On the Ageing of Objects in Modern Culture: Ornament and Crime

The Ageing of Objects

Let me begin my elaborations with a citation of Simmel. Simmel concludes his well-known essay on fashion (1997) by commenting on the difference between ‘classical’ and ‘baroque’ artwork:

[E]verything that may be termed ‘classic’ is comparatively far removed from fashion and alien to it […]. For the essence of the classical is a concentration of appearance around a sublime middle point; the classical possesses something directing it inwards [etwas Gesammeltes], which does not offer so many points of attack, as it were, from which modification, disturbance and destruction of the balance might emanate. […] In contrast to this, everything eccentric, immoderate and extreme will be drawn to fashion from within […]. Baroque statue[s] are, as it were, always in perpetual danger of being broken off, since the inner life of the figure does not exercise complete control over them, but lays them open to the fortuitous elements of external life. (1997: 204–5, translation modified)

What Simmel tells us is essentially that certain processes of creative behaviour related to certain styles are more susceptible to collective influence than others. Such styles simply contain more parameters to adjust than the more rule-bound, geometrical or minimalist ones. Thus, correspondingly, they afford more opportunities for the collective to agitate the process of composition. Conversely, where the composition is determined ‘from within’, where the creative or expressive space is restricted, the ‘extraneous powers and fortunes’ are bypassed.

I shall permit myself to generalize this thought. Granted, mathematical theory, also, is haunted by different theoretical fashions and trends, but a mathematical proof offers markedly fewer ‘points of attack’ for collective powers than does, say, a literary essay or a theoretical sociological dissertation. In the same way, female apparel is typically more ‘baroque’ than male apparel, the high-bourgeois intérieur more baroque than later functionalism, and so on.

Now, a basic point made in this article is that this intrusion of the collective into the baroque or ornamental composition becomes tangible only when the collective has abandoned the object. Exactly because ornamental objects bear a decisive imprint of the collective context at the time of their creation, they age differently from rule-bound objects. I shall analyse two examples. The first I find in Franz Hessel’s work on the arcades of Berlin. Hessel, a friend of Benjamin, was a crucial source of inspiration behind Benjamin’s own interest in the arcades of Paris. Here is Hessel’s description of a dilapidated arcade in Berlin, the Kaysergallerie:

I cannot enter it without a damp chill coming over me, without the fear that I might never find an exit.

I linger over […] Knipp-Knapp cufflinks, which are certainly the best, and over the Diana air rifles, truly an honour to the goddess of the hunt. I shrink back before grinning skulls, the fierce liqueur glasses of a white bone cocktail set. The clowning face of a jockey, a handmade wooden nutcracker graces the end of the musical toilet paper holder.

The whole center of the arcade is empty. I rush quickly to the exit. I feel the ghostly hidden crowds of people from days gone by, who hug the walls with lustful glances at the tawdry jewellery, the clothing, the pictures […]. At the exit, at the window of the great travel agency, I breathe more easily; the street, freedom, the present. (Hessel, cited in Buck-Morss, 1989: 38)

In Hessel’s portrayal it is not, as in Benjamin’s own analyses, the many utopian ‘images’ standing out sharply and garishly in the fading goods which are in focus. Rather, in Hessel’s description the arcade exudes the traces of a past and anonymous collective which ardently invested its dreams and desires in it, and this ‘presence’ of the by-gone cult decisively transforms the very appearance of the arcade. ¹

We find the same dynamic in the following example. Here Karen Blixen (alias Isak Dinesen) returns to Africa after a longer stay in Europe:

I have wondered why numb things placed aside in cupboards or on shelves, and in no way attacked by either moth or corrosion, in their unnoticed existence over the years suffer radical changes. I have seen it with my own dresses, bought in Europe but left in the wardrobe in Africa, when I, after two or three years, took them out to put them on, and they, without having stretched or shrunk, suddenly seemed to be too long or too short. They had not changed, and yet they were changed. Fashion and my own eyes caused this change. (Blixen, 1951: 10, my translation)

Again we note how objects testifying to the former presence of collective energies age differently from ‘normal’ objects. In fact, phenomenologically speaking, the experience of the old-fashioned is a paradigmatic testimony to the constant and strangely elusive changes to our object world brought about by our participation in gathering and dissolving ‘collectives’. To obtain a theoretical grip on this collective dimension, I shall expand, selectively, on some intuitions found in Durkheim’s late work.

The Collective and the Objective: A Durkheimian Framework

I take as my point of departure Durkheim’s central chapter on the projection of effervescent energies onto objects, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995: 207–41):

It is by shouting the same cry, saying the same words, and performing the same action in regard to the same object that [the individuals] arrive at and experience agreement. […] [Collective representations] presuppose that consciousnesses are acting and reacting on each other; they result from actions and reactions that are possible only with the help of tangible intermediaries. […] Without symbols […] social feelings could have only an unstable existence. (1995: 232)

This template relates ‘effervescent’ collectivity – forms of collective synchronization, entrainment and convergence – to certain ‘tangible intermediaries’ placed at the centre of collective attention. Durkheim emphasizes that this form of fetishism is both general and timeless:

The cause we are capturing at work is not exclusive to totemism; there is no society in which it is not at work. Nowhere can a collective feeling become conscious of itself without fixing upon a tangible object. (1995: 238)

But not only does the effervescent gathering always take place around shared objects –the objects also change. They ‘stand out’, Durkheim tells us, with ‘exceptionally sharp relief’ (1995: 222). A surplus of appearance is ‘added’ to or ‘superimposed’ on them, new ‘properties’ are ‘imputed’ to them or ‘projected’ on them (Durkheim, 1995: 228–30).

This template is in fact present already in The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim, 2013). Here we find the idea that certain objects – or certain beliefs or practices – placed at the centre of collective attention possess a ‘special energy’, a form of moral ‘authority’ or ‘obligation’ (Durkheim, 2013: 25). Yet, in the late work, the palette of possible emotional and phenomenological experiences is extended, together with the scope of possible objects subject to such ‘charging’. Durkheim speaks of collectively articulated and intensified sentiments of ‘devotedness’, ‘attraction’, ‘desire’ and even ‘love’ for certain objects (1974: 35–79; 1995: 210–11, 214) and he mentions a multitude of modern ‘fetishes’: besides ‘Fatherland, Liberty, Reason’ (1995: 216), modern humanism (1994), Kantian morals (1974: 35–79) and the national ‘flag’ (1995: 228–9), we find cultural personalities or ‘leaders’ (1995: 215), but also objects for collectors’ mania, such as ‘stamps’ (1974: 87; 1995: 228–9), or of consumerist desire, such as ‘pearls’, ‘diamonds’, ‘fur coats’ and ‘laces’, ‘attire’ and the ‘whims of fashion’ (1974: 86).

In the following paragraphs I will try to sketch both the explanatory potentials and the limits of this template when transferred into a modern setting. These elaborations based on selective aspects of Durkheim’s work collide, it must be said, not only with other traits in his work but, to a certain extent, with the very tenor of his thought. Most importantly, the reader will notice that I leave out the ‘coercive’, regulating and disciplining aspect of the social so important to the young Durkheim. In my interpretation the individual does not hurt himself on the hardened contours of the ‘social fact’. Rather – as in the late work – he or she is permeated by the social, attached to more or less anonymous others through collectively generated attachments to the object world. ²

In Durkheim collective effervescence is closely related to the actual gathering. It is of strategic importance to Durkheim’s argument in The Elementary Forms (1995: 221ff.) that a sharp distinction between gathering and dispersal – ritual and everyday – corresponds with his distinction between the sacred and the profane. I should like to attenuate this distinction. Thus, as Durkheim emphasizes, the tribe is indeed held together even when it is apart. The charged objects continue to glow (at least for a time) and remind the individual of his attachment to the group even when he or she is alone and occupied with profane matters. In another instance, Durkheim remarks:

The stimulating action of society is not felt in exceptional circumstances alone. There is virtually no instant of our lives in which a certain rush of energy fails to come to us from outside ourselves. (1995: 213)

Such paragraphs extend the sacred into the profane and individualized realms of everyday life. The distinction between the individual and the social, between gathering and dispersal, loses its firmness.

Now, this attenuation of Durkheim’s ‘interactionism’ goes hand-in-hand with the idea of the object as a form of mediator for collective energies. This aspect takes on acute importance in a modern reality characterized by the constant presence of mass-produced objects and communicative and ‘social’ media. Thus, instead of focusing on the actual gathering, as do Durkheim and his interpreters (Lukes, 1973: 462f.; Pickering, 1984: 385f.), I take his depiction of the situation between the gatherings as my point of departure: a situation in which the collective is dispersed, yet still – consciously or unconsciously – emotionally connected through shared objects.

Consequently, to accommodate these elaborations, I should like to tie the notion of effervescence to the object rather than to the ‘assembly’ (Pickering, 1984). Shared objects of all kinds – ideas, themes, agendas, fashions, political ideologies, commodities, criticisms, new technologies – are dissipated or picked up by the media, accentuated and animated in heated discussions, are subjects for vivid gossiping or lingering discourse, even for ‘individualized’ dreams, desires and fears long before any actual gathering occurs – if it occurs at all. Mediation makes room for a multitude of dislocated, asynchronous and decentralized but connected ‘micro-gatherings’ around shopping windows, televisions, fashion magazines, internet blogs or through word of mouth. Abrupt political change may still be bound to larger physical assemblies, and the same goes for religious rituals, military parades and sporting events, yet in a modern society even events or objects bound to large-scale actual gatherings are – at least if they are to have general importance – unthinkable without mediation. Architecture is no exception.

Some of these objects are transient, whereas others take on a more permanent nature, and these differences originate in differences in the stability of the respective collectives forming around them and ‘enlivening’ them. Durkheim does not, himself, theorize on this dimension, yet my idea is that it can be constructively unfolded on the basis of his more or less implicit distinction between ‘re-creative’ and ‘creative’ gatherings (Pickering, 1984: 388–9). Basically, if an effervescent collectivity contains no re-creative dimension it cannot endure – and neither can the object. Yet, in as much as modern culture is characterized by an ever growing number of temporalized and short-lived object fascinations, ‘creative’ assemblies have largely supplanted the ‘re-creative’ ones known from traditional societies. So how come certain – modernist – objects may endure? As it turns out, modernist design and ideology is exactly characterized by an attempt to promote or retain this re-creative dimension and to merge it in intriguing ways with the creative one. Modernism is unique in its way of uniting conservatism and inventiveness, creativity and rule-following. And my thesis is that this contributes decisively to explaining its timelessness.

Interestingly, Durkheimian thought shares basic temporal features with the modernist ‘attitude’. Durkheim mistrusted the transient forms of effervescence which are to be found in the commodity world and on the forefront of ‘the arts and the industry’ – ‘morbid effervescence’ was the term he used (2002b: 335–6) – and therefore never explored these transient forms in any depth. He clung to the presumably more stable areas of the political, the moral and the religious. ³ Polemically speaking, his ‘puritan’ dismissal of the ephemeral and aesthetic ⁴ and his longing for the rebirth of the ‘one big master ritual’ (Collins, 2004: 15) hinders him from according due notice to the ever changing face of the modern object world and the correlative anonymous, dynamic and spontaneous facets of modern collectivity. ⁵ The result is a fatal under-theoretization of the important and paradigmatic presence of distinctively modern forms of integration and solidarity found in the realm of ‘culture’. Durkheim never develops a basis for theorizing on the varying levels of endurance of different object fascinations relative to different domains in a modern differentiated society.

We now see that we must reconcile two perspectives if we want to understand the ageing of objects. On the one hand, Durkheim’s template is indispensable. In as much as collective participation directly effects and affects temporal experience of certain conspicuous objects, we cannot hope to understand one of the most salient traits of modern culture without drawing in the collective. In this regard, my construction of Durkheim as a theoretician of mediation is important. As we shall see, it is a decisive feature of modernist architecture – and of contemporary architecture as well – that it is dissipated and collectively consumed through images. On the other hand, we cannot hope to understand the collective dimension – and its modern tendency to continuously detract and absolve – without drawing in the objective dimension of composition and design. In short, we have to connect Durkheim and Simmel; we have to focus on the reciprocal relationship between the collective and the object in question.

With these considerations in mind I shall now proceed to uncover a hitherto unexplored side of the history of modernism: its initial interest in and subsequent neglect of the collective embeddedness of architecture.

Adolf Loos and the Collective

This brings us, finally, to the topic of architecture and architectural theory. My thesis is that the experience of the sudden ageing of objects left behind by the collective is a direct motivating factor in the very coming into being of the modernist paradigm of architectural composition. To demonstrate this, I shall jump directly into an investigation of the motives behind Adolf Loos’s paradigmatic critique of ornament, so important to the modernist movement:

Where is Otto Eckmann’s ornamentation now, or that of van der Velde? […] The modern ornamental artist […] lags behind or is a pathological case. After three years even he himself disowns his own products. Cultured people find them intolerable straight away; others become aware of it only after a number of years. (Loos, 1998: 171)

To ‘disown’ one’s ‘own products’ after no more than ‘three years’ – isn’t this exactly what Blixen had to do? Loos’s critique of ornament is not merely rooted in a wish to avoid waste of labour and loss of economic value (Adorno, 1997: 11; Colomina, 1996; Stewart, 2000), but also in an attempt to avoid the rapid ageing processes of certain ‘ornamental’ object designs. Tellingly, what is ‘modern’ for Loos is not contemporary, but timeless: the dress of the English ‘gentleman’ is an ‘Urkleidung [mankind’s original clothing]’ (1998: 157). This explains Loos’s wish to bring fashion to a halt by fundamentally altering the very practice of design:

Fashion only moves so quickly because our relationship with things is out of synch. As soon as we have objects which possess the qualities of beauty and endurance, fashion will immediately come to a halt. ⁶

The fundamental relationship between the collective and the objective is implicit in almost every line Loos writes. In Durkheimian vocabulary, he wants to end the constant dynamic of gathering and dispersal around ever new objects through the introduction of new forms of composition securing ‘endurance’. So how is timelessness actually ‘composed’ on the objective level? In as much as it embodies his own ideals, we can find the answer in Loos’s proper architectural practice. His friend, the architect Richard Neutra, recalls that:

Loos started a revolt against the practice of indicating dimensions in figures or drawings. He felt, as he often told me, that such a procedure dehumanizes design. ‘If I want a wood panelling or wainscot to be of a certain height, I stand there, hold my hand at that certain height, and the carpenter makes his pencil mark. Then I step back and look at it from one point to another, visualizing the finished result with all my powers. This is the only human way to decide on the height of a wainscot or on the width of a window’. ⁷

Loos never drew his buildings. He insisted on building them. The compositional demands of the actual architectural object are so complex that he must privilege ‘bodily experience over mental construction’ (Colomina, 1996: 265). The architect must, Margali Larson writes about Loos, heed the ‘tactile and tectonic principles’ rather than the ‘scenographic dimension’ of building (1993: 174). Conventional architects, on the other hand – ‘these knights of the drawing board’, as Loos (1998: 70) disdainfully terms them – are not sensitive and ‘object-directed’ enough. The result is that ‘everything [is] worked on and worked over with the same mouldings and the same ornaments’ (Loos, 1998: 70). The collective powers intrude where the objective dimension loses its directive or imperative function in the creative process.

This contrast between an object-directed ‘modernist’ approach and a traditional approach subject to collective energies runs parallel to Loos’s distinction between the work of the ‘engineer-architect’ and the ‘applied arts’. Whereas Loos’s architect-engineer redeems the actual practical and utilitarian concerns of the object, the ‘artist’ of the applied arts, in contrast, has lost this ability. In the work of the ‘applied’ artist, the collective, the epoch, the ‘style’, imposes itself on the creative process and eclipses the vital connection to the imperatives of the object. The result is, we have seen, that her creations grow old even before their expiration date.

Loos’s insistence on the ‘object-oriented’ nature of authentic composition drives the peculiar dialectic between disguise and individuality often remarked upon in Loos’s thought (Colomina, 1996; Stewart, 2000):

The nomads of herd society had to distinguish themselves by various colours; modern man uses his clothes as a mask. So powerful and strong is his individuality that it can no longer be expressed in articles of apparel. Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength. (Loos, 1998: 92)

Ideally, Loos's houses do not wish to tell anything to the exterior; instead all its richness must be manifest in the interior. ⁸ The role of the individual in the creative process is not to ‘express’ herself but to redeem the object. What is often interpreted as a bourgeois impulse in Loos’s thought – the privilege of a ‘rich’ interiority which does not show on the outside – also contains an ideal for creative practice. Instead of thinking in terms of (collective) reception, the modern architect should remain so tightly connected to the redemption of the practical imperatives of the object that the collective finds no access to the composition. The consequences Loos draws for himself of this perspective are salient in the following quote:

It is my greatest pride that the interiors which I have created are totally ineffective in photographs. I have to forego the honour of being published in the various architectural magazines. I have been denied the satisfaction of my vanity. Nothing is known of my work. But this is a sign of strength of my ideas and the correctness of my teachings. […] Only the power of [my] example has had an influence; the very power with which the old masters had been effective and faster in reaching the farthest corner of the earth although, or especially because, post, telegraph, or newspapers were not yet in existence. ⁹

At this point, however, yet another important element enters the discussion: Loos directly connects the modern coming into being of media of reproduction and communication with a reinforcement of collective powers. He wants to be commissioned for the ‘right reasons’, by ‘example’ like the ‘old masters’, and not due to mere prestige or standing stirred up in the collective through images and media. Probably, if we may speculate, the unpopularity of his architecture in his own epoch contributed to his renunciation of collective confirmation. In this sense, Loos made a virtue out of necessity. Yet, this public perception would change drastically after his death. Today, Loos is hailed as the true precursor of modernism.

Before we move on, I should like to recap three critical points. First, we should remark how Loos takes as his point of departure an attempt to break apart the relationship between the collective and the objective. His version of modernism emerges in an attempt to separate the two. To escape social influence, Loos advocates an ideal of object-directedness in processes of creative composition.

Second, Loos is acutely aware of the collective powers nesting in processes of mediation and reproduction. He insists that photography is incapable of mediating what is, to him, the true purpose of architecture: dwelling. Architecture is three-dimensional and embodied; its true quality and its true nature simply cannot be conveyed through photography. Yet at the same time Loos’s critique of media implies that all modern design practice is subjected to reproduction and mediation, and, consequently, in danger of being distorted and disfigured by the effervescent powers that these technologies make possible.

Third, this means, further, that modernist objects are as collectively charged as all other objects serving as nodal-points for collective energies. The modernist objects do not escape the social as such, rather, the object-directed nature of ‘authentic’ composition merely prevents collective influence from leaving decisive traces ‘in’ them. In other words, modernist object-directed and anti-expressive composition practices do not abolish the cult; rather, they prolong it. Loos was right in tying creative design to the object in his attempt to avoid cultic collectivity from influencing design, but he was utterly wrong in believing that the cult, as such, could be avoided and that the timelessness of modern design is due to such avoidance. It is not the avoidance of the cult but its prolongation that explains the a-temporal phenomenology of modernist design.

These complex elaborations will help us to see where Loos diverges both from his successors in the modernist movement and from later architectural theorists. Before we get that far, however, a word on the modernist movement in my Durkheimian perspective is required.

The Modernist Collective

So why is the modernist collective longer lived than other collectives? How does modernist design prolong the surrounding cult? And what does mediation mean for our understanding of architecture, and of modern architecture in particular?

The modernist ‘collective’ was initially small and specialized, but it did not remain this way. At the same time as it was effectively strangled in Europe (by the Nazi regime), it expanded radically in the US. The leading modernists migrated to America, where virtually all of them took up positions at leading architectural schools. The original ‘progressive’ agenda was largely forgotten, and (many of) the modernist proponents became the brand-names of the wave of large-scale ‘corporate architecture’ of the ’50s and ’60s. At the same time, the modernist collective metamorphosed into a popular cult of ‘international style’: a cult of architecture which has reached global scale over the last decades.

The famous MoMa exhibition in 1932 represents an early turning point in this story. Here we find everything that Loos was against: the exhibition is a deliberate and professional attempt by the curators, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, to create collective effervescence by turning modernist architecture into a mediated spectacle. Tellingly, the decisive factor behind the success and expansion of modernism was not the actual six weeks of the exhibition in New York (Riley, 1992: 85; Tabibi, 2005), but rather the ‘specially prepared catalogue giving the first comprehensive survey of the works of modern architecture’. ¹⁰ This catalogue – soon transformed into the book, The International Style (Hitchcock and Johnson, 1996 [1932]) – has never been out of print for the last 60 years. In Terence Riley’s words, it ‘has supplanted the actual historical event’ (1992: 6). ¹¹

This mediated ‘canonization’ of modernist objects was further accelerated by other illustrated publications, not least by Siegfried Gideon’s Space, Time and Architecture (1982), first published in 1941. Gideon’s book served as ‘obligatory reading for generations of students in architecture’ and architectural theory (Heinen, 1999: 41).

However, these two books are not only exemplary and canonized, but also representative for a number of modernist ideological traits. First, we should notice that the modernists critically ‘project’ the collective dimension ‘back’ onto traditional design. As for Loos, the critique of pre-modernist architectural design entails a critique of its collective embeddedness: in the critique of the lack of ‘honesty’ of materials, of the detached historicist ‘façade’, and of the ‘boastfulness’ of ornament or of mere ‘superficial appearance’; in the critique of material ‘imitation’, or of the ‘verbose’, ‘melodramatic’ or ‘vulgar’ character of historicist design, pre-modern architectural practice is made synonymous with the intrusion of seductive and animating collective powers. Modernist architecture, on the other hand, is – allegedly – autonomous.

Second, we should remark that Johnson, Hitchcock and Gideon all refrain from using contemporary photographic illustrations of the buildings they discuss; they do not portray their real-time ageing. Interestingly, this practice, modelled by virtually all architectural publications ever since, has never been seriously investigated as to its impact on our very experience or understanding of what architecture is. Yet it installs a gap between image and reality which is only widened by later architectural ‘reproductions’ which seek recourse to the same ‘original photographs again and again’ (Tournikiotis, 1999: 105). The modernist masterpieces gain a form of virtual existence in a perpetual present situated above temporal reality; forms of canonization may thus occur completely detached from the actual physical buildings. ¹²

Third, we should remark how the architectural ideals programmatically consecrated by Hitchcock, Johnson and Gideon decisively compromise or ‘shorten’ the object-directed dimension of composition so dear to Loos. Instead of Loos’s ideal of a tactile relation to the object – and in an inversion of Loos’s ‘privileging of bodily over mental constructs’ – the process of spatial imagination becomes subjected to purely formal conceptions of building structure and geometrical shape, while at the same time material selection is constrained by a cultic celebration of a very limited number of authentic ‘modern’ materials (Hitchcock and Johnson, 1996 [1932]: 55–89; cf. Heinen, 1999: 193). ¹³ This development increasingly turns the actual building into a detached object, only accessible through the gaze, bereft of tactile sensations and separated from its context, making it even more susceptible to photographic reproduction and circulation and thus to collective consumption and effervescent charging. In contrast to Loos, Johnson, Hitchcock and Gideon do not critically reflect on this dimension.

Moreover, and fourth, the shortening of the object-directed dimension of actual design has additional consequences. Instead of exorcising the collective powers by tying design closely to the architectural object, the modernists formalize and ritualize the very process of design to a previously unseen degree. This means that creative and re-creative forms of effervescence are fused in intriguing ways. Modernism is no ‘new style’ among others, but – as the subtitle to Gideon’s book reads – a ‘new tradition’. In contrast to the avant-garde and the early politically engaged branches of modernism, mature modernism does not rupture with the past, it rather moves into a zone of timelessness by exploring certain primordial, pure and eternal geometrical forms and structural possibilities. Every innovative act reconnects with eternity. Modernism has a historical genealogy, yet it is in reality to be understood as a long awaited redemption of a priori forms and shapes lying dormant – or covered over by ornamental, historicist or eclectic practices – in all previous architecture (Gideon, 1982). In this way modernist composition is portrayed as re-creative, conservative and restorative in the very creative act; indeed these different aspects merge in the well-known modernist term, ‘purification’. The creative dimension keeps modernism ever young by securing a certain space for architectural development; and yet, every new building is nothing but an actualization of the self-same canonized principles and materials. No doubt this tight connection between invention and dogma, creativity and re-creativity in modernist theory and practice helps to prolong the life of the modernist collective.

The reader should note that the above points contribute to a paradox characterizing modern culture in general and modernism in particular: on the one hand, modernism is characterized by an attempt to escape the effervescent and irrational collective. On the other hand, there remains a constant – at the same time strangely unremarked yet promoted and facilitated – return of effervescent forces converging on masterpieces, architectural dogma, certain materials and certain geometrical forms and shapes. Yet, due to the formalization of the process of composition, the effervescent energies are barred from forming and moulding the actual object. They leave no traces. This means that they are not ‘discovered’ and this, again, prolongs the cult. This should be rightly understood. Of course, for ordinary people, modernism was in vogue for years; in this sense formalism did not hide effervescence, rather it expressed it. Yet at the same time, formalism and universalism hindered the social from influencing creative practice and this made it possible, not least for the modernists themselves, to ignore the cult and its experiential contributions to the phenomenology of modernism.

In the following sections I shall address the way this theoretical neglect of the social haunts architectural theory and seek to outline the consequences thereof. I shall start this discussion by revisiting one of the inspirational sources behind current architectural or cultural theory: early critical theory.

Adorno and Benjamin

Adorno’s paper on Loos, ‘Functionalism Today’ (1997: 6–20), is interesting in many aspects. In fact, Adorno, by seeing an essential link between the experience of ageing and the concept of ornament, concurs with the approach of the present article. Yet at the same time he makes an abstract and generalizing turn. For Adorno, the ornamental is simply the vestige of the process of cultural change. It is what is left over, what has lost its place in the immense ramification of functions and purposes in which it found its original meaning:

What was functional yesterday can therefore become the opposite tomorrow. Loos was thoroughly aware of this historical dynamic contained in the concept of ornament. Even representative, luxurious, pompous and, in a certain sense, burlesque elements may appear in certain forms as necessary […]. Criticism of ornament means no more than criticism of that which has lost its functional and symbolic signification. Ornament becomes then a mere decaying and poisonous organic vestige. (Adorno, 1997: 6)

It is true, as we have seen, that Loos’s critique of ornament is rooted in a historical ‘awareness’. Nevertheless, Adorno’s appropriation of Loos’s thought conceals crucial differences: whereas Loos wanted to avoid ornamental objects because they age too rapidly, according to Adorno’s perspective all objects – functional and non-functional alike – turn into ornament when they go out of use. In fact, Adorno’s idea implies a dismissal of the very thesis that drives this article: it effectively dismisses the fact that the question of whether or not an object becomes old is inseparable from the question of the endurance of the collective that surrounds it and projects its energies upon it – and that this endurance of the collective is prolonged by certain forms of design.

To settle this argument, it is important to take a step back. Adorno’s generalization goes hand-in-hand with his attempt to attenuate Loos’s sharp distinction between autonomous and applied art. He thus insists that even functional or technological objects – the ‘house’, the ‘car’ or the ‘airplane’ – possess ‘symbolic character’ in the sense that they, just like artworks, are marked by processes of unconscious expressive ‘mimesis’ (Adorno, 1997: 10). This idea – which is also found in Benjamin – highlights how an epoch’s collective imaginary is invested in (and informed by) objects or images. Such objects may subsequently, when they fall out of use, be interpreted by the skilled interpreter of the ‘pre-history of modernity’ who reads the past collective ‘dreams’ sedimented in the ‘ornaments’, the refuse, the ‘fossils’ of the epoch.

But does this permit the historian to treat purposeful and non-purposeful designs alike? Doesn’t, for instance, the American car of the ’50s, with its excessive tailfins, display a tangible trace of collective excess and a corresponding rupture with an object-directed design process centred exclusively on functional and practical purposes? And don’t such objects appear differently, once the cult is gone, than, say, the standard ‘functionalist’ office building? Obviously, Adorno is right in insisting that the analysis of the materialized ideologies of the past might just as well take as its point of departure a purposeful object as an ornamental one. In this sense, of course, the ‘functionalist’ hypostatization of the technologically and rationally purposeful may hide an ideological – totalitarian and standardizing, but also utopian and progressive – layer, which should be duly excavated by the cultural critic. Yet the difference as to the possible excess in collective ‘dreaming’, tangible in the very design of the two objects, persists.

In fact, this difference is tangible in Benjamin’s work. As early as in his book on the baroque (1991), Benjamin is particularly interested in a certain genre of objects, that is, precisely, in objects that age more rapidly or differently than others. He distinguishes de facto – albeit implicitly – between functional and ornamental objects. He does not generalize, as does Adorno. Thus, when he insists in the baroque book that the utopian ‘origins’ of (another) future are to ‘be recovered in the most exaggerated [verschrobensten] of phenomena, in the most impotent and clumsy attempts, just as in the overripe figures of decadence [Spätzeit]’ (Benjamin, 1991: 227, my translation), we are dealing with a fundamental preference for the ‘ornamental’ and the way it alters, presenting clear similarities with the meaning it has been given in this article and the way it is experienced by Blixen and Hessel. Moreover, it is this selfsame intuition that the older Benjamin wants to apply to (early) cultural-industrial kitsch, to the world exhibitions, to old children’s toys, to the bourgeois intérieur, to the faded phantasmagorias of a Grandville, a Saint Simon or a Fourier, and to the crumbling Parisian arcades. He deliberately takes as his point of departure objects marked by dynamics of exaggeration and transgression – since it is here that the utopian images stand out most garishly. ¹⁴ Since it is here we find room for agitation and animation and, consequently, extraordinarily accentuated expressions of utopian content, it is not too much to say that large parts of Benjamin’s work are permeated by a predilection for the baroque, the ornamental or the kitschy. Provided, of course, that it does not itself dream the same dreams, it is the excesses in collective ‘dreaming’ which become overtly tangible to the next generation. And this contrast between collective attachment and subsequent neglect directly informs and directs Benjamin’s ‘phenomenological’ interests. Thus, in a passage from his Surrealism essay he writes about the revolutionary energies of the ‘outmoded’ to be found in

the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. (Benjamin, 1999a: 210)

Benjamin was indeed aware of the powers of the collective to decisively change the appearance of objects. But he was also, and in contrast to Adorno, aware that some object designs are more vulnerable to these dynamics than are others. The ‘iron constructions’ and ‘factory buildings’ mentioned here are precisely the pre-modernist ones in which ornament and modern design collide in intriguing ways.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, Benjamin is prevented from pursuing these more sociological (or mass-psychological) reflections in any depth. He never explicitly theorizes on the different magnitudes of collective exaggeration relative to various compositional principles. Just like Adorno – and probably largely because of Adorno ¹⁵ – he remains caught up in a Marxist model, in which, exclusively, ‘the forces of production’, and not anonymous forms of effervescent participation and the attachments they produce, decide on the fate of objects: ‘The development of the forces of production shattered the wish symbols of the last century, even before the monuments representing them had collapsed’ (Benjamin, 1999b: 13).

Even though Benjamin implies that the objects start to crumble before they ‘collapse’ physically – that is, before they lose their ‘use value’ – he still, undialectically, blames the ‘constant tremors of the forces of production’ for the modern production of the old. In my view, in contrast, the sudden ageing of certain objects is not (only) caused by the advent of new technology, but (also) by autonomous dynamics of ‘gathering’ and ‘dispersal’. Even a brand new technological invention is not profoundly ‘actualized’ before a collective gathers around it. The ‘shock of the new’ is a fundamentally collective phenomenon – and so is the shock of the old. Benjamin comes close to such intuitions, yet he refrains from taking the last step. At the decisive moment he refrains from theorizing the scars and wounds inflicted on objects by collective processes.

This ambivalence also shapes Benjamin’s theory of ‘mechanical reproduction’ (2003b: 251–83). Even though his famous artwork essay is critically aimed at a highly effervescent and mediated cult – the German Führer-cult – he also, contradictorily, ties mediation and reproduction to the disappearance of ‘aura’ and thus, in fact, to progressive disenchantment and de-ritualization: ‘For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical subservience to ritual’ (2003b: 256). Unluckily, it is these lines – together with the fatal paragraph V, separating ‘cult value’ and ‘exhibition value’ (Benjamin, 2003b: 257) – and not the ‘collectivist’ and mass-psychological thrust of the essay which has inspired later theory of architectural reproduction (cf. Colomina, 1988: 7). Once more, the effervescent collective disappears from view.

It is my thesis that this lack of theoretization of the collective (in the sense it is given here) is a symptom of deeper theoretical prejudices in critical theory. In this tradition the ‘masses’ never really meet. The isolated ‘atoms’ or ‘monads’ do not share anything, do not entrain, imitate, or converge. ¹⁶ And, basically, if there are no genuine collective sentiments and energies, there can be no collectively generated phenomenologies either. This makes it impossible to reconnect to our Durkheimian template from inside the ‘critical’ perspective. Critical theory remains effectively hampered in this respect – and so, I fear, do the successors in the ‘critical’ theory of architecture.

The Neglect of the Social in Current Architectural Theory

For all their differences, many of the thinkers in the ‘critical’ tradition of architectural or cultural theory understand the social or societal dimension to architecture in terms of a form of material reflection of particular epochal ideological traits, historical constructions or tendencies. I do not wish to dismiss this perspective. To be sure, the coming into being of the bourgeois intérieur corresponds with the emergence of a divide between the individual and the collective and the emergence of a modern private sphere (Benjamin); to be sure, the subsequent coming into being of modern forms of ‘public interiority’ – related to an architecture equipped with larger window frames, letting the surroundings enter the building, and based on mass production (Le Corbusier) – reflects a form of post-bourgeois ‘making public’ of the private sphere and its inscription in processes of mass-design and mass-consumption (Colomina, 1996: 209); to be sure, forms of ‘mass-customization’ and singularizing computer-aided mass-production technologies used in current architecture reflect the growing ‘customization’ or diversification of the commodity world corresponding to the ever increasing level of individualization (Foster, 2002: 13–42; 2013: 1–16, Martin, 2010: 123–46). Indeed, these historical correspondences between architecture and the ‘socio-material’ construction of the individual are important and should be duly investigated.

Nevertheless, I maintain that this perspective suffers from a blind spot with respect to effervescent forms of collectivity. This blindness is not total. Contemporary architectural theory does have an eye for architecture as a form of mass media or even a form of cult.

The decrease in the fiscal life of buildings, the multiplication of images from which clients can choose, and the increase in the media’s emphasis on the architect as a ‘cultural hero’, all conspire to subject stylistic conventions […] to rapidly exhaustive trends. Architects have not only moved closer to providing images instead of buildings; the life cycles of these images themselves have moved closer to those of the fashion and the culture industries. (Larson, 1993: 249–50)

Likewise, Hal Foster establishes that the ‘primary site of [Frank Gehry’s] architecture’ is ‘in media reproduction’ (2013: 14); Beatriz Colomina notes that ‘the traveling of the image [of American silos]’ through modernist avantgarde journals and publications might also be read as a media “phenomena”’ (1996: 153) and writes about Le Corbusier’s borrowings of ‘rhetoric and persuasive techniques from modern advertising’ (1996: 185; cf. 1988: 57–99); Reinhold Martin elaborates on Philip Johnson as a ‘brand’ in connection with Johnson’s and John Burgee’s ‘Pennzoil Place’ building in Houston (2010: 97), or he condemns the ‘fetishism of the surface’ (2010: 124) of contemporary architecture which hides the ‘actualities of structural poverty’ underneath consumerist ‘spectacle’; Kenneth Frampton writes about ‘spectacular imagery’ and ‘celebrity architect[s]’ (2007: 344); one could offer further examples.

And yet, the effects that the collective has on experience (of architecture) still disappear from the equation at one point or another. There may be lots of ‘spectacle’, but the collective does not really seem to contribute anything. Effervescent collectivity is reduced, it seems to me, to a mere ‘result’ of mediation as such or directly brought about by an inherently conspicuous architecture. Even the theories and theorists of ‘architectural reproduction’ remain one-sided in this sense. Colomina (1988: 7, 82), for instance, remains indebted to Benjamin’s opposition between ‘cult-value’ and ‘exhibition value’ and thus remains barred from really exploiting the collective charging made possible by Le Corbusier’s media strategies. On the one hand, she clearly sees that

the works in [Le Corbusier’s] imaginary ‘museum’ are the poster, fashion, the industrial design object, advertising; they are the equivalent in our time of the madonnas, crucifixes, and the frescoes of medieval society. (Colomina, 1988: 82)

On the other hand, she remains tied to an analysis of the influence of the advertisement on Le Corbusier’s work and does not analyse the effervescent side to ‘the cult of consumption’ which he initiates, and which actively informs experiences and creates fascination with the circulated modernist paradigms. As do Benjamin’s, her analyses of the historical transformation to experience caused by the coming into being of new forms of reproduction remain hampered. Thus, in my view, we are not merely dealing with a displacement from ‘use’ to detached ‘consumption’ of architecture (Columina, 1988), but these new forms of consumption are also decisively collective, and this fact profoundly influences what we are to understand by ‘consumption’ of mediated architecture in the first place.

To understand the issues surrounding modernist mediated architecture a complex of tendencies must be analysed together: the ‘shortening’ of object-directed composition; the lack of tactile experience; the focus on spatial or geometrical problems or aesthetics; the detachment of the modernist building from its context – placing it on actual or imaginary Corbusierian pilotis – making it extremely suitable for circulation and reproduction; the conventions of architectural reproduction (circulating the original photos) contributing to the sense of timelessness of modernist design; the explicit or implicit ascription of all collective energies to the pre-modern context and the corresponding ‘invisibilization’ of the modernist collective – all these tendencies must be understood in their mutual dependence.

Neglecting the collective embeddedness of architecture has consequences. Important aspects of one of the main attractions of modernism – its apparent timelessness – have been left unexplored phenomenologically and theoretically. This scenario can be generalized. Even though we live in a culture of constant change, we still do not sufficiently understand the ageing processes of the objects around us and the relationship between the collective and the objective expressed therein. We miss reflections on the relationship between, on the one hand, the phenomenological sensations of the new and the old and, on the other, changes to patterns of collective participation, actualizing and de-actualizing the objects around us. And we miss analysis of how mediation and reproduction informs these processes. The influence of the dynamic of gathering and dispersal on the altering of objects; the differences in susceptibility inherent to different forms of composition or ‘styles’; the influence due to collective participation on our attachments, tastes and interests – all these fundamental issues have largely remained, I feel, terra incognita.

Why is this so? My tentative answer is that the collective powers have hidden in the blank surfaces of modernism where not even Loos really recognized their presence. In a sense, Loos’s hubris is the hubris of modernism: believing in its ability to successfully ban archaic forces from having access to composition or design has merely made these forces invisible and has thus unwittingly expanded their hold on us. The modernists meant to escape collective energies by rationalizing the object world – and yet merely relegated these energies to a somewhat hidden realm from where, unseen, they influence modern culture at large.

These developments, finally, cast their shadow also on the current situation. With the critique of modernist formalism and its lack of contextual awareness, my positive intuition is that object-directed sensitivity has gained force as a compositional criterion.

And yet, maybe the true lesson has yet to be learned. When it comes to the current global wave of signature buildings designed by star architects, the hubris of modernism is, I fear, as tangible as ever. At the same time as architecture is turned into image as never before, the collective of architectural consumers has reached global scale. But due to the neglect of the collective dimension, both the current wave of star architects and the (star) architectural theorists remain as oblivious as before to the collective forces which co-animate and co-direct their creative endeavours. This is of extreme importance in a situation in which new materials and means of production have made the distinction between ‘the ornamental’ and ‘the modern’ increasingly difficult to maintain. In a new situation in which an abundance of new materials and new forms of ‘customized’ mass-production makes it possible to ‘deconstruct’ modernist ideals of space – or to play ‘ornamentally’ with the very notion of structure – the modernist limitation and formalization of the compositional process has become impossible. The barrier against effervescent energies, preventing them from directly informing creative processes, has disappeared.

In a sense we have come full circle – to a situation akin to the one in which Loos found himself. The collective energies have again found access to the very process of composition. Effervescent collectivity, at one and the same time animated by and animating the very dreams and fascinations connected with the new technologies, ideas and materials so enthusiastically exploited and celebrated at present, will thus be ‘tangible’ once it has left these materials and ideas behind. A day will come when it will be clear that collective hysteria helped animate, bend or dislocate the walls of Gehry’s Bilbao, of Eisenman’s City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela or of Koolhaas’s CCTC building in Beijing. Now, will the future beholder of these buildings one day feel the same as Blixen or Hessel did? That it was ‘mere fashion’ that animated the appearance of these objects in the first place? Will he or she sense the ‘ghostly hidden crowds of people from days gone by’ (Hessel), which once enlivened these buildings, now desolate and crumbling? Only time will tell.

So, how to guard the strengths of the modernist attitude while avoiding its weaknesses? How to make enduring design in a situation in which modernist forms of formalization no longer provide any protection against the powers of the collective? I think Loos gave us the answer: enduring design can only be obtained through object-directed sensitivity.

The stakes are higher than ever. On the one hand, with the disappearance of modernism, the possible autonomy and complexity of the creative process is indeed restored, making room for a new form of sensitive and contextual architecture. On the other hand, again, the disappearance of modernist formalization also means that the bulwark against collective influence has crumbled. Of course, the outcome of these ‘negotiations’ between the imperatives of the object and the influence of the social has to be discussed in each individual case. And yet, more general conclusions can be drawn: attentiveness towards the collective embeddedness of architectural composition and design (and of creative processes more generally) would make us more attentive to the inherent wishes of the architectural object; attentiveness towards the consequences of ever increasing mediation and ‘reproduction’ of architecture and the global cult it makes possible is of equal importance.

Most importantly, however, I should like to maintain that this collective has its own life and its own powers. It is sui generis, as Durkheim insisted. It changes the appearance of objects, it creates masterpieces and decides on their lifespans, and it makes buildings crumble which show no signs of physical decay; it actualizes and de-actualizes, accelerates and decelerates time. In this article I have tried to sketch how an appreciation of some of the most central ‘phenomenologies’ and dynamics of modern culture may rely on an understanding of this autonomous collective dimension and its relation to different paradigms of creativity and design.