Student Work
Diagrammatic analysis of Hannes Meyer’s Petersschule.
Title
Petersscule
Project Description
Meyer’s Petersschule stands between avant-gardism and ‘altogether different instruments of social-perceptual change’ at a time when the idealization of function and technology was shaping different forms of social reorganization. It subverts references to a range of Modernist work from Le Corbusier’s Maison Citrohan to Lissitzky’s Cloud Hanger, and suggests that the heroic structure of the Petersschule is revealing of the unsatisfactory current physical and social order. What a viewer must do, with either work, is then, to oscillate between the metaphor-making habits engrained in conventions of perception and the objective, material-perceptual facts. Meyer’s insistence on damming up subjective meaning, foregrounding the building as instrument, constitutes a serious break from the humanist demiurge that is still fundamental to Modernist ideology. This is lateness because it proposes an ideological aberrance to Hegelian time, an anti-social, post-humanist turn.