Stone, steel, glass
Subtitle: constructions of time within European modernity
By: by Christina Lynne Svendsen
Series: Collections of the Harvard University Archives
Published: 2010
Language: eng
Number of pages: 292
Description: The epistemological and philosophical power of Walter Benjamin's "dialectical image at a standstill" comes from the fact that it crosses abstract thought with visual images or even material objects. My dissertation seeks to take this methodology of Benjamin's seriously by using architecture as the material substance against which to read his philosophical account of modernity. He described the Arcades Project Adorno as a project in Geschichtsphilosophie, even though superficially his convolutes have to do with mundane objects from the nineteenth century such as catacombs, arcades, mirrors, ironwork, and Art Nouveau. However, Geschichtsphilosophie refers not only to the study of the past, but more broadly to a philosophy of time in its human scope. I have chosen four building typologies that act as models for the new awareness of time in the twentieth century. My study opens with chronologically layered buildings, examining these structures as models for submerged, forgotten, unofficial, or unconscious memories. However, modernity is a time of anxiety over rupture with the past.

My second chapter therefore investigates conscious memory: modem monuments that carefully designed sites for the experiential transmission of history. Meanwhile, modernity also incites us to forget -- to become emancipated from the past. My third chapter explores the appeal of glass: an artificial substance that is attractive because it is so smooth and hard that it is nearly impossible to leave a permanent trace on it. However, the glass house is not just liberating but disorienting. By contrast, sudden catastrophic ruins, the focus of my final chapter, embed the viewer in the full web of fourth-dimensional time, past and future Sudden ruins are often elided in the usual Romantic discourse, which relates ruins to the past and gradual erosion. By contrast, my study shows that sudden ruins break open a fissure that can reveal a glimpse of a future previously unimaginable according to habitual ways of predicting or planning it. Indeed they have a "weak prophetic power" in a secular age; they connect us to posterity and make visible a larger and more meaningful temporal context for our lives than simply the present.
Notes: "November 2010."

Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of Comparative Literature)--Harvard University, 2010.

Includes bibliographical references.