Ethics of Architecture

This thought piece explores post-war urban reconstruction in Sarajevo from the perspective of the societal process of dealing with the past. In the complicated canvas of urgent reconstruction needs, including housing shortages and infrastructure repair, funding considerations and local and national politics, the paper inquires what is the place of the process of 'coming to terms with this past' in urban reconstruction. It introduces key threads of the multidimensional relationship between reconstruction and dealing with the past for the LSE Cities project Reconstructing Sarajevo. The author coordinated the LSE Cities Programme urban design workshop which originated the publication.

This paper scrutinizes Benjamin’s interest in the urban fabric of nineteenth century Paris, and compares it to contemporary writings on Paris and on (more generally) new forms of urbanism in the journalistic work of Joseph Roth. It argues that both authors come to terms with the modern city through a shared set of observations and concepts, particularly the concepts of ‘expressionism’, ‘physiognomy’, and ‘phantasmagoria’. The paper clarifies how Roth and other writers in (or immediately before) the 1920s developed such concepts, and how Benjamin’s The Arcades Project builds on these writers. It shows that Benjamin’s specific contribution to this body of literature is the invention of a secular mythology, with a clear application to architecture in Benjamin’s focus on the ‘boundless interiorization’ of glass and iron construction. The paper concludes that Benjamin’s contribution to architecture is considerable when compared to the materialist orientation of his main sources in The Arcades Project (especially Boetticher and Giedion), but that the purported improvements on Benjamin’s distinguished predecessors of architectural non-materialism are by comparison less impressive.