In Cultural Crossroads Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the

Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, edited by

J Gatley. Auckland: SAHANZ, 2009.

People who Live in Glass Houses:

Walter Benjamin and the Dream of Glass Architecture
Gill Matthewson
Wellington Institute of Technology

Abstract
The glass house began with descriptions of a utopian ideal just after World
War I when Walter Benjamin and others discussed the use of glass to
create an appropriate domestic environment for living in the modern world.
Glass was perceived to have qualities that rendered it perfect for the
construction of the modern house; with glass walls even signifying the
modern. Their words and work influenced the mid-century Modern houses
of Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. They in turn are again highly
influential in the twenty-first century, particularly in New Zealand, where the
glass pavilion house has become an established feature in the architectural
press.

This paper argues that such extensive use of glass subverts the modernity
it aspires to, by discussing Walter Benjamin’s writings on glass, particularly
in his essay ‘Experience and Poverty’, and drawing on recent work by Hilde
Heynen on domesticity. Whilst glass has indeed ushered in the modern
world, it also has aspects that disconnect it from the modern.

Introduction
The glass pavilion house has been a powerful image in Modern architecture since the
oft-published photographs of Philip Johnson’s House (1949) and Mies van der Rohe’s
Farnsworth House (1951). Judging from the architectural press, it is once again
popular and highly influential globally. In New Zealand, for example, it can be seen as
the zeitgeist architecture with both professional (Architecture New Zealand) and
popular (Urbis and Home New Zealand) journals and magazines extensively
promoting it. Glass walls that slide and fold away to open the interior to the outside
also feature in professional awards; Australian architect and juror for the NZIA National
Awards in 2005, Ian McDougall, notes: ‘New Zealand architects … idealise the idea of
the house as a pavilion in the garden.’1
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Such pavilions are unquestionably highly photogenic, and new technologies enable
glass to be deployed in multiple ways, but underlying this proliferation is an idea of the
modern. As Joseph Rykwert puts it: ‘To some people modernity is identified with a
glass wall.’2 The more glass, the more modern. In this paper, however, I argue that
such extensive use of glass subverts the very modernity this kind of architecture
aspires to.

The Glass Pavilion

As an idea, the glass pavilion has been in the architectural imagination since at least
World War One when Walter Gropius and his peers in Germany called for a radical
architecture to accommodate, represent and encourage a new transformed society. In
their 1919 ‘Exhibition for Unknown Architects’ they wanted to show ‘a world of beauty
built anew from the ground up.’3 The recent success of the Russian Revolution
seemed to imply that a new world was indeed emerging and built form needed to
reflect it.

Although the seeds for Modernism had been planted perhaps centuries beforehand, it
was the aftermath of World War One that brought about its first major flowering in
Europe. With large numbers of a generation of men dead, and the rest shell-shocked
and shattered from this ‘war to end all wars’, something had to change. There was a
commitment to a starting again from clear principles for this brave new world; history
was seen as corrupt, inadequate and inappropriate. Modernism therefore marked a
search for pure forms – architectural and social – not contaminated by a history that
was seen to have culminated in the nightmare of World War One. Instead, ‘form must
follow function’ so that built form would be honest and ‘cleansed’; as architecture was
purged, then so too would society be purified. Bruno Taut argued that the new housing
with its combination of functional planning and the new aesthetic would have profound
social and cultural implications, leading to new social behaviour.4 The architect was
thus seen as the hero, forging a way forward, and ‘the protagonist not only of an
architectural but of a social revolution.’5

To create this new world there must be new materials. Steel and glass were
nominated as they were seen to both symbolise and enable Modernism’s aims and
aspirations. Steel was valued for its structural virtuosity and ‘mechanistic’ or
functionalist aesthetic.6 Glass was especially prized for a transparency that argued for
honesty and clarity in a world that had become sticky and murky with history. Walls of
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glass mean that there can be no secrets, no corruption. Glass was of course not a
‘new’ material; in some form it had been around since at least the time of the Egyptian
pharaohs, who valued it as a jewel. But only since the beginning of the twentieth
century had it been able to be produced in sheet form relatively inexpensively, thus
allowing the possibilities of larger and more ‘glassy’ structures. Gropius’s 1925 design
for the Bauhaus studios at Dessau and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye of 1929 are
examples of such a structure.

Walter Benjamin and Glass

Critical theorist, Walter Benjamin, lays down the case for glass in his much-quoted
essay of 1933, ‘Experience and Poverty’,7 drawing on and summarising writers and
thinkers before him. He describes the post-war world in compelling words:

A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood

in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except
the clouds and, at its centre, in a force field of destructive torrents and
explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.8

The world produced by the huge development of technology (as demonstrated by the
viciously effective machinery of the war) meant that experience could no longer be any
kind of guide of the future. This devaluing of experience resulted in what Benjamin
called a ‘poverty of experience’. This was not a cause for despair, however, but a
chance and opportunity (albeit forced) ‘to start from scratch; to make a new start … to
clear a tabula rasa.’9 One begins, he thought, by rejecting ‘the traditional, solemn,
noble image of man, festooned with all the sacrificial offerings of the past.’10 Now was
the time for something completely different.

Benjamin points to German author Paul Scheerbart’s ideas (some of which were
detailed in 1914 in his influential book, Glass Architecture) as leading the way.
Scheerbart proposed to house people ‘in adjustable, movable, glass-covered
dwellings.’11 Glass, agrees Benjamin, is the obvious material as it is ‘a hard, smooth
material to which nothing can be fixed. A cold and sober material into the bargain.’12

Benjamin argues that what was needed in the new modern world was an environment,
or more accurately an interior, in which one could leave no traces. The desire for
traces he describes as a stifling nineteenth-century bourgeois fixation resulting in a
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cosy cocoon around an individual. But rather than providing protection and succour,
this kind of cosiness traps people, not allowing them to move and change; and such
flexibility of movement is absolutely essential in order to survive, thrive and be in the
modern world. One might call it the signature of the modern. All the hallmarks of the
bourgeois nineteenth-century ‘cosy’ interior such as collections of possessions, knick-
knacks, soft furnishings, etc., are traces of the individual and of their history; but no
history can be trusted, not even one’s own. The cosy cocoon bites back by locking a
person into only one archaic, constricting and oppressive way of being. Adolf Behne
also exhorts the erasure of traces and of cosiness, which he described as ‘the dull
vegetative state of jellyfish-like comfort in which all values become blunted and worn.’13

Cosiness, Benjamin argues, is paid for with melancholy.14 It creates an environment

where rooms have become ‘battlefields over which the attack of commodity capital has
advanced victoriously.’15 He repeats Bertold Brecht’s refrain: ‘Erase the traces!’16 As
Karina Van Herck summarises it: ‘Benjamin rejects the bourgeois ideal of privacy
within the walls of the home because it dissimulates secrecy as intimacy, egocentricity
as individualism and indifference as cosiness.’17

For Benjamin the power of glass in counteracting the cocoon is multiple. Firstly,
‘objects of glass have no “aura”.’18 He explains ‘aura’ as ‘the unique phenomenon of a
distance, however, close it may be,’19 and this concept includes ‘the authenticity of a
thing, [which] is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from
its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.’20 To
have no aura then is to have no history, no essence, no unique distance – thus the
pure tabula rasa required for the new world. Secondly, ‘glass is, in general, the enemy
of secrets. It is also the enemy of possessions.’21 Glass hard, smooth, cold and sober
allows no cocooning, no traces to be accumulated. All is visible. According to Adolf
Behne, glass has ‘an extra-human, super-human quality’.22 With all these perceived
characteristics, glass could not help but be the material of choice for constructing the
modern world, and the brave new world of the future. For Behne, ‘Glass architecture is
going to eliminate all harshness from the Europeans and replace it with tenderness,
beauty and candour.’23 As Scheerbart put it, glass architecture would ‘transform
humanity utterly.’24
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Glass
The notion that glass has extraordinary qualities including the capacity for
transformation was not altogether new. Art historian Rosemarie Haag Bletter describes
in ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream’25 a literary-architectural convention
associated with glass beginning with the Old Testament and stories of King Solomon.
The convention continues with the New Testament’s Revelation of St John, through
legends surrounding the Holy Grail, via Rosicrucian symbolism down to the
Expressionism of Bruno Taut and his mentor: the same Paul Scheerbart whom
Benjamin quotes. In all these, glass (and materials that might simulate glass like water
and gold) are used to create a transcendent, spiritual world. Whilst little could be built
until glass production became easier at the turn of the century, these remained
architectural fantasies but highly influential ones. The impact of these legends and
their iconography is particularly visible in Gothic cathedrals and buildings that sought
to emulate King Solomon’s temple (such as the eleventh-century Alhambra). This
iconographic tradition emphasises the transparency and reflectivity of glass in creating
a fluid, flexible and transformative world.

Glass symbolism notwithstanding, there are other writings that attest to glass being an
extraordinary material. In their book The Glass Bathyscape,26 science historians Alan
Macfarlane and Gerry Martin argue to their subtitle: How Glass Changed the World.
‘Glass is strange. Chemists find it defies their classifications. It is neither a true solid
nor a true liquid.’27 It is produced by a controlled cooling from a molten state so that it
passes into the solid state unusually without crystallisation. This gives it some peculiar
properties: it is at the same time very brittle, infinitely malleable and highly durable. It
can be obtained in any colour, its surface take any pattern and be produced in a wide
range of gradations from transparent all the way through to opaque. It can split light to
create the rainbow, enhance sight, and store food without contamination. This
versatility means that glass has had an extraordinarily powerful impact on every aspect
of Western culture and civilisation and is indeed, for Macfarlane and Martin, utterly
essential to Western development. At the very least, without window glass colder
climes would be less habitable. But without the optical glass of prisms and lenses
there would be no spectacles, microscopes, telescopes, photography, etc., and the
deep and expansive knowledge of the world they give us. David Hockney agrees,
arguing that the striking realism artists achieved from the Renaissance was the result
of the technical innovation of optics and calls their seldom-acknowledged use by artists
a ‘secret knowledge.’28 In addition, Macfarlane and Martin argue, without glass vessels
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(which do not react with their contents) there would be no science of chemistry and
again the knowledge and products they give us. Nor would there be light bulbs and
any number of glass instruments and tools. The list of products, qualities and benefits
of glass seems endless.

In an appendix to their book, they look at the role of glass in the twenty experiments
that changed the world, nominated in 1981 by an Oxford University science historian,
Rom Harré.29 Whilst this list is relatively arbitrary and scientists would no doubt argue
endlessly which experiments should be included in a top twenty, it is objective in the
sense that Harré had no agenda to select experiments utilising glass. Macfarlane and
Martin find that sixteen of the twenty experiments ‘could not have been performed
without the use of glass apparatus, sometimes as a transparent container, sometimes
as optically worked components such as prisms or lenses.’30 Use of glass, they argue,
ushered in the modern world. Glass then enables progress and invention; it allows and
permits the very essence of modernity.

Glass Architecture
In ‘Experience and Poverty’ Walter Benjamin was of course writing in and of a
particular time (and from a Marxist perspective); with the memory of World War One
still sharp and resonating, ‘economic crisis … at the door, and behind it … the shadow
of the approaching war.’31 His call to use glass to build a new world that would erase
the traces of history certainly makes sense to a generation who felt themselves to be
so heavily battered by history. And yet the call for a glass architecture has continued to
be answered.

Glass architecture began to really assert itself mid-century when it crossed the Atlantic
to the United States. Here, glass-skinned skyscrapers were first constructed and then
replicated across the world. It was in the States too that the first pure glass houses
were built: Philip Johnson’s glass house of 1949 and the 1951 Farnsworth House by
Mies van der Rohe. Photographic images of these demonstrated the possibilities of full
glass walls and have been published in most every book on architectural history ever
since they were built. Initiated by Los Angeles based magazine Arts and Architecture,
the progressive Case Study House programme 1945-62, was designed to promote
modern living in modern houses, and likewise made full use of glass walls.
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This move across the Atlantic, however, shifted the ideology and symbolism of glass.
Bletter describes the glass iconography surviving in form only, stripped of its
metaphoric meaning and qualities in the work of both Johnson and Mies.32 Likewise in
the move, the Modern Movement lost many of the social concerns that rallied
Benjamin and before him Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, and others. Architectural
historian, Richard Pommer argues that Mies van der Rohe’s work was presented by
Philip Johnson ‘as if it had no political, social, or even philosophical, foundation and
the modern movement as if it were merely a style.’33 What remained, however, was the
idea that glass and glass walls signified the Modern.

It is of course this ‘style’ that influences the glass pavilions we see in the architectural
press. In New Zealand, the photographs published in Home New Zealand34 of the
finalists in the magazine’s ‘Home of the year 2008’ competition are reasonably typical:
all feature houses with full glass walls that move to open the interior up to a garden or
view. (One of the houses, by Marshall Cook, also appears in Architecture New
Zealand, declared by them as one of the five ‘buildings of the year.’35) Another by
Fearon Hay Architects, is the most pavilion-like, with glass walls that slide and fold
away opening up the living space on almost all sides.

It is not just exterior walls that are glass, internal surfaces are also of glass: shower
enclosures, glass tiles on walls, glass splash backs in kitchens, and glass moveable
furniture such as tables and shelves. Other ‘hard, smooth, cold and sober’ materials
such as stainless steel and polished granite accompany these glass objects and
surfaces. In their slickness and use of carefully detailed expensive materials, it might
seem that none of these glass pavilion houses has the ground zero, ground-clearing
and groundbreaking ‘new poverty’ of which Benjamin writes. But it is not their cost that
betrays them; instead it is that they do not resist possessions. Although usually
sparsely furnished and decorated (Minimalist), they feature carefully and especially
selected objects; nameable art and furniture (which Home New Zealand duly and
dutifully names, including where you might buy such items). The contemporary glass
pavilion is often photographed portrayed as a jewel case to show and display the
objects of the interior such that it can be read as a vitrine or bell jar preserving the
interior from all disturbances (despite moveable glass walls).

The Farnsworth House might have been attacked in the fifties as being anti-
consumer,36 and Benjamin might have pleaded for a glass architecture to counteract
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the vicious ‘attack of commodity capital’, but here in the twenty-first century the glass
pavilion quite literally showcases the very best money can buy. Rather than glass
architecture leading to a new world and society, it has been co-opted back into the
world of bourgeois consumption that Benjamin deplored so emphatically. Once again,
‘commodity capital has advanced victoriously’ and completely.

Glass walls give a connectedness between inside and out, and when these walls slide
and fold away, that connectedness is complete. However, when closed, such glass
walls become a device par excellence for separation. While glass permits free flow of
vision, no other senses, particularly touch and sound, may pass. Even then, the vision
can sometimes deceive with reflections veiling view, or too clean clarity rendering the
glass invisible so that one walks right into it (and sometimes dangerously right through
it).

Glass and Traces

So how is it that this modern material of glass, which promised in housing to herald the
brave new modern world, has failed in Benjamin and others of his generation’s terms?
An answer perhaps lies in the way he considered possessions and the way he writes
of traces. For Benjamin the nineteenth-century interior was redolent of ‘completeness:
pictures must cover the walls, cushions the sofa, covers the cushions; ornaments must
fill the mantelpiece, coloured glass the windows....’37

[It] conceived of the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it

encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior,
that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the
instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet
folds of velvet.38

Soft materials predominate, because it is on these the inhabitants can leave traces ‘for
velour and plush … preserve the imprint of all contact.’39 It is these materials, objects
and their traces that create the cosiness that Benjamin finds so very anti-modern.

Benjamin thought glass to be the ‘enemy of possession’ because nothing can be fixed
to its hard, smooth surface. Cold and sober with no aura, no history, it would allow no
traces of the inhabitant. But only if it remains untouched; in fact, everything that
touches glass leaves a trace: a drop of water dried on the surface; or salt, pollen and
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dust from the wind and rain; but, in particular, the stickiness of a human fingerprint and
the smudge and smear of skin contact. Touches, then, no longer leave traces that are
imprints of a body in velvet, velour and plush but are instead of the body’s excess and
accidental secretions: the pure surface of glass marred by the impure body. One might
describe these as traces able to be identified by scientific means. A fingerprint is more
a form of identity than an indent in velvet, and moreover an involuntary one. These
identifying traces are different from the carefully encasing traces of bourgeois interiors
that Benjamin criticizes, but nonetheless traces.

Whilst the nineteenth-century interior desired traces, demanded traces and materials
like velvet are even enhanced by traces; the twenty-first-century interior has materials
that will not sustain touch, smears and smudges mar the surface and thereby demand
removal by vigilant attention and constant cleaning. It therefore maintains the notion
that traces ought not to exist. The number of products promoted for cleaning glass
surfaces (tables, windows, etc.) testify to the difficulty of frequently required cleaning.
Stainless steel is likewise ‘a hard smooth material to which nothing can be fixed’40 and
also features in the contemporary glass pavilion. Like glass, it requires a regime of
cleaning products and constant attention to maintain it. (A friend, who has the same
cleaner as one neighbour, reports the cleaner refusing to take on another neighbouring
house, despite the efficiencies of close location for her, because of the large stainless
steel island bench. ‘Life’s too short,’ she said.)

Just as Benjamin claimed with the nineteenth-century bourgeois room, if you enter the
twenty-first-century New Zealand glass pavilion house ‘the strongest impression you
receive may well be, “You’ve got no business here.”’41 Not so much because it carries
so strongly the identity of the owner or inhabitant in a cosy cocoon that can neither fit
nor accommodate another, but because of an untouchability. This reaction to the
Modern aesthetic of the glass pavilion and its Minimalism is well documented. As
beautiful as a space might look in photographs and upon entry, there is a perception
that it would be impossible to relax. To relax would be to touch, to touch would be to
leave traces, and these are traces that glass (and other like materials) will not tolerate.

Bruno Taut (a close friend and collaborator of Paul Scheerbart) wanted the new
modern architecture to erase the superfluous (Karina Van Herck connects this call with
Benjamin and Brecht’s to erase the traces42). Taut argued in his influential book of
1924, The New Dwelling: The Woman as Creator for ‘the rationalisation of the
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household as a means for the emancipation of woman from the slavery of domestic
work.’43 Superfluous, excessive possessions and ‘fussy’ interior details created more
cleaning work for the ‘housewife’ or cleaner locking them into an endless cycle. The
uncluttered, clean-lined interior would thus liberate her, but when composed of the
hard, smooth materials thought to herald the modern, they introduce a different
tyranny. Far from reducing house work, liberating the housewife from relentless
domestic duties, these ‘modern materials’ require ever more vigilance. ‘Erase the
traces’, now becomes erasing the traces not of memory, possessions and affectation,
but of the passage of the body. The liberation theorised for glass architecture is at best
superficial.

Hilde Heynen critiques both the clichéd cosy cocoon and the naked uncluttered
modern interior by identifying them as polar extremes. She notes that ‘most people’s
experience of domesticity … is a continuous process’44 and, appropriately for the
‘modern condition of changeability and transparency, … a continuing gesture …
involv[ing] the constant shaping and reshaping of the shell.’45 The cosy cocoon did not
allow such a process, it was too static. But nor does the glassy modern interior allow it,
as the materials – hard, smooth, sober – do not permit reshaping. Instead, they insist
on being returned time and again to their original condition by the act of cleaning. Such
cleaning is not the same as Heynen’s ‘continuing gesture’ of domesticity. It is an
interior that dictates a certain behaviour of the inhabitant, just as much the nineteenth-
century interior demanded a particular behaviour. But what connects the two is the
human body and its excesses and the rigid inability of the interior to allow
reciprocation. This lack of reciprocation limits domesticity. But as Heynen says these
are two extremes and between them are interiors with less glass, less cosy velvet
which create the touchable worlds we actually live in (rather than photograph).

Both the indent in velvet and fingerprints on glass are traces of the body. If there is a
material that does not reveal the touch of the human body, it is not glass. Both it and
the cocoon interior demand a heavy payment from the body – melancholy for one and
the physicality of incessant cleaning for the other. Behne’s description of glass’s super-
human quality is a material that cannot deflect the human touch.

In the end, the extraordinary versatility of glass, which once seemed to embody the
changeability and condition of modernity, renders it highly, even multiply, ambiguous. It
preserves the past every bit as much as it implies and engenders the modern. Just as
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glass is neither solid nor liquid but both; it is also both modern and not modern. Glass
then cannot really be claimed as the modern material uniquely enabling a revolutionary
new modern world as Benjamin and others thought. As Benjamin argues, nothing can
stick to its cold hard smooth surface, not even the ideology of modernity.

Endnotes

1
Ian McDougall, ‘Retreats to the Long House,’ in Architecture New Zealand, 5,
(September/October 2005), 96-7.
2
‘A Judicious Eye’, Joseph Rykwert interviewed by John Walsh, Architecture New Zealand, 1,
(2009), 22-26, 24.
3
Cited in Richard Pommer, ‘Mies van der Rohe and the Political Ideology of the Modern
Movement in Architecture’, in Franz Schulze (ed.), Mies van der Rohe: Critical Essays (New
York: MOMA & Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 96-147, 100.
4
Cited in Sandra Honey, ‘Mies in Germany’, Architectural Monographs, 11 (1986), 10-25, 17.
5
Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villas and Other Essays (Cambridge & London:
MIT Press, 1976), 12.
6
See Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, Deconstructivist Architecture (New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 1988), 16.
7
Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, in translation in Michael W. Jennings, Howard
Eiland, and Gary Smith (eds.), Selected Writings: Walter Benjamin Vol 2 1927-1934,
(Cambridge MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 731-36.
8
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 732.
9
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 732.
10
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 733.
11
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 733.
12
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 734.
13
Behne cited in Karina Van Herck, ‘“Only Where Comfort Ends, does Humanity Begin”: On the
Coldness of Avant-garde Architecture in the Weimar Period,’ in Hilde Heynen & Gülsüm Baydar
(eds.), Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (London
& New York: Routledge, 2005), 123-144, 124.
14
Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow’ in translation in Jennings, Eiland and Smith (eds), Selected
Writings: Walter Benjamin Vol 2, 22-46, 30.
15
Benjamin, ‘Moscow’, 30.
16
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 734.
17
Van Herck, ‘“Only Where Comfort Ends”’, 127.
18
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 734.
19
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ first published in
Zeitschrift für Socialforschung V, I (1936). Reference here to the translation in Hannah Arrendt
(ed) Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 219-53, 224.
20
Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, 223.
21
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 734.
22
Cited in Van Herck, ‘“Only Where Comfort Ends”’, 123.
23
Behne cited in Van Herck, ‘“Only Where Comfort Ends”’, 136.
24
Cited in Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 734.
25
Rosemarie Haag Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream – Expressionist Architecture
and the History of the Crystal Metaphor’, Journal of Architectural Historians, 40, 1 (March
1981), 20-43.
26
Alan Macfarlane & Gerry Martin, The Glass Bathyscape: How Glass Changed the World
(London: Profile Books, 2002).
27
Macfarlane & Martin, The Glass Bathyscape, 4.
28
David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2001).
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29
Macfarlane & Martin, The Glass Bathyscape, 208-13.
30
Macfarlane & Martin, The Glass Bathyscape, 209.
31
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 735.
32
Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream’, 42.
33
Pommer, ‘Mies van der Rohe and the Political Ideology’, 131.
34
‘Home of the Year’, Home New Zealand (August /September 2008), 76-142.
35
‘Buildings of the year’ Architecture New Zealand, 6 (November December 2008), 38.
36
See Alice T Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and
Architectural History (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1998), 141.
37
Benjamin, ‘Moscow’, 30.
38
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 19.
39
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 20.
40
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 734.
41
Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 734.
42
Van Herck, ‘“Only Where Comfort Ends”’, 129.
43
Van Herck, ‘“Only Where Comfort Ends”’, 128.
44
Hilde Heynen, ‘Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions’, in Heynen &
Baydar, Negotiating Domesticity, 1-29, 21.
45
Heynen, ‘Modernity and Domesticity’, 22.