ABSTRACT
The previous two chapters have sketched the contours of Benjamin’s experience
of the built environment and his appreciation of the need to revolutionize
theoretical method in line with modern productive and aesthetic practice. The
central theme of this chapter is Benjamin’s appreciation of modernity and, more
specifically, modernism as it expressed itself in art and architecture in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Benjamin embraced the
pioneering spirit evident in modernist architecture in the early decades of the
twentieth century, he was at best ambivalent towards its rhetoric of triumphant
progressivism. To temper this rhetoric Benjamin follows Giedion’s lead in tracing
modernism back to the mid-nineteenth century. In this context Benjamin’s
intensive study of Charles Baudelaire was to provide the main contours for
reconstructing what he called ‘the primal history of nineteenth century’.
