In 1991, the celebrated German filmmaker Wim Wenders followed up his critically acclaimed film, Wings of Desire, with the inexplicably rambling and self-indulgent, Until the End of the World. Based on a story co-written with his then-partner, Solveig Dommartin, who was also one of the film’s protagonists, the nearly five-hour long Until the End of the World follows a shuffling cast of characters as they careen across the planet in pursuit of another protagonist, and the innovative dream visualization technology he possesses, all while under the pall of an impending nuclear disaster.

 

The film’s title suggests a double meaning. It refers at once to the characters’ pursuit of one another and the aforementioned technological device across every corner of the globe, literally to the ends of the earth,  while also underscoring the looming threat to human existence posed by a different kind of device: the plot device of an imminent nuclear explosion. A third meaning may have occurred to those individuals suffering through the film’s seemingly interminable 287 minutes of incoherent plot twists and turns: the end of the world most likely couldn’t come soon enough.

 

Nevertheless, what grounds this otherwise sprawling and messy enterprise is the film’s depiction of the fictional technology around which its contorted narrative revolves—one that can record a person’s dreams, and allow them to re-watch those dreams while awake. These visualizations of dreams—luminous and phantasmagoric montages—are shown to be so compelling to the individuals that view them that they become powerfully addictive. Unlike viewers of the film itself, the characters in the film are so engrossed that they become incapable of any other activity.

 

In the film, dreams are a kind of drug—their images so powerful and their logics so poetic that they offer a compelling escape from the swirling social, political, and environmental crises that hover at the story’s periphery. Among the film’s many disappointments, however, is that its recognition of the potency and virtuality that dreams can manifest within reality is depicted merely as a means of withdrawal from this problematic world—rather than as a potential agent of its transformation.

 

                                                                                *  *  *

 

Sixty years earlier, the German philosopher and historian Walter Benjamin was also contemplating the power of dreams. While Wenders was of the generation that had to reckon with the consequences of his nation’s culpability in the events of the second World War, Benjamin’s generation witnessed the appalling cultural shift that gave rise to it. His work can be seen as urgently motivated by a desire to understand how such catastrophic social ideas could take root, and to envision and articulate a possible path to their dismantling and displacement.

 

For Benjamin, dreams were one of many frameworks through which he interrogated the manner in which the aesthetic dimension of the world facilitated society’s blind acceptance of  it, and undermined its capacity to imagine and enact alternatives to that world. He interrogated this power of aesthetics through his examination of urban interiors and sites of capitalist consumption, such as the Parisian arcades, as well as through his reflections on literature and on the social implications of new forms of media.

 

Benjamin’s aesthetic concerns focused on the ontological flattening of objects and images inherent to modernity, and also how the mass production and commodification of those objects and images led to what he termed the loss of their “auratic” power—their ability to engross a viewer to the point where that viewer loses themselves in the image, potentially succumbing to its message as a passive and obedient subject. However, in his writing on new forms of art, such as epic theater and cinema, he repeatedly considered how these mediums afforded a new and empowered form of subjectivity—through their circulation, pluralization, and juxtaposition of diverse, disconnected, and decontextualized objects and images. For him, this immersion of the individual within a field of diverse and non-hierarchical content was akin to being in a dream state. Furthermore, he felt that such a form of subjective experience could permit the discernment of the ideological premises behind the seeming commonsense appearance of the world, and also enable the formulation of new ideas about the world.

 

                                                                                *  *  *

 

Benjamin contended that ideas are real philosophical objects—present within the world, yet inaccessible to direct sensation. Rather, they are revealed through the relationships between the physical objects that are their visible traces. He felt that the ability to scrutinize the structural relationship between objects would reveal the underlying ideas that govern that relationship. However, the corollary to this assertion is that the construction of new relationships among given objects could, in turn, stimulate the recognition of new ideas.

 

For this reason, Benjamin was particularly fascinated by cinematic montage.   For him, the viewer of such a montage is an active one. Confronted with a succession of heterogenous images, this viewer must engage in a critical consideration and interpretation of them—in order to make sense of them. Ideas would emerge from this process as relationships between objects were discovered or invented. The various forms of viewing associated with the montage—from the concentrated focus on selected elements, to the distracted absorption of the overall flood of images—produced a disjointed and intermittent form of vision that Benjamin felt was particularly productive with regard to the stimulation of ideas.

 

These spontaneous interpretations and ideas would naturally differ according to the different dispositions of individuals, as well as the differences in how they elected to direct their attention. Their intermittent but discerning gaze had the capacity to not only reveal the otherwise hidden structures behind the instruments of capitalism and authoritarianism, but also to permit the formulation of new ideas—ones with the potential to lead to a redefinition of society and its practices.

 

Dreams were of particular interest to Benjamin, because they were an everyday form of this phenomenon. For Benjamin, the commonplace experience of trying to make sense of one’s dreams upon waking up produced a form of dialectical thinking—one that he felt was necessary for the critical understanding of one’s world, and also essential to the imagination of preferable alternatives.

 

Benjamin speculated that if this practice could be transposed from an individual experience to a collective one, then it could lead to an empowered social body, capable of seeing through the logics of the social ideas to which they were hypnotically in thrall. For him, the sleepwalking masses of the “dreaming collective” could undergo an awakening—and thereby give rise to a historical revolution. “Every epoch,” he argued, “not only dreams the one to follow but in dreaming, precipitates its awakening.” 

 

                                                                                *  *  *

 

Benjamin’s distinction between objects and images, and the ideas that underlie them, is fundamental to his belief that aesthetic techniques inherent to certain contemporary media can be leveraged to illuminate, and challenge, the premises behind contemporary social problems—premises that otherwise have been taken for granted, which appear as “commonsense,” and whose actual contingency is thereby obscured.

 

In short, his insistence on an intangible and invisible matrix of ideas capable of being revealed by the mediated objects and images that manifest them is motivated by an attempt to articulate a means of foregrounding and re-politicizing those ideas, through the collective and transformative power of multiple forms of artistic media.

 

However, while this instrumental capacity of objects—as mediums for the reification of underlying ideas—might have been Benjamin’s primary concern, latent in his writings is the sense that objects also cannot be reduced to their mere instrumentality. It is, after all, the inherent power of objects that make them such potent agents for the ideas they might represent—ideas which are otherwise intangible, and debatable. This power is precisely the “aura” of those objects that, elsewhere, Benjamin had regarded as a casualty of new forms of media.

 

The German playwright Bertold Brecht is known to have been a significant influence on Walter Benjamin, and it is therefore not surprising that Benjamin’s early writings on the aura of works of art reflect some degree of Brecht’s disdain for this quality. However, over the course of Benjamin’s writings one can discern a more ambivalent stance: even while recognizing the power of new aesthetic forms to give rise to the re-politicization of ideas, Benjamin admitted the potential impactfulness, even meaningfulness, of the auratic gaze. In one of his later essays, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” he likens the aura to a form of intersubjective recognition between the viewer and the work of art—with the latter possessing the same degree of presence as another human individual. “Experience of the aura,” he observed, “thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.” 

 

Just as we should care about, and empathize with, fellow humans, auratic works can make us care about the ideas they represent. Benjamin’s later writings recognize that the aura was not merely a sinister and disempowering tool of autocratic power, as Brecht believed, but could also be an equally powerful agent for new and progressive social ideas—galvanizing our belief in and commitment to them.

 

                                                                                *  *  *

 

Walter Benjamin’s relationship to architecture is a complicated one. While he is appreciated as being one of the few philosophers to specifically write about architecture, his characterization of our discipline has not been regarded as a particularly charitable one. He is most remembered for the ignominious pronouncement that architecture is a form of art that is primarily engaged in a distracted state  —relegated to the aesthetic background. One might therefore suppose that he viewed architecture as unimportant.

 

However, his intense interest in the architectural typology of the Parisian arcade suggests otherwise. Benjamin viewed the arcade typology—interior shopping streets covered with glazed ironwork vaults—as a powerful social instrument, one that guided Parisians into forms of perception, thought, and action that were congruent with the premises of modernity and capitalism. It made consumerism, and the meandering and intermittently focused gaze associated with such consumption, seem natural and habitual.

 

Benjamin understood the architecture of the arcade as something that philosopher Michel Foucault would later define as an “apparatus,” which is the common English translation of the French term dispositif—something that creates a particular disposition. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben summarizes Foucault’s concept of the apparatus as “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” 

 

One might therefore say that, for Benjamin, architecture was a uniquely powerful apparatus. It did not depend on the auratic power that architects presume it to always possess. Rather, its power was more subversive. He ascribes to it the power to resolve—to make appear definite and resolute—the otherwise contingent and debatable social ideas that underlie society. As a social apparatus, it gives form to those ideas, it subjects individuals to their logics, and it obscures the possibility that things might be otherwise. It makes them seem like commonsense, regardless whether those ideas are truly common, or make sense, to all individuals.

 

In this way, architecture can be seen as is a kind of world-making. If social ideas are fabrications dreamt up by dominant institutions and social bodies that comprise a society, then architecture makes those dreams come true—some dreams, at the expense of others. It therefore matters significantly whose dreams it brings to fruition. Any sense of Benjamin’s ambivalence about architecture is more likely due to his recognition of how architecture has typically been deployed—as an instrument of dominant but repressive ideologies—rather than a rejection of its potential to act beneficially.

 

Our discipline is fundamentally entangled in the politics of space, culture, power, and ways of life that define our world—to an extent that escapes the common, but problematically narrow, equation of it with the mere design of buildings. This implicates architecture in the problems and injustices of the world in a manner that is not sufficiently recognized. Specifically, architects give form to the social and cultural institutions that support many of us, but disenfranchise others. As a profession beholden to these dominant institutions for many of its opportunities to make space in the first place, architecture must acknowledge its own compromised position.

 

Nevertheless, architecture’s multi-dimensional entanglement in these social and political structures and systems also means that it has a unique capacity to engage them, and to effect positive change. As a fundamentally speculative and aspirational discipline, architecture always maintains the potential to rise to the occasion by envisioning and designing unprecedented spaces and experiences that expand and diversify the world, making it more meaningful to more individuals.

 

Architecture, as a powerful social apparatus, empowers architects to make a difference. It affords them agency to change the world.

 

                                                                                *  *  *

 

The 1987 Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire opens with two angels, Cassiel and Damiel, overseeing the city of Berlin—which was still a divided city at this time. In this film, which preceded the disastrous Until the End of the World, the angels have the capacity to see everything everywhere all at once, but repeatedly shift their gaze to focus in on the intimate actions and thoughts of selected individuals. They take in scene after scene, bridging the physical distance between different subjects in the various neighborhoods of Berlin, and also collapsing the distinction between normative social, cultural, and political categories.

 

This is a form of seeing that is strikingly reminiscent of the kind of montage-like vision that Walter Benjamin suggested was afforded by the architectural typology of the Parisian arcade, and which formed the basis of his lifelong, and unfinished, Arcades Project—wherein he attempted, among other things, to define how this form of dream-like vision could be critically applied, in order to lead to a social and political awakening.

 

Despite the clarity that this omniscient and ontologically flattened view affords Cassiel and Damiel, however, they don’t actually do anything with the insight they derive from it. This, one can suppose, allowed Wenders to rationalize how human suffering could persist in a world in which angels were imagined to exist. In fact, rather than powerful heralds of change, Wenders depicts these angels as silent observers—immortal recorders whose only task is to ceaselessly memorialize all human activity. They are essentially historians. Not surprisingly, they spend most of their time hanging out in the library.

 

Eventually, Damiel becomes dissatisfied with this perpetual aloofness, and decides to forego his immortality and become human. He loses his omniscience, as well as his ability to commune with the other angels, such as his friend Cassiel, but gains agency in return.   Meanwhile, Cassiel encounters an individual about to end his life, and becomes tormented by the fact that he is powerless to prevent it.

 

                                                                                *  *  *

 

Walter Benjamin lived through the unprecedented social and political crises of the first few decades of the 20th century, but he did not survive them. As a Jewish intellectual caught up in the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe at this time, he was forced to flee Europe, but was unsuccessful. He was eventually stopped at the Spanish border town of Portbou on September 25, 1940, while attempting to escape the advance of the German army through France. His plan was to emigrate to the United States from Portugal, but the Spanish police informed him that he would be immediately repatriated to France, where he feared imminent capture by the Nazis. In desperation, he committed suicide that night—at the age of 48. No angels intervened, and whatever dreams he may have had—for himself, and for society—remained unresolved.

 

Those unfulfilled dreams were undoubtedly shared by many: a world of equality, free from tyranny and oppression, and in which individuals could experience social community without sacrificing the differences they held dear.

 

Benjamin’s inquiry was continued in spirit by his contemporaries—his mentors, colleagues, and friends—whose own work was driven by the same aspirations: Hannah Arendt, who smuggled Benjamin’s final written manuscript out of Europe and made it available for posthumous publication, but who also, in her own writing, more forcefully articulated the aesthetic dimension of the political realm; Theodor Adorno, who developed a more elaborate theory of aesthetics within the framework of modernity; and Ernst Bloch, whose magnum opus was a three-volume history and philosophy on the possibility of hope. These individuals, like Benjamin before them, dared to dream of a better world, and to articulate the means of its potential realization, during one of the darkest periods in human history.

 

Sadly, one does not have to struggle to see how this work, undertaken during the previous century, remains strikingly relevant to our present moment: the similarities between that time and our own are profound, and also profoundly frightening. Characterized by, among other things, the emergence of the Anthropocene, the environmental degradation and human exploitation underpinning globalization, the dominance of neoliberalism, rampant precarity and injustice, and prejudice and hate masquerading as politics—our present time desperately needs new social ideas, even architectural ones. We need to somehow believe that architecture can rise to this occasion.

 

After all, these contemporary problems are wicked and complex—and it is too easy to simply assume that they are beyond the scope of architecture. Yet architecture is entangled in all of these problems, and this entanglement means that it is positioned to squarely engage them. As it is the incarnation of the tenuous and intangible ideas that underly a society, so too can architecture be reincarnated to manifest new ones—ones that afford new ideas and new experiences that address the problems and opportunities of the present moment in the hopes of affording a better future.

 

Its capacity to do so is both unique to our discipline, and arguably its most quintessential aspect. It derives from architecture’s inability to be permanently defined. The big picture of architecture cannot be scrutinized: its origins are unknowable, and its future is never definitively written. This makes it infinitely reprogrammable.

 

In this way, architecture is a kind of dream. It can be as novel, ambitious, different, or diverse as the various individuals who dream it. These individuals are those who have cultivated a vision that sees through the dream of the everyday. They have developed a sense that is no longer the “commonsense” that sustains normative social ideas—those derived from dominant ideologies, or congruent with predominant social practices and customs. Rather, architects are lucid dreamers, actively reorganizing the world according to new and different logics.

 

The work from this studio represents 21 different dreams of a better world. The authors of this work have fearlessly engaged such complex and challenging concerns as:

​

– the re-politicization of shared space in the public realm

– new aesthetics and performances of the social multitude

– the spatial and temporal recontextualization of urban form

– redefining urban spatial categories and their extents

– affording spatial supports for new subjectivities

– envisioning posthuman and transhuman technological frameworks, and

– cultivating new environmental and ecological sensibilities

 

They have tackled these issues with a rigor and sophistication that is truly admirable, and which belies the relatively short amount of time that has transpired during their education. It is, frankly, astounding to observe the amount of growth that they have exhibited in just five years—and to consider the jaw-dropping potential this represents as one extrapolates their trajectories forward into the future.

 

These 21 individuals are future architects who dream of differences that will actually make a difference. Their dreams are the dreams of many: dreams of a better world, of justice and equality, of diversity and collectivity, and of pleasure and fulfillment. These are familiar dreams, because they are ones that concern issues that have so far remained unresolved. What makes this studio’s work unique, however, is not only its manifold resolution of those unresolved dreams, but also its ability to persuasively articulate the means of their plausible realization.

 

They are architectural dreams we can believe in.

 

And we have every right to do so, because architecture has the power to

make dreams come true.

​

​

​

​

​