Vortrag Anselm Wagner: „Silent Spaces: On Absent Signifiers in Modernist Architecture“

Vortrag von Prof. Anselm Wagner:

„Silent Spaces: On Absent Signifiers in Modernist Architecture“

Im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung „Significant Absence: Gaps in Signifiers across Media“ am Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG), Institut für Amerikanistik, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

Modernist architecture has been frequently characterized by its abdication of iconography and signification. When traditional architecture was said to provide a certain message, expressed by the hierarchy of its elements, orders of columns, sculptures, and ornamentation, modernist buildings were stripped of all these features to present just their naked basic forms and functions. A building in the Bauhaus-style was either addressed to represent a universal, not very specific language (as, for example, Mies van der Rohe took his own buildings) or to remain in absolute silence at all (as, f.e., Manfredo Tafuri characterized Mies’ buildings). This kind of silence could be realized by blank, white, “naked” walls and facades, minimalist-empty rooms, but also by the structural element of the grid (which was preferred by Mies and his school). According to Rosalind Krauss, the grid (in modernist art, but also in architecture) eliminates all kinds of narration and signification that where prevailing in former art and architecture. But is there, after all, a kind of (suppressed) meaning in the silence of Mies and his colleagues? Or is this silence just a sign of absence, “signifying nothing” (as Shakespeare’s Macbeth says at the end of his life), being responsible for all the ugliness, homelessness, and inhospitality so often attributed to modernist cities?