In the early 1930s, Walter Benjamin wrote several essays criticizing the idea of a 19th century bourgeois interior [Among these essays, Benjamin's essays are particularly noteworthy "Experience and Scarcity" and "Moscow"]. For Benjamin, the bourgeois apartment was filled with objects intended solely to confirm the very ideology of a private home. He noticed that the furniture and interior design were not consequences of necessity, but expressed the tenants' desire to leave their mark on the interior, to make their homes their own, to declare their right to space. The result was a strained cosiness in which each object was intended to remind of the owner. Benjamin's criticism was very subtle, because it did not attack the bourgeois interior from a populist anti-consumption stance. During this period, Europe, and especially Germany, was experiencing the consequences of the 1929 catastrophe, and millions of people (including Benjamin himself) lived in dire conditions. Not only the lower classes, but also people accustomed to the bourgeois comfort of William's time, suddenly realized the precariousness of their position. Deprived of their pretentiousness and economic arrogance, the interiors of 19th century houses were in melancholic desolation. Benjamin was well aware that private property entails not only greed and appropriation, but also creates the illusion of permanence, stability and identity.
In protesting against this model of dwelling, Benjamin proposed as an alternative an empty space, a tabula rasa, an architectural space devoid of identity, property, and signs of belonging. His famous essay "Experience and Scarcity" describes Le Corbusier's bare concrete structures as the personification of such architecture [Benjamin V. Illumination. M., 2000. S. 265].
It's funny that Benjamin classified Corbusier's minimalism as a radical form of living arrangement, while we saw that this architecture was aimed at strengthening the mechanism of private property to a much greater extent than it was even in the bourgeois interior of the 19th century. At the same time, the architecture of Corbusier, devoid of scenery, was for Benjamin the most sincere representation of the ruthless life of the industrial era: only the space of the house, devoid of familiar features and originality, can reflect our precarious position, the scarcity of our experience, generated by industrialization and the abundance of information that overflows human life in a metropolis … For Benjamin, paucity of experience does not imply personal poverty or even giving up the excess of things and ideas produced by capitalist society. On the contrary, the paucity of experience is a direct consequence of this excess. Overflowing with all sorts of information, facts and beliefs - "a depressing ideological wealth that has spread among people, or rather, overwhelmed them", as Benjamin put it, - we no longer believe in the depth and richness of human experience. Living in the context of a constant simulation of cognition, we have lost the opportunity to share our experience. For this reason, the only acceptable way of life for Benjamin is to become a new “barbarian”, able to start all over again and “make do with small things, construct from small things, without looking either to the left or to the right” [Ibid. P. 264]. Here Benjamin presents to the reader one of the most radical and revolutionary versions of modern asceticism, transforming the crisis of modern experience, unrootedness and instability, which he described, into a liberating force, which he described in one of his most beautiful and mysterious Denkbilder. mental image - as Benjamin called his short essays] - essay "Destructive character" [Ibid. S. 261–262]. It is not hard to imagine that for Benjamin this character was generated by the instability of the Weimar Republic, where the economic crisis, fascism and conformism did not inspire hope for the future. There was instability in the life of Benjamin himself: at the age of forty he found himself in complete uncertainty, without constant work and permanent housing (in the 30s he moved 19 times). As a mendicant medieval monk, he steadfastly transformed his unsettledness into an opportunity to start all over again. He appealed to the "destructive character" as deliverance. As he wrote in the most striking paragraph of his text, “the destructive character knows only one motto - from the road; only one thing is to free up space. His need for fresh air and free space is stronger than any hatred”[Ibid. P. 261].
Here Benjamin is close to one of his favorite heroes - Charles Baudelaire, the poet who turned the instability of the modern city from an object of representation into a condition for life, an object of direct perception and conscious recreation with the help of the art of living. Despising any methodical work, Baudelaire made idle wandering around the capital his main work. As Michel Foucault noted, Baudelaire's favorite urban types, the flanneur and the dandy, are essentially ascetics, whose life becomes a subject of art. At the same time, the art of living always contains an element of self-destruction, which Baudelaire not only sang in his poems, but also tried on himself, deliberately leading a dubious lifestyle. Baudelaire hated traditional apartments and huddled in microscopic rooms, moving frequently, pursued by creditors and unwilling to make concessions. Like a monk, Baudelaire reduced his possessions to a minimum, as the city itself became his gigantic dwelling, large enough to feel free there.
It is curious that in the same year when "Experience and Scarcity" and "Destructive Character" were written, Benjamin writes another small text in which he describes with sympathy the life of people in Moscow after the 1917 revolution [Benjamin V. Moscow Diary. M., 2012]. Instead of separate housing, Muscovites had rooms, and their property was so insignificant that they could completely change the situation every day. According to Benjamin's observation, such conditions forced people to spend time in communal spaces, in a club, or on the street. Benjamin has no illusions about such a life. Being himself a "dubious" freelance creative worker with no stable income, he was well aware that living in a poorly furnished room was more a need than a choice. And yet it was obvious to Benjamin that the more this position manifested itself in interior design, the more real it became the opportunity to radically change life.
Perhaps the best example of ideal housing was Hannes Meier's Co-op Zimmer, shown at the 1924 Ghent cooperative housing exhibition. The project was based on the idea of a classless society, each member of which has an equal minimum. All that remains of this project is a photograph showing a room with walls of stretched fabric. Meyer's room was an example of an interior designed for the working class, homeless and nomadic. The Cooperative Room has kept furniture to the bare minimum for a single person's life: a shelf, folding chairs that can be hung on the wall, and a single bed. The only overkill is the gramophone, whose rounded shapes contrast with the restrained setting. At the same time, the gramophone is important because it shows that the minimalist “Cooperative room” is not just a forced measure, but also a space of “idle” pleasure.
Unlike many contemporary architects, Meyer considered the room rather than the apartment as the main living unit, thus avoiding the existenzminimum problem concerning the minimum size of a single-family home. Meyer's project says that in the case of a private room, nothing limits the public space around it. Unlike a private house as a product of the urban real estate market, a room is a space that is never autonomous. Like a monastic cell, the “Cooperative Room” is not a property, but rather a minimal living space that allows an individual to share the rest of the building's communal space. Here privacy is not a fact of ownership, but rather an opportunity for loneliness and concentration, an opportunity that our “productive” and “social” life excludes. The idea of wholesome seclusion is embedded in Meyer's low-key design, which does not idealize poverty, but shows it for what it is. For Meyer, unlike Mies, less does not mean more, less is just enough. At the same time, the atmosphere of the "Cooperative room" does not overwhelm with its severity; on the contrary, it creates a sense of calm and hedonistic pleasure. It seems that Meyer realized the idea of communism in the understanding of Bertolt Brecht: "Equal distribution of poverty." Brecht's assertion not only parodies the very idea of capitalism as the best way to manage scarcity, but describes poverty as a value, as a desirable lifestyle that can become a luxury, which is paradoxical, only when everyone shares it. At the same time, we see here a danger for asceticism to turn into aesthetics, into style, into an atmosphere.
