ABSTRACT
This chapter isolates the telling of a significant and interruptive event, urgently re-enacted by a witness to fellow onlookers, investigators and passers-by. It considers some of the developments across these two decades (focusing particularly on the 1920s) as an extended moment where attempts were made to transform the auditorium into a machine-for-action. The chapter is structured around the Russian constructivists, the Bauhaus and Brecht; united under the rubric of Marxist constructivism, described by Fredric Jameson as "an attempt to overcome paralysis and impotence, the failure of individual action and the sense of a global situation that cannot be changed. It concludes by discussing adaptations of early 20th-century industrial spaces toward the end of the century, which achieved architecture of alienation by staging the failure of utopian modernism and revealing the paradoxes and duplicity of abstract space.
