This dissertation explores the intersection of a topic--transparency in modern architecture--and a figure--the historian-critic Sigfried Giedion. It takes Giedion as a carrier of this topic, reviews his treatment of it, places it in context by reconstructing the reception of cubism in German architectural discourse and looks at its afterlife in the writings of his best reader, Walter Benjamin. It begins by demonstrating that Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky's well-known distinction of 1963 between "literal" and "phenomenal" transparency is inadequate, both historically and theoretically. For Giedion, transparency operated as a privileged signifier within what he took to be the underlying structural form of modernity--"space-time." His portrait of the historical emergence of this post-perspectival, non-anthropomorphic symbolic form focused on the new means of architectonic expression (parallel to those in art and technology) struggling for (transparent) self-realization through the morphological transformation of earlier architectural systems. These means held the promise of making open constructions in space-time capable of supporting a new participatory modality of spatial experience, characterized by the fluid and indeterminate interweaving of subject and object in the activity of space-creation. Its sign was a feeling of groundless and hovering transparency, an amorphousness experienced with "excitement." In looking behind Giedion, the complex history of experiments from (cubist) painting into (post-cubist) architecture is reviewed with these ideas in mind.While presenting Giedion's conception of cubist transparency in its own terms and in relation to those whose work he sought to represent, the failures, contradictions and limitations of his quest for self-overcoming are also examined. Looking beyond Giedion, Benjamin's reworking of the post-Kantian traditions that underpinned Giedion's conception of architectural modernity enabled him to draw potentials out while at the same time correcting for Giedion's premature claims to the immanent resolution of modernity's antimonies. Benjamin's transformative reading serves to shift the conception of transparency from the aesthetic to the social and political, and from ideals of unity, immediacy, morality and free creation to a dialectical image of awakening in which transparency remains inseparable from opacity, mediation and destruction.
展开▼
