Walter Benjamin’s topology of envelopes and perspectives

Résumé En

This article identifies conditions for architecture as political agency. It discusses how the spatial organisation of architecture can be strongly influenced by a broader social context. Conversely, it also discusses how architecture affects the social behaviour of its users and exerts political meanings. The theoretical proposition of this article is based on Walter Benjamin’s identification of a strong interaction between spatial organisation and social context. In this light, Benjamin analysed pervasive architecture, such as the bourgeois interior, and publicly accessible buildings that welcome large crowds. He argued that this interaction is especially visible in the intertwining of interior and exterior, public and private, individual and collective spaces. Jean-Louis Déotte later analysed Benjamin’s examples of architecture as ‘apparatuses’ that significantly affect social life via their spatial characteristics, and thus acquiring political agency. Building on Déotte’s philosophy, this article examines further conditions under which ‘architectures as apparatuses’ both reveal and affect social life in a way that echoes Benjamin’s earlier descriptions. I start by interrogating conventions of ‘envelopes’ and ‘perspective’ in the spatial organisation of architecture to propose both a new methodology of analysis and radical redefinitions. I then apply this new methodology to analyse Benjaminian examples from the past, such as the city of Naples, Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico, and the iconic example of the Parisian arcades. This demonstrates key characteristics of ‘architectures as apparatuses’ and interrelations between (individual, or groups of) users that are orchestrated by the case studies’ spatial organisation. Finally, I revisit the widely-discussed Yokohama Ferry Terminal project by Foreign Office Architects (FOA) to present it as a contemporary example of ‘architecture as apparatus’.