On the basis of the project being “merely a photograph,” K. Michael Hays describes Co-op Interieur as a “misnomer”—both in Hannes Meyer’s oeuvre and in the canon of avant-garde modern architecture at large[1]. It is not that the project is only survived by photographs of it, as is not untypical, but that the project was always only a photographic image of an architectural interior. In this way, Co-op Interieur differs fundamentally from built architecture, which can typically only be signified by a photographic reproduction. Regarding the particular relationship signifying images have to their signifieds, Roland Barthes writes:
All images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifieds, a floating chain of signifieds, the reader is able to choose some and ignore other. Polysemy poses a question of meaning [...]in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs[2].
Through Barthes, we understand that the room that Co-op Interieur attempts to signify is impossible to know through the reading of the image alone, as its meaning only exists by virtue of socially-constructed techniques of interpretation. Though polysemous, the image of the room has been widely discussed and each of the represented objects have been examined for their particular relevance to Meyer’s vision. The versions of the Co- op Interieur that are best-known and most widely circulated both present the same room, one a slightly cropped version of the other. The wider-view shows an opened folding chair and a small shelf mounted on white fabric (hung to delimit the area of the room and construct the photo as an interior) holding jars of everyday consumables, in addition to the single bed, a second folded chair hung up on the “wall,” and a phonograph sitting on a small collapsible table, which can be seen in both photographs. These signs, individually and in their combination, have been studied for their relevance to questions of dwelling, housing, and collective and individual modes of production both for their historical significance and as applied to the contemporary condition.
Interpreting an image
In Less Is Enough, Pier Vittorio Aureli examines the room depicted in Co-op Interieur through its furnishings, as implicit of an ascetic lifestyle and in its relationship to the contemporary aesthetics of minimalism.[3]More recently, through a similar analysis of the objects represented in the image, Aureli writes of Co-op Interieur as presenting an alternative mode of dwelling in our contemporary condition in which domestic architectures have been financialized as real estate.[4] Likewise, Aristide Antonas explains the contemporary relevance of Meyer’s project to what he terms our “culture of retreat” and the role that interiors play in structuring its infrastructure,[5] and K. Michael Hays offers a reading of Meyer’s photograph as project that addresses and constructs what he terms to as “the posthumanist subject” and as a visual diagram of New Objectivity.[6] While each of these readings been more or less accepted as either appropriate descriptions or extrapolations of Hannes Meyer’s Co-op Interieur, they present architectural readings (culturally-validated responses) of an image. This paper in based on the understanding a reading of Co-op Interieur is necessary to understand Meyer’s intent for the project and its significance. While Barthes does not offer a method by which to permanently fix meaning (nor does he advocate for such a process), a consideration of the photographic medium provides a more specific framework by which to interpret the work. Elaborating on the relationship between media and content theorized by Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Binkley writes:
A medium is not simply a physical material, but rather a network of such conventions which delimits a realm over which physical materials and aesthetic qualities are mediated. [...] In its network of conventions, each artistic medium established non-aesthetic criteria for identifying works of art. By being told which medium a work is in, we are given the parameters within which to search for and experience its aesthetic qualities.[7]
While the medium does not fix interpretation, it offers a way to read an image that does not rely solely on understanding the signs contained in the image. Following Binkley, interpreting Co-op Interieur requires the framing provided by its medium: photography. Photography, like many media, is defined both as product and as a mode of production and the conventions that govern the medium exist in both arenas. In “Author as Producer,” Walter Benjamin explains how the method of production of a work, which he terms “technique,” is not only a relevant framework through which to reveal the message of a piece (though Benjamin believes this to be a fruitless question of oppositions) but also reveals the work’s relationship to the struggles in the modes of production of its time.[8] When read through Die Neue Welt, the manifesto alongside which the second version of Co-op Interieur was published in 1926 (the first version was sent directly to Adolf Behne on the back of a postcard earlier that same year), we understand that like Hannes Meyer’s project is largely one of repositioning of society in relation to new modes of production.[9] Meyer writes, “The revolution in our attitude of mind to the reorganisation of our world calls for a change in our media of expression. Today is ousting yesterday in material, form and tools.”[10] Though he does not address photography explicitly in the text, this approach seems to invalidate the idea that the photographic medium is simply incidental to his project.
To position Co-op Interieur more specifically than through the media of photography, one can place it in the canon of photographs of domestic interiors. Adolf Loos famously contested the photograph as a technique that could be communicative of his interiors, in writing, “It is my greatest pride that the interiors which I have created are completely lacking in effect when photographed; that the people who live in them do not recognize their own apartments from the photographs.”[11] The obvious difference in quality between Loos’ interiors and exteriors has led to the theories of “the split-wall,”[12] ideas of domestic spaces resisting “the intrusion of social spaces in into the realm of the individual,”[13] and notions of architectural schizophrenia[14] and of the schizophrenic subject that was to inhabit these spaces.[15] Regardless of the specific formulation of these theories, they all acknowledge Loos’ domestic spaces as constructing the modern subject as a two-faced individual: anonymous in the collective and characteristically individual when in the private realm. The modern subject is, through Loos’ work, both unknown and unknowable—undistinguishable in the collective and enclosing and performing their subjectivity in the domestic realm. It is through this understanding of domestic interiors as highly differentiated, autonomous, and ritualized constructions that produce the individualized modern subjectivity that Loos claimed that the photographic reproduction of his interiors were unable to authentically capture their essence. Supporting Loos’ reasoning, in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin explains that the value of the authentic work of art, the original piece “has its basis in ritual” and that this value is destroyed by means of photographic reproduction. This ritualistic value presents itself in artwork as its aura, which Benjamin defines as a “strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”[16]Through reproduction, the artwork’s aura is violated as the original artwork’s specific and singular existence is destroyed. As such, the photographic method by which Co-op Interieur was created rejects the very possibility of an aura being attached to project. There is no “authentic”—or “more authentic”—Co-op Interieur, which is to say that there is neither an existing room to which the photograph is meant to refer to nor is the stage set that was photographed the subject of the project. Co-op Interieur was conceived of and made purely as a photographic referent, without a pre-existing “referred,” which makes the image entirely self-referential. The most intentional and complete version of the project is the photograph, which is inherently without specificity and without aura. In this formulation, the question of authenticity is reformulated, as the photograph is no longer the site of a reproduction but is the site of production as well as the product.
Unlike the photographs of Adolf Loos’ interiors, there is no more authentic work than the photograph of Co-op Interieur, and there is, thus, no subjectivity outside of that implied by the photograph. The subjectivity implied through this method of production can be understood through the loss of the specific signified in Meyer’s project. Where many photographs become grounded in a material reality, Co-op Interieur refers to the medium of photography itself. In “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin presents photography in terms of the technique’s advent, which took place as socialism was gaining momentum in Western Europe[17]. In light of the medium’s inherent connection to the socialist movement and its destruction of the specific aura, we can understand the subjectivity imposed by the photograph as having its basis in the collective and in opposition to the fundamentally and uniquely individual subject for whom Loos was designing interiors. In Co-op Interieur, Meyer’s subject is the individual who is the base unit of the collective.
Meyer’s project, as an aura-less one, not only rejects the singular inhabitation of it but the possibility of a singular reception and interpretation of the work. By virtue of the lossless reproducibility of the photograph, Co-op Interieur can be experienced collectively and simultaneously. For Benjamin, this collective experience of the photograph approaches a normative experience of architecture:
Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception, as architecture has always been able to do, as the epic poem could do at one time, and as the film is able to do today.[18]
Rather than the architecture of domestic interiors per se, Benjamin’s conception of architecture in this passage references “public” architecture that can be collectively experienced and received. In this sense, the photograph does not replicate the enclosed and private nature of the interior but reframes the domestic sphere as public architecture through the shared mode of reception of the medium. Through photography, Co-op Interieur is positioned not as the bourgeois, individualized (and individualizing) Loosian domestic interior but as an architecture that denies the possibility of being inhabited outside the larger context of the collective. Whereas Loos constructs a schizophrenic subject whose interior and exterior identities are odds with one another, Meyer creates a subject that fluidly exists in both realms, always an individual, but always part of the larger collective. The particular mode of subjectivity for which Hannes Meyer calls for when he writes, “Co-operation rules the world. The community rules the individual,” is both constructed and communicated when Co-op Interieur is created and disseminated as a photograph.[19]
As a medium, photography never creates an autonomous whole. The photograph can only ever be understood as a fragment: a fragment of space and time that is decontextualized through its capture on film. While the signs presented in Co-op Interieur allow it to be read as depicting a domestic space, the space is necessarily a fragment. It is neither a house nor an apartment, it is a single room. “The room,” Aristide Antonas writes, “is not designed with the intention of condensing the infrastructure of a house into a minimum space, but to create a shelter for temporary rest.”[20] As such, the room is intentionally depicted as reliant. To serve its function, it depends on the infrastructure that presumably lies outside of it. Through the use of photography, Meyer presents Co-op Interieur not as a self-sufficient, autonomous whole but as an interior that inherently belongs to the exteriors that sustain it. Without employing a window or visual threshold to allow for the space outside the room to be characterized, the medium leads the viewer to assume that collective dwelling, societal cooperation, and urbanity are the context from which of Meyer’s photograph was extracted.
Photography as a vehicle for a collective vision
In this sense, Co-op Interieur can be read as advocating for the opposite of Walter Benjamin’s “liquidation of the interior.”[21]Where the Benjaminian formulation implies the end of the bourgeois subjectivity through the dismantling of the bourgeois dwelling, Co-op Interieur expresses a collective sphere that is composed of individual subjectivities that cohere with one another because the logic of mass-production has surpassed that of individual ownership. Instead of a liquidation of the interior, Meyer posits a sort of liquidation of the exterior. Unlike Loos’ subject who is interiorized and individualized through architecture, an identity that must be shed in the collective, Meyer’s subject is always inside and individual but lives as such collectively. This is the mode of subjectivity and dwelling that Meyer calls for in Die Neue Welt and that Co-op Interieur seeks to support. The photograph simultaneously presents a vision of the world in its entirety, as a collective at its largest possible scale, and the individual, who is its constituent part. The photograph of Co-op Interieur, rather than a physical construction or the stage-set assembled to create the photograph is what allows both the room and its exterior to simultaneously be proposed and perceived, in addition to communicating the subjectivity implied by that simultaneity.
Fragmentation in photography also takes place in its capturing and crystalizing of a moment in time and removing it from the temporal continuum. Roland Barthes has written about the temporal space of the photograph as being the portrayal of the “absolute past.” For Barthes, this certainty of the past is interpreted as a certainty of death in the future, both literally, as he is writing specifically about human portraiture, and figuratively as it is also certain that the specific moment captured and fragmented from the temporal continuum, no longer exists.[22] While this holds for the photograph in which there exists an external signified, as Co-op Interieur is entirely self-referential and cannot refer to an actual moment in time, past or present, in which the room it depicts existed outside of the site of the photograph. Before Co-op Interieur was photographed, there was only ever a construction that would appear as a room in a photograph. The photograph of Meyer’s set is not an impression of reality but rather creates an impression of a reality that never was. It was only by photographing the hung sheets of fabric did they become walls and the open set became an enclosed room. From this method of formation, it can be said that the temporal space created by this technique of photographic construction is not an absolute past, but projects into the future, much like the future tense in which Meyer wrote Die Neue Welt. As were the sheets hung to project the semblance of a room, Meyer disseminated the photograph of the room to project the changed appearance and quality of the “new world,” and its implication of a fundamentally changed individual subject. At a time when domestic architecture was being presented as the realm of individualistic private life, Meyer constructed its counterpoint via photography. The architect’s project was not to create a photograph of Co-op Interieur but was to create Co-op Interieur through a photograph. Or perhaps, the use of photography for Meyer’s Co-op Interieur was simply a “misnomer.”
[1] K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer & Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 63.
[2] Roland Barthes, “The Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York City: Hill and Wang, 1977), 38–39.
[3] Pier Vittorio Aureli, Less is Enough (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2013), 39–41.
[4] Pier Vittorio Aureli, “A Room Without Ownership,” in Hannes Meyer Co-op Interieur, eds. Jesko Fezer, Martin Hager, and Christian Hiller (Leipzig: Spector Books), 33–39.
[5] Aristide Antonas, “The Unhomely Bed,” in Hannes Meyer Co-op Interieur, eds. Jesko Fezer, Martin Hager, and Christian Hiller (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2015), 41–49.
[6] Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, 55–81.
[7] Timothy Binkley, “Piece: Contra Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 3 (1977): 269–270.
[8] Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 86.
[9] Hannes Meyer, “Die Neue Welt,” in Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939, eds. Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton, and Dennis Sharp (London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1975), 107.
[10] Meyer, “Die Neue Welt,” 109.
[11] Adolf Loos, “Architecture,” On Architecture, ed. Daniel Opel, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2002), 78.
[12] Beatriz Colomina, “Split-Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” Sexuality & Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York City: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 73–130.
[13] Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 233– 282.
[14] Benedetto Gravagnuolo and C. H. Evans, Adolf Loos, Theory and Works (New York City: Rizzoli, 1982), 204–205.
[15] Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, 118–119.
[16] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [Second Version] (1935),” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 24.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid, 36.
[19] Meyer, “Die Neue Welt,” 107.
[20] Antonas, “The Unhomely Bed,” 43.
[21] Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty (1933),” in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings Volume 2: 1927-1934, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 731–736.
[22]Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York City: Hill and Wang, 1981), 96.