Archives Fever, but Buildings Shrill! Adolf Loos in Palestine
Modern architecture, with the émigré architect as its messenger, sought to create a world in which buildings performed an act of global dissemination. They were to exist in a universal space where site specificity was no longer a value and authorship no longer central. A protagonist 'on the move', a homeless modernist perhaps, challenges the very essence of place-bound nationalist politics. The experience of exile, dislocation, or disarticulation is deeply inscribed in the aesthetic structure of modernism, challenging the site, appearance and meaning of the architectural object. Consequently, historians of modernism are challenged to narrate and follow the trajectories of migration, trying to piece together routes as artefacts keep on popping up in unexpected places.
This paper looks at the migration of ideas through different means and media: writings, architectural drawings, photographs, films, artefacts, building materials and buildings themselves, but also their protagonists — authors, owners and inhabitants. In a series of archival close-ups, this paper presents research on Adolf Loos's collaborators, those who had worked and studied with him in Vienna and Prague, and who in the 1930s brought his design principles to Palestine. This research does not only add to an already well-established scholarship about Adolf Loos, but tries to make a series of methodological and theoretical points about threads and traces that pose the most potent questions for the architectural historian as she follows the complex experience of modernity through exile.
Prof. Dr. Ines Weizman is a junior professor of Architectural Theory at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and director of the Bauhaus Institute of History and Theory of Architecture and Planning. She trained as an architect at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Ecole d’Architecture de Belleville in Paris, the Sorbonne, the University of Cambridge, and the Architectural Association where she completed her Ph.D. thesis in History and Theory.
Since 2014 Ines Weizman directs Documentary Architecture, a research collaboration between the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and the Faculty of Media. One of her recent projects, conducted together with students and junior researchers, is the film and research project From the Second Life. Documents of Forgotten Architectures which was exhibited in Weimar (2014) and in Tel Aviv (2015).
Selected publications: Celltexts. Books and Other Works Produced in Prison, 2008 (with E. Weizman); Repeat Yourself. Loos, Law and the Culture of the Copy, 2012, 2013 (with A. Linke, A. Thiele); Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, 2014 (ed.).