city with an exterior that resembles a singular smooth tower, but an interior that reveals endless levels of houses and streets suspended one above the other. He sees a city of closely-packed structures piled up like a towering mountain, higher than the clouds. He sees a great forest of smooth, inhabited columns, a city of terraced pyramids, and a city of polygonal shafts, carved out to permit habitation. And finally, he finds himself face to face once again with the architect, who has just completed a city of heavy granite, of simple form and oppressive force. It is the 33rd city. Emperor and architect confront one another in silence. Both have grown old. For the first time, the emperor recognizes that his architect’s life has been wasted—as has his own—in a desire for the unattainable. He recognizes that his life is in danger of trickling away into death without ever finding its way to peace. Weary but newly self-aware, he renounces any further ambition. Thanking the architect for his trouble, he returns home. Watching him leave, the architect’s contempt is gradually overcome by a dismay that deepens into horror. He recognizes that for 30 long years this project has been his life’s sole purpose, the only thing that has held together the brittle shell of his old body. What remains, now that this purpose has faded? His future lies before him like a terrifying wasteland. Stooped and broken, he too returns home. But this weakness is temporary. In the cold severity of the studio, his pride reawakens. The emperor might capitulate; but he, the great artist, will not. He is convinced that a sufficiently compelling presentation will win his master over to new projects— or, at least, to one last project, the greatest and most beautiful of all. And he rushes back to work. Many weeks later, his eyes reddened by long nights without sleep, unwashed and unkempt, still wearing his work-stained drawing-smock, he returns to the palace. Startled, the emperor

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grants an audience, determined to resist the architectural temptations that are sure to be presented. The architect unrolls his gigantic plans. The emperor, now experienced in the reading of drawings, recognizes instantly that this new project will far surpass anything built thus far. It is a city of cities, a tower piled up to the heavens. Hesitating, he looks over the top of the drawings to meet the gaze of the architect. But what he sees is a wild, staring face filled with pride and contempt; and he steps back in horror, raising his hand as if to ward off a devil. Feverishly, he collects himself and dismisses his architect. The architect replies with scorn. But the emperor has grown quiet. In this final scheme, in this tower of cities that storms the heavens, the emperor has recognized the sinfulness of his l­ ong-held desire. It is wrong, he asserts, to aspire to heavenly perfection; to expect to banish all suffering and inequality from the world; to attempt to build—here on earth, with earthly means—an ­altogether beautiful city. Full happiness and complete perfection are to be hoped for only beyond this world. Only God in his sovereignty is entitled to construct a fully perfect city. With remorse the emperor admits that he has squandered his life and sacrificed the happiness of countless others in chasing his futile dream. He staggers up the steps to his throne and buries his face in his hands. For a while all is silent; and then the architect laughs. It is the laughter of anger and of contempt. With savage stride he rushes out, his face disfigured like that of a devil. He will not accept defeat. He will proceed on his own. He will build one last city, the crowning construction of his lifetime’s work. He will build the heavenly city, and he will build it out of sheer spite. The project is immense, and the architect’s exertions superhuman. Earth, steel, concrete; bottomless shafts, never-ending walls—the city grows upward: a mountain of buildings, a tower of cities set upon one another. Its construction pushes the b ­ oundaries of production capacities, rising ever higher until the palaces above seem from below to be mere huts. It resembles the blossoming of

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organic material; and yet in fact all is ruled by the architect’s ordering spirit. The architect himself is quite sure that this will be the fulfilment of his striving: an otherworldly, heavenly, eternal city. After years of work, the city is complete. The architect’s plans have been realized, and all traces of toil have been removed. Standing at the very summit, the architect contemplates the success of his masterpiece, in a spirit of triumph and pride. Meanwhile, the emperor in his palace gazes in inner turmoil toward this great tower. It is not the heavenly city of his dream; but it is certainly superhuman, towering against the sky like a well-ordered mountain; and even if one final and indescribable touch of transcendence is missing . . . might that transcendence not, after all, have been merely a dream within a dream, his memory’s wishful fabrication?—in which case . . . could this not be the true heavenly city? Suddenly, there appears in the sky around the tower a growing brightness. Light! Splendor! Glory! The emperor is cast into despair. He cannot believe that it is granted to mankind to realize heaven on earth. But this growing splendor plunges him into doubt. This visible sign contradicts his belief. The architect sees it at exactly the same moment, standing high on his tower. Minutes later he finds himself gazing into a bottomless gulf, billowing with mist and flooded with color, driving, spinning, lifting like a whirlwind. The mist rises from the gulf: radiant, brilliant, growing . . . the heavenly city! At first, the architect assures himself that this is the delusion of a mind strained by years of overexertion. But the higher the city rises, the more clearly he recognizes that this is no illusion, but real—as real as the city of stone beneath his feet. And in just a few minutes this city has outdone the hard labor of his many years. Anger and defiance rise up within him. He will deny this even if it is true. He will insist on the impossibility of such a city, on the impossibility of heaven, on the impossibility of God. This, here, is truth: the stone beneath his feet, the city that he himself has built, established for all ages according to undeviating mathematical laws. Faced with the radiant city—so wonderfully near, so unattainably far—the architect feels the stir of trembling adoration in the depths of his soul; but he gathers all the defiance

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of his unyielding reason, and fights off the delusion of his feelings. Perhaps this heavenly city is real, after all; perhaps there is a heaven; perhaps there is a God . . . But what of it? It is no match for his city, his tower . . . It is in any case so unlikely, so impossible in its construction . . . The architect scoffs at the very idea of a God who could disregard his own natural laws. The heavenly city fades away into lifting clouds, growing ever fainter. And then, all of a sudden, those clouds tear apart in deafening thunder and blinding flashes of lightning. The scornful words die on the architect’s lips. The tower is struck; it cracks; it trembles; it gives way; and the architect falls backward into the crashing rubble, crushed by the ruins of his own construction. The emperor, feeling the ground tremble, stumbles to his knees. A final blow—and all is quiet. As the dust clears, he sees the heavenly city once again, taking the place of the tower. His own long, weary life seems to sink away; and with it the wasted years, the misdirected effort, the misplaced anxiety. The architect’s heaven-storming project has been destroyed by heaven itself. The vision fades; but he is left with an enduring conviction. The heavenly does not belong upon earth. What is needed instead is a patient submission before God. One day he will see the heavenly city once again, in the dawning light of a new morning.

The Emperor and the Architect Der Kaiser und der Architekt carries a subtitle: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern. The Emperor and the Architect: A Tale of Fifty Pictures. The story of Der Kaiser und der Architekt is first and ­foremost just that: a story, a tale, a Märchen—as its subtitle insists. But in this narrative the discipline of architecture is understood as a metaphor for broader concerns. Architecture represents the aspiration to a constructed utopia—urbanistic, political, cultural, religious. And yet the story also has a bearing on architecture itself. Its implications would seem, upon first reading, to be ­discouraging at best. The account ends, after all, with the death of the architect. It is a horrible death, rendered all the more explicit

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by an exceptionally vivid accompanying illustration. It is not the architect but the emperor who survives; and if the emperor can be assumed to live out his days in patient submission, the architect perishes in an act of unrepentant defiance, maintaining to the end a misplaced confidence in the capacities of his ­discipline. In this story, after all, it is without question the discipline itself that falls short. It is difficult to find fault with the talents of the architect; the error must be more fundamental: a disciplinary failing. There is no hint that the architect is anything other than a consummate master of his art. He is introduced to the reader as an artist of international renown, a household name. And his architectural schemes are not merely speculative, but backed by a well-established record of built work: he is a Baumeister, a master builder, with extensive experience of high-profile projects at the most ambitious scale. If he is also something of an agitator and skeptic, that fact alone might not be calculated to provoke the modern reader’s opprobrium; after all, is not any artist worthy of the name expected to function as an irritant within a complacent society? Are such figures not expected—or even required—to challenge the culture’s prevailing pieties? And project conditions are ideal. The scale of the commission is prodigious, and the client totally invested in its success. Site selection is left to the architect’s complete discretion, the schedule is open-ended, and the budget seemingly unlimited. The architect himself is the epitome of exceptional talent, furious energy, endless imagination, and total commitment. He has at his disposal a massive workforce, equipped with the most modern technologies; he has ample opportunity for material research and technical development; and he has complete control over the mechanisms of production and delivery. The reader is left, it might seem, with little alternative but to attribute the failure to architecture itself, and to conclude that, in this instance, architecture’s greatest ambitions, products of the most fantastic invention and of the strictest rigour, have failed. The story’s ending might lead the reader to conclude that the author is instead asserting his allegiance to the emperor and

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to his ultimately obedient piety. And that endorsement would seem to devalue the art of the architect, denying the ­discipline’s trans­formative potential. Indeed, the book’s final image shows the emperor kneeling in prayer—a prayer of submission—within an architectural environment that is conspicuously more ­con­ventional than any of the schemes illustrated on the previous pages. And yet . . . If modern readers are liable to find the repentant emperor’s submissive piety irritating, the architect remains, to the end, a distinctly heroic, if tragic, figure. Is it not he, after all, who has supplied the material for the narrative? Is it not he who has captivated the reader with his astonishing inventions? Does the building of his great tower not preserve something of its allure?

A Crumbling Modernity Birnbaum’s publications represent just a fraction of his output. Throughout the twenties he took on commercial work—designs for advertisements, postcards, bookplates, book illustrations, and book covers, some for children: a cover for an edition of two legends by Tolstoy, another for an edition of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, re-used for a translation of Ruskin’s Of Kings’ Treasuries, a cover for Gottfried Keller’s Tanzlegendchen (A little legend of the dance), and illustrations for translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Between 1925 and 1926, he contributed poems and illustrations to the children’s weekly Der Regenbogen (The rainbow), compiled in a 1926 book entitled Allerlei absonderliche Tiere (Peculiar animals of all sorts). He produced a host of unpublished drawings, often arranged in cycles, just like the illustrations to Der Kaiser und der Architekt. Between 1919 and 1920, he produced a 50-piece cycle entitled Von Welt zu Welt (From world to world), also in colored ink. To these one might add several thousand poems, often conceived in great overwhelming waves. Only some of these pieces are explicitly biblical in character; but almost all are informed by the same condemnation of modernity’s godlessness, like a prophet calling the people to repentance

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in the face of impending judgement. And while he had no qualms about seeing the hand of God acting within history, even through the terror of war, Birnbaum invariably points to a final judgment awaiting beyond history. He was conscious that such prophets are rarely welcome. Certainly his own career took a sharp downward turn, albeit for other reasons too. A 1936 booklet entitled Uriel Birnbaum: Dichter–Maler–Denker (Uriel Birnbaum: Poet, artist, thinker), by Graf Polzer-Hoditz, chief of cabinet to the last Habsburg emperor, lists under “works in progress” an essay entitled “Der Aufstand Babylons: Weltgeschichte der Gegenwart” (Babylonian uprising: Contemporary world history).33 Its very title is hardly calculated to signal the author’s willingness to accommodate the inclinations of contemporary culture. And so it is perhaps unsurprising to find that Polzer-Hoditz, while judging his subject worthy of nothing less than a Nobel prize, also begins the tradition, upheld ever since, of lamenting Birnbaum’s obscurity, his anonymity, his rejection even by his own. Writing of the courage of Birnbaum’s convictions, Polzer-Hoditz notes his resolve “to remain loyal, when loyalty was dangerous—even when loyalty to ancient tradition was punished with a sentence of hunger and hardship by the powers of an age that called itself new.” He also describes that new age as “searching for a way out of today’s chaos.”34 How, in times of serious danger, might one bring order to such chaos? The most immediate threat was that of Nazi power. Arrested by the Gestapo in the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, Birnbaum was at first released, apparently because of his status as a wounded war veteran; having married a Roman Catholic, he was also living in what was defined as a Mischehe—a mixed marriage.35 He had spent the previous years living in poverty, insufficiently alleviated by the receipt of a small scholarship from the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom. On the night of the Anschluss, in March of 1938, he had written a letter to his brother Menachem in the Netherlands, requesting help; but emigration proved difficult to engineer.36 At the last possible moment, in January of 1939, he escaped Vienna on a train to Holland, where a petition for a travel permit had been signed by authors and artists of all kinds.

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He fled with his sick wife, his only daughter, and an extensive archive of manuscripts, notes, and drawings.37 Birnbaum arrived in Holland on January 22, and stayed, at first, in The Hague, in the home of his brother Menachem, who had fled Berlin shortly after Hitler seized power in 1933. Uriel’s own escape into exile was accompanied by hopes for renewed oppor­ tunity. At first those hopes seemed justified. Within months he had mounted an exhibition at the distinguished Kunstzaal ­d’Audretsch in The Hague, still known for Herwarth Walden’s legendary Der Sturm exhibition of 1916 (“Expresssionisten, Kubisten”) which included work by Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Marc, and Georg Mucke.38 Birnbaum’s was a 178-item solo exhibition. It was followed nine months later by a more expansive 202-item show at P. Loujetzky’s Kunstzaal “Kunst Van Onzen Tijd” (Art of our time), also in The Hague.39 There was talk of further exhibitions in Amsterdam and Utrecht.40 The artist seemed to have reached a turning-point in his fortunes.

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C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time” [1939], in The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 51. Jess Olson, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity: Architect of Zionism, Yiddishism, and Orthodoxy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 20. For an animated description of Nathan Birnbaum as “ideological father of Zionism” see Charles Raddock, “The Uncompromising Birnbaums, Pere et Fils,” Jewish Forum 35, no. 9 (October 1952): 166–67. See Solomon A. Birnbaum, The Qumran (Dead Sea) Scrolls and Palaeography (New Haven: The American Schools of Oriental Research, 1952), and Erika Timm, “Solomon Birnbaum’s Life and Work,” trans. Ruth Segal, in Salomo A. Birnbaum: Ein Leben für die Wissenschaft, vol.  2, Paläographie, ed. Erika Timm, Eleazar Birnbaum, and David Birnbaum (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), ix–xxv. Uriel Birnbaum, “Selbstbiographie,” in Die Exlibris des Uriel Birnbaum: Gefolgt von einer Selbstbiographie des Künstlers, ed. Abraham Horodisch (Zurich: Verlag der Safaho-Stiftung, 1957), 87. Georg Schirmers, ed., Menachem Birnbaum: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen Künstlers: Eine Ausstellung der Univer­si­ täts­bibliothek Hagen (Hagen: Fern­Uni­ versität Hagen, 1999), 10. For Kar­dorff’s friendships with Mies van der Rohe, Ernst Cassirer, and Albert Einstein, see Jutta Hülsewig-Johnen and Thomas Kellein, eds., Der Deutsche Impressionismus (Cologne: DuMont, 2009), 106. Uriel Birnbaum, “Mit Bild und Wort: Ein Essay über mich selbst” (Vienna: unpublished manuscript, 1929), 3, Uriel Birnbaum Archive, uncatalogued, my translation. Ralf-B. Wartke, foreword to Wartke, Auf dem Weg nach Babylon, 6. Ibid., 3–4, my translation. Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/183. Edward William Lane, trans., “The Story of the City of Brass,” in Stories from the Thousand and One Nights (New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1909), 326. To this story one might compare Rudyard Kipling’s 1909 poem “The City of Brass.” Ibid., 317. Ibid., 326. Ibid., 331–32. Andras Hamori, “An Allegory from the Arabian Nights: The City of Brass,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 34, no. 1 (February 1971): 10.

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102 16 Ibid., 15. 17 Birnbaum, “Mit Bild und Wort,” 3, my translation. 18 Birnbaum, “Selbstbiographie,” 88, my translation. 19 See Wolfgang Pehnt, Die Architektur des Expressionismus, 3rd ed. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998), 28, and Volker Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 159–60. For the claim that in the modern view religion is in any case “not far removed from alcohol and its effects, or from the dreams induced by opium,” see Friedrich Weinreb, Roots of the Bible: An Ancient View for a New Outlook, trans. N. Keus (Braunton: Merlin, 1986), 56. 20 See also Friedrich Weinreb, “Es war vor fünfzig Jahren: Zwei Verleumdungen und ihre Folgen,” in “Weinreb erzählt,” ed. Heini Ringger, special issue, Die Wolke 8, no. 2 ( July 1987): 23. 21 See the account by the German Oriental Society at “Stadt des Marduk und Zentrum des Kosmos,” Deutsche Orient-­ Gesellschaft, accessed July 1, 2022, http:// orient-gesellschaft.de/. 22 Tilman Spreckelsen, “An den Flüssen von Babylon,” Frankfurter Allgemeine, June 24, 2008. 23 A second edition of Koldewey’s 1913 Das wieder erstehende Babylon was published the same year, a third edition in 1914, then, after a pause coincident with the start of the war, a fourth edition in 1925. A fifth edition was printed more recently. A bibliography of other texts can be found at Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 227–28. 24 See, for instance, H. V. Hilprecht’s assessment of Babylonian law in comparison to Roman law, quoted by Julian E. Reade, “Tablets at Babylon and the British Museum,” in Finkel and Seymour, Babylon, 77. 25 Friedrich Delitzsch, Zweiter Vortrag über Babel und Bibel (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1903), 41. 26 See Bill T. Arnold and David B. Weisberg, “A Centennial Review of Friedrich Delitzsch’s ‘Babel und Bibel’ Lectures,” Journal of Biblical Literature 121, no. 3 (Autumn 2002): 441–57. 27 Delitzsch, Zweiter Vortrag, 39–40, quoted in translation by Arnold and Weisberg, “A Centennial Review,” 453. 28 Friedrich Delitzsch, Die große Täuschung, 2 vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-­Anstalt, 1920–21). 29 Arnold and Weisberg, “A Centennial Review,” 446.

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Architecture as Metaphor 30 For an account of the high hopes held by Wenzel Hablik, Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, and others in their circles, see Pehnt, Architektur des Expressio­ nismus, 20–21; for discussion of Birnbaum, see 34 and 291–92. See also Georg Schir­ mers, “Nachwort,” in Uriel Birnbaum, Ein Wanderer im Weltenraum: Ausgewählte Gedichte, Vergessene Autoren der Moderne 47 (Siegen: Universität-Gesamt­ hochschule Siegen, 1990), 41. 31 Uriel Birnbaum, “Kurze Selbst­biographie,” in “Uriel Birnbaum Sonderheft,” special issue, Menorah 2, no. 5 (May 1924): 15–16. 32 Uriel Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst (Vienna and Berlin: R. Löwit Verlag, 1919), 13. A  similarly-titled but shorter essay appears in the exhibition pamphlet Uriel Birnbaum (Vienna: Verlag Wiener Zeitkunst, [1919]). 33 Arthur Polzer-Hoditz, Uriel Birnbaum: Dichter–Maler–Denker (Vienna: Heinrich Glanz, 1936), 50. 34 Ibid., 44–45, my translation. 35 Birnbaum was taken from a café on November 10, 1938: see Uriel Birnbaum to Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein, Scheveningen, January 30, 1939, in Werner Berthold, Brita Eckert, and Frank Wende, eds., Deutsche Intellektuelle im Exil: Ihre Akademie und die “American Guild for German Cultural Freedom” (Munich: K. G. Saur Verlag, 1993), 145. 36 Notes by David Birnbaum, documenting a December 2, 2011 conversation with Mirjam Birnbaum, Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto. 37 See Birnbaum’s letter of January 30, 1839 to Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein, reproduced in part in Berthold, Eckert, and Wende, Deutsche Intellektuelle im Exil, 145–46. See also his letter of January 31, 1939 (now in the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto), written from Scheveningen to his elder brother Solomon in London. Birnbaum’s library followed him into exile. 38 The exhibition “Werken door Uriel Birnbaum” ran from May 8 to 27, 1939. For discussion of the Sturm and Birnbaum exhibitions, and of Herman d’Audretsch’s subsequent discrediting for having dealt during the German occupation in work confiscated from Jewish ownership, see Anita Hopmans, Disputed Ownership: On the Provenance of two Works by Jan Toorop in the Boymans Museum, trans. Lynne Richards (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2006), 12 and 28. In 1925, the gallery had also mounted an exhibition of the work of Hermann Finsterlin.

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103 39 This exhibition opened on February 26, 1940, and appears to have run until April 10, 1940; see “Uriël Birnbaum,” Het Vaderland, Feburary 27, 1940, evening edition, C1, and the typewritten catalogue in the Uriel Birnbaum Archive (1/492). A March 19 review (“Kunst Van Onzen Tijd,” De Tijd, March 19, 1940, evening edition) suggests that the exhibition was extended “wegens groote belangstelling” (due to great interest). For an extensive review, see Josiah Willem de Gruyter, “Uriel Birnbaum, denker, dichter, teekenaar,” Het Vaderland, March 8, 1940, evening edition, C1. 40 Thomas Biene, “Uriel Birnbaum, ignoriert, emigriert, vergessen: Stationen im Leben eines prophetischen Dichters, Denkers und Zeichners,” in Öster­reichische Exilliteratur in den Niederlanden 1934–1940, ed. Hans Würzner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986), 147–48.

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Architecture After God

3. The Claims of ­Antiquity upon ­Modernity

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THE CLAIMS OF ­ANTIQUITY UPON ­MODERNITY

To deal with the topic of Babel today is to wrestle with the question of the relationship between biblical antiquity and the modern world. What good are such stories now? Are they merely of archaeological or historical interest, at best? Do they not, in the end, represent a smaller and more primitive world, one that had yet to deal with diverse and complex issues of truly global dimension? The biblical text is not, after all, addressed to the modern reader. As one author has put it: Sheep, cattle, camels, slaves, tents, gods, they pertain to antiquity. The Bible does not mention radio, nuclear energy, aeroplanes, trade unions, democracy, and the UN, it does not deal with the great migration of the nations, the discovery of the Americas, any more than with the world wars and Auschwitz.1 Yet this characterization has not always rung true.

Ter Braak In May 1937, the Dutch critic Menno ter Braak (1902–1940) published an essay in which he addressed one of the apparent contradictions of the age: the perceived tension between the growing body of modernity’s scientific knowledge and an increasing confusion in the mind of the modern individual.2 Grasping for an analogy, Ter Braak turned to architecture. More specifically, he turned to the motif of Babel, understood as an immense tower built of numberless individual units, striving toward formal perfection yet lacking in overall cohesion and susceptible to ruin at any moment.

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107 For Ter Braak, as for so many others among his contemporaries, Babel was an obvious point of reference. The structure appears repeatedly in his texts and documents, always loaded with implied significance. It appears in a blistering 1929 critique, by Ter Braak, of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis.3 It appears in a 1932 reference to the poems of Pieter Cornelis Bouten in the literary magazine De Gids.4 It appears in the lines of a sixteenth-century hymn entitled “De Heer is Koning in Israël” (The Lord is king in Israel), to be sung to the tune of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” quoted in a 1934 review of an anthology of Dutch poetry.5 It appears in a letter from Emmy van Lokhorst enclosing an excerpt from her new novel De toren van Babel (The tower of Babel), published that same year.6 It appears in an approving mention, in a January 1937 review, of a poem by Hendrik Marsman, himself influenced by German Expressionism, likewise entitled “Toren van Babel.”7 Ter Braak was not a religious man: on the contrary, he was known for his committed distrust of dogma, whether pious or political—a distrust frequently tied by biographers to his interest in Nietzsche. And yet the biblical account of Babel seems to have resonated with his experience of a modernity that was teetering on the edge of ruin. That experience approached a tipping point in 1939, at a time when the modern skepticism of Menno ter Braak was confronted with the orthodox belief of Uriel Birnbaum. It is unclear exactly when each first became aware of the other; but in July 1938 Ter Braak was a co-signer, along with 24 other Dutch artists and authors, of the petition to grant Birnbaum exile in Holland.8 In the weeks following his arrival in The Hague, Birnbaum and Ter Braak met repeatedly. Ter Braak’s diary for 1939 indicates frequent appointments: Friday, March 3 (3:00–3:30), Monday, March 6 (3:00–3:30), Saturday, March 18 (12:00), Friday, April 28 (2:30), Saturday, May 6 (dinner at the Culclub), Monday, May 9, Friday, May 12 (2:00–3:00 at Kunstzaal d’Audretsch), Saturday, May 13 (postponed), Wednesday, May 24 (11:00 at Kunstzaal d’Audretsch), Tuesday, May 30 (11:30 at Café Riche), Tuesday, June 13 (12:00 at Café Riche), Friday, July 14, and Thursday, August 10 (4:00–4:30).9 Ter Braak’s biographer has suggested that some of these meetings lasted for hours.10

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Ter Braak scheduled two of the appointments to take place at the d’Audretsch gallery, coinciding with the first exhibition of Birnbaum’s work. One was planned for the day following the exhibition’s opening. The previous night, the two men had met for dinner; and they met again at the Café Riche the week after the closing. What did they discuss, and what attracted Ter Braak to the person of Uriel Birnbaum, whose disposition was in so many ways dissimilar to his own? Léon Hanssen’s biography of Ter Braak suggests that amid the growing crisis of impending violence, the modern critic found a measure of comfort in Birnbaum’s work: Ter Braak discovered a greater measure of truth in the world of imagination that grew out of the Jewish faith than in the objectively reported liberal logic that rolled daily off the newspapers’ presses. The artist told him of a project for an epic novel entitled The Redemption of the World, laid out as a great anti-utopia. It denounced those who promise to improve the world, who gain power and control over humanity through abstract slogans, but who ultimately overwhelm them with torrents of blood and tears. As Birnbaum explained, a world striving for efficiency and material prosperity manifests, at its core, a terrible and deadly numbness, precisely because it destroys that part of the individual that is most personal and intangible.11 Birnbaum’s Redemption of the World, although conceived in 1927, existed at that moment only in manuscript form, and remained unpublished until his death.12 But it was of similar persuasion to other, more accessible material. Hanssen notes that Birnbaum showed Ter Braak a copy of Der Kaiser und der Architekt. A typewritten text in Birnbaum’s archive indicates that the Kunstzaal d’Audretsch exhibition included fifteen plates from “De keiser en de architect”; the other plates were available for inspection.13 Hanssen concludes:

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This encouraged Ter Braak. In fact, it inspired him. He was often overcome by fear of a heavenly utopia that would be translucent and hermetically sealed, like life in a jam jar. But from Birnbaum he learned that fear can also inspire creativity.14 On March 8, 1940, the Dutch daily Het Vaderland, a liberal newspaper that published a weekly column by Ter Braak, printed a review of Birnbaum’s exhibition at “Kunst Van Onzen Tijd.” This was the second article on Birnbaum to run in Het Vaderland during the exhibition, and it was noticeably longer than the previous review. Written by the newspaper’s arts editor, Josiah Willem de Gruyter, the piece was entitled “Uriel Birnbaum: Thinker, Poet, Illustrator.” While suggesting with admiration that emphasis should be placed on the term thinker, De Gruyter also called attention to Birnbaum’s drawings, and to his use of sharply defined outlines filled with vivid color, executed in a swift, virtuoso technique that permitted no subsequent correction. In fact, he described Birnbaum’s approach as a form of graphic writing: There is no noticeable hesitation or aesthetic uneasiness, and there is also no question of naturalism or of ­stylization, but only an efficient, obedient recording or writing of images that appeared to the mind of the artist.15 This is a curious description. The word “obedient” is particularly striking when used in reference to the notion of “images that appeared to the mind of the artist.” One recalls that Der Kaiser und der Architekt is itself built around the conceit of such a vision, and around the question of its obedient recording, its faithful reproduction in material form. But the associations are ambiguous, tying the role of Birnbaum as artist not only to the obedient figure of the emperor but also to the defiant figure of the ­architect. De Gruyter continues, drawing on an earlier article by illustrator and critic Cornelis Veth, also among the signators of the 1938 appeal on behalf of Birnbaum:

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Veth has pointed out a remarkable characteristic: that Birnbaum builds more than he draws. “His imagination is more constructive than impulsive. Expression is conveyed through volume, site, proportion and form.” He adds: “It is characteristic of the feverish and yet deliberate nature of this fantasy that the artist is not readily satisfied by a single realization of his idea, preferring to shape it in a series of iterations, a cycle. This overflowing impetus could seem obsessive, were it not for the organized, natural, ­systematic, logical way in which each idea is handled, and the tranquillity with which the arguments are exhausted.” It is indeed striking how resolutely and deliberately Birnbaum assembles his dream cities . . . with the steady hand of an architect.16 Here too, it is Birnbaum who is associated with the figure of the architect. While it is true that Birnbaum was in some sense a skeptic, like the architect in Der Kaiser und der Architekt, his skepticism was not directed toward traditional orthodoxy, but toward the claims of modernity itself. On the other hand, it is not clear that Birnbaum could realistically be identified as an agitator. Or, at least, he did not fit the picture of a destabilising agitator in a world that was otherwise at peace. That opportunity never presented itself. And his newfound opportunities were in any case shortlived. His second Dutch exhibition closed on April 10, 1940. On May 10, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Four days later, the Luftwaffe carpet-bombed Rotterdam: modernity waging war against the city. → Fig. 3.1 As Holland capitulated, Ter Braak committed suicide via lethal injection. The notes in Birnbaum’s diary for May 14 state simply “Capitulation—terrible night,” followed on May 15 by “Dreadful morning.”17 Birnbaum himself plunged into another period of obscurity, from which he would not emerge alive. Although he remained in the Netherlands until his death, never returning to Vienna, his final years were marked by ill health, lack of opportunity, and poverty; he continued to write, but declining eyesight discouraged further artistic endeavor. A

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3.1 The ruins of Rotterdam after the German bombardment of May 14, 1940.

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close acquaintance would later state, with some pathos: “Uriel Birnbaum died in ’56. People avoided him because he spoke the truth.”18 The year following Birnbaum’s death saw the publication of an anthology of about a thousand of his poems, a small fraction of his poetic output. An obsessive self-archivist, his legacy, according to one count, includes 6,000 poems, 700 aphorisms, 35 short dramatic pieces, 13 fairy tales, 10 fantastical novels, parts of an epic novel, a great number of essays on art, literature, religion, society, and politics, and artwork organized in 31 graphic cycles, comprising 884 drawings, paintings, lithographs, prints . . .19 Most of this work never reached the public eye.

In Times of Serious Danger The darkness of World War II did not immediately extinguish Birnbaum’s artistic production. He spent part of the war in hiding. But an account of his wartime activity describes the artist’s talents as having been redirected toward forgery. That account is found in the autobiography of Friedrich Weinreb (1910–1988), who informs his reader at a critical moment in his story that his friend Uriel Birnbaum worked on an identity card for a certain Henri van Walt van Praag. “Uriel was a poet and an artist, an extraordinary man. His copies of genuine stamps were so good that no one could tell the difference.”20 The author provides few further details. Yet Birnbaum plays a more than anecdotal role in Weinreb’s autobiography. And the name Van Walt appears in other contexts also, not all of them calculated to affirm the reliability of Weinreb’s recollections. Indeed, the reader may be predisposed to question Weinreb’s account precisely because the efficacy of its author’s own wartime fabrications has been so thoroughly disputed. Friedrich Weinreb, as it transpires, is an exceedingly skilful storyteller, and many stories told about him are also stories told by him—his massive three-volume autobiography can itself be understood as an attempt to establish a definitive record of wartime events. Appearing in various guises as biblical scholar, Dutch economist, wandering Jew, hero, villain, and

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professor, Friedrich Weinreb is also, according to a more recent analysis, a pathological liar: diagnosis pseudologia fantastica.21 Van Walt’s name resurfaces in a report on Weinreb’s own wartime activities, assembled by Holland’s National Institute for War Documentation—a 1,683-page document in which the Birnbaum family features prominently.22 What is at stake? The charge against Weinreb is one of treason. According to a more recent summary, Friedrich Weinreb was a shadowy person whose cause the radicals championed in the complicated Weinreb Affair, as it came to be called, which held the public’s attention throughout the late 1960s. Weinreb was a Dutch Jew of Galician origin. . . . He became famous because of a kind of game he appears to have played with the Germans that allowed him and perhaps a few others to survive the war. At the command of a nonexistent “General von Schumann,” Weinreb created a list of Jews who were to be allowed to emigrate. Hundreds of people desperately sought to be registered.23 Should the reader trust Weinreb’s accounts? They certainly offer a persuasive perspective on the life of Uriel Birnbaum. Published in 1969, Weinreb’s autobiography is in fact dedicated to three individuals, of whom the third is “Eli Lissaur, New York,” the second, “Henri van Leeuwen, New York,” and the first, a posthumous dedicatee, “Uriel Birnbaum, Amersfoort.”24 Weinreb spoke, years later, of having shown Birnbaum around the bombed remains of Rotterdam in May of 1940,25 and his later recollections offer a striking parallel to the attitude attributed to Menno ter Braak in the months leading up to Rotterdam’s destruction: Uriel was the only person—excepting his father—who gave me any hope for humanity. Conversations with him were high points of existence [Höhepunkte des Daseins]. He was clever, witty, and deep, a human being who was himself an article of faith. . . . I knew that he was difficult. . . . But his

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impulsivity was a product of his uncompromising search for truth, his uncompromising faith.26 The relationship between Weinreb and Birnbaum came to an unhappy end—one that was not unconnected to the accusations levelled against Weinreb—as is evident from a 1987 journal article by Weinreb and a subsequent letter to the journal’s readers by Uriel’s daughter Mirjam.27 If Mirjam’s account is the more reliable of the two, as a first reading might suggest, then the reader would be advised to enjoy the dexterity of Weinreb’s biographical storytelling with circumspection. That said, it appears that Weinreb’s friendship with Uriel Birnbaum was, for many years, genuine. Born in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Weinreb served as secretary to Uriel’s father Nathan Birnbaum between 1935 and 1937; but he was known to the whole family, and his relationship to Uriel extended both before and after that employment. He later acknowledged, in an interview, his debt to both father and son: “Nathan Birnbaum, the great Jewish leader and cultural philosopher, and his son, the poet Uriel, left their mark on my life.”28 There survive enough such marks to justify a degree of guarded confidence in the ­veracity of Weinreb’s account. One of the surviving material traces of the friendship takes the form of a bookplate designed by Birnbaum in 1941. → Fig. 3.2 Beneath the words “exlibris f weinreb” can be seen Uriel’s distinctive signature, similarly present on every plate in Der Kaiser und der Architekt. The Hebrew text identifying the book’s owner frames a collection of elements of biblical and cosmological significance. At the center is a blazing sun, surrounded by shooting stars, whirling planets, and the Earth itself, rotated so as to show the outline of a Europe plunged, at that very moment, in political turmoil. The universe is in this instance encompassed, quite literally, by the unfolding of God’s law, the Torah; and both universe and law are in turn framed by the faceted geometry of an enclosing crystal. That crystal presents a distinctly architectural form, framed in metal, its construction reminiscent of a museum display cabinet, or of the larger and more fantastical constructions of

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3.2, 3.3 Uriel Birnbaum, bookplates for (left) Friedrich Weinreb, 1941; and (right) Henri van Leeuwen, 1943.

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Expressionism. One might be reminded of the forms described in Paul Scheerbart’s 1913 Lesabéndio, or of the cosmic space described in Bruno Taut’s 1920 Weltbaumeister (Architect of the world), itself dedicated to Scheerbart.29 Yet while the crystal, no less than its accompanying astral panoply, is a familiar motif of Expressionist imagery, it is here intended to symbolise the divine order, revealed in God’s law, that holds the universe in its place.30 Weinreb, after all, was “an exceedingly religious Jew.”31 If the crystalline tower of Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio has distinctly Babelic connotations, and Taut’s Weltbaumeister ends with reference to an impersonal cosmic principle, Birnbaum’s message is different. In this instance, the architect, the Weltbaumeister, is God. The bookplate speaks, in other words, of God’s law as Der göttliche Bauplan der Welt (God’s blueprint for the world)—also the title of a book by Weinreb. Bookplate design was never among Birnbaum’s primary interests—it was closer to what he referred to as “Brotarbeit” (literally bread-work): a form of employment that helped to put food on the table.32 Yet there are certain motifs that recur with notable insistence. While this is attributable in part to the identities of the individuals who commissioned Birnbaum’s artwork, it also speaks to the broader landscape of ideas within which his work can be located. Among those motifs, the distinctively architectural image of Mount Zion is especially visible: its stepped outline reappears frequently in Birnbaum’s bookplates, and its composition is closely comparable to that of the heavenly city in Der Kaiser und der Architekt.33 In some instances, there is no doubt that the motif is tied to the Zionist inclinations of Birnbaum’s clients; in other cases, it is equally clear that the figure of Mount Zion is intended to represent something else. A 1943 bookplate designed for the merchant Henri van Leeuwen, the second dedicatee of Weinreb’s autobiography, juxtaposes a silhouette of the wandering Jew, turned toward Mount Zion, with a strikingly similar rendition of New York City, its skyscrapers towering upward toward heaven, surrounded by representations of modernity’s bravest technologies: a departing steamship and a veritable swarm of propeller aircraft. ← Fig. 3.3 Yet Van Leeuwen (1888–1973), a Dutch Orthodox Jew, was no Zionist. He had been co-editor, with Nathan

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Birnbaum, of the anti-Zionist newspaper Der Ruf (The call), and was later a leader in the anti-Zionist Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization. In 1939, he sent his family to America, while himself remaining in Holland, where he was active with the Dutch resistance until being sent to Bergen-Belsen in 1944.34 But in 1943, he evidently commissioned a bookplate from Uriel Birnbaum. Its composition suggests that the figure of Zion may be juxtaposed with other, formally similar, constructions—but that the two realms are ultimately incommensurable. Nathan Birnbaum had coined the word “Zionism” but had later rejected political Zionism’s aims; and Uriel Birnbaum, too, seems interested in recovering a use of the architectural vocabulary of Zion that could point beyond the longing for a particular physical place, be it old Jerusalem or the new Jerusalem, New York City.35 After all, the wandering Jew in Van Leeuwen’s bookplate is not headed toward America, despite its evident attractions; his face is turned, instead, toward Zion, the city of God. If that orientation was appropriate for Van Leeuwen, it was equally true for Uriel Birnbaum himself. This fact is not unrelated to the causes of Birnbaum’s obscurity. Both aspects feature in Weinreb’s account of his first encounter with Birnbaum. In 1933, when Birnbaum was 38 years old and Weinreb only 22, the two men had met, by appointment, at Vienna’s Babenbergerhof café, then a fixture of Vienna’s Jewish coffee house culture. → Fig. 3.4 Weinreb’s first impression of Birnbaum was that of a deeply devout man: When I arrived he was already sitting there at a little table; and from his first words I could tell that he was a very solitary man, who was nonetheless very happy—because deeply religious. His happiness was not the product of wealth and success: both were denied him.36 Shunning platitudes, Birnbaum asked the young man what he thought of Sigmund Freud. Although Freud’s consulting rooms were only a short walk from the Babenbergerhof café, there was more to this question than a mere exchange of opinions on local

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3.4 Jewish coffee house culture: Uriel Birnbaum, “Im Café,” preparatory pencil sketch for Der Wurm, a cycle of oil pastel drawings, ca. 1918.

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Jewish personalities. In Weinreb’s answer Birnbaum might hope to discover the young man’s attitude to more complex questions— about the pathology of contemporary anxieties, the diagnosis of the modern individual’s symptomatic alienation, and the redemptive potential of psychoanalysis, itself understood as a distinctly modern response to human malfunction: a response tied, via a clearly-articulated Nietzschean lineage, to reports of the death of God. The question about Freud, in other words, was a short cut to larger questions about civilization’s discontents and the anxieties of a godless modernity.37 Weinreb notes that his own response was deemed unsatisfactory: He asked me whether I knew Freud, and what I thought of him. I replied with a polite platitude . . . but he did not like that at all. A real conversation had to offer more. For me, this was a radically new idea: that one could live in society and yet tell the truth. For him, it was only the truth that mattered: truth as it related to the whole of life. To enquire about the purpose of life was simply to ask: Is it possible, here, to integrate the eternal? . . . For him, life here on earth was related to eternity.38 Yet that orientation toward the eternal did not obviate the more immediate demands of the temporal. Birnbaum’s home was further away than Freud’s office; and he walked with difficulty: Uriel Birnbaum told me, there in the café, that he had difficulty walking, as he had a prosthesis and his leg would often bleed. He was badly wounded in the war, as you know. He lived on Cumberlandstrasse, and I knew how far that was. I had come on the tram, but he said he would walk. He had brought a bag with his picture books—Moses and The Emperor and the Architect—and was willing to sell them quite cheaply. But I was embarrassed to buy from the artist, and did not realize that he needed the money to pay for a tram ticket.39

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The reality of this neediness is attested by Birnbaum himself. A diary entry for the period reads simply “Summer ’33 and ’34 in Vienna: misery.”40 A letter to the Langen-Müller-Verlag publishing house is more explicit: My situation is unspeakable. For months now I have sunk to the condition of a beggar, and the days when need escalates to hunger add up unbearably. . . . I still accomplish a little in the way of writing, but after twelve years of such struggles for survival I am so apathetic, and so dead tired, that I no longer even enjoy it.41 Birnbaum’s appeals had little effect. Formed by the merger of two established German publishers, the Langen-Müller-Verlag could claim a sympathetic heritage. The Verlag Albert Langen had been responsible for the publication of Simplicissimus (1896–1906), and, more recently, of the Bauhausbücher series (1925–1930); and the Georg Müller Verlag, which had previously published Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio, had recently published Birnbaum’s own Moses (1928).42 But that was all past. Soon after receipt of Birnbaum’s letter, the Langen-Müller-Verlag came under the effective control of the NSDAP, rendering further publication of Birnbaum’s work impossible. This goes part of the way, no doubt, to explaining one of the enigmas that surround Uriel Birnbaum: the swift lapse into almost perfect obscurity of a once celebrated author. In 1933, precisely ten years after winning Austria’s most coveted literary award, he can be found in a Vienna café offering unsold copies of his books at discount so as to be able to afford the cost of the ­tram-ride home. Weinreb notes that “the name of Uriel Birnbaum has been utterly forgotten—it has disappeared even from ­anthologies of Austrian poetry of the period between the wars.”43 But this antipathy toward Birnbaum’s work was shared by an unlikely assortment of ­constituencies, including some from which he might have expected to receive a more sympathetic reception. He was, after all, the son of one of his generation’s most ­prominent Jewish thinkers; he had exhibited his artwork to

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critical acclaim both in Vienna and further afield;44 when a selection of his drawings was displayed in the Vienna Secession’s Ver Sacrum room for the 1918 Expressionism exhibition, the reviewer for the monthly Deutsche Arbeit (German work) singled out his work for particular praise alongside the drawings of Alfred Kubin;45 and at the start of World War I he had published poems in the left-wing journal Die Aktion, champion of German Expressionism.46 But over the space of just a few years he found himself increasingly at odds with Expressionists, Socialists, Orthodox Jews, Zionists, and anti-Semites. Weinreb explains Birnbaum’s rejection by his Jewish public as follows: “The orthodox (or ‘orthopractic’) Jews considered him an apostate; as for the others, who longed to become a nation—they said: He dreams of a messianic kingdom, of a kingdom of God, but we need something practical.”47 Birnbaum’s visions of the heavenly city, in other words, were of no earthly good. They could not even secure a seat on the tram. Weinreb notes further that Birnbaum’s contribution to a 1932 edited volume on anti-Semitism was rejected.48 To date, his most widely-circulated text is, ironically, an excerpt from a 1929 article reproduced in Theodor Fritsch’s virulent Handbuch der Judenfrage (Handbook of the Jewish question), which reached its 49th edition in 1944 and continues, even today, to sustain a readership as a neo-Nazi sourcebook.49 The text, critical of Jewish radical Marxist, r­ evolutionary, idealistic and utopian tendencies, was clearly intended by Fritsch to be self-incriminating. Birnbaum himself never recovered his former standing within public favour.50

Weinreb Friedrich Weinreb, in contrast, is amply published. The number of his titles published in German alone approaches a hundred, not including reprints or revised editions. Among these are nine volumes of autobiography. His work is available in Czech, Dutch, English, German, Hebrew, Slovenian, and Spanish. The Dutch edition of his wartime autobiography has been printed in Braille. A dedicated website makes his work available for digital download.51

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Since 1964, the Dutch Academie voor de Hebreeuwse Bijbel en de Hebreeuwse Taal (Academy for the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew language) has offered conferences, books, pamphlets and recordings. The Friedrich Weinreb Foundation, established in 1980 and based in Switzerland, exists for the express purpose of preserving and disseminating the work of the man whom it describes as one of the twentieth century’s greatest story-­tellers.52 It maintains an active program of events for which interest remains strong. His work has appealed across boundaries of nationality and confession. Despite the unmistakably Jewish, Orthodox, even Chassidic, character of his thought, he has found a public among Christians and those of less readily defined conviction. This very fact has provoked critique, not least among those who would question his willingness to draw connections between Hebrew and Greek scriptures. And to this antipathy one might add a measure of disagreement as to whether the doubts that surround Weinreb’s wartime activities should be extended to the reception of his exegetical work. Can one distinguish between the credibility of his autobiographical texts and the reliability of his biblical studies? Can one trust the academic work of a man whose non-­ academic actions have been denounced with such vehemence? And why, in any case, this fascination for the stories of a man recently described as a pathological liar? Another name for the diagnosis pseudologia fantastica is “mythomania.” Here “mythos” is understood as something that is unreliable, even deceitful. Indeed, a similar understanding of the term is implied by the subtitle of Weinreb’s own wartime autobiography, Collaboratie en Verzet, 1940–1945: Een poging tot ontmythologisering (Collaboration and resistance, 1940–1945: An attempt at demythologization). Myth is here contrasted to truth. Similar categories have been applied to the analysis of Babel, especially in the last few years—Babylon: Mythos und Wahrheit (Babylon: Myth and truth), exhibited in 2008 at the Pergamonmuseum, its catalog published simultaneously in two distinct volumes: Volume 1, Mythos, Volume 2, Wahrheit . . . or Babylon: Myth and Reality, exhibited in the same year at the British Museum. The distinction between myth and truth is

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deemed significant; hence the accompanying insistence, already noted, that “the Tower of Babel is not a myth.”53 And yet the use of the word myth in contradistinction to truth is a distinctly modern one, traceable back no further than the mid-nineteenth century. To this use one might contrast a competing definition: that myths are “stories about divine beings, generally arranged in a coherent system; they are revered as true and sacred.”54 The definition is here inverted: myth is associated with truth, albeit of a kind that does not answer to the more narrowly scientific, mathematical demands of modernity’s rational calculations. What becomes of Babylon’s tower under this latter ­definition? Is it still possible to distinguish truth from myth? Is it possible to separate Babel’s biblical narratives from its architectural histories? If one were to agree, with Ernst Cassirer, that both art and religion develop from myth, then Babel’s debt to the mythological encompasses both its biblical and its architectural aspects. Indeed, architecture more broadly must identify itself with the realm of myth. If Weinreb’s autobiographical accounts may be classified with myths understood as untruths, much of his other writing owes its broad appeal to the association of myth with truth. And he suggests that such truth is to be sought, in particular, within accounts of biblical origin. The introductory text in a collection of his essays, first presented in March 1966 at a conference in Germany, establishes the standard against which his writing is to be measured, setting up a distinction between the mathematical precision of the statistician—“things that are either correct or not”—and a contrasting realm of speculation “about which each individual has, after all, his own opinion.”55 To what does he compare this imprecision? To the post-Babelic dispersion, the confusion of tongues. Such, he notes later, is the modern condition—everything is confused. Yet his own thought aspires to a critical exactitude, offering to humanity a fixed center that is itself reminiscent of pre-Babelic longings. These longings have evidently not been dispelled by the conditions of modernity; on the contrary, they seem more present than ever before:

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The world has entered a phase that places certain requirements upon us: that we think through our position, that we ponder our responsibilities in this world. We have to ask ourselves whether there exists anything that we humans can hold onto, a center that can provide us with some element of certainty [Gewißheit] or even eternity—something that could enable us to stand fast against the developing chaos that surrounds us. I am convinced that there is such a certainty.56 Gewißheit—certainty—truth. Weinreb goes on to note that mathematics and the sciences more broadly do offer such certitude, but that other elements of human experience—good and evil, justice, beauty—do not seem to lend themselves so readily to formulaic precision. And yet . . . would not certainty in precisely these areas be an important, perhaps even the most important, possession? Weinreb the writer turns, at this moment, to language, and to the precise correspondence between the word and that which it denotes, between signifier and signified. He insists that the lack of such precision is symptomatic of the human condition. And here he reaches back, at some risk to himself, to the experience of World War II. There is no mention of the fact that the battle over Weinreb’s wartime reputation was fought precisely over the question as to the correspondence between word and reality. What was the actual experience of those who, surrounded by the chaos of war, entrusted their lives to Weinreb’s promises of redemption? “The world has entered a phase that places certain requirements upon us: that we think through our position, that we ponder our responsibilities in this world.” Weinreb’s critics might argue that he could profitably have applied such thinking to himself. Instead, he notes simply that the imprecision of such terms as race, blood, and Volk lend themselves to abuse, to violence, and to the confusion that is associated with the name of Babel: It really is a confusion of tongues, of which a certain knowledge can be found within humanity’s ancient stories, associated with the name Babel—which in Hebrew means nothing

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other than confusion. But despite this Babylonian confusion, there still exists a language that has preserved the identity of word and thing: the language of biblical revelation.57 Weinreb turns from the fallible word of man to the infallible Word of God. And here he stands in a long tradition of earlier thought that has counterparts within both linguistic and architectural speculation. A well-established body of early modern scholarship sought to reconstruct the grammar of a pre-Babelic moment when, according to Genesis 11, “the whole earth had one language and the same words.” The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher was a nexus for such thought, drawing on the work of many others.58 Using a similar logic, one might argue that a successful reconstruction of the Tower of Babel could recover the elusive architectural vocabulary of perfect communication; and it is surely no coincidence that Kircher, again following many ­others, should display a parallel interest in the architecture of Babel.59 → Fig. 3.5 Both of these conjectural structures—the language and the tower—are famously absent, both lost to the confusion of Babel. In contrast, argues Weinreb, the surviving language of the Bible offers a unity of word and thing; it is in this territory that the archaeological search for origins can uncover clarity. One might compare Weinreb’s paper to Michel Foucault’s more familiar The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, published in its original French edition two weeks after Weinreb’s conference presentation: In its original form, when it was given to men by God himself, language was an absolutely certain and trans­parent sign for things. . . . This transparency was destroyed at Babel as a punishment for men. Languages became separated and incompatible with one another only in so far as they had previously lost this original resemblance to the things that had been the prime reason for the existence of language. All the languages known to us are now spoken only against the background of this lost similitude, and in the space that it left vacant. There is only one language that retains a memory

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of that similitude, because it derives in direct descent from that first vocabulary which is now forgotten; because God did not wish men to forget the punishment inflicted at Babel; because this language had to be used in order to recount God’s ancient Alliance with his people; and lastly, because it was in this language that God addressed himself to those who listened to him. Hebrew therefore contains, as if in the form of fragments, the marks of that original name-­giving.60 Foucault’s interest in Genesis soon fades; his discussion of Adam gives way to more frequent references to Adam Smith; and he moves on, later in his text, to the “dehistoricized” humanity of modernity, for whom “language no longer bears the marks of a time before Babel.”61 Weinreb, however, stays with his subject. Plunging into a series of examples drawn from the text of Genesis, he refers his reader to another of his books, published three years prior. That book is, today, his best-known publication. Its titles vary across its several translations, placing emphasis on differing aspects of its contents. The original Dutch rendition is De Bijbel als schepping (The Bible as creation).62 In English it is known as Roots of the Bible: An Ancient View for a New Outlook. In German it goes by Schöpfung im Wort: Die Struktur der Bibel in jüdischer Überlieferung (Creation in the Word: The structure of the Bible in Jewish tradition), its most recent 2012 edition running to 956 pages; an earlier, shortened edition is entitled Der göttliche Bauplan der Welt (God’s blueprint for the world).63 Taken together, these various titles rehearse ideas that, by now, are familiar: the interest in origins and in ends, the application of the lessons of biblical antiquity to the demands of modernity, and the conception of God as architect of the universe. Appropriately, perhaps, a recent reprint adopts, for its front cover, an abstracted version of the crystal form that features in Birnbaum’s 1941 bookplate for Weinreb. ← Fig. 3.2 The book’s opening pages—which respond to the question “Why was this book written?”—communicate immediately the urgency of its appeal:

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3.5 Athanasius Kircher, frontispiece and plate from Turris Babel (1679).

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The primary intention of this book [is] to create the possibility of finding the way back to lost certainties. In times of serious danger . . . the Thora, which is otherwise to remain in the house of instruction, according to ancient Jewish usage, is carried through the streets of the town threatened with destruction.64 It is a compelling opening. Here too, the lessons of biblical antiquity promise certainties that may be applied to a modernity in crisis. The city itself provides the locus for that application. And to judge from the book’s reception, the crisis of modernity is felt as keenly today as it was in the aftermath of World War II; perhaps it is true to suggest that those “lost certainties” remain as palpably absent now as then. In fact, much of the book deals with gematria, the practice of assigning numerical value to letters and words in search of a perfect correspondence between signifier and signified, extracting geometric precision from the ostensible contingency of language. Accordingly, there are no fewer than three indexes at the back of the book: first, an index of sources— biblical, Talmudic (both Jerusalemite and Babylonian), Halachic, Haggadic, Midrashic, Targumic—a confusion of terms for the unfamiliar reader; second, an index of names and places, ranging from Aaron to Zippora, with a particular emphasis on the book of Genesis; and third, an index of numbers, ranging from 1/5 to 600,000.65 Numerology is outside the scope of this chapter. What is directly relevant are the architectural dimensions of Weinreb’s approach, which leave their traces in the more standard index entries. Here too, the Tower of Babel looms large. What follows is therefore an attempt to explicate in architectural terms two elements that stand out in Weinreb’s approach: first, the ever-­ present role of Babel; and second, the suggestion that the account of Genesis more broadly may be brought to bear on the dilemmas of modernity. It is by no means a comprehensive assessment; as Roland Barthes wrote of the Eiffel Tower, itself compared to Babel, “the Tower attracts meaning, the way a lightning rod attracts thunderbolts.”66 The structure of Babel today groans under the weight

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of accumulated interpretations, and any attempt at an exhaustive analysis is therefore doomed to failure, like the project of Babel itself.67 → Fig. 3.6 Weinreb was himself conscious of the apparent incompatibility of biblical antiquity with the apparatus of modernity, and of the dangers inherent in the attempt to reconcile the two: Sheep, cattle, camels, slaves, tents, gods, they pertain to antiquity. The Bible does not mention radio, nuclear energy, aeroplanes, trade unions, democracy, and the UN, it does not deal with the great migration of the nations, the discovery of the Americas, any more than with the world wars and Auschwitz. . . . Why does it restrict itself to ancient Egypt which has long since ceased to exist, to ancient Kanaan or Babel?68 Not only is the historical context of Genesis radically distant from contemporary experience; the attempt to read it in allegorical terms, and to interpret it as a story applicable beyond the limits of its own narrative time and space, contributes to the indiscriminate multiplication of meaning. Weinreb acknowledges that biblical imagery is amenable to the imprecision of endless reinterpretation; the gap between antiquity and modernity allows “all kinds of would-be prophets” to peddle in “inevitable vagueness—which an image-story as such is bound to contain.” Such “text-conjurers,” as he calls them, “have often been surprised at their large following.” And yet the possibility of abuse does not, in Weinreb’s judgement, invalidate the exercise of exegesis; it merely reinforces the need for rigour. For “the Bible is eternally operative, what we might style ‘holy.’” He refers, in a gesture reminiscent of his own bookplate, to the idea of “crystallization” to describe the seemingly contingent temporal and spatial specificity of biblical events: “In the Bible it is told how the essence crystallizes in time . . . in matter and in space.” And so the exegetic task is clear: “We shall have to decode the slaves and tents just as well as Egypt and Babel and unite it with the essence in order to have a standard

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3.6 Accumulated associations: Abel, Noah, Babel, and the sack of Troy, in a miniature from Pierre Le Baud’s Compillation des ­cronicques et ystoires des Bretons (1480).

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for our actions, for the things of the present and the future. The happenings in the remote past, detached from this essence, are devoid of interest to us now. At best they may rouse a measure of archeologic—or historic interest.”69 Archaeologic and historic interest notwithstanding, this study will indulge Weinreb’s recommendations, if only as an exercise in extracting architectural essence from precedent. Approaching the Genesis account as a framework within which to evaluate modernity’s anxieties, it will focus especially on the role of architecture within the archetypal narrative of the book’s first eleven chapters. It will draw, in some regards, on Weinreb’s approach, without being defined by it alone. After all, Weinreb’s observations are by his own admission rarely altogether new. Indeed, to protest their newness would be to undercut their authority, their purchase on truth. They draw instead on “old and often ancient sources”; and this constitutes, no doubt, a large part of their appeal.70 Such analysis in turn sponsors a broader examination of the archetypal figure of the tower as contrasted with the figure of the primitive hut. It thus addresses both the architecture of Genesis and, by extension, the genesis of architecture.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 1 Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 60. 2 Menno ter Braak, “Specialiteiten: De roeping van den mensch is mensch te zijn,” review of Duizend-en-eenige hoofdstukken over specialiteiten, by Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Het Vaderland, May 16, 1937. For an assessment of this passage within the broader context of Ter Braak’s thought, see Léon Hanssen, Menno ter Braak (1902–1940): Leben und Werk eines Querdenkers, trans. Marlene Müller-Haas (Münster: Waxmann, 2011), 286–87. 3 Menno ter Braak, Cinema Militans (Utrecht: De Gemeenschap, 1929), 85–88. 4 Menno ter Braak, “Dionysos en Pentheus,” De Gids 96 (1932): part 3, 184. 5 Menno ter Braak, “Revolutionnaire poezie,” Het Vaderland, February 11, 1934, evening edition. 6 Emmy van Lokhorst to Menno ter Braak, April 27, 1934, accessed July 1, 2022, https:// www.mennoterbraak.nl/. The book, a roman à clef, is Emmy van Lokhorst, De toren van Babel (Amsterdam: Querido, 1934). 7 Menno ter Braak, “Tijdschrift in bloei,” Het Vaderland, January 8, 1937, evening edition. 8 For a list of signators, see Hopmans, “Disputed Ownership,” 34n72, and also Horodisch, Die Exlibris des Uriel Birnbaum, 98. Ter Braak quotes from Birnbaum’s 1932 Volk zwischen Nationen in his own 1939 essay “De joodsche geest en de litteratuur,” published in Anti-semitisme en Jodendom, ed. H. J. Pos (Arnhem: Van Loghum Slaterus, 1939), 155. Volk zwischen Nationen was Birnbaum’s last publishing endeavor in Austria—see Biene, “Uriel Birnbaum,” 132. 9 For Ter Braak’s pocket diary see “Menno ter Braak 1902–1940: Agenda’s,” Stichting Menno ter Braak, accessed March 20, 2013, http://mtb.dbnl.nl/. The penultimate appointment listed here is followed by the entry for Ter Braak’s July 19 meeting with Thomas Mann. 10 Léon Hanssen, Menno ter Braak 1902– 1940, vol. 2, Sterven als een polemist, 1930–1940 (Amsterdam: Balans, 2001), 689n50. 11 Hanssen, Menno ter Braak: Leben und Werk, 336, my translation. 12 The novel was eventually published with a foreword by Friedrich Weinreb: Uriel Birnbaum, Die Errettung der Welt: Eine utopische Novelle (Zurich: Efhag-Presse, 1969). The manuscript is dated to 1927 by Arpad Weixlgärtner, “Der Maler-Dichter Uriel Birnbaum,” Die Graphischen Künste

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132 (Vienna) 50, no. 1 (1927): 102. See also Polzer-Hoditz, Uriel Birnbaum, 26. 13 Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/495. The book is listed again in a similar manuscript prepared for the following year’s exhibition (1/492). 14 Hanssen, Menno ter Braak: Leben und Werk, 337, my translation. 15 De Gruyter, “Uriel Birnbaum, denker, dichter, teekenaar,” my translation. 16 De Gruyter, “Uriel Birnbaum, denker, dich­t er, teekenaar,” my translation. The reference is to Cornelis Veth, “Léon Holman, Uriël Birnbaum, Theo Ort­mann,” De Vrije Bladen 16, no. 12 (December 1939): 14, 18. 17 Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/391, my translation. 18 Friedrich Weinreb, interview by Bibeb [Elisabeth Maria Lampe-Soutberg], Vrij Nederland (Amsterdam), November 29, 1969, my translation. 19 This estimate is drawn from the Uriel Birnbaum Archive finding aid: Regina Thiele and Jens Brokfeld, “Uriel Birnbaums künstlerisches Werk,” Uriel Birnbaum Nachlass, Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien, Universität Potsdam, accessed July 1, 2022, https://www.mmz-potsdam. de/birnbaum/. 20 Friedrich Weinreb, Die langen Schatten des Krieges, trans. Franz J. Lukassen (Weiler im Allgäu: Thauros Verlag, 1989), 1:732, my translation. 21 Regina Grüter, Een fantast schrijft geschiedenis: De affaires rond Friedrich Weinreb (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 1997), 346–52. The title translates as “A storyteller writes history.” 22 D. Giltay Veth and A. J. van der Leeuw, Rapport door het Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie uitgebracht aan de minister van justitie inzake de activiteiten van drs. F. Weinreb gedurende de jaren 1940–1945 (The Hague: Staatsuitgeverij, 1976), 1:163–86. 23 Debórah Dwork and Robert-Jan van Pelt, “The Netherlands,” in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, ed. David S. Wyman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 66–68. For an update in the Israeli press, see Yair Sheleg, “The Continuing Mystery of Friedrich Weinreb,” Ha’aretz, May 5, 2005. 24 Friedrich Weinreb, Collaboratie en Verzet, 1940–1945: Een poging tot ontmythologisering, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1969), 3:x. 25 Friedrich Weinreb, “Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes,” Wortmühle: Literatur-

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28

29

30 31

32

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blätter aus dem Burgenland 2–3 (1983): 22. The essay is reprinted in Das chassidische Narrenparadies und andere Schriften, ed. Christian Schneider (Weiler im Allgäu: Thauros Verlag, 2003), 296–301; subsequent citations refer to this version. Weinreb, “Es war vor fünfzig Jahren,” 36, my translation. Weinreb, “Es war vor fünfzig Jahren.” Mirjam Birnbaum’s September 1987 letter (Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/597) lists misrepresentations and omissions in Weinreb’s account, drawing attention to the fact of its publication only after the death of its other protagonists. For Uriel Birnbaum’s position, see the poem “Statt eines Fluchs,” in Uriel Birnbaum, Eine Auswahl: Gedichte (Amsterdam: Erasmus Buchhandlung, 1957), 1036–38. Weinreb, interview by Bibeb, November  29, 1969, my translation. The biographical details in this legendary account by the grandmother of Dutch interview journalism are disputed. See, in particular, the tower in Alfred Kubin’s illustrations for Paul Scheerbart, Lesabéndio: ein Asteroïden-Roman (Munich: Georg Müller, 1913)—its title accompanied by a check-mark in the bibliography at the back of Birnbaum’s copy of Paul Scheerbart, Das graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiß: Ein Damenroman (Munich: Georg Müller, 1914). To the roll of the ancient law in Birnbaum’s drawing one might contrast the role of the text in Bruno Taut’s 1919 drawing of a Monument to the New Law, which, alongside astral references, proposes a tower bearing illuminated quotations both from Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio and from the Bible. For God’s creative word as that which upholds the universe, see Gen. 1, to which may be compared Heb. 1:1–3. Abraham Horodisch, ed., Die Exlibris des Uriel Birnbaum: Gefolgt von einer Selbstbiographie des Künstlers (Zurich: Verlag der Safaho-Stiftung, 1957), 70, my translation. Horodisch was an Amsterdam bibliophile (with an interest in the work of Kubin) who had fled Berlin in 1933; the introduction to his collection of bookplates by his close friend Birnbaum notes that he had discussed their symbolism with Birnbaum prior to his death. See Kitty Zijlmans, “Jüdische Künstler im Exil: Uriel und Menachem Birnbaum,” trans. Sofia Rodriguez, in Würzner, Österreichische Exilliteratur, 154–55. Birnbaum’s rendition of the motif of Zion can be compared to the earlier work of Ephraim Mose Lilien (1874–1925)—see,

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for instance, Lilien’s souvenir card for the Fifth Zionist Congress (1901) or his illustrations for Die Bücher der Bibel (from 1908 onward). See also Alfred Gold, “E. M. Lilien,” in Juedische Kuenstler, ed. Martin Buber (Berlin: Juedischer Verlag, 1903), 73–104, which discusses the figure of the wandering Jew and its relationship to Zionism. For Van Leeuwen’s support of Birnbaum’s publishing endeavors, with specific reference to Der Kaiser und der Architekt, see Leon B. van Leeuwen, Let My Half Cry: An Autobiography (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2007), 115. The New York City Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide had asserted in the late 1860s that “this whole country is bound to be the great commercial centre of the world . . . and the city of New York the world’s metropolis. . . . This is the veritable land of promise, and New York will be the New Jerusalem.” David M. Scobey, Empire State: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 50. By the early twentieth century, New York was both the world’s largest city and home to the world’s largest Jewish population. For its description as “the very incarnation of the Jewish prophecy of a New Jerusalem” (421), with reference both to skyscrapers and to the Tower of Babel, see Fredric Bedoire, “The Promised City: New York,” in The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture, 1830–1930, trans. Roger Tanner ( Jersey City: Ktav, 2004), 421–44. Weinreb, “Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes,” 296, my translation. For a discussion of similar concerns in the context of Freud and of Expressionists from Kubin to Kafka, see Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3–14. Vidler suggests that it is ultimately architecture that is handed the responsibility for solving modernity’s existential crisis. Weinreb, “Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes,” 296–97, my translation. Ibid., 298, my translation. Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/391, my translation. Uriel Birnbaum to Paul Floerke, Vienna, September 14, 1932, quoted in the auction catalog Autographen aus allen Gebieten: Katalog 674 (Marburg: J. A. Stargardt, 1990), 12, my translation. Uriel Birnbaum, Moses (Munich: Georg Müller, 1928).

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 43 Weinreb, “Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes,” 299, my translation. 44 For exhibitions in Vienna, Brünn, Stockholm and Czernowitz between 1916 and 1924, see Polzer-Hoditz, Uriel Birnbaum, 48. For anticipated but unrealized exhibitions in Prague and Berlin, see Uriel’s March 24, 1922 letter from Vienna to his brother Solomon, now in the collection of the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto. 45 Walther Schmied-Kowarzik, “Die Expressionisten-Ausstellung in der Wiener Sezession,” Deutsche Arbeit 17, no. 10 ( July 1918): 422. 46 For poems by Birnbaum, see “Verse,” Aktion 5, no. 33/34 (1915): 422; “Lied,” Aktion 5, no. 39/40 (1915): 483–84; “Auf der Brücke,” Aktion 5, no. 51 (1915): 646; and “Geschichte,” Aktion 6, no. 27/28 (1916): 391. For drawings by Menachem Birnbaum, see also Aktion 6, no. 39/40 (1916): 542, and Aktion 7, no. 1/2 (1917): 10. 47 Weinreb, “Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes,” 299, my translation. 48 See Uriel Birnbaum, Volk zwischen Nationen: Ein zurückgewiesener Beitrag zu dem Sammelwerk “Der Jud ist schuld . . .!” (Vienna: published by author, 1932). The collection cited in Birnbaum’s title is Hermann Bahr et al., Der Jud ist schuld . . .? Diskussionsbuch über die Judenfrage (Basel: Zinnen-Verlag, 1932). Birnbaum’s voice did in fact make it into the collection, albeit via a brief quotation in Hans Hauptmann’s distinctly anti-Semitic essay “Die systematische Vernichtung der arischen Kulturgüter,” 162–63. 49 The text is listed as “Uriel Birnbaum im ‘Neuen Wiener Journal,’ 31. Oktober 1929, Nr. 12 911,” in Theodor Fritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage, 49th ed. (Leipzig: Hammer-Verlag, 1944), 298–99. 50 For the untimely nature of Birnbaum’s work, see Lee van Dovski [Herbert Lewandowski], “Uriel Birnbaum,” in Eros der Gegenwart (Geneva: Neuer Pfeil-Verlag, 1952), 195–99; for an account of his precipitous fall from public favour see Biene, “Uriel Birnbaum, ignoriert, emigriert, vergessen,“ 127–43. See also Hans Rochelt, “Leben und Werk Uriel Birnbaums,” Wortmühle: Literaturblätter aus dem Burgenland 1 (1983): 22–23. 51 Weinreb Tonarchiv, accessed July 1, 2022, https://weinreb-tonarchiv.de/. 52 Friedrich Weinreb Stiftung, accessed July  1, 2022, https://www.weinreb-­ stiftung.­org/. 53 Jones, “Babylon at the British Museum.”

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134 54 Jacqueline Simpson and Stephen Roud, Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), s.v. “myths.” 55 Friedrich Weinreb, “Das Verborgene im Buch Esther,” in Schneider, Chassidische Narrenparadies, 9, my translation. The text is identified as a March  27, 1966 presentation to a meeting of the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Symbolforschung (Society for scientific study of symbolism), first published (with some differences) in Symbolon: Jahrbuch für Symbolforschung 6 (1968): 163–78. 56 Weinreb, “Das Verborgene im Buch Esther,” 9, my translation. 57 Ibid., 11, my translation. 58 For Augustine’s discussion of Hebrew as the original language, see De civitate Dei 16.11. For a broader cross-section of research on the divinely given pre-Babelic lingua Adamica, see David E. Mungello, “Proto-Sinology and the European Search for a Universal Language,” in “Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins of Sinology,” supplement no. 25, Studia Leibnitiana (1985): 174–207. For Kircher’s attempt to achieve a scientific “linguarum omnium ad unum reductio,” and for his correspondence on the subject with Leibniz, see 185–88; for arguments by the architect John Webb that China was peopled by pre-Babelic emigration, and was therefore “able to preserve the Primitive Language,” see 178–83. See also Friedrich Weinreb, Vor Babel: Die Welt der Ursprache, trans. Konrad Dietzfelbinger (Weiler im Allgäu: Thauros Verlag, 1995). 59 Compare also Steven A. Mansbach, “Pieter Bruegel’s Towers of Babel,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 45 (1982): 54. 60 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966], trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970), 36. 61 Foucault, The Order of Things, 368–69. 62 Friedrich Weinreb, De Bijbel als schepping (The Hague: Servire, 1963). 63 Friedrich Weinreb, Schöpfung im Wort: Die Struktur der Bibel in jüdischer Überlieferung, trans. Konrad Dietzfelbinger and Franz J. Lukassen (Weiler im Allgäu: Thauros Verlag, 1994; 3rd ed., Zurich: Verlag der Friedrich-Weinreb-Stiftung, 2012), and Der göttliche Bauplan der Welt: Der Sinn der Bibel nach der ältesten jüdischen Überlieferung, trans. Christian Schumacher (Zurich: Origo-Verlag, 1966). 64 Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 12.

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65 See also Friedrich Weinreb, Zahl, Zeichen, Wort: Das symbolische Universum der Bibelsprache (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), in the popular pocket-­ book series edited by Ernesto Grassi, where Weinreb’s volume joins texts by Theodor Adorno, Reyner Banham, Ernst Bloch, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Siegfried Giedion, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Jean-Paul Sartre, not to mention Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. 66 Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 5; see 7 for discussion of a “Babel complex.” 67 See, for instance, Arno Borst’s four-­ volume, six-book, 2,332-page Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1957– 63); or the thousand-odd respresentations collected in Helmut Minkowski’s Aus dem Nebel der Vergangenheit steigt der Turm zu Babel: Bilder aus 1000 Jahren, rev. ed. (Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag, 1960); or, more recently, Wilfried Seipel’s massive Der Turmbau zu Babel: Eine Ausstellung des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien (Milan: Skira, 2003). 68 Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 60. 69 Ibid., 61. 70 Friedrich Weinreb, Die Rolle Esther: Das Buch Esther nach der ältesten jüdischen Überlieferung, trans. Eining Düssel (Zurich: Origo-Verlag, Zürich, 1968), 14 (my translation), referring to Der göttliche Bauplan der Welt. Weinreb does not credit his sources individually, but notes that his most recent sources are mainly late medieval.

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Architecture After God

4. The Genesis of ­Architecture

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THE GENESIS OF ­ARCHITECTURE

The Hut To start at the beginning: Architecture has always confessed a fascination for origins; and the figure of the primitive hut occupies an especially well-­ established position within architectural consciousness. The idea of the old has held particular attraction at those moments that have been confronted most directly with the consequences of the new, and so the hut has reasserted its authority at periodic intervals across the centuries. The most celebrated examples are associated with such names as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gottfried Semper, Laugier, or Filarete; but behind these modern examples lies a much longer tradition. The hut makes a tentative appearance in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is counted among the earliest surviving works of literature, long predating the founding document of architectural theory, the text of Vitruvius—where it appears also. Its most familiar biography is provided by Joseph Rykwert, in a book entitled so as to suggest a direct connection to the biblical account of Paradise.1 But as Rykwert himself admits, his readers will search in vain for scriptural references. The specifications for Adam’s house are absent from the Genesis account. Within the plenitude of Paradise, Adam had no need for architecture. Instead, architectural endeavor appears only outside Eden. Introduced under highly compromised conditions, it rapidly reaches full and magnificent expression with the account in Genesis 11 of the Tower of Babel—a structure traditionally interpreted as the ultimate expression of human pride. But what is the biblical background to the architectural account of Babel? Or what is the architect to extract from the Genesis account more generally? What if one were to read the book of Genesis as an account of architectural origins?

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4.1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, (top) Tower of Babel, 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and (bottom) Tower of Babel, ca. 1565 (­Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, ­Rotterdam).

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This is, after all, the very beginning—as communicated to the English-speaking reader by the book’s name. Genesis, chapter one, verse one: “In the beginning, God created.” It is both an account of origins, and a story of design and fabrication. Space and time, light and darkness, form and order: this is the stuff of architecture. But the architect, in this instance, is God: deus architectus mundi, God the Weltbaumeister, the prime constructor, the ἀρχι-τέκτων. What, if any, are the implications of this account for other, later architects? The story offers what would seem to be a promising start. The creative project itself is deemed a success: it is truly exemplary. And God saw that it was good. The phrase recurs over and over again within the opening chapter; similar language is used in Genesis 1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25, and 1:31. The idea is stressed, as if it were important that it be remembered when the reader moves on to subsequent chapters. Created nature, in Genesis 1, is good. And yet there is, so far, no mention of architecture as more conventionally understood: in the Garden of Eden there is no need even for a primitive hut. The plenitude of nature and the absence of architecture: these ideas are connected, and stand in stark contrast both to subsequent accounts of architectural beginnings and, one might add, to the reader’s lived experiences, which demand that architecture compensate for nature’s inadequacies. The reader learns also that man is made in the image of God. Biblical commentaries have tied this to the idea that humanity is endowed with the capacity for reason, morality, language, and creativity. This last attribute, at least, must encompass the capacity for architecture. So by this account the work of the architect is in some sense tied to the creation of man in the image of God: architectus secundus deus. This phrase, too, finds its way into ­architectural theory. The architect derives his creative powers from his creator. But invert the equation, and the product is a God made in the image of man. This in turn is precisely the biblical definition of idolatry; and it is perhaps not so distant from current conceptions of religion as an essentially human construct: man as the architect of God—vide Peter Sloterdijk. But it is the conceit of the Bible to insist that the God of Genesis is the one true God, a Gen.  1:

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God not made by human hands, a God who pre-exists the beginning of Genesis 1. It is this God who grants to mankind, in the final verses of the chapter, a certain dominion over the earth. That, too, is a prerogative that has been exploited by the architect, often to a fault. Returning to the juxtaposition of linguistic and of material realms, to the relationship between word and thing, one might note also that it is God’s creative word that gives materiality to all things. Schöpfung im Wort—Creation in the Word: the signifier denotes the signified, and, in an act of perfect correspondence, the signified comes into existence. The first man, the first Adam, is the embodiment of God’s word. To this idea the Bible will return in a later account of new beginnings. Gen.  2: Genesis 2:8 notes that Adam is placed in a garden that is planted by God himself. The very familiarity of the Genesis account is liable to obscure the significance of this detail, which is not calculated to enhance the standing of the discipline of architecture. Eden’s plenitude pre-exists the need for architecture; instead, it is in the designed landscape that the reader may find the explicit presence of commodity and of delight. Firmness, he may assume, can be taken for granted. And God saw that it was good. Among Adam’s earliest tasks is the naming of the animals: the development, that is, of the pre-Babelic language. This exercise in creative speaking rehearses the subordinate nature of Adam’s God-given authority over the created order. God names Adam, and in so doing, brings him into existence; to Adam is delegated the responsibility for naming the other creatures, already created by God. But Adam’s broader charge, divinely given in Genesis 2:15, is to “till and keep the garden”—or, according to Genesis 2:5, “to till the ground” (the translation into German would be bauen). Work here is a good gift, not a necessary evil; it is a task that precedes the account of the Fall in Genesis 3. In fact God himself, in Genesis 2:2, is described as working—which corresponds to the prior assertion that man is created in the image of God. Man works, just as God works; and the nature of God’s work, in this instance, is creative—the reference, after all, is to the design and construction of the universe. But the reader will note also that

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4.2 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, (left) Tower of Babel, 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and (right) Tower of Babel, ca. 1565 (­Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, ­Rotterdam): details.

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God rested on the seventh day. He stopped working, because he “finished the work” of creation, and “it was good.”2 The contrast, before and after the following chapter’s Fall, is exceptionally clear. In Genesis 2, the work of God, architect of the universe, is complete. It has reached perfection, inasmuch as “to perfect,” from the Latin perficio, means “to accomplish, to finish, to complete.” Subsequent to Genesis 3, however, the most ambitious human structures are more characteristically unfinished—they are seldom fully complete, rarely fully good, never fully perfect. The practising architect is familiar with this reality. Even today, the vocabulary of architectural practice is replete with traces of incompletion and imperfection. Procedures to deal with just this predicament are written into the language of the architectural contract before the project is even begun. Revisions, addenda, and change orders allow for in-progress corrections. Sub-clauses within specifications attempt to compensate for the absence of correspondence between word and thing. Architectural contracts refer to “substantial completion” on the understanding that final completion may prove a more heavily disputed condition. Time is budgeted for the punch list in a brave attempt to reduce the gap between concept and reality. And time forever conspires with ­technical and material failure; warranties are carefully circumscribed, their limits heavily contested; the new becomes old at the very moment of installation. In fact, the more ambitious the ­structure, the higher the likelihood that its lower levels will begin to wear even before the upper levels are put into place. For this, either of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel paintings might serve as ­illustration.3 ← Figs. 4.1, 4.2 The structure ages not only materially, but also con­ceptually, with the accelerating movement of modernity rendering both of these disfigurements more conspicuous than ever before. For the perfectionist, architectural practice can by its very nature ­resemble only a long catalog of disappointments. After all, even in its most ambitious forms it is described as just that: a ­practice, and a practice that very rarely makes perfect. Conversely, it is a ­discipline that is built on the basis of a constant and ­unremitting striving; and in this regard it fits well within the broader frame-

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work of modernity, or even, as Arthur Schopenhauer would insist, within the nature of mortal existence itself. In the philosopher’s description, human life no longer exhibits the fullness of a conception in the image of God; instead, it is compared to the subhuman: “a restless, never satisfied striving, a ceaseless activity . . .; nowhere is there a goal, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a point of rest.”4 Such rest, to be sure, is in short supply—the prospect of entering into rest must be postponed. The same is true for the injunction at Genesis 2:15 to “till and keep” the garden. Similar vocabulary is used in later biblical accounts to describe the Levitical priests’ ministry within God’s dwelling-place, the tabernacle.5 There is a parallel drawn here between the garden and the tabernacle; and extrapolating from tabernacle to garden might suggest that Paradise, just like the t­ abernacle, is in some sense to be understood as God’s ­dwelling-place. Certainly God is present in Eden in a very immediate way—he is described in Genesis 3:8 as “walking in the garden”—and the modern reader may already be thinking of the New Testament description of God’s presence within a paradise to come. But the parallel also sets up the ideal of work itself as a form of ministry in the service of God, retaining the memory, within the Latin word minister, of a proper subordination. Does this too have implications for architectural work? Such an association would lend a different emphasis to the phrase architectus secundus deus. The reader will note also that man, according to Genesis 2:7, is presented as a combination of two parts, material and spiritual. As a spiritual being, he is given the breath of life, inspired by God. But as a physical creature, he emerges from the very ground that he is told to work. The textual record reminds the reader of this archetypal relationship, via the linguistic proximity in the Hebrew between man and ground, between ’adam and ’adamah. Adam is made of dust; to dust he will return; and this same dust, the stuff of man, is also the stuff of architecture: according to the account of Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel is built of baked dust, of brick. And according to the reports of architectural history, it is the material failure of that same dust that constituted the ruin of

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4.3, 4.4 (top) Athanasius Kircher, Topographia Paradisi terrestris, from Arca Noë (1675). At center, the first wall; at left, the first hut; and immediately beneath that, the first (very small) city: “Henochia Civitas prima ­Gigantum à Kain ædificata.” (right) Adam, driven from Paradise, encounters a hostile nature: marginal illustration to Medici manuscript of Filarete’s Trattato d’architettura (ca. 1465).

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Babel, and that contributes to the ruin of the architectural project more broadly. Gen.  3: The trail of dust, in other words, leads from the creation of man in Genesis 2, to the fall of man in Genesis 3, and then on to Genesis 11, to the conception and failure of Babel. And this is, precisely, the nature of the world as known from lived experience. Accounts of architectural origins invariably default, sooner or later, to the assertion that nature, as given, is not always so obviously good.6 For in Genesis 3 sin enters the picture, the pride of human self-determination, accompanied in the natural order by thorns and thistles. Upon their expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve still work; but the nature of that work has been marred; and the responsibility to “guard” or “keep” the garden is handed over, at the end of the chapter, to the cherubim who stand at the entrance to Paradise. The verdant garden of Eden is now an enclosed space, a walled precinct—a fact concealed, some might argue, even within the non-Semitic etymological memory of the word garden. This is the image of Eden that has informed subsequent representations: again, Athanasius Kircher offers a convenient illustration; ← Fig. 4.3 and that enclosing wall—a symbol of the separation of man from the presence of God—is the first sign of architecture. It is an unpromising association. Adam and Eve are now on the outside of the wall, and it is this exclusion that generates the need for an alternate enclosure within the otherwise unbounded space of exile. Although its construction does not warrant mention in the record of Genesis 3, it is precisely here, outside Eden, that artists have located representations of the prototypical primitive hut.7 It is typically a rude, provisional construction, of doubtful firmness, of limited commodity, and of minimal delight; and yet subsequent theorists have argued over whether such a ­structure is not indeed the very type of ­architecture. Certainly it is a reminder not of plenitude but of loss, for in their failure to “keep” the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve have evidently forfeited both their ­original home and their ministerial status, just as their sin has driven them from the presence of God. ← Fig. 4.4 This too ties forward to the subsequent ministry of a newly instituted

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Levitical priesthood, whose access to the holy is progressively restricted in ways that are heavily reinforced by the architecture of tabernacle and temple. And, once again, modern readers will be reminded of discussions in the New Testament of another ­priesthood, the priesthood of believers, ministering within a temple that is not material but spiritual: the renewal, they are told, of a holy calling.8 As it is, work—once modelled on the divine creative act— becomes laborious, repetitive, tiresome. Such is the conflict inherent to the human condition: that work is ever crowded out by labor; that homo faber gives way to man as animal laborans; that opportunities for the common pursuit of the higher, more permanent, ends of a humanity created in the image of God are ever hostage to the insatiable demands of those temporal and purely physical needs that are shared with the animal. In describing this world as the product of the Fall, Genesis 3 claims that the ambition of human self-determination leads, ironically, not to freedom, but to alienation, to the withering of that which is most distinctively human. Such discussion might remind the contemporary reader of The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt’s critique of modern alienation.9 She too draws on the Genesis account in order to assess the anxieties of modernity; she too draws a contrast between labor and work, further contrasted with action, which is tied in turn to language. She too acknowledges, in the title of her book, that such conditions transcend the limits of modernity. After all, the unremitting striving of human existence is a constant, just as the absence of rest is, in God’s accounting, not an exclusively modern liability. Nor, according to Genesis, is it unrelated to the nature of the dusty ground: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”10

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Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Generations of architects have no doubt stood among those congregations who at regular intervals have been reminded of these words—and this at the very moment of the most acute exposure to the consequences of their own mortality, of their own impending material failure, as the body is lowered into its final resting place. These same architects may have speculated as to the relationship between the account of Genesis and the narratives of architecture. Architecture too, after all, has sought to address both material and spiritual concerns, and to address the demands of both physical and metaphysical exposure. Indeed, the question of exposure is present in the opening chapters of Genesis. Genesis 2:25 states, quite explicitly, that in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve “were both naked, and were not ashamed.” It is a verse taken to heart by generations of figurative artists; and it is one that might also bear implications for architects. After all, just as Adam and Eve have no need for architecture, so they have no need for clothes; in this context clothing qualifies as a sort of proto-architecture. Adam and Eve are naked but not ashamed—and their nakedness is a counterpart to the absence from Eden of architecture.11 By contrast, the fig leaves of Genesis 3 are a marker of the Fall—Adam and Eve’s feeble attempt to cover up their shame. And in some ways architecture could be thought to fulfil a similar function. Is not much of the architect’s work an attempt to mitigate the effects of the Fall? This is perhaps true not only in literal but also in more abstract ways. The more immediate function of the primitive hut may be to provide protection from the hostile elements. But discussion of architecture’s more ambitious goals is liable, today, to drift toward ideas more metaphysical than physical: conceptions of architecture as an index of the nature and priorities of human dwelling, as a statement of identity in a self-consciously rootless culture, as a search for a more authentic existence in a world of allegedly boundless space, as an attempt to articulate a consciousness of time and mortality, as a response to claims of human perfectibility in the face of rapid technological change, as a commentary on the challenge of defining a shared center within a plural society, or as a marker

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of the promises implicit in the movement toward sustainability. Such ideas are indeed tied to the narrative of Genesis. Conversely, critics will insist that architecture presents poor material for the resolution of such intractable existential embarrassments; it offers, in this sense too, a mere fig leaf. But Genesis 3 notes that God replaces the fig leaves with something else: “garments of skins”—which require the death of animals, the innocent sacrificed on behalf of the guilty. This idea, too, recurs in subsequent passages. Later, a passage in Isaiah speaks of being “clothed . . . with the garments of salvation” and “covered . . . with the robe of righteousness.”12 What is more, the New Testament uses similar language to refer to Christ’s substitutionary atonement. Such passages suggest that architecture itself can never, in the end, constitute the highest and best resolution to the challenge of human exposure.

The City If Genesis 3 posits architecture as a fig leaf, a marker of the Fall, Genesis 4 goes one step further. For it is in the account of Cain and Abel that the reader first experiences the full effects of that Fall on human society more broadly. If Adam is in some sense humanity’s representative, then the next generation’s fratricide may likewise be understood in representative terms, as the embodiment of interpersonal violence more generally. And it is clear that the act of murder is in this case the expression of a deeper disorder. Cain, “tiller of the ground,” whose livelihood is tied to the earth, to place, kills his brother Abel, “keeper of sheep”; and that murder is presented as an act of hostility not only toward man but also toward God.13 As a result, Cain is condemned to being “a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,” in exacerbation of his existing alienation from Eden.14 Adam and Eve are in a sense already homeless, having been expelled, for their sin, from the presence of God; Cain’s sin renders him doubly homeless. The text of Genesis reinforces this point: “Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Gen.  4:

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Nod, east of Eden.”15 Biblical commentaries annotate the name Nod with the words “location unknown,” while noting its relationship, in Hebrew, to the term “wandering.” It is as if Cain’s experience describes a permanent condition, the alienation of man living apart from God. To Adam and Eve’s alienation is added a further, social alienation—one that prompts, as the reader will soon discover, a turn to architecture. The reader does not need to be reminded of the centrality of that word, alienation, to the sociological analysis of the modern city, to imagine how this passage too might be read as a commentary on more recent experience. In fact, in the very next verse it is the wandering Cain, afraid of the repercussions of violence, who goes on to build the first city. This detail has not escaped prior generations’ attention. Abraham Cowley wrote in a 1668 poem that “God the first garden made, and the first city Cain,”16 but the significance of Cain’s city had already been noted by Augustine.17 Friedrich Weinreb observes further that the construction of the city is tied to Cain’s fear of his own mortality. It is Cain, who has soaked the earth with his brother’s blood, who is himself afraid of death; and it is not Abel but Cain who becomes a city-builder. The city is thus understood as a reaction to that horror mortis, an attempt to exclude the threat of death by means of material artifice, through deployment of the city’s formidable powers of distraction: A city—in our modern times we are quite well aware of it—is a concentration of people, a merging of human strength. In a city one is apt to forget there is anything beside the existence of the sham-world of development created there; the city creates the very conditions for forgetting it all.18 In its goal of “making material life stronger, richer, more power­ ful,” the striving that is characteristic of the city unites the primary human motivations named by Schopenhauer: the burden of life and the fear of death.19 Weinreb’s analysis suggests that these two forces are related: the alleviation of the one promises to preclude the return of the other, such that, in its focus on material welfare, the city also nurtures a state of distraction from

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the realities of spiritual destitution. Weinreb describes the nature of Cain’s wandering as a “flight from death” into the domains of culture, arts, and technology—a flight into the city.20 Of this enigmatic city the reader of Genesis is told little— perhaps it was just a small city, as Kircher’s illustration would suggest; ← Fig. 4.3 or perhaps it is sufficient to note that the intent of the opening chapters of Genesis is prehistorical, not historical.21 But Genesis 4 ends with the birth of Seth, a brother given “instead of Abel”—and from his line springs Nimrod the hunter, alleged founder of Babel, city of cities.22 In this light, just as clothing is a cover-up of humanity’s nakedness, so the city points not, first, to Eden’s plenitude, but rather to humanity’s alienation, its fugitive condition within a hostile landscape. Genesis 4:17 ties the origin of the city to the Fall, just as Genesis 4:21–22 associates the development of art and technology with the line of Cain. Where, one might ask, does architecture sit within this genealogical trajectory? Is it not permanently marked by its commitment to the city, and to the union of art with technology? If the building of a city is, in some sense, an attempted response to the problem of alienation, and to the accompanying fear of reciprocal violence, it is clear by the end of the chapter that such architectural measures offer no lasting resolution. Quite the contrary: the language of Genesis 4 seems instead to suggest an exacerbation of violence: “I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”23 And yet at the very close of the chapter, with the mention of Seth, there is also, perhaps, the faintest hint of better things to come. “At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.”24 Such an appeal would suggest a redemption conceived not by the human but by the divine architect, deus architectus mundi, who offers a more effective and more enduring redemptive structure. And it is of course difficult to resist drawing further analogies. The line of Seth, who “walked with God”25—an alternative to the line of Cain—is, according to later genealogies, also the line of David.26 In a profusion of names, the narrative leads on to Jerusalem, the City of David, the City of Peace, Zion, “the city of our God, which God establishes forever.”27 This

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4.5 Architectural redemption: Athanasius Kircher, Optica projectio trium Arcae ­Noemicae contignationum, from Arca Noë (1675).

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narrative can be continued through the New Testament: the line of David leads, according to the gospel of Luke, to Jesus.28 And at the very end of scripture, paradise is itself described as a city: the New Jerusalem—a city shaped both by the presence of God and by the absence of violence.29

The Ark The account of Genesis turns first, however, to a more immediate redemptive structure. It is introduced by a genealogy that is tied to previous references to work, to rest, and to the effects of the Fall. The narrative leads from Adam, via Seth, to Noah, with an observation, in a passage notable for breaking the pattern of previous verses, that seems to place Noah—a name that in Hebrew means “rest”—in a peculiarly redemptive relationship to the Fall’s damaging effects on work. Lamech fathered a son and named him Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.”30 It is as if the very name of Noah suggests the promise of a redemption to come. This stands in stark contrast to the story of the Flood itself, which reads as an undoing of God’s creation: God created the world, and saw that it was good; sin marred that goodness, and the result of man’s pervasive wickedness is a reversal of God’s creative work. But alongside the Flood’s judgment, God also offers a means of redemption. And that redemption has a distinctly architectural expression, in the form of the ark. It is doubtless unsurprising that the ark should have held such a longstanding fascination for architects. Kircher’s drawings come to mind once again: they are nothing if not architectural, and strike the contemporary reader as being almost modern in their articulation. ← Fig. 4.5 But each generation appropriates the ark for its own purposes. Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres is a case in point, ­drawing on the motif in ways that speak more directly to contemporary preoccupations than to the context of Genesis. The ark figures not only as an archetypal house, but also as a (quite Gen.  5–9:

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literally) redemptive architecture that employs the technology of construction to provide shelter in the face of environmental disaster—an autonomous, placeless archetype which, like Hollein’s aircraft carrier or Le Corbusier’s steamship, provides a self-contained artificial environment, bearing with it the means of self-preservation. Genesis 6:14–16 is in fact famous as a record of what is often described as the earliest written architectural specification—a specification drawn up by none other than God himself.31 In this instance, the fact of God’s initiative is significant: it distinguishes this from other architectural endeavors, such as Cain’s city, or the tower of Babel. This redemption is God’s idea, not man’s; and it provides a vehicle of escape, for those who will take it, from God’s righteous judgment. In fact, the ark is an early prototype in a series of divinely conceived structures that will include the tabernacle, the temple of Jerusalem, and ultimately the New Jerusalem itself; and in each case the architecture plays a specific role in what was once described as “the history of salvation.”32 But before proceeding to these other constructions, the biblical account offers what might best be understood as a counter-example—or an antitype— to the figure or type of the primitive hut. Indeed, these words—type and antitype—were themselves transferred to architecture only after they were first used in theology.33

The Tower Gen.  11: 1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And

as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” 5 The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And

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the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.34 Much ink has been spilled on the debate as to whether the primitive hut constitutes Architecture with a capital A, or whether, like Nikolaus Pevsner’s bicycle shed, it is merely a building.35 But if the hut is disputed, it is surely easier to agree that the tower of Babel must stand for architecture in its fullest glory. In his Encyclopédie, begun two years before the abbot Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, Jean le Rond d’Alembert defined architecture as “the embellished mask of one of man’s greatest needs.”36 Not long after, Quatremère de Quincy would expand on this definition in his entry for “architecture” in the Encyclopédie méthodique: “Among all the arts . . . with which man has formed a partnership in order to help him bear the pains of life and transmit his memory to future generations, it can certainly not be denied that architecture holds a most outstanding place.”37 Such are the ends, more metaphysical than physical, to which architecture has laid claim. And indeed, according to the account of Genesis, Babel is designed to fulfil exactly these criteria: it is intended to address “one of man’s ­greatest needs,” his need for permanence and for authentic dwelling in a world of alienation, his desire to “transmit his memory to future generations.” It is precisely these motivations that have been read into the terse language of Genesis 11:4. Babel, that is, represents architecture understood as a response to the transience of human experience, of that continuous present that is in constant danger of being lost in the hurried exchange between future and past. This is, after all, the

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nature of human mortality. Babel’s attempts to define space are thus tied to the attempt to conquer time. Firmness, commodity, and delight: Pevsner adds to his definition the further contention that “the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.”38 If the artistic records are to be trusted, Babel measures up to the standard on this count too. But it also fulfils the more basic requirements of building: it is clear from Genesis 11:3 that the project is intended to be a triumph of materials technology and production.39 After all, humanity’s attempt to redeem itself from the consequences of mortality and the forgetfulness of history—a supremely abstract and immaterial objective—has very real material and technical implications. Babel’s builders might well have doubted whether a primitive system of trabeation could have met the needs of the tower’s long-term program; and even if its architects had been offered access to modernity’s most sophisticated glass and steel technologies, it is not clear whether these materials could have satisfied the clients’ demand for a project that would preserve their name in perpetuity. Instead, “they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.”40 And so, on the arid plain of Babylonia, where the failure of nature’s plenitude has provided neither stone nor wood, the people make brick. From the very dust of the ground they create their architecture; it is thus an expression not only of the particularity of place, but also of the common denominator of architecture and of human embodied existence. That material in turn quite literally informs the articulation of the structure; Babel’s scholarly reconstructions attest to the most basic of tectonic schemes, with brick stacked upon brick in a massive pile: load and support in its least sophisticated expression. Indeed, architectural histories of material technology have typically ascribed to Mesopotamia the invention of brick—a technological compensation, devised and perfected by human ingenuity, for nature’s material deficiencies, for the “thorns and thistles” of Genesis 3:18.41 But what is also clear is that the sheer dimensions of the project of Babel demand that its builders operate at

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4.6 Materials for mass production: Pieter ­Bruegel the Elder, Tower of Babel, 1563 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna): detail.

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a massive scale to which, one may presume, only the efficiencies of mass production can do justice. Its construction in fired brick masonry takes for granted the ability to exploit prodigious quantities of raw material, torn from the earth and processed into a standardized product of identical components. In fact, the successful production of a masonry tower demands both economies of scale and structures of vertical integration at their most systematic. The massive stockpiles of baked brick at the base of the larger of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel paintings, now in Vienna, are reminders of the smoothly operating mechanisms that must be set in place to enable such technologically ambitious development. ← Fig. 4.6 Although the Genesis account does not dwell on such logistical details, what is specified is the identity of the commodity that is to hold the entire structure together: bitumen. So the construction of Babel assumes both the existence of industrial-scale mass production and, quite literally, a reliance on fossil fuel to hold the enterprise together. This has gone unnoticed neither by observers of the modern economy nor by critics of the global forces that have been marshalled for its preservation. Indeed, the sceptre-wielding figure in the foreground of Bruegel’s painting, typically assumed to represent Nimrod, and the anonymous smaller figures that lie prostrate before him, serve as reminders of the structures of power and oppression that can facilitate the delivery of such large-scale ventures. And to material innovation, logistical sophistication, and tectonic elegance, one might add formal clarity. Pevsner is not alone in speaking of buildings as structures that enclose or articulate space; and whether one appeals to the defining landmark of the Babylonian ziggurat or to the walls that surround it, it is clear that Babel exceeds all such demands. After all, the people who wander into the opening verses of Genesis 11 are at first rootless and nomadic, as if still searching for a permanent home after having been driven out of Eden. “And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.”42 Geographic fugitives, they are confronted with the alienating immensity both of space and of time, and they respond to each with architecture. Within the

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4.7 City walls as spectacle: Johann Adam Delsenbach, Spectacula Babylonica, from ­Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, ­Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (1721).

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endless space of the plain of Shinar they employ the two strategies by which the discipline seeks to create a sense of place, one ­considered in plan, the other in section. First, they establish a city within clearly defined limits, whose prodigious multi-layered enclosure is described by Herodotus (1.178–81) and illustrated by Fischer von Erlach, ← Fig. 4.7 a precinct marked off from its limitless context by architecture. And second, they erect a landmark, a tower that will impose a point of vertical reference onto the flat horizon. “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower.”43 And if such enclosure and definition are associated by Pevsner with the satisfaction of primarily physical needs, one might recall that in the pages of Sloterdijk Raumangst (fear of space) is listed alongside such terms as Weltangst (fear of the world) and Todesangst (fear of death). The sense of alienation exposes what is primarily a metaphysical need. In this regard, Babel’s tower provides a perfect counterpart to the figure of the archetypal hut. In practice, they tend to appear together, and where one is invoked, the other is rarely far away. → Fig. 4.8 If one is aimed at the satisfaction, first, of physical needs, the other is directed toward spiritual wants. If one is motivated by the necessities of the present, the other is directed toward the demands of the future and of the past. If one begins with the requirements of pragmatism, the other is immediately imbued with the expectations of symbolism. If one can be compared to the constructions of the animal kingdom, the other is unique to the domain of human endeavor. If one offers evidence of bare life, the other insists on the monumental expression of power. If one is assembled from sticks, the other is built of stones. If one is in its essence temporary, the other aspires to permanence. The list of such contrasts could be extended. It is clear that a great deal has been read into the brief text of Genesis 11, and that physical details are not so easily separated from their metaphysical implications. It is also clear that if Noah’s ark can be understood as a redemptive architecture designed by God, then the story of Babel presents an account of just the ­opposite: an attempt at a self-redemptive architecture. The tower is unquestionably an ambitious enterprise, undertaken without

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4.8 The hut and the tower: Pieter Bruegel the ­Elder, Tower of Babel, 1563 (Kunst­ historisches Museum, Vienna): details.

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reference to God. Man, not God, is the great architect, designer of his own identity, his own security. And it is this interpretation that explains the association of the project of Babel with the sin of pride. After all, why else should Babel be associated with pride? At first glance, the text of Genesis does not seem to imply any extraordinary arrogance or hubris; there is no suggestion that Babel’s inhabitants are actively rejecting God’s authority—that is, they are not going out of their way to shake their collective fist at God. If anything, God is conspicuously absent from the opening verses of Genesis 11. And yet, when God enters the text, it soon becomes clear that there is something fundamentally amiss. The problem is not merely one of scale; that aspect is addressed almost as a humorous aside: the inhabitants of Babel aspire to build a tower “with its top in the heavens,” and yet in the following verse the Lord must come down “to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.”44 The more fundamental error of Babel—one that makes sense of the diagnosis of pride—is that its builders attempted to build a new identity for themselves on their own terms, placing themselves quite literally above the flat plains of the created order, denying the narrative of their own past. Their focus was on making a name for themselves when instead, as ­creatures made in the image of God, their true identity could only be found in their creator. Such architectural projects will inevitably fail. Other biblical texts make it clear not only that “the name of the Lord” delivers on that which Babel failed to provide, but also that the misnaming of God is to be equated with idolatry. Both memory and identity are at stake: past, present, and future. The biblical account insists that it is God himself who fulfils the role envisioned, in Genesis 11, for Babel. Proverbs 18 cites the name of God as a strong tower, its security juxtaposed with a false confidence in manmade structures; the psalmist adds that it is not these, but rather God’s power and righteousness that “reach the high heavens,” and that it is God whose might endures to subsequent generations.45 The builders of Babel, in other words, have misjudged their architectural capacities. And what underlies this error? One might argue that the sin of Babel is identical to the sin of Adam and Eve, and identical,

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perhaps, to the root of all sin as it is presented in the biblical text. It stems from a resistance to the very idea of submission before an almighty God, a preference for the constructions of human artifice, the achievements of human reason, the capacities of human science—a word derived from the Latin scientia, knowledge. Is that not precisely the crime for which the Fall is the inexorable punishment?—that mankind should seek to take upon itself the responsibility for choosing its own values, to take into its hands the fruit of the tree of knowledge both of good and of evil? In so doing, it forfeits its right to seek its security in God, and must confront the dangers of a newly godless world. This may remind the reader of another distinction drawn by Pevsner between medieval and modern architecture. “While in the thirteenth century all lines . . . served the one artistic purpose of pointing heavenwards,” the new architecture of modernism must reflect the new world “in which we live and work and which we want to master, a world of science and technique, of speed and danger, of hard struggles and no personal security.”46 These lines were published in 1936, at a moment when that new world’s appetite for speed and danger would soon be fully indulged in the struggle for mastery. Indeed, such language is also reminiscent of Nietzsche, whose metaphysics, as Heidegger puts it, is “a reflection on the situation and place of contemporary man.”47 Even before Nietzsche, Hegel names the feeling “on which rests the religion of the modern period—the feeling God himself is dead.”48 Hegel too grants primacy to Babel in his assessment of architecture’s origins. But it is Nietzsche who states most clearly, in 1886, that “the greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead’ . . . —is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe,” and also, one might add, over America.49 In his account of “The Madman,” he not only points to human complicity in the death of God, he also draws the connection to the fugitive condition of modernity. “Where is God?” cries the madman: I’ll tell you! We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the

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4.9 Human shelter afforded at the cost of ­doing violence to nature: illustration to Medici manuscript of Filarete’s Trattato d’architettura (ca. 1465).

4.10 Charles Eisen, frontispiece to Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture, 2nd ed. (1755).

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entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? . . . Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? . . . God is dead! . . . And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! . . . Who will wipe this blood from us?50 Heidegger, commenting on this text, ties the act of murder to what he describes as modernity’s objectification of reality, wherein value is assigned only by reference to the human subject. “The world changes into object. . . . Nature appears everywhere . . . as the object of technology,” available for ever greater consumption and exploitation.51 The architect might be inclined to locate the origins of that modern objectification in the putative hut of primitive man, for whom nature’s exploitation provides the material for construction. The illustrations to Filarete are in this regard surely more accurate than the familiar frontispiece offered by the abbot Laugier.52 ← Figs. 4.9, 4.10 But the reader might also recall Adam and Eve’s original sin, the desire to control the assigning of value, the assessment of good and of evil by reliance not on God’s word but on that of the human subject. And this returns full circle to the subject of Babel. The project of Genesis 11 is an assertion of human self-­ sufficiency, just as the disobedience of Genesis 3 is an assertion of humanity’s autonomy in the face of God’s law. Both prove disastrous; in the formulation of Genesis 11:6 (“nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them”), as in Genesis 3:22 (“man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”), a superficially positive ambition is understood to have deeply catastrophic consequences. Just as Adam and Eve’s sin leads to death, not life, so the pride of Babel leads to dispersion rather than unity. Weinreb articulates a similar contradiction in questioning the ostensible goodness of upward-spiralling material progress: It is difficult, once one has set foot on this way of progress, to see the unreasonableness of it all. To the contrary, one

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4.11 Sacred geographies: Athanasius Kircher, Descriptio regionis Edeniae, from Arca Noë (1675). The map locates the garden of Eden, Cain’s crime scene, the city of Enoch, the construction site of Noah’s ark, the sources for its materials, and the city of Babel.

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thinks one is doing a good thing in promoting this progress on earth, one often thinks one is helping mankind that way. It is not that it is bad to help mankind; only it is not good, if one thinks one can do it in following a way which leads to mankind’s destruction.53 The means must be judged with an understanding of the ends. Elsewhere, Weinreb articulates this position in terms that plot the site of Babel as a way station on the path in search of a lost Eden—a conceit prefigured, once again, by Kircher’s geographies: ← Fig. 4.11 “Paradise is not accomplished along the road of material development; to the contrary one moves away from it; one runs along that road to meet catastrophe.”54 The project of Babel is inherently self-destructive; and so, in a radical reversal, the ruin of Babel can be seen as a protective measure, guarding not against any challenge to divine authority but against the over­ estimation of human capacities: The unity of their aspirations and the unity of their language is broken. All of a sudden people have different aims and purposes and they no longer understand each other. What had given man the enormous impetus, his unity, . . . had driven him . . . to take possession of the earth, to exploit it still further yet in its seductive possibilities of development, taking things into his own hands like a deity.55 Thus, in Genesis 11 just as in Genesis 3, God’s judgment may be read as an act of mercy, preparing the way for a subsequent redemption.56 This reading is reinforced by the position of the account of Babel within the longer biblical narrative. It has already been noted that Genesis 11 stands at a threshold between prehistory and history; that the chapters of Genesis that precede the account of Babel deal with humanity as a universal condition—with Adam, whose name in Hebrew means “man,” standing as a type for humanity—while the passage that follows plunges immediately into the specifics of Abrahamic genealogy. Within Jewish thought, the dispersion of peoples “over the face

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of all the earth” in Genesis 11 is a direct precursor to the gathering of the people of Israel, the people of God, chosen under the Abrahamic covenant of Genesis 12. Christians, meanwhile, speak of a new covenant, by which the calling of God’s elect is extended through a redemption that is composed at Easter and rehearsed at Pentecost, when God comes down again to undo the confusion of tongues. → Fig. 4.12 As it is, the account of Babel can be read as the narrative not only of a particular people in a particular place at a particular time, but also as the narrative of humanity more broadly. After all, does not this story, from the reader’s perspective, look very much like the story of all architecture? Certainly architecture’s ambitions did not fade subsequent to Genesis 11. And the impulse to “make a name for ourselves” remains familiar. The account of Genesis suggests no catastrophic destruction, no cataclysmic act of God; it merely leaves room for the familiar processes of history, the slow decay of mortal endeavor. As with Babel, so elsewhere: all such projects are susceptible to misunderstanding; none reaches perfection; all, sooner or later, will fall to ruin. Might contemporary readers not see themselves within this all-too-predictable narrative? It is perhaps for this reason that—despite the failure of its builders’ ambitions—Babel, like the primitive hut, has preserved with such extraordinary endurance its central position among the archetypal structures of Western architectural narratives, offering itself all the while as a site for sustained architectural speculation. For centuries, its memory has lived not among the ruins of a particular site, but on the canvases of artists and in the pages of historians, theorists, philosophers and theologians, who have fully exploited the freedoms of its primarily textual conception. And its architectural descriptions have almost always been accompanied by implied prescriptions for contemporary practice. If Babylon has traditionally played a cautionary role—offering, first of all, not a type, but rather an antitype—each generation has been inclined to discover in the motif of Babel, as in that of the primitive hut, an occasion for reflection on its own condition. It is an old fascination, but its lessons are constantly renewed.

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4.12 The expression of violence against nature reinforces the association of Babel with ­Calvary: Construction de la tour de Babel, from a French manuscript of Augustine’s City of God (1480). Compare fig. 4.9.

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Indeed, it is hardly remarkable that architects should once have been so interested in the Tower of Babel. This is to be expected of a pre-modern culture for which biblical precedent served as primary authority. What is more surprising is that in the twentieth century, just at the moment when one might imagine such biblical figures to be fading from the pages of architectural influence, Babel seems instead to reassert its presence with greater insistence than ever before. It does so in exactly those places where the anxieties of architectural modernity seem to play out with the greatest intensity: in the architecture of German Expressionism and of Russian Constructivism, in the visions of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, in Le Corbusier’s project for the Mundaneum, or in the towers of Manhattan as represented by Hugh Ferriss.57 And often that resurgence is tied to a new consciousness of the absence from modernity’s plausibility structures of the figure of God. Babel’s presence, in other words, is tied to God’s absence. If God is no longer held to be the architect of the world, who is to take his place? In this light, the account of Babel itself begins to take on a curiously modern cast. It appears to address problems that suddenly seem newly pertinent: the anxieties of an alienated, mobile society, its perceived loss of center prompting a turn to human artifice; the troubled yearning for an architecture that might provide its builders with a spiritual shelter, to be pursued through the embrace of mass production and the application of contemporary technologies; the evident failures of a confident humanism; dreams of the communicative potential of a shared language denied by the destructive effects of a confusion of tongues—all read into the story of a culture that no longer seeks its security in the God of its earlier chapters but turns instead to the constructions of human reason: a story within which any reference to God is, at first, conspicuously absent. A similar logic can be applied to the very remnants of modern religiosity itself: remnants marked not by an explicit rejection but by a more casual recategorization of God. Nietzsche would insist that today’s faith cannot be what it once was: the movements of modernity have changed for good the possibilities of

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such belief—and here a Heideggerian might speak of the influence of science and of technology on the way humanity understands its place in the world. Does this rule out the practice of religion? Not at all; as Heidegger acknowledges, modernity continues to support religious practice;58 but more and more that religion is itself understood as an essentially human construct. Again the language adopts architectural vocabulary. And here too, modern readers can surely identify with the project of Babel; in fact, Babel offers itself as a figure for the religious project of modernity as a whole, which speaks not only of architectural but also of religious “traditions” in the understanding that those traditions are created by those who practice them. And if religion itself is understood as a human construct, its expression lends itself readily to the application of architectural creativity. This goes some way to explaining what might otherwise be something of an enigma: how, in the wake of the death of God, which has been described as “modernity’s banishment of the sacred from the center of human life,” religious architecture—“sacred architecture”—has in fact fared so well, even when expressed in the language of modernism, which might in other ways seem antagonistic to religious conviction.59 The theologian will insist that “the sacred is essentially non-producible by human effort.”60 For the Christian, as for the Jew, this is a given. But it is entirely at odds with what others have identified as the defining premise of contemporary Western culture: that when it comes to the sacred, individuals must construct their own reality and their own transcendence. This stands in stark contrast to the presumption that is fundamental to Christian doctrine: that the biblical text is the authoritative revelation of the Word of God. Does not this very assertion make the modern hearer feel uneasy? Talk of divine revelation—of what the theologian describes as “the self-manifestation of the sacred”— seems terribly un-modern.61 But where does this lead? Any attempt to confront the subject of “sacred architecture” must first come to terms with modernity’s underlying assumptions as to what defines the sacred. One cannot conform architecture to the demands of modern religion without first acknowledging modern religion as a form of architecture, as

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a human construct. Can this modern conception of religion escape association with the project of Babel? Historians note, after all, that the ziggurat of Etemenanki was a temple-tower; Babel, too, was conceived as an exercise in sacred architecture. But the discussion can be extended from the domain of religious structures to the construction of human flourishing more broadly. If it is valid to speak of Babel as the architectural articulation of the project for human self-determination, then the failure of Babel may be read as a warning. Such self-identification with the conditions of Babel goes some way, perhaps, to explaining modernity’s interest. If Babel stands at the end of prehistory, it also provides a datum against which to measure the strivings of modernity. More precisely, Babel offers a structure through which to examine the architectural implications of the death of God. The lessons of the past are applied to the present; modernity is measured against the story of prehistory. And where does that story end? The account of Genesis does not close with chapter 11, and it is misleading to extract that account from the longer narrative without acknowledging this fact. The theologian Miroslav Volf has argued that memory of the past is tied to anticipation of the future, and it is clear that the discussion of the city of Babylon in the book of Genesis is tied to subsequent discussions of other cities yet to come: Babel’s memorial function is in an important sense prospective.62 Peter Eisenman, the architect, has noted further that a monument can be cautionary; or, to use the appropriate German vocabulary, a Denkmal can also be a Mahnmal, in which “memory becomes a warning.”63 This observation is made in the context of a discussion of contemporary architecture’s troubled relationship to the darkness of World War II. But one could extend its application more broadly. For the biblical figure of Babel, a building intended by its builders as a Denkmal, surely functions as just such a Mahnmal: a warning of particular value in times of serious danger. And such, according to Weinreb, is the nature of modernity.

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The Genesis of ­Architecture 1

2 3

4 5 6

7

8 9

10 11

Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972). Gen. 2:2 (New Revised Standard Version). The popular belief that the lower levels of the structure of the Vienna Tower of Babel are beginning to crumble fails to distinguish between face brick and common brick, and between masonry construction and carved rock-face. Less equivocally, it has been noted of the Rotterdam Tower of Babel that “whilst the bricks near the top of the tower are still bright red, those lower down have started to weather.” Friso Lammertse, ed., Van Eyck to Bruegel, 1400–1550: Dutch and Flemish Painting in the Collection of the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1994), 402. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:309. Num. 3:7–8, 18:7. In this regard, Charles Eisen’s frontispiece to Laugier’s second edition is misleading; it does not, after all, correspond to the text. The discussion of Jabal at Gen. 4:20 and the account of Noah at 9:21 and 9:27 provide the first explicit references to “tents,” sometimes referred to as “huts”— see, for instance, the preface to Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), n.p. See 1 Pet. 2:4–10, also intensely architectural in its language. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Ostensibly drawing on Augustine’s City of God, Arendt finds in the opening chapters of Genesis an occasion to associate human freedom with man’s position in the created order (177), later identifying this faculty of beginning with “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin” (247). It is clear that Arendt’s discussion of the relationship of action to “the Greek word archein, ‘to begin,’ ‘to lead,’ and eventually ‘to rule,’” if tied to what has already been noted of the ἀρχιτέκτων, can expand on the association of the architect with homo faber (177, 99n36). Gen. 3:19 (NRSV). This association is implicit to the critique by Ernst Gombrich of Rykwert’s assessment of the primitive hut. “The title of

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173 these architectural meditations is attractive. It is pleasant to think of Adam, the perfect man, living in a perfect house in Paradise. . . . Alas, like so many other pleasant fantasies this one must be heretical. Adam no more had a house in Paradise than Eve had a dress.” Ernst Gombrich, “Dream Houses,” review of On Adam’s House in Paradise, by Joseph Rykwert, The New York Review of Books, November 29, 1973, 35. 12 Isa. 61:10 (NRSV). 13 Gen. 4:2 (NRSV). 14 Gen. 4:12 (NRSV). 15 Gen. 4:16 (NRSV). 16 This poem, The Garden, later found its way into Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture; but Fletcher cites only an earlier excerpt: “For God, the universal Architect, / It had been as easy to erect / A Louvre or Escurial, or a tower / That might with Heaven communication hold, / As Babel vainly thought to do of old; / He wanted not the skill or power.” Banister Fletcher and Banister F. Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method for the Student, Craftsman, and Amateur, 5th ed. (London: Batsford, 1905), 533. 17 Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 635. For another account of origins that acknowledges both the city of Cain and the city of Babel, presenting the narrative of scripture in parallel to that of the Vitruvian primitive hut, see A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture, by Sir William Chambers, with Illustrations, Notes, and an Examination of Grecian Architecture, by Joseph Gwilt (London, 1825), 105–36. 18 Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 229. 19 Schopenhauer asserts that human life “swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom” (World as Will and Representation, 1:312). The association of pain with the fear of death is self-evident; the association between the burden of life and boredom derives from the need “to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, ‘to kill time,’ in other words, to escape from boredom” (1:313). Søren Kierkegaard extends the narrative to forge a link to Babel: “From that time boredom entered the world and grew in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored in union, then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille, then

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD the population increased and the peoples were bored en masse. To divert themselves they conceived the idea of building a tower so high it reached the sky.” Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992), 228. 20 Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 230–31. 21 “If we were even for a minute to look at it from the historical point of view, then who is supposed to live there? Where would the people be to do that?” Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 230. 22 Gen. 4:25 (NRSV). For Nimrod’s descent from Seth, see Gen. 5 and 10; for his association with Babel, see Gen. 10:10. 23 Gen. 4:23–24 (NRSV). For the extra-biblical tradition that Lamech killed Cain while hunting, directed by Tubal-Cain the technician, who mistook the human for the animal, see Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 232–35. This too can be understood allegorically, as a comment on modernity’s attitude toward what it identifies as the primitive: “the last generation takes its ancestor for a beast” (230). Weinreb develops the motif of the hunter as a figure of incessant striving, in language reminiscent of Schopenhauer, who insists that art offers no lasting satisfaction, “but always delivers us only from a pain or want that must be followed either by a new pain or by languor, empty longing, and boredom” (World as Will and Representation, 1:320). Weinreb notes further that another such figure is presented by Nimrod, the “mighty hunter” of Gen. 10:9. Extending this line of thought, the Tower of Babel emerges as a culmination of the striving that is already prefigured by the city of Cain. 24 Gen. 4:26 (NRSV). 25 Gen. 5:22 (NRSV). 26 1 Chron. 1–9, a grand sweep leading from Adam’s exile from Eden to Israel’s exile in Babylon. 27 Ps. 48:8 (NRSV). 28 Luke 3:23–38 (NRSV): “Jesus, . . . the son (as was thought) of Joseph, . . . son of David, . . . son of Noah, . . . son of Seth, son of Adam, son of God.” 29 See Augustine’s discussion at De civitate Dei 15.8 of the line of Cain, the line of Seth, and the contrast between the city of man and the city of God. 30 Gen. 5:29 (NRSV). 31 See, for instance, the Construction Specifications Institute’s Project Resource Manual: CSI Manual of Practice, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill Professional, 2004), xxvii. See also the preface to

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174 Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects, n.p., which places the ark within a longer trajectory of biblical architectures. 32 To bring the ring of associations full circle, see 1 Pet. 3:21 for an analogy of the ark with baptism, and Gal. 3:27 for an analogy of baptism with clothing, returning once again to the idea of clothing as a form of proto-architecture. 33 The term antitype (Greek άντιτυπον ) shares with the term type a theological heritage that predates any architectural use. Thus “the relation . . . of the Old Testament to the New . . . [is] that of Type to Antitype, of Porch to Temple, of Dawn to Day” (Frederic Myers, Catholic Thoughts on the Bible and Theology [London: W. Isbister, 1874], 42). 34 Gen. 11:1–9 (NRSV). 35 Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1942), 10. 36 Jean le Rond d’Alembert, introduction to Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751– 72), quoted in translation in Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 179. 37 Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, entry for “architecture” in the expanded Encyclopédie méthodique: Architecture, vol. 1 (Paris: Panckoucke, 1788), 109, quoted in Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 12. 38 Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 10. 39 Weinreb argues (Roots of the Bible, 278) that it is precisely Babel’s status as a “pinnacle of development” that generates a sense of false confidence in the tower’s builders, provoking a distorted understanding of man’s chief end. 40 Gen. 11:3 (NRSV). 41 See, for example, Norman Davey, A History of Building Materials (New York: Drake, 1971), 67–69, on Nebuchadnezzar’s claims to having improved brick technology’s resistance to the cyclical ravages of nature through the bedding of burnt brick in asphalt (compare Strabo, Geography 16.1.5); or T. K. Derry and Trevor I. Williams, A Short History of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 158–59, which notes that “in the plains of Mesopotamia brick-building reached its climax with the places of worship known as ziggurats.” None of this is altogether distant from the 1860–

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The Genesis of ­Architecture 62 account by Gottfried Semper, in Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty, 2004), 311 and 449n217, reacting to recent archaeological acquisitions by the Louvre. 42 Gen. 11:2 (NRSV). Shinar is understood as geographically equivalent to Babylonia—see Helmut Minkowski, Vermutungen über den Turm zu Babel (Freren: Luca Verlag, 1991), 16. An alternative interpretation (ibid., 50–51) traces the migration of its inhabitants from highland to flatland, where they must establish an artificial mountain to replace their lost home. In this context, one might compare the account in the Epic of Gilgamesh of the role of material in the implied progression from natural to civilized man and in prolonging existence when the human body has decayed. Immortality is guaranteed both by building and by text, by baked clay bricks and by baked clay tablets, with the latter archived in the temple precinct connected to the primary structure of Babel’s tower. 43 Gen. 11:4 (NRSV). 44 Gen. 11:4–5 (NRSV). 45 Prov. 18:10–12, Ps. 71:1–3, 18–19 (NRSV). 46 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 207. 47 Mar tin Heidegger, “T he Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead,’” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1977), 54. 48 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Faith and Knowledge,” quoted in Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” 58–59. 49 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 199. 50 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 119–20. 51 Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” 100. 52 Laugier’s text invokes a benevolent nature, which has not only provided the necessary materials but has even pre-­ determined the basic structure; man’s role is simply to discover the well-ordered form that has already, for many years, been growing in the forest. As Rykwert notes, “Laugier’s primitive man is quite at ease with nature. The stream by which he settles flows gently, the meadow is green and soft” (Rykwert, Adam’s House in Paradise, 46). Compare Vitruvius 4.1.9–10, or Semper, Style, 247. 53 Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 280. 54 Ibid., 429. 55 Ibid., 281.

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175 56 For God’s judgment as an act of mercy, see also the discussion of Birnbaum’s Die Legende vom gutherzigen Engel at Friedrich Weinreb, “Wunder und Engel um Uriel Birnbaum,” in Schneider, Chassidische Narrenparadies, 239–40. 57 For echoes of Babel in the work of Le Corbusier (among others), see especially “Well-Ventilated Utopias,” chapter 3 of Mark Crinson, Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 93–141. 58 Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” 57. 59 Miroslav Volf, “Architecture, Memory, and the Sacred,” in Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture, ed. Karla Cavarra Britton (New Haven: Yale School of Architecture, 2010), 61. 60 Ibid., 62. 61 See also Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 55–56. 62 Volf, “Architecture, Memory, and the Sacred,” 64–65. 63 Peter Eisenman, “Is There a Religious Space in the Twenty-First Century?” in Britton, Constructing the Ineffable, 210. For an encounter between Eisenman and Chassidic numerology see 213. See also the editors’ notes to Jürgen Habermas, “The Finger of Blame: The Germans and Their Memorial,” in Time of Transitions, ed. and trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 173n5: “Habermas uses three related German words in connection with the [Berlin Holocaust] Memorial—Denkmal, Schandmal, and Mahnmal—whose lexical relation to the root “Mal” (lit. “mole” or “mark,” as in “birthmark” or “mark of Cain”) is difficult to render straightforwardly in English. Mahnmal, which means a memorial intended as a warning (from mahnen, to warn or exhort), does not have an exact English equivalent. . . . It is worth noting that, although the official title of the Holocaust Memorial is Denkmal, it is commonly referred to as the Holocaust Mahnmal.”

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Architecture After God

5. The Tower and the ­Cathedral

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THE TOWER AND THE ­CATHEDRAL

“Churches, castles, palaces, gateways, halls, monuments!”1 Such are the constructive aspirations of the a ­ rchitect Hermann Grossjohann, protagonist of Josef Ponten’s Der Babylonische Turm (The Babylonian tower). Described in 1930 as the German author’s longest novel, “and by many critics considered his best,”2 the book has aged poorly, both in reputation and in material substance. Printed in Germany during the final months of World War I, its physical remains are now—one century later—disintegrating, as its brittle, yellowing paper returns to dust.

The Babylonian Tower Josef Ponten (1883–1940) was the son of a builder. After studying philology in Geneva and Berlin, he moved to Aachen, where in 1904 he began four years of training in architecture and art history. He also began writing, and although he went on to submit a doctoral dissertation in art history, he never completed his architectural training; it was as an author that he established his reputation. But he later stated, in 1923, that if offered a different place in history he would have chosen not “our unholy age . . . of nationalistic brute force,” but rather the period of the Gothic, “the age of friendship with God.”3 To be precise, he would have chosen to be the architect—the Baumeister—of a great Gothic cathedral. Hermann Grossjohann, too, is an aspiring architect, and a mason. True to its title, Der Babylonische Turm opens with a reading of Genesis 11, to which Grossjohann adds his own gloss: “Bauen, nur bauen . . .!” “Ah, to build, to build . . . such that people

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179 might say: ‘All this was made by man!’ To build a tower that reaches to the clouds, to make a name for ourselves, at which the peoples will marvel!” He dreams of the Tower of Babel not as an empty signifier, but as a building that can take on a new materiality, warranting new architectural drawings: “It’s not just fantasy: this thing was in fact built. It says so in the Bible. . . . As I was reading the story, I asked myself: What did the tower actually look like? And I tried to reconstruct it in my mind’s eye. Look.” He picked up a thick roll of paper, pulled off the wrapping, and unfurled a drawing. . . . He let the roll fall onto his lap, where it unwound as he slowly pushed the crackling paper over the tabletop . . .: “The Babylonian Tower: An Attempted Restoration. By Hermann Grossjohann.”4 The drawing reveals a monumental structure. “It must be massive—not like that needle, the Eiffel Tower. It must be massive, built not of flimsy iron but of stone and timber.”5 Its physical dimensions are matched by its programmatic aspirations. Cavernous spaces carved into its base provide dormitories for journeymen. Its higher levels house corporations and institutions—a library of vast dimensions, churches and temples for believers of differing persuasions, a hall of monuments to great minds, a royal palace, a poets’ colony, and, above that, accommodations for artists and architects. “Everything has been planned out and thought through! The painters and the architects belong higher up, because they need the light of the heavens.”6 The architects, that is, occupy a privileged position, above the scholars, the priests, the kings, and the poets. And the summit is programmatically open-ended. The tower, in other words, contains within itself all architectural aspirations: churches, castles, palaces, gateways, halls, monuments. Here too, Babel represents the capacities of architecture tout court. The drawing provokes scandal. “It’s crazy! . . . It’s unbuildable! . . . It’s blasphemous!” But the draftsman responds with a question: “Must all your dreams be buildable?”7 Indeed, Grossjohann’s

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fantasies extend further still: “He fell asleep for an hour before dawn, and during that hour he built, in his dreams, an entire city.”8 The tower and the city: these are the constitutive components of the architect’s constructive ambitions. As the story unfolds, Grossjohann’s career trajectory soars from the lowest level of construction labor to the highest level of architectural accomplishment. His solitary rise is marked by tireless striving toward the loftiest goals of human aspiration. Indeed, architectural projection is in this instance a manifestation of the ambition to create something meaningful, perhaps even to create meaning itself—“to accomplish something great in this world of trivialities.”9 He possesses an exceptional tenacity in the face of life’s contingencies, and an uncommon dedication to the project of building, valued for its own sake. Ah, to build, to build! Bauen, nur bauen! But such a commitment demands devotion even at the price of self-destruction—the architectural project cannot be compromised to accommodate the needs of individual persons— and this plays itself out over the course of the novel in ways that prove increasingly tragic, particularly in their impact on the wider circle of Grossjohann’s disintegrating family. If Ponten’s heroic protagonist presents the architect as a representative type, one might well ask whether such single-mindedness is in fact characteristically human, or whether it might more accurately be described as superhuman. There are certainly moments that suggest comparison to Nietzsche’s conflicted Übermensch, the heroic figure responsible for the creation of meaning and the recalculation of values in the wake of the death of God. But the reader might also propose other comparisons. A counterpart might be found in the traditional narratives that surround the account of Babel. One might, for instance, turn to a passage entitled “Nimrod and the Tower of Babel” in Pirkê de Rabbi Eliezer, an early medieval Haggadic-Midrashic text. It records the suggestion that the error of Babel can be identified with a miscalculation of values: specifically, the violent subordination of the individual to the collective. After describing the extraordinary technological achievement of the Tower’s construction, the text states, of its masons: “If a man fell and died they paid no heed to him, but if a

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brick fell they sat down and wept.”10 Left unspoken is the contention that this state of affairs can be criticized only on the basis of another, more authoritative system of values that can transcend the internal rationality of the masons’ lament. That said, within the framework of Ponten’s story, the structures of traditional theological and cosmological narratives evidently have little to offer. They are obsolete: they no longer meet the demands of a more ambiguous modernity. Grossjohann is well versed in biblical doctrine—but when the church bells ring he has no time for ecclesiastical ritual. The pragmatic demands of the contemporary world require a focus that is not other-worldly but rather this-worldly. Of course the shell of the old theological structure remains in place, just as the figure of the Gothic cathedral still towers over the builder’s imagination; but it does so not as a reminder of an authoritative, transcendent reality, but rather as a monument to humanity’s constructive capacities. If Ponten’s Babylonische Turm was published amid the rubble of the end of World War I, the reader learns that Grossjohann completed his drawing among the vaults of Notre-Dame de Paris in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. As a young journeyman member of the Dombauhütte (the cathedral masons’ lodge), he was assigned to repair the crumbling figures on the cathedral’s tower: “those magnificent devils, larger than life, who sit on the gallery in front of the belfry and look down on the great city.”11 There is a certain symmetry to this conception; after all, if God is dead, then surely the devils, originally conceived to be larger than life, may also succumb to the depredations of history. And just as the death of God is marked by the contention that the image of God was itself only ever a human construct, so it is now the mason who must patch up the devils. What endures is a fascination for the architectural fabric itself: “For three months we lived up there without ever coming down. My God, that was a glorious time! . . . We slept on the floor. If you pressed your ear to the surface of the stone, at night, when the clock struck in the tower and the sound billowed through the gigantic building—boy, how it rolled

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through the structure! And on Sundays, when all the bells tolled! It felt as if the whole tower was trembling—and yet it stood fast. . . . “I would work at my drawing board with compass and rule. Boy, oh boy! What structures I built! How perfectly the vaults were fitted! How the thing grew! Back then I built only Gothic churches, and the size of the drawing board was never sufficient. My towers rose and rose, parted the clouds and split the heavens.”12 Architecture here substitutes for an obsolete theology: the pealing of bells acts no longer as a call to worship a transcendent God, but rather as an occasion for heightened experience of the belltower itself. The metaphysics has been discarded, but the physics must be preserved; indeed, the ongoing process of construction substitutes for the abandoned mission of edification. Uncoupled from external ends, architecture takes on new significance as a surrogate for lost certainties. Bauen, nur bauen! Toward the end of the novel, Ponten’s narrative pauses to reflect on this condition, described by Nietzsche as the experience of a modernity “straying as though through an infinite nothing.”13 “The age I belonged to . . . demanded certainty, and if it didn’t have certainty, it deceived itself through belief. But I suspect a new age will learn to live with the oscillations of doubt. We lived our lives toward specific ends; but in the future you might be able to live purely for the sake of living itself. Why not? You just have to avoid getting seasick on the swaying sea of ideas.”14 And yet Ponten’s book recounts the gradual unravelling of Grossjohann’s constructive dreams. For Der Babylonische Turm is also a story of relentless miscommunication, as its subtitle suggests: Geschichte der Sprachverwirrung einer Familie (The story of a family’s confusion of tongues). That miscommunication, embedded in the interpersonal relationships that constitute the contingencies of human life, threatens the downfall of

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Grossjohann’s ambitions. His personal affairs trace the failure of the aspiration that is articulated in the book’s opening ­paragraphs: to translate the narrative concept of the Tower of Babel into built reality. Grossjohann is not, it seems, the architect of his own fortune; and despite the single-mindedness of his efforts, his failure argues against the viability of such super­ human aspirations. Grossjohann the hero remains human, all too human. But in the place of these failed ambitions Ponten offers a different surrogate, a stronger version of the architectonic impulse. He acknowledges that the built project rarely lives up to expectations. The realities of human existence do not lend themselves to such purity; no perfect structure can be fabricated with such imperfect material. In any case, contemporary architecture no longer aspires to the material permanence of older monuments. But might a turn toward the conceptual guarantee architecture’s autonomy? Grossjohann’s attentions begin to shift away from the building site toward more intangible fabrications. As he explains to Gabriel, the only one of his children who has maintained an interest in the business of building, “The best of what has been built, my son, has been built only on paper.”15 By the end of the narrative, the shift is complete. The architect proposes not a building but a book: “I have a suggestion for you.” “Well?” asked Gabriel, intrigued. “If I were learned like you, Gabriel, I’d go to the old bookshops and flea markets to collect sketches and drawings of everything that hasn’t been built. There are so many books about what has been built. But that’s already there—standing there quite adequately—and it doesn’t need books. But of the seven towers that it was supposed to have, Reims cathedral got only two, and both are stumps. And of that city laid out in Arabia . . . only one avenue was ever completed, and its vast and awe-inspiring columns are still standing there in the endless sand—and yet it was supposed to be just a side street . . .

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“There’s no truly great building anywhere in the world that doesn’t qualify as a ruin in some sense. Even if it’s ostensibly finished, it was surely never completed quite as its architect intended—a thousand compromises interfered. Of course, I’d expand on all this—I’d help you, and I would draw, but you’d have to write what was needed and do all the research, and then we’d publish it as the architecture that was not built. ‘Unbuilt Architecture’ would be a good title.”16 Ponten’s story was published in 1918. Among its admirers was Thomas Mann, who read it amid the ruins of Germany’s collapse at the end of World War I. His diary entries for November 1918 record his reactions. On November 13, two days after the Armistice, he writes: “Evening: ‘The Babyl. Tower,’ very intriguing. Very German, poetic, intricate and idiosyncratic. Will keep reading.” November 21: “The book is very good, severe in its ­critique of humanity, fantastical: just the sort of thing I love, rich in little artistic thoughts and poetic ideas, powerful and stubbornly suggestive . . . and yet tender, ethereal, poetic, symbolic, spiritual. Truly very German.” November 25: “The style of ­storytelling is naïve, almost like a fable.” November 26: “Finished the ‘Babyl. Tower’ with the greatest respect, even admiration.”17 A few weeks later he wrote a letter, which Katia Mann would identify as the start of her husband’s friendship with Josef Ponten: His first book, The Tower of Babylon—a novel—was very promising, my husband thought. He wrote a nice letter to Ponten about it, and they became acquainted. Ponten was such a funny man; he was devoured by ambition, and it was the bane of his existence that he always measured himself by Thomas Mann and wanted to surpass him. But he didn’t succeed. . . . His plans were grandiose. He had a certain talent, but his ambition destroyed him. His projects were simply overblown.18

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The acquaintance between Mann and Ponten endured for several years, and Ponten came to be seen as a friend of the family. The relationship proved uneven: in 1927, Mann would describe Ponten as “a follower who is perpetually troubled by my literary existence and overcompensates by a blindly zealous friendship.”19 Nonetheless, this friendship accounts for a curious intersection, early in 1921, with the life of Uriel Birnbaum. Birnbaum and Mann were not personally acquainted; such connections as might be drawn are, at best, indirect. Birnbaum had participated in a 1916 exhibition at the Kunstsalon Heller in Vienna, owned by the bookseller and gallerist Hugo Heller. The gallery promoted both artistic and literary interests, and Heller, who was also the publisher of Sigmund Freud, had previously hosted author evenings with Heinrich and Thomas Mann.20 Birnbaum had been just a boy at the time. But in 1921, the 26-­year-old undertook to send to the older and more established author a letter, in which he explained that he would be proud to count Thomas Mann among his readers.21 With the letter, he enclosed copies of two books: his newly-published collection of poems In Gottes Krieg (In God’s war), for which he would soon win the Bauernfeld Prize, and his 1919 Gläubige Kunst (Faithful art).22

Faithful Art Birnbaum’s Gläubige Kunst can be understood as a precursor to the narrative of Der Kaiser und der Architekt. In its physical aspects it could not be more different. It is a thin, 28-page pamphlet, printed on cheap paper, held together with staples and enclosed in a brown paper cover. → Fig. 5.1 It boasts none of the bookish attractions of Birnbaum’s later volume. If Der Kaiser und der Architekt offers a lucid, almost child-like narrative, this is a densely-argued polemic, emphatically unillustrated. It is essentially a manifesto. It aims to articulate the valid ends of art, and to question the legitimacy of “art for art’s sake.” But its intended scope is not restricted to art alone. On the premise that art can serve as a phenomenon through which to iden-

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tify broader existential conditions, Birnbaum’s text can be read as an all-encompassing critique of modernity. It offers, among other things, a challenge to that notion of “life for life’s sake” that accompanies the Nietzschean recalculation of values. Its account begins quietly enough, with an assessment of art’s legitimacy in the face of the pressing pragmatic demands of postwar revolution. But it is not long before Birnbaum introduces the central hypothesis of his argument: that the artist’s belief in a transcendent God has far-reaching implications. The ends of a faithful art, he argues, are radically different to those of an otherwise godless modernity. It is immediately clear that Birnbaum’s argument lays claim to validity beyond the boundaries of a specifically Jewish religious practice. The primary distinction drawn by his text is not that between Jew and Gentile. Nor, for that matter, does it betray any traces of nationalism. Birnbaum writes of culture and of race—of Austria, Germany, and the Jews—but his appeal to these concepts is tied neither to territorial boundaries nor to blood; instead, he writes of “a clear separation between the two main cultural races—in fact the only two races that really exist: the faithful and the unfaithful.”23 There are memories, here, of his reading of Augustine; after all, one might also characterize these two groups as “the city of God” and “the city of man.” But this essay also bears comparison to a shorter text by the same title, published in the same year to accompany an exhibition in the Wiener Zeitkunst gallery. Here, Birnbaum is more specific about the contrast between belief and unbelief. It is, he argues, a binary distinction, a Kierkegaardian contradiction without possibility of synthesis: “Here there can be no compromise and no negotiation, only an either–or.”24 On one side stands a belief in God as moral center; on the other, a view of the world as a morally indifferent combination of atoms. The two positions are fundamentally incompatible. This argument is elaborated by the introduction of another distinction, drawn along the lines of a commitment to ethics or to aesthetics. And here Birnbaum engages head-on with the debate over “art for art’s sake.” He distinguishes between those for whom the claims of art must be measured against other ends, broadly

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5.1 Uriel Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst (1919).

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classified as ethical, and those who would insist that art’s justifications must be sought within art itself. This is a well-rehearsed dispute. What is less familiar is Birnbaum’s subsequent effort to cross-examine the relationship between the terms of these competing distinctions: ethics/aesthetics and belief/unbelief. He notes that these paired categories do not map onto one another; the correlation of ethics with belief and of aesthetics with unbelief is untenable. For one, the tendency to understand art as a means to an end can be demonstrated both among believers and among unbelievers.25 While there exist self-identifying aesthetes whose commitment to the pursuit of “art for art’s sake” is tied to a disbelief in the possibility of any transcendent, divinely-ordained value, there are also unbelievers who would insist on art’s rightful subordination to external ends, be they ethical, social, or political. In fact, Birnbaum is relatively uninterested in the unbeliever’s commitment to the aesthetic approach. Its conception may well be internally coherent; but, he maintains, its under­lying structure is visibly unsupported. In refusing to yield to any transcendent imperatives, it renounces the possibility of external validation. It is by nature unresilient, such that any systemic flaw will escalate, sooner or later, to the point of structural collapse. With a nod to Julian the Apostate, Birnbaum argues that “the visible pillars of paganism—pure realism and materialism—will fall of their own accord.”26 More insidious, he maintains, is the position of those who claim an ethical function for art without being able to construct a strong basis upon which to support the implied imperative that accompanies such a claim. Birnbaum insists that only belief in a transcendent God can provide a sufficiently secure foundation; the ends of any ethical system constructed without such belief are revealed, under closer inspection, to be no more than aesthetic in their underlying nature. Why is this insidious? One might, at this point, appeal to a familiar architectural principle: a hidden structural flaw is more dangerous than one that is visible. Indeed, the tectonic ­metaphors pile up rapidly. On its façade, the superstructure of

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ethically conscientious unbelief may resemble that of more orthodox belief; but underlying differences remain unseen and unexamined. The superficiality of such resemblance is the main target of Birnbaum’s critique, prompting a sustained attack on tectonic verisimilitude: What must be challenged—to the point of collapse—are those pillars of paganism that disguise themselves as bearers of divine will, as supports of the very structure of the world’s law. False belief, hypocritical unbelief, sweet superstition: these are more hateful to God than open denial.27 False belief (der falsche Glaube), hypocritical unbelief (der heuchelnde Unglaube), sweet superstition (der süße Aberglaube) . . . What, in Birnbaum’s account, has taken the place of genuine faith (Glaube)? His response reads like an indictment of the new laws invented to substitute for what Sloterdijk describes as “traditional theological and cosmological narratives”:28 They seek God by all imaginable paths, trying to grasp the ungraspable through symbolism or through philosophical propositions, trying to comprehend that aspect of God that is incomprehensible. And they fail to realize how far this symbolizing and philosophizing strays from reality, how terribly it ties itself up in knots as it circles around the simple and naïve truth—the simple and naïve truth of the world as God’s creation. . . . They scorn religion but lose themselves in religiosity. They laugh at the mysteries of God but rave about mysticism. They mock the pyramid of God’s law, and build towers of Babel out of their own crumbling ethics. They flee before God, and end up with idols. Too proud and too independent to humble themselves before God, they bow down instead before the bungling incompetence [Pfuschwerk] of their own ideas.29 The significance of Birnbaum’s reference to Babel is clear. However ambitious its aspirations, and however sophisticated its

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assembly, any structure that is built of defective material is destined to crumble. The attempted design of an all-encompassing, coherent, self-sufficient ethical system—a work of aesthetic creation, perhaps even a unified work of art, a Gesamtkunstwerk—is exposed, instead, as bungling incompetence, as mere Pfuschwerk. Just as in Genesis 11, so here the demand for autonomy is nothing other than pride; and that pride is guaranteed to fall. Such pride, argues Birnbaum, is the distinguishing feature of contemporary Western culture, finding political expression on every front. He reserves particular criticism for socialist idealism, no doubt chosen for the clarity of its redemptive promises: Supposing they do manage to construct [erbauen] the golden age of the future, a realm of human blessedness without need for God. . . . This is the socialist ideal: that men should inhabit the same space and time as us—swinging, rolling, flying along on the earth’s furious circuit around itself, around the sun, and around some faraway unknown, inhabiting this wild chaos from which, at creation, God’s laws forged days and months and years, measures of time that set a b ­ oundary to the boundless—that in this law-governed chaos there should live men who have freed themselves not only from the chaos but also from the governance of God’s fundamental laws. . . . To some, such a future might seem attractive.30 The socialist future—to be manufactured without God—is condemned for the impermanence of its fabric: in its materialist logic it must yield to the failures of materiality. Its ambition to build (erbauen) is insufficiently radical. The projected socialist ideal (it would be appropriate to speak here of a heaven-storming cathedral) is incommensurable with the messianic future prophesied by Isaiah, a future filled with the presence of God. Quoting from the Book of Revelation, Birnbaum ties that future to nothing less than the absorption of time into eternity.31 In fact, Birnbaum utterly rejects modernity’s tendency toward utopian thought. It is a false surrogate, offering a merely

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temporal satisfaction of a deeper longing for a more permanent redemption. In a critique that could be directed as much toward architects as toward politicians, he denounces those who put their confidence in “world improvements” (Weltverbesserungen).32 He condemns what he describes as the self-deification of humanity, the reversal of the biblical doctrine of creatures created in the image of God. And here art is especially culpable. “Art must be knocked off the pedestal from which it currently dreams of redeeming the world.”33 It must recognize that its legitimate end is the service of God: However unimportant art may be in its own right, it becomes important in setting itself to this purpose. In God’s light it acquires value. In God’s service it attains significance.34 Such language is hardly conciliatory. And Birnbaum recognizes that his position is unlikely to be well received by a culture whose patterns of thought are fundamentally materialist. But he goes on to assert that his position will be welcomed least of all by fellow Jews, who have tended to replace the transcendent longing for Zion with something infinitely inferior—with architecture— being too readily satisfied with pale, earthly imitations of more real, more vibrant heavenly realities: Have we not surrendered even our most unique possession? That glorious God-given gift, our messianic longing for Zion, the incalculable longing for a temple, for the holy . . . This our dream, the dream of all dreams—have we not exchanged it for the most desolate utopianism?35 Such arguments cast a sharply raking light on the architectural details of the dream that introduces Der Kaiser und der Architekt. And they also frame Birnbaum’s prediction that the early decades of the twentieth century would mark a low-point in history. In a passage that responds to a Nietzschean lament for modernity’s abandonment of the firm ground of existential certainty, Birnbaum contrasts the chaos of modern moral relativism with

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the conviction of a firm belief “that is alone capable of leading to solid ground”: The world has lost its one sure grip. And that is why, in days to come, our age will surely be named the most immoral of all. . . . Liberal babble has tried to deny the very foundation of its own logic: the world’s conformity to law. It has done so out of a childish hatred for the eternal lawgiver, whom an acknowledgment of universal law would have to presuppose. And this liberal babble has now become the daily jargon of millions around the world. It screams from the stage, it flickers on the screen, it howls from the press, it chatters in the parliament—and the whole world takes up the refrain in a thousand variations.36

Unbuilt Architecture Mann’s diary entry for May 19, 1921, records the arrival of Birn­ baum’s letter: A certain Herr Uriel Birnbaum from Vienna sent a book of his poems, along with a longish, clever essay in the vein of the Betrachtungen on the theme of Austria, Germany, and the Jews. Jewish conservatism, very good. Napped in the garden. Ponten came to tea and was agreeable, as he usually is. I shared the letter with him.37 Mann replied two weeks later. His May 31 diary entry records his response. And here, not for the last time, the reception of Birnbaum’s work is overshadowed by the events of twentieth-­ century history: In addition wrote . . . to Uriel Birnbaum regarding his letter and the package of books. Nothing else of importance.—Was impressed by the Salzburg plebiscite in favor of Austria’s annexation to Germany.38

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Mann had reason to be impressed by the plebiscite. With support from Berlin, the vote produced an overwhelming majority in favor of annexation to Germany. But it did not bode well for the theme of Austria, Germany, and the Jews. Nine months earlier, Adolf Hitler had made his first public appearances in Vienna and Salzburg, railing against the restrictions imposed upon Germany after World War I, and advocating for the unification of all German states: The first and most important thing we wish to establish— which in the end must be the ultimate objective of the people’s whole existence—is the fight for freedom and unity and for the unification of the whole people [Volk].39 The transcript dutifully records the interruption of frequent applause. Hitler’s call to a freedom and unity of ontological significance—“the ultimate objective of the people’s whole existence”—is evidently a compelling message. At stake is a degree of self-determination that responds to the existential dimensions of Hitler’s appeal: Let us not forget that today we are not the masters of our own destiny. . . . This is our first demand . . .: that our people be set free, that our chains be burst, that Germany again become its own master, determining its own history . . . [applause]. What is the first step toward such mastery? Pronouncing a diagnosis that identifies as the cause of Germany’s underlying disorder neither the political conditions of the Entente nor the circumstances of human nature, Hitler turns to the “Jewish question” ( Judenfrage): Upon our answer to this question hangs the recovery of our people’s inner health, along with the complete disappearance of the Jewish spirit. Do not imagine that you can fight a disease without killing the pathogen and annihilating

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the bacillus. . . . The effect of Jewry will never pass, and the poisoning of the people will never end, until the pathogen, the Jew, has been removed from our midst [applause].40 This immunological narrative was one to which Hitler would return frequently in subsequent public appearances, not least in a lengthy speech at a party rally in Munich six days later. Indeed, the argument can also be architecturalized: the exclusion of the allegedly wandering Jewish spirit (jüdische Geist) is, in Hitler’s design, a necessary counterpart to the construction of a perimeter around German identity. But it is worth underlining the centrality, in this particular address, of the corresponding demand for German unity. Hitler insists that national identity is to be found in a unity of purpose, of constructive effort, and of language. Religion is divisive, so doctrinal debate must be renounced: “We reject all confessional conflicts. . . . We seek something that can bind us together, and must set aside all that divides.” Where might one look for such a binding agent? “Above all, we reach for one thing: the unity of all those millions who, as we know, acknowledge only one purpose—a great German fatherland [applause]. . . . We wish not to dissipate this energy by fighting one another, but rather to pursue the same purpose, together.” Only such cooperation will permit the rebuilding of Germany. The following day a postcard was sent to Anna Drexler, wife of the NSDAP chairman. It stated, simply: “The unification of all National Socialists in the German-speaking world has become a reality. . . . Kind regards, A. Hitler.”41 The Salzburg plebiscite would reinforce that assertion. Back in Munich, two months later, Hitler would take leadership of the NSDAP, as architect of a constructed German unity. So Thomas Mann was right to take note of the Salzburg plebiscite. He was already aware of debates over the contested relationship between German and Jewish identities. His June 3, 1921 diary entry records dinner with his friends the Wassermanns and the Pontens, followed by “discussions about the Jewish problem.”42 Just a few weeks earlier, Jakob Wassermann, a popular novelist, had published his autobiographical Mein Weg als Deutscher und

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Jude (My path as a German and a Jew), in which he had articulated his own understanding of “the Jewish problem.”43 So it is difficult, today, not to read Mann’s letter to Birnbaum—dated May 29, the day of the plebiscite—without some consciousness of this political context. He thanks Birnbaum for his books and for his “beautiful, meaningful letter”: I wish I could have replied to you under the first impression of your letter. I read it more than once, and shared it with appreciative friends—such as the writer Josef Ponten, of whom you have perhaps heard or read something yourself. He is a singular thinker with a freshness of intellect and spirit that is very much in tune with popular sensibility, and he took great pleasure in your letter. He fully agreed that it articulates the best Jewish spirit [bester jüdischer Geist]. . . . The author of the Betrachtungen hardly needs tell you that your ideas strike him as both reliable and admirable.44 Mann writes kindly of Birnbaum’s books: he expresses full agreement with Gläubige Kunst, describes himself as deeply moved by Birnbaum’s poetry, and ends his letter with an expression of appreciation. No doubt Birnbaum was pleased to receive such a generous response. But it is the mention of Josef Ponten that deserves attention. For if Mann shared Birnbaum’s letter with Ponten, it is likely that Birnbaum read Ponten’s work—if not before this occasion, then certainly after. And of the books written by Ponten prior to that point, the most widely known was Der Babylonische Turm. Did this story—of the rise and tragic fall of a great builder—influence Der Kaiser und der Architekt? It was precisely during this period, after all, that Birnbaum conceived his own Babelic tale. But if both books respond to the Genesis account of Babel, Birnbaum’s text can be read as a rebuke of Ponten’s. The contrast will become clearer if Ponten’s story is ­followed a little further. “‘Unbuilt Architecture’ would make a good title”: so Hermann Grossjohann, in the closing pages of Der Babylonische Turm.45 And it is precisely within this turn to the purely conceptual, to the

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drawing, and to the design of dream cities, that Ponten’s protagonist finds fulfilment of the architectural aspirations with which his story began: He built in the grand manner, without stopping, without constraint, with a boldness matching the flight of his imagination—just as he had once dreamed of doing when he was in the pure freshness of his youth. . . . He worked on the documents of Architecture That Will Never Be Built. The rooms of the small house filled up with huge drawing boards, each bigger than the last . . . He built cathedrals with seven times seven towers, and domed cities like the temple cities of India and Java. He raised structures that stormed the heavens, with little people crawling like beetles between them; and with these he filled the ­immeasurable emptiness that separates earth from heaven.46 Architektur die  nicht  gebaut wurde (Unbuilt architecture) was in fact the title of a book published by Ponten himself in 1925, one year after the appearance of Der Kaiser und der Architekt.47 As he acknowledges in his introduction, it is the fulfilment of the promise of Der Babylonische Turm: the author lives out the dream of his earlier book’s protagonist. Elegantly bound in two quarto volumes—text and image, matte and glossy, discursive and episodic—it offers a compelling study in the transmission of architectural ideas. The thickly-printed, almost unbroken text is as impenetrable as the collection of plates is eclectic. It is a celebration of architecture’s proudest ambitions, an astonishing compendium of materials—plans, sections, elevations, perspectives, axonometrics, renderings, models, photographs—spanning two thousand years of architectural thought. Little is said about the process of assembly, except that Ponten benefitted from the assistance of two students, whom he describes as his hodmen, or mason’s assistants, assigned by Heinrich Wölfflin.48 But it is an impressive compilation, and one can only assume that Ponten took the advice that he himself had once offered through the mouth of the aged architect Grossjohann, to comb the streets of

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Munich: “I’d go to the old bookshops and flea markets to collect sketches and drawings of everything that hasn’t been built.”49 Thus assembled, the drawings made their way back out to the bookshops of Europe. Some found their way to Vienna, offered for sale by Hugo Heller.50 → Fig. 5.2 Ponten’s approach to this unbuilt architecture deserves attention. Here too, he assesses the gravity of the architectonic impulse, with particular emphasis on its claims to extradisciplinary significance. Opening with an epigraph drawn from the ­architectural annotations of the “architect king” Friedrich Wilhelm IV, patron of Berlin’s Neues Museum, he launches into an explication of architecture’s metaphysical dimensions. Architecture is measured against the other arts; and although music is acknowledged for the abstract purity of its disembodied existence, Ponten is at pains to argue that it is precisely the materiality of architecture that shapes its significance. It is around architecture, more than any other art, that there accumulate the adjectives of weightiness: substantial, ponderous, momentous, solid, forceful, impressive; by the same token, architecture has the capacity to be oppressive, grievous, burdensome. Those attributes are to be measured not only in units of gravitational force; they also extend to the domains of geography, of time, of morality, of aesthetic presence, of bare existence. Compared to the other arts, architecture is ineradicably tied to place; granted adequate dimensions, the demands of a single project can readily occupy a lifetime; it is inexorably public, in a manner inseparable from its ethical responsibilities; and its most heroic expressions assume a potentially catastrophic risk. But it is architecture’s sheer mass that draws Ponten’s particular attention: At its most basic, architecture is always a mountain, a hill, a mass. . . . To be precise, it is a mass that is raised, moved, and relocated with meaning and purpose. . . . As such, it is the clearest and most visible representation of the mastery of material by the spirit. That explains the deep power it wields on everyone—even the unartistic. No other artform is its equal in this quite uninvited impact.51

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It takes little imagination to identify sympathies between this description and the establishment of Babel as architecture’s primary archetype. But it is also clear that such analysis lends itself readily to direct political appropriation. If architecture indeed possesses an unrivalled capacity to influence even the most reluctant of its subjects, then it must take its rightful place in any comprehensive effort to shape popular conviction. Glancing forward, it seems almost inevitable that the leadership of the NSDAP should have learned to devote special attention to architecture. Indeed, Ponten’s text grows increasingly explicit: It is supremely material, supremely tangible, supremely earth-bound, supremely heavy; but in its formal language— in its essence—it is supremely abstract, and therefore inwardly spiritual. It is physical like no other, and yet ultimately purely mathematical. It mixes mystical fantasy with bare number. . . . It evokes, almost always, the impression of force: the highest awe-struck astonishment in the presence of greatness.52 Once again, the dimensions of architecture—both conceptual and material—are correlated directly to the most generous estimate of its significance. And here Ponten introduces language that is not dissimilar to that later adopted by Sloterdijk in his account of architecture’s world-shaping capacities. Like Sloterdijk, Ponten speaks in terms that shuttle seamlessly between the physical and the metaphysical; and like Sloterdijk, he argues for architecture as a discipline that both registers and shapes humanity’s experience of the world. It is architecture that can most readily guard against dissolution into the limitless space of existence— Nietzsche’s “infinite nothing”—for it is architecture that can most effectively build a sense of enclosure and of identity. The consciousness of security demands a corresponding consciousness of an external threat. And so that construction of security, of identity, of immunity, is tied to the act of exclusion. At its most basic, the enclosure of a wall creates a space that is separated from the world, generating an exterior that is distinct and

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excluded from the interior. The secure perimeter may be architectural; but the security in question is primarily ontological. Indeed, contemporary readers may be reminded of the title of that chapter in Sloterdijk’s Spheres that contains Birnbaum’s drawing—“Arks, City Walls, World Boundaries, Immune Systems: The Ontology of the Walled Space”—and they may recall Sloterdijk’s own reading of Babylon, and of the relationship between the tower at the city’s center and the walls that define its boundary. But Ponten continues. Not only is humanity’s experience of the world shaped by architecture; architecture itself becomes a figure of the embodied human experience. By the same token, architecture offers a register of humanity’s inherent limitations. In no other art, argues Ponten, is the discrepancy between theory and practice so evident: Architecture is nothing less than a symbol for the tension between what the spirit desires and what can actually be accomplished. Architecture is truly regal, majestic—but how many prosaic, mean contingencies it depends on! There it stands, a tower for the ages, a long shadow over the centuries—but it is captive to the earthly and earthy, surrendered to the powerful, and reliant on the rich. . . . In the most fundamental sense, all architectural experience is dramatic, precisely because it demands so much bodily motion, so much action, from hodman to architect. But often—perhaps always—it is a tragic drama. Why? Because the intent of all that acting and laboring is seldom—almost never—fully realized. So many hostile powers insert themselves between desire and execution. The full-size stone copy out there in the world seldom corresponds to the small image in the mind of the architect. It remains an architecture of intent, a proposal, a picture, on paper: unbuilt architecture.53 With this introduction, Ponten plunges into the body of his work: Volume 1: Text; Volume 2: Plates. He explicitly excludes from his account those projects—he names, by way of example, “glass

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architectures over the Alps”—that are unfeasible or mathematically impossible. All else is embraced: “architecture that was never built, but that could have been built, whether by humans or by superhumans [Übermenschen], or architecture that was not built as it should have been built.” This nod to the Nietzschean Übermensch introduces a formidable catalog of entries. Churches, castles, palaces, gateways, halls, monuments! And what leads the way? As a form of revenge on that which is petty, needy, and all too human, I have sought those architectural ideas that are least burdened by earth’s gravity: the freest, the boldest, the greatest—all that, to which the sacred Word assigns the goal of building “a tower that reaches to heaven, at which the peoples will marvel.”54 This explicit Babylonian tower resides only in the text; Ponten provides no corresponding image. Babel itself is conspicuously absent from Ponten’s second volume. Instead, its early plates present Gothic cathedrals. These include sites to which readers of his earlier novels have already been introduced. He devotes five images to the cathedral of Strasbourg, its spire towering over the surrounding rooftops in a well-established composition that is used also for other representations of the Gothic cathedral’s crowning position within the city. →  Fig.  5.3 Indeed, the reader discovers that it is to this incomplete project—embodying an unfulfilled desire for “skyscraping towers that are high as the heavens,” with continuous spiral staircases winding up its stepped spire—that Ponten first assigns the explicit comparison to “the Babylonian.”55 His account of the cathedral’s development encompasses a long history of frustration, and reads like a catalog of the predictable effects upon architecture of its enemies: fire, material failure, reallocated priorities, shortage of funds, lack of talent, decline in taste, absence of imagination, excess of ambition, technological obsolescence, foreign interference, frivolousness, rashness, weariness, hesitation, mortality, failure. Its architects’ greatest plans never reach completion.

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5.2 Literatur . . . Kunst (Literature . . . Art): Hugo Heller’s bookshop in Vienna, ca. 1920.

5.3 The tower and the city: (left) George Dehio, Strasbourg Cathedral, ca. 1922; (right) ­Frederick Evans, Lincoln Cathedral, 1896.

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And yet this emphatically “German project,” once celebrated as the world’s tallest building, stands nonetheless as a monument to architectural achievement.56 It is the site that Goethe once described as a glorious Denkmal to a man who shared a destiny “with that architect who built a tower of mountains up into the clouds,” one of a select few to whom it was granted “to conceive a Babel-thought within their souls—complete, great, and possessed of an inevitable beauty down to its smallest part,”57 whose genius partook “of that spirit, that can look down onto such a creation and pronounce, like God, ‘It is good!’”58 Adolf Hitler, visiting in 1940, → Fig. 5.4 would consider transforming this cathedral into a national shrine devoted to the German people.59 Ponten provides additional examples, many of which can readily be burdened with Babylonian associations. He devotes particular attention to the utopian towers of the fifteenth-century author-architect Filarete, whose discussion of architecture’s mortality draws explicit comparison to Babylon,60 and whose authorship of an architectural novel clearly provokes Ponten’s sympathy. Indeed, this reference invites further comparisons. Filarete tells of an architect who persuades his prince to embark on the building of a city, a project of staggering dimensions, its success guaranteed by dint of force: I need 12,000 masters; for each master 7 apprentices, which makes 84,000 apprentices; 6,000 hodmen—altogether 102,000 men. The masters lay 30 million bricks a day. . . . Each group of workers is kept apart from the others, and each is guarded at work and at rest by 10 cavalrymen and 50 infantrymen. Disobedience is punished by death.61 So proceeds Ponten’s animated description of the construction of the city of Sforzinda, a project reminiscent of the opening of Der Babylonische Turm. “The building keeps going: city hall, prison, customs house, mint, monasteries, hospital.”62 Ponten sees fit to offer a comparison of his own, looking forward to a more contemporary project:

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The city in the novel is built with incredible speed. Such is the effect of a military presence. Filarete obviously thinks he is proclaiming miracles when he describes the accelerated schedule. But if he had experienced our own wartime construction of the Leuna works—which are hardly smaller than Sforzinda—where the chimneys were smoking after just one year (and that with only 13,000 workers, who also had to install the machinery), he would have grown quiet before the Germans of today.63 It is a provocative comparison. Developed during World War I to speed the manufacture of explosives, the Leuna site would grow larger still during World War II, when a comparable number of slave laborers would work under close military supervision to meet the chemical demands of the Third Reich. Leuna is not illustrated in Ponten’s book, since it failed so emphatically to meet his criteria for unbuilt architecture. But in Leuna as in Sforzinda, it is the towers that attract particular notice. → Fig. 5.5 Sforzinda’s towers are followed by a skyscraping scheme from Jacques Perret’s 1601 Des fortifications et artifices, a meticulous engraving encircled with the inscription “You must climb to the highest point, to contemplate the heavens and the earth and the things that are there, before worshipping God alone.”64 → Fig. 5.6 Ponten glosses this text with an interpretation of his own that draws comparisons to other structures both old and new: A house that is high enough for its inhabitants . . . to spend their time in religious edification on the terrace of a tower that is as close as possible to the heavens and the stars. The aspiration is Gothic; but the idea reaches back to its earliest precedent, the Assyrian step pyramid, and its form reaches forward to the modern tower or “skyscraper.”65 And so, gradually, the imagery shifts from the cathedral to the tower, resolving itself fully in the architecture of modernity. Having previously likened the upward-striving cathedral to the skyscraper (“the Gothic cathedral is in fact, in a certain way, a

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5.4 Adolf Hitler on an official visit to ­Strasbourg Cathedral in 1940, photographed by ­Heinrich Hoffmann, from Eva Braun’s personal albums, now in the US National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized.

5.5 The towers of the Leuna works, aerial ­photograph, 1920s.

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holy high-rise”),66 Ponten proceeds to liken the skyscraper to the cathedral: After the war all architecture, even the most functional, came to an apparently hopeless standstill. But just then there emerged quite organically—with all the force and solemnity of an event in natural history—a new architectural idea: the idea of the high-rise. . . . And precisely because the high-rise must grow out of the inner compulsion of the age, one can predict for it a great future. It will be carried forward by the law of the age and the instinct of mankind. It is even possible that it will introduce, once again, an age of great architecture—of an architecture as great and as holy as that of the cathedrals. Quoting the German-Jewish politician Walther Rathenau, recently assassinated by right-wing extremists, he adds: Rathenau states: “To my mind, since the Middle Ages there has been no architecture as imposing as that of New York City.” Or, one might add, as holy. For wherever men build from the innermost longings of their lives and beings, that is where the holy emerges—be it factory, fortress, or skyscraper. Only a romantic, antiquarian definition would restrict the word holy to cathedrals.67 This observation is significant. In the search for a new source of values, for a new faith to replace the antiquarian structures of a premodern era, Ponten turns to humanity itself. Sanctity is endowed not by dedication to a holy God, but by association with the human architectonic impulse. This is, quite literally, religion as a human construct. And here Ponten’s assertion begs comparison to an argument made by Hegel, who appeals first to Goethe and then to the account of Babel to suggest that the origins of architecture and of religion may be held to coincide:

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5.6, 5.7 (top) “You must climb to the highest point”: ­engraving from Jacques Perret, Des ­fortifications et artifices (1601). (bottom) “An architecture as great and as holy as that of the cathedrals”: Otto Kohtz, Reichshaus am Königsplatz, Berlin, 1920.

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5.8, 5.9 (top) Otto Kohtz, Hochhauskonzept, Berlin, 1935. (bottom) Hugh Ferriss, “The Four Stages”: Study for Maximum Mass Permitted by the 1916 New York Zoning Law, 1922.

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“What is holy?” Goethe asks . . ., and answers: “What links many souls together.” In this sense we may say that the holy with the aim of this concord, and as this concord, has been the first content of independent architecture. The readiest example of this is provided by the Tower of Babylonia. In the wide plains of the Euphrates an enormous architectural work was erected; it was built in common, and the aim and content of the work was at the same time the community of those who constructed it.68 What example does Ponten introduce to illustrate such sanctity? He directs his reader to the stepped mass of a 1920 design by Otto Kohtz for Berlin’s Reichshaus, an administrative office building for the German Reich—a gigantic structure axially aligned with the processional way of the Siegesallee, rising like a ziggurat above the flat plain of the city. ← Fig. 5.7 Such a monument to bureaucracy might seem an unlikely candidate for beatification, reinforcing, if anything, the philosopher’s reservations about modernity’s artistic capacities. After all, while Hegel contends that art “only achieves its highest task when it has taken its place in the same sphere with religion and philosophy,”69 he also notes that in the intellectual context of “the spirit of our modern world,” conditions are inauspicious: “art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.”70 To this predicament Ponten’s enthusiasm offers no obvious resolution. But neither does Kohtz’s drawing invite self-doubt. A second version of the same drawing adds an architectural halo of sorts, a series of expanding rings that seem to radiate from the building in an aura of holiness. Indeed, Ponten draws an explicit parallel to the medieval cathedral, while noting that “the gigantic modern city, drawn out beyond measure, is missing the corresponding vertical extension that would make it perceptible to the observer.” New towers must substitute for the modern city’s lost center: The Reichshaus, for instance, “would be higher by almost a quarter than the tallest church in Germany . . . So modern cities too can be granted the ‘city crowns’ that are typically absent today.”71 With a nod to the

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stepped massing of New York City’s zoning laws, best articulated in the celebrated 1922 renderings by Hugh Ferriss, ← Fig. 5.9 he adds: “Purpose and material have given birth to a thoroughly unique style. It is as unique and as independent as that of the Gothic cathedral; yet it is reminiscent, from a distance, of a Persian stepped temple. Perhaps the architect felt it too. . . . A truly Babylonian ambition— one that can be realized!”72 Kohtz’s architecture was buildable, perhaps—but not built: this was one of many such designs, culminating in a massive 1935 scheme for the capital of the Third Reich, likewise unbuilt. ← Fig. 5.8 Ponten presents further towers, further projects, further architectures. There are family resemblances between them, not least in scale. Indeed, his concluding case studies grow progressively larger, their ambitions increasingly bold. He illustrates Ernest Hébrard’s 1912 International World Centre, a future city of communication laid out on an empty plain, a monumental Tower of Progress providing a central point of reference for its axial layout. There are equally ambitious projects for newer worlds: Walter Burley Griffin’s scheme for a new Australian capital, also conceived in 1912, its axes converging on the capitol; and Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plans for a new Chicago, “the great fantasy,”73 its projected population described as twice that of the Republic of Austria. Ponten illustrates, in particular, its iconic civic center, “an enormous building which was immediately criticized for its inflated proportions,”74 towering over the surrounding urban fabric (“its height designed to surpass all the skyscrapers of the city”75) as human figures swarm like beetles round about. → Fig. 5.10 Another drawing from the same source would have shown this tower, too, silhouetted against an apparent aura of holiness, the concentric rays of the sun illuminating the layout of an ideal city. Indeed, it is notable that Ponten’s illustrations end not with Europe but with the New World. He had already lamented his inability to put his hands on comparable plans for Berlin.76 If he had delayed the publication of his book by another decade, he could doubtless have begun to fill this gap. But instead, he closes his account with a Denkmal:

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5.10 (top) View Eastward to Lake Michigan, (­middle) Jules Guérin, View, Looking West, of the Proposed Civic Center Plaza and Buildings, Showing It as the Center . . . of the Surrounding Country, and (bottom) detail of Fernand Janin, Elevation Showing the Group of Buildings Constituting the Proposed Civic Center, for Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909).

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Farewell—and let us remind ourselves from time to time that if we prosper in this life, the clearest and most tangible gift we can leave to our grateful descendents is a built legacy that is both staggeringly beautiful and high as the heavens. And those of you who rise above this world in power and wealth . . . on whom this art depends as no other, to whom the strictest and proudest of the muses looks expectantly for friendship—remember that what Filarete told us is still valid today: “A nation has never grown destitute or gone to ruin through building,” but rather through the waging of mindless wars.77

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 1

Josef Ponten, Der Babylonische Turm: Geschichte der Sprachverwirrung einer Familie (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1918), 8, my translation. 2 Peter Hagboldt, “Joseph Ponten,” The German Quarterly 3, no. 1 ( January 1930): 1. 3 Josef Ponten, “Persönliches: Selbstbildnis aus dem Jahre 1920,” in Kleine Prosa (Trier: Friedrich Lintz Verlag, 1923), 23, my translation. 4 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 8–9, my translation. 5 Ibid., 10, my translation. 6 Ibid., 13, my translation. 7 Ibid., 16, my translation. 8 Ibid., 19, my translation. 9 Ibid., 16, my translation. 10 Gerald Friedlander, trans., Pirkê de Rabbi Eliezer (The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great) According to the Text of the Manuscript Belonging to Abraham Epstein of Vienna (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1916), 176. 11 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 405–6, my translation. 12 Ibid., 407–9, my translation. This episode functions as an architectural variant of the transformative mountain-top experience that drives subsequent effort. Nietzsche, too, claimed such an experience. 13 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 120. 14 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 217–18, my translation. 15 Ibid., 409, my translation. 16 Ibid., 411–12, my translation. 17 Hans Wysling and Werner Pfister, eds., Dichter oder Schriftsteller? Der Briefwechsel zwischen Thomas Mann und Josef Ponten 1919–1930 (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1988), 141n2, my translation. 18 Katia Mann, Unwritten Memories, ed. Elisabeth Plessen and Michael Mann, trans. Hunter Hannum and Hildegarde Hannum (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 52. 19 Thomas Mann to Heinrich Mann, August 29, 1927, in Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949, ed. Hans Wysling, trans. Don Reneau, Richard Winston, and Clara Winston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 136. 20 Sabine Fuchs, “Hugo Heller (1870–1923), Buchhändler und Verleger in Wien: Eine Monographie” (master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 2004), 11n5, 77, 80–81. The 65 pieces exhibited by Birnbaum touched on themes that would be developed in Der Kaiser und der Architekt; they included an illustration to Edgar Allan

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212 Poe’s poem “The City in the Sea,” with its “proud tower” and “Babylon-like walls,” and a series of illustrations to the Book of Daniel, including “Das Ende von Babel.” For the catalog, introduced by the art historian Max Eisler, see Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/496. Other artists exhibited included Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Gustav Klimt, Alfred Kubin, Max Liebermann, Ephraim Mose Lilien, Max Oppenheimer, Auguste Rodin, and Egon Schiele—a colorful mix. 21 Birnbaum’s May 15, 1921 letter is in the Thomas Mann Archive; a copy of Mann’s May 29 response is in the Uriel Birnbaum Archive (1/261). 22 Uriel Birnbaum, In Gottes Krieg: Sonette von Uriel Birnbaum (Vienna and Berlin: R. Löwit Verlag, 1921). 23 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 6, my translation. 24 Uriel Birnbaum, “Gläubige Kunst,” in Uriel Birnbaum (Vienna: Verlag Wiener Zeitkunst, [1919]), 2, my translation. The exhibition included drawings with titles comparable to those of plates in Der Kaiser und der Architekt: the catalog (Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/493) lists such entries as “Basaltstadt,” “Die Stufenstadt,” and “Traumstadt.” 25 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 7. 26 Ibid., 12, my translation. 27 Ibid, my translation. 28 Sloterdijk, Spheres, 1:25. 29 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 13, my translation. 30 Ibid., 23–24, my translation. 31 Ibid., 25–26. Compare, with caution, Isa. 11:9 and Apoc. 10:6. 32 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 13. Compare the attitude of Mies van der Rohe, who stated in 1968: “I am not a world improver, never was, never wanted to be. I am an architect, interested in building and in problems of form.” Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 149. 33 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 15, my translation. 34 Ibid., 31, my translation. 35 Ibid., 28–29, my translation. 36 Ibid., 9–10, my translation. Birnbaum’s use of the term “liberal” cannot be associated too narrowly with its contemporary political application. 37 Hermann Kesten, ed., Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918–1939, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982), 114. Mann’s diary notes that he had been reading the manuscript

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The Tower and the ­Cathedral of another novel by Ponten; perhaps this was among the subjects of the two men’s teatime conversation. 38 Ibid., 116. 39 Eberhard Jäckel, ed., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 176, my translation. 40 Ibid., 176–77, my translation. 41 Ibid., 181, my translation. 42 Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1979), 526, my translation. 43 Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1921), 54, my translation. 44 Thomas Mann, Briefe II: 1914–1923, ed. Thomas Sprecher, Hans R. Vaget, and Cornelia Bernini (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2004), 397, my translation. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche had also written to Mann to communicate her admiration for his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, characterized in terms consistent with her efforts to exploit her brother’s legacy in support of anti-­Semitism: see Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, 109. 45 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 412, my translation. 46 Ibid., 458–59, my translation. 47 Josef Ponten, Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1925). 48 Ponten, Architektur, 1:161. Wölfflin left for Zurich in 1924, as brown-shirted SA members fought KPD members in the streets of Munich. 49 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 411, my translation. Ponten quotes himself at Architektur, 1:13. 50 See the listing under “Moderne Architektur” in Martin Flinker, ed., Fünf­und­ zwan­z ig Jahre Bukum: Litera­r i­s cher Fest­alma­nach auf das Jahr 1930 (Vienna: Bukum, 1929), 62. 51 Ponten, Architektur, 1:11, my translation. 52 Ibid., my translation. 53 Ibid., 1:12–13, my translation. 54 Ibid., 1:15, my translation. 55 Ibid., 1:28, my translation. 56 Ibid., 1:29, my translation. 57 Wolfgang von Goethe, “Von Deutscher Baukunst,” in Von deutscher Art und Kunst: einige fliegende Blätter, ed. Johann Gottfried Herder (Hamburg: Bey Bode, 1773), 122, my translation. 58 Ibid., 130, my translation. 59 Alfred Rosenberg to Martin Bormann, Munich, December 7, 1940, in Dokumente

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213 zur Kirchenpolitik des Dritten Reiches, vol.  5, 1939–1945, ed. Gertraud Grünzinger and Carsten Nicolaisen (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2008), 226. 60 John R. Spencer, trans., Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture: Being the Treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino, Known as Filarete (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 1:15. 61 Ponten, Architektur, 1:33, my translation. 62 Ibid., 1:35, my translation. 63 Ibid., 1:37, my translation. 64 Ibid., 2:35, my translation. 65 Ibid., 1:41, my translation. 66 Ibid., 1:30, my translation. 67 Ibid., 1:123–24, my translation. 68 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 2:638. 69 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet, ed. Michael Inwood (London: Penguin, 2004), 9. 70 Ibid., 12–13. 71 Ponten, Architektur, 1:125, my translation. 72 Ibid., 1:126, my translation. For comparison of Kohtz’s skyscrapers to “the pure substance of the great mountains of Babel,” see Manfredo Tafuri, “New Babylon,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 175. Tafuri adds: “The skyscraper as a cathedral, as a metaphor symbolizing a rediscovered collectivity, did not remain solely at the unconscious level in German culture. Gerhard Wohler, commenting in 1924 upon the results of the competition for the new Chicago Tribune headquarters, spoke of the German skyscraper as a ‘symbol of the aspiration toward the metaphysical.’” In a footnote to his discussion of Kohtz, Tafuri also draws attention to Ponten’s Babylonische Turm (341n9). 73 Ponten, Architektur, 1:143, my translation. 74 John Zukowsky, ed., The Plan of Chicago, 1909–1979 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1979), 26. 75 Ponten, Architektur, 1:144, my translation. 76 Ibid., 1:143. 77 Ibid., 1:144, my translation.

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6. The Master Builder

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THE MASTER BUILDER

On 26 October 1933, the morning edition of Berlin’s Vossische Zeitung—effectively Germany’s newspaper of record—published a recently circulated statement of solidarity. Signed by 88 writers and poets, the “Vow of Most Faithful Allegiance” was nothing less than a formal declaration of loyalty to Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler. Josef Ponten was among the signatories. Alongside commitments to such abstractions as peace, freedom and honor, the brief text suggested that loyalty to Hitler might receive more concrete expression. It juxtaposed the conscious exercise of power and unity with the insistence that this unity be built around submission to a central figure. And it tied these ideas in turn to the formidable architectonic task of Germany’s reconstruction (Wiederaufbau).1 What role might writers and poets play in such a project of reconstruction? Ponten was perhaps well equipped to answer this question—he was, after all, an architecturally trained author who had described his own writing in architectonic terms. He had characterized the writing of Der Babylonische Turm (The Babylonian Tower) as, itself, a project of construction, designating its chapters in terms of the rising levels of the book’s title; and he had built its narrative around a similar theme. He had also taken up the challenge of his own literary protagonist to assemble a collection of architectural projects that had not, as yet, been built: Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde (Unbuilt architecture). In fact the “Vow of Most Faithful Allegiance” was only one of several similar declarations, articulating convergences and conflicts of loyalty that contested all areas of cultural production. In a November 1933 letter to his younger brother, Heinrich Mann had offered his own assessment. Referring to the short-lived chancellor Kurt von Schleicher, who had insisted not long before that Germany’s problems could be solved only by a strong man, Mann,

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217 too, wrote of the task of renewal, albeit from an opposing perspective: The betting is on a military dictatorship. . . . Not to be foreseen is where and when the real renewal will begin. No question but that it must be preceded by a long and difficult period. . . . Moreover, 88 “writers” have announced their support for the Führer.2 Indeed, in June of 1932 and February of 1933, Heinrich Mann had himself signed two versions of an “Urgent Call for Unity,” demanding the rejection of fascism. This document, too, made appeals to freedom, to concerted action, to the construction of defences. Its effects were immediate. The day after the public posting of the second declaration, Heinrich Mann was forced to withdraw from the Prussian Academy of Arts. Thomas Mann resigned within weeks, as the Academy required its members to affirm their loyalty to Hitler. Ponten, whose membership had originally been proposed in 1926 by Thomas Mann himself, remained a member until 1940. The friendship between Mann and Ponten had, by this date, already dissolved. Although efforts have recently been made to argue that Ponten was neither a Nazi nor a “fellow traveler,” given that his pacifist, cosmopolitan views did not align with those of the National Socialist party, consensus tends to settle around the charge that “Ponten was a conceited, pompous little man, focused on success and therefore prepared for any concession even toward National Socialism.”3 The enjoyment of professional success, in the publication of books as in the construction of buildings, brought with it certain demands. Indeed, practicing architects were not immune to such pressures. On August 18, 1934, the Nazi party’s official newspaper published an “Artists’ Appeal,” signed not only by such party enthusiasts as Paul Schultze-Naumburg, but also by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: We believe in this Führer, who has fulfilled our fervent desire for unity. We trust his work. . . . We belong to the Führer’s

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followers. . . . We demand for ourselves only that which we grant to other peoples without reservation; but we must demand it for this people—the German people—because we need and desire its unity, freedom, and honor.4 The motivations for affirming such a declaration are not hard to imagine. Mies van der Rohe, for one, emerges from this chapter as an architect for whom political considerations were distinctly subordinate to the desire to build. The anonymous journalism of an article in Der Spiegel offers a conspicuously unqualified assessment: “Mies wanted to build, no matter for whom—and so he built for communists and for capitalists and for republicans—preferably for patrons who would let him get on with it.”5 This statement amplifies more scholarly texts: Franz Schulze notes that Mies’s attitude in the early part of the 1930s “was a conflicted patchwork of indifference toward national politics in general, hostility toward Nazi philistinism in particular, dedication to architectural principle, and desire to build regardless of who asked him”6. As Schulze adds, “this was, after all, a man who within eight years’ time had designed a monument to a pair of Communist martyrs, a throne for a Spanish king, a pavilion for a moderately socialist government, and another for a ­militantly right-wing totalitarian state.”7 Ah, to build, to build! At the moment in 1934 when he declared his allegiance to the Führer, Mies was hoping to win from Joseph Goebbels a commission for the German pavilion at the 1935 world’s fair in Brussels—“Mies evidently wanted the commission at almost any price.”8 But Hitler rejected his submission, and in 1937 Mies was required to leave the Academy (signing the required letter of resignation with a dutiful “Heil Hitler!”9). The following year, he left Germany for America. Elaine Hochman has argued that “he left not because he opposed Hitler, but because Hitler had very strong ­architectural views. Mies left, in fact, because Hitler fancied himself an architect.”10 This statement has been vigorously disputed, not least because of its imagined implications for the dispute between aesthetics and ethics, not to mention the debate over the legitimacy of modernism.11 But if it is arguable whether Hitler’s archi-

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tectural aspirations were indeed the reason for Mies’s departure, those aspirations themselves are harder to deny. Among the sites where they become visible are the pages of another book by Josef Ponten, which first appeared shortly after the publication of Der Babylonische Turm.

The Master In 1919, Ponten published a short story entitled Der Meister (The Master).12 The protagonist is a Baumeister, a master builder or architect. To be precise, he is a Dombaumeister, a cathedral architect, employed as official guardian of one of Germany’s great Gothic cathedrals—“preserver of a great and proud structure.”13 Just as elsewhere in Ponten’s work, so here it is clear that the narrative can be read on more than one level; in this instance, the fate of the cathedral can be compared to that of Germany itself. The building’s integrity is threatened by a hidden structural weakness, and Ponten’s story is built around the architect’s search for a means to save it from imminent collapse. As the story unfolds, it becomes obvious that despite his claims to mastery, the architect is unequal to the task. Various strictly provisional measures have been put into place, plastering over evidence of structural flaws and painting the deteriorating components in bright colors (“with all that color, you don’t notice the cracks”14), but it is clear that a new approach is needed. The architect, whose name is Gottschalk, is at a loss. Gottschalk is a name of ambiguous interpretation, its original connotation as God’s servant tainted by association with the figure of the rogue, or fool. Within Ponten’s account that ambiguity is doubtless intentional. As the narrative progresses, the promise of salvation appears in the person of Gottlieb (child of God, or, by folk etymology, beloved of God ), a new apprentice recently arrived from the cathedral at Strasbourg—a detail significant for any reader with a stake in the debate over Strasbourg’s national identity. He presents a less equivocal figure: a blond, blue-eyed youth, an orphan who adopted the life of the cathedral masons’

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lodge, the Dombauhütte, in awe of the structure’s transcendent significance (“it seemed not to have been built by human hands, but to have been placed into this world from outside, from the infinite”15). To Gottlieb’s mind, the Gothic cathedral stands as an expression of an “inner unity” of metaphysical dimensions.16 It presents a conceptually complete and coherent world of stone, in which the proportions of the crossing determine the dimensions of all other components: From this measure unfold all the others, whether great or small. The width of the nave repeats three times in the height, and the height repeats three times in the length. Isn’t it wonderful? The unconscious instinct continues to play out this rhythm on the grandest scale, to infinity. And in the smaller elements of the architecture this same unity divides itself into the very smallest detail. . . . What wonderful order! This artificial world is utterly superior to the natural world. In the natural world you often think that this or that should be bigger or smaller. Here each thing is exactly as big or as small as it should be.17 This proportional argument, which ranks architecture as conceptually superior to nature’s created order, is soon reinforced by a stronger numerological assertion: Art is man’s way of re-creating the world after God, and mankind is superior to God in producing meaningful order. But now comes the greatest, the most beautiful thing of all . . . This one, this unity that we have found and inflected to create meaning—this is precisely the power, the inscrutable something, the beginning and end of all numbers and harmonies. . . . We can master the two and the three, and with them all the others—but the one remains a mystery. It is pure number. It is neither even nor odd; it combines both, it makes up both. It originates from no other number; it is simply there, it is everything . . . it is God! For God is one, and one is without beginning and without end. How can that be

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6.1, 6.2 Cover art (unattributed) for Josef Ponten, (top) Der Babylonische Turm (1918), and (­bottom) Der Meister (1942 military edition).

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made visible? Can it be represented in stone? Yes, it can—in fact, the stonemason does it all the time.18 Where does this reasoning conclude? People describe the church as a house of God, and they have no idea, fools that they are, how accurate their words really are. For God does not inhabit it in some bodily fashion: it is the body of God, it is God. Everything is God, that is made with intent and with purity of heart.19 It is an assertion that recurs in similar form in Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde: “For wherever men build from the innermost longings of their lives and beings, that is where the holy emerges.”20 And it is perhaps not altogether surprising to discover that into this book, too, the author introduces the motif of Babylon. It appears in a dream, a fantastical vision that seems to flicker between images of Gothic cathedrals and of Babylonian monuments. At first reading, the associations seem incongruous. On the banks of the Euphrates, the cathedral itself takes on the form of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. “Over there a great stairway with numberless steps worked its way upward. . . . Gothic angels made of stone . . . fluttered up and down the stair.”21 The author is never explicit as to the connection between the Babelic and the Gothic, and the motif is undeveloped. Yet its presence offers a curious counterpart to another anachronism, which is impressed onto Ponten’s publication of the previous year, Der Babylonische Turm. For the front cover of that book bears an illustration of a tower.22 And the architecture of that tower—rising, still unfinished, above the fabric of the surrounding city—is unmistakably Gothic. ← Fig. 6.1 The cover of a subsequent edition of Der Meister shows a comparable scene, the cathedral’s tower rising above the surrounding houses. ← Fig. 6.2 In fact there exist several versions of this cover. For Ponten’s book, which ends with both architect and apprentice plunging to their deaths from the scaffolding of the cathedral, was well received. By 1930, it could be stated that “The Master has now been generally accepted as a great book.”23 Described

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6.3, 6.4 (top) Josef Ponten, Novellen (1937); Yale ­University Library copy. (bottom) Adolf Hitler’s copy of Josef Ponten, Der Meister (1933 edition): inscription.

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by Hermann Hesse as an almost perfect piece of literature, it was successful enough to warrant multiple editions and impressions, reappearing in 1919, 1922, 1933, 1935, 1937, 1940 and 1941.24 20,000 copies were printed for a military edition in 1942, and another 16,000 copies were sent to the front in 1944.25 Between 1933 and 1945, the Insel edition alone went to press seven times.26 The bibliography in the back of a 1937 volume of Ponten’s collected novels indicates that, at the time of publication, 55,000 copies of Der Meister had been printed, comparing favorably with a total of 53,000 copies for Der Babylonische Turm.27 Yale University’s library copy of this compilation, acquired in 1947, bears a series of inked stamps ­opposite the table of contents, indicating that the volume was once shelved in the library of Hermann Giesler’s NSDAP Ordensburg Sonthofen.28 ← Fig. 6.3 Ponten’s work did not, it seems, fall out of favor as rapidly as that of Uriel Birnbaum, who by 1933 was unable to sell his books even for the cost of a tram ticket. Of particular interest is an edition that first appeared in the popular Insel series in 1933—the year of public burnings around Germany of books by such un-German authors as Heinrich and Thomas Mann. A copy of this small volume today forms part of the delicately-named Third Reich Collection at the Library of Congress: a private library extracted from Berlin toward the end of World War II and placed into temporary storage in a salt mine in the Bavarian Alps, perhaps in the hope that the books would escape the fate of Berlin’s buildings. The collection was transported to America in 1946. Alongside more standard bibliographic details, the Library of Congress record for this copy of Der Meister offers an entry for “related names” that states simply “Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945, former owner.”29 Indeed, the book bears an inscription, dated 28 August 28 1934: “To the great architect [Baumeister] of the German cathedral, Adolf Hitler.”30 ← Fig. 6.4 The author of this dedication is unknown. But the characterization of Hitler as architect is familiar. Other books in Hitler’s library bear similar inscriptions. A volume on Schwerin Castle was evidently presented in 1933 as a gift on the occasion of Hitler’s 44th birthday: “Dedicated to our glorious Führer and architect.”

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Exactly one year later, Franz Heberer’s 1929 contribution to the Neue Werkkunst series of architectural monographs was dedicated “To our Führer, the architect of the Third Reich.” A 1937 copy of the German Concrete Association’s Neues Bauen in Eisenbeton (New building in reinforced concrete) is shrewdly inscribed “To the Führer and creator of the new Germany.”31 Similar characterizations of Hitler as Baumeister can be drawn from other, less strictly bibliographic, sources. Many are listed in “The Masterbuilder Adolf Hitler,” a chapter in Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt’s 1954 Art Under a Dictatorship. The frustrations of the young, orphaned Adolf, unable to gain admission to the architecture school of Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, are well known, the primary source being Hitler’s own account in Mein Kampf.32 In his carefully structured narrative, Hitler tells of his early aspirations (“I, too, knew that I would become an architect”), of his lack of academic credentials (“in all human probability it seemed as though the realization of my artist dreams was no longer possible”), and of his continued perseverance (“I wanted to become an architect, and one should not submit to obstacles but overcome them”).33 Indeed, he would later find occasion to return to this idea of an architectural career; he is said to have stated, in 1933, that if Germany had won World War I, he would have become “not a politician, but rather a great architect.”34 He never abandoned this conceit altogether.35 When asked why he did not in fact become an architect, he is said to have told the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann that he decided instead “to become the master builder [Baumeister] of the Third Reich.”36 Lehman-Haupt elaborates: As the Masterbuilder, Hitler saw himself as the incarnation of the idea of the Nazi state, a concentration of all power in his person, himself the mainspring of all energy and activity. The physical planning and construction of all buildings, of the cities, of the entire state, with him as the Masterbuilder was a completely natural concept to him. From his person was to flow all constructive energy, shaping temples with himself as the god, buildings that were to crown cities

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each of which would be oriented along a central axis. Over broad avenues of approach the masses would assemble to worship.37 Joseph Goebbels was one of many who saw fit to refer to Hitler publicly as “Architect of the Reich.”38 Both attended the January 1938 opening of the first Exhibition of German Architecture and Crafts, held in Munich’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German art) as an architectural counterpart to the previous year’s inaugural Great Exhibition of German Art. Describing Goebbels’s speech at the opening ceremony, an anonymous German correspondent to London’s Spectator magazine reported the assertion by the minister of propaganda that Hitler had indeed realized his architectural ambition—“Mr Hitler, who was firmly convinced that he would one day make a name for himself as an architect, had now become Architect of the Reich.” He continued: Mr Hitler opened the exhibition with a speech in which he praised the “word in stone” and then chiseled out, in five monumental points, the characteristic permanence of those words. The exhibition evidently documents the opening of a new age, which is being revealed to humanity at this scale for the first time. German architecture will withstand the critical scrutiny of the ages, and for millenia it will be the pride of the people. Every project will be realized.39 Such themes are familiar: the blurring of the distinction between physical and metaphysical interpretations of architecture . . . constructive achievement understood as the monumental embodiment of the pride of a unified people . . . the desire to make a name for oneself . . . the aspiration to a permanence to which only stone can do justice . . . Predictably, Fritz Erler’s Portrait of the Führer, exhibited at the entrance to the following year’s Great Exhibition of German Art, showed Hitler standing amid the enduring symbols of an architecture built of stone. → Fig. 6.5 And deeper into the Exhibition of German Architecture and Crafts could be found representations of such monuments of stone as Giesler’s Ordensburg

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6.5 Fritz Erler, Porträt des Führers, 1939, in a contemporary postcard reproduction.

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Sonthofen, a “castle of the order” dedicated by Hitler himself in 1937.40 Conceived as one in a series of symbolic “national crowns” built to overlook the landscape of the new Germany, it was a complex not unrelated to ecclesiastical precedent. Its model, complete with belltower, is reminiscent of more familiar monastic reconstructions such as those of the Plan of Saint Gall.41 → Fig. 6.6 But if this architecture represented the expression of a community of shared belief, it was founded not on the permanence of that Word of which Dürer’s treatise on measurement had spoken four hundred years earlier, but rather on the anticipated permanence of the “word in stone” itself. And the pealing of bells acted no longer as a call to worship a transcendent God, but rather as testimony to a new faith and a new and explicitly German spirit, centered on one man, the Architect of the Reich. For a vivid illustration of the thoroughness with which the figure of the Baumeister was integrated into attempts to edify that new German spirit, one might turn to a 1942 volume entitled Ewiges Deutschland (Eternal Germany)—one in a series issued annually by a welfare arm of the National Socialist Party. A ­collection of short readings (including a poem by Ponten’s wife, Julia Ponten von Broich) lends to this commonplace book a devotional character that is reinforced by the size of the volume and by the deep purple of its cloth binding; and in fact it was published for the express purpose of serving as a suitable Christmas gift for the German people.42 Indeed, the book is organized as a devotional calendar; but each month is introduced with a woodcut portrait and accompanying biography dedicated not to a prophet or saint but to a celebrated German architect. April, for instance, is introduced by the figure of Elias Holl (1573–1646), Augsburg’s city architect, whose work is said to provide insight into the great potential of “the German will to build.” Particular attention is given to Holl’s association with Augsburg, a city at the pinnacle of its economic power and political greatness, and to Holl’s city hall—notable especially for its “forceful development of height.”43 The significance of Augsburg’s city hall could doubtless have been developed more fully. A monumental structure of a size far exceeding its programmatic requirements, representa-

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6.6 Hermann Giessler, Ordensburg Sonthofen: (clockwise from top) model, ca. 1934; ­newly-cast bells, awaiting hanging, undated photograph; bell tower, photographed ca. 1938.

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6.7, 6.8 (top) Caelum aperitur: Golden Hall, ­Augsburg City Hall, reproduction after 1643 original. (bottom) Matthias Kager, Civitates ­conduntur, reproduction after 1643 original.

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tive of the city’s aspirations to autonomy, it was built by an architect fully committed to “the permanence of his work and the immortality of his name.”44 Its foundation stone, adopting lines from antiquity, reads “accipe, posteritas, quod per tua saecula narres”—“Here, O posterity, is material for your stories through the ages.”45 It is not only a celebration of architecture for architecture’s sake, but also an emblem of the idea of the state itself as a work of aesthetic praxis.46 The magnificent Golden Hall is the culmination, both literal and symbolic, of a long architectural progression through the interior, and its ceiling offers a staggering vision of glory that can only be appreciated in an attitude of upward contemplation: ← Fig. 6.7 “above, the heavens are opened— caelum aperitur.”47 What is revealed? Amid a profusion of allegorical imagery, a place of honor at the right hand of Wisdom is granted to none other than architecture: a prominent representation entitled “The Founding of Cities” shows the city hall itself under construction, its incomplete upper levels shrouded in scaffolding and seeming to rise above the clouds. ← Fig. 6.8 A ladder brings a workman into the field of view, which is populated with gibbet-frame hoist, tread-wheel crane, and chisel-wielding mason. As in other such images, among which representations of Babel figure prominently, the architect himself is present—under the patronage, here, of Architectura herself. And the corresponding roundel to the left hand of Wisdom, “The Exclusion of Enemies,” represents Augsburg’s protective fortifications. These, too, came under Holl’s oversight as city architect. The city’s autonomy is thus guaranteed both by the tower at its center and by the walls that define its boundary condition. Both are entrusted to the architect. Posterity can still reflect upon these stories, as narrated by the architecture. But the architectural artifacts themselves are, in a manner of speaking, fake; the interior of today’s Golden Hall is in its entirety a postwar fabrication. The accuracy of its reconstruction was in fact assured by an unusually far-sighted architectural-historical initiative ordered by Hitler in 1943, at a time when it had become clear that the work of Germany’s architects was not as durable as the concept of an eternal Germany might demand. In the face of escalating aerial bombardment, a division

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of the German propaganda ministry was commissioned to execute the exhaustive documentation, in 39,000 color photographs, of Germany’s most celebrated architectural monuments. The Golden Hall was among the first sites to be selected. Soon after, on the night of 25 February 1944, it was destroyed by Britain’s Royal Air Force Bomber Command. → Fig. 6.9 The devotionals of 1942 stop short of any such reflections on architecture’s impermanence. Instead, facing the representation of Elias Holl in Ewiges Deutschland, the reader finds verses by two of the Third Reich’s most celebrated poets. The first, by Gerhard Schumann, develops the idea of the protective wall as the guarantor of security. Entitled “Pledge to the Führer,” it adopts a distinctly biblical vocabulary, using the familiar pronoun that is the German equivalent to Thou in English liturgical usage. The poetry is doubtful, but the message is clear: As walls around thee we withstand, In faithfulness endure; No sacrifice too great or grand— Our debt to thee is sure. In the silence of the devotee We wage the holy war, Confessing only victory— And Germany forevermore.48 The second, by Wolfram Brockmeier, focuses not on the protective perimeter, but on the defining center. Written with a messianic passion, it addresses the constructor of Germany’s unity, the architect who must play the role of champion. It is entitled, more simply, “The Führer”: There must be one who thinks for all who dream; There must be one who guides the people’s steps. There must be one who draws them all to one, Who binds to one their individual wills.49

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6.9, 6.10 (top) Elias Holl’s Golden Hall, Augsburg City Hall: 1943, 1944, and 2011. (right) Willi Engelhardt, “Hitler builds up”: election poster, 1933.

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Beneath these verses, rounding out the celebration of the architect, is a quotation from Frederick the Great: “The strength of nations rests on the great men who are born to them at the right hour.” The following pages launch into an address by the Architect of the Third Reich himself, a speech delivered in Berlin in April 1941 with a view to building unity within the German army. The characterization and self-identification of Hitler as architect is well-established; illustrations could be multiplied from many angles, both literal and metaphorical. ← Fig. 6.10 Indeed, the architectural challenges facing this Baumeister were massive and altogether real. The project of Germany’s reconstruction was a veritable synthesis of the arts, having embraced all programmatic aspirations: temples, castles, palaces, gateways, halls, monuments, libraries, museums, schools, theatres, administrative headquarters, youth hostels, parade grounds, barracks, dormitories, factories, highways, bridges—“Everything has been planned out and thought through!”50 And if the onset of war soon brought an end to construction, the planning continued, growing ever more fantastic. In fact the longing itself endured to the end; LehmannHaupt describes a 1944 interview during which “Hitler got up, walked to the window, pressed his forehead to the pane, and gave a deep sigh: ‘Ah, to build! To be able to build! My God, to be able to build again!’”51 The sentiment is strongly reminiscent of a text by Josef Ponten. Ah, to build, to build! Hitler’s architectural ambitions correspond tidily to his conception of the role of the artist—which in turn corresponds closely, if narrowly, to Goethe’s description of the architect of Strasbourg cathedral as a genius of God-like spirit “who can look down on such a creation and say, like God, ‘It is good!’”52 The reader is here reminded of that passage of Ponten’s Der Meister in which Gottlieb declares: “Art is man’s way of re-creating the world after God, and mankind is superior to God in producing meaningful order.”53 The meaning of that phrase—“Art is man’s way of re-creating the world after God”—is surely clear. It is tied, as is the equivalent passage from Goethe (“It is good!”), to the creation

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narrative of Genesis, and to the understanding that the architect derives his creative powers from his creator: architectus secundus deus. And yet it is possible, without doing undue violence to the author’s intent, to understand the phrase in a different sense also—in a sense to which the German barely hints. “Art is man’s way of re-creating the world after God”—so Lehmann-Haupt’s translation.54 This English rendition suggests a second interpretation. After God, after the death of God, the world must create for itself new values; and that process of creation is, fundamentally, an artistic act, an aesthetic praxis. Hitler’s copy of Ponten’s Der Meister is, in this regard, of more than anecdotal interest. For although the 1934 inscription “to the great architect of the German cathedral” is not unprecedented, the Library of Congress record also notes the presence of “marginal pencil marks” added by the reader. This is worthy of note, not least because other accounts have observed that Hitler was not in the habit of reading novels.55 Lehmann-Haupt, a biblio­grapher and rare book expert, adds: Der Meister “shows more signs of intensive reading than any other book I have seen in the Hitler collection.”56 And among those passages that are noted as being marked by Hitler’s “frequent underscorings and marginal accents” is that very phrase: “Art is man’s way of re-creating the world after God.” Hitler evidently understood such language to be applicable to himself, in much the same way as was true for a later passage from Ponten’s book, → Fig. 6.11 of which Lehmann-Haupt writes: “In the margin is a succession of ever more emphatic strokes, a faithful seismograph of Hitler’s mounting excitement. On the very next page a veritable battery of strokes surrounds the following outbreak”:57 To rob a man of his spirit is worse than robbing him of his money. . . . And why does this concern me? Because I was unable to attend the famous school, but had to work everything out for myself. Because my parents were so irresponsible as to leave me to this world an orphan, stealing an early exit from this stage of fools and criminals. Because I was unable to get myself stamped with the title “Architect.”58

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6.11 Adolf Hitler’s copy of Josef Ponten, Der ­Meister (1933 edition): annotations.

6.12 (left) Der Baumeister (1937): front ­cover; (right) ­onsite with Albert Speer at ­Nuremberg’s Nazi party rally grounds, before 1937.

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As Lehmann-Haupt suggests, Hitler “identifies himself with Gottlieb, the underprivileged genius whose lowly origin has denied him education and the approval of society, but whose artistic intuition has revealed to him the means of saving the cathedral.”59 But he continues: “No one who reads the story today would have the slightest difficulty in discovering that not Gottlieb but his antagonist, the Masterbuilder himself, resembles Hitler.” Hitler is to be identified, in other words, not with Gottlieb but with Gottschalk. Lehmann-Haupt goes on to note the close similarity in language between Ponten’s Meister and Hitler’s own later speeches. “The Masterbuilder’s pronouncements . . . are so close to Hitler’s own utterances that one is tempted to consider them an important influence, perhaps a direct source.” And in a footnote to his chapter on “The Masterbuilder Adolf Hitler,” he suggests, more bravely yet, that the grandiose schemes collected in Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde “may have influenced the bigness of Hitler’s architectural planning.”60 This assertion is difficult to prove; yet it finds resonance in one of the biggest and best-known articulations of National Socialism’s architectural aspirations.

Constructed Unity Also exhibited in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst were the ongoing plans for Nuremberg’s Nazi party rally grounds, devoted to the construction, in stone, of an appropriately-scaled architecture of assembly. The cover of a 1937 issue of the journal Der Baumeister (The architect) documents Hitler’s speech, earlier that year, on the occasion of the first Day of German Art; ← Fig. 6.12 it is immediately followed by a report on progress at Nuremberg. Its author opens with a sentiment that could be taken straight from the pages of Josef Ponten: If you want to write a history of architecture, you cannot settle for an account of what was actually built. You also have to introduce plans of buildings that were unrealized,

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or were only realized as fragments of the original idea. For there is a whole array of well-known projects that emerged bold and beautiful from the imagination of the architect, but were never built because no client could be found who could summon up the courage and the means to make them a reality. . . . The execution of a great project requires not only a great architect, but also a strong-willed client, and, not least, an age possessed of the power and capacity to prepare the spiritual ground in which such a great structure can take root. In the year 1934, the Führer commissioned the architect Speer to establish a masterplan for the Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg.61 Laying out the massive dimensions of the project, the reporter suggests: “Until now you could have interpreted what was described here as nothing more than a daring scheme, an ‘unbuilt architecture’.” But this time the plans will reach fulfilment. “By 1943 construction will be finished.” Proof, he adds, can already be found on the site of the Zeppelinfeld, “its construction in stone complete.”62 The Zeppelinfeld is a well-known project, for good reason. The familiar photographs, showing the faithful congregated in a conscious display of power and unity, are among the more memorable images to have survived the collapse of the Third Reich.63 → Fig. 6.13 Not only do they illustrate architecture’s capacity to influence even the most reluctant of its subjects, they also support, to a fault, Ponten’s theory as to architecture’s fundamental nature—its capacity to evoke “the impression of force—the highest awe-struck astonishment in the presence of greatness.”64 Nor did the Zeppelinfeld neglect architecture’s more basic functions; in the articulation of a suitable space for assembly, its architectural perimeter dutifully effected both inclusion and exclusion: “Enclosing the space with the ramparts of bleachers, and closing it off with the main grandstand, not only enables the participation of a larger mass of spectators, it also closes out the surroundings.”65 Yet this perimeter was not the site’s defining architectural element.

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6.13, 6.14 (top) Zeppelinfeld, Nuremberg, 1937: described at the time as an Überwältigende Glaubensbekenntnis, an “overwhelming confession of faith.” (bottom) Zeppelinfeld perimeter towers, ca. 1937.

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6.15 The Zeppelinfeld, exterior and interior: (left) photographer unidentified, 1936; (right) photographer Lala Aufsberg, 1937.

6.16 The upward view, cloudy and clear: (left) “the blazing corona,” 1937; (right) “an infinite cathedral,” 1938.

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Despite the materiality of the Zeppelinfeld’s stone boundary, it was not, in this instance, the expression of sheer mass that constituted its most forceful effect; the proportions of the towers on the ramparts surrounding the field ← Fig. 6.14 made it clear that their function was merely to provide the base for a more ambitious structure. “From the very start of his tenure as designer of the Party’s mass rallies, Speer was clear that in this instance he could not settle for stone as the design medium. . . . Here, for the first time at this scale, the designer brought a further material into service.”66 The more insistent architecture, the more real and enduring memory, was constructed by the careful placement of a large share of the nation’s anti-aircraft searchlights, each one precisely calibrated to create what was simultaneously an enclosing perimeter and a defining tower of infinite proportions, fading out into the night sky. ← Fig. 6.15 In fact, the most compelling view was one that could best be appreciated in an attitude of upward contemplation. ← Fig. 6.16 As its architect later explained in his own carefully crafted memoir, Placed around the field at intervals of only twelve meters, the 130 sharply-defined beams remained visible to a height of six to eight kilometers before they blurred into a single luminous surface. They gave the impression of a vast space, with individual beams forming the mighty pillars of infinitely high exterior walls. Occasionally, a cloud would pass through the corona of light, adding to its magnificence an element of surreal illusion. I presume that this “cathedral of light” constitutes the first light-architecture of its kind. For me, it remains not only my most beautiful creation, but also the only one that, in its own fashion, has survived the test of time.67 Describing the experience of standing in that space, amid mounting tension, the account in Der Baumeister concludes: And then the image freezes. The crowd falls silent. A clear light outlines the masses in sharp definition. The haze has

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lifted from the field. All around, the vertical beams of the searchlights trace sharply cut upward lines. That field in the Lorenzer Forest is no longer merely a piece of earth, it is a space in a vast cathedral of light, its dome vaulted high up into the darkness of the night sky. The people are cut off from all earthly heaviness—here, they are all part of a great community, part of an experience that is greater than them. All are focused on a single point, to which all eyes, all hearts, are turned. All have become a part of this power, standing there, a small dot on the grandstand, brighter than everything else: the centerpoint of this great spectacle of light. There he stands.68 The comparison to the sacred is explicit, articulated both by participants and by the architect: “It was a fantastical experience, like being in a Gothic cathedral.”69 The comparison to Babel is implicit.70

A New Faith Ponten’s Der Meister was first published in 1919, as was Birnbaum’s Gläubige Kunst (Faithful art). Despite aspirations to bibliographic permanence, both books have since fallen into oblivion. Meanwhile, another product of that same year, printed as a disposable leaflet on a single piece of folded paper, is today monumentalized as a founding document of the architecture of modernity, a defining manifesto of modernism. ← Fig. 0.5 On the face of it, the premises of Walter Gropius’s Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar relate both to the dogmatic concerns of Birnbaum and to the constructive conceits of Ponten. For what, after all, is a manifesto, if not a public declaration of beliefs and objectives? Insofar as the domain of the Program of the State Bauhaus is ostensibly artistic, this printed declaration promises to unite the realms of belief and of art. This, too, in other words, is a call to a faithful art. And if this belief is typically assumed, today, to be of a non-religious character, the text is more ambivalent.

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The closing sentence of Birnbaum’s manifesto, previously quoted, is intended as a reminder that the ends of all art are to be subordinated to the service of a transcendent God. This is hardly a novel idea, either historically, or within the context of Birnbaum’s argument. It is a restatement of an established position rehearsed in the preceding pages: The faithful art of the faithful artist must take the form of a challenge, a challenge to all who through their art pursue more—or, rather, less—than the one legitimate goal: serving God.71 Gropius’s opening statement, in contrast, makes a contradictory claim. Its lack of self-evidence is perhaps only fully apparent when isolated from the expectations that the contemporary reader is liable to bring to such a text; and its concluding exclamation mark can serve, perhaps, as a reminder of the radical restriction of its goals. “Das Endziel aller bildnerischen Tätigkeit ist der Bau!”— The ultimate goal of all creative endeavor is building!72 The standard English translation, by careful selection of adjectives, offers a less ambiguous rendition: “The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building!”73 But even if bildnerischen Tätigkeit can be represented, without undue violence, by the term “visual arts,” to translate Bau as “complete building” is at best an interpolation. And yet, absent any reference to the more ­capacious Bauen of Genesis 2, other possible renditions threaten either to descend into triviality or to scale new heights of architectural self-assertion, according to whether the declaration is read as a truism or understood as a statement of faith. “The ultimate goal of all creative endeavor is building!” Ah, to build, to build! Bauen, nur bauen! This is, after all, the Bauhaus—the centrality of the constructive act is built into the name of the institution.74 Under the subtitle “Goals of the Bauhaus,” Gropius adds, by way of ­clarification: “The ultimate, albeit distant, goal

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of the Bauhaus is the unified work of art—the great building.”75 Lest such self-­ justifying constructions be found lacking in ­external supports, the text goes on to supply, in the space of four brief paragraphs, a litany of metaphysical parallels. And central to these parallels is the figure of the cathedral, the irrefutable Gesamtkunstwerk.76 The resonance between Bauhaus and Bauhütte is not coincidental, as is immediately clear from Gropius’s insistence on the nomenclature not of teachers and pupils, but of masters (Meister), journeymen, and apprentices. Art, writes Gropius, is to be redeemed (erlöst) from its degenerate state “through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen.” Those artists who attain a full knowledge of building in all its aspects will find their work to be filled “with the architectonic spirit.” And what is the call to action? “Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers as the crystal symbol of a new faith.”77 If this is remote from the motivations of Birnbaum’s Gläu­bige Kunst, it is surely closer to the language of Ponten’s Babylonische Turm. Bauen, nur bauen! “Ah, to build, to build . . . such that people might say: ‘All this was made by man!’ To build a tower that reaches to the clouds, to make a name for ourselves, at which the peoples will marvel!”78 The reference to the sky-­ scraping tower as the “crystal symbol of a new faith” is one to which this account must return; but it is worth remembering that the image chosen for the cover of Gropius’s declaration was none other than Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut of a new cathedral ← Fig. 0.5, rising toward heaven in an expression of unbridled upward aspiration. Gropius’s rising tower, in other words, is a surrogate ­cathedral—best appreciated, perhaps, in the light of the death of God. If Feininger’s woodcut left room for ambiguity, Oskar Schlemmer’s subsequent manifesto, → Fig. 6.17 composed in 1923 to accompany the first Bauhaus exhibition, was immediately recognized as being overly explicit. Intended as part of another four-

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6.17 Oskar Schlemmer, announcement for The First Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, July–September 1923.

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page pamphlet, it was rapidly withdrawn from circulation, and most copies were destroyed. Yet a handful reached the school’s critics, strengthening their conviction that the Bauhaus was dangerous. Ten years later, a similar suspicion would prompt the school’s closure by the NSDAP. The manifesto’s most offensive sentence, often tied to the image of Feininger’s woodcut, is typically assumed to be the following: The Staatliche Bauhaus, founded after the catastrophe of the war, in the chaos of the revolution and in the era of the flowering of an emotion-laden, explosive art, becomes the rallying-point of all those who, with belief in the future and with heaven-storming enthusiasm, wish to build the cathedral of socialism.79 And Schlemmer continues, making it clear that the motivation for the construction of this new heaven-storming cathedral is tied to a perceived spiritual absence. In a passage that bears close comparison to Birnbaum’s Gläubige Kunst, he writes: The triumphs of industry and technology before the war and the orgies in the name of destruction during it, called to life that impassioned romanticism that was a flaming protest against materialism and the mechanization of art and life. The misery of the time was also a spiritual anguish. A cult of the unconscious and of the unexplainable, a propensity for mysticism and sectarianism originated in the quest for those highest things which are in danger of being deprived of their meaning in a world full of doubt and disruption. The words are thickly assembled into a closely-printed block of accumulated significance, piling up in a veritable paroxysm of undeveloped aphorisms and Goethean allusions. “Architecture builds Utopian towers on paper. . . . Reason and science, ‘man’s greatest powers,’ are the regents. . . . Calculation seizes the transcendent world.”80 Where do such pronouncements lead? They

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culminate in a brief, bald statement that dismisses one authority while neatly substituting the rational faculties of another: Religion is the precise process of thinking, and God is dead.81 There is little space in which to flesh out the implications of those last three words, casually inserted into the running text. God is dead . . . i am who i am is no longer; God’s eternal will is obsolete, the creator of the universe no longer active. But again, Nietzsche’s commentary seems apt: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! . . . Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?”82 As if in response, at the foot of the page, the reader finds a declaration of exclamatory self-assertion, printed in widely-spaced capital letters: WE ARE ! WE WILL! AND WE CREATE!83 The contrast to Birnbaum could not be clearer. What is celebrated, on one side, as “the precise process of thinking,” is condemned, on the other, as “the bungling incompetence [Pfusch­werk] of their own ideas.”84 Pfuschwerk: this too is an archi­tec­tural term, to be contrasted with Meisterwerk.85

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4

5

6 7 8 9

10

11

12 13

14

For a list of signatories, see Wysling, Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 367. Heinrich Mann to Thomas Mann, November 3, 1933, in Wysling, Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 152. Werner Bergengruen, Schriftstellerexistenz in der Diktatur: Aufzeichnungen und Reflexionen zu Politik, Geschichte und Kultur 1940–1963, ed. Frank-Lothar Kroll, N. Luise Hackelsberger, and Sylvia Taschka (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2005), 151, my translation. For opposing assessments see Hans Wysling, “Glück und Ende einer Freundschaft,” in Wysling and Pfister, Dichter oder Schriftsteller, 7–24, and Richard Matthias Müller, “Josef Ponten (1883–1940), Freund Thomas Manns,” Thomas Mann Jahrbuch 17 (2004): 147–61. “Aufruf der Kulturschaffenden,” Völ­ki­ scher Beobachter, August 18, 1934, my translation. For a list of signatories, see Peter Hahn, ed., Bauhaus Berlin: Auflösung Dessau 1932, Schließung Berlin 1933, Bauhäusler und Drittes Reich (Wein­ garten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1985), 148. “Langer Abschied: Wie hielt es der deutsche Architekt Ludwig Mies van der Rohe mit den Nazis?” Der Spiegel, June 5, 1989, 234, my translation. Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 188. Ibid., 201. “Langer Abschied,” 238, my translation. Ibid. Erich Mendelsohn had left in 1933, Bruno Taut in 1934. For an account of Hitler’s dislike of Mies’s scheme see Schulze and Windhorst, Mies van der Rohe, 170–72. Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), xv. “This is nonsense”: Roger Kimball, “Is Modernism the Enemy? The Case of Mies van der Rohe,” review of Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich, by Elaine S. Hochman, The New Criterion 7, no. 9 (May 1989): 67. See also Schulze, Mies van der Rohe, 200. Josef Ponten, Der Meister (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1919). Josef Ponten, Der Meister (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, [1933]), 9, my translation. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent citations use this edition, of which a significant copy is held by the Library of Congress. Ibid., 10, my translation.

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248 15 Ibid., 23, my translation. 16 Ibid., 36, my translation. Phrase accented in Library of Congress copy. 17 Ibid., 36–37, my translation. 18 Ibid., 37, my translation; passage partly accented in Library of Congress copy. This text appears to draw on the discussion of Strasbourg Cathedral in Carl Heideloff, Die Bauhütte des Mittelalters in Deutschland (Nuremberg: Johann Adam Stein, 1844), 15. Heideloff (1789–1865) was himself Baumeister of Nuremberg. 19 Ponten, Der Meister, 38, my translation; passage partly accented in Library of Congress copy. 20 Ponten, Architektur, 1:123–24, my translation. 21 Ponten, Der Meister, 43, my translation. 22 The unnamed artist may have been Julia Ponten von Broich (1880–1947), the author’s wife. 23 Hagboldt, “Joseph Ponten,” 5. 24 Quoted in the editor’s preface to the American textbook edition, Josef Ponten, Der Meister, ed. Oscar F. W. Fernsemer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), x. The quotation is attributed elsewhere to Thomas Mann: see the advertisement at Modern Languages Forum 16, no. 1 ( January 1931): 70. 25 Josef Ponten, Der Meister (Cologne: Schaffstein, 1942; Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1944). 26 Herbert Kästner, ed., Die Insel-Bücherei: Bibliographie 1912–1999 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1999), 67. 27 Josef Ponten, Novellen (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1937), 554. 28 A 1939 report summarizes the status of this library within the NSDAP’s library system, noting that “from the party point of view” it was among “the most essential, though not the largest.” Cyril C. Barnard and Arthur D. Roberts, “Special Libraries,” in The Year’s Work in Librarianship, ed. Arundell Esdaile and J. H. P. Pafford (London: Library Association, 1939), 44–45. See also Joachim Petzold, “Das Büchereiwesen der NSDAP unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der wissenschaftlichen und Spezialbibliotheken,” Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 55, no. 9/10 (1938): 524–33, which notes the discreet didactic goals of each Ordensburg. For the postwar transfer from Sonthofen of the 8,000volume library of the “Hohen Schule für Baukunst“ (Advanced school of architecture), intended to train architects for the emerg­ing national socialist state, see

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29 30

31 32

33

34 35

36

37 38

39 40

Eberhard Dünninger, ed., Handbuch der historischen Buchbestände in Deutschland, vol. 10 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1996), 295. For the Library of Congress catalogue record, see https://lccn.loc.gov/77473932. See Philipp Gassert and Daniel S. Mattern, eds., The Hitler Library: A Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 233. The handwriting does not resemble Ponten’s. Ibid., 82, 135, 159, my translation. It has been noted that Hitler’s application to the Academy’s school of architecture “is unsupported by any evidence”: see Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 611n149. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Alvin Johnson et al. (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939), 27–28; in German, Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1936, 172nd–173rd printing), 19–20. “Der verhinderte Michelangelo,” Bildende Kunst 1, nos. 4/5 (1947): 33, my translation. Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier, 1941–42 (Bonn: Athenäum-Verlag, 1951), 364. For later expressions of Hitler’s architectural aspirations, see also Kershaw, Hitler 1889– 1936, 82–83 and Gassert and Mattern, The Hitler Library, 225–26. Robert R. Taylor, The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 29, loosely quoting Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend, trans. R. H. Stevens (London: Burke, 1955), 184. For the German, see Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler, wie ich ihn sah (Munich: Herbig Verlag, 1974), 157. Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 49. Wolfgang Pehnt, Rudolf Schwarz 1897– 1961: Architekt einer anderen Moderne (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1997), 79, my translation. “Kunst des Bauens,” The Spectator, February 4, 1938, 180, my translation. For the superiority of stone, and the corresponding observation, by Giesler, that Hitler disparaged American skyscrapers as examples of “architectural esperanto” on the grounds that “their style was as international as were the materials out of which they were constructed,” see Alexander Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 93n1.

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249 41 Hildegard Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963), 127. On the architectural vocabulary of the Ordensburg, see Ruth Schmitz-Ehmke, Ordensburg Vogelsang: Architektur, Bauplastik, Ausstattung (Cologne: Rheinland-Verlag, 2003), 38–51. 42 August Friedrich Velmede, ed., Ewiges Deutschland: Ein deutsches Hausbuch, Herausgegeben vom Winterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes, vol. 4 (Braunschweig: Verlag Georg Westermann, 1942), 5. For other bibliographical attempts to reorient the celebration of Christmas, see Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship, 137–44. 43 Hans Kiener, “Elias Holl,” in Velmede, Ewiges Deutschland, 92, my translation. 44 Bernd Roeck, Elias Holl: Architekt einer europäischen Stadt (Regensburg: Pustet, 1985), 185, my translation. 45 I am grateful to my brother Eric Dugdale for improving my translation from the Latin, here as elsewhere. 46 For this idea in the context of the 1930s, see Karsten Harries, “Architecture as an Aesthetic Praxis?,” Cloud-CuckooLand: International Journal of Architectural Theory 6, no. 1 (September 2001), accessed July 1, 2022, http://www.cloudcuckoo.net/. 47 Sergiusz Michalski, “Das Ausstattungsprogramm des Augsburger Rathauses,” in Elias Holl und das Augsburger Rathaus, ed. Wolfram Baer, Hanno-Walter Kruft and Bernd Roeck (Regensburg: Pustet, 1985), 78, my translation. 48 Gerhard Schumann, “Gelöbnis an den Führer,” in Velmede, Ewiges Deutschland, 93, my translation. 49 Wolfram Brockmeier, “Der Führer,” in Velmede, Ewiges Deutschland, 93, my translation. 50 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 13, my translation. For the massive scale of Germany’s reconstruction, see Brenner, Die Kunstpolitik des Nationalsozialismus, 127. 51 Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship, 59. For the German, see Hans Frank, Im Angesicht des Galgens (Munich: Friedrich Alfred Beck, 1953), 421. 52 Goethe, “Von Deutscher Baukunst,” 130, my translation. 53 Ponten, Der Meister, 37, my translation. 54 Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship, 52. 55 Gerhard Ritter, “Zur Einführung,” in Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 27. Hitler is said to have stated (Hugh R. Trevor-­ Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944:

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens [New York: Enigma Books, 2000], 360): “I have never read a novel. That kind of reading annoys me.” 56 Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship, 51. 57 Ibid., 52. See also Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture, trans. J. A. Underwood and Edith Küstner (New York: Praeger, 1973), 218n6. 58 Ponten, Der Meister, 69, my translation; underlining Hitler’s. 59 Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship, 52–53. 60 Ibid., 254n9. 61 Wilhelm Lotz, “Das Reichsparteitaggelände und seine Bauten: Verantwortlicher Architekt Prof. Albert Speer, Berlin,” Der Baumeister: Monatshefte für Architektur und Baupraxis 35, no. 10 (October 1937): 305, my translation. 62 Ibid., 306–7, my translation. For the ­allusion to Ponten, see Rolf Nederling, ed., Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 1923–1939: Zeitgeschichte im Bild, 2nd ed. (Leoni am Starnberger See: Druffel Verlag, 1985), 161. 63 For a suggestion that the Zeppelinfeld might have informed Heidegger’s comments in “The Origin of the Work of Art” on the towering temple as a place “in which a people comes to itself, i.e. comes into the dispensatory might of its god,” see Emmanuel Faye, “The Temple, the Lecture on the Work of Art, and the Nuremberg Congress of 1935,” in Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935, trans. Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University, 2009), 237–39. 64 Ponten, Architektur, 1:11, my translation. 65 Lotz, “Das Reichsparteitaggelände,” 309, my translation. 66 Ibid., my translation. 67 Albert Speer, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1989), 71–72, my translation. 68 Lotz, “Das Reichsparteitaggelände,” 309, my translation. For another personal account of the overpowering experience of the Zeppelinfeld’s “cathedral of light,” see Rolf Nederling, Die Reichsparteitage, 180–82. 69 Albert Speer, “Die Bürde werde ich nicht mehr los,” interview by Manfred W. Hentschel and Wolfgang Malanowski, Der Spiegel, November 7, 1966, 52, my translation. For Hitler’s insistence that the concluding ceremony at Nuremberg

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250 possess the solemnity of a Catholic mass, see Taylor, The Word in Stone, 33. 70 For a more extensive discussion, see Yasmin Doosry, “Wohlauf, laßt uns eine Stadt und einen Turm bauen . . .”: Studien zum Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2002). 71 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 16–17, my translation. 72 Gropius, Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar, 2, my translation. 73 Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” 31. 74 For the origins of the name Bauhaus and  its association with the Gothic cathedral, see Charles W. Haxthausen, “Walter Gropius and Lyonel Feininger: Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919,” in Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Barry B ­ ergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 64–67. 75 Gropius, Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar, 3, my translation. 76 For the attractive idea of the Gothic cathedral as a collaborative effort “borne by the religious feelings of a whole people” see Magdalena Bushart, “It Began with a Misunderstanding: Feininger’s Cathedral and the Bauhaus Manifesto,” in Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model, ed. Wolfgang Thöner, trans. Benjamin Carter et al. (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), 30. 77 Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” 31. One might question several elements of this translation; but I have replaced only one word in order to reverse its softening of the original German, substituting as for like in “like the crystal symbol of a new faith.” See also my “Faith in Architecture,” in “Ethics in Architecture: Festschrift for Karsten Harries,” ed. Eduard Führ, special issue, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land: International Journal of Architectural Theory 22, no. 36 (2017): 71–82. 78 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 8, my translation. 79 Oskar Schlemmer, “The Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” translated in Wingler, The Bauhaus, 65. I have omitted the inverted commas added by the translators around the term “cathedral of Socialism,” as they are absent in the German. I have also replaced “sky-storming” with “heaven-storming” to better reflect the Promethean significance of the German himmelstürmend. 80 Ibid., 65−66, substituting “Architecture builds Utopian towers” for “Architecture piled Utopian schemes” to better render

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the significance of “Die Baukunst türmt Utopien.” 81 Ibid., 66. For analysis of the relationship between the Bauhaus and the Dombauhütte, and for discussion of the figure of the cathedral in the light of the recognition that “Schlemmer’s new faith is a humanist one that presupposes the death of God,” see also Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 335. 82 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 120. 83 Oskar Schlemmer, “Die erste BauhausAusstellung in Weimar Juli bis Sep­tember 1923,” transcribed in Das Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar: Dokumente zur Geschichte des Instituts 1919–1926, ed. Volker Wahl (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2009), 298, my translation. The standard rendition into English fails to communicate the biblical weight of “Wir sind!” and the Nietzschean import of “Wir schaffen!” in the expression “Wir sind! Wir wollen! Und wir schaffen!” 84 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 13, my translation. 85 For an articulation of architecture’s primary opposition as that of Meisterwerk versus Pfuschwerk, see Fritz Schumacher, Streifzüge eines Architekten ( Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1907), 17.

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7. New Faith, New ­Architecture

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Birnbaum’s critique of the Pfuschwerk of human self-assertion may be read as an architectural field report. The project under inspection is undeniably impressive, its aspirations lofty; indeed, it is articulated as a Babylonian tower—the apogee of constructive ambition. But upon close inspection, it becomes clear that the building must be condemned: it is materially unstable and structurally unsound. Just as the builders of Genesis 11 found it necessary to substitute brick for stone, so here the available material is found to be lacking in permanence. Birnbaum predicts that the architectural schemes of 1919 will age poorly. They mock the pyramid of God’s law, and build towers of Babel out of their own crumbling ethics. They flee before God, and end up with idols. Too proud and too independent to humble themselves before God, they bow down instead before the bungling incompetence [Pfuschwerk] of their own ideas.1 Later that same year, the architect Bruno Taut (1880–1938) would distribute twelve photostat copies of a sketch entitled Monument to the New Law (Monument des neuen Gesetzes). A copy survives, today, in the archives of Berlin’s Academy of Arts. → Fig. 7.1 It is among the first contributions to the 1919–1920 exchange of correspondence that came to be known as the Crystal Chain, initiated by Taut and distributed to a carefully chosen group of twelve disciples, perhaps aptly imagined as members of a mason’s lodge (Bauhütte). They were self-consciously diverse individuals of differing enthusiasms, their names obscured by pseudonyms; they included, alongside Taut (“Glas”), such figures as Hermann Finsterlin (“Prometh”), Walter Gropius (“Mass”), and Wenzel Hablik (“W. H.”).2 And their exchanges encompassed both draw-

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7.1 Bruno Taut, Monument to the New Law, 1919.

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ings and texts. As Taut noted early in 1920, “Today writing seems just as important to us as drawing.”3 Taut’s sketch presents a celebratory structure, one of many comparable schemes imagined during that year: “Purely festive things. . . . Starting-point for the new architecture.”4 At the foot of the page can be found the words “Christmas Greetings,” alongside an equally festive date: December 23, 1919. The drawing seems, at first, appropriately seasonal: near the top of this night-time scene, careful observers will notice a star shining in the darkness. They will see radiating lines implying a familiar aura of holiness, accompanied by an exhortation that they fear not; for there are glad tidings to be proclaimed from above. This is surely the fulfilment of a prophecy made by Taut in his inaugural letter to the Crystal Chain one month earlier: “For some of us, the evenings of the Christmas season will perhaps be marked by a joyful r­ adiance.”5 But this is no conventional Christmas greeting. The drawing represents not the hut of a traditional nativity scene, but rather a great tower—albeit one that reads less as a singular building and more as a complete city, composed of countless smaller forms superimposed onto one another to form a steeply rising crystalline structure. Its lower parts appear to be articulated with windows, their scale suggesting that the monument as a whole might reach a hundred storeys into the heavens. But this first impression of astonishing size gives way to ambiguity: closer examination reveals the scale of a human being measured out at the foot of the tower, implying either an initial overestimation of the architecture’s magnitude or a vastly expanded estimate of human stature. And the glad tidings? They are presented on prominent backlit tablets that cantilever out from the structure of the tower, and can be read only in an attitude of upward contemplation. As the annotations explain, they are “written on tablets of glass—legible against the heavens, and legible by night against the beam of light descending from above.” The image of light radiating from the top of a tower might remind the reader of Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut of the same year, printed to accompany Gropius’s “crystal symbol of a new faith.”6 The similarities to the Bauhaus program are doubtless not entirely

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coincidental—both documents share, after all, a common ancestor in Taut’s own Christmas 1918 Architektur-Programm, which called for “a new architecture.”7 Taut’s Monument to the New Law is also a manifesto of sorts, its beliefs expressed through a city crown that will in this instance remain unbuilt. As if to guarantee architecture’s capacity to bear meaning—even, and especially, in its existence on paper—the sheet is densely annotated, its messages disposed across the surface of the page in sweeping gestures loaded with ornamental vigor. These annotations present the contents of the tablets that crown Taut’s structure. They are emphatically not the Mosaic tablets of biblical antiquity, contained within the architecture of tabernacle and temple, but rather the tablets of the new law that justifies the existence of this new monument. This is a new testament, but not the New Testament. The reference here is Nietzschean; and the Zarathustrian source in turn makes it clear that the new laws are intended to replace the old laws of traditional Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy.8 Those tablets are evidently broken, their laws considered obsolete. “New values on new tablets” are needed to take the place of the old—in the language of the scholastics, corruptio unius est generatio alterius: the death of the one is the life of the other.9 The potential scope of this new creative challenge is enormous. Nietzsche insists, after all, that all values are of purely human creation. The most basic of moral judgements are artifacts not of divine revelation, but of human fabrication; and he notes—with an unmistakable reference to the opening chapters of Genesis—that first among those values is the knowledge of good and evil: Humans gave themselves all of their good and evil. Indeed, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not fall to them as a voice from heaven. Humans first placed values into things . . . they first created meaning for things, a human meaning!10

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If this is so, and if the authority of the God by whose name the old laws were once validated has now been discredited, then the categorical imperative of those laws is open to question. If fundamental notions of good and evil are of human construction—and Nietzsche singles out, as basic examples, the Mosaic imperatives “Thou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not kill!”11—then they are open to reassessment. That which has been constructed can be deconstructed.12 This suggests a dual task: to expose the failure of the old and to design the new that will take its place. And, quite logically, Nietzsche describes the person who must assume this task as the creator—“der Schaffende,” cognate of the word Schaffen, to create. This too, in its various translations, is a biblical word, used in the opening chapters of Genesis to describe God. The Nietzschean text revels in the ambiguity of the vocabulary. This creator “gives the earth its meaning and its future: This one first creates the possibility that something can be good and evil.”13 And just as there is no longer a single, ultimate authority, so the creator is no longer necessarily singular. As Zarathustra notes, “Fellow creators the creative one seeks, who will write new values on new tablets”14— such tablets, perhaps, as can be found on Taut’s Monument to the New Law. Here is the critical turn. For in this instance, it is the architect who facilitates the establishment of those new laws; and if his adoption of other men’s aphorisms does not, perhaps, fully live up to the self-sufficiency of the Zarathustrian creator, it is nonetheless the architect who takes upon himself the authority to set up the new tablets. In the wake of the death of the creator God, of deus architectus mundi, the architect assumes a new responsibility. It is one that might be imagined to come naturally to him; just as God was once understood to be the prime constructor, the ἀρχι-τέκτων, so now the architect adopts God’s role: architectus secundus Deus. It might not, at this point, be altogether far-fetched to recall Birnbaum’s juxtaposition of “towers of Babel” with “the pyramid of God’s law.” Taut’s tower, too, is described in the accompanying annotations as a “glass-crystal pyramid,” but the crystal is here symbolic not (as in Birnbaum’s 1941 bookplate for Weinreb) of the

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divine order revealed in God’s law, but of the multiple reflections and refractions discernible within Taut’s own creation. Indeed, its inscriptions would seem to correspond closely to Birnbaum’s description of the symbolizing and philosophizing that accompany modernity’s search for a new faith. There would appear to be little scope for unanimity among the sources invoked; Martin Luther, Karl Liebknecht, Friedrich Nietzsche, the prophet Haggai, Paul Scheerbart, and the author of the biblical Apocalypse here appear side by side, possibly for the first time.15 All contribute to the collection of illuminated aphorisms; and whether this is to be interpreted as a joyfully unprecedented plurality of voices or as a confusion of tongues, it is clearly no dogmatically singular enterprise. Unsurprisingly, this mirrors the general tenor of the Crystal Chain itself. Taut had dismissed orthodoxy in his inaugural letter of December 19: “Within the framework of cooperation, everything should be left to the free will of the individual.”16 Yet the structural analogy also exposes the limitations of this approach. Such unrestricted bricolage leads more readily to Pfuschwerk than to the rational, architecturally lucid tower of a Cartesian or Kantian system; the uninhibited exercise of individual liberties is more likely to produce incoherent horizontal sprawl than the articulate vertical extension of Taut’s design. Taut himself acknowledges the danger when he grants the need for a “framework of cooperation.” Yet this is a mere shifting of architectural responsibility; utopian dreams aside, the design and imposition of such an all-encompassing framework invites the appointment—or self-appointment—of a great architect, a master builder. This in turn does not always align with “the free will of the individual.” Three days after Taut’s inaugural letter, Finsterlin added to the Crystal Chain his own first contribution, itself studded with unreconciled biblical and Nietzschean references. His December 22, 1919 text makes it clear that the architect is indeed to be understood as a successor to God—architectus secundus deus— and that such a figure is not beholden to any external constraints. Opening with allusions to the book of Genesis and to the first epistle to the Corinthians (“Tell me what love, faith, and the hope

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of an iron will are, and I will tell you the meaning of building: to take the creation of the seventh day one wave further in the chain of breakers stretching toward infinity”), he insists that “there is no greater voice of affirmation than he who builds” (the word used here is Bauer).17 He builds as an assertion of his own will; and he does so in a world that longs for “the kingdom of heaven on earth, home, the most sacred fulfillment of our most treasured dreams.” Again thoughts might drift toward Birnbaum: the building of the heavenly city on earth, in fulfilment of a treasured dream . . . —this is, after all, the narrative premise of Der Kaiser und der Architekt. And the architectural assertion of will—this is the premise of Babel. Other texts by Finsterlin refer more explicitly to the motif of Babel, albeit interpreted as a mark of shame (Schandmal): “monument to that great disgrace, the defeat of the children of men in the Promethean battle against a false stepfatherly God.”18 Alternating between biblical and classical sources, Prometh embraces the resentment of his assumed identity. Finsterlin’s letter proceeds in language that is enigmatic and densely metaphorical. Such treasured dreams, he writes, belong to the homeless, swarming masses, who seek protection for their naked souls within the leftover shells of empty illusions. Like insects pining for sweetly scented blossoms, they long for the sweet consolations of cathedrals and tabernacles. It is within this context that Finsterlin calls on the architect to assume the role of Führer, exercising leadership that is neither restless “like the wandering Jew,” nor under “the illusion of universal genius”— which “leads to pap” (the word here is not Pfuschwerk but Brei). The structure of the argument is itself only loosely coherent; but the architectural figure that emerges is that of the solitary, unscrupulous leader, masterful and shrewd—“the strong are most powerful when they remain alone.” The architect assumes, here, a high and difficult calling, for which excessive enthusiasm may yet prove premature. For it includes a heavy responsibility toward the future. Finsterlin makes it clear that the task of the Crystal Chain is to establish new prototypes that will be developed by subsequent generations. His focus is forward-looking, with an eye toward a new architecture for a new modernity; the task of 1919–1920, in

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other words, is to shape the architecture of succeeding decades. In Finsterlin’s assessment, this is a duty best articulated in the architectural vocabulary of the sacred. “If today we are to shape powerful prototypes, then let us protect them from immature hands, which could doom them to the enfeeblement of a premature birth. The smaller, more selective, and more polished our circle is, the more intensive and radiant will be its impact. Keep our temple pure.”19

Mass’s School of Architecture There has been a tendency within narratives of twentieth-century architecture to dismiss the real impact of such language, and of other similarly esoteric Expressionist tendencies. Such preoccupations do not, after all, seem to correspond tidily to the priorities of modernity’s architecture, and they have seldom found their way into the discipline’s textus receptus. The convenience of this dismissal is particularly evident in accounts of the legacy of the Bauhaus, in which the objective rationalities of building (Bauen) supplant the unwanted emotive strains of Expressionism. Indeed, the prototypes conceived by Finsterlin in 1919 were not in fact those that would be developed in subsequent years; just as he feared, their birth seems to have been premature. If, a century later, observers have sought affinities between the schemes of Finsterlin and the designs of architects like Zaha Hadid, this would seem merely to support the contention that such forms can flourish only within a culture that has rejected the strictures of modernism. The influence of Finsterlin himself is easy to discount. Often identified as the most radical among the Expressionists, he dealt exclusively in unbuilt architecture. He has been described as an architect with a penchant for “making every building a monument to his own dreams,” his designs “among the purest paper-buildings ever devised.”20 Certainly his ideas cannot readily be measured against the built record of the twentieth century, and he does not play an important role in the familiar story of the Bauhaus; he

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7.2, 7.3 (top) Hermann Finsterlin, Haus der Künste, 1919 or 1920. (bottom) Walter Gropius, Ausstellung für unbekannte Architekten (1919).

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lectured there under the directorship of Hannes Meyer in 1930, but his involvement is understood to have been a “colorful insert” within an otherwise more sober reality.21 This dismissal is already evident in the pages of Josef Ponten, who in Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde (Unbuilt architecture) described one of Finsterlin’s typical creations ← Fig. 7.2 as an example of “an architecture that will remain (thank God) unbuilt, and that is in fact unbuildable.”22 Ostensibly conceived in glass and artificial stone, its explicitly biomorphic form—Ponten quotes from Finsterlin’s “Eighth Day” in proof of this assessment23—flew in the face of Ponten’s conceptions of tectonic coherence. But the task of dismissal is more difficult when it comes to Taut, not least because he articulated so clearly the implications of his position, and went on to elaborate such a substantial oeuvre of built work.24 To be sure, his fantastical preoccupations blossomed at a moment when more pragmatic commissions were hard to come by; he himself wrote, in his November 1919 invitation to prospective members of the Crystal Chain, that “today there is almost nothing to build.”25 But in the same letter he went on to make a virtue of this lack of opportunity: “It is a good thing that nothing is being built today. Things will have time to ripen, we shall gather our strength, and when building begins again we shall know our objectives and be strong enough to protect our movement against botching and degeneration. Let us consciously be ‘imaginary architects’!” The challenge is framed as a collaborative endeavor; and indeed, Taut’s speculative explorations were far from being the isolated fantasies of a solitary dreamer—the skill with which he tackled later architectural tasks makes it clear that he was a consummate professional. Observers have sometimes struggled to reconcile the unbuilt architecture with the built; but if the lack of formal similarity is at first confounding, Taut himself makes the case for conceptual continuity, with built projects serving as necessarily compromised instantiations of a purer, more ambitious unbuilt architecture. And just as his opening invitation to the Crystal Chain urges a self-conscious commitment to the imaginary, so his closing 1922 contribution to Frühlicht (a journal that had dawned with the work of the Crystal Chain) reviews

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his new and distinctly pragmatic responsibilities as municipal architect for Magdeburg.26 Conscious of his reputation as the very figure of “a hopeless dreamer,”27 Taut insists on the need for technical mastery. But he adds: “The fantastical and utopian become the source of form.”28 The accompanying description of his built work in Magdeburg, later developed in Berlin, displays an enviable sensitivity to such pragmatic concerns as budget, function, site, material, structure, and municipal politics, while still insisting on continued loyalty to earlier commitments. The necessary connection between the unbuilt and the built, between the immaterial and the material, is argued throughout. Indeed, Taut’s Crystal Chain letter of December 26, 1919 begins with an articulation of the primacy of architecture’s metaphysical obligations—“Style not through the pursuit of form (van de Velde) but through a philosophy of life, through religion”—and ends with an explicit charge for Gropius’s Bauhaus: The “New Architecture”: floating, impracticable models: stars and absolute fantasy. Purely festive things. To charm through their mere existence. Probably the most i­ m­portant starting-point for the new architecture. A light world! Couldn’t Mass’s “Bauschule” make something like this?29 It is the prescription for a new architecture—one that rejects the tyranny of narrow functionalism in order to liberate other, less earth-bound aspirations. The bonds that tie architecture to the dead weight of exclusively material concerns are to be broken, allowing it instead to drift in the ethereal currents of its intellectual, metaphysical and even religious commitments. This assertion expands on the position articulated twelve months earlier in Taut’s Christmas 1918 Architektur-Programm. And it explains, no doubt, the biblical text selected to fill one of the seven tablets of Taut’s Monument to the New Law. “In the second year of King Darius, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the Word of the Lord came by the prophet Haggai to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son

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of Jehozadak, the high priest: Thus says the Lord of hosts: . . .”30 What follows might readily be applied to the second year of the aftermath of World War I. Mounted high above Taut’s city, the book of Haggai records the prophet’s proclamation of God’s insistence that the returning Babylonian exiles concentrate not on the rebuilding of their own homes but on the reconstruction of the house of God. If the people are to enjoy the fruits of peace in the presence of their God, their architects’ first commitment must be to Mount Zion. Amid the ruins of destruction, the temple must take precedence over the provision of housing; in other words, the cathedral must once again rise above the surrounding rooftops. Did Gropius take up Taut’s challenge? And is the cathedral on the cover of the Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar in some regard a response to Haggai’s demand? Within the exchanges of the Crystal Chain, Gropius (“Mass”) figures not as an active contributor but as a quiet listener.31 Yet he was clearly not unsympathetic. A text by Gropius, almost precisely contemporary with his Bauhaus manifesto, appears alongside a rehearsal of Taut’s position in a brochure for the Berlin Exhibition for Unknown Architects, organized in April 1919 under the auspices of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, the Workers’ Council for Art. ← Fig. 7.3 Gropius writes: “What is architecture? The crystalline expression of man’s noblest thoughts, his ardour, his humanity, his faith, his religion! . . . Structures created by practical requirements and necessity do not satisfy the longing for a world of beauty built anew from the bottom up, for the rebirth of that spiritual unit which ascended to the miracle of the Gothic cathedrals.”32 Indeed, it was Gropius who had first encouraged the submission of Finsterlin’s “dream houses” to that same exhibition.33 It was Gropius who in May 1919 encouraged Finsterlin to read the fantastical writings of Taut’s literary accomplice, Paul Scheerbart.34 Wenzel Hablik would later suggest that Gropius had followed his colleagues’ exchange very closely indeed, noting that on a visit to the Bauhaus he had seen work that could only be explained by an intimate knowledge of contributions to the Crystal Chain.35 And Gropius’s own early declarations would suggest comparably

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expansive conceptions of architecture’s fundamental task. One might note again the language of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto: “Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers as the crystal symbol of a new faith.”36 This is not the stuff of narrowly conceived functionalism; indeed, among the “Principles of the Bauhaus” listed on the facing page, the reader finds a commitment to “mutual planning of extensive, Utopian structural designs—public buildings and buildings for worship—aimed at the future.”37 It is a lofty ambition, equal to the aspirations of the Crystal Chain; and it bears the same utopian demand for a robust framework of cooperation. Gropius’s call in April 1919 for the architectural expression of a new faith (“eines neuen kommenden Glaubens”) is directly comparable to Taut’s call in a March 1919 issue of the Berlin monthly Sozialistische Monatshefte for the construction of “buildings of the new faith” (“Bauten des neuen Glaubens”).38 And not only is Taut’s elaboration of that call described in terms reminiscent of Josef Ponten’s 1918 Babylonische Turm—to Taut’s workshops and artists’ colonies one might compare the poets’ colonies and craftsmen’s accommodations that occupy Grossjohann’s attempted reconstruction of the Tower of Babel—but the phrase “buildings of the new faith” is itself cross-referenced, in a footnote, to Taut’s February 1919 Die Stadtkrone (The city crown), published two months earlier, just as Taut handed leadership of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst over to Gropius. That book in turn elaborates the content of Taut’s own Christmas 1918 Architektur-Programm, predecessor to Gropius’s April 1919 Programm.39 The fabric of related ideas is tightly woven. Yet the standard history of modern architecture suggests that Gropius soon discarded such beliefs. Gropius’s own later accounts would typically omit reference to his early sympathies. This is perhaps especially true for English-language sources. Departing Germany in 1934, the émigré presented himself to his new British public by publishing a book entitled The New Architecture and the Bauhaus; but while it takes pains to deny an exclusively functionalist creed, it has little to say about utopian aspirations, its three prin-

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cipal chapter headings being “Standardization,” “Rationalization,” and “The Bauhaus.”40 Gropius was introduced in turn to America through a 1938 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Alfred Barr’s preface to the accompanying publication implies that Gropius’s work emerged as “an island of integrity” in direct opposition to Expressionism,41 and an adjacent essay by Alexander Dorner suggests that any association of Expressionism with the Bauhaus was a result of early misunderstandings. Indeed, the school had moved away from “hostile Weimar” because the city of Goethe and Nietzsche proved unwelcoming to the “functional design” taught at the Bauhaus.42 Such assertions sit uneasily alongside the reproduction of Feininger’s woodcut a few pages later. Finsterlin himself would later accuse Gropius of having abandoned the creative tropics of Prometheus for the disconsolate wastelands of Mies van der Rohe, and of having denied, thereby, the faith of his youth.43 But others have claimed to discover traces of such convictions preserved more broadly among the ruins of modernism. Not long after Finsterlin’s indictment, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter would use similar language, looking back at the decline and fall of utopian modernism and summarising its ambitions in terms that are strikingly similar to Taut’s December 26, 1919 assertion of architecture’s metaphysical obligations: Modern architecture is surely most cogently to be interpreted as a gospel—as, quite literally, a message of good news; and hence its impact. For, when all the smoke clears away, its impact may be seen as having very little to do with either its technological innovations or its formal vocabulary. . . . One definition of modern architecture might be that it was an attitude towards building which was divulging in the present that more perfect order which the future was about to disclose.44 Such talk of a more perfect order, to be sought in a world to come, is surely of a kind with the Crystal Chain visions of “Prometh,” the pseudonymous identity of Hermann Finsterlin. Prometheus (Προμηθεύς), the “forward-thinker,” conceives of his role as

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prophetic. And indeed, the text with which Rowe and Koetter support their assertion is none other than the text of Finsterlin’s December 22, 1919 Crystal Chain letter, which preceded, by one day, Taut’s Monument to the New Law. Finsterlin’s prose is excerpted to describe the architect’s goal as the construction of “the kingdom of heaven on earth”;45 and this prompts Rowe and Koetter to cast the associative net more broadly still: While extreme in all its naked extravagance, this statement also provides an hysterical condensation of much of what was said with more circumspection elsewhere. Alter the form of words only a little and one is admitted to the mood of Hannes Meyer and Walter Gropius. Alter it only a little more and the moods of Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford will begin to emerge.46 Such moods are aptly described as being marked by a “messianic passion.”47 And if this passion has been dulled by the experience of the long twentieth century, it is still not altogether absent in the architectural enthusiasms of the twenty-first.

Stadtkrone Even if Taut’s sketches and Birnbaum’s drawings today occupy pages of the same books,48 one can assume that the privately-­ distributed Monument to the New Law would have been unknown to Birnbaum at the time of the conception of Der Kaiser und der Architekt. But Die Stadtkrone is a different matter. Printed on the brittle paper of the postwar publishing trade, a tattered copy can today be found among the volumes of Birnbaum’s library. If the photocopied Monument to the New Law was the record of an ephemeral missive to the members of a small group, Taut’s Stadtkrone, despite its material impermanence, represents the enduring legacy of the man who has been described as Germany’s most influential theorist of the years immediately after World War I.49

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7.4, 7.5 (top) Jan van Eyck, Saint Barbara, oil on wood, 1437, used as frontispiece to Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone (1919). (bottom) Durham Cathedral, one of Taut’s historic city crowns.

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It is therefore not unreasonable to read Birnbaum’s Der Kaiser und der Architekt against the backdrop of Taut’s Stadtkrone. Indeed, the comparison begins with the frontispiece. Birnbaum’s book opens, somewhat enigmatically, to a drawing of a tripartite Gothic window—which seems, at first glance, unrelated to the subsequent text. → Fig. 8.24 At the front of Die Stadtkrone, meanwhile, is a print of Jan van Eyck’s 1437 drawing of Saint Barbara and her tower, ← Fig. 7.4 perpetually incomplete. This, too, presents itself as an enigma; for it is not immediately evident that Saint Barbara’s tower is intended to serve as an example of the “city crown” of the book’s title. Saint Barbara is patron saint of architects, protector against lightning, and, by ironically apposite extension, guardian of bomb-makers. She presides, in other words, over all aspects of the mortality of building. In Van Eyck’s drawing, she sits before the architecture of her confinement, turning the pages of a large volume on her lap. Flanked by the temporary lean-to of the masons’ Bauhütte, the unfinished tower behind her is articulated in the architectural vocabulary of a Gothic cathedral; yet it also resembles representations of the Tower of Babel—most notably, in the apparatus of ongoing construction that extends beyond the top edge of the drawing. Like Babel, this tower fulfils multiple purposes: celestial observatory, guarantor of physical security, and register of metaphysical reality. For upon contemplation of the starry heavens, the imprisoned Barbara is said to have rejected her father’s idols of wood and stone in favor of the true God, persuading her father’s masons to alter the design of the tower so as to articulate through the architecture of its tripartite Gothic window the substance of theological truth. It was this act of architectural signification that led to her death. Van Eyck’s tower is also comparable to the drawing on the cover of Ponten’s Der Babylonische Turm; ← Fig. 6.1 that too, after all, presents a Gothic tower, in apparent contradiction to the book’s title. And the examples of historic city crowns that dominate Taut’s subsequent illustrations include—alongside images of temple towers from India, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia—the more predictable figures of the cathedrals of Cologne, Strasbourg,

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Paris, and Durham, ← Fig. 7.5 the tower rising in each instance above the fabric of the surrounding city. Alongside a rendering of Solomon’s Temple, Taut also provides a tentative reconstruction of an Assyrian ziggurat.50 → Fig. 7.6 Temple, ziggurat and cathedral tower fulfil, for Taut as for Ponten, a comparable function: that of the Stadtkrone. Taut’s explanatory essay opens with a bold statement. “Greatly to be praised is the glory [Herrlichkeit] of architecture!”51 Such language was once reserved for God;52 now, after God, it is transferred to the products of human creation. To quote, again, Ponten’s Der Meister, “Art is man’s way of re-creating the world after God.”53 Such praise may be justified, if architecture proves capable of providing a new center, filling the gap left by an absent God. For such are Taut’s contentions: that architecture must aspire to ends that are higher than those of the primitive hut; that the mere accommodation of form to function is an insufficient goal; that the architect must respond to the people’s deepest longings. The image to which he appeals is that of the collaborative construction of a great tower: Towering upward through the centuries, this stone monument [Denkmal] to the human spirit must rest upon a broad and strong foundation of experience. Although its spiritual creator is an individual, the building’s genesis requires many hands and material resources. In order to bring it forth, the architect must bear within him a consciousness of the depths of feeling and belief that govern the community for which he wishes to build. He must be familiar not just with that ephemeral thing known as the Zeitgeist, but rather with the slumbering, still latent spiritual strength of the people [Volk], still shrouded in faith, hope, and aspiration, straining toward the light in the desire to “build” [bauen] in a higher sense.54 Architecture’s highest end, in other words, is other-worldy; it extends, as it were, beyond the top edge of the drawing, perhaps even beyond the clouds, upending pragmatic preoccupations:

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7.6 Taut’s biblical city crowns: Solomon’s ­Temple in Jerusalem (top) and an ­Assyrian ziggurat (bottom), as reconstructed by Charles Chipiez and Georges Perrot.

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“In this light, today’s narrow conceptions of building are fully reversed.” And here Taut returns to the familiar example of the tower rising over the fabric of the surrounding city: “The cathedral above the historic city, the pagoda above the huts of the Indians, the enormous temple complex in the square of the Chinese city, and the acropolis above the simple dwellings of the city of antiquity—they demonstrate that the pinnacle, the highest point, the crystalized religious idea [Anschauung] is simultaneously the beginning [Ausgangspunkt] and the end [Endziel] for all architecture, radiating its light upon each individual building down to the simplest hut.” Articulating a position comparable to that adopted more recently by Peter Sloterdijk, Taut argues that the built environment is a direct expression of a culture’s worldview (Weltanschauung)— “the fabric of the old city is a clear reflection of the inner structure of mankind and its thoughts.”55 The physical, in other words, offers a material analogue to the metaphysical; every built architecture corresponds to “an architecture of the spirit.” And it is this that guarantees the discipline’s significance. “Architecture pervades the entirety of existence [Dasein], such that existence itself becomes a form of architecture. Can architecture’s significance ever be overestimated?”56 As a pure creation of the spirit, it is nothing less than “life, and worlds of thought, translated into stone.” And in this context, the meaning of the old city is abundantly clear: “The greatest buildings correspond to the highest thoughts: faith, God, religion. The house of God commands every village and every town, and the cathedral is enthroned in majesty over the great city.”57 None of this is a product of function, narrowly understood—in reality the cathedral’s nave is truly impractical, its tower even more so. The same is true, Taut adds, for the architecture of antiquity—not least, its massive temples. But the apparatus of modernity brings chaos to this ordered picture. Uninhibited development—of tenements, factories, office buildings—produces incoherent horizontal sprawl. This too, argues Taut, is an expression of modernity’s worldview, reflecting perfectly “the despair and ugliness of this materialistic existence [dieses materialistischen Daseins].”58

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Given his professed belief in the relationship between the physical structure of the city and metaphysical structures of thought, it is notable that Taut does not acknowledge any conflict between this critique of the freedom of the marketplace and his own insistence, elsewhere, that in the realm of ideas “everything should be left to the free will of the individual.”59 Instead, he focuses on the outward expression, the architecture; it is this that brings the problems of modernity within the purview of the architect. But the contradiction is inescapable. In his discussion of the “new city” he admits that recent efforts are inadequate, because typically directed toward outward form—he lists as examples the garden city movement and the new disciplinary efforts of urban planning (Städtebau) more generally. But again and again he himself returns to questions of outward architectural expression, even while insisting that the goal of such architectural endeavor is nothing less than inward happiness: A new idea drives all these thoughts and actions: the idea of the new city. A deep longing guides us all: we want cities in which, according to Aristotle, we can again live lives that are not only safe and healthy, but also happy.60 Yet the Aristotelian city of the Politics is happy not because of its architecture, but because of its virtue; indeed, the polis of Aristotle’s title is emphatically to be understood not merely, or even primarily, as the built fabric of the city, but rather as the community of its constituents. Taut here approaches a category error, a misidentification of causes; after all, if, for Aristotle, the final cause or end of the city is indeed happiness, its material cause is not its built fabric but its body of citizens. Taut, meanwhile, diagnoses the evident unhappiness of contemporary modernity by focusing on its buildings. If the old city was centered on the cathedral as the expression of its faith, what of the new city? Healthy homes, artfully disposed gardens, well ordered businesses and industries—such things are good, but they are evidently insufficient: they have little in the way of what Taut characterizes as “building force” (bauende Kraft). “It seems

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that convenience, comfort, and pleasantness are not enough. It all melts away like snow in the sunshine. . . . Is this our image? Is this our spiritual condition? We look at the old cities and are forced to admit: we have no firm footing.”61 “We have no firm footing.” The phrase is reminiscent of a similar assertion made by Nietzsche’s madman; he too laments modernity’s lack of a firm hold, tying it to a loss of center. “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?”62 Taut offers a further, more strictly anatomical, articulation: despite the best efforts of its planners, the modern city resembles a “body without a head.” Civic buildings—schools and libraries—are insufficient to hold the center; and much the same can be said for other contenders, including the regional administration building, with its endless modern bureaucratic functions. Is there an alternative? If regionalism is inadequate, could the role of the cathedral be assumed instead by the architecture of nationalism? Taut acknowledges that glimpses of such capacities are beginning to appear in the spaces of spectacle and of mass gathering. He speaks of theatres and of cinemas, and he speaks also of political rallies. Architecture’s powers over human instinct have not, he notes, gone unrecognized by the nation’s leaders (the German word is, again, Führer). Far from being a matter of mere entertainment, such phenomena articulate “the cry of the soul for something higher,” responding to nothing less than “our world’s will to build [bauende Wille].”63 But with a brief cross-reference to Nietzsche, Taut dismisses outright the power of national politics. In a text that is ominous only in hindsight, he notes that without the strength of religious conviction, the constructive capacity of such nationalism is inadequate: The rise of nationalism, emerging from the carnage of World War I, makes the concept of the state suitable as the highest expression of the will to build the new city. In antiquity,

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nationalism combined itself so closely with religion that the Acropolis or the Forum with its temples were at the same time the seat of the highest law, the Areopagus, and the highest authority. However, an imitation of these conditions today would be nothing but a copy, and the life of our people would only be enriched by the further mistake of imitation. Even if it were made convincing by virtue of intense nationalism, this building would never develop a sacred glory.64 This aspiration to “a sacred glory” might serve as a description not only of Taut’s monument or of Feininger’s cathedral, but also of that structure which aspired to substitute in the popular imagination for the tower of the Gothic cathedral: Speer’s cathedral of light, the architectural expression of a new faith. For notwithstanding Taut’s own political inclinations, and notwithstanding his book’s dedication “To the peacemaker,”65 the idea of the city crown was readily appropriated into National Socialist doctrine. Historians have speculated as to whether Hitler was familiar with Taut’s book, not least because Taut’s urbanistic ideas are so similar to those articulated seven years later in Mein Kampf;66 but if it is unlikely that Hitler had read Taut, it is clear that Taut’s ideas were, by the 1930s, in common circulation.67 What was especially well understood was the potential value of appropriating religion’s aura. And that, according to Taut, is precisely the nature of the challenge facing the architect: Even today, the highest, crowning ideal must be embodied in a religious structure, just as it was on the skyline of the historic city. The house of God remains for all time the one building . . . that is able to sustain our deepest feelings about humanity and the world. Why then has no great cathedral been built or even seriously planned in recent times? . . . The church is absent from the very idea of the contemporary city. Churches are still designated in the plans, but they are distributed in such a way that they achieve no overall significance. And the

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idea of God has dissipated like the city itself. It is not that religious life has diminished in its intimacy, but rather that it has been confined to narrower and narrower channels. Communal prayer and liturgical practice have lost their binding strength. It is as if a strange embarrassment had fallen upon the joyful profession of religious faith, prompting it to retreat into the quiet chamber of individual experience. . . . Religious conviction seems to have lost its former strength. There are no confessors and no fighters to stand up for it.68 But Taut remains hopeful: he does not accept what might today be described as the secularization thesis. “Faith certainly still exists. It is unthinkable that millions of people could live out their lives totally surrendered to materialism, with no idea why they exist.” But the object of devotion has changed. In his opinion, the new faith is a faith in humanity itself. This new faith replaces the old; in fact, Taut goes so far as to label it a new form of Christianity, with equivalent urbanistic capacities: There is a word that resonates everywhere, that is followed with interest by rich and poor, that promises something like Christianity in a new form. That word is socialism. It is the feeling of needing to contribute in some way to the well-­ being of mankind, of somehow achieving ­redemption for oneself and thus also for others, and experiencing a sense of solidarity with all humanity. . . . If anything can crown today’s city, it is the expression of this thought.69 This, then, is the cathedral of socialism: a cooperative structure that is to rise over the surrounding fabric of the city, dedicated not to God but to humanity itself. Again the comparison to Babel is clear; and a relationship to the broader humanistic claims of modernism begins to take shape. Here too, of course, such cooperation demands leadership. And who must take charge? “Unless he wants to render himself redundant, it is the architect who will have to design this—and in so doing he will discover his life’s

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mission.” It is a high calling; and it is entirely in sympathy with Taut’s insistence that being (Dasein) is itself an architectural matter. Taut insists that the life of the architect who is unconscious of his ultimate end will devolve into meaninglessness; his talents will be wasted on professional struggles, aesthetic arguments, and other trivialities. He continues: Let the architect reflect on his high, glorious, priestly, even divine vocation. . . . Let him immerse himself in the soul of the people [Volk] and in full self-renunciation find both himself and his high calling, striving to give material expression to that which slumbers in all mankind. As of old, so today a built ideal must rise again to bring happiness, and with it, the recognition that all are elements of a great architecture.70 In speaking of the architect’s priest-like vocation, Taut’s language is strikingly similar to what might be extracted from a reading of Genesis; but here the primary focus is not on the divine creator to whom the architect owes service, but on the Nietzschean creator, the god-like architect himself. Indeed, the fabric of architectural history is itself offered as material proof of the architect’s generative capacities: “The cathedrals, the giant temples: each one of them was created. There was a time when it did not yet exist, and then at a certain point the idea for it was born—in the mind of a single architect.”71 Having established the nature of the problem, Taut presents his own architectural solution. It is a remarkable proposal, illustrated with sketches that are concrete expressions of the desire for height. He is conscious that they may seem bold, utopian, even presumptious (vermessen). An archetypal city is built on the representative plain; and at its center stands a tower, the symbolic marker of the city crown. → Fig. 7.7 After first plunging with enthusiasm into the logistics of urban planning—low-rise homes, parks, playgrounds, schools, hospitals—he locates, on a hundred-acre site at the city’s geometric center, the precinct of the Stadtkrone itself. Its initial description is framed in the pragmatic terms of a complex that accommodates the varied functions of concert hall,

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7.7, 7.8 Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone (1919): (top) city skyline and schematic plan; (bottom) Stadtkrone “silhouette” and plan.

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opera house, aquarium, greenhouse, museum, and library. These structures are surrounded by the architecture of consumption: cafes, restaurants, and department stores. In another vision of overriding harmony, the provision of consumer choice is shown to preclude conflict. “Everything is accessible to everyone; each individual can go wherever he likes. There is no conflict, because those of like mind always find one another.”72 And there is architectural provision for a more conscious display of unity: “For open-air assemblies, a vast grassy slope in front of an exterior stair accommodates the masses arrayed before the speaker.”73 This horizontal extension is accompanied by vertical definition, the symbolic towering over the functional. A close examination of the plan ← Fig. 7.8 shows that at ground level the very center of the city is in fact taken up with the logistical infrastructure of warehousing, storage and utility. But this forms the juncture, or crossing, of a symbolic cruciform, its arms composed of opera house, theatre, and assembly halls of differing sizes; in this sign, the reader is told, lies the fulfilment of the people’s hope. And above it all, supported on the more pragmatic structures of various subsidiary components, rises the defining element of the city crown, the functionless house of crystal—“pure architecture.”74 This is, in every way, the culmination of Taut’s urban vision. Justifying its position at the very top of his fictive budget (“Construction costs: 1. Crystal House . . . 15.0 million Marks”), Taut draws an explicit comparison: “Who today would want to calculate a fixed cost for the construction of Strasbourg Cathedral?”75 Tracing a nine-square plan, buttressed at its corners, this house of crystal forms a single, huge, vertically-defined space, described in terms reserved elsewhere for the cathedral of modernity: “Bathed in the full light of the sun, its tall interior awakens the deepest and greatest feelings.”76 Not for the first and not for the last time, that light is equated with spiritual transcendence, in language that explicitly reminds the reader of the structure’s origins in the Gothic-domed, illuminated Glashaus designed by Taut for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition.77 Like the Glashaus, the Kristallhaus could no doubt be described as a cathedral of light (Lichtdom); but the light is here provided by the sun, and the space is devoted

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7.9, 7.10, 7.11 (top) Bruno Taut, view of Stadtkrone, 1919. (middle) Waterworks of the Priory and Christ Church Cathedral in ­Canterbury, Eadwine Psalter, ca. 1160: detail. (bottom) Félix Thomas, Palais de Khorsabad, from Victor Place, Ninive et l’Assyrie (1867).

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not to mass assembly but to individual contemplation. “The solitary wanderer discovers, within, the pure bliss of architecture.”78 And yet here too, the ultimate goal is unity—a unity articulated in terms strikingly similar to those of the founding documents of the Bauhaus: “Architecture will here renew the beauty of its covenant with sculpture and painting. It will all constitute one single work, in which the architect contributes the conception of the whole, the artist paints rapturous other-worldly fantasies on glass, and the sculptor’s art is so inseparable from the rest, so intimately united, that everything forms part of a single great architecture [Baukunst], an expression of the highest creative impulse.”79 Taut’s Stadtkrone precinct is an exceptionally plural confection. In its supporting functions it resembles a massive mixed-use development, encircled by the structures of modern consumer culture. In its representation it is reminiscent of the architectural drawings of medieval Europe. ← Figs. 7.9, 7.10 At its highest point it answers to architecture’s most transcendent aspirations, putatively timeless. But in its architectural articulation, what is especially conspicuous is a distinct formal similarity to the architecture of Mesopotamia. The most immediate point of reference is not Babylon; while Taut was doubtless familiar with Koldewey’s published reconstructions, these did not typically extend to comprehensive urban visions. Instead, Taut draws on the representation of an Assyrian ziggurat precinct reproduced elsewhere in his book, ← Fig. 7.6 itself reconstructed after a relief from Niniveh, and on an “attempted restoration” of the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad. ← Fig. 7.11 Towering upward through the centuries, Taut’s precedents represent the glory of architecture, greatly to be praised.

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New Faith, New ­Architecture 1 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 13, my translation. 2 For the list of initial members, see Bruno Taut, Berlin, December 19, 1919, in Die gläserne Kette: Visionäre Architekturen aus dem Kreis um Bruno Taut 1919–1920, ed. Oswald Mathias Ungers (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, [1963]), 11. 3 Bruno Taut, January 18, 1920, in The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle, ed. and trans. Iain Boyd Whyte (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 47. 4 Bruno Taut, December 26, 1919, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 25; for the German, see Dietrich Schubert, “Bruno Tauts ‘Monument des Neuen Gesetzes’ (1919): Zur Nietzsche-Wirkung im sozialistischen Expressionismus,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 29/30 (1987/1988): 242. 5 Bruno Taut, December 19, 1919, in Ungers, Die gläserne Kette, 11, my translation. 6 For discussion of Feininger’s woodcut, see Haxthausen, “Walter Gropius and Lyonel Feininger,” 64–67. 7 Bruno Taut, “A Programme for Architecture” [1918], trans. Michael Bullock, in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 41. For Taut’s influence on Gropius see Manfred Speidel, “Bruno Taut and Berlin Architecture from 1913 to 1923,” trans. Daniela Haller, in City of Architecture, Architecture of the City: Berlin 1900–2000, ed. Thorsten Scheer, Josef Paul Kleihues, and Paul Kahlfeldt (Berlin: Nicolai, 2000), 114. 8 See especially “On Old and New Tablets,” in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian Del Caro, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 156–73. The phrase that occupies the top of Taut’s drawing, “das grosse Nichts,” is drawn from this section; the same phrase appears in the final plate of Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur (Hagen: Folkwang-Verlag, 1919). 9 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 14. 10 Ibid., 43. 11 Ibid., 161. 12 For a similar articulation see Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)—especially “World as Work of Art” (122–29). See also Matthew Mindrup, “Advancing the Reverie of Utopia,” in Bruno Taut, The City Crown, trans. Matthew Mindrup and Ulrike Altenmüller-Lewis (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 19–20.

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283 13 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 157. 14 Ibid., 14. 15 The biblical texts reappear at Bruno Taut, ed., Frühlicht: Beilage zu Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit (Berlin) 4 (1920): 61 and Frühlicht 8 (1920): 125. 16 Bruno Taut, Berlin, December 19, 1919, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 20. 17 Hermann Finsterlin, December 22, 1919, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 21. 18 Hermann Finsterlin, “Babel” (1922), quoted in Reinhard Döhl, Hermann Finsterlin: Eine Annäherung (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1988), 69, my translation. For the context of this essay and for Finsterlin’s comparable poems of 1908 (“Kommt zu mir, Ihr Söhne Babels”) and 1918 (“Damit wir uns einen Namen machen!”), see 68–69. 19 Finsterlin, December 22, 1919, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 23. 20 Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt and The Unbuildable: In Pursuit of Architectural Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 170–71. 21 Hannes Meyer, quoted in Döhl, Hermann Finsterlin, 125; for context see “Kein Professor am Bauhaus,” 123–25. See 11–13 for Finsterlin’s own later and inaccurate account, accepted by Nikolaus Pevsner, “Finsterlin and Some Others,” Architectural Review 132, no. 789 (November 1962): 353. 22 Ponten, Architektur, 1:140, my translation. For the images, see 2:202. Traditional orthography evidently struggles to represent such non-rational geometries: Finsterlin’s plan, reproduced on the same page as the primary rendering, is misidentified by Ponten’s compositor as belonging to an adjacent but unrelated scheme by Paul Gösch, another member of the Crystal Chain. 23 See Hermann Finsterlin, “The Eighth Day” [1920]—a development of his December 22, 1919 contribution to the Crystal Chain—in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 84–95. 24 For a glimpse of the aporia that has faced scholars trying to reconcile Taut’s earlier and later work, see Iain Boyd Whyte, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1–3. On the relationship between Taut’s built and unbuilt projects, see also Ulrich Conrads, “Zwischen Utopie und Wirklichkeit,” preface to Bruno Taut, Frühlicht 1920–1922, ed. Ulrich Conrads, Bauwelt Fundamente 8 (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1963), 7–10.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 25 Taut, November 24, 1919, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 19. 26 Bruno Taut, “Mein erstes Jahr ‘Stadtbaurat,’” Frühlicht: Eine Folge für die Verwirklichung des neuen Baugedankens (Magdeburg) 1, no. 4 (1922): 125–31. 27 Conrads, Bruno Taut, 215, my translation. 28 Ibid., 222, my translation. 29 Taut, December 26, 1919, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 25, substituting “light world” for “frivolous world” to better capture the ambiguity of “Leichte Welt.” 30 Hag. 1:1–2 (NRSV). 31 For evidence that Gropius followed the Crystal Chain exchanges with interest, and for his “comments in private letters to Taut, in which he signed himself as Mass,” see Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 3. 32 Walter Gropius, in Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Adolf Behne, “New Ideas on Architecture” [1919], trans. Michael Bullock, in Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes, 46. 33 Döhl, Hermann Finsterlin, 10. 34 Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 8, 15n22. 35 Gerda Breuer, Wenzel Hablik: Architekturvisionen 1903–1920 (Darmstadt: Verlag Jürgen Häusser, 1995), 109. 36 Gropius, “Program of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” 31, substituting as for like in “like the crystal symbol of a new faith.” 37 Ibid., 32. One might compare Erich Mendelsohn’s contemporary statement of belief, “The Problem of a New Architecture” [1919], trans. Michael Bullock, in Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes, 54–55. While Mendelsohn appears at first to call not for utopian visions but for pragmatic solutions, these too are expected to respond to new metaphysical realities, reaffirming architecture’s commitment to shaping “the shrines of a new world” in an expression of all-encompassing unity, will, and happiness (54–55). 38 Bruno Taut, “Der Sozialismus des ­Künst­lers,” Sozialistische Monatshefte 25, no. 4 (March 24, 1919): 262, my translation. 39 Taut’s Architektur-Programm “presented the contents of Stadtkrone in reverse order” (Speidel, “Bruno Taut,” 115). 40 Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, trans. Philip Morton Shand (London: Faber and Faber, [1935]). 41 Alfred Barr, preface to Bauhaus 1919–1928, ed. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 7.

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284 42 Alexander Dorner, “The Background of the Bauhaus,” in Bayer, Gropius, and Gropius, Bauhaus 1919–1928, 15. 43 For correspondence between Finsterlin and Gropius, leading up to Finsterlin’s 1968 denunciation, see Döhl, Hermann Finsterlin, 140–41, with reference to Gropius’s 1919 contribution to the pamphlet published on the occasion of the Exhibition for Unknown Architects, cited in Ulrich Conrads and Hans G. Sperlich, Phantastische Architektur (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1960), 23 and 137. It was through this exhibition, which also included work by Mies and Mendelsohn, that Finsterlin and Hablik came into contact with Taut. 44 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 11. The text of this book dates largely to 1973 (186). 45 On this point the German is more enigmatic. It has frequently been noted, following Pevsner, “Finsterlin and Some Others,” 357, that Finsterlin’s writing does not lend itself readily to translation; Finsterlin himself wrote in a February 3, 1920 contribution to the Crystal Chain (Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 55) that “each language has given form to different concepts, which are as incomparable and untranslatable as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra into English.” 46 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 11. 47 Ibid., 13. 48 See, for instance, Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture in Drawings, trans. John Gabriel (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1985), in which drawings by Taut, including the Monument to the New Law (23), are followed by plates from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (60–61). 49 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience (London: Routledge, 2000), 45. 50 Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone ( Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1919), 26 (Solomon’s Temple); and 24 (ziggurat). 51 Ibid., 50, my translation. 52 See, for instance, the long-standing poetic and hymnic tradition represented by Christian Weise, Reiffe Gedancken (Leipzig, 1682), 200, or Georg Christian Schemelli, Musikalisches Gesang-Buch (Leipzig, 1736), 642. 53 Ponten, Der Meister, 37, my translation. 54 Taut, Stadtkrone, 51, my translation. 55 Ibid., 52, my translation. 56 Ibid., my translation; compare Sloterdijk, Spheres, 1:10. 57 Taut, Stadtkrone, 53, my translation.

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58 Ibid., 54, my translation. 59 Taut, Berlin, December 19, 1919, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 20. 60 Taut, Stadtkrone, 55, my translation. 61 Ibid., 56, my translation. 62 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 120. 63 Taut, Stadtkrone, 62, my translation. 64 For this striking translation see Taut, City Crown, 80–81. 65 Taut, Stadtkrone, 5, my translation. 66 Iain Boyd Whyte, introduction to Modernism and the Spirit of the City, ed. Iain Boyd Whyte (London: Routledge, 2003), 19–22. 67 “The term Stadtkrone was turned into the opposite  of what Taut intended, when the Third Reich used it in reference to its ostentatious Nazi regional forum complexes and showed the innate ambivalence of the concept.” Speidel, “Bruno Taut,” 114. For more on Nazi appropriation of this idea, see “The Modern Skyline,” in Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 319–35—closely followed by Kostof’s conclusion: “And They Left Off To Build the City” (333–35). 68 Taut, Stadtkrone, 58–59, my translation. 69 Ibid., 59–60, my translation. 70 Ibid., 60, my translation. 71 Ibid., 61, my translation. 72 Ibid., 66, my translation. For discussion of Taut’s placement of commercial uses at the core of the city crown, motivated by a broader “desire to create social unity,” see James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience, 138. 73 Taut, Stadtkrone, 66, my translation. 74 Ibid., 67, my translation. 75 Ibid., 77, my translation. On January 28, 1920 Taut wrote, in a letter to the members of the Crystal Chain, “Today I went up the tower of the Strasbourg Minster,” adding that he “cried with delight” (Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 46). 76 Taut, Stadtkrone, 67–68, my translation. For explicit comparison to the cathedral, see 69–70. 77 For the “modern secular gothic” of the Glashaus, see James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience, 45; for the “anti-Gothic” of Gropius’s model factory for the same exhibition, see Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 206–7. 78 Taut, Stadtkrone, 69, my translation. For a narrative connecting Taut’s Glashaus and Kristallhaus to Speer’s Lichtdom, see James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience, 70–94. 79 Taut, Stadtkrone, 68, my translation.

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8. Fabricated Glory

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FABRICATED GLORY

There are moments in the public life of a community, or nation, when—for better or for worse—architecture takes on a greater than usual significance, whether real or aspirational. Taut’s vision of the city crown fell into the latter category. Writing in 1919, his “buildings of the new faith” were not yet real, at least in the context of Germany. A wider panorama was necessary. That panorama is provided by an afterword to Die Stadt­ krone. Of the various components that compose the book, it is Taut’s main essay that has received most attention. But it is the afterword, duly illustrated, that presents Taut’s assessment of more recent city crowns further afield.1 It is worth noting that there is significant overlap, here too, with the illustrations to Ponten’s Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde (Unbuilt architecture). And here too, pride of place is granted to America, a nation understood to combine optimism with a corresponding capacity to aim high and to make big plans. Thinking, no doubt, of Burnham’s plans for Chicago, Taut praises the American “Civic Center,” marked both by its impressive dimensions and by its prodigious aspirations. He refers also to George Burdett Ford, an American architect possessed of an evangelical fervor not dissimilar to his own. Ford had recently addressed his professional colleagues with an urbanistic optimism that would have appealed to Taut: “To those of us who have been at work in city planning during the past year, and who have come gradually to a realization of its great importance, it is our duty—I will say more—it is our privilege to spread the gospel far and wide throughout the land.”2 Taut quotes with approval Ford’s description of a city gathered around a defining center, disposed so as to satisfy man’s longing for beauty. “If you let your imagination play with the possibilities of such a plan, the vision of the metropolis of the future will begin to unfold.” Its architecture will nurture mankind’s sensitivity to

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289 the well-being of the community as a whole, “until, one day, the whole great panorama will unroll before him as in a vision, and he will experience ‘The City’ in its full glory.”3 Here too, the word “glory” (Herrlichkeit) describes a vision of architecture. Such architectural devotion, notes Taut, is an appropriate register of the city’s pride. Here he points to McKim, Mead and White’s 580-foot-tall Manhattan Municipal Building, → Fig. 8.1 completed in 1914: a structure duly ornamented at its base with a relief of “Civic Pride” that shows the city receiving tribute from its citizens, and topped with a colossal gilded statue of “Civic Fame” by the German-born sculptor Adolph Weinman. Built to represent the distinctly pragmatic interests of New York City’s recently consolidated boroughs, the building was internationally celebrated, earning an outsized reputation as one of the largest government administration buildings in the world, and inspiring similarly grandiose architecture as far away as Moscow. Its fame reached Germany too. And yet Taut contrasts its place within the city to that of a favorite German counterpart. “It stands out powerfully on the city skyline, asserting itself alongside the skyscrapers. Yet when you see it on the skyline of New York, it is no more powerful than the glorious city hall of Augsburg, which ultimately subordinates itself to the city’s actual crown, the Church of Saint Ulrich.”4 The architecture of America compares unfavorably to that of Germany. Why? In Augsburg, the claims of government are subordinated to those of a higher authority. But such subordination is clearly no longer operative in New York City. Taut refers the reader to an accompanying panorama of downtown Manhattan. → Fig. 8.2 The photograph does not, in fact, show the Municipal Building; it was captured in 1908, when work on McKim, Mead and White’s structure had only just begun.5 But the governing principle is already evident. The same photograph appears in a guidebook issued two years prior to the publication of Die Stadtkrone, entitled New York, The Metropolis of the Western World. The book presents a well-­established portrait of the city. An image of Weinman’s “Civic Fame” acts as frontispiece, and subsequent pages pay due

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8.1, 8.2 (top) McKim, Mead and White’s Manhattan Municipal Building under construction, ca. 1912. (bottom) Manhattan skyline, 1908 (“New York, Stadtbild”) as illustrated in Bruno Taut, Die ­Stadtkrone (1919).

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­ ttention to the “tremendous bulk” of the Municipal Building and a to the staggering statistics of its construction, deemed “unimpressive in comparison with the effect produced by the actual sight of the building itself.”6 But the image chosen to introduce the text is precisely that 1908 skyline photograph that reappears in Die Stadtkrone. The guidebook also appropriates the content of an anonymous article that had been circulating internationally, with necessary adjustments, for several years.7 In 1911, the same piece had appeared in the onboard newspaper of the Hamburg America Line, which offered steamship service to New York. Its relevance to approaching travelers is self-evident: In describing New York, none other than superlatives will suffice. It is in area the largest city in the world. . . . The g ­ igantic office buildings of the business districts are among the modern wonders of the world; there are none to compare with them; their foundations are sunk deeper toward the center of the earth, their summits are uplifted higher toward the heavens. The largest steamships afloat make New York their port, and from the deck of the incoming ship the world-traveler beholds the towering bulk of Manhattan with amazement. . . . Great and surpassing as the city is, each year adds to its material greatness and commanding influence.8 This is the vision that presented itself to the approaching traveler across the early decades of the twentieth century; it is directly comparable, mutatis mutandis, to that vision of towers “rising up, stretching into the sky” that was documented a few years later in Erich Mendelsohn’s celebrated Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (America: An architect’s picture book). The equivalent photograph, taken in 1924, is there captioned “The World Center—The Financial Center”;9 and in his preface, Mendelsohn documents “the physical power with which Manhattan’s towers suddenly thrust themselves into the sky above the horizontal line of the sea voyage.” In a subsequent paragraph, he adopts a familiar metaphor, describing the international city of New

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York as “a babel-like cauldron.”10 In drawing these observations, Mendelsohn was not alone; standing on the deck of the same steamship (the SS Deutschland) in October 1924, the filmmaker Fritz Lang, too, watched the approach of Manhattan. Like Mendelsohn, Lang was deeply struck by this image of the city’s power; and his impressions would find their way not only into the pages of Amerika but also into the architecture of Metropolis.11 As he put it later that year in a personal account of his experience, “[Where is] the film about one of these Babylons of stone calling themselves American cities?”12 In both texts—New York, The Metropolis of the Western World and Amerika—New York is granted global significance as a model city, an archetypal city, a pattern for the future. It is “the growing and expanding New York of the present, the Metropolis of America, from which is emerging that city of the future which shall be the Metropolis of the World.”13 In this respect at least, New York City corresponds well to Taut’s interests. Yet it is clear that the speculation to which its ever-rising towers are dedicated is not other-worldly. The 284-foot Gothic spire of Wall Street’s Trinity Church was once the highest point in New York City; → Fig. 8.3 but it is today invisible on the city skyline, literally overshadowed by newer architectures.14 The Metropolis of the Western World describes it as having been “dwarfed by the surrounding office buildings, which tower above the spire.”15 Here, the publishers reproduce a famous 1915 photograph by Irving Underhill, → Fig. 8.4 silhouetting Trinity’s dark spire against the sheer walls of a ring of towers that culminate in the mass of the newly-constructed Equitable Life Insurance Building. This, “the largest office building in the world,” and the first to incorporate steam passenger elevators—so a contender for the disputed title of world’s first skyscraper—is built by a culture that now places its trust not in the God of Israel but in the calculated, pooled risk of a commercial life insurance company.16 A comparable photograph is offered by Mendelsohn too. → Fig. 8.6 Both images represent a precise inversion of the Stadtkrone principle understood by Taut to define the relationship between the cathedral and the historic European city. ← Fig. 5.3

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8.3 (middle) Trinity Church, Wall Street, 1889; (bottom) Manhattan, 1876, detail of panorama photograph by Joshua Beal.

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8.4 (top) Plan of lower Manhattan, as published in Deutsche Bauzeitung (1915), its structures hatched to indicate height. Although the Equitable Building is not yet shown, Trinity Church at upper center is already ­surrounded by a black ring of rising towers. (middle) Trinity Church, Wall Street, 1915, photograph by Irving ­Underhill, in New York, the Metropolis of the Western World (1917).

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8.5, 8.6 (top) Erich Kettelhut, design for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, first version, 1925. (bottom) “Once surely a place of worship for adventurers at sea; today, with its Gothic tower and its churchyard, a European relic of a still higher order and of an otherworldly authority”: Trinity Church, as presented in Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika (1925).

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8.7, 8.8 (top) Erich Kettelhut, design for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, second version, 1925. (bottom) “The new Tower of Babel”: still from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927.

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A further point of comparison may be found in an early storyboard drawing for the set of Lang’s Metropolis. ← Fig. 8.5 Drawn in 1925 by the art director and architect Erich Kettelhut, it too represents a Gothic spire dwarfed by surrounding office buildings. But Lang has red-lined the church, crossing it out and writing above it the words Kirche fort, dafür Turm Babel: “Remove church, substitute Tower of Babel.”17 The drawing’s subsequent revision ← Fig. 8.7 shows a “New Tower of Babel” marking the center of Lang’s Metropolis. An upper landing deck cantilevers from the tapering shaft of its principal structure, in a design comparable to that of Taut’s Monument to the New Law.18 It is similar to the ­structure that would dominate Lang’s film as released in 1927, ← Fig. 8.8 except that the upper reaches of this Tower of Babel are a little closer to the subsidiary vignette in the upper corner of Taut’s 1919 sketch—a little closer, that is, to the image of the city crown. ← Fig. 7.1 Indeed, even in the 1908 panorama of lower Manhattan, surely chosen for the correspondence of its outline to the “city skyline with city crown” illustrated elsewhere in Taut’s book, Trinity’s crowning position has been usurped by the 612-foot tower of the Singer Manufacturing Company headquarters, claiming at that moment to be the tallest building in the world.19 → Fig. 8.10 It is described in The Metropolis of the Western World as “a house founded on a rock,” the phrase referring in this instance not to the familiar New Testament parable, but rather, more literally, to the building’s structural foundations.20 A contemporary rendering published in a celebratory account of the tower’s conception—a vanity publication—neatly illustrates the implied vertical hierarchy of commercial, governmental, and religious architectures. → Fig. 8.9

To Taut’s mind this hierarchy is disordered, just as its obsession for record-breaking—proud but short-lived—is misdirected. Yet he is conscious that this is symptomatic of contemporary priorities. Like Ponten, he offers his readers an illustration of Walter Burley Griffin’s 1912 scheme for a new Australian capital, noting that the church is largely absent.21 Like Ponten, too, he illustrates Ernest Hébrard’s 1912 International World Centre, ­gathered

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8.9, 8.10 (top) Architecturally implied hierarchy: the Singer Building at its peak, 1908. (bottom) “Highest Building in the World”: postcard of the Singer Building, ca. 1908.

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8.11 Hendrik Petrus Berlage, design for a ­Monument to the Nations (­Völkerdenkmal), 1915.

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around its thousand-foot Tower of Progress. Unlike Ponten, he adds a grainy image of Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s 1915 design for a “Monument to the Nations” (Völkerdenkmal ), conceived in the throes of World War I to articulate a vision of reconciliation and unity. ← Fig. 8.11 This Monument to the Nations is a curious project. Sited so as to overlook an unspecified plain, it forms the processional focus of eight military roads that converge from every direction of the compass but lead the nations not toward conflict but to an octagonal “Pantheon of humanity.”22 As its contradictory ­qualifier suggests, this pantheon is devoted not to all the gods but to mankind; and it is explicitly nonreligious. Dedicated to Europe’s war dead, it is centered about a “monument of human unity” and topped by a “dome of international community.” All elements of the design are intended to convey meaning. Not least among them are eight light-emitting towers, representing love and courage, enthusiasm and prudence, knowledge and power, freedom and peace. There is no trace here of commercial interest; and n ­ ationalistic sentiment has been evicted in favor of the most generous conception of international friendship. And yet to Taut even this seems inadequate—in the absence of an applicable ­iconographic tradition, the desired attachment of abstract meaning to architectural form is deemed weak. “You cannot just take a building and decorate it with symbolic markings. Those symbols must first become common property through established philosophical and religious practice.”23 Absent this common ground, the fate of such a monument is not mutual understanding, but confusion. And yet one architectural reference was clear, if not to Taut, then certainly to others among Berlage’s critics. Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932), a Dutch poet and reformer who (presumably with some difficulty) sustained simultaneous enthusiasms both for Nietzsche and for cooperativism, complained (like Taut) of the absence of spiritual content, but went on to draw a more pointed comparison: “The building is intended for the glorification [verheerlijking] of humanity, not for the glory of God: its high towers are too proud—like the tower of Babel.”24 Again that term:

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verheerlijking—Verherrlichung—of humanity and of its architecture. The connection to Babel is here explicit. Greatly to be praised is the glory (Herrlichkeit) of architecture! Berlage was himself not unwilling to exploit biblical references. The booklet in which he published his Monument to the Nations quotes a famous passage from the book of Micah: they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more;25

but it omits, not insignificantly, the immediately preceding text, which asserts that it is the God of Israel who will bring about this international reconciliation: In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills. Peoples shall stream to it, and many nations shall come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;26 The prophet’s vision is precisely not one that is stripped of religious content; while he, too, speaks of an architecture that will provide a point of convergence for the nations, the symbolism of that architecture is very specific—for Berlage’s purposes, no doubt, altogether too specific. It is the architecture of Zion,

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8.12, 8.13 Frederik van Eeden and Jaap London: (top) design for a City of Light (Lichtstad), 1918, centered on a Cathedral of Brotherhood (Dom der Broederschap); (bottom) Lichtstad perspective detail, 1921.

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8.14 New centers: (top) Hendrik Petrus Berlage, design for a Monument to the Nations (Völkerdenkmal), 1915; (middle) Frederik van Eeden and Jaap London, design for a ­Broedertempel, 1918; (bottom) Albert Speer, design for a Volkshalle, Berlin, 1939.

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described both as a tower and as “the mountain of the Lord’s house” (or “temple”27). This temple-tower, “the highest of the mountains,” stands in contrast with another temple-tower; for it is a promise set against a prophetic acknowledgment of a coming redemption from the oppression of Babylon. And this longing for Zion is emphatically not areligious, nor even pluralist: “For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God.”28 Van Eeden’s critique of Berlage was tied to his own personal interests. Berlage’s design can be compared to a still more ambitious urban-scale project developed between 1918 and 1921 by Van Eeden himself in collaboration with the Dutch architect Jaap ( Jacob) London. In plan, ← Fig. 8.12 its disposition is similar, albeit at a vastly larger scale, to that of Berlage’s earlier scheme. Its architectural articulation presents a curious mix of garden city planning and broadly Babylonian massing. ← Fig. 8.13 As a design for a “world city,” it too was a reaction to the conflict of World War I, and it was advertised through a dedicated publication entitled Het Godshuis in de Lichtstad (The house of God in the city of light). Its language is familiar, resounding with the epiphanic vocabulary of Expressionism. But its origins are more obscure. Certainly it upstaged the Expressionist predilection for seeking inspiration in mountaintop visions, having reputedly been conceived, according to Van Eeden’s diary, during a series of séances: Van Eeden and London received through a medium “messages from friends ‘on the other side’ about the design of the metropolis and how the plan should be announced to mankind.”29 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the city’s layout does not neglect spiritual interests. Its concentric arrangement devotes space to the demands of body, mind and soul. Commercial interests are relegated to an outer ring, neatly inverting the model of Manhattan, which Van Eeden had visited on a steamship in 1908. A middle ring accommodates artistic, cultural, and institutional programs: in explicit acknowledgment of the fate of Babel, a prominent site is earmarked for an academic library of language and literature, so as to preclude misunderstanding through linguistic discipline.30 And an inner ring is devoted to a distinctly pluralist religious

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sensibility: various creeds are represented in what is described as a “holy circle” or “crown.” In an uncomfortable compromise between the abstract conceptions of geometry and the more concrete demands of architectural typology, the main arms of a centralized hooked cross are devoted to four of the world’s major traditions, Western and Eastern, with minority interests relegated to the minor wings (“swastika arms”). The technicalities of this arrangement receive little attention; instead, the reader is told that within this sacred space, Buddhist will speak with Christian, Protestant with Catholic, each constrained by architectural ­opportunity to appreciate the good and the beautiful in each other’s faith. At the crossing, under a dome of religious unity, stands the central Godshuis (house of God), which—stripped of any religious specificity—is to become “the temple of the searching human soul.”31 Van Eeden’s premises differ from those of Berlage; but the architectural conclusions are strikingly similar, and curiously vacant. ← Fig. 8.14 Notwithstanding repeated attempts to communicate his plan to the President of America and to Henry Ford, Van Eeden’s visions remained in the category of unbuilt architecture—as was true also for Berlage’s Monument to the Nations. But an unhappy memory was perpetuated in the medievalising towers of Johannes and Walter Krüger’s Tannenberg Monument (TannenbergDenkmal ), → Fig. 8.15 a nationalistic memorial to Germany’s war dead built in East Prussia in 1927, and later appropriated by Hitler for propagandistic purposes as a Reichsehrenmal: a monument to German pride, a sacred shrine, and a place of national pilgrimage. With appropriate extensions and enlargements, the architecture proved readily adaptable to this purpose. Hitler’s attentions guaranteed the structure’s later ruin. Victim to war, politics, and looting, nothing remains today of its architectural fabric. Its octagonal form is now best discerned from above: as a rough outline traced across the surface of an otherwise deserted site by the vegetation that has replaced the architecture. → Fig. 8.16 It is an unprepossessing sight. But this unremarkable present betrays a spectacular past. The memorial’s moment of greatest fame came in 1934, at the funeral ceremony

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8.15 Walter and Johannes Krüger, Tannenberg Monument: view from Junkers Ju 52, 1944. In the background the huts of prisoner-­ofwar Camp Stalag I-B.

8.16 Walter and Johannes Krüger, Tannenberg Monument: (middle) Hohenstein, East Prussia, 1944; (bottom) Olsztynek, Poland, 2010.

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for Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg—an immaculately choreographed production designed by Albert Speer using techniques further developed at Nuremberg’s Nazi party rally grounds, and celebrated in military splendor with Hitler in attendance. After a silent 60-mile torch-lit procession, the soldiers assembled within the enclosure of the Reichsehrenmal towers sang, in ­patriotic unison, the hymn “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”—“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”32

Creative Forces “And though this world, with devils filled . . .” The first of the seven texts chosen by Taut for projection onto the illuminated tablets of the Monument to the New Law is in fact a line from “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Written around 1529, Martin Luther’s hymn is based on Psalm 46, which begins with the words “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” The hymn, and the psalm, speak of a world in turmoil (“The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter . . .”33), and this association is evident in the text’s many appropriations for political use both before and after World War I. → Fig. 8.17 This is also, perhaps, among the reasons for its selection by Taut. The hymn had been especially popular in the context of the four-hundredth anniversary, in 1917, of the nailing of Luther’s 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg; and for Taut this event surely offered an instance of a worldwide revolution provoked by the attachment of text to architecture. The hymn, and the psalm, duly celebrate the power of the word: “The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice . . .” And yet the word here in question is very explicitly the Word of God, not the word of man. Taut’s excerpt from Luther’s text thus represents a distinctly selective appropriation of biblical references. In fact, the hymn’s architectural implications could be pursued rather further: it speaks, not least, to the role of the tower within the city. Although best known today under the title “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the hymn was first rendered into

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English in 1539 by the Puritan translator Myles Coverdale, and entitled Oure God is a defence and towre. Again, the psalm from which it is drawn expands into a vocal celebration of Zion: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved.”34 The psalmist offers a vision of a city crown; but it is not that of Bruno Taut, and its conception of the tower is not that of the Expressionists. It is more closely aligned, perhaps, with Birnbaum’s vision of the heavenly city in Der Kaiser und der Architekt. Birnbaum is himself conscious of this discrepancy. But he is conscious also of the shared perspectives that align his position with those of Taut and of other Expressionists. And those alignments are not insignificant. There exist, to be sure, similarities of technique, form, and iconography—the exaggerated vocabularies, the intense colors, the willingness to experiment with different media and different genres, the inclination toward working in cycles, the belief in the communicative capacities of fiction, the exploration of organic form, the obsession with towers, the indulgence in astral and cosmic fantasy, the apocalyptic visions—even the fascination with Scheerbart. Such points of comparison have not been lost on observers.35 But these similarities are superficial in comparison with the mutually held underlying convictions. For there is no question that Birnbaum shares Taut’s fundamental disenchantment with the narrow premises and promises of materialism. He too, like Finsterlin, Mendelsohn, Obrist, and Bartning, attributes the nature of his vocation to an experience of transcendence.36 He too, like Hablik, is committed to explicating through his work the significance of the war, in observations sharpened by bitter personal experience on the Isonzo Front. He too, like Taut, holds a conviction that the artist’s first responsibility is toward the articulation of meaning, understanding the primary task of architecture to be intellectual, not functional; he too, like the diverse assembly of the Expressionists as a whole, shares a longing for a conception of meaning that is in some way transcendent. Birnbaum, too, in other words, is committed to prioritizing the metaphysical over the physical.

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But that, for Birnbaum, is insufficient. If the origins of his convictions are similar to those that informed Expressionist enthusiasms, the destinations diverge. An October 1916 letter mailed to his parents from the Eastern Front articulates both sympathy and disagreement: I find myself on the side of the Futurists, or rather, Ex­pressionists. I admit that their horizon is limited; but it is limited to a piece of infinity, whereas the Impressionists— however skilful their drawing or painting, and however open their vision—are more limited still. What reconciles me to the Futurists is precisely the thing that you emphasize with me, which is the most important thing of all: the pursuit of the absolute. They too pursue the absolute; but the path that they have chosen is false.37 It is clear from other texts that Birnbaum’s applications of the terms “Futurism” and “Expressionism” are not synonymous with their typical use elsewhere. His classifications are broader, encompassing other categories also—he speaks of “Expressionists in art, religion and politics.”38 But it is also clear that much of what is today labelled as Expressionism falls under his critique. Indeed, in the same letter, Birnbaum supplies specific points of reference, urging his parents to visit the bookshop of Hugo Heller, in whose gallery his own work had been exhibited earlier that year: Go to Heller’s, and have them show you Katharina Schöffner’s book and Wenzel Hoblik’s portfolio—pure Futurism, and no mistake, just the way it should be. And yet it is unquestionably false, because it detaches itself completely from this world, even though that world blurs into this one.39 The categories are imprecise and the spellings uncertain, their shortcomings perhaps attributable to conditions in the trenches, documented in a drawing sent by Uriel to his brother two months later. →  Fig.  8.18 But Birnbaum’s position is clear. The “book by Katharina Schöffner” is likely Ferdinand Avenarius’s 1908 Eine

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8.17 And though this world, with devils filled . . . (left) ­postcard of illustration by Max Frey, ­Dresden, 1914; (middle) cover of musical score by Ludwig ­Roman Chmel, Leipzig, 1914; (right) Großdeutsche Volks­partei election poster, Vienna, 1923, betraying evidence of rising anti-Semitism.

8.18 Feldjägerbataillon 17, III. Kompanie: ­Uriel Birnbaum to Solomon Birnbaum, ­December 19, 1916.

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8.19 (left) Katharine Schäffner, God’s Wrath (Gottes Zorn), ca. 1908; (right) ­Uriel ­Birnbaum, The Angel of Destruction (Der ­Engel der Zerstörung), lithograph from Weltuntergang (1921).

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neue Sprache (A new language), which presented the work of the young artist Katharine Schäffner as a new language of abstract expression, freed from functional requirements to allow communication of spiritual realities.40 There are memories in later work by Birnbaum of the style and content of Schäffner’s drawings; ← Fig. 8.19 and it is clear that Birnbaum eventually made her acquaintance—a copy of Eine neue Sprache now at the library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art bears a 1924 inscription by Schäffner to Uriel Birnbaum.41 But more pertinent still to the architectural dimensions of Birnbaum’s position is the “portfolio by Hoblik,” or Hablik—who in 1916 was serving on the Isonzo Front, like Birnbaum, albeit as a war artist. The reference is probably to Hablik’s 1909 Schaffende Kräfte (“Creative forces”), which had been frequently reviewed and exhibited in the preceding years. Avenarius had introduced the newly published portfolio to readers of Der Kunstwart (a journal represented in AustriaHungary by Hugo Heller);42 selected plates had been exhibited in 1908 at the Berlin Secession (where Birnbaum would later study) and in 1909 at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Vienna (where Birnbaum was living at the time); and the full cycle was exhibited at the gallery of Der Sturm in 1912, just as Birnbaum was establishing the Birnbaum Brothers Atelier in Berlin.43 Schaffende Kräfte was also familiar to members of the Crystal Chain; in a letter sent privately to Hablik on December 22, 1919, Wassili Luckhardt expressed his admiration.44 It is not surprising that Schaffende Kräfte should have attracted Birnbaum’s critique. The first word of its title is a direct reference to that “Schaffende” (creator) who had been praised by Nietzsche, a fundamental influence (alongside Schopenhauer) on the young Hablik.45 It is clear that Hablik identifies himself with the “creator” of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, writing in a 1913 letter: “We who ‘create value’ [Wir ‘werteschaffenden’ Menschen] are closest to omnipotence.”46 The proof of that creative supremacy, for Hablik as for Finsterlin, is architectural. Thus the towers that populate Hablik’s work, of which Schaffende Kräfte provides a first glimpse, fulfil two distinct roles: one serving the needs of a new society, the other celebrating the capacities of the individual

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8.20 Wenzel Hablik, outlook and memorial towers: Original Design for a Memorial on an Uninhabited Rock in Open Water or on a Rocky Coastline (Original Entwurf für ein Denkmal in offener See auf einsam. Fels od. an felsig. Küste), 1915; Outlook Towers, in Place of the Old Newly-“Restored” Ruins, etc. (An Stelle der alten neu ‘restaurierten’ Ruinen usw., Aussichtstürme), 1916; Lighthouse by Night, Memorial and Outlook Tower by Day (Leuchtturm bei Nacht, Denkmal u. Aussichts­ turm bei Tag), 1915–16.

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8.21 Wenzel Hablik, Sunset, Mont Blanc (Sonnen­ untergang Mont Blanc), oil on canvas, ca. 1906—also used as cover art for the Penguin Classics edition of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.

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creator. Monuments to the architect’s power and symbols of a common aspiration, they can be described both as “lookout towers” (Aussichtstürme) and as “memorial towers” (Denkmaltürme)—as is the case for a series of drawings exhibited at the 1919 Exhibition for Unknown Architects. ← Fig. 8.20 Crowning the peaks of nature’s most exalted sites with architectural perfection, they articulate man’s dominion over the created order; in so doing, these buildings for worship (Kultbauten) also provide new foci for the world’s devotion—a new architecture offering new monuments to new values for a new society. The tower’s significance thus operates in two directions. For the individual who looks down from its heights, it provides a visceral sensation of pride: the view from above, after all, is a privileged view;47 ← Fig. 8.21 and for those on the surrounding plain who turn toward it in an attitude of upward contemplation, it provides a shared center: a crystalline symbol, perhaps, of a new faith. There is no question that Hablik, following Nietzsche, understands the architect’s role as godlike, albeit with a troubled consciousness of lingering human limitations. That understanding, typically accompanied by a cry of protest against mortality, is repeatedly inscribed into the aphorisms that supplement the towering architectures of Schaffende Kräfte: → Fig. 8.22 There exists no power that I have not felt within me. Gods and men have lodged with me; in my paradise gardens dwell animals, flowers, and precious stones of every form; suns move in all their brightness, waters run in all their depth— and yet I must die.48 I was, and I am, but I never again shall be.49 You have not experienced the curse of the creator who wishes to be omnipotent, who needs a thousand lives—yet carries only one weak body to the grave.50 But elsewhere in Hablik’s writing the ascription of a godlike nature is extended to humanity as a whole. And this has momen-

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8.22 Wenzel Hablik, plates from Schaffende Kräfte (1909).

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tous implications for architecture and its future prospects. Hablik writes, in 1913: I believe the future of humanity to be that of becoming godlike. . . . We humans will one day possess a godlike agency: in other words, all those things that today our minds can only conceive . . . will one day become fact at the very moment of thinking.51 Such thinking vastly expands the significance of architecture, which now becomes the disciplinary register of humanity’s apotheosis. More specifically, it expands the significance of that contested relationship between the unbuildable and the built. For the history of unbuilt architecture aligns, in its most significant part, with the testing to breaking-point of humanity’s creative and intellectual capacities. Such architecture serves, first of all, as a monument to creative thought; it functions quite literally, in this regard, as a Denkmal. And this thinking, argues Hablik, is a precursor to the exercise of tangible power. “Thinking is omni­potence—for the ultimate consequence of thought is action. That is why we who ‘create value’ are closest to omnipotence.”52 There is no great distance between this assertion and Finsterlin’s description of architecture as “power made concrete, the will turned to stone.” That, he insists, “is what it seems to me architecture should be.”53 But there is also no question that there exists for Hablik, as for Taut, a clearly articulated social aspiration—the “idea of a common striving”—that is built into the very fabric of his crystalline structures.54 Hablik, too, emerges as a visionary who is simultaneously enthusiastic both about Nietzschean individualism and about collective collaboration. Some might describe as wishful thinking the expectation that architectural omnipotence dutifully take its place within a peaceful framework of cooperation, and that the will to power find its natural outlet in the building of community. Others might seek parallels in the account of Babel. Less diffident critics might reach for the word “utopian.” Indeed, in a 1920 contribution to

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the Crystal Chain, Hablik expanded on the terms of Schaffende Kräfte by confessing his own devotion to utopian thought: “For this reason I profess ‘Utopia’ (ad perpetuam memoriam!) as the form nearest to nature of all artistic and architectural energy—of all the yearnings of the creative universal soul.”55 In expressing this faith Hablik was clearly not alone. And yet the demonstrable failure of such utopian thought in the years after 1920 might seem to validate the term chosen by Birnbaum in 1919: Pfuschwerk. Indeed, the word “false” (falsch) appears more than once in Birnbaum’s appraisal of Hablik and, by extension, of Taut. “The path that they have chosen is false.”56 “Yet even that is undoubtedly false.”57 These are bold indictments, dispensed in passing; but they are tied to a more developed argument that is embedded throughout Birnbaum’s critique of those practices of art, religion and politics that he characterizes as Expressionist. While they strive toward the infinite, they do so in a manner that will never reach the desired heights, precisely because they are constructed without a solid foundation. Their ambition is prodigious, but they are destined for ruin: they are “on the path to fanaticism, instead of on the path to God.”58 And Birnbaum here draws a distinction between “true and misconceived Expressionism.”59 The category of misconceived Expressionism receives scant sympathy. Unlike Hablik or Taut, Birnbaum insists not, first, on form, but rather on content, and on the legitimacy of that content. The validity of the artist’s desire to express meaning is deemed subordinate to the validity of that which is expressed. And in its substitution of the created for the creator, an unbelieving Expressionism is emblematic of a misdirected devotion. Only true belief, argues Birnbaum, produces a right orientation of the artist’s ends: “In the end, that which is presented becomes more important than the means of presentation. The quality of the presentation is a necessary condition—but, once recognized, instantly secondary. . . . The content of all art is the world as God’s work, and any other notion, taken to extremes, must lead either to Impressionist muck heaps or to Neo-Expressionist color ­triangles.”60 This is hardly more complementary than the accusation of “bungling incompetence” (Pfuschwerk). Birnbaum insists that

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any creation that does not adequately acknowledge the creator God—and one might include here the mainstream of utopian production in the years following World War I—leads inevitably “to Impressionist muck heaps or to Neo-Expressionist color triangles.” But this much, at least, is patently untrue; for it can readily be demonstrated that other ends are possible too. Indeed, in later years Birnbaum himself would be less playful in his dismissal. One might return once again to his 1939 conversations with Menno ter Braak: The artist told him of a project for an epic novel entitled The Redemption of the World, laid out as a great anti-utopia. In it he denounced those who promise to improve the world, who gain power and control over humanity through abstract slogans, but who ultimately overwhelm them with torrents of blood and tears.61 The same point was made more emphatically by Friedrich Weinreb when, in 1969, he wrote a foreword for that same novel, Die Errettung der Welt. Speaking of Birnbaum’s attitude to the would-be creators of constructed utopias, he wrote: These utopians invariably insist that their theories offer the only path to bliss. If the world is to be redeemed, mankind must behave according to the laws that they themselves claim to have discovered. . . . It is a given that the world needs redemption; after all, is it not visibly off-course? They intend to take matters in hand, and press forward, obsessed with an aggressive expansionism that extends to all areas of life. Employing every art of seduction, they offer the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Uriel Birnbaum saw right through these world-­ improvers. He pointed out that they have brought upon humanity unspeakable suffering, torrents of blood and tears, just as the serpent with its temptation brought—and continues to bring—death. . . . He recognized these men as seductive purveyors of misery and death, even though they

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came bearing fair promises. He recognized them with a clarity that compelled him to speak out. And instinctively they perceived in him the great adversary, the true and faithful fighter for God. Two powers recognized one another—two powers that have confronted one another since the beginning of creation. It is their conflict that defines the true history of the world.62 For a graphic illustration of that struggle, and of the torrents of blood to which Birnbaum refers, one might turn to Weltuntergang (Apocalypse), a cycle of plates published by Birnbaum in 1921, and a striking contrast to Hablik’s Schaffende Kräfte.63 There are no accompanying aphorisms, and there is little in the way of explanatory text; Birnbaum’s portfolio is introduced only by a sonnet, which does not pretend to narrate the story suggested by the lithographs. But the titles of the opening plates—“The Golden Age,” “The World Capital,” and “God’s Anger”—suffice to establish the basic premise. Here too, the reader encounters a distinctly Babelic metropolis, → Fig. 8.23 a powerful world city; but the utopian opening proves ephemeral at best, overwhelmed by apocalyptic ruin.64 And here too, the implications of a belief in God—or, by contrast, of a belief in the death of God—are assessed in dramatic terms. On this front, after all, Birnbaum is in some respects closer to Nietzsche than is Hablik—or, for that matter, Taut. At first this may seem counterintuitive, given Taut’s evident enthusiasm for Nietzschean doctrine. But does not Taut ultimately succumb to the very weakness that Nietzsche decries: that is, a refusal to confront the implications of a godless universe, and an attempt instead to fill the gap with an inadequate substitute? As articulated in a more recent restatement of the premises of The Gay Science, the death of God “is the most momentous event of human history, yet men and women are behaving as though it were no more than a minor readjustment.” The architectural analogy that accompanies this restatement can be read in more ways than one: “You cannot kick away the foundations and expect the building still to stand.”65

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8.23 Uriel Birnbaum, Weltuntergang (1921), with lithographs The World Capital (Die Welthauptstadt) and The Last Judgement (Das jüngste Gericht).

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Indeed, Taut’s collection of aphorisms, intended for public proclamation from the top of the Monument to the New Law, comes across today as purely anecdotal: a painfully personal selection, steeped in the anxieties and enthusiasms of its moment. It corresponds better, perhaps, to the ephemeral nature of the photostat than to the putative permanence of a monument in stone. It answers, in a very real sense, to the “crumbling ethics” of which Birnbaum had written in that same year. And yet a revised assessment might be justified in concluding that, if anything, this brittleness has now spread to the point where, almost a century later, it is endemic. For who, today, if required to assemble an equivalent ledger of new laws, would be confident of avoiding similar deficiencies? In this regard Taut is surely not so different from those architects who have succeeded him. They do not, after all, typically practice Birnbaum’s “faithful art” (gläubige Kunst); instead, they might be justified in echoing Taut’s wistful lament: “Is this our image? Is this our spiritual condition? We look at the old cities and are forced to admit: we have no firm footing.”66 How many today can easily locate the foundations of permanence, or, conversely, provide a ready apology for an almost universally unsubstantiated denial of meaninglessness, or offer even the most rudimentary reckoning of fundamental rights and wrongs, or locate the source of ultimate non-contingent value in a universe stripped of transcendent authority, or condemn with any self-confidence the sacrifice of principle to the demands of personal success, or denounce without fear of hypocrisy the desire to build even in the face of political violence? How many can recommend reliable repairs for those signs of structural unease—fear of space, fear of the world, fear of death (Raumangst, Weltangst, Todesangst)—to which Sloterdijk points? Does it not prove impossible to reach consensus even on such rudimentary matters as the ends of architecture? Is it not easier to continue building despite the evident crumbling of previously laid foundations? As Nietzsche recognizes, is it not more convenient to deny the murder of God? Is it not more agreeable to assume the superiority of goodwill over evil intent, of altruism over selfishness, of the constructive over the destructive? Is it not more palatable to presume the possibility

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of a legitimate community of shared beliefs, or to posit the non-­ negotiable value of human life—to assume the continuing validity of those very commitments that were tested to breaking-point in the heart of a culturally and intellectually sophisticated post-­ Nietzschean society just two decades after the distribution of Taut’s drawing? All of these architectural anxieties come to a head in the account of Babel. And that account is nowhere more attractively illustrated than in its retelling by Uriel Birnbaum—not, that is, in his indictment of the bungling incompetence of human self-­ assertion, but in his elaboration of the story of the emperor and the architect.

Exegetical Structures The basic premise of Der Kaiser und der Architekt may at first seem simplistic, its conclusion all too predictable. The ambitious architect believes himself capable of building the heavenly city on earth, and is able, for a while, to persuade his patron of this capacity. His conviction offers a measure of hope in the face of a rapidly fading dream, and makes possible a lifetime’s architectural work, producing a series of richly inventive designs. And yet the hope proves ill-founded. Despite an initial indulgence of the architect’s schemes, society finds itself increasingly dissatisfied and disillusioned, as it becomes clear that the nurture of society’s wellbeing was never in fact the architect’s primary goal. On this reading, the story is a rejection of architecture’s redemptive claims—a premature refutation, in the most colorful terms, of what Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter would later characterize as the “gospel” of modern architecture. The didacticism of this interpretation becomes all the more galling when transferred from the physical to the metaphysical. Toward the end of Birnbaum’s account, the architect’s confidence is shown to correspond to a parallel theological presumption—a trust in human artifice over divine revelation, a faith in the strength of humanity’s architecture that is maintained to

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the end despite growing evidence of its many failures. Both in Birnbaum’s story and in the historical context to which that story seems to point, physical and metaphysical convictions reinforce one another, such that the very sophistication of the architecture supports its claims to authority. Looking down onto the surrounding plain from the formidable heights of his own construction, the architect is not inclined to doubt his own creative powers; even the recurring vision of the heavenly city is dismissed as mere sentimentality when compared to the hard logic of the material world. The commitment to a materialist positivism leaves no room to entertain the possibility of transcendence. And so the proud architect remains faithless unto death—whether that death is to be understood as that of the individual or as that of the discipline is open to interpretation—and it is instead the emperor who learns to acknowledge the betrayal of his misplaced confidence. And yet it is precisely here that the critical reader might find cause to question the dismissal of Birnbaum’s story as a mere reassertion of traditional piety. For a closer examination makes it clear that it is not the emperor who commands the reader’s empathy. It is not the emperor who engages Birnbaum’s fascination. And it is not the emperor who provides occasion for the story’s visual and conceptual richness. As a character, the figure of the emperor is undeveloped. The chief protagonist is undeniably the architect: it is he who dominates the narrative, and it is his creative energy that shapes the reader’s experience. A glimpse of this is provided by the book’s frontispiece; → Fig. 8.24 for within the tripartite articulation of its Gothic window, the reader is introduced to the principal figures of the narrative. In the central panel, colored light illuminates the hemisphere of a globe, its diameter providing the measure for the division of the arched window-frame. This is the view from above, as seen from space, here represented on a two-dimensional backlit surface. It is the only appearance of this motif within the book; and the globe is rotated so as to show Europe and the Middle East: a view comparable to that of the satellite image that in 2008 would greet visitors to the Metropolitan Museum’s Beyond Babylon exhibition. Here too, the image suggests the scope of the subsequent

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8.24, 8.25 Uriel Birnbaum, frontispiece plates for Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924) and Moses (1924).

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content’s significance. Above it, in otherworldly beauty, rises the vision of the heavenly city around which the story’s narrative will revolve. And on either side stand the protagonists of the book’s title. Both occupy similar spaces on the page; but the difference in their engagement with the space of the reader is striking. Clad in flowing purple, the slight figure of the emperor turns away, gazing toward the heavenly city—and in so doing he hides his face from the viewer. But the powerful, uncompromising figure of the architect, “with shaggy red hair and fiery, unkempt beard,”67 boots planted firmly on the ground, bearing in clenched fist the rolled-up products of his labor—his gaze is fixed upon the earth; and in so doing, he confronts the viewer face-to-face. The frontispiece is conspicuously similar to that of Birnbaum’s Moses, printed by the same publisher in the same year and in the same format, it too advertised as a cycle of fifty pictures.68 Both drawings adopt the motif of a stained-glass window, anticipating the translucent effect of the subsequent plates. But the window in Moses is round-arched, not Gothic, ← Fig. 8.25 and its most basic division is not tripartite but bipartite, framing the outline of the two tablets of the Mosaic law, enlarged to architectural dimensions. This drawing is not a monument to a new law but rather a celebration of an old covenant. That covenant still asserts its claim over the present; as in Der Kaiser und der Architekt, so in Moses the frontispiece is followed by a biblical epigraph, in this instance a verse from the fifth book of Moses: “Not with our ancestors did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today.”69 When the two books are compared more closely, first impressions give way once again to more ambiguous second thoughts. For in the frontispiece to Birnbaum’s companion volume the figure who is presented to the reader as strong and uncompromising, with shaggy white hair and unkempt beard, feet planted firmly on the ground, clad in workmanlike garb, clasping in his hand the emblem of his authority, confronting the viewer face-to-face, is none other than Moses himself. The correspondence, in other words, is not between Moses and emperor, but between Moses and architect. Furthermore, it becomes clear that in pursuing his

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practice of a faithful art (gläubige Kunst), Uriel Birnbaum owes his material precisely to the energies of the architect, without whom there would be no occasion for a book. Visions of transcendence occupy only a small number of the book’s pages; whether in word or image, it is not the singular heavenly city but rather the 33 cities of the architect’s invention that are designed to capture the reader’s fascination. A glance at the list of plates provided at the back of the book renders this instantly obvious. If, at the very start of the narrative, the emperor had rejected his longing to materialize the heavenly city, or if there had existed no agitators to disrupt the quietness of the book’s opening paragraph, there would have been no story. In this instance, at least, Birnbaum the faithful artist relies on the unbelieving architect to provide the provocation for his art. Der Kaiser und der Architekt is advertised as a tale of fifty pictures. There is no question that its narrative operates, in some fashion, on the level of allegory. Like a parable, it offers ­illustrations intended to clarify a reality external to the story. Something ­similar might be argued for the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel: it too illustrates a lesson in exceptionally vivid terms. The rhetorical strength of the parable is typically derived from its capacity to insert conceptual space between the ostensible subject of the narrative and the object of its potential application. In providing this exegetical distance, it remains open to continual reinterpretation. The parable, in other words, is at its most effective when it provokes the reader to reconsider its potential significance, offering within that moment of disinterested hesitation an opportunity to challenge preconceptions. It acts, that is, as an obstruction to the otherwise smooth operation of pre­­judice. Again, something similar could be said for the story of Babel: it is sufficiently enigmatic to provoke continuous re-­­evaluation, ­guaranteeing its continued relevance as each new generation discovers in the account of Genesis an occasion for reflection on its own condition. This mechanism is especially effective when the signi­ficance of the story is not immediately clear, or when the correspondence

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between narrative and application is not self-evident. In such instances, interpretation must proceed by a systematic process of reconstruction. There is something fundamentally architectural, or perhaps archaeological, about this process—the material evidence is combined with an interpretation of h ­ istorical context so as to reconstruct potential structures of significance. Such reconstruction is invariably a creative exercise; and post­modernity has learned, following the examples of patristic exegesis that went before it, to resist overly definitive claims to significance. This also opens the possibility that the significance of Birnbaum’s story might be drawn out in more than one direction, applied not only backward but also forward: to the subsequent development of an emerging modernity as much as to the prior course of a moribund Expressionism. Such openness uncovers new value in what could otherwise seem to be a work of relatively limited interest. For there is no question that the standard interpretation of Birnbaum’s book has underestimated its significance. Until quite recently, its most extensive treatment was a ten-page essay published in German in 2003.70 Here and in other, still briefer, assessments, the tendency has been to consider Birnbaum’s book either in retrospective relationship to the Expressionist architecture of which it offers such a clear critique, or as the predictable product of a conservative mind, a retrogressive artifact that is readily swept away by the currents of modernity. In both cases, Birnbaum’s text is placed at a dead end that leaves little room for further exploration.71 But the significance of Der Kaiser und der Architekt is not exhausted by its relationship to prior Expressionisms. Birnbaum’s story must be understood within a more expansive context, read against a longer architectural trajectory.

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Fabricated Glory 1 Taut, Stadtkrone, 81–87. 2 George Burdett Ford, “What Has Been Accomplished in City Planning during the Year 1916,” The Art World 2, no. 5 (August 1917): 444. 3 Taut, Stadtkrone, 84, my translation, citing Ford’s 1916 speech to the National Community Center Association, published as George B. Ford, “­Planning the City for Community Life,” The National Real Estate Journal 13 ( June 1916): 357–58. The speech is reproduced as “Ein amerikanisches Stadt-Ideal,” ­D eutsche Bauzeitung 50, no. 87 (1916): 450–54, and this was presumably Taut’s source. 4 Taut, Stadtkrone, 84, my translation. 5 The Library of Congress attributes this photograph to the Detroit Publishing Company: see https://www.loc.gov/ pictures/item/2016802978/. Taut refers to J. Stübben, “New-York’s Bauordnung und Stadtbauplan,” Deutsche Bauzeitung 49, no. 86 (1915): 482. That article in turn cites Otto Rappold, Der Bau der Wolkenkratzer: Kurze Darstellung auf Grund einer Studienreise für Ingenieure und Architekten (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1913), where the photograph is credited to George P. Hall and Son. 6 New York, The Metropolis of the Western World: New York Standard Guide (New York: Foster and Reynolds, 1917), 52. Subsequent citations refer to this edition; the guidebook was reissued repeatedly from as early as 1911. 7 See, for instance, “A City of Wonders,” New Zealand Herald (Auckland), May 20, 1905, or “A Glimpse of New York,” Oamaru Mail (Oamaru, New Zealand), May 6, 1905. 8 New York, The Metropolis of the Western World, 7–8. 9 Stanley Appelbaum, trans., Erich Mendelsohn’s “Amerika”: 82 Photographs (New York: Dover, 1993), 24; originally published as Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin: Rudolf Mosse, [1925]). 10 Appelbaum, Erich Mendelsohn’s “Ameri­ ­ka,” ix. 11 A photograph by Lang was included in Amerika (ibid., 52). 12 Fritz Lang, “Was ich in Amerika sah,” Film-Kurier, 11 December 1924, quoted in translation in Holger Bachmann, “The Production and Reception of Metropolis,” in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 4.

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Lang draws attention to the backlit messages inscribed on the city’s towering skyline, reaching for the heavens in a shining fury of light and color. By the time of his visit work on Metropolis had already begun; his experience of New York City therefore shaped but did not inspire the film. New York, The Metropolis of the Western World, 8. Discounting temporary constructions, Trinity Church was the tallest permanent structure in New York City until 1889. New York, The Metropolis of the Western World, 34. Ibid., 20. It was the seven-acre shadow of the 1915 Equitable Building, designed as headquarters for one of the world’s largest life insurance companies, that precipitated the adoption of New York’s 1916 zoning law—which in turn provided the premise for the famously Babelic 1922 “Four Stages” study by Harvey Wiley Corbett and Hugh Ferriss. See George R. Adams, “Equitable Building,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form (1977). See Dietrich Neumann, “Der Turmbau zu Babel und das Hochhaus im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Der Turmbau zu Babel: Maßstab oder Anmaßung?, ed. Joachim Ganzert (Biberach: Fachhochschule, 1997), 82–83, and also Erik Tängerstad, “The Medieval in the Modern: The Cathedral and the Skyscraper in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” in The Image of the Baltic, ed. Michael F. Scholz, Robert Bohn, and Carina Johansson (Visby: Gotland University Press, 2012), 161–62, where the author argues for Lang’s Metropolis as a critique of Taut and, more broadly, of the Bauhaus. For more on Lang’s juxtaposition of cathedral and tower, and on his protagonist’s creative mis-telling of the biblical account of Babel, see Lawrence Bird, “Lumen opacatum,” Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture 1, no. 6 (2011): 1–24. Wolfgang Voigt, “Herman Sörgels Makroprojekt ‘Atlantropa,’” in Bau einer neuen Welt: Architektonische Visionen des Expressionismus, ed. Rainer Stamm and Daniel Schreiber (Cologne: Buchhandlung Wal­ther König, 2003), 78. O. F. Semsch, ed., A Histor y of the Singer Building Construction: Its Progress from Foundation to Flag Pole (New York: Trow, 1908), 32. This claim, which discounts the Eiffel Tower, would be of short duration, passing in 1909 to the tower of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 20 New York, The Metropolis of the Western World, 14. 21 Taut, Stadtkrone, 85, 95. 22 “Kriegs-Ehren- und Gedächtnishallen,” Deutsche Bauzeitung 50, no. 29 (1916): 154–56, my translation. 23 Taut, Stadtkrone, 87, my translation. 24 April 18, 1918 diary entry, in Frederik van Eeden, Dagboek 1878–1923, vol. 3, 1911– 1918 (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink-Noorduijn, 1971), 1663, my translation. 25 Mic. 4:3 (NRSV), cited in Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Het pantheon der menschheid: Afbeeldingen der ontwerpen (Rotterdam: Brusse, 1915). 26 Mic. 4:1–3 (NRSV); compare 4:8. 27 Mic. 4:1 (NRSVue). 28 Mic. 4:5 (NRSV). 29 Jan Fontijn, “The American Adventure of Frederik van Eeden,” trans. Julian Ross, The Low Countries 6 (1998–99): 137. For details of the séances, which communicated with figures identified as Émile Zola, Victor Hugo, and Michelangelo, see Van Eeden’s diary entries from 1917 onward, in Van Eeden, Dagboek 1878–1923, vol. 3, 1911–1918, and vol. 4, 1919–1923 (Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink-Noorduijn, 1972). The young woman who acted as medium was possessed, observed Van Eeden, of literary aspirations. 30 Frederik van Eeden, Het Godshuis in de Lichtstad (Amsterdam: Versluys, 1921), 44. 31 Luc Bergmans, “Gerrit Mannoury and his Fellow Significians on Mathematics and Mysticism,” in Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study, ed. Teun Koetsier and Luc Bergmans (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 558. 32 For an arresting account, see “Thousands in Tribute at von Hindenburg Rites,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 7, 1934. 33 Ps. 46:6 (NRSV). 34 Ps. 46:4–5 (NRSV). 35 See, for instance, Roland Jaeger, Neue Werkkunst: Architektenmonographien der zwanziger Jahre; Mit einer Basis-Bibliographie deutschsprachiger Architekturpublikationen 1918–1933 (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann Verlag, 1998), 26. 36 For Finsterlin’s mountaintop experience, one moon-lit night in 1910 (Pevsner, “Finsterlin and Some Others,” 353), of “the omnipotence of uninhibited creative ideas,” and for Bartning’s repeated hearing of the words “build towers, build towers,” see Axel Feuß, “Wenzel Hablik (1881–1934): Auf dem Weg in die Utopie” (PhD diss., University of Hamburg, 1989), 41 (my translations).

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328 37 Uriel Birnbaum, October 13, 1916, quoted in Armin A. Wallas, “‘Gläubige Kunst’— Zivilizationskritik als Gottes-Offenbarung: Bemerkungen zu Uriel Birnbaums Frühwerk,” in Deutschsprachige jüdische Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert (Wuppertal: Arco Verlag, 2008), 2:254, my translation. Previously published to accompany an exhibition at the Universitätsbibliothek Hagen: see Georg Schirmers, ed., Uriel Birnbaum, 1894–1956: Dichter und Maler (Hagen: Fernuniversität-Gesamthochschule, 1990), 37–82. 38 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 9, my translation. 39 Birnbaum, quoted in Wallas, “‘Gläubige Kunst,’” 2:254n21, my translation. 40 For more on Schäffner, born in Prague in 1864 and later resident in Berlin, Dresden and Munich, see Lada Hubatová-­Vacková, “The Silent Revolutions in Ornament (1880–1920),” Umění/Art: Journal of the Institute of Art History (Prague) 58 (2010): 403–23. 41 Ferdinand Avenarius, Eine neue Spra­ che? Zweiundvierzig ­Z eichnungen von ­Katharine Schäffner: Mit einer ­B esprechung von Ferdinand Avenarius (Munich: Kunstwartverlag Georg D. W. Callwey, [1908]). Birnbaum also owned a copy of  ­Schäffner’s Zeichnungen zu: “Prometheus u. Epimetheus” (1. Teil ) von Karl Spitteler (privately printed, no date), inscribed on May 20, 1923, “Uriel Birnbaum, in ­herzlicher Verehrung, Katherina Schäff.” 42 Ferdinand Avenarius, “Unsre Bilder und Noten,” Der Kunstwart 22, no. 22 (August 1909): 231. 43 See Feuß, “Wenzel Hablik,” 63–64. 44 Hans Luckhardt to Wenzel Hablik, with additional note by Wassili Luckhardt, December 22, 1919, in Maria Stavrinaki, La Chaîne de verre: Une correspondance expressioniste, trans. Jean-Léon Muller (Paris: Éditions de La Villette, 2009), 87. 45 See “Der Zyklus als Spiegelbild von Nietzsches ‘Zarathustra,’” in Feuß, “Wenzel Hablik,” 65–71. 46 Hablik to Rose Burger, Itzehoe, July 6, 1913, quoted at Feuß, “Wenzel Hablik,” 71, my translation. 47 See Wenzel Hablik’s 1909 letter to Ewald Bender, quoted at Feuß, “Wenzel Hablik,” 55. 48 Wenzel Hablik, Schaffende Kräfte: Original Radierungen (Itzehoe: published by author, 1909), plate 9, my translation. 49 Ibid., plate 17, my translation. 50 Ibid., plate 19, my translation.

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Fabricated Glory 51 Hablik to Rose Burger, Itzehoe, July 6, 1913, quoted at Feuß, “Wenzel Hablik,” 51, my translation. 52 Ibid., my translation. 53 Finsterlin, “The Eighth Day,” 93. 54 Feuß, “Wenzel Hablik,” 98, my translation. 55 Hablik, July 1920, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 133. 56 Quoted in Wallas, “‘Gläubige Kunst,’” 2:254, my translation. 57 Ibid., 2:254n21, my translation. 58 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 9, my translation. 59 Birnbaum, “Gläubige Kunst,” 2, my translation. 60 Ibid., 2–3, my translation. Compare Finsterlin’s insistence that “two great maternal poles of art have existed through the centuries and millenia,” that even “the divine creator” can be located within this binary distinction between “‘Impression’ and ‘Expression’,” and that all impressionist art “is on the wrong track.” Finsterlin, “The Eighth Day,” 90–91. 61 Hanssen, Menno ter Braak: Leben und Werk, 336, my translation. 62 Friedrich Weinreb, foreword to Birnbaum, Errettung der Welt, i–ii, my translation. 63 For Hablik’s association of the Great War’s torrents of blood with the opportunity for new beginnings (echoed in 1933), see Gerda Breuer, “Expressionismus und Politik: Aspekte einer Architekturmoderne zwischen Sozialismus und Nationalsozialismus,” in Stamm and Schreiber, Bau einer neuen Welt, 156. 64 Uriel Birnbaum, Weltuntergang: Zwölf Original-Lithographieen und lithographiertes Titelblatt von Uriel Birnbaum: Mit einem Einleitungssonett des Künstlers (Vienna: Verlag Carl Konegen, 1921). To the city that appears in the background of the bucolic landscape of Birnbaum’s first plate one might compare the heavenly city in Der Kaiser und der Architekt. 65 Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 156. 66 Taut, Stadtkrone, 56, my translation. 67 Uriel Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern (Leipzig and Vienna: Thyrsos-Verlag, 1924), 7, my translation. 68 Uriel Birnbaum, Moses: Ein biblischer Zyklus in fünfzig Bildern (Vienna and Berlin: Thyrsos-Verlag, 1924). 69 Deut. 5:5 (NRSV). 70 Roland Jaeger, “Die Märchenhaften Stadtvisionen des Uriel Birnbaum,” in

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329 Stamm and Schreiber, Bau einer neuen Welt, 140–49. 71 For a typical assessment in what is often identified as the standard work on Expressionist architecture, see Pehnt, Architektur des Expressionismus, 34, 291–92.

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Architecture After God

9. Death of the Architect

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DEATH OF THE ARCHITECT

The opening of Birnbaum’s story is bathed in a luminous tranquility. “The world was industrious, orderly and peaceful; thrift and contentedness rendered every circumstance attractive.”1 But it is evidently difficult to reconcile such happiness with the conditions of the immediate present. Instead, the narrator explains this vision by explicit contrast to an experience of suffering that is all too familiar. “No longer did hunger languish in growing hatred of wealth and power.” Whether in 1924 or today, the reader can understand descriptions of plenitude only in imagined contrast to more vivid present realities. Enveloping peace, tranquil prosperity, quiet contentedness: such abstractions are difficult to picture. But violence, hunger, poverty, and resentment—of these, modernity can guarantee direct and personal experience. Something similar can be said of the book’s subsequent architecture, which contributes, as the reader discovers, to the destruction of that quiet prosperity with which the story opens. The heavenly city is introduced as a dream, an immaterial ­abstraction; despite the intensity of its sumptuous splendor, the reader’s encounter with transcendence proves ephemeral. But the failed cities of the architect’s subsequent efforts are real, and enduring. Indeed, it is precisely their failures that sharpen, by way of contrast, the outlines of the heavenly city’s ideal form. This goes some way toward explaining the need for such a superabundance of architectural experiments. Each of the book’s 33 cities illuminates some aspect of the heavenly ideal; and it is in turn through perceived similarities between those cities and other architectures more familiar to the reader that the vision of the heavenly city gradually accumulates significance. That significance clearly extends beyond the boundaries of the emperor’s opening dream. For Birnbaum’s story is nothing less than a

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9.1 (left) The Emperor (Der Kaiser) and (right) The Architect (Der Architekt) from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924).

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critique of the new role assumed by architecture under the con­ditions of modernity. The memory of plenitude is never fully absent. The vision of the heavenly city serves as a constant point of reference, and the lingering memory of its enveloping peace drives the architect’s exertions. But that memory is also painful; for it becomes clear that the architect is not only the creator of formally magnificent and experientially powerful designs: he is also deeply implicated in shaping structures of dysfunction and oppression—and if his contribution to such injustice is not always deliberate, it is also not accidental. Indeed, it seems to be in the very nature of the exercise of his profession that single-minded ambition should proceed hand in hand with an inattention to collateral harm. The opportunity to build monuments to new laws proves more intoxicating than any commitment to old constraints. In its most ambitious articulation, architecture offers, after all, a thrill of power. “Ah, to build!”2 PLATES 1–2: THE EMPEROR, THE ARCHITECT If Birnbaum’s emperor maintains ties to older structures, the architect is a thoroughly modern character. The contrast is clearly articulated in the book’s opening plates, succinctly labeled “The Emperor” and “The Architect.” ← Fig. 9.1 The emperor sits “in the dusky darkness of his golden throne room”3—accessible to the reader only at the vanishing point of a long one-point perspective. Architecture here reinforces the structures of temporal authority, and the outline of the gilded throne behind the emperor’s head offers the faintest hint of a radiant aura. The surrounding shadows are alive with color. The architect, in contrast, works in the clear, cold openness of his glass-walled studio. There is no need here for perspective; the image is almost entirely flat, adopting the measured two-dimensionality of an architectural elevation. Above the hard lines of the tiled floor, there is little in the way of solid mass; instead, the space of the picture is defined by a gridded framework that measures out the incoming light into squares that make no distinction between horizontal and vertical. Here, amid this mathematical precision, the reader encounters the architect, bent over his drawings, the specificity of his features ceding to the silhouetted posture of

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9.2 1923 interior view of the engine house at Walter Gropius’s Fagus Shoe-Last Factory, Alfeld an der Leine, built 1911–1925; photograph by Edmund Lill.

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9.3, 9.4 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The Emperor’s Dream (Des Kaisers Traum), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (right) Bruno Taut, The Building Site (Das Baugebiet), from Alpine Architektur (1919): detail.

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his discipline. The creator is observed in the act of creation, his authority clearly drawn from the work of his own hands.4 Here, as elsewhere, it is hard to tie Birnbaum’s drawings to any singular precedent. And yet the general association is clear. The architect’s studio belongs to a lineage represented by a 1923 photograph that documents the interior of the powerhouse at Walter Gropius’s Fagus factory. ← Fig. 9.2 Its architecture epitomized “a modern, technological, and professional world” in which workers could be understood as “active subjects, masters of machinery.” As such, it “stood as a metaphor for faith in humane progress. The space and light of the architecture evoked the advent of a liberated and better world: the world of modern technology.”5 Here too, the physical domain of architecture expands to encompass an attitude toward metaphysics. If Gropius’s work is typically placed squarely within the tradition of modernist functional architecture—of a New Objectivity understood as an articulation of sober realism, a rejection of Expressionist excess— its description here aligns more directly with those redemptive claims advanced by the Expressionists and later interpreted by Colin Rowe “as a gospel—as, quite literally, a message of good news.” This, argues Rowe, explains its power: “For, when all the smoke clears away, its impact may be seen as having very little to do with either its technological innovations or its formal vocabulary. . . . One definition of modern architecture might be that it was an attitude towards building which was divulging in the present that more perfect order which the future was about to disclose.”6 Rowe goes on to excerpt from the words of Hermann Finsterlin an assertion that architecture’s goal is the construction of “the kingdom of heaven on earth.” The aspiration embedded in the lucid world of Birnbaum’s second plate is not, after all, so distant from that of the plate that immediately follows it: the vision of the heavenly city. ← Fig. 9.3 PLATE 3: THE EMPEROR’S DREAM Its description occupies no more than two paragraphs. Yet that is deemed sufficient. For one of the defining features of the heavenly city is its self-evidence. The vision is admittedly fleeting, its character more closely related to poetics than to science, its description more invested in the language of

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light and color than in the vocabulary of analytic form. But the emperor is conscious that its architecture is perfect: it possesses that character ascribed by the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes to the work of God, whereby “nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it”7—the same character that is later ascribed by Alberti, echoing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, to the perfect work of architecture, and taken up once more as a rallying cry by architects in the early twentieth century.8 Expressed in different terms, the heavenly city of the emperor’s vision is understood to possess the elegant simplicity of an instantly comprehensible geometric proof. It is an architecture of perfect communication, moving the emperor to breathless delight. And he saw that it was good. The list of the city’s perfections can be extended. It is unique and yet comprehensive; it encompasses a spectrum of colors— “blue like the summer sky, purple like the sunset and emerald green like the early morning, fused with a milky white and a piercing black”—that combine to generate a sumptuous beauty. Multiplicity here resolves into unity without sacrificing diversity; and this polychromatic coherence is paralleled in its form, “appearing as a tangled throng of structures beyond count; and yet on closer examination the restlessness of small buildings always flowed together.” The city is both many and one, both limitless and contained—“small, and yet infinite.”9 Indeed, the reader may be reminded of that identity, unity and ontological security ascribed by Peter Sloterdijk to the architecture of the Mesopotamian city, defined both by its towering center and by its boundary condition. Not by coincidence, after all, does Sloterdijk illustrate his argument with Birnbaum’s drawing. Yet there are no traces here of the anxieties that are equal and opposite to the certitudes of the Mesopotamian city’s architecture: Raumangst, Weltangst, or Todesangst—fear of space, fear of the world, fear of death. On the contrary, the heavenly city elicits overflowing happiness: it possesses the redemptive powers ascribed to the shining city of Taut’s Alpine Architektur, ← Fig. 9.4 delivered by its architects to a grateful people for whom “Earth, previously a poor dwelling, shall become a good dwelling.”10 It possesses the

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radiant centrality that also defines the dream of the city crown: it boasts that defining structure that is able by the very force of its architectural presence to lift the surrounding city out of the heaviness of earthly being. “The shining city was crowned by an immense golden-green dome, stretched above it all, seeming by the very thrust of its great vault to hold the city suspended in the heavens.”11 And for once, its boundary is not exclusive but inviting. The architectural function of the wall, elsewhere the marker of a hostile environment, a reminder of unresolved violence, is here redeemed. To the contemporary reader, such perfection can prove irritating—it may answer to the fullness of Paradise, but it finds no correspondence in lived experience, and seems calculated instead to underline the abundant failures of all ready points of comparison. Of this discrepancy Birnbaum is aware. Yet the heavenly city plays a critical role within the structure of his narrative: for it serves to clarify the aspirations of the architect’s subsequent cities. The ideal, in other words, clarifies the real, in ways that become increasingly insistent as the story progresses. And the effect of the ideal is not restricted to the realm of metaphysics; it has a tangible impact on lived experience. That impact is, first of all, destructive: disrupting the emperor’s sleep, consuming his thought, undermining his contentment. But Birnbaum’s account makes it clear that it is precisely this that makes possible the work of the architect. It is the emperor’s discontent with present reality that prompts his turn to architecture—after dismissing, in the persons of the physician and priest, the competing practices of science and religion. The discipline of architecture is presented as a response to the consciousness of a fundamental flaw, here as in the opening chapters of Genesis: fig leaf, city walls, tower. And here as there, metaphysical anxieties and physical responses map onto one another in a recognizable pattern: exposure/covering, violence/enclosure, fear of dispersal/construction of identity. PLATE 4: THE EMPEROR AND THE ARCHITECT Birnbaum’s reader does not wait long for a demonstration of the contrast between abstract ideal and solid reality. If the heavenly city represents an architecture that is perfectly comprehensible, the architect’s

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first city is a systematic exercise in miscommunication. And just as the architectural reader may recognize himself in subsequent descriptions of Birnbaum’s protagonist (“eyes reddened by long nights without sleep, unwashed and unkempt, still wearing his work-stained drawing-smock”12), so he is here confronted with a scenario that is uncomfortably familiar. Arriving for his first client meeting, the architect listens but does not hear. He is interested only in the opportunity to develop his own voice, to articulate his own project, and he can barely conceal his contempt for his client’s architectural ignorance. “Feeling an urge to be alone with the visions that were bursting forth within him, he interrupted the emperor’s childish descriptions, suggested that he return one week later to review the developed plans, and left.” The architect values the client only as the means to achieve his own architectural ends. Architecture is not, after all, a service profession. PLATE 5: THE PLANS The failure of comprehension is mutual. Returning as agreed, the emperor “stood helpless before the teeming red and black lines of the plans and elevations of the city, and stared even more helplessly at the complex sketches of individual building components, interrupted by page-long calculations.”13 Indeed, the miscommunication extends beyond the architect-­client relationship. Just as the emperor fails to communicate with the architect, so the architect’s drawings fail to communicate design intent; and these in turn offer little more than an approximation, imperfect at best, to the eventual built reality—a reality that in due course will undermine the relationship between architect, patron, and public. Later stages in Birnbaum’s story spell out the progressive breakdown of mutual trust, as each new city is completed, each scheme falls short of its promise, and each party learns to doubt the intentions of the other. The very process of architecture assumes the form of a long chain of successive miscommunications, each tenuous link weighed down by negotiated contingency, by material instability, by tectonic complexity, by wearisome calculation, by interpersonal conflict, by the very gravity of earthly existence. The translation from ideal into reality is never straight and true, nor clear and distinct. Its distortions are the very stuff of contract documents, with which the practicing

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architect is painfully familiar. Hence the conceptual superiority of unbuilt architecture. “The best of what is built, my son, is built only on paper.”14 This is, after all, another way of asserting the superiority of the heavenly city. That misalignment, that all-too-predictable deviation from the true, has been deemed constitutive of human nature—“out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”15 Here too can be found a contrast between the ideal and the real. For within Birnbaum’s account, what is most consistent is the architect’s self-interest: the human animal’s impulse, if not controlled by a strong master or restrained by universally valid laws, to assert its will over others of its kind. Indeed, the suggestion that this assertion of will should be expressed most adequately in terms of architecture corresponds perfectly to Hablik’s conception of architecture as the exercise of power, or to Finsterlin’s description of architecture as “power made concrete, the will turned to stone.”16 That metaphor raises other associations too, tied in turn to the figure of the strong master: Kant’s sovereign (Oberhaupt), Nietzsche’s leader (Führer), or Ponten’s architect (Baumeister). Such terms sit uncomfortably alongside Taut’s assertion, in his inaugural Crystal Chain letter of December 1919, that “within the framework of cooperation, everything should be left to the free will of the individual.”17 The failure of communication exacerbates the imbalance in power. Birnbaum’s architect exercises his professional authority over the emperor, while resenting all the while his dependence on his client’s patronage. And yet that same miscommunication is productive. For it is precisely the failure to communicate that sponsors the extension of the project. This is true within the narrative scope of Birnbaum’s text: without such misunderstanding, there would be no 33 cities, no 50 pictures, no gloriously illustrated book. But it is also true, in more enigmatic ways, for the architectural project tout court. Within the client’s failure to articulate an exhaustive account of desire lies the architect’s opportunity for creative exploration; it is precisely because the drawing omits to communicate the predictable shortcomings of the design that the project is allowed to continue; and within the ultimate failure,

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however gradual, of each successive structure, lies the occasion for the next. Such is the nature of architecture. After all, the creation account of Genesis comes to an end—“on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested”18—but the story of architecture continues indefinitely. Finsterlin assigns the discipline to the open-ended category of “the eighth day.” If, in Genesis 2, the work of the architect of the universe reaches perfection, human architectures are characteristically unfinished: seldom fully complete, rarely fully good, never fully perfect. PLATE 6: THE CITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION Accordingly, Birnbaum’s ensuing text celebrates not the product but the process. The reader is presented with constructive endeavor on a massive scale, orchestrated within a carefully ordered framework of unimpeded collaboration. Armies of laborers are marshalled on the building site. Both language and imagery celebrate the violent beauty of modernity in throes worthy of the most ecstatic pronouncements of Futurist devotion. Modernolatria! Within just a few weeks the chosen mountain sank and disappeared beneath a thick forest of machines and scaffolding and tracks. Giant cranes stood around its flanks, snatching up with their clattering beaks the things that were brought to the chasms’ near side, setting them down just where they were needed. The architect spanned dozens of bridges from the peak to the surrounding mountains, so that the heavy loads of great blocks and iron rails might make their way across. The dark air was thick with stone dust, and the sun shone red where it stood over the city. The noise of construction could be heard from a distance of three days’ journey.19 Nature here yields to technology; the mountain subsides, while the machineries take on life, the forests now built of iron, the flightless cranes now mechanical, the tracks now left by a network of systems designed to maximize logistical efficiency. The very landscape changes meaning: its chasms take on a negative value as breaches to be bridged, as strategic faults to be over-

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come by the abundant reserves of an industrious modernity in pursuit of ever more efficient consumption. “The world changes into object. . . . The earth itself can show itself only as the object of assault, an assault that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears everywhere . . . as the object of technology.”20 And the triumph of enterprise is announced by spectacular pollution—of air, of light, of sound. The earth is writhing under architecture’s rapacious advance, forced to submit to the master’s plans. It is a carefully planned assault, to be sure—one that corresponds all too closely to the domination of which Nikolaus Pevsner would write in 1936, when arguing that the architecture of modernity glorifies the “creative energy” of a new world “which we want to master, a world of science and technique, of speed and danger, of hard struggles and no personal security.”21 One might wonder whether such assertions should provoke a re-examination of Taut’s insistence that within the framework [Rahmen] of cooperation, everything should be left to the individual’s free will.22 It is not only a matter of questioning that framework—questioning the relationship of Taut’s Rahmen to Heidegger’s enframing Gestell—but also a matter of reconciling the language of free will with the mechanics of mastery. Such premeditated assaults render questionable, after all, any claims to a genuine respect for persons. Such mastery replaces subject with object; indeed, a comprehensive objectification conveniently reduces the number of subjects whose interests demand respect, replacing them with growing reserves standing available for exploitation. What remains intact is the interest of the objectifying subject. And that triumphant subject, in Birnbaum’s account as in Finsterlin’s formulation, or, for that matter, in Nietzsche’s conception of the creator, is none other than the figure of the master architect, the Baumeister. It is he who plans the assault. If one were to reconsider the charges that might be brought against the architect by a violated nature, one might have grounds to question the architect’s adoption of the language of informed consent. This is, after all, no novel allegation. The language of dominion over the created order is already present in the book of

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Genesis; and if exegetes have been at pains to distinguish between the legitimate authority of a creator God, delegated to his creatures in Genesis 1, and the illegitimate, abusive exploitation of subsequent chapters, it is precisely in these subsequent chapters that architecture establishes its own dominion. It is with good reason that the origins of architecture are so often illustrated with graphic images of the violation of nature. ← Fig. 4.9 But it can be noted also that Pevsner’s assessment was made in the context of claims for the explicitly modern character of the architecture of Walter Gropius. The building that illustrates Pevsner’s argument is the factory designed by Gropius for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition; but similar assertions might be made of his design for the Fagus factory, which immediately precedes the Werkbund factory in Pevsner’s account: There is something sublime in this effortless mastery of material and weight. Never since the Sainte-Chapelle and the choir of Beauvais had the human art of building been so triumphant over matter. Yet the character of the new buildings is entirely un-Gothic, anti-Gothic. While in the thirteenth century all lines, functional though they were, served the one artistic purpose of pointing heavenwards to a goal beyond this world, and walls were made translucent to carry the transcendental magic of saintly figures rendered in coloured glass, the glass walls are now clear and without mystery, the steel frame is hard, and its expression discourages all other-worldly speculation. It is the creative energy of this world in which we live and work and which we want to master, a world of science and technique, of speed and danger, of hard struggles and no personal security, that is glorified in Gropius’s architecture, and as long as this is the world and these are its ambitions and problems, the style of Gropius and the other pioneers will be valid.23 Pevsner’s argument warrants closer examination. His comparison between thirteenth and twentieth century acknowledges that “mastery of material and weight” is common to both modern and

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pre-modern: this is, after all, the stuff of architecture, then as now. What has changed is the status of the architect. For if ever it was true to speak of architecture as a “faithful art”—wielding its powers in conscious subordination to the ultimate authority of a creator God, in service of goals “beyond this world”—it is true no longer: modernity’s comprehensive objectification of the universe leaves little room, as Pevsner notes, for such “other-worldly speculation.” In “a world of science and technique,” all of reality becomes a matter of precisely such “material and weight,” amenable to mastery. Indeed, the same is true for the objectification of the individual, evidently a component part of that material world. The only perplexing exception, perhaps, is the architect, who claims to complicate the laws of material and efficient causation through possession of the uncanny capacity, once attributed to God, for creatio ex nihilo: the capacity not of reconfiguration but of creation. This, in turn, points toward a disconcerting conclusion: that the alternative to subordination before an omnipotent God is subjection before the authority of the architect. This condition too is illustrated in Birnbaum’s account. Alongside the description of a rapacious architecture, of a violated nature, of a triumphant technology, and of a systematic objectification of persons, the reader encounters an uneasy veneration of the creator architect. It is a troubling condition: when first confronted with the reality of the building site, the emperor is startled. Is this the nature of architecture? The ground beneath him heaved and throbbed, as if the entire mountain were laboring. . . . Wailing and clashing filled the air, trucks screeched as they chased by, deposits of stone sank groaning to their assigned places, cranes swept backward and forward across the sky like the greedy heads of restless birds. The emperor felt unutterably weak—so tender and so pale in his purple cloak, so powerless in spite of his imperial strength, in the shadow of these walls that towered to dizzy heights, these fantastical machines, and even these tiny, numberless human beings, who labored

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amid the blows struck on the shuddering mountain. . . . And the emperor seemed to himself to be all too small in comparison to the artist at his side. Timidly, he glanced over at him, observing with apprehension the furious red beard and the angry eyes in his dusty grey face, gauging with admiration the stature of this figure who, in denial of man’s ungainliness, stood there among the burning stones, himself an altogether harder stone.24 Pevsner, too, is conscious of this new hardness, to be found both in the character of modernity and in the materiality of its architecture. And Pevsner, too, associates the hardness with submission before a new authority. Indeed, the difference ­ between thirteenth and twentieth century is expressed in the contrast between the Gothic window, “made translucent to carry the ­transcendental magic of saintly figures rendered in colored glass,” and its modern, disenchanted counterpart, in which “the glass walls are now clear and without mystery, the steel frame . . . now hard.” The same divide informs the contrast between the memory retained in the frontispiece of Birnbaum’s book and the architectural commitment demonstrated in the cold rigidity of his second plate. This commitment was exhibited at the 1914 Werkbund exhibition by Gropius’s glass-walled factory, as Pevsner notes; while, on the same site, the enigmatic figure of Taut’s Glashaus, aspiring successor to the Gothic cathedral, → Fig. 9.5 tried in vain to reconcile the divide of the centuries. Taut’s structure was located on a site that looks across the Rhine to Cologne’s historic center—confronting the cathedral whose completion had been celebrated only 34 years earlier, when it was briefly considered the world’s tallest building. → Fig. 9.6 An enthusiastic contemporary writes, of Taut’s Glashaus: “The Gothic of this domed glass structure is glorious [herrlich], its vaulting drenched in light. It knows no equivalent in the Gothic of brick masonry; even the glorious arches of the cathedral on the other side of the Rhine are dead in comparison.”25 A contemporary postcard shows a view of the city similar to that later published in Taut’s Die Stadtkrone, except that this image shows Cologne’s Hohenzollern

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9.5, 9.6, 9.7 (top) Bruno Taut, Glashaus: Werkbund-­ Ausstellung Cöln 1914; Führer zur Eröffnung (1914): detail of title page. (middle) Carl Rehorst, site plan of 1914 Werkbund exhibition, with inset showing relationship to Cologne Cathedral; the Glashaus is no. 2. (above) View of Cologne from the site of the Werkbund Exhibition, postcard, 1914; (right) Oskar Barnack, view of ­Cologne Cathedral, 1915.

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Bridge—a feat of modern engineering inaugurated three years earlier—striding across the river, its masterly iron trusses oriented to the central axis of the cathedral so as to capture within its structural framework the experience of the Gothic. ← Fig. 9.7 Birnbaum would doubtless have been fascinated by the Glashaus. Heavily inscribed so as to guarantee meaning, its aspiration to a colored transcendence clearly struggles to resist the objectifying tendencies of modernity, even as it refuses to glorify any transcendent reality beyond that suggested by the experience of its own material nature. For if the architectural framework around the Gothic windows of the thirteenth-century cathedral was designed, in Pevsner’s words, “to carry the transcendental magic of saintly figures rendered in coloured glass,” Taut’s twentieth-century responsibility has doubled: “Here architecture must be both frame [Rahmen] and content, all at once.”26 This temple still claims the motivations ascribed to older architectures, but it no longer serves “the one artistic purpose of pointing heavenwards to a goal beyond this world,” and no saintly figures are rendered in its colored glass. In its dogged resistance to a perceived debasement of architecture’s artistic purposes, it still bears inscriptions devoted to glorifying the work of the creator; but that creator is no longer God, deus architectus mundi, but rather God’s successor, architectus secundus deus. And its resistance proved futile. Taut asked his friend Scheerbart to write texts for the entablature of his temple, but Scheerbart found it to be a difficult task; his letters to the architect show him struggling to generate, ex nihilo, appropriate content. “Composing mottoes is no easy matter. Some of them sound a little banal.”27 The concept demanded verses in praise of glass; and the context demanded both gravity and brevity. Drawn from a long list of rejected contenders, the text that was eventually inscribed over the entrance laid the architect’s aspirations open to the mockery of history. Only the surviving black and white photographs preserve the memory of the carefully composed roman capitals, spelling out a motto that rhymes in German but not in English: “das bunte glas zerstört den hass”—“coloured glass destroys hatred.” Just as the proclamation of war weeks

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after the building’s completion scorned the declaration over its portal, so its architecture was soon judged invalid. The supposedly willful indulgence of Expressionism was deemed an interruption, “a short interlude”28—and not only by Pevsner. Josef Ponten, after all, offers a photograph of Taut’s Glashaus in his Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde (Unbuilt architecture).29 Strictly speaking, this particular architecture did not in fact remain unbuilt; but its promises remained unfulfilled. PLATE 7: THE FIRST CITY The failure of the architect’s first city establishes the pattern for many subsequent failures. It is not entirely unforeseen; on his preliminary site visit, the emperor notes, with apprehension, that means and methods are inappropriate to the design intent: It seemed to the emperor that the work was just too much, the effort too great, for the city that he had observed in his dream. How could such dust and sweat and noise be fashioned into the peace, tenderness and fragrance of which he had dreamed? How could the anguish of mankind, machines, and stone blossom into the serene majesty for which his soul longed?30 It is clear from the start that this project will not satisfy the emperor’s longings. And yet it proceeds. Indeed, each of the 32 subsequent cities builds on the failures of previous p ­ rojects. Ah, to build, to build! The disjunction between aspiration and results is painfully obvious not only to the story’s protagonists but also to the book’s reader. It is an embarrassment—but an ­embarrassment that is all too familiar. For the dream of the heavenly city combines, in its various aspects, much of what has been sought, and sought in vain, in the various architectures of modernity: the indisputable authority of self-evident truth, the total absorption of transcendent beauty, the irresistible imperative of organic growth, formal complexity combined with conceptual simplicity, full inclusion, unbounded joy. And to these ­enigmatic traits the failed cities add others: technical ­sophistication, industrial-­scale production, material ­extravagance, formal ­exuberance, ­mathematical

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precision, conceptual singularity, sheer size. In their unrelenting variety, Birnbaum’s cities offer an exhaustive catalog of potential architectural ends, with the conspicuous exception of the sole end attributed to a faithful art: “the one artistic purpose of pointing heavenwards to a goal beyond this world.”31 It also becomes clear that what is demanded of architecture is not just physical perfection, but rather a conceptual perfection that embodies more than mere cleverness. The architect’s creations remind the emperor of the heavenly city; “but what was there sacred and earnest was here a game; it failed to satisfy.”32 The desired perfection must be given, not made; it must be the product of revelation, not fabrication. And here Der Kaiser und der Architekt shares common ground with its companion volume Moses; for the problem inherent to the architect’s attempt to recreate the heavenly city on earth is ultimately the problem, writ large, of the golden calf: the irreconcilable difference between the product of human artifice and the glory of an almighty God.33 → Fig. 9.8 The epigraph to Der Kaiser und der Architekt puts it more pithily, quoting the book of Ecclesiastes: “For God is in the heavens, and thou art on the earth.”34 In the account of Moses, a further dimension is introduced by comparison to the Mosaic tablets of God’s law. Here too, there is a contrast between the given and the made; and here too, remembering the premise of Taut’s Monument to the New Law, architecture is implicated. The association with the charge of idolatry is clear; for it can readily be observed that once promises of goods “beyond this world” have been removed from circulation, equivalent demands will instead be made of more worldly goods. Among such goods are the products of architecture. In a universe stripped of other opportunities for transcendence, permanence, and redemption, architecture takes on a new significance. In Birnbaum’s story, architecture’s failed attempts to deliver on these inflated demands lead to resentment, both within the culture at large and within the discipline. This in turn provokes a disciplinary retreat that plays itself out in the architect’s search for autonomy. “The emperor did not wish to build? In that case, he would build on his own! And the emperor would

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9.8 Uriel Birnbaum, The Golden Calf (Das ­Goldene Kalb) and Moses Shatters the Tablets of the Law (Moses ­zerschmettert die Gesetzes­tafeln), from ­Moses (1924).

9.9 Uriel Birnbaum, New Construction (Neue Bauten), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924).

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not pay? In that case, he would pay himself!”35 This impulse, too, is familiar. The architect’s first city is constructed on “a sheer and rocky mount, rising up from terrible chasms.”36 The site corresponds closely to the formula recommended by Taut and by Hablik for maximum effect, crowning the peaks of nature’s most exalted landscapes with architectural perfection, celebrating man’s dominion over the created order. But Birnbaum’s account mentions, in passing, a detail that is typically omitted from other accounts of Alpine architectures. In an act of unintentional significance, the debris of the city’s construction has been dumped into the ravine, the collateral waste of construction’s excess violence beginning to flatten out the landscape that was originally given. The result is admittedly impressive. “It flickered and flashed in the sunlight, it was clean and quiet despite the sweat and the noise in which it was conceived. . . . But it was not the city of the emperor’s dream. It was a beautiful earthly city, but it was not the heavenly city for which the emperor longed.”37 It possesses a city crown, in the form of a golden dome that radiates the concentric rings of a quasi-sacred aura. But those rings are geometrically distinct from those of the heavenly city: in Birnbaum’s drawings they are seen in a distorted perspective, as if occupying uncomfortably the space of the world, while the representations of the radiance of the heavenly city are invariably formed as perfect circles, drawn from a purer geometry. ← Fig. 9.3, → Fig. 9.12, 9.25, 9.28 PLATES 8–9: NEW CONSTRUCTION, THE CITY OF MARBLE And so it con­tinues. Subsequent designs are products of the architect’s ­growing contempt, matched by a growing disillusion on the part of the emperor. The second city is to be defined by a singular ­material; it is built of smooth and spotless marble, the stuff of ­architectural distinction, deployed in massive cut blocks. Its nature is nothing if not solid. And it too is sited on a mountain crest. It seems at first to deliver on what was promised, and it raises the emperor’s hopes. Indeed, the eighth plate ← Fig. 9.9 is among Birnbaum’s most evocative compositions, offering a glimpse through the shade of an archway onto “shimmering colonnades and the shining white walls of great terraces, set ­glistening

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beneath the blue sky.”38 The drawing takes full advantage of the bold lines and saturated colors of the artist’s translucent ink wash technique, framed against a grey background contrasted with deep blacks and blinding whites. Here as elsewhere, the focus is not on sophistication of modelling or on ingenuity of detail. Birnbaum’s preparatory sketches, frequently drawn on paper recycled from some other use, invariably come across as hurried gestures, as means to a more distant end; → Fig. 9.10 and something of that notational character is preserved also in this finished plate. But the image is carefully composed. In the foreground the architect, drawings in hand, presents the work in progress to his client. Beyond rise the outlines of his design, their conflicting perspectives distorting the reading of depth. Here and there can be seen the cranes that signal the mechanization of a serious project of high ambition. Featuring repeatedly in Birnbaum’s book, these machines tie this endeavor to a long history of architectural ambition; they are related, after all, to the cranes that for five hundred years symbolized the unfinished construction of Cologne Cathedral; → Fig. 9.11 or that define both Van Eyck’s drawing of Saint Barbara and the cover illustration of Ponten’s Der Babylonische Turm; ← Figs. 6.1, 7.4 or that populate Bruegel’s iconic Tower of Babel. ← Fig. 4.8 Scattered about the foreground can be seen the raw materials of architecture’s constructive aspirations. Faceless workers, distinctly smaller than emperor and architect, strike the stone with all their might, rehearsing the violence of construction with gestures reminiscent of older accounts of architecture’s origins. ← Fig. 3.6, 4.3, 4.9, 4.12 As Birnbaum’s narrative observes, this architecture of radiant marble, so beautiful and so still, is born nonetheless of dust, sweat, noise, toil, and anguish. The promise of an endless peace remains empty. The disillusion deepens as the narrative extends. Like the city of the emperor’s dream, this is a walled city, its entrance placed at the far end of a bridge “that offered the only path from the world into the city.”39 It too offers the potential for intimacy and community; but in fact its artfully designed exclusivity is uninviting: it is guarded by the hostile figure of the architect himself, standing on the bridge, arms crossed. With time, the emperor’s memory of

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9.10 Uriel Birnbaum, The American City (Die amerikanische Stadt), The Desert City (Die Wüstenstadt), and The Flying City (Die fliegende Stadt): preparatory ­sketches, ­undated. Annotations indicate ­proposed colors.

9.11 Cologne Cathedral under construction, ­photographed by Johann Franz Michiels in 1852.

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the heavenly city has grown fainter; yet it is clear, once again, that this city is a failure. Once again . . . PLATES 10–39: THE WALLED CITY, THE CITY OF STEPS, THE CITY OF BRIDGES, THE ISLAND-CITY, THE GREY CITY, THE WHITE CITY, THE PURPLE CITY, THE GREEN CITY, THE RED CITY, THE YELLOW CITY, THE BLUE CITY, THE BLACK CITY, THE MULTICOLORED CITY, THE CITY OF PORCELAIN, THE CITY OF CRYSTAL, THE CITY OF LEAD, THE CITY OF BRASS, THE CITY OF SILVER, THE CITY OF GOLD, THE CITY OF IRON, THE CITY OF MOTHER-OF-PEARL, THE CITY OF GLASS, THE ILLUMINATED CITY, THE KALEIDOSCOPE-CITY, THE CITY OF GEMS, THE MULTILEVEL CITY, THE MOUNTAIN-CITY, THE CITY OF COLUMNS, THE TERRACED CITY, THE CITY OF BASALT

And so is launched the epic catalog of Birnbaum’s cities. There are 33 in total; and if 33 is itself a well-rounded number, imbued with long-standing esoteric significance, it also corresponds tidily to the goal of publishing a book with a total of 50 plates. But from notes in Birnbaum’s archive it is clear that this list of cities is only partial—the plates of Der Kaiser und der Architekt evidently draw from a longer list of potential subjects. Among the records in Potsdam, stacked folders collectively marked “Cities” preserve over a hundred pencil sketches, each annotated with instructions for eventual rendering in colored ink.40 ← Fig. 9.10 But the full list was doubtless longer still: Birnbaum’s notes mention the production in 1917–18, during his wartime convalescence, of “a few hundred” sketches for “Cities.”41 Indeed, the list itself resembles nothing so much as an attempt, however futile, to catalog all possible permutations of the city according to its various distinguishing characteristics—geographic, topographic, climatic, tectonic, religious, environmental, or temperamental. And from this longer list the author has selected a limited number of representative figures. There is therefore a sense in which the 33 cities of Birnbaum’s book merely occupy the gap between the story’s beginning and end; they represent a more extensive trajectory of possible architectures, filling in, as it were, for the space of history. The selected cities are loosely organized into a series of overlapping urbanistic explorations, encompassing different modes of research into form, color, and material. If the importance of color may at first seem exaggerated, its attraction may be understood against the vibrant background of Expressionist sensibility. But

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the exaggeration also precludes any attempt on the part of the reader to interpret the text too literally.42 Certainly it makes for memorable images: the red city, for instance, → Fig. 9.12 “rose within a yellow desert” and “gleamed in every shade, from pink through scarlet and purple to deep violet; and the blue sky appeared green above its lurid redness.”43 Color and form are in turn tied to l­ ocation; for the striking formal aspects of the architecture correspond to equally remarkable geographies. The walled city, a formidable composition of tragic dignity, of smooth surfaces and sharp folds, is located in the far north of the emperor’s realm, “where the flat green sea lay beneath a cloud-white sky like a vast and smoothly-polished emerald.” The island-city is built “far out in the ocean, with a barren rock at its core . . ., the heavy waves of the open sea surging about the bottommost houses, the topmost house high above like the point of a lance.” The black city stands “high up in the arctic ocean’s enduring twilight; lying in the green waters like a mountain, it extended a huge, square, black tower from among an indistinguishable throng of dark houses into a smoldering red sky.” The city of porcelain is built “on a bare rock in a red desert, enthroned, indestructible, in the driest of air, above endlessly changing dunes.”44 But the very earnestness with which each design makes its case for a particular formal, chromatic or material category is liable to obscure the fundamental characteristic of Birnbaum’s cities: that each strives toward its goal with the full force of its architectural identity. Each must measure up to the expectations established by its name, as if in anxious response to an earlier exhortation: “Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”45 Identity must be embraced through the totality of the city’s being, not through the construction of individual ­monuments, let alone through such sideshows as detail or ­ornament. It is an attitude that reflects the doctrine of the definitive artistic Gesamtkunstwerk, proclaimed by Joseph Maria Olbrich at the 1898 opening of the first Secession exhibition in Vienna: “We must build a city, a whole city. Anything less would be ­pointless.”46

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9.12, 9.13 Uriel Birnbaum, representative cities: (top) The Red City (Die rote Stadt) and (bottom) The City of Steps (Die Stufenstadt) from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924).

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9.14 Cities of bridges: (clockwise from top left) Uriel Birnbaum, The City of Bridges (Die Brückenstadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); Bruno Taut, Path to the House of Crystal in the Wildbach Valley (Weg zum Kristallhause im Wildbachtal), from ­Alpine Architektur (1919): detail; Hugh Ferriss, Apartments on Bridges, from The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929); Constant Nieuwenhuys, View of New ­Babylon Sectors (Gezicht op New Babylonische sectoren), 1971.

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By the same token, the focus is not on the city’s political, religious, or social structures. On the contrary, Birnbaum’s cities are invariably empty—disconcertingly empty, both in their initial conception and in their later representation. They are empty precisely because their identity lies within their archi­tecture; human inhabitation can only pollute the abstract purity of ­architectural concept. If, in some regard, attainment of the ­longed-for heavenly city is to be equated with redemption, what is here proposed is an unequivocally architectural redemption. Once again, the contemporary reader is reminded of Colin Rowe. It is doubtless disingenuous to draw too singular a com­parison between Birnbaum’s cities and the modern architectures imagined by Rowe. For the associations evoked by Birnbaum’s descriptions extend rather more broadly. The contemporary reader who scans the plates of Birnbaum’s book cannot help but search for parallels to these lucid designs that emerge fully formed from the poet’s page. And such instincts do not share the ­historian’s distaste for anachronism. Some points of reference have been noted already: Gropius’s factories, Taut’s temples of glass, Finsterlin’s organic fantasies, Hablik’s mountaintop structures; but the list could be extended both backward and forward. Each city suggests new comparisons. The stripped orthogonality of the city of steps speaks of a sectionally rich modernism, its form driven by the arrangements of its interior spaces, light and shadow playing off the surfaces of its white walls. ← Fig. 9.13 And architects are acquainted from other references too with the idea of a city of bridges, be it Hugh Ferriss’s inhabited infrastructure, the bridges of Taut’s Alpine Architektur, or, in a different register, the un­tethered spans of Constant’s New Babylon floating above the rippled landscape. ← Fig. 9.14 The grey city, with its almost-Gothic tower rising above the roofs of the surrounding city, → Fig. 9.15 built “in quiet memory of old, long-forgotten styles,” evidently serves as a rejoinder to those who would seek too easy an escape in a formal historicism.47 The purple city—built as a deliberate affront to the aesthetic sensibilities of the emperor—finds ready counterparts in Gropius’s housing developments at Dammerstock or at Bad

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9.15 Uriel Birnbaum, The Grey City (Die graue Stadt): preparatory sketch (undated), intermediate color separation for offset printing (undated), and final plate as printed in Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924).

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9.16 (top) Uriel Birnbaum, The Purple City (Die ­violette Stadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (left) Walter ­Gropius, housing development, Karlsruhe-­ Dammerstock, 1928–1929; (middle) ­Alexander Klein, Groß-Siedlung Bad Dürren­berg, Leuna, 1930; (right) ­Alexander Klein, Doppelhaus Typ C7, 1929.

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Dürrenberg—the latter a project ceded to Alexander Klein “after differences with the client on account of the flat roofs that Gropius required,” ← Fig. 9.16 and providing a horizontal counterpart to the vertical towers of the expanding Leuna works four miles away.48 In contrast, the “bizarre forms, twisted columns and distorted domes” of the green city are reminiscent of Scheerbart’s hostility toward the straight line.49 Birnbaum’s domed cities beg c­ omparison to similar schemes by Hablik, → Fig. 9.17 just as the multicolored city responds to the demands of Taut’s “call to colorful building”50—one might recall his schemes for Garden City Falkenberg (the “­paint-box settlement”) or for Magdeburg (“Colorful City Magdeburg”). Indeed, Birnbaum does not discount the promise of such vivid speculation; “from that wild and grotesque idea there grew, here too, a beautiful city. The architect liked it; and the emperor liked it too—but it was no heavenly city.”51 The exploration of color gives way to the study of material. The city of crystal is surely a response to the dreams of Expressionism, expressed in such drawings as Hablik’s Phantasie, published in the bravely-titled 1920 Ruf zum Bauen (Call to building)52 and finding later counterparts in such works as Herbert von Reyl-Hanisch’s Wonder. → Fig. 9.18 The city of gold, built out over the waters, might be compared to more recent cities devoted to a more liquid commodity; → Fig. 9.19 and to the cities built of exotic materials, like mother-of-pearl, one might compare the interests of Scheerbart, tied to that author’s ill will toward masonry.53 In these instances, the commitment to material research is emblematic of more fundamental commitments to human advancement; as Scheerbart reminds his readers, choice of material is tied to ­arguments for architecture’s redemptive capacities: “Our hope is that glass architecture will also improve mankind in ethical respects. . . . This quality appears to me not just an illusion, but something very real; the man who sees the glories of glass [Glasherrlichkeiten] every day cannot have ignoble hands.”54 The reader might take note of the adoption of that word: Glasherrlichkeiten, the glories of glass. Greatly to be praised is the glory of architecture! But Scheerbart goes further. Tracing the legacy of Babylon via the Gothic cathedral to his own proposals,

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9.17 (top) Uriel Birnbaum, The Blue City (Die blaue Stadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); Wenzel Hablik, (­middle) Self-Supporting, Self-Buttressed Dome (­Freitragender, selbstspannender Kuppelbau), 1920, and (bottom) Cathedral in the Open Sea (Dom im offenen Meer), 1922. The surrounding text urges the reader to “Make big plans! Think of a new religion!”

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9.18 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The City of Crystal (Die Kristallstadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (middle) Wenzel Hablik, Crystal Castle in the Sea, 1914, published as Phantasie in Ruf zum Bauen (1920); (right) Herbert von Reyl-Hanisch, Wonder (Das Staunen), 1928.

9.19 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The City of Gold (Die goldene Stadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (right) Stanley Greene, photograph of the “Oil Rocks” off the coast of Baku, Azerbaijan, a city built on the sea, 1999.

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9.20 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The City of Glass (Die gläserne Stadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (middle) Bruno Taut, Träger-Verkaufs-Kontor pavilion, Berlin, 1910; (right) Alfred Koerner, Großes Tropen­ haus, Royal Botanical Garden, ­Berlin, ca. 1905.

9.21 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The Illuminated City (Die beleuchtete Stadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (middle) Bruno Taut, Great Church with Eccentric Tower (Die grosse Kirche mit exzentrischem Turm), from Die ­Auflösung der Städte (1920); (right) Paul Gösch, design for a cemetery, ca. 1920.

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9.22 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The Kaleidoscope-­City (Die Kaleidoskop-Stadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (middle) the Cascade Room in Bruno Taut’s Glashaus, 1914; (right) Bruno Taut, Night in the Mountains: Searchlights and Illuminated Buildings (Die Bergnacht: Scheinwerfer und leuchtende Bauten), from Alpine Architektur.

9.23 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The City of Gems (Die Kleinodienstadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (middle) Hans Scharoun, Cult Building (Kultbau) from Ruf zum Bauen (1920); (right) Wassili Luckhardt, Monument to Work / Ode to Joy (Denkmal der Arbeit / An die Freude), ca. 1920: detail.

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9.24 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The Multilevel City (Die Etagenstadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (middle) Harvey Wiley ­Corbett, City of the Future, 1913; (right) Arthur Köster, interior photograph of Bruno Taut’s Glashaus, 1914.

9.25 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The Mountain-City (Die Bergstadt), from Der Kaiser und der ­Architekt (1924); (middle) Uriel Birnbaum, The Terraced City (Die Terrassenstadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924); (right) Adolf Loos, project for Grand Hôtel Babylon, Nice, 1923.

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he concludes: “Glass architecture makes homes into cathedrals.”55 By dint of material selection, in other words, the human dwelling takes upon itself the character of the house of God. Indeed, the nested, prismatic forms of Birnbaum’s city of glass, ← Fig. 9.20 disposed as if panes of sheer glass had been substituted for the steel frames of Taut’s Träger-Verkaufs-Kontor pavilion in Berlin, anticipate later experiments with layered glazing. Certainly they are purer and more abstract than Alfred Koerner’s glass cathedrals at Berlin’s New Botanical Gardens, which Scheerbart admired but criticized for their single glazing.56 And if the city of glass responds to ideas inherent in the vocabulary of Expressionism, the same is true of the illuminated city, ← Fig. 9.21 which finds parallels both in Scheerbart’s fictions (such as his 1912 Light Club of Batavia) and in his Glass Architecture, where power plants and floodlit towers turn night into day in the ultimate assertion of human ingenuity.57 One might also compare a drawing of a “great church with eccentric tower” in Taut’s Die Auflösung der Städte; oder, Die Erde eine gute Wohnung; oder auch: Der Weg zur Alpinen Architektur; in 30 Zeichnungen (The dissolution of cities; or, Earth—a good dwelling; or even, The road to Alpine architecture: 30 drawings);58 or the design by Paul Gösch for a cemetery, reproduced by Ponten in Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde (Unbuilt architecture).59 Such comparisons proliferate readily. The kaleidoscope-city ← Fig. 9.22 is a development, on a larger scale, of the premise of the lower level of Taut’s Glashaus; and it is comparable also to the kaleidoscopic effect of the “searchlights and luminous buildings” in Taut’s Alpine Architektur.60 The city of gems, ← Fig. 9.23 which “rested on a rocky peak, in the shape of a crown,”61 may stand alongside Hans Scharoun’s cult buildings, or Wassili Luckhardt’s Monument to Work.62 Anticipating the many layers of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, ← Fig. 8.8 the multilevel city with its “suspended streets of stone” ← Fig. 9.24 answers to Harvey Wiley Corbett’s metropolitan speculations, or to the renderings of Hugh Ferriss’s Metropolis of Tomorrow, while also offering a curious inversion of the view up into the structure of Taut’s Glashaus; the mountain city corresponds to the simile of the architectural work “piled up like a towering

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mountain, higher than the clouds”;63 ← Fig. 9.25 whereas the terraced city speaks most directly to recollections and reconstructions of the Tower of Babel, not least among them Adolf Loos’s 1923 project for the Grand Hôtel Babylon or Otto Kohtz’s 1920 Berlin Reichshaus—the example offered in Ponten’s Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde (Unbuilt architecture) of a sanctity endowed not by dedication to a holy God, but by association with the human architectonic impulse. ← Fig. 5.7 These comparisons are suggestive; but they are of limited value. For they prioritize the image over the text, and in so doing, obscure other aspects of Birnbaum’s narrative—not least, the shift in attention from color and form to material. This move toward a new architecture once again offers new hope, as the architect is found “employing for his structures substances that had never before been used for buildings.”64 New factories are required— foundries, smelting furnaces, glassworks, rolling mills—and the architect must adopt a new role, entering the business of industrial production on a massive scale. He is evidently prepared for this task, his architectural skills readily transferable to other applications. → Fig. 9.26 The form of the resulting architecture corresponds in each case to the possibilities inherent in the new material. But hopes are dashed. Redemption is not to be found in material revolution, for the results do not live up to expectations; even the architect finds himself critical of his creations. This premonition of failure sparks a disciplinary crisis. For the architect soon recognizes that he is struggling against the limitations of his own mortality. The dimensions of a human life are evidently incommensurable with the ambition of rivalling that which endures forever. “He felt old age approaching, and feared that he would be interrupted by death before he had created the final city, the true heavenly city.”65 It is a crisis of measurement, but also of intent. For the protagonists’ motivations clearly differ. At the beginning of the story, the laborers work with a gladness born of devotion to their emperor. The emperor himself is motivated by a fading memory. But the architect is increasingly building for himself, “building ever new and ever different cities, devising ever more singular

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9.26 Architect as Generalbauinspektor: Max Krajewsky, Fotograf der Bewegung (Photo­ grapher of the Movement), interior view of Albert Speer’s offices in Berlin, ca. 1940. In the foreground, a Siedlung massing model; in the background, diagrams illustrating the logistics of wartime industrial production, including, at lower left, protection of the Leuna works.

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schemes, constructing towering mountains of ever more gigantic buildings”; but each is acknowledged, even by the architect, as falling short of the dream. PLATE 40: THE CITY OF GRANITE The last of the thirty-three cities is built of heavy granite—“of simple form and, by the same token, of oppressive force.”66 It is a walled city composed of a material characterized elsewhere as being “established for all ages”67—a striking choice for the apparent end-point of such staggering architectural ambition. Rejecting previous experiments in more technologically sophisticated techniques, it represents a return to stripped historic form in a material that represents sheer mass, cut from the earth, aspiring to a quality of permanence to which only stone can do justice. Subsequent years would see other architects, too, turn to granite, for similar reasons.68 And if the detailing of Birnbaum’s accompanying illustration is unrefined, its articulation certainly conveys the desired association with antiquity. → Fig. 9.27 An assertion of the architect’s will, it answers to Finsterlin’s earlier demand for an architecture that represents “power made concrete, the will turned to stone.”69 The emperor has grown all too accustomed to repeated promises and repeated failures. But this city, the 33rd of 33 cities, prompts him at last to renounce his dream. The narrative offers a pause, marked by momentary clarity. For a moment the architect recognizes, with rising horror, that his life has been wasted, devoted to no higher end than that offered by his discipline. “Now that this purpose had faded away, now that the great task, which had shed light on his path for decades, was extinguished—what was that life to him now? His future lay before him like a terrifying wasteland, like a barren desert.”70 The image offers a striking contrast to the vivid saturation of the architect’s prior cities; there is a direct correspondence between the fading of his purpose and the evacuation of chromatic depth from a life grown pale. There is a moment’s vacillation between two worlds, the worlds of the faithful and the unfaithful, of the Gläubigen and of the Ungläubigen: worlds that confess allegiance either to the city of God or to the city of man. But here that vacillation is framed in the terms of the contrast later advanced by Pevsner: the contrast between submis-

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sion to other-worldly goals and assertion of architectural aggression. Pevsner insists that in “a century cold as steel and glass,” in a world “which we want to master, a world of science and technique, of speed and danger, of hard struggles and no personal security,” the architect must devise a response in which “the glass walls are now clear and without mystery, the steel frame is hard, its expression regardless of otherworldly speculation.”71 The terms of Birnbaum’s account are closely comparable: Stooped and broken, he traveled home to the glass studios to which he had not returned in so many years. But not for long did he bow in weakness. The cold rigidity of his drawing studio put an end to the frail feelings that had been awakened in him by the emperor’s surrender; and with pride he told himself that the whinging cowardice of a purple-robed fool could not diminish the greatness of his own soul. The emperor might capitulate; but he, the artist, would not! . . . And with staring eyes already fixed upon the work before him, the architect hurried back to work, just as he had for so many years before.72 Dismissing his self-critical thoughts, the architect returns with renewed vigor to his defiant pride, in full assertion of “the greatness of his own soul.” What other response, after all, is left open to him? When faced with personal ruin, the gospel of self-reliance can offer no redemption beyond a reaffirmation of its own commitments. PLATE 41: THE PLANS FOR THE TOWER The architect makes one final proposal. And now architecture is presented very clearly as the very embodiment of “the temptations of beauty and design.”73 Its seductions are powerful. “Immediately the emperor was gripped by that old desire, that old hope, that old dream.” In the context of Birnbaum’s narrative the scope of reference is restricted; yet the story of “that old desire” is surely to be understood as a longer story. For the architect’s final scheme is representative of architecture itself, with all its well-worn aspirations and promises. It takes its typological task seriously; it prompts “deep admiration”

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9.27 Uriel Birnbaum, The City of Granite (Die granitene Stadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924).

9.28 Uriel Birnbaum, The Apparition of the ­Heavenly City (Die Erscheinung der ­himmlischen Stadt), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924).

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on the part of the emperor, and that admiration is not undeserved: for the project is, in its very conception, superlative. Of this the emperor is left in no doubt: “Now far more experienced in the reading of architectural plans than he was when faced with the designs for the first cities, he recognized immediately that this new construction would surpass everything that the architect had built for him thus far—in size, in beauty and in the power of its impact. It would be a city of cities, a tower of cities piled on top of one another up to the heavens.” This archetypal Babel encompasses in a singular proposal the figures both of the enclosing city and of the defining tower. And the architect here adopts a well-established role. Birnbaum’s language is clear; and that clarity is acknowledged by the emperor: “The face of his old artist appeared to him as the face of a devil; and the emperor stepped back from him with a shudder, raising his hand against him as if to ward him off.” The gesture with which the emperor recoils from the temptation of architecture is equal and opposite to that with which the architect will soon reject the vision of the heavenly city. ← Fig. 9.28 It is the very gesture that is reproduced on the pages of Sloterdijk’s Spheres. ← Fig. 1.1 PLATE 42: THE ARCHITECT’S DISMISSAL But the emperor recognizes the temptation. And at this moment Birnbaum turns from ­architecture to theology. In the persona of the emperor he denounces the emptiness of architectural redemption, the error of this gospel: In this final scheme, in this tower of cities that stormed the heavens like a Titan, the monarch, as if struck by lightning, had recognized the innermost sinfulness of his long-held desire. . . . It was sinful to want to lead the world and the state to heavenly perfection; it was sinful to want to banish misery and suffering and human inequality from the earth; it was sinful to want to supply mankind with full happiness here on earth, just as it was sinful to attempt to build—here on earth, with earthly means—an altogether great, altogether beautiful, altogether complete city. Just as mankind could

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hope for full happiness and complete perfection only beyond the grave, so it should not expect, while still in this life, on this earth, to be able to create something heavenly—it needed to know that only God in his sovereignty is entitled to create a fully perfect work, to construct a true heavenly city.74 This text is likely to prompt mixed reactions among Birnbaum’s readers. Discounting the insistence on a sovereign God, it may be easy to support the dismissal of architecture’s utopian aspirations as misguided and even destructive; it is easy to acknowledge, with Birnbaum’s emperor, the tendency of such commitments to subordinate human happiness to a controlling dream. The history of architecture is littered, after all, with the rubble of failed visions. But the desire “to banish misery and suffering and human inequality from the earth”—is that not, even today, a frequently repeated wish? Is it not a worthy aspiration? It is optimistic, certainly; overly optimistic, no doubt—but sinful? Such condemnation is unlikely to resonate with the language of contemporary piety. Yet Birnbaum is not alone in disavowing the pursuit of happiness as the chief end of man. One might usefully compare a better-known text, contemporary with the publication of Rowe and Koetter’s Collage City: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard commencement address of 1978—it too articulated against the backdrop of failed utopian promises. Like Birnbaum, Solzhenitsyn finds fault with the commitments of modernity—commitments to “rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of all.”75 Identifying such commitments as firmly rooted in the premises of the Enlightenment, he argues: “The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself our guide, did not . . . see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshiping man and his material needs.” Using language that is familiar to the architect, Solzhenitsyn decries “the calamity of

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an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness” on the grounds that “it has made man the measure of all things on earth— imperfect man, who is never free of pride.”76 The architectural implications of Solzhenitsyn’s position remain unexamined; he directs his comments toward the politician and the journalist. Yet it is clear that the architect assumes a position of honor in the vanguard of the relentless march to improvement, the establishment of a more perfect order. This is true not only for the modernists of Rowe’s caricature, nor, for that matter, only for the Expressionists whose redemptive claims attracted his explicit critique (facing the corresponding passage in Collage City is an illustration from Taut’s Alpine Architektur)—but for the discipline at large. What prompts an architectural commission, after all, if not a desire for improvement? Why engage an architect if not in expectation of a more perfect order? And does this not fit neatly with the origins of architecture as articulated both by Vitruvius and by the book of Genesis: architecture as an attempt to supply a plenitude that is evidently lacking in the existing material order? The first instinct of the architect does not readily align with the inclinations of a polemic that sees value in suffering, any more than its ends are likely to align with the conclusion of Solzhenitsyn’s address: If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty.77 If the manifestos of twentieth century architecture occasionally provide glimpses of similar beliefs—one might, after all, compare the programmatic statements emerging from Expressionism itself—this is not, on the whole, the typical premise of the architectural profession. Architecture’s primary allegiance, as a rule, is not other-worldly. And Birnbaum’s architect is no exception. His

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earnest duty, in his own estimation, is to build. Ah, to build, to build! The goal of the architect is to create architecture; indeed, in Birnbaum’s narrative this translates into a personal commitment that subsumes the fiduciary duties of the protagonist’s profession. The boundaries between architecture’s commitment to public edification and the architect’s commitment to the construction of his own identity grow increasingly unclear. PLATE 43: THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE TOWER The description of the final project is saturated in the vocabulary of the exceptional. “Machines and cranes were wheeled in, more gigantic than ever, the earth was excavated deeper than ever, and blocks of concrete as big as houses were laid down to form foundations that would endure forever.” In an account that draws ever closer to the ­premises of Babel, the aspiration to architectural immortality is made explicit. The enduring masterpiece emerges from an ecstasy of creative effort and a fury of technological innovation. “Powerful steel claws of the architect’s own invention lifted and carried the fearsome blocks, unloading them at the appointed locations. Like a whitehaired demon the master builder labored and perspired among his workers, whom he rewarded richly to spur them on to ever greater intensity, to ever faster work. He was everywhere to be seen: on the heights of never-ending walls, in the depths of bottomless wells, amid the droning of red-hot machine shops, in conveyor trucks that sped through the air like lightning—even hoisted on those great claws, suspended fearlessly over the ­excavated chasms.”78 → Fig. 9.29 The reader’s air is smothered in clouds of dust, and the breathless speed of the ascending narrative barely keeps pace with the rise of a form so massive that the most fundamental distinctions between tower and hut lose their significance. “Low houses stood at the edge of the platform; shallow ramps led up past them to the taller houses, which pushed into one another, slid over one another, climbed up onto one another, rode on top of one another upon massive arched bridges, extruding into towers and vaulting into domes—creeping upward in competition with one another like living stone, day by day, month by month, ever higher—until, though in fact they were gigantic palaces, they seemed from the platform below to be mere huts.”

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9.29 (left) Uriel Birnbaum, The Foundations of the Tower (Die Fundamente des Turmes), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924): detail; (right) Lewis W. Hine, photograph of man on hoisting ball, Empire State Building, New York City, ca. 1931; gelatin silver print.

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As the dust clears, it discloses the outline of an order that ultimately has very little to do with technological innovation or formal vocabulary: an order that not only approaches the scale of a natural landform, a “gigantic mountainside of buildings,” but that takes on the larger challenge of rivalling the natural order, once ascribed to the creator God, deus architectus mundi. For the architect’s dream is that of ­creating a self-evident truth, possessed of unassailable perfection. The architectural project aspires to the status of a reality that is given, a design that is unquestioned because it defines empirically ­experienced reality, the object not of design critique but of ­scientific study. “It resembled the aimless blossoming of organic material; and yet in fact all was ruled by the architect’s ordering spirit, tirelessly capable.”79 The spirit of the creator architect storms the heavens: architectus secundus deus. It is the spirit of the eighth day. PLATE 45: THE TOWER OF CITIES “And then one day, quite suddenly, as it seemed to him, the great city was complete.” He saw that it was finished. But was it good? Was it perfect? Birnbaum’s assertion is followed immediately by a reminder that this structure was not what it seemed. Quite the contrary: it was a carefully contrived artifice; for in fact “the last of the great machines, the powerful crane that had just swung this house of granite into place, had been removed and taken apart, and was just at that moment being loaded up—at the very spot chosen by the architect for this occasion so many years ago—to be driven away, so that no trace of the toil that had been involved could spoil the impression of the completed building.” Yet for a brief moment, the artifice was persuasive enough to convince the architect of his own success. And for the duration of one part of a late afternoon, the clear, hard glory of the completed city seemed even to the emperor to be a compelling substitute for other forms of speculation, sufficient to discourage his commitment to a goal beyond this world: PLATE 44: THE TOWER UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Even if it lacked one final splendor, one last and indescribable point of beauty, nonetheless in its size and in its majesty this city could rightly be described as an other-

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worldly, superhuman, heavenly city: this immense pyramid, ­towering like a well-ordered mountain against the colored bands of evening cloud. And that missing splendor—that ultimate fulfilment and ultimate beauty? Perhaps it had been just a dream within a dream, his memory’s wishful fabrication.80 Just at this moment, with the suggestion that the splendor of the heavenly city might indeed have been “just a dream within a dream,” the narrative returns to the vision that in fact had been introduced as just that: a dream, contained within the framework of a Märchen. From the reader’s perspective, it is a carefully wrapped confection. Birnbaum would insist that the vision of the heavenly city is more real than any other element of his narrative framework; and yet it is presented as a kernel of reality surrounded by layers of fiction: as a vision granted to the protagonist of a story recounted by a narrator who attempts to approximate its glories in drawings that are in turn reproduced on the brittle pages of an illustrated book that will reach its reader, if at all, only across further separations of space, time, language, and culture. The author is conscious of this condition; and he toys with its contradictions, just as he plays with the reversals of physical and metaphysical certainty. As the emperor looks on, a growing brightness emerges around the architect’s creation. The emperor is conscious that this aura partakes of the splendor of God’s divine revelation; and yet he wonders, at first, whether it does not contradict theological truth in favor of architectural assertion. But the radiance of the architect’s tower proves to be a borrowed radiance; the emperor is in fact witnessing the emerging glory of the heavenly city. The architect himself is astonished. This structure is neither built nor assembled; it grows—effortlessly—before his very eyes, “like a reef, like a hill, like a mountain, radiant.”81 In the description of the heavenly city, Birnbaum returns once more to the sumptuous fullness of all the traits to which the architect’s previous fabrications have aspired: glories of color, material, composition, form, and light. In text and image, the city is juxtaposed PLATE 46: THE APPARITION OF THE HEAVENLY CITY

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with its would-be earthly counterpart. The heavenly city, after all, is a city—to which the earthly city of the architect’s invention begs comparison. Faced with this juxtaposition, the architect rehearses the various responses that are available to the skeptic. “At first he had found comfort in telling himself that it was an illusion, the delusion of a mind wracked by years of unbalanced overexertion.” But this wishful disillusion does not long survive the experience of empirical reality. “The higher the shining city arose, the more clearly he saw, with horror—in fact he felt more than he saw—that this was the truth, and no illusion; a truth as real as the city of stone beneath his feet—no, more real!” And so skepticism gives way in rapid succession to defiance, to hostility, and to downright denial. “Even if what he was seeing was true, even if it had descended from heaven as a sign from God—still he would deny it! . . . That city before him was mere lies and deception, its beauty and size unfounded pretense. There existed no heaven where it might truly stand; there existed no God to have created it. This, here, was truth: the granite beneath his feet, the city that he himself had built, that stood on earth, established for all ages according to great valid undeviating mathematical laws!”82 Birnbaum’s narrative blurs the distinction between the voices of narrator and protagonist. “The stir of trembling adoration” is dismissed as “the delusion of his feelings,” fought off by “all the pride and all the defiance of his arrogant spirit and unyielding reason.” In an account that parallels attitudes toward theological claims more generally, denial gives way to hostility, supported in turn by a conscious dismissal on the grounds of divine self-­ contradiction: Perhaps this heavenly city was in fact real—perhaps there was a heaven, in which it stood—perhaps there was also a God, who had created it . . . What of it? It was no match for his city, for this tower of cities! How small it was!—far smaller than all the many cities that he, a man, had built for the emperor, that had never seemed big enough for that fool! And how ugly it was!—how raw those garish colors, when he

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compared them in his mind to the harmonious effect of his own colorful cities! And how faulty its construction—that dome, above all, was quite impossible! Scornfully, the architect ridiculed a God who could allow his own natural laws to be so disregarded in the city of his heavenly residence.83 PLATES 47–48: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TOWER, THE COLLAPSE OF THE

The final stages of Birnbaum’s narrative unfold quickly. The architect’s story has come to an end; he has been offered a glimpse of transcendence but has chosen to reject it, and there is evidently no more to be said. What remains is the certainty of his own mortality. And while the emperor’s closing reflections acknowledge the authority of a sovereign God, Birnbaum’s plot does not resort to the intervention of a deus ex machina— the author does not follow the precedent set by earlier Babelic ­illustrations. → Fig. 9.30 Instead, the architect’s end is brought on by an act of nature: by the very bolts of lightning that are documented in the accounts of architectural history as having precipitated the destruction of so many other towers. → Fig. 9.31 The tower, after all, attracts lightning, just as the Tower of Babel attracts meaning. And if a lightning strike is still described, even in contemporary legal documents, as an “act of God,” it can at most be asserted that here, as in the account of Babel, the forces of nature act as divine agents. Just as the narrative of Genesis 11 leaves room for the predictable forces of history, so Birnbaum’s story merely accelerates the impact of the predictable enemies of architecture. By the same token, just as earthly architectures stand in competition with the architecture of the heavenly city, so the elements of earthly nature may, in Birnbaum’s reading, be understood to point heavenwards. Read properly, the book of nature becomes a book of revelation. This suggests a dramatic interpretative expansion of Pevsner’s assertion that “while in the thirteenth century all lines, functional though they were, served the one artistic purpose of pointing heavenwards to a goal beyond this world, and walls were made translucent to carry the transcendental magic of TOWER

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9.30 Cornelis Anthonisz, Fall of the Tower of Babel, 1547. The elements are familiar, but the ammendment of the biblical reference at top right to read “Genesis 14” suggests a ­conflation of Genesis 11 with Revelation 14.

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9.31 Uriel Birnbaum, The Destruction of the Tower (Die Zerstörung des Turmes), from Der Kaiser und der Architekt (1924).

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saintly figures rendered in coloured glass, the glass walls are now clear and without mystery, the steel frame is hard, and its ­expression discourages all other-worldly speculation.” For it suggests that the limitations imposed by modernity onto architecture’s ­significance—to signify, after all, is to point—are merely part of a more comprehensive evacuation of meaning. But the converse is perhaps also true: that if modernity now sees fit to question its former enthusiasm for “the creative energy of this world in which we live and work and which we want to master, a world of science and technique, of speed and danger, of hard struggles and no personal security,” then a return to other-worldly speculation could provoke a renewed expansion of architecture’s significance. There was a time, after all, when the term “speculation” referred to the view from above, the view from a specula, or watch-tower. This was, by definition, a clearer view than that available from below. PLATES 49–50: THE ARCHITECT’S EXIT, THE EMPEROR AT PRAYER

Birnbaum’s story concludes as it began, with portraits of its protagonists. The architect’s end is unhappy; like others among his literary counterparts, and like others answering to the name of a “great architect,” he meets his destruction at a site of his own design. The parallel between his own mortality and that of his architecture is explicit; it is fitting that the figure who most clearly embodies the desire to tie his identity to his own constructive capacities should meet his end among the ruins of his architectural achievements. Indeed, those ruins operate as monuments in the purest form, as monuments to the death both of the architect and of his architecture. But they are reminders in another way too; for at the very moment of death they serve the explicit purpose of pointing heavenwards to a goal beyond this world. Staring upward, the architect’s “blind eyes, still angry, reflected even in death the heavenly city.”84 The lifeless body of the architect, lying amid the broken fragments of his discipline, reflects a more enduring reality. Here, too, the common mortality of architect and architecture, of material bodies destined for corruption, suggests that man’s “task on earth evidently must be more spiritual.”85 The striking coincidence of these two destructions offers a glimpse of

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a common condition, the inexorable reassertion of an old law to which both are ultimately subject. This is, in effect, the architect’s final message, even if unintended. The closing lines of the book assert that “the architect’s heaven-storming and blasphemous project had been destroyed . . . by an angry heaven.”86 The primary point of reference here is perhaps not so much the account of Babel as it is the myth of the Titans—a reference introduced by Birnbaum himself when writing of “this tower of cities that stormed the heavens like a Titan.”87 And it is an obvious point of comparison for a story that seeks application to the narratives of modernity. The Titanic struggle is, after all, a struggle for authority, between an increasingly powerful and restive modernity and the jealous gods of an older order threatened with obsolescence. The language of heaven-storming human enterprise corresponds neatly to this narrative. But what of Babel? If the account of the Titans has often been read in the tradition of Judaeo-Christian thought, it is equally true that the account of Babel has frequently been interpreted in the language of Classical mythology—one might, for instance, recall Finsterlin’s description of Babel as a “monument to the disgrace that was the mighty defeat of the children of men in the Promethean battle against a false stepfatherly God.”88 Yet Genesis 11 says nothing of an angry God. Its underlying premise is different. Taken literally, the architecture of heaven is in no danger of being stormed by the assault towers of humanity—that is an idle threat, for as Genesis notes, the Lord had to come down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. The battle against the divine is waged on different fronts. In his 1914, Glasarchitektur, Scheerbart asserts: The face of the earth would be much altered if brick architecture were ousted everywhere by glass architecture. It would be as if the earth were adorned with sparkling jewels and enamels. Such glory is unimaginable. All over the world it would be as splendid as in the gardens of the Arabian Nights. We should then have a paradise on earth, and no need to watch in longing expectation for the paradise in heaven.89

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Scheerbart proposes an architecture that will discourage other-­ worldy speculation: an architecture that is itself worthy of devotion. Such glory is unimaginable. But Birnbaum insists that this devotion is misplaced. It is this misplacement that marks the striving of Babel; and it is this misplacement that generates the architectures of Birnbaum’s story. Toward the end of the book, it becomes clear that what is at stake is ultimately the architect’s disbelief in the possibility of revelation, disbelief in the very existence of God, with truth invested instead in material and mathematical laws. It is architecture, in this instance, that embodies those laws. And it is architecture, broadly conceived, that absorbs the devotion of a world devoid of divinities, that seeks to occupy the empty space that is left, as Nietzsche’s madman declares, by the death of God. “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us?”90 In substituting an exclamation mark for the question mark that should follow Nietzsche’s rhetorical question—How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers!—Nietzsche’s translator has perhaps betrayed the implicit answer. For in the “infinite nothing” of Nietzsche’s account there exists no adequate consolation, just as there no longer exists a divinity who might offer valid atonement. And so Nietzsche continues: “Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?” Here too, there are memories of Babel. For if the failure of Babel is a failure to recognize the unbridgeable distinction between earth and heaven, between God and man, then the precipitating danger, expressed to readers’ perplexity in Genesis 11:6, is in fact the rearticulation of an older threat: the threat that Eve might be persuaded by the false promise, breathed by the serpent in Genesis 3, that “you will be like God.”91 Such an interpretation inverts the orientation of the subsequent narrative; for judgment is understood no longer as an act of vindictive punishment by an angry God, but rather as an act of grace. The ruin of Babel, the

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failure of architecture, even the death of the architect, is understood as a reassertion of truth in the face of a persuasive falsehood. The disobedience of Genesis 3 produces shame, prompting the sewing of temporary coverings of fig leaves—the first intimation of a proto-architectural impulse. And just as those fig leaves are subsequently replaced by God with “garments of skins,” still provisional, requiring the death of the innocent on behalf of the guilty, but pointing forward to later narratives of more permanent sacrificial atonement, so the longer story of which the account of Genesis 11 is only a part replaces the figure of Babel with images of a more enduring city. Der Kaiser und der Architekt does not fully articulate this longer narrative. But it lays the groundwork for subsequent interpretative structures. As the story ends, the distinction between earth and heaven is presented as the difference between the city of man and the city of God, between the temporary and the permanent: It would not be long now. And then this new night would be over too. And he believed—in fact, he knew—that he would see the heavenly city once again in the dawning light of a new morning. This time he would see it up close—forever . . .92

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Death of the Architect 1 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 7, my translation. 2 Lehmann-Haupt, Art Under a Dictatorship, 59. 3 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 7, my translation. 4 For Birnbaum’s attitude toward legi­ timate authority, expressed in reference to Augustine, see Dugdale, “City of God.” 5 Annemarie Jaeggi, Fagus: Industrial Culture from Werkbund to Bauhaus, trans. Elizabeth Schwaiger (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 112 and 149n14. 6 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, 11. 7 Eccles. 3:14 (NRSV). 8 For J. J. P. Oud’s 1921 call for an architecture from which “nothing can be added, nor taken away,” published in the summer 1922 edition of Frühlicht, see Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960), 159. 9 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 8, my translation. 10 Matthias Schirren, Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur: Eine Utopie / A Utopia, trans. John Gabriel (Munich: Prestel, 2004), 76. 11 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 8, my translation. 12 Ibid., 23, my translation. 13 Ibid., 9, my translation. 14 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 409, my translation. 15 Immanuel Kant, “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” Berlinische Monatsschrift, November 1784, 397, quoted in loose translation by Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 19. 16 Hermann Finsterlin, “The Eighth Day,” 93. 17 Taut, Berlin, December 19, 1919, in Whyte, Crystal Chain Letters, 20. 18 Gen. 2:2 (NRSV). 19 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 10, my translation. 20 Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” 100. 21 Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 207. 22 For the German, see Ungers, Die gläserne Kette, 11. 23 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), 216–17. First published in 1936 under the title Pioneers of the Modern Movement, the final assertion (“as long as

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389 this is the world . . .”) is new to the 1960 edition. 24 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 10–11, my translation. 25 Felix Linke, “Die neue Architektur,” So­z ia­l istische Monatshefte 20, no.  17 (1914): 1137, my translation. For reference to the Gothic cathedral in a defence of the Glashaus, see Bruno Taut, ‘‘Eine Notwendigkeit,’’ Der Sturm 4, no. 196/197 (1914): 174–75. Taut here echoes his Glaspapa; for Scheerbart’s insistence on the Gothic cathedral as legitimate forebear to the new architecture, preceded by the culture of ancient Babylon, see Paul Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture” [1914], trans. James Palmes, in Glass Architecture by Paul Scheerbart and Alpine Architecture by Bruno Taut, ed. Dennis Sharp (New York: Praeger, 1972), 46–47 and 72. 26 Bruno Taut, “A Necessity,” trans. David Britt, in Metropolis Berlin: 1880–1940, ed. Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 277. 27 Paul Scheerbart to Bruno Taut, Berlin, February 10, 1914, translated in Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader, ed. Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 133. Architecture here serves to test the viability of newly proposed scriptures. Scheerbart was himself familiar with the demands of scripture; he had once hoped to become a missionary, but gradually abandoned theology for philosophy and then art: see Leo Ikelaar, ed., Paul Scheerbart und Bruno Taut: Zur Geschichte einer Bekanntschaft (Paderborn: Igel Verlag, 1996), 18. But biblical motifs linger throughout his work, not least in Lesabéndio and Das graue Tuch—which proposes, at 144–51, nothing less than the reconstruction of Babylon. 28 Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 217. 29 Ponten, Architektur, 2:200; for discussion in the context of Taut’s “truly Babylonian” Alpine Architektur, see 1:136. 30 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 11, my translation. 31 Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 206. 32 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 20, my translation. 33 For discussion of Birnbaum’s poem “Moses zerschmettert die Gesetzestafeln,” contrasting the glory of God with the kitsch of the golden calf, see PolzerHoditz, Uriel Birnbaum, 18–19.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 34 Eccles. 5:1 (GNV). The versification of the 1599 Geneva Bible matches that used by Birnbaum. 35 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 24, my translation. 36 Ibid., 9, my translation. 37 Ibid., 11–12, my translation. 38 Ibid., 12–13, my translation. 39 Ibid., 13, my translation. 40 Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/211–13. Birnbaum had evidently been assembling cities for some time; the annotated catalog for his 1919 exhibition at the Wiener Zeitkunst gallery lists similar entries (1/493). 41 Birnbaum, “Kurze Selbstbiographie,” 16, my translation. 42 For a similar argument on behalf of the saturated world of Scheerbart’s Lesabéndio, see Ufuk Ersoy, “To See Daydreams: The Glass Utopia of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut,” in Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia, ed. Nathaniel Coleman (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), 122. 43 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 17, my translation. 44 Ibid., 14–18, my translation. 45 Gen. 11:4 (NRSV). 46 Bernd Krimmel, “In the Matter of J. M. Olbrich,” in Joseph Maria Olbrich, Architecture: Complete Reprint of the Original Plates of 1901–1914 (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), 12. 47 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 16, my translation. 48 Winfried Nerdinger and Cornelius Tafel, Architectural Guide Germany: 20th Century, trans. Ralph Stern and Ingrid Taylor (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996), 80. 49 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 17, my translation. Compare chapter 40 of Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture.” 50 Bruno Taut, “Der Regenbogen: Aufruf zum farbigen Bauen,” Frühlicht: Eine Folge für die Verwirklichung des neuen Baugedankens 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1921): 28, my translation. 51 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 17, my translation. 52 Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Ruf zum Bauen (Berlin: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1920), 14. 53 Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture,” 52–53, 71. 54 Ibid., 63, substituting “glories” for “splendours” to preserve consistency in translating the German Herrlichkeiten. 55 Ibid., 72. 56 Ibid., 41. 57 Ibid., 54–55. Birnbaum was familiar with Glasarchitektur; the title is added

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390 in pencil to the bibliography at the back of his copy of Scheerbart’s Das graue Tuch, now in the Uriel Birnbaum Archive. 58 Bruno Taut, Die Auflösung der Städte; oder, Die Erde eine gute Wohnung; oder auch: Der Weg zur Alpinen Architektur; in 30 Zeichnungen (Hagen: Folkwang-Verlag, 1920), plate 23, my translation. 59 Bruno Taut, ed., Frühlicht: Beilage zu Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit 14 (1920): 223, and Ponten, Architektur, 1:139–40 and 2:202. 60 For comparison of this floodlit vision to Albert Speer’s design for the Nuremberg rallies, see Jens Bisky, “Das gewaltigste Werk ist nichts ohne das Höhere,” Berliner Zeitung, December 21, 1999. 61 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 21, my translation. 62 For Scharoun’s Kultbau and Luckhardt’s Denkmal der Arbeit, see Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Ruf zum Bauen 15 and 22. 63 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 21, my translation. 64 Ibid., 17, my translation. 65 Ibid., 18, my translation. 66 Ibid., 21, my translation. 67 Ibid., 28, my translation. 68 For details of Nazi Germany’s formidable demand for granite, see Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 181: “In the middle of September 1941 .  .   . Hitler ordered sizable increases in our contracts for granite. . . . Contracts to the value of thirty million Reichsmarks had been awarded to the leading companies in the Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, Belgian, Swedish, and Dutch stone industry. In order to bring these vast quantities of granite to Berlin and Nuremberg, we founded (on June 4, 1941) a transport fleet of our own and set up our own shipyards in Wismar and Berlin, with plans to build a thousand boats with a cargo capacity of five hundred tons each.” A footnote adds (534n5): “Norway was commissioned to provide 31,200,000 cubic yards of uncut granite and 12,050,000 cubic yards of cut granite, and Sweden was to provide 5,473,000 cubic yards of uncut and 6,890,000 cubic yards of cut granite.” 69 Finsterlin, “The Eighth Day,” 93. 70 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 22, my translation. 71 Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 206–7. 72 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 22–23, my translation. 73 Ibid., 23, my translation.

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74 Ibid., 23–24, my translation. 75 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8, 1978 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 47, 49. I am grateful to David Birnbaum for suggesting this comparison. 76 Ibid., 57. 77 Ibid., 57, 59. 78 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 24–25, my translation. 79 Ibid., 25, my translation. 80 Ibid., 26–27, my translation. 81 Ibid., 27, my translation. 82 Ibid., 28, my translation. 83 Ibid., 29, my translation. 84 Ibid., 30, my translation. 85 Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, 57. 86 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 30, my translation. 87 Ibid., 23, my translation. 88 Hermann Finsterlin, “Babel” (1922), quoted in Döhl, Hermann Finsterlin, 69, my translation. 89 Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture,” 46. 90 Nietzsche, Gay Science, 120. 91 Gen. 3:5 (NRSV). 92 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 30, my translation.

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Tucked away among the documents of Uriel Birnbaum’s personal archive, a slip of paper bearing blue typescript is enclosed within a folder marked “On the exteriors of books.” It states as follows: In Dagestan, a book is created not only by the author, the calligrapher and the illustrator, but also by the master of scents, whose task is to find the correct perfume for the book in question. The scent must harmonize with the content, the binding, the script, and the illustrations. It should not be disruptive, but should interpret the content in its own way.1 The occasion for this annotation is not provided; but a similar account can be found in a now discredited but once wildly popular book published in 1930 by the elusive Essad Bey.2 It is not surprising that this observation should have caught the eye of a writer who was himself so deeply committed to the cultivation of the book arts. If olfactory manipulations seem ultimately to have escaped Birnbaum’s attentions, his archive provides ample evidence of his efforts as author, calligrapher, and illustrator. The relationships between content, binding, text, and image are considered alongside endpapers, bookplates, inscriptions, initials, inks, and printing techniques. Indeed, the crafting of Der Kaiser und der Architekt is emblematic of these bibliographic preoccupations. This is surely among the reasons for the book’s inclusion in the collection of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: it is, quite simply, an exquisitely crafted object. Call number 2007  +251 is today assigned a value rather greater than it commanded in 1933. After a sharp depreciation in both ideological and economic appeal, the book’s monetary value, at least, has recovered. Elsewhere in the same archive is preserved a copy of the Thyrsos-Verlag’s promotional brochure for its 1924 “Book of the

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395 Year.” It is a single folded sheet of paper, its cover graced by the image that would reappear a hundred years later on the pages of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres—The Apparition of The Heavenly City—here reproduced in glorious full color. For details of pricing, the prospective buyer is referred to an enclosed order form, now missing; but on the back of the brochure the publisher promises five versions at various levels of distinction, from the linen boards of the basic edition to a more exclusive variant answering to a description printed in the back of the Beinecke copy: “One hundred copies were hand-bound as a special edition in full leather and parchment, hand-numbered and signed by the artist.”3 The brochure’s anonymous text, set in the same typeface as the book itself, draws attention to the extraordinary care lavished on the book’s creation—a level of care that cannot fail to remind today’s reader of the architectural exertions described in the book itself: The artist has overseen every detail of the printing—supervising the reproduction of the richly colored originals through polychromatic offset printing, and personally designing the volume’s binding, endpapers, and initial. As is appropriate to the serious nature of the work, the text has been set in the Antiqua typeface designed by Professor Peter Behrens. In sum, this book constitutes an accomplishment that is in every respect the model of distinguished publishing.4 As advertised, the text of Birnbaum’s book is set in Behrens Antiqua, black on white, a densely printed counterpart to the lucid color images. There is little doubt that this was a conscious choice on the part of the author. But why this typeface? The typographer Stanley Morison, designer of Times New Roman, noted in 1923 that “in the hands of a fine craftsman an appropriate type will suggest an atmosphere, point the conception of an author, and, in short, go more than half way towards illustrating the book.”5 This observation would suggest that the book’s typeface should be studied with a seriousness equal to that applied to its illustrations.

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Indeed, Behrens might have shared this conviction. For typography, in his estimation, occupied a position second only to architecture. As he noted in 1902, “One of the most eloquent means of expressing the style of any epoch is through letterforms. After architecture, they probably give the most characteristic picture of a time, and the best evidence of the state of a nation’s spiritual development.”6 A similar point had been made, shortly before, in a publication identified as “the first use of sans serif type as running book text”7—a 1901 booklet designed by Behrens as a celebration of “the coming redemption through the union of art and life.”8 Behrens’s commitment to the Gesamtkunstwerk, to the idea of “total design,” in turn demanded typographic reform. Behrens’s 1908 Antiqua typeface had its origins in his design for the corporate identity of the AEG electrical company, and is doubtless best known among architects for its use, in preliminary form, for the letters that remain inscribed into the monumental masonry façade of the AEG turbine factory. The design of a corporate typeface was intended to nurture unity, applying to this institution of corporate Germany an argument previously advanced on behalf of the nation more broadly.9 That visual unity was to show “a sober, classical face, felt to be the appropriate one for a leader of modern industry.”10 The developed typeface claimed descent both from medieval manuscripts and from monumental Roman inscriptions, as preserved in the chiselled stone of antiquity’s architecture; within the trajectory of Behrens’s other typeface designs, it represented a definitive move away from black-letter gothic Frakturschrift.11 Accordingly, the preface to the specimen provided by the type foundry notes: “In its imitation of the Roman script of the Germanic culture, the Behrens type will assist the task of renewing the Roman script in the German spirit. . . . Let us hope that the foundation has been laid for a german roman [Deutsche antiqua] !”12 Such assertions are preliminary to more complex arguments advanced during the years of the Third Reich, when the question of the appropriate typographic face for a renewed Germanic culture was sharply contested.13 As it is, the text of Der Kaiser und der Architekt was set not in Frakturschrift but in Behrens Antiqua. If the reader were to take

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seriously Behrens’s assertion that, after architecture, letterforms provide “the best evidence of the state of a nation’s spiritual development,”14 then this, his best-known typeface, might be held to represent the architect’s controlling hand on history, the desire for influence over the nation’s spiritual development. The extent of Behrens’s involvement in its development was striking: when the Klingspor foundry finally issued a complete typeface, it had exchanged over three hundred letters with the designer.15 And the new typeface was promoted on its foundry’s specimen sheets through “sample settings of philosophical, Latin and biblical texts,” implying an authoritative gravitas while communicating the governing influence of a “pervasive, rationalist aesthetic.”16 Certainly it can be said, without hesitation, that by 1924, the adoption of Behrens Antiqua was understood to reflect a certain severity, “appropriate to the serious nature of the work.”17 The architectural extensions of such typographic assertions can be traced both backward and forward. Returning to the page in Dürer’s Underweysung der Messung that introduces his discussion of typography, ← Fig. 0.3 the reader finds that the typeface of Dürer’s printed text corresponds perfectly to an analysis of the historical development of Frakturschrift proffered by Behrens in 1902, annotated with the words “It is as if each letter here were a mirror to world-history; a spiritual picture of time passes before our eyes.” But Behrens’s analysis is ultimately intended as a critique of a dissolute modernity. Referring to the final stage in the development of Frakturschrift, he continues: In this type, which has reconstituted the once visible signs of original manual technique into flourishes, and in which garish embellishments irreverently deny any artistic principle of construction, we are expected to read of how technological science surpasses itself time and time again with its inspired invention; of great statesmen and heroes; of the emergence of the united German State.18 In Behrens’s estimation, the Frakturschrift of Dürer’s treatise stands as evidence of an earlier, more pious age. But in the wood-

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cut placed beneath Dürer’s printed text, the phrase “das w gotes bleibt ewiglich” (The Word of God endures forever) is inscribed in a carefully composed roman face that corresponds both to the architectural nature of its context and to the lapidary truth proclaimed in its message. In a more recent typographic analysis, discussing the publication of Spheres, Peter Sloterdijk has gone further, suggesting that the printed book lends itself to the representation of truth in a way that no longer holds true for the ephemeral digital image: In a sense, the printed page of the book is always a quotation of the carved stone inscriptions of ancient monumental alphabets. The roman Antiqua, which formed the prototype for European printing culture, is a monumental alphabet rendered elegant. This is why it was so well suited for the transportation of truth.19 What is here unsaid is that what is true for the printed word insofar as it bears memories of monumental architecture must be assumed to hold true for architecture itself. The underlying premise, in other words, is that architecture can contribute to the monumentalization—or commemoration—of truth. Yet this in turn presents further problems. For one, it is difficult to ­identify the architectural monument that might best answer to that premise. Certainly the familiar Roman sources—Trajan’s carefully constructed column being the classic epigraphic example—leave room for doubt. The history of epigraphy, after all, is that of a ­discipline that has learned to be suspicious of any verities inscribed in stone. This lesson has not been lost on modernity, which is liable to believe that it is precisely those assertions that have been inscribed in stone that deserve to be read with the greatest caution. And the suspicion has extended beyond lapidary inscription to encompass the use of stone more broadly. It was with reason that demand for granite declined in the years after 1945. But the underlying difficulties are more complex still; for the problem is not merely evidential. Sloterdijk declares that the roman typeface of the printed page is suited for the representation

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of truth precisely because of its association with monumental inscriptions carved into stone—because of its association with architecture. But how is the reader to reconcile this declaration with the assumption, held to be equally valid, that truth is itself to be understood as a form of architecture? For this in turn transfers the responsibility for construction of truth onto the architect. But if the architect’s own assertions are to be trusted, it would seem that the truth of architecture is more likely to be found on paper than in any material elaboration. To insist that the best architectures are those that remain unbuilt is to insist on the superiority of that architecture that is commemorated in the printed book. “The best of what is built, my son, is built only on paper.”20 It is a carefully crafted dilemma. The printed page derives its truth from architecture; that truth is duly revealed to be the fabrication of its architect; and the architect in turn seeks truth on the printed page. It reads suspiciously like a circular argument, with each constitutive element deflecting responsibility to the next element in the circle. The book points to the building; the building points to the architect, and the architect points back to the book, in an unyielding circle of signification—a circle that can be escaped only if one of the terms has the capacity to signify beyond its own limits: to point outward, or perhaps heavenwards, “to a goal beyond this world.” Such is, after all, the premise of that other archetypal example of epigraphy, the Mosaic law, inscribed on tablets of stone: it claims to derive its authority from above. But what if, as the reader is reminded by Sloterdijk’s ­introduction, modernity has established that “there is nothing more to look for up there”?21 Where is the architect to turn? Can ­architectural ­signification escape the self-referential circle? Can it escape f­ utility? At those moments when architects have attempted with the greatest urgency to find new substitutes for old ­certainties, the record is discouraging—Taut’s Monument to the New Law comes to mind, as does Scheerbart’s struggle over the m ­ onumental ­inscription above the entrance to the Glashaus. “Composing mottoes is no easy matter. Some of them sound a little banal.”22 And is there not, in any case, something disconcertingly self-­contradictory about the very idea of a Monument to the New Law? For the monumentum is, by defini-

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tion, a reminder. It is a structure best suited to the commemoration of old laws that remain valid; the very concept of a monument to new laws is an oxymoron. Yet the search for new laws continues, finding expression both in the Bauhaus and in the familiar narratives that succeed it. And again the new begs comparison to the old, Johannes Itten’s “eager search for a new spiritual foundation” (eifriges Suchen)23 contrasting with Uriel Birnbaum’s “eager Bible-reading” (eifriges Bibellesen).24 Those positions meet for an uncomfortable moment on the pages of Bruno Adler’s Utopia of 1921, its reproduction of a plate from a medieval Bible—“Christ, architect of heaven and earth”—supplemented by Itten’s Bauhausera color sphere, saturated with aspirations toward metaphysical significance. ← Figs. 0.6, 0.7 Peter Sloterdijk is in fact respectably diffident about the truth-claims of his own book, despite its adoption of a roman typeface. And no doubt his reticence is valid. In fact he insists that it is precisely the book’s illustrations that betray the ambivalent status of his work.25 Such images hold the capacity to call into question the claims of the primary text. Sloterdijk’s appropriation of Birnbaum’s drawing, The Apparition of The Heavenly City, might offer a case in point. For Sloterdijk’s text assumes that truth is itself a construction best understood in the image of architecture. This is a recognizably modern position—one that corresponds to “the thought of the Modern Age, which presented itself for so long under the naïve name of ‘Enlightenment’”26—and one with monumental implications for the position both of the philosopher and of the architect. It reduces to the status of fabrications all prior certitudes: among them not only conceptions of the nature of humanity (“humans are themselves an effect of the space they create”27) but also ideas about the presumed relationship between human and divine architectures, and in due course, convictions about the very idea of divinity. In other words, both the philosophical project of modernity and modernity’s conception of God are understood as human constructs, conceived in essentially architectural terms. One of the attractions of Sloterdijk’s text is the clarity with which it unfolds the implications of this position—implications

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that were foreseen by Nietzsche’s madman, but that have not yet, perhaps, been adequately acknowledged elsewhere. And among them is the recognition that modernity must assign to the architect not only a godlike responsibility for the shaping of humanity, but also a responsibility for the shaping of God. As the madman recognizes, this is hardly a welcome responsibility. Sloterdijk’s reproduction of The Apparition of The Heavenly City seems, at first, to support his assumptions as to the relationship between human and divine architectures. But a closer reading of the drawing and of its radiating spheres of influence suggests instead that this illustration calls into question modernity’s claims. The conceits of modernity have been pre-empted by the narratives of pre-modernity. The account of Babel presents a challenge to all architectural presumption, calling attention to the frailty and impermanence of human fabrications. This very impermanence is written into the story of Babel in ways that never fail to find resonance in subsequent attempts at reconstruction, however confident. The architecture of Babel, a monument present through its absence, stands as a reminder that structural permanence must be given, not made. In Birnbaum’s elaboration of the account of Babel, the narrative ends with the death not of God but of the architect: a death witnessed at the culmination of a lifetime’s experience with the mortality of architecture itself. Reports of the death of God, after all, remain in the domain of speculative theory, open to dispute. The death of the architect and the failure of architecture, on the other hand, are events for which modernity can supply ample empirical evidence; they possess a certainty of a different order. To revisit Sloterdijk’s book with an eye newly sensitive to the doubtfulness of its underlying premise is to call into question the claims of the text. Such questioning may begin with the introduction, which looks back to the beginnings of that age “which presented itself for so long under the naïve name of ‘Enlightenment’”; for if “the certainty that there is nothing more to look for up there” is itself in question, then other assertions can be found to take on a new ambivalence. Among them are assertions about the status of architecture in the modern world—the status of architecture after the death of God.

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Architecture after the Death of God This book opens with the account of a display of architectural relics laid out in the literary catacombs of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The contents of that display were in some regards predictable; much the same selection had been extracted from the library’s vaults on previous occasions for the edification of other architectural neophytes; and no doubt subsequent devotees would repeat the exercise. The viewing was imagined, after all, as an opportunity to engage with the material remains of architecture’s textual heritage, laid out at a respectful distance; and if there is any validity to the description of the library as the repository of dead bodies, it is certainly true that—new acquisitions aside—the contents of the mortuary typically offer few surprises. Indeed, F. T. Marinetti predicted with unremarkable accuracy the conditions of his own interment: “They will advance toward us from a distance . . . clutching at the air with their predatory fingers. At the gates of the academies they will pause to inhale the rich odor of our decaying spirits, already committed to the catacombs of the libraries.”28 Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio, Dürer, Wotton, Marinetti, Gropius, Itten, El Lissitzky, Nieuwenhuys: all are eagerly numbered and cataloged. All are stamped in permanent ink with the mark of the library’s ownership, on the understanding that this condition is more final than provisional; for the dead, once assigned to their resting-places, are not expected to disturb the peace of the passing centuries. Extracted temporarily from their protective cases, they lie quietly side by side on the long tables of the library, small white tags listing in desiccated bibliographic language the records of their former lives, their identities now committed to the rigid permanence of their corresponding call numbers. GGnv90 bi521, Jp2 2w, 1999  +66, JJaf42 P177 570Bw, 1971 Folio 561, 1999 455, GEN MSS 130, 1996  +82, 2009  +357, 2009  +364, 2009  +208, 2007  +84, 2009 Folio 18.

—new acquisitions aside— One item has been omitted. In the near corner, adjacent to Itten’s color chart, lies a slim book bound in faded blue linen, its cover slowly separating from its contents. A curator supplies a title: Der Kaiser und der Architekt: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern.

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Vienna, 1924. The book is open to its final image, printed in deeply saturated color, curiously unsettling, its caption legible at the end of a list of fifty plates on the facing page: “The emperor at prayer.” The list itself is strangely repetitive. “The green city, the red city, the yellow city.” Read aloud, the effect is incantatory. “The city of silver, the city of gold, the city of iron.” The curator comments on the arresting beauty of the printed page, and suggests an allusion to the story of the Tower of Babel, a tale of destruction, an unhappy ending. Little else is said. A recent acquisition, the book is otherwise unknown, the name of its author previously ­un­familiar. But call number 2007  +251 claims the capacity to breathe a form of new life into this collection of texts. Or, at least, it offers an approach to architecture that claims to extract itself from the mortalities of history through a focus on nothing less than eternity. It does so in response to the brave assertion of Birnbaum’s faithful art: “However unimportant art may be in its own right, it becomes important in setting itself to this purpose. In God’s light it acquires value. In God’s service it attains significance.”29 This, too, after all, is the language of architectural aspiration—language with massive implications for the narratives and texts of architecture. Vitruvius, Alberti, Palladio . . . To return to that array with an eye not to physical but to metaphysical significance is a daunting exercise—and an exercise for which most architects are unlikely to claim any special preparation. Yet even a preliminary review of the material reveals its potential for entanglement in an ongoing debate about architecture’s metaphysical ends: a debate to which Birnbaum’s book offers its own contribution. And it points toward a number of more general, and increasingly tentative, conclusions: 1. If architects are to respond with any degree of rigor to the broader intellectual claims of their discipline, they must, by very nature of their subject, grapple with problems that extend far beyond the limits of the building site. The outlines of these problems may themselves be more clearly discerned through the shadows that they cast over the project of architecture. This is not yet to ask whether the expertise of the architect, if carefully deployed, should be expected to cast light into these shadows. But

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it is to make a case for architecture as a means of working through the construction of larger intellectual arguments, of assessing their capacities and their faults, of testing the potential of the given material to build a world. To this task architectural fictions offer a significant contribution. 2. There are certain motifs—even certain buildings—that have exercised a peculiar attraction for such speculative endeavors. One such building is the Tower of Babel, understood as nothing less than an archetype of the architectural project. Indeed, if architectural speculation has often been precipitated by provocations external to the discipline, Birnbaum’s narrative shares with a surprising number of such texts the dominant central motif of Babel. Der Kaiser und der Architekt contributes to a body of work within which Babel establishes a landmark around which to organize thought. 3. Just as the task of the architect in a modern world has been held to differ from that of the architect in a pre-modern world, so the status of the architect in a world that is godless is distinct from that of the architect who practises in subordination to an eternal creator. Architecture after the death of God is an endeavor radically different to that which went before. This is hardly a well-recognized fact. As a discipline, architecture has largely failed to come to terms with the death of God, and most schools of architectural thought do not go out of their way to train their students to discriminate between the competing claims of such theological debates. The field of such architectural discrimination is still, in many respects, uncharted territory, echoing with a resounding stillness. One might argue as to whether this is a mere rehearsal of the disconcerted silence that greeted Nietzsche’s madman. 4. It is unclear whether the discipline is likely to welcome any attempt at breaking this silence. For if it is valid to interpret Birnbaum’s book as a cry of protest, it can also be observed that it was not well received at the time of publication. Birnbaum’s voice, too, soon fell silent; his time, in Nietzsche’s words, was not yet—and it may be long in coming. There will always be reasons to discount such voices, which are likely, at best, to come across in broken and hesitant tones. A discipline that aspires to Cartesian

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clarity and distinction cannot hear such cries. Nor can it welcome the claims made by an author such as Friedrich Weinreb, of “the possibility of finding the way back to lost certainties. In times of serious danger,” insists Weinreb, “the Thora, which is otherwise to remain in the house of instruction, according to ancient Jewish usage, is carried through the streets of the town threatened with destruction.”30 Modernity may, with Nietzsche, acknowledge the loss of certainty; it may even, with Weinreb, recognize the danger; but it is unlikely to resort to carrying the Torah through the streets of its cities. This would be a retrogressive step, out of character with a modern identity. Modernity is willing to acknowledge, with Heidegger, that “homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world”;31 but it is quick to delegate the responsibility for resolving that crisis.32 Is the provision of homes not, after all, a task within the domain of architecture? In an age when metaphysical homes are in short supply, and heavenly cities no longer viable, does the onus of redemption not fall onto the architect? In the absence of a creator god, the world presents itself as the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk: as the material for a comprehensive project of reconstruction, a project of Babelic dimensions. It is the human art of building, broadly understood, that must triumph over this new and modern world: this world in which we live and work and which we want to master, a world of science and technique, of speed and danger, of hard struggles and no personal security. Birnbaum’s argument is not without its complications. If Der Kaiser und der Architekt can be read as a critique of the redemptive claims advanced on behalf of the architecture of Gesamtkunstwerk Erde—Earth as a total work of art—the Thyrsos-Verlag’s 1924 Book of the Year is described in its own promotional brochure precisely as a Gesamtkunstwerk that will capture the reader “with the imprint of a comprehensive harmony.”33 In other words, the failure of the architectural Gesamtkunstwerk to achieve the perfection of a structure that might substitute for the heavenly city is exposed by a Gesamtkunstwerk entitled Der Kaiser und der Architekt. The height of its bookmaking ambition is amply evident, even from a cursory inspection. Indeed, immediately after the description of its architectural protagonist’s ambition “to storm the heavens

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with a new Tower of Babel,” the promotional brochure describes the book itself as a triumph of innovative printing technology, requiring nothing less than the building of new factories: No expense was spared in making possible the facsimile-perfect reproduction of this publication—either by the publisher or by Hermes, the Viennese art book printers to whom it was entrusted. They had to set up their own facility to produce the color plates, which could not have been fabricated here until now; and they had to acquire new and specialized printing machinery.34 It is surely redundant to ask whether the book’s ambition contributed to the failure, later that same year, of the Thyrsos-Verlag itself. In May 1924, the Viennese monthly Menorah published a special issue devoted to the work of Uriel Birnbaum. Bearing a self-portrait of the artist on its front cover, it offers one of the final records of Birnbaum’s popularity immediately prior to its precipitous decline. An announcement invites readers to the Wiener Zeitkunst exhibition for which Birnbaum published his brief essay on faithful art. On the first page, an article on Birnbaum’s books begins with the words “With few exceptions, the Jewish art of the past century bears the marks of rupture and rootlessness.”35 Below that, a paid advertisement announces, with pride: Thyrsos Publishing No. 10 Strohgasse, Vienna III has obtained sole publishing rights to the work of Uriel Birnbaum Already available, notes the advertisement, is the author’s SeelenSpiegel (Mirror of the soul), a book of 120 caricatures.36 This will shortly be followed by Der Kaiser und der Architekt and by Moses. Currently under preparation is Leben in Liebe (Life in love): “a new volume of poetry by the author who was recently honoured with the Bauernfeld Prize.” It goes without saying that Leben in

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Liebe was never published. But the article’s author has evidently seen an advance copy of Der Kaiser und der Architekt. He writes: Finding a distant parallel in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, this work unfolds in 50 pictures that glow like old stained-glass windows in the richest colors of the rainbow. It presents a flight of vivid and unspeakably beautiful cities, created by the architect in hopes of realizing the heavenly dream of his patron, the emperor. But however significant he may be, man should not measure himself against God’s creative power: “for God is in the heavens, and thou art on the earth.”37 The comparison of Birnbaum’s technique to that of historic stained glass is not unprecedented. But the author of this article develops the analogy further. Writing of Birnbaum’s devotion to God, he adds a reference to that irrefutable Gesamtkunstwerk, the Gothic cathedral itself: “There are parallels with Expressionism, but only to the extent that would be expected, given the proximity in time. . . . One is reminded, above all, of the craftsmen of the Catholic Middle Ages, the unknown altar-builders and cathedral architects.”38 The unknown architect of this comparison is none other than Uriel Birnbaum. But his is not the fabrication of a godless modernity; it is, in the most established sense, a faithful art.

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Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/158, my translation. 2 For a rendition into English see Essad Bey [Lev Nussimbaum], Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus, trans. G. Chychele Waterston (New York: Viking Press, 1931). Chapter 7 is entitled “The Master of Fragrance.” 3 Birnbaum, Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 85, my translation. The Beinecke Library’s copy does not correspond to this description; the space left for the artist to number the individual copy remains empty. 4 Der Kaiser und der Architekt: Ein Märchen in fünfzig Bildern von Uriel Birnbaum; Das Buch des Jahres (Vienna: Thyrsos-Verlag, [1924]), Uriel Birnbaum Archive 1/497, my translation. For a brief history of the Thyrsos-Verlag, see also Roland Jaeger, “Nachforschungen zum Wiener Thyrsos-Verlag (1922−24),” Aus dem Antiquariat: Beilage zum Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel 87 (October 31, 1995): 369–75. 5 Stanley Morison, On Type Faces (London: The Medici Society, 1923), vi. 6 Peter Behrens, “Von der Entwicklung der Schrift,” translated in Chris Burke, “Peter Behrens and the German Letter: Type Design and Architectural Lettering,” Journal of Design History 5, no. 1 (1992): 35. 7 Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, 2nd ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 228, citing typographic historian Hans Loubier. The booklet is Peter Behrens’s Feste des Lebens und der Kunst (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1900). 8 Welter, Biopolis, 223. 9 Meggs, History of Graphic Design, 234–35. For Behrens’s design as “the first comprehensive visual-identification program,” see 228. 10 Robin Kinross, Modern Typography: An Essay in Critical History (London: Hyphen Press, 1992), 70. 11 Burke, “Peter Behrens and the German Letter,” 24. On the origins of Behrens Antiqua see Fritz Hoeber, Peter Behrens (Munich: Georg Müller and Eugen Rentsch, 1913), 75. 12 Burke, “Peter Behrens and the German Letter,” 25, quoting Tilmann Buddensieg and Henning Rogge, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907–14, trans. Iain Boyd Whyte (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 182. 13 For the fate of Frakturschrift, “outlawed by the Nazis as a Jewish abomination,” see Burke, “Peter Behrens and the German Letter,” 22; the author adds (32n13) that “Hitler understood that the German language, as an instrument of world

explarch-bd2-dugdale.indb 408

408 domination, would be more successful in roman letters.” That this 1941 reversal of previous positions was in practice neither immediate nor complete can be demonstrated by the mixed typography of the 1942 edition of Ewiges Deutschland. 14 Behrens, “Von der Entwicklung der Schrift,” 35. 15 Mateo Kries, “Le Corbusier in Germany,” in A Study of the Decorative Art Movement in Germany, by Le Corbusier, trans. Alex T. Anderson, ed. Mateo Kries (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2008), 53. 16 Burke, “Peter Behrens and the German Letter,” 24–25. 17 Der Kaiser und der Architekt . . . ; Das Buch des Jahres, my translation. 18 Behrens, “Von der Entwicklung der Schrift,” 35–36. 19 Peter Sloterdijk, “Bild und Anblick: Versuch über atmosphärisches Sehen,” in Ausgewählte Übertreibungen: Gespräche und Interviews 1993–2012, ed. Bernhard Klein (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 241, my translation. 20 Ponten, Babylonische Turm, 409, my translation. 21 Sloterdijk, Spheres, 1:25. 22 Paul Scheerbart to Bruno Taut, Berlin, February 10, 1914, translated in McElheny and Burgin, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!, 133. 23 Johannes Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus: Gestaltungs- und Formenlehre (Ravensburg: Otto Maier Verlag, 1963), 11, my translation. 24 Birnbaum, “Selbstbiographie,” 88, my translation. 25 Sloterdijk, “Bild und Anblick,” 241. Sloterdijk’s Sphären appears to be typeset in Stempel Garamond, released in 1925 as a revival of a 1592 specimen. Stempel acquired a majority share of the Klingspor foundry in 1917. 26 Sloterdijk, Spheres, 1:20. 27 Sloterdijk, “Spheres Theory,” 127. 28 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Le Futurisme,” Le Figaro, February 20, 1909, my translation. 29 Birnbaum, Gläubige Kunst, 12, my translation. 30 Weinreb, Roots of the Bible, 12. 31 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” [1947], trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and John Glenn Gray, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 219. See also Peter Sloterdijk, “Der Operable Mensch: Anmerkungen zur ethischen Situation der Gen-Technologie,” in Der (im-)perfekte Mensch: Vom Recht auf Unvollkommenheit, ed. Helga

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33 34 35

36 37 38

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Raulff (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 97–98. For an account that ties Heidegger’s description of modernity to Ernst Bloch’s “empty spaces” (222n21) and to the tabula rasa of the modernist utopia as the material “given over to architecture” (13), see also Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, 3–14. Der Kaiser und der Architekt . . . ; Das Buch des Jahres, my translation. Ibid., my translation. Leo Oser, “Die Bücher von Uriel Birnbaum,” in “Uriel Birnbaum Sonderheft,” special issue, Menorah 2, no. 5 (May 1924): 1, my translation. Uriel Birnbaum, Der Seelen-Spiegel: Hundertzwanzig Grotesken (Vienna: Thyrsos-­Verlag, 1924). Oser, “Die Bücher von Uriel Birnbaum,” 3–4, my translation. Ibid., 2–3, my translation.

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412 Barnard, Anne. “Atop Spiral Minaret, Army Sniper Teams Take Aim.” Boston Globe, January 28, 2005. Barnard, Cyril C., and Arthur D. Roberts. “Special Libraries.” In The Year’s Work in Librarianship: Volume 11, 1938, edited by Arundell Esdaile and J. H. P. Pafford, 27–48. London: The Library Association, 1939. Barr, Alfred. Preface to Bayer, Gropius, and Gropius, Bauhaus 1919–1928, 7–9. Barthes, Roland. “The Eiffel Tower.” In The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, translated by Richard Howard, 3–17. New York: Hill and Wang, 1979. Bayer, Herbert, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, eds. Bauhaus 1919–1928. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938. Bedoire, Fredric. “The Promised City: New York.” In The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture, 1830–1930, translated by Roger Tanner, 377–453. Jersey City: Ktav, 2004. Behrens, Peter. Feste des Lebens und der Kunst. Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1900. ———. “Von der Entwicklung der Schrift.” Translated by Chris Burke. In Burke, “Peter Behrens and the German Letter,” 35–36. Bergengruen, Werner. Schriftstellerexistenz in der Diktatur: Aufzeichnungen und Reflexionen zu Politik, Geschichte und Kultur 1940–1963. Edited by Frank-Lothar Kroll, N. Luise Hackelsberger, and Sylvia Taschka. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2005. “Gerrit Mannoury and his Fellow Significians on Mathematics and Mysticism.” In Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study, edited by Teun Koetsier and Luc Bergmans, 549–68. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005. Berlage, Hendrik Petrus. Het pantheon der menschheid: Afbeeldingen der ontwerpen. Rotterdam: Brusse, 1915. Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Edited by Henry Hardy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991. Berthold, Werner, Brita Eckert, and Frank Wende, eds. Deutsche Intellektuelle im Exil: Ihre Akademie und die “American Guild for German Cultural Freedom.” Munich: K. G. Saur Verlag, 1993. Bey, Essad [Lev Nussimbaum]. Twelve Secrets of the Caucasus. Translated by G. Chychele Waterston. New York: Viking Press, 1931.

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414 Derry, T. K., and Trevor I. Williams. A Short History of Technolog y. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Vol. 2, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Diderot, Denis, and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 28 vols. Paris, 1751–72. Döhl, Reinhard. Hermann Finsterlin: Eine Annäherung. Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1988. Doosry, Yasmin. “Wohlauf, laßt uns eine Stadt und einen Turm bauen .  .   . ”: Studien zum Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2002. Dorner, Alexander. “The Background of the Bauhaus.” In Bayer, Gropius, and Gropius, Bauhaus 1919–1928, 11–15. Dugdale, Kyle. Babel’s Present. Basel: Standpunkte, 2016. ———. “City of God: On the Longing for Architectonic Perfection.” In The Individual and Utopia: A Multidisciplinary Study of Humanity and Perfection, edited by Cameron Ellis and Clint Jones, 179–99. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. ———. “Die Materielle Richtung der Utopieen: Uriel Birnbaum’s Contribution to Sloterdijk’s Spheres.” In “Architecture and Utopia,” edited by Nathaniel Coleman, special issue, Utopian Studies 25, no. 1 (2014): 194–216.

De Gruyter, Josiah Willem. “Uriel Birnbaum, denker, dichter, teekenaar.” Het Vaderland, March 8, 1940, evening edition, C1.

———. “Faith in Architecture.” In “Ethics in Architecture: Festschrift for Karsten Harries,” edited by Eduard Führ, special issue, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land: International Journal of Architectural Theory 22, no. 36 (2017): 71–82.

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———. “They Too Were Silent.” Perspecta 48, Amnesia (2015): 108–17.

———. Zweiter Vortrag über Babel und Bibel. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1903.

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415 Ford, George Burdett. “Ein amerikanisches Stadt-Ideal.” Deutsche Bauzeitung 50, no. 87 (1916): 450–54. ———. “Planning the City for Community Life.” The National Real Estate Journal 13 ( June 1916): 357–58. ———. “What Has Been Accomplished in City Planning during the Year 1916.” The Art World 2, no. 5 (August 1917): 442–44. Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock, 1970. Frank, Hans. Im Angesicht des Galgens. Munich: Friedrich Alfred Beck, 1953. Friedlander, Gerald, trans. Pirkê de Rabbi Eliezer: (The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great) According to the Text of the Manuscript Belonging to Abraham Epstein of Vienna. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1916. Fritsch, Theodor. Handbuch der Judenfrage. 49th ed. Leipzig: Hammer-Verlag, 1944.

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———. Critique of Cynical Reason. Translated by Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ———. “Der Operable Mensch: Anmerkungen zur ethischen Situation der Gen-Technologie.” In Der (im-)perfekte Mensch: Vom Recht auf Unvollkommenheit), edited by Helga Raulff, 97–114. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001. ———. Spheres. Vol. 1, Bubbles: Microspherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011. ———. Spheres. Vol. 2, Globes: Macrospherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. South Pasa­ dena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014. ———. “Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself about the Poetics of Space.” Harvard Design Magazine 30 (Spring/Summer 2009): 126–37. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. A World Split Apart: Commencement Address Delivered at Harvard University, June 8, 1978. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Speer, Albert. “Die Bürde werde ich nicht mehr los.” Interview by Manfred W. Hentschel and Wolfgang Malanowski, Der Spiegel, November 7, 1966, 48–62. ———. Erinnerungen. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1989. ———. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Spencer, John R., trans. Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture: Being the Treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino, Known as Filarete. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Speidel, Manfred. “Bruno Taut and Berlin Architecture from 1913 to 1923.” Translated by Daniela Haller. In City of Architecture, Architecture of the City: Berlin 1900–2000, edited by Thorsten Scheer, Josef Paul Kleihues, and Paul Kahlfeldt, 104–19. Berlin: Nicolai, 2000.

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Bibliography Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson. Vol. 2, Perspectives of World-History. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928. Spreckelsen, Tilman. “An den Flüssen von Babylon.” Frankfurter Allgemeine, June 24, 2008.

423 ———. Die Stadtkrone. Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1919. ———. ‘‘Eine Notwendigkeit.’’ Der Sturm 4, no. 196/197 (February 1, 1914): 174–75. ———, ed. Frühlicht: Beilage zu Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit (Berlin) 4 (1920).

Stamm, Rainer, and Daniel Schreiber, eds. Bau einer neuen Welt: Architektonische Visionen des Expressionismus. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003.

———, ed. Frühlicht: Beilage zu Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit (Berlin) 8 (1920).

Stavrinaki, Maria. La Chaîne de verre: Une correspondance expressioniste. Translated by Jean-Léon Muller. Paris: Éditions de La Villette, 2009.

———. “Mein erstes Jahr ‘Stadtbaurat.’” Frühlicht: Eine Folge für die Verwirklichung des neuen Baugedankens (Magdeburg) 1, no. 4 (1922): 125–31.

Strabo. Geography. Translated by Horace Leonard Jones. Vol. 7. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930.

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Stübben, J. “New-York’s Bauordnung und Stadtbauplan.” Deutsche Bauzeitung 49, no. 86 (1915): 481–84. Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. ———. “New Babylon.” In The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, 171–89. Translated by Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.

———, ed. Frühlicht: Beilage zu Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit (Berlin) 14 (1920).

———. “A Programme for Architecture.” Translated by Michael Bullock. In Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes, 41–43. Taylor, Mark C. After God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Taylor, Robert R. The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Ter Braak, Menno. Cinema Militans. Utrecht: De Gemeenschap, 1929.

Tängerstad, Erik. “The Medieval in the Modern: The Cathedral and the Skyscraper in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” In The Image of the Baltic, edited by Michael F. Scholz, Robert Bohn, and Carina Johansson, 145–63. Visby: Gotland University Press, 2012.

———. “De joodsche geest en de litteratuur.” In Anti-semitisme en Jodendom, edited by H. J. Pos, 148–64. Arnhem: Van Loghum Slaterus, 1939.

Taut, Bruno. Alpine Architektur. Hagen: Folkwang-Verlag, 1919.

———. “Revolutionnaire poezie.” Het Vaderland, February 11, 1934, evening edition.

———. The City Crown. Translated by Matthew Mindrup and Ulrike Altenmüller-Lewis. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015.

———. “Specialiteiten: De roeping van den mensch is mensch te zijn.” Review of Duizenden-eenige hoofdstukken over specialiteiten, by Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Het Vaderland, May 16, 1937.

———. “Der Regenbogen: Aufruf zum farbigen Bauen.” Frühlicht: Eine Folge für die Verwirklichung des neuen Baugedankens 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1921): 28. ———. “Der Sozialismus des Künstlers.” Sozialistische Monatshefte 25, no. 4 (March 24, 1919): 259–62. ———. Die Auflösung der Städte; oder, Die Erde eine gute Wohnung; oder auch: Der Weg zur Alpinen Architektur; in 30 Zeichnungen. Hagen: Folkwang-Verlag, 1920.

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———. “Dionysos en Pentheus.” De Gids 96 (1932): part 3, 184.

———. “Tijdschrift in bloei.” Het Vaderland, January 8, 1937, evening edition. Thiele, Regina, and Jens Brokfeld. “Uriel Birnbaums künstlerisches Werk.” Uriel Birnbaum Nachlass, Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien. Accessed July 1, 2022. http://www.mmz-­ potsdam.de/birnbaum/. “Thousands in Tribute at von Hindenburg Rites.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 7, 1934.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD Timm, Erika. “Solomon Birnbaum’s Life and Work.” Translated by Ruth Segal. In Salomo A. Birnbaum: Ein Leben für die Wissenschaft, vol. 2, Paläographie, edited by Erika Timm, Eleazar Birnbaum, and David Birnbaum, ix– xxv. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011.

424 Vitruvius. De architectura libri dece traducti de latino in vulgare. Edited and translated by Cesare Cesariano. Como, 1521. ———. The Ten Books on Architecture. Trans­ lated by Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.

Trevor-Roper, Hugh R., ed. Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944: His Private Conversations. Translated by Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens. New York: Enigma Books, 2000.

Voigt, Wolfgang. “Herman Sörgels Makro­ projekt ‘Atlantropa.’” in Stamm and Schreiber, Bau einer neuen Welt, 76–79.

Tupitsyn, Margarita. El Lissitzky: Experiments in Photography. New York: Houk Friedman, 1991.

Volf, Miroslav. “Architecture, Memory, and the Sacred.” In Britton,  Constructing the Ineffable, 60–65.

Ungers, Oswald Mathias, ed. Die gläserne Kette: Visionäre Architekturen aus dem Kreis um Bruno Taut 1919–1920. Berlin: Akademie der Künste, [1963].

Wallas, Armin A. “‘Gläubige Kunst’—Zivi­ lisationskritik als Gottes-Offenbarung: Bemerkungen zu Uriel Birnbaums Frühwerk.” In Deutschsprachige jüdische Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, 2:243–95. Wuppertal: Arco Verlag, 2008.

Uriel Birnbaum. Vienna: Verlag Wiener Zeit­ kunst, [1919]. “Uriël Birnbaum.” Het Vaderland, Feburary 27, 1940, evening edition, C1. Van Eeden, Frederik. Dagboek 1878–1923. 4 vols. Culemborg: Tjeenk Willink-Noorduijn, 1971–72. ———. Het Godshuis in de Lichtstad. Amster­dam: Versluys, 1921. Van Leeuwen, Leon B. Let My Half Cry: An Autobiography. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2007. Van Lokhorst, Emmy. De toren van Babel. Amsterdam: Querido, 1934. Velmede, August Friedrich, ed. Ewiges Deutsch­ land: Ein deutsches Hausbuch, Herausgegeben vom Winterhilfswerk des Deutschen Volkes. Vol.  4. Braunschweig: Verlag Georg Westermann, 1942. Veth, Cornelis. “Léon Holman, Uriël Birnbaum, Theo Ortmann.” De Vrije Bladen 16, no. 12 (December 1939): 3–27. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ———. Histories of the Immediate Present. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. ———. “The Space of History: Modern Museums from Patrick Geddes to Le Corbusier.” In The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts, edited by Michaela Giebelhausen, 160–82. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

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Wartke, Ralf-B., ed. Auf dem Weg nach Babylon: Robert Koldewey—Ein Archäologenleben. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2008. Wassermann, Jakob. Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude. Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1921. Weinreb, Friedrich. Collaboratie en Verzet, 1940–1945: Een poging tot ontmythologisering. 3 vols. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1969. ———. “Das Verborgene im Buch Esther.” Symbolon: Jahrbuch für Symbolforschung 6 (1968): 163–78. ———. “Das Verborgene im Buch Esther.” In Schneider, Chassidische Narrenparadies, 9–32. ———. De Bijbel als schepping. The Hague: Servire, 1963. ———. De Bijbel als schepping. [Callantsoog?]: Hebreeuwse Academie, 2010. ———. Der göttliche Bauplan der Welt: Der Sinn der Bibel nach der ältesten jüdischen Überlieferung. Translated by Christian Schu­ macher. Zurich: Origo-Verlag, 1966. ———. Die langen Schatten des Krieges. Translated by Franz J. Lukassen. 3 vols. Weiler im Allgäu: Thauros Verlag, 1989. ———. Die Rolle Esther: Das Buch Esther nach der ältesten jüdischen Überlieferung. Translated by Eining Düssel. Zurich: Origo-Verlag, Zürich, 1968. ———. “Es war vor fünfzig Jahren: Zwei Ver­leumdungen und ihre Folgen.” In “Weinreb erzählt,” edited by Heini Ringger, special issue, Die Wolke: Forum der Schweizer Akademie für Grundlagenstudien . . . 8, no. 2 ( July 1987): 4–55.

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Bibliography ———. Foreword to Birnbaum, Errettung der Welt, i–vi. ———. Interview by Bibeb [Elisabeth Maria Lampe-Soutberg]. Vrij Nederland (Amster­ dam), November 29, 1969. ———. Roots of the Bible: An Ancient View for a New Outlook. Translated by N. Keus. Braunton: Merlin, 1986. ———. Schöpfung im Wort: Die Struktur der Bibel in jüdischer Überlieferung. Translated by Konrad Dietzfelbinger and Franz J. Lukassen. Weiler im Allgäu: Thauros Verlag, 1994. ———. Schöpfung im Wort: Die Struktur der Bibel in jüdischer Überlieferung. Translated by Konrad Dietzfelbinger and Franz J. Lukassen. 3rd ed. Zurich: Verlag der Friedrich-WeinrebStiftung, 2012. ———. “Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes.” Wortmühle: Literaturblätter aus dem Burgen­ land (Eisenstadt) 2–3 (1983): 20–24. ———. “Über Leben und Werk eines Freundes.” In Schneider, Chassidische Narrenparadies, 296–301. ———. Vor Babel: Die Welt der Ursprache. Translated by Konrad Dietzfelbinger. Weiler im Allgäu: Thauros Verlag, 1995. ———. “Wunder und Engel um Uriel Birn­ baum.” In Schneider, Chassidische Narren­ para­dies, 236–41. ———. Zahl, Zeichen, Wort: Das symbolische Universum der Bibelsprache. Reinbek bei Ham­burg: Rowohlt, 1978. Weise, Christian. Reiffe Gedancken. Leipzig, 1682. Weixlgärtner, Arpad. “Der Maler-Dichter Uriel Birnbaum,” Die Graphischen Künste (Vienna) 50, no. 1 (1927): 87–103.

425 Wingler, Hans M. The Bauhaus: Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago. Translated by Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert, edited by Joseph Stein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978. Woodward, Christopher. In Ruins. London: Chatto and Windus, 2001. Woolley, C. Leonard. Ur of the Chaldees: A Record of Seven Years of Excavation. London: Ernest Benn, 1929. Wotton, Henry. The Elements of Architecture. London, 1624. Wullen, Moritz, and Günther Schauerte, eds. Mythos. Vol. 1 of Babylon: Mythos und Wahrheit. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2008. Würzner, Hans, ed. Österreichische Exil­ lite­ratur in den Niederlanden 1934–1940. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986. Wysling, Hans. “Glück und Ende einer Freund­schaft.” In Wysling and Pfister, Dichter oder Schriftsteller, 7–24. Wysling, Hans, and Werner Pfister, eds. Dich­ter oder Schriftsteller? Der Briefwechsel zwischen Thomas Mann und Josef Ponten 1919– 1930. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1988. ———, ed. Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949. Translated by Don Reneau, Richard Winston, and Clara Winston. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Zijlmans, Kitty. “Jüdische Künstler im Exil: Uriel und Menachem Birnbaum.” Trans­ lated by Sofia Rodriguez. In Würzner, Österreichische Exilliteratur, 145–55. Zukowsky, John, ed. The Plan of Chicago, 1909–1979. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1979.

Welter, Volker. Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Whyte, Iain Boyd. Bruno Taut and the Archi­ tecture of Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———, ed. and trans. The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies by Bruno Taut and His Circle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. ———, ed. Modernism and the Spirit of the City. London: Routledge, 2003.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 0.1 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 0.2 Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress. 0.3 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 0.4 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers. 0.5 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 0.6 (left) Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Bodl. 270b fol. 1v. (right) Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, Cod. 2554. 0.7 Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives; © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich.

426 1.8 British Museum, London. 1.9, 1.10 Google, © 2013 DigitalGlobe. 1.11 (top) Felix Friebe, stock.adobe.com. (bottom) Photograph Steve Clemens. 1.12 Photograph John Russell. 1.13 Heinrich Schäfer and Walter Andrae, Die Kunst des Alten Orients (Berlin: PropyläenVerlag, 1925), 540. 1.14 US Department of Defense / Laurie Rush, Tracy Wager, and James Zeidler, Legacy Resource Management Program. 1.15 Fakhri Mahmood, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/?oldid=608477003 1.16 Georg Gerster / Science Source. 1.17 Agnieszka Dolatowska / Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, Republic of Poland.

0.8 (above) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. (top) Yale University Art Gallery.

1.18 (top) Google, © 2014 Maxar Technologies, with overlay by John Russell. (bottom) Photograph John Russell.

1.1 Photograph Kyle Dugdale.

1.19 Gertrude Bell / Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, Koldewey-Nachlass.

1.2 US Department of Defense / Spc. Ernest Sivia III. 1.3 Bibliothèque nationale de France / Augustin Calmet, Dictionnaire historique, critique, chronologique, géographique et littéral de la Bible, rev. ed. (Paris, 1730). 1.4 Courtesy of Musée du Louvre, Paris. 1.5 Courtesy of MetaDesign GmbH. 1.6 Photograph Ian Stubbs, https://www.flickr. com/photos/bolckow/3325402040/. 1.7 (top + detail at 392–93) US Department of Defense / Spc. Samantha Ciaramitaro. (bottom) Used with permission.

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1.20 Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, Berlin. 1.21 + detail at 24 Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Koldewey, Die Tempel von Babylon und Borsippa, plate 11. 1.22 Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung 39, no. 71 (August 30, 1919): 425, fig. 7. 1.23 (top) © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum / Deutsche OrientGesellschaft Bab Ph 157+158, photographer unknown, reprint Olaf M. Teßmer. (bottom) Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Koldewey, Die Tempel von Babylon und Borsippa, 41, fig. 60.

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Image Credits 2.1, 2.2 Moses Mendelssohn Center for EuropeanJewish Studies, University of Potsdam, Uriel Birnbaum Archive. 2.3 Photograph © Zentralarchiv der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, SMB-ZA, V / Fotosammlung 2.19/8722. 2.4, 2.5 Moses Mendelssohn Center for EuropeanJewish Studies, University of Potsdam, Uriel Birnbaum Archive. 3.1 US National Archives, 208-PR-10L-3. 3.2 Courtesy of Academie voor de Hebreeuwse Bijbel en de Hebreeuwse Taal. 3.3, 3.4 Moses Mendelssohn Center for EuropeanJewish Studies, University of Potsdam, Uriel Birnbaum Archive. 3.5 + details at 104 and on back cover (top) Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Kircher, Turris Babel, 41a. (right) New York Public Library. 3.6 Bibliothèque nationale de France. 4.1 (top + details at 4 and at 411–12) Kunsthisto­ risches Museum, Vienna. (bottom) Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 4.2 (left) Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. (right) Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

427 4.7 Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. 4.8 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. 4.9 Antonio di Pietro Averlino, Trattato d’architettura, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Fondo Nazionale II.I.140, 5v. 4.10 Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. 4.11 Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University. 4.12 Bibliothèque municipale, Mâcon. 5.1 Courtesy of Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris. 5.2 Flinker, Fünfundzwanzig Jahre Bukum. 5.3 (left) Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Georg Dehio, Das Straßburger Münster (Munich: Piper, 1922), 2. (right) Frederick H. Evans, Lincoln Cathedral from the Castle, Metropolitan Museum of Art 1997.398.3, The Rubel Collection, Gift of William Rubel, 1997. 5.4 US National Archives, 242-EB-7-45B; Bavarian State Library Munich / image archive. 5.5 Postcard published by Albert Neubert, photographer unknown.

4.3 + detail at 136 Courtesy of The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology.

5.6 Photograph courtesy of Bonhams.

4.4 Antonio di Pietro Averlino, Trattato d’architettura, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Fondo Nazionale II.I.140, 4v.

5.7 Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin, Inv. Nr. 9063 (left) and Inv. Nr. 9064 (right).

4.5 Courtesy of The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology.

5.8 Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin, Inv. Nr. 9162.

4.6 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

5.9 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, gift of Mrs. Hugh Ferriss; 1969-1371, 1969-137-2, 1969-137-3, 1969-137-4.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 5.10 Burnham and Bennett, Plan of Chicago, figs. 131, 132, 141. 6.1 + detail at 176, 6.2, 6.3 Photograph Kyle Dugdale. 6.4 Third Reich Collection, Library of Congress; photograph Kyle Dugdale. 6.5 Postcard, photographer unknown. 6.6 (top) “Ordensburg Sonthofen” photograph album, author unknown, ca. 1939, Army War College Library / Matthew B Ridgway collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LOT 7488 (H) [P&P]. (bottom left) Postcard, photographer Hugo Schmölz. (bottom right) “Ordensburg Sonthofen” photograph album, author unknown, ca. 1939, Army War College Library / Matthew B Ridgway collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LOT 7488 (H) [P&P]. 6.7 Allie Caulfield, CC BY 2.0, https://flickr.com/ photos/28577026@N02/5482009587. 6.8 Pierre André Leclercq, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://www.flickr.com/photos/95387988@ N07/44456344885. 6.9 (left) Rolf-Werner Nehrdich © Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Farbdia-Archiv. (middle) Stadtarchiv Augsburg. (right) Allie Caulfield, CC BY 2.0, https://www. flickr.com/photos/28577026@N02/5484518755. 6.10 + detail at 214 Bundesarchiv, Plak 002-042-154. 6.11 Third Reich Collection, Library of Congress; photograph Kyle Dugdale. 6.12 (left) Der Baumeister 35, no. 10 (1937): 301, photographer unknown; Silesian University of Technology Digital Library. (right) Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1971-016-29, CC BY-SA 3.0, from Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler abseits vom Alltag (Berlin: ZeitgeschichteVerlag, [ca. 1937]). 6.13 US National Archives, 532605.

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428 6.14 Der Baumeister 35, no. 10 (1937): 311, photographer unknown; Silesian University of Technology Digital Library. 6.15 (left) Dokumentationszentrum Reichs­partei­ tagsgelände, Nürnberg. (right) Nuremberg City Archives A 62 Nr. LA-10998. 6.16 (left) Ullstein Bild / Granger: Schirner, 00266429. (right) Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1992-113-21A. 6.17 Harvard Art Museums / Busch-Reisinger Museum, gift of Herbert Bayer, photograph © President and Fellows of Harvard College, BR48.84. 7.1 Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Hans-ScharounArchiv, Gläserne-Kette 71. 7.2 © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 7.3 © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; photograph Anja Elisabeth Witte / Berlinische Galerie. 7.4 + detail at 252 Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. 7.5 Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Taut, Stadtkrone, 22, fig. 6. 7.6 Charles Chipiez and Georges Perrot, Le Temple de Jérusalem et la Maison du Bois-Liban restitués d’après Ezéchiel et le Livre des Rois (Paris, 1889), plate 3, and Histoire de l’art dans l’antiquité: Egypte, Assyrie, Perse, Asie Mineure, Grèce, Étrurie, Rome, vol. 2, Chaldée et Assyrie (Paris, 1884), plate 4. 7.7–7.9 Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Taut, Stadtkrone, 71, figs. 45–48. 7.10 Trinity College, Cambridge. 7.11 Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Victor Place, Ninive et l’Assyrie (Paris, 1867), plate 18 bis.

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Image Credits 8.1 George Grantham Bain Collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-B2-2365-12 [P&P]. 8.2 Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Taut, Stadtkrone, 93, fig. 61. 8.3 New York Public Library. 8.4 (top) Deutsche Bauzeitung 49, no. 80 (1915): 450. (middle) New York, The Metropolis of the Western World, 13. 8.5 Deutsche Kinemathek, Erich Kettelhut Archive. 8.6 Mendelsohn, Amerika, 4. 8.7 + detail at 286 Deutsche Kinemathek, Erich Kettelhut Archive. 8.8 Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang (Babelsberg, Germany: Universum Film, 1927). 8.9 Semsch, Singer Building, 5. 8.10 New York Public Library. 8.11 Berlage, Het pantheon der menschheid, 12–13 (top) and 9 (bottom). 8.12 Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam / LOND, 4.1. 8.13 Collection Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam / LOND, 4.5-2. 8.14 (top) Berlage, Hed Pantheon der Menschheid, 16–17. (middle) Van Eeden, Het Godshuis in de Lichtstad. (bottom) Bayerisches Hauptsstaatsarchiv, Büro Speer Pläne 2845. 8.15 Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-679-8187-26, photograph Sierstorpff (Sierstorpp), CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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429 8.16 (middle) Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-679-8187-31, photograph Sierstorpff (Sierstorpp), CC-BY-SA 3.0. (bottom) DigitalGlobe (WV01) image captured on June 4, 2010 as shown in the February 20, 2014 version of the World Imagery map: Esri Community Maps Contributors, GUGiK, Esri, HERE, Garmin, GeoTechnologies, Inc, METI/ NASA, USGS, https://arcg.is/00rim5. 8.17 (left) Postcard, photographer unknown. (middle) Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, MS85042-2°. (right) Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, PLA16333086. 8.18 Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives, Toronto. 8.19 (left) Thomas J. Watson Library Special Collections, Metropolitan Museum of Art. (right) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. 8.20, 8.21 © Wenzel-Hablik-Foundation, Itzehoe. 8.22 Hablik, Schaffende Kräfte, plate 9 and plate 17 with caption. 8.23, 8.24 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. 8.25 Courtesy of the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. 9.1 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. 9.2 Harvard Art Museums / Busch-Reisinger Museum, gift of Walter Gropius, photograph © President and Fellows of Harvard College, BRGA.3.35; © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 9.3 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. 9.4 Universitätsbibliothek, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD 9.5 Bruno Taut, Glashaus: Werkbund-Ausstellung Cöln 1914 (Berlin: Buchdruckerei Albert Nauck, 1914), 1. 9.6 Offizieller Katalog der deutschen WerkbundAusstellung Cöln 1914 (Cologne: Rudolf Mosse, 1914). 9.7 (above) Postcard, photographer unknown. (right) Alessandro Pasi, Leica, témoin d’un siècle, trans. Antonin Lautrey (Manosque, France: Le bec en l’air, 2007), 31, https:// commons.wikimedia.org/?oldid=304443643. 9.8 Courtesy of the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. 9.9 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. 9.10 Moses Mendelssohn Center for EuropeanJewish Studies, University of Potsdam, Uriel Birnbaum Archive. 9.11 Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal. 9.12, 9.13 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. 9.14 (top left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (top middle) Universitätsbibliothek, BauhausUniversität Weimar. (top right) Ferriss, Metropolis of Tomorrow, 71; used with permission. (bottom) © Fondation Constant, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2023; Kunstmuseum Den Haag, photograph Tom Haartsen. 9.15 (top) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (left, right) Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam, Uriel Birnbaum Archive. 9.16 (top) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (left) Harvard Art Museums / Busch-Reisinger Museum, gift of Ise Gropius, photograph © President and Fellows of Harvard College, BRGA.28.83.

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430 (middle) Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-09733, CC-BY-SA 3.0. (right) Julius Michels, “Die 1000 Wohnungen der Siedlung Bad Dürrenberg, Architekt: Alexander Klein,” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst 13, no. 7 (1929): 287, fig. 12. 9.17 (top) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (middle, bottom) © Wenzel-HablikFoundation, Itzehoe. 9.18 (left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (middle) National Gallery Prague, O 4302. (right) Antonia Hoerschelmann and Peter Weiermair, eds., Von Schiele bis Wotruba: Arbeiten auf Papier 1908 bis 1938 (Kilchberg, Switzerland: Stemmle, 1995), 165, fig. 89. 9.19 (left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (right) Stanley Greene / NOOR. 9.20 (left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (middle) Berliner Architekturwelt 13 (1911): 201, fig. 258. (right) Alfred Koerner, Die Bauten des Königlichen Botanischen Gartens in Dahlem (Berlin: Wilhelm Ernst, 1910), plate 4 fig. 1. 9.21 (left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (middle) Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg / Taut, Auflösung der Städte, plate 23. (right) Ponten, Architektur, 2:202, fig. 405. 9.22 (left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (middle) “Deutsche Form im Kriegsjahr: Die Ausstellung Köln 1914,” special issue, Jahrbuch des deutschen Werkbundes 4 (2015): 78. (right) Universitätsbibliothek, BauhausUniversität Weimar. 9.23 (left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (middle) Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Ruf zum Bauen (1920). (right) Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Luckhardt-und-Anker-Archiv, 780 pl.13.46.1. 9.24 (left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven.

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(middle) Scientific American 109, no. 4 (1913): 61. (right) Akademie der Künste, Berlin, BrunoTaut-Archiv, 1008 F.4; © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 9.25 (left, middle) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (right) “Adolf Loos: Das Grand-Hotel Babylon,” in “Das neue Wien,” ed. Paul Westheim, special issue, Das Kunstblatt 8, no. 4 (1924): 97. 9.26 Max Krajewsky, untitled photograph, ca. 1940, Army War College Library / Matthew B Ridgway collection, Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LOT 7486 (G) [P&P]. 9.27, 9.28 + detail at 72 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. 9.29 (left) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. (right) Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum. 9.30 + detail at 330 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1878-A-1641. 9.31 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce material in this book. Every effort has been made to supply accurate credits. Any error or omission is inadvertent and will be corrected in future editions if notification is sent in writing.

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Abraham, 33–34, 37 Adam and Eve, 34, 80, 126, 138–50 Adler, Bruno, 18, 21, 400 Aktion, Die, 76, 87, 121 Alberti, Leon Battista, 13–17, 338 Alexander the Great, 57, 65 alienation, 119, 149–51, 155, 160, 170 “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” 107, 306 Anthonisz, Cornelis, 29 anti-Semitism, 86, 121, 193-95 Arbeitsrat für Kunst, 265–66 architect as god, 21, 28, 86, 162, 278 See also God as architect architecture ends of, 17, 81, 145–46, 155, 243, 273, 320 origins of, 13, 36, 138–40 praise, glory, and worship of, 14, 271, 282, 289, 300, 362, 387 architectus secundus deus, 140, 144, 235, 258–59, 348, 379 Arendt, Hannah, 147 Aristotle, 62, 274, 338 Augsburg city hall, 228–32, 289 Augustine, Saint, 76, 82, 150, 186 Auschwitz, 74, 75, 106, 129

B

Babel, Tower of, 26–67, 106–7, 122–31, 138–72, 178–85, 198–208, 254, 270, 292–303, 325, 382, 386–88, 401, 403–407 Babylon, 34 as metaphor, 42, 67, 291–92 Etemenanki, 40, 47, 52, 55–58, 64–65, 172 (see also Babel, Tower of ) excavation of, 58–65, 83–85 exhibitions of, 38–42, 51, 58–61, 64–65 Ishtar Gate, 39, 47–51, 55, 58, 64–65 lions of, 38–40, 48, 83 military occupation of, 40, 42–58, 65 Processional Way, 48, 64–65 walls of, 30, 33, 36–37, 48, 62, 158–60, 199 ziggurat of. See Babel, Tower of Barnum and Bailey Circus, 67 Bartning, Otto, 82, 307 Bauernfeld Prize, 88, 120, 185, 407 Bauhaus, 261–67, 282, 400 manifestos, 18–21, 242–47, 256, 265–66 Baumeister, 98, 178, 224–25, 234, 343 Behrens, Peter, 75, 395–97 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus, 299–304 Berlin, 40, 74–79, 83–86, 208–9, 224, 368, 369 Neues Museum, 67, 76, 197 Pergamonmuseum, 39, 58–61, 64–65, 122 Secession, 76, 311 Bible, 21, 26, 40, 82–85, 106, 123, 232, 400 Deuteronomy, 324 Ecclesiastes, 338, 350 Genesis, 34, 42, 45, 125–31, 138–72, 178,

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432 190, 243, 257–59, 325, 342, 344, 382, 386–88 Haggai, 259, 264–65 Isaiah, 149, 190 Micah, 300 Psalms, 162, 306–7 Birnbaum, Menachem, 75–76, 100–101 Birnbaum, Nathan, 75, 83, 114, 117 Birnbaum, Solomon, 75–76 Birnbaum, Uriel, 74–88, 99–101, 107–21, 185, 192, 195, 307–21 Apparition of the Heavenly City, The, 28–31, 37–38, 86, 380–82, 394, 400–401 Der Kaiser und der Architekt, 22, 87–99, 108–10, 114–16, 119, 185, 191, 195, 260, 268–70, 307, 321–26, 332–88, 394–97, 403–7 Die Errettung der Welt, 108, 317 Gläubige Kunst, 88, 185–92, 195, 242–47, 254 In Gottes Krieg, 88, 185 Moses, 88, 119–20, 324, 350, 407 Weltuntergang, 88, 318 Bruegel, Pieter, 54, 64, 79, 143, 158, 353 bungling incompetence, 189–90, 247, 254, 316 See also architect as god Burnham, Daniel, 209, 288

C

Cain and Abel, 149–51, 154 Camp Babylon. See Babylon: military occupation of cathedral, Gothic and modern, 181, 200–209, 219–22, 244–46, 265, 270–73, 275–80, 292, 368, 407 cathedral of light, 241–42, 276, 280 center and perimeter, 160, 232, 241–42, 275 city, the, 33–34, 149–53, 273, 355 Cologne Cathedral, 270, 346, 353 confusion of tongues, 123–25, 168, 170, 182, 259 cranes, construction, 231, 342, 353, 377–79 creation ex nihilo, 22, 345, 348 Crystal Chain, 254–68, 311, 316, 341 Czernowitz, 74–75, 88

D

D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 155 death of God. See God Delitzsch, Friedrich, 83–86 De Quincy, Quatremère, 155 Descartes, René, 32 deus architectus mundi, 140, 151, 258, 348, 379 Deutscher Werkbund, 76, 280, 344, 346 Dürer, Albrecht, 14–17, 86, 228, 397–98

E

Eden, Garden of, 138–51, 158, 166 Eisenman, Peter, 172

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Index Enlightenment, the, 31, 375, 400–401 Etemenanki. See Babel, Tower of eternity, 119, 190, 228, 231 Ewiges Deutschland, 228, 231–32 Exhibition for Unknown Architects, 265, 313 Expressionism, 18, 82, 88, 116, 170, 261, 267, 307–8, 316

F

Feininger, Lyonel, 18, 244–46, 256, 267, 276 Ferriss, Hugh, 170, 209, 359, 368 fig leaves, 148–49, 339, 388 Filarete (Antonio di Piero Averlino), 138, 165, 202–3, 211 Finsterlin, Hermann, 82, 254–68, 307, 311, 315, 337, 341–43, 371, 386 Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard, 160 Foucault, Michel, 125–26 Freud, Sigmund, 75, 117–19, 185 Futurism, 17–18, 342

G

German Oriental Society, 61, 83–85 Gesamtkunstwerk, 190, 244, 356, 396, 405–7 glass, colored and clear, 334, 344, 346–48, 362–68, 372, 385–86, 407 God as architect, 21, 116, 126, 140–43, 151, 205, 258, 400 (see also architect as god) as human construct, 31, 36–38, 85–86, 140, 172 death of, 31, 37, 82, 170–72, 181, 235, 244, 247, 258, 318, 401, 404 Word of, 17, 86, 125, 171, 228, 306, 398 (see also Bible) Goethe, Wolfgang von, 202, 205–8, 234 Google, 45–47 Grieb, Rosa, 87, 100–101 Griffin, Walter Burley, 209, 296 Gropius, Walter, 18, 242–44, 254, 264–68, 337, 344, 346, 359–62

433 Hugo, Victor, 67, 85 Hussein, Saddam, 47–48, 65 hut as antithesis to tower. See primitive hut

I

infinity, 13, 17, 30–31, 54, 164, 198, 241, 308, 316 inscriptions, architectural, 80–81, 348, 396, 398–400 Isonzo Front, 87, 307, 311 Itten, Johannes, 21, 400

J

Jerusalem, 39, 117, 151, 300

K

Kant, Immanuel, 32, 341 Kettelhut, Erich, 296 Kircher, Athanasius, 29, 51, 125, 146, 151, 153, 167 Kohtz, Otto, 208–9, 369 Koldewey, Robert, 39, 58–67, 79, 83, 86, 282

L

Lang, Fritz, 107, 170, 292–96, 368 language, 36, 124–28, 140–41, 154–55, 166, 194, 303 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 138, 155, 165 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), 138, 154, 170, 268 Lehmann-Haupt, Hellmut, 225, 234–37 Leuna works, 203, 362 Lissitzky, El, 21 London, 67 British Museum, 39–40, 47, 61, 64, 122 Luckhardt, Wassili, 311, 368 Luther, Martin, 259, 306

M

H

Hablik, Wenzel, 82, 87, 254–56, 265, 307–16, 341, 352, 362 Schaffende Kräfte, 311–15, 318 Hébrard, Ernest, 209, 296 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 32, 163, 205, 208 Heidegger, Martin, 26, 163–65, 171, 343, 405 Heller, Hugo, 87, 185, 197, 308–11 Herodotus, 54, 62, 160 Hitler, Adolf, 193–94, 202, 216–19, 231, 304–6 as architect, 218–19, 224–28, 234–37 Holl, Elias, 228–32 homelessness, 21, 149, 158, 260, 405

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Mann, Heinrich, 185, 216–17, 224 Mann, Thomas, 88, 184–85, 192–95, 216–17, 224 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 17–18, 402 master builder materialism, 82, 190–91, 246, 273, 277, 322 McKim, Mead and White, 289 Mendelsohn, Erich, 82, 87, 291–92, 307 Mesopotamia, 36–37, 42, 48, 52, 156, 282 metaphor, architecture as, 79–81, 97, 106, 160, 188–89, 337 metaphysics, 79, 160, 182, 197, 267, 273–74, 307, 321, 337 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 217–19, 267 modernism, 261, 267, 277, 337 modernity, 17–18, 82, 106

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ARCHITECTURE AFTER GOD godless, 33, 99, 119, 170 monument, 17, 172, 260, 304, 315, 385, 400 mortality, human and architectural, 144–50, 155–56, 270, 369, 376, 385, 401 Moses, 324, 350 myth and truth, 39–40, 96, 108, 112–14, 122–24, 189, 379–81, 387–88, 398–400

N

National Socialist (Nazi) Party, 100, 120, 198, 209, 217, 228, 246, 276 Nazi party rally grounds, Nuremberg, 237–242, 306 Nebuchadnezzar, 37, 38–39, 47–48, 55, 57, 222 New Babylon, 22, 359 New York City, 116–17, 170, 205, 209, 303 Manhattan Municipal Building, 289–91 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 40–42, 322 Singer Building, 296 skyline, 116, 289–96 Trinity Church, 292, 296 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 107, 119, 170, 180–82, 191, 200, 247, 259, 278, 341 Gay Science, 31, 163–65, 275, 318–20, 387, 401 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 257–58, 311–15 Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 22, 359 Nimrod, 151, 158 Noah’s Ark, 30, 153–54, 160

O

objectification and mastery, architectural, 164, 197, 343–48 Obrist, Hermann, 82, 307 One Thousand and One Nights, 79–81 order, 21, 273, 337, 376

P

Palladio, Andrea, 14 paper architecture, 183, 261, 399 Paris, 40 Eiffel Tower, 67, 128, 179 Cathedral of Notre-Dame, 67, 181, 271 Louvre, 38–39, 64 Perret, Jacques, 203 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 155–56, 163, 343–48, 372, 382 pluralism, architecture and, 282, 303–4 Polzer-Hoditz, Arthur, 100 Ponten, Josef, 192, 194–95, 216–17, 228, 238, 341 Architektur die nicht gebaut wurde, 196–211, 216, 237, 263, 288, 349, 368–69 Der Babylonische Turm, 178–84, 195–96, 202, 216, 222–24, 234, 244, 266, 270, 353 Der Meister, 219–24, 234, 235–37, 242, 271 pride, 162, 190, 296–99, 322, 372 prime constructor, 13, 140, 258

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434 See also God as architect prime mover, 21 primitive hut, 33, 131, 138–49, 155, 160, 271 Prometheus, 254, 260, 267, 386

Q

Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome, 155

R

Raumangst, Weltangst, Todesangst, 31, 160, 320, 338 religion as human construct. See God as human construct Rotterdam, 64, 110, 113 Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter, 267–68, 321, 337, 359, 375–76 Ruskin, John, 67

S

Samarra, Great Mosque of, 52–54 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 87 Schäffner, Katharine, 308–11 Scheerbart, Paul, 88, 116, 120, 259, 265, 307, 348, 362, 368, 386–87, 399 Schlemmer, Oskar, 244–47 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 144, 150, 311 science, 85, 106, 163, 343 Shinar, plain of, 30, 154, 158–60 Sloterdijk, Peter, 21, 26–38, 57–58, 85–86, 140, 153, 160, 189, 198–99, 320, 338, 374, 395, 398–401 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 375–76 Sonthofen, Ordensburg, 224, 227–28 specification, architectural, 154 Speer, Albert, 65, 238–41, 276, 306 Spengler, Oswald, 21, 33 Strabo, 36, 62 Strasbourg Cathedral, 200–202, 219, 234, 270, 280

T

tabernacle, 144, 147, 257 Tannenberg Monument, 304–6 Taut, Bruno, 76, 263–66, 315–16, 343, 352, 362, 368 Alpine Architektur, 338, 359, 368, 376 Architektur-Programm, Die Stadtkrone, 266, 268–82, 288–99 Glashaus, 280, 346–48, 368 Monument des neuen Gesetzes, 254–59, 264, 268, 276, 296, 306, 318–21, 350, 399 Weltbaumeister, 88, 116 technology, 156, 165, 246, 337, 343

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Index

435

temples, ancient and modern, 147, 154, 172, 225, 271, 303, 348 Ter Braak, Menno, 106–10, 113, 317 The Hague, Kunstzaal d’Audretsch, 101, 107–8 Torah, 34, 114, 128, 405 See also Bible Tower of Babel. See Babel, Tower of typography, 395–400 typology, 14, 131, 146, 154, 180, 292, 374

U

Ur, 33–34, 42–45, 52 utopia, 22, 97, 108–9, 121, 190–91, 202, 246, 264, 266–67, 278, 315–18, 375

V

Van Eeden, Frederik, and Jaap London, 299, 303–4 Van Eyck, Jan, 270, 353 Van Leeuwen, Henri, 113, 116–17 Vienna, 21, 64, 74–75, 79, 100, 117, 120–21 Kunstsalon Heller. See Heller, Hugo Secession, 87, 121, 356 Wiener Zeitkunst, 88, 186, 406 Vitruvius, 10–13, 17, 138, 376 Volf, Miroslav, 172

W

Weinreb, Friedrich, 112–31, 150, 165–67, 317, 405 bookplate for, 114, 126, 258 World War I, 86–87, 203, 275, 306 World War II, 22, 110–13, 124, 203 Wotton, Henry, 17, 32

X

Xerxes, 57

Y

Yale University, 224 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 10, 17, 394–95, 402

Z

ziggurat, 40, 208, 271, 282 See also Babylon: ziggurat of; Ur Zionism, 75, 116–17, 121

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With necessary adjustments and not a little embarrassment, I find myself dispensing thanks to God, to country, and to Yale. I am grateful to Karsten Harries, whose work first provoked my research at Yale, and whose writing remains the model for an engagement with architecture that takes seriously its entanglements with history, philosophy, and theology. I am also grateful to Kurt Forster, for planting seeds of curiosity; to Robert Stern and Deborah Berke, for nurturing them within a hospitable environment; to Karla Britton, Stanislaus von Moos, and Anthony Vidler, for their encouragement; and to Mario Carpo, Eckart Frahm, George Knight, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, and Emmanuel Petit, for their generosity along the way. Various groups have advanced my research. Preliminary work was presented to the long-suffering Society for Utopian Studies, and later speculations were tested on the Society of Architectural Historians. At a moment that proved formative for my writing, Julia Weber invited me to take part in a workshop hosted by the Comparative Literature department of Berlin’s Freie Universität. The Rare Book School’s Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography provided an enormous boost to my bibliographic expertise, as did the support of the Bibliographical Society of America. I am grateful to David Birnbaum at the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives in Toronto, whose helpfulness was aptly expressed in his readiness to underwrite the cost of a train ride home, eighty years later; to Karin Bürger at the University of Potsdam’s Moses Mendelssohn Center, who allowed me to spend unusually long hours in the Uriel Birnbaum Archive; to Kevin Repp at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, who introduced me to Der Kaiser und der Architekt; and to the Rare Book and Special Collections Division at the Library of Congress. I thank David Marold and Bettina Algieri

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437 at Birkhäuser for their patience; I thank series editor Reto Geiser for his faith; and I thank the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for their advice. I am grateful for my parents, Richard and Rotraut, who taught me to ask questions; for my brother Eric, who led the way; for Lydia, who did much to speed the writing of this book; and for Ella and Zanna, who did much to slow it down. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, who liked the fourth chapter. This would not be the first architectural text to express ­gratitude for royal patronage. But I owe a debt of thanks to HRH The Prince of Wales—now King Charles III—for making possible my incipient studies at Harvard several years ago. This book builds on his expressed commitment to an architecture that acknowledges its spiritual significance. Finally, as prime recipient of gratitude, and notwithstand­ ing the book’s title, I acknowledge the God to whom Uriel Birnbaum’s work was dedicated, and in whom we live and move and have our being. New York City, September 2022

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kyle Dugdale teaches history, theory, and design at Yale School of Architecture. He holds an undergraduate degree from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a professional degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and a doctoral degree from Yale. A resident of New York City and a licensed architect, he has also taught at Columbia and at the City College of New York. He is a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. His research has been supported by the Society of Architectural Historians, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and his work has been published in journals including Perspecta, Thresholds, Utopian Studies, and Wolkenkuckucksheim.

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For God is in the heavens, and thou art on the earth: therefore let thy words be few. Ecclesiastes 5:1, with regrets.

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Kyle Dugdale

Acquisitions Editor David Marold, Birkhäuser Verlag, Vienna, Austria Content and Production Editor Bettina R. Algieri, Birkhäuser Verlag, Vienna, Austria Proofreading Sue Pickett Series Design Concept MG&Co., Noëmi Mollet and Reto Geiser

Library of Congress Control Number 2022940940 Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche National­ bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de ISBN 978-3-0356-2499-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-0356-2502-8 © 2023 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/ Boston 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1   www.birkhauser.com

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