'... the broad field of general culture': Herman Sorgel's diagrams on the essence and history of architecture

Abstract

The German architect and architectural theoretician Herman Sörgel incorporated the question of what the characteristics of contemporary modern architecture might be into a comprehensive theoretical structure in which he attempted to situate architecture within a cultural system. An engagement with Oswald Spengler's philosophical cultural pessimism inter alia formed a basis for his culturally based view of architecture. Sörgel's work can be seen as a response to Spengler in two ways: first, his draft ‘plan of culture’ (1921) represents a direct reaction; secondly, his work on the ‘Atlantropa' project from 1927 onwards was motivated by an effort, through a large-scale technological project, to avoid the decline of Western culture prophesied by Spengler. Sörgel's higher-order integration of architecture into culture led to a reading of modernism that remained aware of its historicity. Modernism was thus not seen as an a-historical phenomenon; on the contrary, Sörgel regarded it in a genealogical way, as the most recent element in a historical process. He continually resorted to the use of diagrams to illustrate the basic features of his theory of architecture. While early diagrams are still tools for visualising the structure of his theory in the style of a graphic table of contents, later diagrams that Sörgel produced to illustrate specialist and popular-science texts in the form of family trees can be used to analyse his reading of modern architecture as an element in a process of historical and cultural development.