By Claire Zimmerman, CUNY Graduate Center
 

In the historiography of modern architecture, the importance of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer has traditionally been underemphasized. In the first case, this is partly due to the political battles Meyer fought and lost with two important men: Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It also results from Meyer's rejection of a condition of much avant-garde architectural work in Europe beginning even in the 1920s: the condition that paired radical rhetoric with apolitical practice. 1Hilberseimer suffers the opposite problem, sitting literally "in the shadow of Mies," as one of the few recent studies devoted to his work attests.2 Six years ago, the careers of Hilberseimer and Meyer received a brief resurrection at the hands of Michael Hays. Hays' effort was to discuss the alternative, "post-humanist" practices of these architects, to reincorporate their stories into the history of modern architecture, and to offer them as alternative models for future architectural investigation. 3 The impact of Hays' study in the intervening six years is unclear. It has not spawned a rash of investigations of the work of these two architects, as Fritz Neumeyer's and Franz Schulze's books on Mies may have done; nor does it seem to have reinvigorated discussions of political agency in architecture. The author's own efforts in the interim have been directed to other, perhaps more fruitful projects. However, the issues raised by Hays's book are part of a longer discourse in architectural history, and a wider one in art history and criticism. Thus, the book may deserve greater attention than it has thus far received. Hannes Meyer's career at the Bauhaus was bracketed by Mies and Gropius. Meyer first incurred the wrath of Gropius when he became director of the Bauhaus in 1928, launching a decisive critique of the institution by the way he reformed its curriculum. He was subsequently marginalized by Mies when the latter took over from Meyer after the Dessau city government forcibly objected to the latter's Marxist politics. 4Mies and Gropius also strenuously objected to Meyer's politicization of the school, as both an unqualified error of judgment and a politically risky strategy in an increasingly uncertain time. And yet, just nine years before, the affiliation of art and politics had been wholeheartedly endorsed by progressive members of the German artistic world, including those of the Novembergruppe (to which Mies belonged), the Arbeitsrat fuer Kunst (of which Gropius was a founding member), and Berlin Dada. Gropius and Mies, unlike Meyer, are remembered as the "masters" of modern architecture. Mies is known for the singlemindedness with which he pursued an autonomous vision of 'universalised form,' for the beauty and austerity of his details, and for the sumptuous materials with which his buildings are often lined or clad. He is also remembered as an architect particularly interested in structure, in spite of his own idiosyncratic and often non-rationalised structural configurations. Gropius is remembered for first adapting an industrial aesthetic to conventional architectural programs (like schools), for his attempts (and failures) to pioneer a mass-produced architecture for a capitalist society, and finally, as a corporate architect producing works of variable quality in the U.S. and elsewhere. Both were adept at modifying their formerly avant garde practices to fit neatly into American corporate culture; in both cases, the opportunity to build extensively was a function of the success of that adaptation. Where both Mies and Gropius began their careers as part of an avant-garde Berlin milieu, they both finished safely ensconced in the most conservative of economic-cultural entities. In both cases, the development of a marketable aesthetic was important to commercial and artistic success. By contrast, Hannes Meyer left Germany to work in the Soviet Union from 1930-36, returned to Switzerland briefly, and then emigrated to Mexico City to work for the Mexican govenment before returning to Switzerland in 1948. He died in 1954, 15 years before the deaths of Mies and Gropius and well before the period of Mies's greatest productivity (from about 1955 until his death in 1969). In most histories of architecture Meyer is remembered as a marginal figure, a 'radical functionalist' who attempted to reduce building design to a set of objective functional parameters. Meyer rejected aesthetic judgment in building design by trying to eliminate all subjective or aesthetic design decisions. His Petersschule project in Basel (a winning competition entry designed in collaboration with Hans Wittwer in 1927) was partially represented in the competition submission by a list of construction materials directly available as industrially produced off-the-shelf materials. The competition entry is like a similar experiment in mass-produced art: Moholy-Nagy's dictation of paintings by telephone to a sign painter who would produce them, during Moholy's years at the Bauhaus. This comparison is useful: it serves to re-introduce the context in which Meyer was working, and from which he has been more or less effectively stripped. Marxist ideology led him to question individuality in design, substituting a mechanised, de-aestheticized architecture that would have its basis in new modes of living. Meyer's interests found their parallel in other radical, anti-individualist artistic practices, like those of Moholy and others; his work on ABC brought him into close contact with El Lissitzky. Finally, his ideological commitment and his desire to make a virtue of necessity (i.e. machine-age mass-production) is related to practices of Berlin Dada. These affiliations are easy to locate in Meyer's work. His selective use of photomontage and the unusual angles of the photographs deployed in design presentations 5 all attest to the influence of Moholy-Nagy and other practitioners of photomontage. In this context, Meyer's Marxist affiliations are thoroughly normative and his dismissal from the Bauhaus a function of the political situation that began to prevail in Germany in the 1930s. Instead of being cast as a politically inept radical, he might be seen as merely another modern German artist with socialist leanings who fell afoul of the incipient Nazi regime. Like Bruno Taut, he then went east instead of west; like Taut he has subsequently failed to receive adequate recognition for what was extremely important modernist theory and production. Ludwig Hilberseimer has also remained at the edges of mainstream accounts of the architectural history of modernism, tending to be remembered for his highly mechanised megalopoli, such as the Hochhausstadt of 1924. These radically urban schemes made Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin seem intimate, and they tend to overshadow the continuous development of Hilberseimer's ideas over time. By 1938, when he arrived in the U.S., he had begun to transform his earlier urban schemes into less mechanistic configurations integrated with extensive green space: the necropolis replaced by the cemetery. Mies played a substantial role in Hilberseimer's history as well. Hilberseimer came from Germany as one of Mies's two lieutenants (the other was Walter Peterhans) and owed his livelihood in Chicago directly to Mies's patronage. Mies probably also collaborated with Hilberseimer on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago in the forties, and on other American projects. However, Hilberseimer only appeared as a full partner in the Lafayette Park housing development in Detroit, in 1955. Also generally underrepresented with respect to Hilberseimer is the changing nature of his ideas over time. What stands out from Hilberseimer's work is a constantly evolving set of propositions about urban space and communal life as controlled or constructed by architecture. His own proclamations about the failure of the Hochhausstadt model, that "the result was more a necropolis than a metropolis"6 indicate an extraordinary frankness about the evolution of his own ideas about the city. They contrast radically with his schemes for a linear city (which places landscape and city in closest proximity) and his adaptation of that model to Chicago. Hilberseimer's work exemplifies the crystallization of process--no single scheme fixed as an authoritative paradigm, but a visible monologue on modern city form developing over time. Regardless of the individual successes and failures of Hilberseimer's various proposals, he is underappreciated as a model of theoretical curiosity and flexibility. His activities as theorist and urbanist are distinguished by their nondogmatic, intellectually inquiring nature. To date, Hilberseimer studies seem to vacillate between the hagiographic treatment of former students and colleagues in Chicago and critiques of the absolutism of Hilberseimer's early urban schemes. Richard Pommer's long article follows the latter model; other essays in the 1988 collection In the Shadow of Mies7 the former . Common threads between Meyer and Hilberseimer lead back to 1920s Germany, where both performed critical roles in the theorization of modern architecture through theoretical texts and built and unbuilt architectural projects. Their work connects to the larger context of modern art: in Meyer's case through connections to El Lissitzky ; for both Meyer and Hilberseimer through connections to and work with Berlin Dada, and through their work at the Bauhaus in close proximity to Klee and Kandinsky. Like many of the artists and architects exploring neue Sachlichkeit practice in the 1920s, both Hilberseimer and Meyer were interested in theorizing a modern architectural practice that responded to the development of industrial technologies and the corresponding transformation of the individual in society. They wereboth demonstrably influenced by Marxism in their search for an artistic language freed from class specificity, elitism, and aesthetics. In light of the neglect that has characterized research on both architects, K. Michael Hays' Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer represents one effort to bring Hilberseimer and Meyer into contemporary discussions of modernism. The book, however, has a dual agenda: not that implied by the presence of two architects' names in the title, but rather that indicated by the double-barrelled title itself. Hays has identified Hilberseimer and Meyer as two architects whose work implicitly absorbed and reflected the same influences that were operating on Frankfurt School theorists, writing at roughly the same time that Hilberseimer and Meyer were proposing their early theoretical work. Furthermore, the deconstruction of subjectivity carried on more recently, by the major figures of postructuralism, seems to Hays to appear in a nascent form in the work of these architects. Finally, Hays' agenda in writing this study is to discuss the phenomenon of "posthumanism"--a way of conceiving the role of the individual in a postindustrial society that accepts the dictate of seriality and mechanization, and that tries to posit both as potentially liberating, re-enfranchising possibilities: This particular inscription of the subject that I have been trying to articulate--a posthumanist subject at once subjected to material forces and systems of signification beyond its control and at the same time capable of mediating or totalizing those external forces and systems with the internal economy of architectural form--this 'doubly perverse' subject is not constructed for nothing. It is an 'enunciative' attempt to compensate for the loss of figurability that I have already mentioned--the loss of signification, the loss of the paternal fiction of humanist thought--to the inauthenticity of mass technological culture...It is an attempt to salvage, within the modality of architecture, some vestige of artistic agency that might replace a dysfunctional and discredited humanism. 8 The book declares itself as both manifesto and critical interpretation, with all the explicit ambition of the manifesto implicit in its author's expressed position: "It seems doubtful to me that a critical theory, history, or practice that forgets, as humanism does, the theories, histories, or cultural politics that overdetermine architecture's production, use, and even its understanding, will ever succeed in constructing conditions and subjectivities truly human." 9 Hays thus declares himself fully cognizant of the relationship between history and theory and contemporary production, one explored at length by Manfredo Tafuri. Tafuri's "operational criticism" is no longer a threat; it is instead an opportunity. Hays' treatment of Meyer and Hilberseimer distinguishes itself from other published sources on these architects. Insisting as he does on an almost purely analytic treatment of their work, Hays throws the reader back on other bibliography for basic information. For Hilberseimer, Hays depends on the treatment offered by Richard Pommer in his 1988 essay. 10 For Meyer, the reader must turn to Claude Schnaidt's 1965 monograph for basic information on his projects and writings, along with several more recent treatments for development of selected themes . 11Without these sources, Hays' treatment is difficult to follow, not only because his references to particular projects and texts are so cursory, but also because he states his conclusions at the outset, and then offers what evidence he feels is required to support them (never enough). Added to these problems is Hays' very dense writing style, which seems to complicate rather than clarify. While his overall agenda for the book is important, the difficulty of reading-- as a pure function of the author's prose style--is troublesome. Hays acknowledges his debt to Rosalind Krauss elsewhere in his writings, 12but nowhere does he attempt to duplicate the clarity of her writing, an absolute necessity for the importation of complex theoretical arguments into a field that has its own internal dynamic and its own sufficient complexity. In conjunction with other basic informational sources (and Hilberseimer's own writings on city planning should be added to this list 13), Hays' text provides valuable insights. It followed a new paradigm for architectural history and theory when it appeared in 1992--one attempting a full contextualization of architectural history within the realm of critical theory. This includes theory as generated more or less in tandem with the architectural ideas under discussion, and theory as it has been used to help understand the period since. But without these other sources the text is dense and nearly unreadable. In spite of this fact, the book appeared under the auspices of a popular architectural and art press, and is sold in paperback as well as hardcover. It would seem to offer itself to the public as a source that requires no specific scholarly background. This can only be a function of its own operational theoretical and critical agenda, not a function of its treatment of Meyer and Hilberseimer. In a sense, then, whether one understands Hays in relation to their work may matter less than whether one understands Hays in relation to his Frankfurt School and poststructuralist sources. Further evidence that the book (1992) has not been marketed as an academic book lies in the fact that it has not been reviewed by any major journal. Three reviews are listed in the periodical indexes: one in the Dutch journal Archis, one in the Italian monthly Casabella, and one in a newsletter published by Hays' home institution, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. In this context, it is important to remember that Hays is a professor in an architectural school, and that he came out of a Ph.D. program (MIT), itself situated within an architectural school. He does not profess to operate as a research scholar; he is instead a rhetorician and theorist operating on the more or less captive audience of the professional school. This explains some of the contemporary references in his conclusion to architects working on theoretical proposals today--many are Hays' colleagues from the group circulating around the magazine he founded and now edits, Assemblage, many also his colleagues at Harvard. It also explains any resume of Hays' writings, not a small number of which consist of introductions to publications of contemporary work. He pursues his agenda in scholarly work and in acts of publicity for the group of architects whose current work he endorses. This does not seem inappropriate in the case of this book, a manifesto for a certain methodological approach which takes its cues from two architects whose own work was decidedly political in nature--political and methodologically innovative for its time. However, if one were to posit a metonymic relationship between Hays and Meyer, one would also come up against the radical difference in their projects: Hays attempting to determine one of the future directions that architectural design might take within the context of an elite architectural school; and Meyer, living by the force of necessity in Dessau, in Moscow, in Mexico City, at every step drifting further away from the centers of intellectual heat in his field.

The chief difficulty, though, of Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject lies in the seam between Hays' critical agenda and the subject matter brought to serve it. At times the conjuncture between theory and material artifact works well, as when he brings Siegfried Kracauer's writings to bear on a consideration of Hilberseimer's work. 14At other times, the thread between subject and critical method is left dangling, as when he attempts to interpret Hilberseimer in light of Roland Barthes' erotism. 15More than the individual success of these particular conjunctures in the book, one is struck by the method itself. It is almost as if Hays has a set of theoretical constructs from the Frankfurt School and postructuralism lined up on one side and the individual projects and writings of Hilberseimer and Meyer lined up on the other. He then draws connections between the two in a more or less creative manner. When the shoe doesn't fit, Hays lets it hang off a little, aware that total success in an exercise like this is never to be expected, and is, indeed, not totally the point.