MIES VAN DER ROHE AND THE MOVING IMAGE Lutz Robbers A ...

equipped with all the modern apparatuses of instinct, reception and transmission, which assure
his connection with life.” 127 In the context of G, film and architecture function as such
“apparatuses,” or what Foucault called “dispositifs,” 128
as media that connect the subject with
his/her life world, producing and conditioning new forms of knowledge that prompts us to
challenge the dominant regimes of vision, language and signification in place. For many of those
associated with G, cinema carried an epistemic charge that would allow the subject to regain
some form of agency to shape his/her material environment.
What is more is that the case of Mies the Filmkämpfer poses the question of methodology:
how to deal with the nexus cinema/architecture if all formal, narrative and representational
aspects, if all formalist interpretations of architectural spaces as potentially ‘cinematic’ are ruled
out from the outset? One way of approaching the question is to consider both cinema and
architecture as media. Recent scholarship has stressed the idea that architecture, instead of
129
standing in relation to other media, should be considered itself as media. This idea,
notwithstanding its relevance, displaces the argument to the question of media – which itself is a
highly contested term ever since in the 1990s, German Media Studies began to challenge all
ontologicial concepts of media as mere technologies of transmission or communication. 130
127
Hans Richter, "G," G: Zeitschrift für elementare Gestaltung, no. 3 (1924), 3. “DEN
Zeitgenossen, der am Wachstum des großen Körpers, zu dem er gehört (der Menschheit)
Interesse und Vergnügen hat, der nicht an Hemmungen dem Leben gegenüber leidet und der
schon mit all den modernen Instinkt- Empfangs- und Absendungsapparaten ausgerüstet ist, die
ihm Verbindung mit dem Leben sichern.“
128
Michael Foucault, "The Confession of the Flesh," Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New
York: Pantheon, 1980), 194-95.
129
Beatriz Colomina has remarked that her work “is not so much concerned with the relationship
between architecture and the media as with the possibility of thinking of architecture as media.”
Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, 15.
130
See Eva Horn, "Editor's Introduction: 'There Are No Media'," Grey Room, no. 29 (2008), 6-
13.
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