arq - august endell e a metrópole

An unorthodox and influential critique of themodern city was published in 1908 by August Endell,an autodidact in the field of architecture. Influencedby empathy theory, Impressionist ideas,contemporary sociology, and the literary and artisticcircles of the time, Endell’s small book Die Schönheitder Großen Stadt (The Beauty of the Metropolis) read themetropolis through a new way of ‘seeing’ [1, 2]. Whathe saw was surprising for most readers: the city’scentre was discovered in marginal sites, and itslasting identity was grasped in its fleeting moments.Although Endell never drew up encompassingschemes for the city, did not participate in the first

city-building competitions of the time, and focusedprimarily on individual building projects, one of hismajor publications was entirely devoted to the city.The Beauty of the Metropolis takes the reader on ajourney through a city that slowly reveals itself asBerlin.1 Throughout the book, Endell describesurban scenes such as streets, plazas, stations, and themargins of urbanity, such as the city’s blank wallsand outskirts.

While common architectural notions of the cityunder the heading Städtebau sought to study theproblems of urbanity and in turn propose urbanrestructuring, Endell’s notion of the city aspired to

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historyTo engage and abet the contingent and fleeting moments of the

city is the prerequisite for understanding and seeing potentials

within the existing urban environment. A view from 1908.

Visual discoveries of an urban wanderer:August Endell’s perception of a beautifulmetropolisAlexander Eisenschmidt

1 Photograph ofAugust Endell, 1904.Photograph by AnnaEndell

2 Book cover of Die Schönheit derGroßen Stadt(Berlin, 1908)

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its rethinking, rather than its remaking. In contrastto the specific urban measures that Städtebauimplements in order to structure the turmoil of themodern city, Endell sought to tap into the disorderedmodern urbanity.2 Questioning not the environmentas such but the way one sees it, Endell’s theory cangive insight into an architectural paradigm thatunderstood the urban realm not as laboratory butrather as catalyst.3 By envisioning creative potentialsin the existing city – particularly in the un-designed,the ugly, and the overly rational environments ofmodern urbanity – Endell bypassed commonarchitectural strategies and aligned himself moreclosely with discourses outside the domains ofarchitecture.

Critiques of the metropolisWorking during a time in which philosophersannounced the vanishing of the ‘homeland’,sociologists searched for the role of the individual,and architects and planners were concerned with theconstruction of new environments and entirely newcities, Endell ventured to formulate a theory thatsought to engage with rather than modify theexisting city.4 Endell’s engagement with themetropolis might be described as an approachtowards the city from a perspective that neithernegates nor embraces, but rather seeks to findpotentials within the given situation – an attitudethat does not envision a new city but a new vision. Tounderstand the uniqueness of Endell’s endeavours, itis helpful to first recall the dominant debate on thecity around 1900. The most prominent philosopherto thematise the metropolis in the late nineteenthcentury as a space that no longer provided a homefor the city dwellers is Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1882,he writes:

‘One day, and probably soon, we need some recognitionof what above all is lacking in our big cities: quiet andwide, expansive places for reflection […] where noshouting or noise of carriages can reach […] – buildingsand sites that would altogether give expression to thesublimity of thoughtfulness and of stepping aside.’5

Three years later, Nietzsche’s critique on themetropolis is even more determined. A shortparagraph in Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus SpokeZarathustra) typifies all the scepticism with which themetropolis was viewed by the end of the nineteenthcentury. Approaching the gates of the great city,Zarathustra’s companion and pupil characterisedthe great city as a location where: ‘all great thoughtsare boiled small […] all feeling decays […] all soulshang like limp dirty rags […] newspapers are madeout of verbal swill […] everything revolves around themerchant (Krämer) [… and where] only sickly bloodruns through all veins’.6 Here, the criticism thatwould become paramount for modern architecturaland city planning discourses was rehearsed. Density,health problems, and capitalist mentalities of themodern city were brought to the fore. For Nietzsche,however, these problems were only an outcome ofthe crisis that was caused by metropolitan life. AsZarathustra states:

‘I am also disgusted by this great city […] Here and there– there is nothing to better, nothing to worsen.[…] And I wish I already saw the pillar of fire in which itwill be consumed![…] But this has its time and its own fate. –[…] However [...] Where one can no longer love, thereshould one – pass by!’7

This plea against the metropolis as site of thenegation of freedom of the spirit portrayed themetropolis as mere tragedy that has to be overcome –an environment no longer providing places fordwelling and a condition associated with an ‘interiorculture’ with no external reference point. Nietzschehere tapped into what was considered the coreproblem of modern culture that prohibited theindividual from being ‘at home’ in the modern city.8

Even though for Nietzsche, there was ‘nothing tobetter’ in the modern city, for the architects of thelate nineteenth and early twentieth century, theexpansion of the metropolis and the problems thatcame along with it were to be answered by thedesigning and conditioning of urban environments.In the German discourse, for example, figures suchas Reinhard Baumeister, Herman Josef Stübben,Theodor Fritsch, or Martin Wagner sought toreintroduce an urban order that related to moderntechnology and, therefore, to modern society.During the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury, the problems of the modern city were onthe minds of all participants in architecture. Endelladdressed these debates as well:

‘The great city, as the most visible and strange outcomeof contemporary life and an expression of our work and

arq . vol 11 . no 1 . 2007 history72

Alexander Eisenschmidt Visual discoveries of an urban wanderer

3 F. Nietzsche, AlsoSprach Zarathustra.Book cover designedby A. Endell, 1898

4 Max Liebermann,Kanal in Leyden.Image aspublished in A.

Endell, DieSchönheit derGroßen Stadt, p. 643

will, has always been the target of criticism […] Onederides its citizens as individuals without homelandand describes the unutterable ugliness of the citiesthrough their chaotic noise, dirt, dark courtyards, andthick air. And, one might aspire to the entire vanishingof cities. For the time being, however, they exist […] andbefore one implants a hopeless longing in hundredthousands of inhabitants, it would be more meaningfulto teach them how to actually see the city.’9

In these sentences, Endell addressed Nietzsche’sassertion about the modern city. Through his studiesin philosophy and psychology in Tübingen andMunich, his friendship with Lou Andreas-Salomé,and his connection to Kurt Breysig, Endell was wellacquainted with the philosophical discourse;10 andafter his shift from philosophy to architecture, hewas even commissioned to design the 1898 edition ofNietzsche’s Zarathustra [3].11 While recognising thearguments about the alien modern environments,the spatial and qualitative deficits, and the resultinglonging for a possible disappearance of the moderncity, Endell questioned their constructive value.Directing his voice towards the architecturaldiscipline, he suggested neither the negation nor there-designing of the city through a new order. Instead,he argued for a new attitude towards the modern city– a seeing that he regarded as the ‘real’ and ‘purevisibility’ of the metropolis. The following pages willshed light on how Endell theorised a new way ofseeing, how this vision was to relate to a theory of thecity, and how these ideas influenced laterarchitectural and urban discourses.

A new visibilityEndell relied on the Einfühlungstheorie (empathytheory) of Theodor Lipps in defining what he called‘the world of the visible’. Investigating the relationbetween subject and object, Lipps wrote: ‘[t]he formof an object has always […] been formed by me, by myinner activity’.12 In order to go beyond the formal and

practical appearance of what we see, Lipps writesthat we would need to suspend our knowledge of theobject and be absorbed into optical perception.13 Heestablished his theory within the trajectory ofnineteenth-century aesthetic thought. RobertVischer, for example, defined empathy as anaesthetic delight that is experienced whenprojecting our feelings or emotions into objects, andHeinrich Wölfflin sought to explain the effects thatforms evoke in their purest or most abstract sense.14

While through these figures, empathy wouldbecome a recognised theory in studies of art andarchitecture, Lipps developed a more general theoryof experience. It was to this more general approachthat Endell was exposed during his doctoral studiesunder Theodor Lipps at the University of Munich. Hetitled his 1896 dissertation (which he neversubmitted) ‘Emotional Contrast’. Influenced byLipps’ more inclusive theory, Endell was able torelate empathy theory to a vision of the modern city.In The Beauty of the Metropolis, aesthetic empathyprovides the grounds on which he would argue for a‘pure seeing’ of the modern city that wouldrecognise the hidden beautiful moments within themodern world.

Differentiating between objective seeing and avision that goes beyond the object, Endelldistinguished between orientation guided byknowledge and a vision that relates to theindividual’s feelings or moods as a pure reflection ofwhat is seen.15 Already in his first major publicationUm die Schönheit (Concerning Beauty, 1896), Endelldefined ‘pure seeing’ as ‘a devotion to visualexperience without associations and any extraneousthoughts [… that] would reveal an entirely newworld’.16 Calling for a suspension of knowledge andan absorption into optical perception, Endellannounced in a text from 1897 an abstract art thatwould enable such a new visual experience. In thesenow famous sentences, Endell argued for:


Visual discoveries of an urban wanderer Alexander Eisenschmidt

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‘A totally new art, an art with forms, that mean nothingand represent nothing and remind one of nothing, yetthat will be able to move our souls so deeply, so strongly,as before only music has been able to do with tones.’17

As Peg Weiss has shown, these ideas greatlyinfluenced artists of the coming generation; one ofwhich was Wassily Kandinsky.18 Yet, what for painterswas to be established through works of art, Endellseemed to have found in the everyday images of themodern city. For him, the metropolis was no longerunderstood as object, nor had it any representationalvalue; instead, snapshots of the city were viewed asdistilled urban moments that in their intensity wereable to frighten, surprise, and move the viewer.Endell described these so-called ‘moments’ byfocusing on the temporal appearance of sites withinthe city.

To illustrate the so-called ‘visible world’ that wasdiscovered through forms of aesthetic empathy,Endell included three Impressionist works as theonly images in his book on the metropolis [4]. Forhim, these illustrations came closest to a ‘pureseeing’. As he states: ‘They no longer painted people,bridges, and towers but instead the strangephenomenon that air, light, dust, and reflection hadmade out of them’.19 It has often been acknowledgedthat Impressionism owes its character to themetropolis – its new materials such as glass and steel,its urban and industrial spaces, and its visual stimuliin general. This image of Impressionism wasintroduced to the German audience by suchinfluential magazines as Pan and Kunst und Künstler,by museum directors such as Hugo von Tschudi, artdealers like Paul Cassirer, authors like Julius Meier-Graefe, and patrons such as Count Harry Kessler.Endell had at the beginning of his career publishedarticles in these new magazines and after his returnfrom Munich established connections to the Berlinart scene around the director of the National GalleryHugo von Tschudi and the Impressionist painter MaxLiebermann. Both Tschudi and Liebermann hadreturned from their legendary visit to Paris in 1896

with Impressionist paintings for the National Galleryin Berlin and were, therefore, fundamental for thedevelopment of Impressionism in Germany and,through their connection with Endell, alsoinfluenced architectural thinking.20

In fact, with the appearance of the modern city,experiential features of architecture and the urbanenvironment received great attention and wereincorporated in concepts of urban design. CamilloSitte’s ‘artistic principles’ (1899) and Hendrick PetrusBerlage’s ‘impressionistic architecture’ (1892) areonly two examples that reveal an increasing interestin Impressionist ideas throughout Europeanarchitectural culture at the turn of the century. InEndell’s The Beauty of the Metropolis, Impressionistideas were to illustrate and explain the phenomenaof the modern world through empathy. By utilisingthese ideas, Endell not only followed thearchitectural trajectory that was increasinglyconcerned about urban experience, but he alsojoined the German intellectual discourses amongfigures like historian and art critic Karl Scheffler and

the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel.Whereas Scheffler spoke of a direct link between themodern city and a new sensitivity of perception,Simmel sought to study the totality of meaningthrough the impressions that everyday details wouldpresent.21 Impressionism was here transformed intoa diagnostic approach through which architecture,the city, and modernity as a whole was to beunderstood.

Attempting to achieve ‘pure seeing’ and, in turn,discovering the aesthetics of the modern city, Endellcalled for the form of the object to be freed from itscontext.22 For him, this meant that the metropolisbecomes dissociated from its overwhelming totality,which, in turn, would make the aestheticcomprehension of moments within the city possible.Reading the urban environment through the lens ofImpressionism and a knowledge of empathy, themetropolis was no longer the purely negativemechanisation of an ‘artless world’ but became theaccumulation of fascinating aesthetic urbanmoments in the modern landscape.23 For Endell, theimpressions of the metropolis needed to be engagedin order to facilitate an understanding of and to beable to navigate within modernity. Sites of themetropolis that are commonly associated with therepresentational value of the city are discharged andurban hierarchies are reassessed. The urban corewith its architectural monuments plays only asubordinate role that occasionally gives orientation.Instead, emphasis is drawn to everyday urbanmoments, which are often detected at the margins ofarchitecture and of the city.

The discovery of urban momentsIn taking Berlin as his case study through which toshow the beauty of local urban moments, Endellchose a city that had grown so rapidly that itsovercrowded traffic systems, rising factories, anddeveloped technologies made it into a city that wasregarded as the prototypical industrial metropolis.In the same year in which Endell published his book,Berlin had self-consciously declared that it was the‘greatest purely modern city in Europe’.24 By thattime, it had become the ‘centre of technological,civilising modernity’ whose people followed thecity’s development ‘with a mixture of horror andfascination’25 – a duality that architects and plannerstried to solve, and artists and poets were inspired by.

Taking the reader on a journey through the city ofBerlin, Endell revealed the fascinating momentswithin the ‘horrors’ of modern urbanity by relatingthem to natural phenomena, the movement of thecity, and modern space itself. He described how theplay of light and shadow, colour, rain and suntransform the metropolis from an apparentlyhomogeneous and uninspiring modern cityscapeinto a differentiated play of forms that have a ‘life’ ontheir own. Fog, for example, was described as anelement that made modern urban space readable byfilling endless straight streets, shadows weredepicted as they transformed large dull urban formsinto fantastic motifs, just as rain changed the colourof the asphalt, creating sharp outlines and depth.26



For photographers of the 1920s, these ideas wouldbecome paramount [5]. László Moholy-Nagy, forinstance, exposed urban territories fromunconventional angles, and by so doing, revealedentirely new landscapes to the eye. What Moholy-Nagy later illustrated, Endell described by focusingon particular moments of the city – establishing anew way of observation that selected within theabundance of everyday experience moments ofintensity that stood for the totality of the city or, asSimmel would put it, ‘there is the possibility […] offinding in each of life’s details the totality of itsmeaning’.27

In fact, Simmel’s concept of the Momentbild(snapshot) as a transitory or temporal image in themind of the viewer is illustrative of Endell’s vision ofthe modern city. Both Simmel and Endell aimed atseeing not the entirety but fragments of the whole;and it is interesting to note that some of the lecturesthat Simmel gave on this topic at the University ofBerlin were attended by Endell. Viewing the urbanenvironment in what Endell called ‘Stundenleben’(temporal appearance) rendered the modern city as aconstantly changing environment. No urban spacewould remain stable in the reflections,reverberations, and motions of the metropolis [6].The Potsdamer Platz, for example, is described byEndell, through the contrast between the buildingsof the plaza and its ‘narrow and low side-streets’, the‘turmoil in the streets that suddenly dissolves and



5 L. Moholy-Nagy,View from the RadioTower (Berlin,1928)

6 Aerial view ofPotsdamer Platz (Berlin,1915). Unknownphotographer

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lets the view expand over the previously coveredasphalt’, and the ‘world of light and shadow that […]animates the surfaces’.28

Simmel himself referred to the very same imagesin an essay from 1896 – calling for a perspective of theobserver that reveals the significance of images andmoments through ‘deep involvement’.

‘Even the lowest, intrinsically ugly phenomenonappears in a context of colour and forms, of feeling andexperiences that bestow upon it a fascinatingsignificance. We only need to involve ourselves deeplyand lovingly enough in the most indifferent phenomena– that in isolation is banal and repulsive – in order to beable to conceive of it too as a ray or symbol of theultimate unity of all things, from which beauty andmeaning flow.’29

These sentences have allowed some theorists to callSimmel a ’sociological Impressionist’.30 Indeed, theimages that Simmel recalled are analogous toImpressionist paintings that sought to discoverpotentials in the ordinary through an observation ofair and light – the very same concepts that Endellwould employ in his reading of the modern city.

The snapshots that Endell took of Berlin’s typicalblank walls, engineered bridges and railway stations,chaotic plazas and streets, form a landscape thatthroughout the book is constantly evolving andchanging through places that are appearing anddisappearing. Tracing the fluxes of modern urbanconditions, Endell visualises an environment thatcould no longer be grasped through static analyticalmodels but rather through multiple points of viewthat are constantly adapting to emerging conditions.Siegfried Kracauer later referred to these conditionsin an article entitled ‘Berliner Landschaft’ (BerlinLandscape) as ‘accidental moments that cannot bemade accountable’.31 Here he called for thedeciphering of the ‘city images […] thatunintentionally express all the contradictions,ruggedness, openness, simultaneity, and glamour ofthe city’.32 Kracauer, furthermore, argued: ‘[t]heknowledge of cities is bound up with the decipheringof these dreamlike expressive images’ that, onceunderstood, could expose modernity.33 Endell, itseems, had these raw images in mind whendescribing distinct urban moments that were toexpress a new image of the modern city.

For Kracauer, the trained architect turned-social-critic and philosopher, the deciphering of theseimages could not be achieved by architects orplanners. As he states: ‘the internal order of theseplaces is only known to the dreamer’.34 Endell,however, a self-educated architect, psychologist andphilosopher by training, and passionate dreamerhimself, would focus on these moments andestablish in The Beauty of the Metropolis an evolvingurban map. Like Kracauer’s ‘urban images’ that‘doze[d] through time unconcerned about theirappearance’,35 so Endell concentrated on undesignedurban moments of contrast in which a beauty, anenergy, and a creative potential was waiting to bediscovered.

For Simmel, Kracauer, and Endell, the potentialityof these urban moments was linked with their

unfinished and ad hoc character – the engineeredbridges with no aesthetic intent, the blank walls atthe margins of architectural structures and theexpanding city, and the streets and plazas in theirformless agglomeration of urbanity. These sites wereunderstood not only as intrinsic to the modern citybut also as moments that could offer insights intothe workings of modernity. Sites that were generallyportrayed in their negativity were here charged aspotential moments of understanding. Whilecommon theories of Städtebau as well as architecturesought to solve these urban moments byimplementing new structures, Endell’s theory seemsto ask: What if we don’t solve problems but insteadabet, support, and engage the existing city, focusingon the potentials that the city offers.

In his text for the now famous 1914 Werkbundconference, Endell addressed the ideas of Städtebauthrough his only recorded remarks on this topic. In‘Die Straße als Künstlerisches Gebilde’ (‘The Street asArtistic Construct’), he calls for an acknowledgementof the difference between urban plans andpedestrian observation. Describing the city as anagglomeration of diverse construction processes,Endell judged universal strategies such as Städtebauas impossible and mere wishful thinking.36 Thus,Endell’s contributions to design practice throughpublications and lectures, such as the one for theWerkbund, were not on the basis of an overarchingdesign method; rather, they called for anunderstanding of the intricacies of the modern cityas contingent to design.

Accepting modernity and envisioning possibilitiesFor Endell, the discovery of places within themodern environment was essential in order toprovide the individual with an urban ground onwhich it could again find itself [7]. What artists suchas George Grosz and Herbert Bayer portrayed as thealienation of the individual from its urbansurrounding, was for Endell a call for reconciliationbetween subject and object. This idea was already putforward by Simmel, who argued in contrast toNietzsche that ‘it is the function of the metropolis toprovide the area for [the] struggle and [the]reconciliation of the individual’s role in the whole ofsociety’.37 Not only did Simmel recognise themetropolis as place for interaction, but he alsoportrayed it as the place that provides the ground onand through which the growing division betweenthe ‘subjective and objective spirit’ could beunderstood. Simmel went even further anddescribed the tension between individual andmetropolis in his dialectics as ‘opportunity andstimuli for the development […] of the role of men[and] a unique place, pregnant with inestimablemeanings for the development of psychicexistence’.38 Agreeing with Simmel on the notion of apotent metropolis but realising the individual’sinability to recognise these pregnant places withinthe city-fabric, Endell’s idea was to show thetechnique of a revealing urban reading bydocumenting his wandering through the city ofBerlin.



Endell’s practice of urban wandering, that throughHonoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Rainer MariaRilke, and Franz Hessel became synonymous with themodern figure of the flâneur, was also inspiration forfilmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann.39 WalterBenjamin formulated the act of wandering mostpoignantly in his Berliner Chronik (Berlin Chronicle). Inthis text that investigated Berlin around 1900,Benjamin described the practice of city-wanderingthat would make a ‘deciphering of the city’ possible.

‘Not to find one’s way […] but to lose oneself in a city –as one loses oneself in a forest […] Then, signboards andstreet names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars will speakto the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in theforest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance,like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lilystanding erected at its centre.’40

Not only does Benjamin here use the very sameanalogies between city and natural phenomena thatEndell was describing, he also argues that this newvision of the urban environment could only beachieved through an aimless and effortless strollingthough the city. The individual was to lose him- orherself in the city, and in turn find the city and theposition of oneself among these newly discoveredplaces.

This kind of strolling through the urban landscapeas act of self-discovery stays in clear reference toEndell’s friend Rainer Maria Rilke, whom Endell firstmet in the late 1890s [8].41 In Die Aufzeichnungen desMalte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids



7 George Grosz,Großstadt (Berlin,1915)

8 Photograph of (fromleft to right) AugustEndell, Akim Volinskij,

Frieda von Bülow,Rainer Maria Rilke, andLou Andreas-Salomé inWolfratshausen, 1897.Photograph byChristophBaumgartner

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Brigge), Rilke’s only novel written at exactly the sametime as Endell’s Beauty of the Metropolis, the mainprotagonist discovers himself through the fantasticand traumatic experiences in the modern city. Hestates: ‘I learn to see […] now everything penetratesdeeper into myself and does not stop where it usuallyended.’42 Here, seeing is portrayed as an act thatneeds to be learned and that requires a relation tothe environment that goes beyond a mere ‘looking atthe objects’. Instead it requires the viewer toovercome preconceptions towards the modern worldthat in turn would allow for a refocusing of visualexperiences within the metropolis. As Endell wouldcall for a devotion (hingeben) to visual impressions ofthe city, so did Rilke’s protagonist experience seeingas something that penetrates – an act in which theworld is ‘taken in’ by the observer. The similaritiesbetween Rilke’s and Endell’s notion of seeing themodern city show not only how Rilke’sunderstanding of urban space and Endell’ssensitivity towards visual observations informed oneanother; they also illustrate how theacknowledgment of the city as source for creativepotential equally penetrated discourses outsidearchitecture.

For these figures, neither the unconditionalembrace nor a reductive negation of the moderncondition, but rather a working through of themodern situation was intended. The notion of apotent metropolis within the work of August Endellshould be seen as a paradigm that during modernityresonated equally in other disciplines. If onecompares, for example, Endell’s metropolis that ‘in itsugliness […] has limitless sources for imagination’,43

Karl Scheffler’s Großstadt that ‘constantly becomesand never is’,44 Simmel’s Metropolitan Life that‘conditions a place, pregnant with inestimablemeaning’,45 Benjamin’s Berlin of childhood dreamsthat was still ‘truly receptive to photography’,46 orRilke’s City that ‘in its ruthlessness […] annihilatesone [and yet causes an] ardent attempt at living’,47 it isthe metropolis that simultaneously provokes andcreates. Understanding the city’s provocative natureas a challenge that called for responses,experimentation, and innovation altered theperception of the city from a merely traumaticexperience to a constructive one – a notion that wasintroduced into the architectural discourse throughthe writings of these figures, among whom AugustEndell was a primary source for architecture.

The psychological model of perception that Endelldeveloped towards the metropolis was to become the

basis for a new understanding of vision that duringthe interwar and the immediate post-war yearsfound its way into design practice and teaching.Walter Gropius, for example, wrote later on: ‘thedesigner must learn to see; he must know the effectof optical illusion, the psychological influence ofshapes, colors and textures, [and] the effects ofcontrast’.48 While Endell is often viewed as an oddlyegocentric architect, too unorthodox to adopt anyexternal schema, it is important to recognise that hisunpragmatic thinking developed an aesthetic theorythat ultimately guided later theories of architecturalperception. Gyorgy Kepes, for example, extractedfrom Endell’s ideas what he thought was relevant fora formulation of a Language of Vision (1944) – aimingat completing a project that Endell had begundeveloping decades before: ‘To grasp spatialrelationships and orient oneself in a metropolis oftoday, among the intricate dimensions of streets,subways, elevators, and skyscrapers, requires a newway of seeing’.49

While Endell’s introduction of the psychologicalprocessing of perception into architecture resonatedin these works, for Endell this was merely aprerequisite for a new way of seeing that couldexpose a new urban ‘reality’. Endell’s metropolis wasno longer feared but was seen as a source for acreative engagement that in turn called for anarchitectural practice that abets the city’s potentialrather than creating blueprints for novelenvironments. His urban research was certainlyunusual in the context of the utopian urbanism ofthe time. Yet current practice is making very similarchoices by discarding utopian proposals andfocusing instead on research of existingenvironments. Therefore, Endell’s unorthodoxtheories might also afford a lens through which tobetter understand the contemporary fascinationwith mutated urban environments and their re-evaluation into productive concepts that helparchitecture first and foremost to understand andnot to remake. This study of a particular modernitymight, then, simultaneously provide historicalevidence for a constructive engagement with the city,just as it gives clues for contemporary research andfor further speculations. Marshall Berman had thishistorical awareness about the early modernists thatcould illuminate an understanding of today in mindwhen he wrote: ‘to investigate and understand […]the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critiqueof the modernities of today and an act of faith in themodernities of tomorrow’.50



Notes1. While the first part of the book is a

general critique of the modern cityand a prelude to the psychology ofvision, the second half of the bookfocuses on urban sites of Berlin,making only two short referencesto another city (Dresden and theSchloßstraße).

2. In the first Städtebau journal,Theodor Goecke und Camillo Sitte(the editors) outlined in 1904:‘Städtebau is the collaboration of alltechnical and artistic arts in orderto form a coherent whole […]Städtebau is a science and an artwith specific goals for research andwith practical objectives’. InStädtebau, ed. by T. Goecke and C.Sitte, vol. 1, no. 1, preface.

3. For further information on therelationship between arts and thecity, see: D. Festa-McCormick, TheCity as Catalyst (London: AssociatedUniversity Press, 1979); Visions of theModern City: Essays in History, Art, andLiterature, ed. by W. Sharpe and L.Wallock (New York: ColumbiaUniversity, Heyman Center for theHumanities, 1983); and P.Lombardo, Cities, Words and Images:From Poe to Scorsese (New York:Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

4. The newly emerging discipline ofStädtebau or urban design wouldparticipate in debates around themetropolis through publicationsthat contemplated possibilities ofmaking the modern city readable.From Reinhard Baumeister’s earlypublication on City Expansion and itsTechnical and Economical Concernsand its Relation to BuildingRegulations (R. Baumeister, Stadt-Erweiterungen in Technischer,Baupolizeilicher und WirtschaftlicherBeziehung (Berlin: Ernst & Korn,1876)) to the debates betweenCamillo Sitte and Otto Wagner, themodern city was to be restructuredeither through a picturesquenotion of urban space or througha rationalisation of infrastructure.

5. F. Nietzsche, Gay Science, trans. byKaufmann (New York: Vintage,1974 [1882]), p. 280.

6. Zarathustra’s ape tries to stop theteacher from entering into thegreat city (Nietzsche used the term‘grosse Stadt’) by saying ‘Have pityon your foot! Rather spit on thecity’s gate and turn back’. He thengoes on to define thecharacteristics of the great city. F.Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra(Leipzig: Druck und Verlag von C.G. Naumann, 1896 [1885]), pp.258–260. Unless otherwiseindicated, all translations fromGerman are mine.

7. Ibid, p. 262.8. The division between ‘internal and

external’ (employed by Nietzsche,

Heidegger, and more recently byFrancesco Dal Co), or between‘subjective and objective spirit’(pronounced by Simmel), drawsattention to the separationbetween the individual and themetropolitan world.

9. A. Endell, Die Schönheit der GroßenStadt (Stuttgart: Strecker &Schröder, 1908), pp. 21–22. All pagenumbers follow the originalpublication. The text Die Schönheitder Großen Stadt has never beentranslated but was republishedthree times in: A. Endell, Vom Sehen:Texte 1896–1925 über die Architektur,Formkunst und ‘Die Schönheit derGroßen Stadt’ (Basel; Boston:Birkhäuser, 1995); A. Endell,Zauberland des Sichtbaren (Berlin:Verlag der Gartenschönheit, 1928);and Endell, Die Schönheit der GroßenStadt – Architextbook Nr. 4 (Berlin:Archibook-Verlag Düttmann, 1984).

10.Endell’s connections to the work ofNietzsche are numerous. In 1891,Endell began to study philosophyand psychology at the University ofTübingen and transferred one yearlater to Munich. In Munich, Endellwas enrolled until the wintersemester 1895/96. According toletters, Endell became acquaintedwith the work of Nietzschethrough his studies in Tübingenand Munich and through hiscousin, the Professor of HistoryKurt Breysig, who was one of thefirst lecturers on Nietzsche. In1986, Lou Andreas-Salomécontacted Endell for the first time,and they became lifelong friends.By that time Andreas-Salomé wasalready known as a Nietzschescholar.

11.Tilmann Buddensieg describedEndell’s book cover for Nietzsche’sGedichte und Spüche and hisZarathustra as ‘the first modernbookbinding’. See T. Buddensieg,‘Der erste moderne Bucheinband?August Endell und FriedrichNietzsche’ in Ars naturam adiuvans.Festschrift für Matthias Winner zum 11.März 1996, ed. by V. v. Flemmingand S. Schütze (Mainz: P. vonZabern, 1996), pp. 662–669.

12.T. Lipps, Ästhetik, Erster Teil (Leipzig,Hamburg: Leopold Voss Verlag,1903), p. 125.

13. Ibid: ‘Die vollkommene Einfühlung isteben ein vollkommenes Aufgehenmeiner in dem optischWahrgenommenen und dem, was ichdarin erlebe. – Solche vollkommeneEinfühlung nun ist die ästhetischeEinfühlung.’

14.R. Vischer, ‘Über das OptischeFormgefühl’ (On Optical Sense ofForm, 1872–73) and H. Wölfflin,‘Prolegomena zu einer Psychologieder Architektur’ (Prolegomena of aPsychology of Architecture, 1886).

For translation, see H. F. Mallgraveand E. Ikonomou, Empathy, Formand Space: Problems in GermanAesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica:Getty, 1994).

15. Endell, Die Schönheit der GroßenStadt, p. 39: ‘Das Gesichtsfeld spieltalso im Leben nur eine dienende Rolle,erst der Künstler machte es zumMittelpunkt seines Arbeitens underkannte seinen Wert für unser Fühlen;und indem er es wiedergab, brachte erdem Menschen Kunde von einer zweitenWelt neben und zwischen der Welt derGegenstände, von der Welt desSichtbaren’.

16.A. Endell, Um die Schönheit: EineParaphrase über die MünchenerKunstausstellungen, 1896 (Munich:Franke & Haushalter, 1986), p. 11.

17. A. Endell, ‘Formenschönheit undDekorative Kunst’, Dekorative Kunst(November 1897), pp. 92–93.

18.P. Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: TheFormative Jugendstil Years (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1979).For further reading on Endell’stime in Munich, see: T. Buddensieg,‘Zur Frühzeit von August Endell’,in Festschrift für Eduard Trier, ed. byHofstede and Spies (Berlin: Gebr.Mann Verlag, 1981).

19. Endell, Die Schönheit der GroßenStadt, p. 45.

20.Endell writes in a letter toWolfskehl: ‘I was very active, sothat by this winter I will have(despite my few recommendations)established contact to theimportant people. Tschudi seemsto be interested in me. Liebermannis more careful. After all that issomething’. Endell, Letter AugustEndell to Karl Wolfskehl, 15 March1905. Deutsches LiteraturarchivMarbach a. N., Handschriften-Abteilung, Nr. 95.54.566/19.

21.A decade after Nietzsche wrote ThusSpoke Zarathustra (1885), GeorgSimmel established sociology as adiscipline within the Germanuniversity system. His theory,which might be understood as ananswer to the scepticism ofNietzsche, set out to identify theposition of the individual withinthe metropolis. Referring toSimmel’s most famous text ‘TheMetropolis and Mental Life’, firstpublished in 1903, David Frisbynotes: ‘Simmel’s interest […] lay inthe direction of an interpretationor description of modernity thatcould aid our understanding ofthe new forms of social interactionin modernity’. (D. Frisby, Cityscapesof Modernity: Critical Explorations(Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2001)).K. Scheffler, Berlin – EinStadtschicksal (Berlin: E. Reiss, 1910),pp. 193–195. G. Simmel, Philosophiedes Geldes [Philosophy of Money],trans. by Bottomore and Frisby



48.W. Gropius, ‘Design Topics’,Magazine of Art (December 1947).Here quoted from W. Gropius,Scope of Total Architecture (New York:Collier Books, 1962), p. 33.

49.G. Kepes, Language of Vision(Chicago: P. Theobald, 1944), p. 13.

50.M. Berman, All that is Solid Melts intoAir: The Experience of Modernity (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 36.

Illustration creditsarq gratefully acknowledges:Akademie der Künste, Berlin (August-

Endell-Archiv, End-20-33.1), 1Archive Dorothee Pfeiffer,

Göttingen, 8Archive Ralf Jentsch, Rome, 7Avery Architectural and Fine Arts

Library, Columbia University, 2, 4Fotosammlung, Landesarchiv

Berlin, 6Hattula Moholy-Nagy; © 2007 Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York / VGBild-Kunst, Bonn, 5

Van Pelt Library, University ofPennsylvania, 3

AcknowledgementsI would like to thank DavidLeatherbarrow and Detlef Mertins fortheir invaluable comments on thetopic. Research for this project andillustrations for this article weremade possible by the generoussupport of the Graham Foundationand the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

BiographyAlexander Eisenschmidt is a Ph.D.Candidate at the University ofPennsylvania; he teaches history andtheory at the Pratt Institute in NewYork. His research investigatesarchitectural visions of the city, fromthe emergence of the metropolis tothe contemporary city of bits.

Author’s addressAlexander EisenschmidtUniversity of PennsylvaniaSchool of Design207 Meyerson HallPhiladelphia, pa 19104

[email protected]

(Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot,1900), p. 55. For further referenceson this topic, see D. Frisby,Sociological Impressionism: AReassessment of Georg Simmel’s SocialTheory (London: Heinemann, 1981).

22.Endell, Die Schönheit der GroßenStadt, pp. 44–45.

23.One should also note that theintroduction of Impressionistideas in architecture and urbandiscourses became the foundationfor a new aesthetic theory thatwould pave the way forExpressionist architecture andGerman Modernism in general.

24.Karl Baedeker (Firm), Berlin and ItsEnvirons, Handbook for Travellers(Leipzig: K. Baedeker, 1908), p. v.

25.C. W. Haxthausen and H. Suhr,Berlin: Culture and Metropolis(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1991), pp. 37–38.


27.Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes(Philosophy of Money), p. 55.


29.G. Simmel, ‘SoziologischeAesthetik’, Die Zukunft, vol. 17

(1896), p. 206. Here quoted from D.Frisby, Fragments of Modernity:Theories of Modernity in the Work ofSimmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986),p. 57.

30.Frisby, Sociological Impressionism: AReassessment of Georg Simmel’s SocialTheory.

31.S. Kracauer, ‘Berliner Landschaft’,Frankfurter Zeitung, 8 November1931. Here quoted from S.Kracauer, Straßen in Berlin undAnderswo (Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1964), p. 50.

32.Ibid, p. 52.33.Ibid.34.S. Kracauer, ‘Zwei Flächen’, in (FZ,

1926). Here quoted from Ibid, p. 24.35.Ibid, p. 50.36.A. Endell, ‘Die Straße als

Künstlerisches Gebilde’, (‘TheStreet as Artistic Construct’), inJahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes:Der Verkehr (Jena: Eugen Diederichs,

1914), pp. 18–19.37.G. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and

Mental Life’. Here quoted from G.Simmel, Simmel on Culture, trans. byFrisby and Featherstone (London:Sage Publications, 1997), p. 185.

38.Ibid.39.On the topic of city-wandering by

the here cited authors, see thefollowing works: H. d. Balzac, LostIllusions, trans. by Raine (New York:The Modern Library, 2001 [1843]);C. Baudelaire, ‘The Painter ofModern Life ’, in The Painter ofModern Life, and other Essays, trans.by Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965

[1863]); R. M. Rilke, DieAufzeichnungen des Malte LauridsBrigge (Cologne: KönemannVerlagsgesellschaft, 1999 [1910]); F.Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin (Munich:Rogner & Bernhard, 1968 [1929]); W.Ruttmann, Berlin, die Sinfonie derGroßstadt (Germany: DeutscheVereins-Film, 1927).

40.W. Benjamin, Berliner Chronik(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Herequoted from the translation in W.Benjamin, Reflections: Essays,Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing,trans. by Jephcott (New York:Schocken Books, 1986), p. 9.

41.Lou Andreas-Salomé fosteredEndell’s meeting with Rilke. In1897, Andreas-Salomé, Frieda vonBülow, and Rilke moved togetherto Wolfratshausen. Endell, wholived during this time in Munich,would visit them frequently.

42.Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des MalteLaurids Brigge, p. 14.

43.Endell, Die Schönheit der GroßenStadt, p. 23.

44.Scheffler, Berlin – Ein Stadtschicksal,p. 219.

45.G. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis andMental Life’. Here quoted from G.Simmel, Simmel on Culture: SelectedWritings, trans. by Frisby andFeatherstone (London: SagePublications, 1997), p. 185.

46.Benjamin, Berliner Chronik, p. 8.47.R. M. Rilke, ‘Letter to Baroness von

Nordeck’, in Letters 1892–1910, trans.by Greene and Norton (New York:Norton and Co., 1945), p. 284.



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