Progress: Re-Building the Ruins of Architecture

In a letter dated February 1929, Walter Benjamin acknowledged the receipt of Sigfried Giedion’s book, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (1928), praising the historian’s intellectual capacity for “uncovering the tradition by observing the present.” ¹ For Benjamin, the business of criticism was a kind of “excavation” in the sense of “mining—taking something out of the earth—but in this case, more accurately, also ‘bringing to light’….” ² The word “uncovering” endows Giedion with the skills of an archaeologist, a person adept at recovering what is beneath the dirt, or at recovering times past, as is the case with the historian’s attempt to unpack the historicity of architecture. ³ According to Benjamin, “vision” is central to the historian’s search for that which should be rescued. But what is this vision? Is it the historian’s intellect, the breadth of knowledge and information he/she has accumulated through observation and collection of facts and figures? Or is it a worldview, “the philosophy of history,” a subject Benjamin took on himself almost a decade after writing to Giedion.