Tim Altenhof
Breathing Space: The Architecture of Pneumatic Beings (2018)
Abstract:
European culture in the early twentieth century was characterized, in part, by a renewed and broad-based fascination with a range of natural processes and their implications for modern society. Among these was the act of breathing. Whether in the context of avant-garde art practice or popular cultural habit, an increasingly refined sensitivity to the problems and processes of breathing was inspired by an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the body’s relationship to the broader environment—to the atmosphere, to air—and of air’s peculiar, dialectical nature, as an agent of both life and death. A surge in the development of both novel breathing practices and progressive approaches to building ventilation gave rise to a concomitant obsession, among physicians and architects alike, with the human lung, and its capacity to serve as a metaphor for a synthesis between inside and outside.
This dissertation maps the formation of this breathing culture , and explores its impact on the course and development of modernist architecture between the years of 1870-1935. Taking the work of historian and critic Sigfried Giedion as a primary point of reference, it is built around a sequence of three case studies: The Queen Alexandra Sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland; the Steinberg-Herrmann hat factory in Luckenwalde, Germany; and the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. For Giedion, air played a vital role in the conception and construction of architectural modernism in the 1920s, and was as fundamental to his reading of the Eiffel Tower as to that of Le Corbusier’s houses. And though his particular theorization of air was tied to the new aesthetics of French iron construction—they were seen as bathed in air—it resonated, as well, with a range of concepts and ideas associated with nineteenth century naturopathy, which promoted an understanding of the atmosphere as a veritable ocean of light and air in which to be submerged.
While the various antinomies inherent in European modernism’s understanding of air as a source of both cure and threat would be thoroughly explored from the mid-nineteenth century onward, it was only in the early decades of the twentieth century that the conscious act of breathing was given full architectonic expression. Concurrent with the emergence of naturopathy, new approaches to tuberculosis management in modern sanatoria came to favor environmental exposure of the patients housed within them, now conceived as fully pneumatic beings. A close reading of the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium exemplifies how the rationale behind this building type relates to the breathing patients inside. To protect workers’ lungs from the adverse effects of toxic fumes produced inside the dye works at Luckenwalde, Erich Mendelsohn developed a technologically primitive, if highly effective, solution, proposing a building which actually breathed. Taking a somewhat different approach, Walter Gropius responded to this pneumatic turn in popular and architectural culture by reifying the act of breathing in a set of flamboyant opening mechanisms, integrated into the building skin at the Bauhaus in Dessau.
In identifying the pneumatic ethos sustaining these and other collective practices in early twentieth century Europe, this project seeks to unveil the ideological underpinnings of modern architecture and its alleged capacities to heal, even as it contributes to a reassessment of aesthetic modernism’s early historiography. Does architecture breathe? In fact, it does.
Bio:
Tim Altenhof is an architect and a university assistant in architectural theory at the University of Innsbruck. His dissertation was awarded the Theron Rock well Field Prize in 2018. An excerpt of this work, which was published in English and Italian under the title The House-As-Chimney. Erich Mendelsohn’s Breathing Space at Luckenwalde, won the Bruno Zevi Prize 2018. During the fall semester 2022, Tim was an International Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen, where he completed his book manuscript. His writings have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual, Log, Engramma, Revista de Arquitectura, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.