![]() ![]() This might sound like the typical Modernist rhetoric, but Hilberseimer took the principle to its highest level. Hilberseimer argued strongly for a total break with history, ‘an end to the metropolis that is based on the principle of speculation and whose very organism cannot free itself from the model of the city of the past, despite all the modifications it has experienced − an end to the metropolis that has yet to discover its own laws’. When Le Corbusier allotted each architectural typology their own role within the hierarchy of the city, Hilberseimer conflated everything As Pier Vittorio Aureli notes in his afterword to the book, Hilberseimer is known (if at all) as the author of the Hochhausstadt, whose ‘two images have been used so frequently to represent the horror of the modern metropolis that they have become clichés, especially because they are often considered only as images and not as illustrations of a precise urban proposal’. Nonetheless, this touching (if somewhat maniacal) concern for architecture’s inhabitants stands against Hilberseimer’s reputation as a ruthless Modernist. Apparently he became obsessed with the students’ thermal comfort, making constant modifications in a futile attempt to regulate a glass box that seasonally baked and froze. At the request of his close friend and collaborator Mies van der Rohe, Hilberseimer had designed custom venetians for Crown Hall. In the last few years before he died, Ludwig Hilberseimer − then senior professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology − spent several hours a day raising and lowering blinds. ![]() Hilberseimer’s blank blocks resonate with today’s aesthetics of anonymity, and lead Jack Self to question the relevance of sculpture-architecture ![]()
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