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ARCHITECTURE IS CONCEALED UNTO ITSELF: 
HELMUTH PLESSNER AND HIS INFLUENCE ON 

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE 

Gerald Adler

INTRODUCTION

Nestling in, moving along, feeling one’s way, occupying 
space, the thousand ways of  living within our postures 
and giving the silent image of  spaces and planes 
through such postures an immediate connection to 
me, these are the ways to understand architecture. We 
always have to feel such an image and its ideal system 
of  expression on our own body in order to taste the 
sense of  a building. The purely ornamental, the effect 
of  light, the qualities of  materials form a meaningful 
structure, if  not consciously, then in a more or less 
immediate reaction to the artificially formed world of  
space.1

By any measure, this is an inspiring, evocative, 
and illuminating text that feels absolutely of  the 
moment. That it was written almost one hundred 
years ago by an aspirant former student of  zoology 
on his way to obtaining a chair in philosophy at the 
University of  Göttingen, gives pause for thought. 
The writer was Helmuth Plessner, and the field 
of  study he made his own was Philosophical 
Anthropology. The purpose of  this paper is to 
elucidate Plessner’s thinking and the relationship 
Philosophical Anthropology had with architecture.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Helmuth Plessner was born into an affluent 
family of  Jewish descent in Wiesbaden, in 1892. 

Nestling in, 
moving along, 

feeling one’s 
way, occupying 

space, the 
thousand ways 

of living within 
our postures [...] 

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A bright schoolboy, he went on to study medicine, and then zoology 
and philosophy in Heidelberg. On the eve of  the First World War he 
moved to Göttingen to study phenomenology under Edmund Husserl. 
He was appointed professor of  philosophy in Cologne in 1926, having 
already published his first major work, The Unity of  the Senses (Die Einheit 
der Sinne, 1923). Within two years at Cologne he had published what is 
generally regarded as his magnum opus, The Levels of  the Organic and Man 
(Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 1928). Seven years later he was 
dismissed from his post, and, after a short stay in Istanbul, was offered 
refuge in Holland with a chair in sociology in Groningen. As the war 
progressed, he went underground in Holland but returned to Germany 
in 1951. Numerous writings followed, leading to his collected works 
being published by Suhrkamp by 1985, the year of  his death.2 Plessner, 
who wrote his key texts in the years of  the Weimar Republic, has been 
largely absent within architectural discourse, especially in comparison 
with the attention afforded his contemporary, Martin Heidegger, with 
whom Plessner shares some common interests, particularly as regards 
the architectural implications of  his thinking. His work on the concept 
of  what he termed ‘ex-centricity’ is the cornerstone of  Philosophical 
Anthropology; indeed, similar to Heidegger, Plessner’s language—his 
images and metaphors—make explicit references to human spatial 
relationships, and indeed to the culture of  architecture. Plessner deserves 
to be seen in the light of  the great upsurge in philosophical enquiry and 
critical thinking emanating from Weimar Germany in the 1920s, alongside 
the likes of  Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Arnold 
Gehlen, Martin Heidegger, Siegfried Kracauer, and Max Scheler.3

PLESSNER’S HOUSE

Before dealing with Plessner the philosopher let us consider the house 
he commissioned for himself  and his wife in Göttingen (Figure 1). On his 
return to postwar Germany in 1951, Plessner took up the newly-founded 
chair in sociology at the University of  Göttingen, married Monika 
Tintelnot, and commissioned the architect Lucy Hillebrand (1906-97) to 
build their house in the eastern suburbs of  the town. Hillebrand was an 
inspired choice, being both local as well as a convinced and thoughtful 
Modernist.4 From the north entrance side the house appears single storey; 
this belies the fact that it is built into a sloping site. It is rendered white, 
with a low-pitched hipped roof: sachlich, simple and straightforward, a 
1950s rendering of  a 1920s Neues Bauen house. The layout of  the (upper) 
ground level is surprising, the orthogonal lines of  the exterior softening 



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into an organic essay of  a curved staircase leading 
down to the guest bedrooms beneath. The private 

quarters of  Plessner, hard by the entrance, give onto 
a free-planned workroom. Beyond, visible through 
glass doors and panels, is a narrow gallery lined with 
bookcases, enveloping the top section of  a double-
height void overlooking the guest and reception 
areas beneath (Figure 2). These give directly onto 
the garden. The house is one of  a family of  villas 
designed by Hillebrand in post-war West Germany, 
all of  which continue the theme of  external restraint 
combined with internal freedom of  layout.5 Evident 
from the plan, the house abounds in fluid spatial 
transitions from one area to the next;6 its organic 
composition resembles that of  the houses of  Hans 
Scharoun and Hugo Häring, and as the sociologist 
Heike Delitz has recounted, “Hillebrand designed 
by virtually dancing through her spaces. Bodily 
movement in space was her guiding principle; […] 
Plessner explained ‘designed’ more precisely, in that 
she drew for him, and they ‘spurred each other on’ 

FIGURE 1: Lucy 
Hillebrand, Plessner House, 
Göttingen (1951-52). View of 

house from garden.



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in this creative work, as Monika Plessner has recounted […] A Bauhaus, 
then, instead of  Heidegger’s hut.”7

 

Delitz’s point with this final, acid aphorism is that Plessner’s 
engagement with Modernism and the development of  architecture was 
a positive and creative one, immersive in the practice, theory and politics 
of  contemporary design, as opposed to the Freiberg professor’s haughty 
withdrawal from it in his Todtnauberg retreat.8 In the words of  Tom 
Spector, “while Plessner was engaging the modern condition, Heidegger 
was retreating from it. While Heidegger bemoans modern alienation, 
Plessner tells us that such alienation is actually the human condition. 
Whereas Heidegger wants to get at the headwaters of  conventions, 
Plessner prefers to take us as we present ourselves. Where Heidegger 
retreats, Plessner is convivial.”9 Plessner’s Göttingen house, in its ‘natural 
artificiality,’ its ‘mediated immediacy,’ and its ‘utopian transcendence,’ 
resembles in all its complexities the houses of  Josef  Frank, with their 
inner spatial gymnastics contrasted with their external simplicity of  
form, plane, and line (Figure 3).10 We shall deal with these three concepts, 
the lynchpins of  Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, in the main 
section of  this paper, and then explain the relevance of  the Viennese-
born architect Frank (1885-1967). Plessner was straightforward and 
uncomplicated in his understanding that “[a]rchitecture, on account of  
rationally understandable functional concepts, presents the object with its 
meaning, a house, a staircase, a garden.”11 For Plessner, these ‘functional’ 
elements are also clear conveyors of  ‘cultural’ meaning: we see a staircase, 
and know that it will take us up to the floor above.

It is wonderful to imagine Plessner and Hillebrand ‘dancing’ the 
Göttingen house into being. And yet Plessner had already described such 
an embodied approach to space, anticipating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 
later writings, as the extraordinary passage from his 1923 book The Unity 

FIGURE 2: Lucy 
Hillebrand, Plessner House, 

Göttingen (1951-52). View 
from Plessner’s workroom 

to the library gallery 
and the garden beyond.



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of  the Senses quoted 
at the start of  this 
paper makes clear.

Plessner built an 
edifice through 
his work in Philo-
sophical Anthro-
pology based on
human positionality. 
It is complex and 
nuanced, and has 
ramifications for 
architecture that are 
similarly complex 
and nuanced and 
that are, moreover, 
suspicious of  
radicalism for its 
own sake. Having 
given a sense of  
Plessner’s archi-
tectural interests 
and preferences, it 
is now time to delve 
into his concepts 
of  Philosophical 
Anthropology and 
the all-important 
term ‘positionality.’

PLESSNER’S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Philosophical Anthropology deals with 
questions like ‘what is man?’ and ‘what is man’s place 
in the nature of  things?’ as opposed to the more 
philosophically fundamental ‘what is being?’ The 
German sociologist Joachim Fischer (president of  
the Helmuth Plessner Society from 2011 until 2017) 
has distinguished Philosophical Anthropology 
(the capital letters denote its distinctiveness), the 

FIGURE 3: Lucy 
Hillebrand, Plessner House, 

Göttingen (1951-52). Upper 
floor (main entrance 

level) plan. 



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special movement within German philosophy of  the 1920s, from a more 
generalised philosophical interest in anthropology.12 Following Fischer’s 
distinction, this paper will capitalise ‘Philosophical Anthropology’ to 
demarcate philosophical anthropology (no capital letters) from Plessner’s 
particular take on it.

Plessner’s claim for Philosophical Anthropology is that it provides “a 
clarification of  the position of  man in the world.”13 Plessner formulated 
his thinking about Philosophical Anthropology at the same time as Martin 
Heidegger conceived his fundamental ontology, although it derives from 
very different premises. In brief, where Heidegger’s ontological starting 
point is man’s temporal sense of  being (‘Dasein’, roughly, ‘being’, or 
‘being-there’, to use a word of  Heidegger’s) in the world, Plessner begins 
with man’s spatial relationships, with other humans, creatures, and the 
wider environment. With this in mind, it is all the more surprising that 
he has been so neglected by architectural culture, especially in light of  
the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities of  recent years. Plessner came from a 
background in the natural sciences, a field of  knowledge requiring plain 
and straightforward language, a language that, moreover, has to act as 
an adjunct to non-verbal forms of  communication, such as drawings, 
diagrams, and photographs, akin to architectural communication.14 
Immersed in transcendental philosophy in parallel with and subsequent 
to studies to those in medicine and zoology, Plessner sought to answer 
Goethe’s wish that Kant’s Critique of  Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) 
be completed by a Critique of  the Senses (Kritik der Sinne).15 In a nutshell, this 
was to be Plessner’s contribution to knowledge, initiated with his The Unity 
of  the Senses and substantiated with his main text The Levels of  Organic Being 
and Man five years later.16 In this book we find Plessner’s one substantive 
contribution to philosophical vocabulary: the word ‘ex-centric’ in the 
sense of  “out of  the centre.”17 The Levels failed to sustain the same degree 
of  interest as the key contemporaneous work of  phenomenological 
philosophy, Heidegger’s Being and Time, either in the field of  philosophy or, 
as this paper focuses on, that of  architecture.18 The reason, perhaps, is due 
to its interdisciplinary nature: Plessner was a trained biologist, and indeed 
of  the seven chapters of  The Levels, it is only the final one, ‘The Sphere of  
Man,’ that fully fleshes out his Philosophical Anthropology.

MAN’S EX-CENTRIC ‘POSITIONALITY’

Plessner posits that, at the (human) observable scale of  biological life, 
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is a decisive factor in our understanding its 
motivations and Dasein. Viewed in terms of  an 
ascending hierarchy in the natural world, plants 
have fixed positions in the world, whereas animals 
move freely. They have, according to Plessner, 
different kinds of  ‘positionality.’ Human beings 
have the additional characteristic of  being aware of  
their positionality and of  being able to reflect upon 
it. They have ‘ex-centric positionality.’ 

Seen in the context of  architecture, the concept 
of  man´s ex-centric positionality has interesting 
implications, both for the way we perceive 
our position in the world, in reference to our 
surroundings, and in the way designers conceive, 
propose, and make such environments. First of  
all, architecture provides a way of  understanding 
ex-centricity through the developing means of  
representing buildings in the early decades of  the 
twentieth century where, in avant-garde circles, 
the axonometric projection began to be favoured 
by architects in preference to the perspective, as a 
means of  conceiving and representing the objective 
realities of  a building’s formal composition.19 
The axonometric, famously, is a more analytical 
representation of  a building from which we are able to 
scale off  accurate dimensions, and does not depend 
upon the single human observer and viewpoint 
demanded by the perspective. It is emblematic of  
a disinterested abstraction, ‘ex-centric,’ as opposed 
to the perspective’s centredness on the human (and 
one particular human’s) eye. The human viewpoint 
of  the perspective, as opposed to other apparently 
more dispassionate and objective architectural 
projections, is the main topic of  Robin Evans’s 
groundbreaking study, The Projective Cast, and 
Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier’s book 
Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge.20 
These were published in the late 1990s, in the wake 
of  a renewed and sustained interest in architectural 
drawing for its own sake, on the part of  avant-garde 

            Human 
Beings have 
‘ex-centric 

positionality.’ 

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architects and students, and on the brink of  the computer revolution in 
architectural practice that would fundamentally change the way buildings 
are imagined and produced.21 In recent years, the ubiquity of  digital 
means of  representation and architectural production has multiplied the 
questions regarding man’s position with respect to architecture, in an era 
where images are commonly projected onto flat screens and scaled up or 
down at will into virtual space.22

We cannot claim that buildings and places have any views of  their 
own positions in the world, be they objective or subjective. What may 
be argued, though, is that people who imagine or make buildings and 
places, ‘architects,’ have, in modern times and places, steadily developed an 
ex-centric view of  their work that has tended to locate them outside, and 
separate from, the work itself, and, moreover, with heightened abilities 
to reflect on their work dispassionately. To be ‘outside the work itself ’ 
means having the mental ability to regard the world dispassionately, where 
‘outside’ is seen as being increasingly separate from the sentient self, while 
‘heightened abilities’ may be understood as belonging to the increasingly 
independent and ‘professional’ architect, no longer (quite so) subservient 
to the whims and interests of  a powerful and socially superior patron. 
Such an ‘ex-centric’ position is a particularly twentieth-century, ‘modern,’ 
disposition of  architects as practitioners, theorists, and historians who 
stand broadly against the ‘autonomy’ of  architecture, seeking instead 
to couple it with other disciplines, most notably sociology in the 1960s, 
linguistics in the 1970s, critical theory in the 1980s, and so on. The 
‘criticality’ at large in the humanities and social sciences has noticeably 
extended into architectural design and has gained increased traction in the 
last decades. Examples from the last decades would be Post-Modernism 
in architecture, where criticality issuing originally from linguistics has been 
a powerful influence upon architectural theory and practice (for instance, 
in the work of  Charles Jencks, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi). 
‘Critical Architecture’ has had a significant impact on post-1980s design 
theory and practice, where psychoanalysis, feminism, and most notably 
Derridean Deconstruction has had a profound influence upon architects 
as diverse as Jennifer Bloomer, Daniel Libeskind, and Peter Eisenman.23 
The architect, as artist and agent, is emblematic of  a renewed philosophic 
interest in the question of  “how to combine the perspective of  a particular 
person inside the world with an objective view of  that same world, the 
person and his viewpoint included. It is a problem that faces every creature 
with the impulse and the capacity to transcend its particular point of  view 
and to conceive of  the world as a whole.”24



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Plessner’s emphasis on space and position as 
opposed to time and occasion is probably his most 
important contribution to architectural culture, and 
is the subject of  the next section of  this paper.

THE FINITUDE OF HUMAN BEINGS

Published in the same year as the now more 
famous Being and Time, Plessner’s The Levels similarly 
explores the philosophical implications of  man’s 
finitude. The substantive difference is that whereas 
Heidegger sees finitude in its temporal sense (‘we 
will all die’), Plessner regards our spatial limitations 
and relationships as more compelling (‘we are all 
located in different places, and in a constantly 
changing relationship to those places’).25 He goes 
on to maintain that ‘human beings live in three 
worlds: an outer world (Aussenwelt), an inner 
world (Innenwelt), and the shared world of  culture 
(Mitwelt).26 This more nuanced and holistic sense of  
the world, derived from a biological understanding 
of  plant, animal, and human life-forms, challenges 
Cartesian dualism and is furthermore at odds with 
Descartes in an additional elaboration. Plessner 
maintains there is a ‘double aspectivity’ to life, at least 
as it appears to us humans. We experience the world 
‘from an inner and outer perspective’ and have a 
double vocabulary when describing ourselves in the 
world.27 There are contrasting outer-world concepts 
such as ‘body’ (‘Körper’) or ‘living body’ (‘Leib’) and 
inner-world ones such as ‘soul’ (‘Seele’) and ‘lived 
experience’ (‘Erlebnis’); and, as far as the Mitwelt (a 
word translated by Jos De Mul as ‘[shared] world of  
culture’) goes, ‘I’ (‘ich’) and ‘we’ (‘wir’). This is indeed 
an elaboration, or perhaps a circumvention, of  the 
mind-body problem bequeathed by Descartes.

PLESSNER’S THREE ANTHROPOLOGICAL LAWS

In the final chapter of  The Levels, ‘The Human 
Sphere’, Plessner outlines his three anthropological 



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laws that follow from his understanding of  man’s ex-centric positionality 
and his finitude. These are (i) the law of  natural artificiality, (ii) the law of  
mediated immediacy, and (iii) the law of  the utopian standpoint.

1. NATURAL ARTIFICIALITY 

The law of  natural artificiality, in a clear nod to Heidegger’s thinking, 
states that man uses artificial means (technology) to overcome his 
‘constitutive homelessness’.28

As an excentric being standing in disequilibrium, out of  place and time, 
constitutively homeless, [man] has to “become something” and form his own 
equilibrium. […] Man wishes to escape the unbearable excentricity of  his being, 
he wishes to compensate for the dichotomy [Hälftenhaftigkeit] of  his own life-
form and he can only manage to do this with things that are sufficiently heavy to 
weigh on the scales of  his existence.29

Plessner goes on to specify what it is that supplies this corrective to 
man’s ex-centricity: culture. To put it simply, as Jos De Mul does in his 
introduction to his edited book on Plessner, “[t]he world of  culture and 
technology is the expression of  the desire of  human beings to bridge 
the distance that separates them from the world, their fellow man and 
themselves.”30 What better combination of  culture and technology is there 
than architecture? Plessner understands architecture as ‘artificial,’ certainly, 
but its artificiality is natural to man as he is currently constituted. Here 
Plessner makes common ground with his contemporary, the philosopher 
Arnold Gehlen, for whom man, the deficient being (‘Mängelwesen’), has 
to build his own world, before he can ‘be’: “Man is naturally a cultural 
being.”31 Plessner’s law of  natural artificiality is an ontological response, 
one that answers man’s existential need for a secure place in the world. 
Plessner recognises that

since man is compelled, through his type of  existence, to lead the life that he 
actually lives, that is, to make what he is – since he only is when he accomplishes 
things–he needs a complement of  an unnatural nature to which he is 
unaccustomed. Because of  this he is by his very nature, by dint of  his form of  
existence, artificial. As an ex-centric being that is not in equilibrium, standing in 
the void, placeless, timeless, constitutively homeless, he has to “become something” 
and to create his own equilibrium. And he creates this only with the assistance of  
unnatural things that emerge from his creation when the results of  this creative 
making are granted their own heft.32

Plessner makes it absolutely clear that culture, the very essence of  natural 



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artificiality, requires both mind and hand; it is, as he 
puts it, “sucked out of  the fingers: intelligence and 
manual dexterity lie at the root of  the origin of  the 
use of  tools and of  culture.”33

2. MEDIATED IMMEDIACY: IMMANENCE AND EXPRESSIVITY

Plessner’s second anthropological law, 
mediated immediacy (subtitled ‘immanence and 
expressivity’), speaks of  the centrality of  culture 
and technology in enabling man to express himself  
and his ex-centric position in the world. “Man can 
only invent insofar as he discovers,” in other words, 
man can only mediate things and conditions that are 
immediately available to him.34 “[Man’s] productivity 
is only a pretext by which discovery becomes 
occurrence and gains substance,” a sentiment that 
finds an immediate echo in the writings of  his 
contemporary, the architect Hugo Häring (1882-
1958).35 Häring asks us to “call on things and let 
them unfold their own forms. It goes against our 
nature to impose forms on them, to determine them 
from without, to force upon them laws of  any kind, 
to dictate to them.”36 Form finding has become 
the mantra of  organic architecture ever since and 
shares its vitalism with that of  Plessner and others 
from the first decades of  the twentieth-century.37 
However, we would be mistaken in thinking that 
the architectural implications of  Plessner’s second 
law are limited to the organic: let us not forget 
the adjective ‘mediated’ that Plessner couples with 
‘immediacy.’ Cultural activities may well begin with 
the world as experienced, but they soon develop 
trajectories of  their own, ‘aesthetics’ if  you will, in 
order to express and make intelligible any particular 
ethos. Certainly, reading the speech that he gave at 
the German Werkbund’s twenty-fifth anniversary 
conference in Berlin, in 1932, it is evident that 
Plessner alludes to the architecture of  the Bauhaus, 
and to the benefits of  the flat roof, while criticising 
the overtly aesthetic tendencies of  the International 

PLESSNER’S       
THREE 

ANTHROPOLOGICAL 
LAWS 

1. Natural 
Artificiality

2. Mediated 
Immediacy 

3. Utopian 
standpoint

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Style and its followers. For instance, in answer to the question of  a how 
a designed object should appear, and what it should look like, Plessner 
(ironically) replies, “It should be beautiful!” He then goes on to explain 
that “This painterly view is somehow to be seen as superseded. […] A 
room is there for living in. A chair is there for sitting in.”38

 By the end of  the section on this second law, Plessner has expanded 
his thesis. He can now claim that, as a “law, […] in the end people do not 
know what they do, but only experience it through history.”39 This second 
law is one that poses problems for those seeking a single architectural 
direction from Plessner, for surely the demands of  extreme functionalism, 
exemplified by the organic architecture of  Häring, compete directly with 
those of  formalism and historicism. However, for Plessner, culture is always 
at least one step removed from the body’s physiology; his phenomenology 
never leads to an over-simplistic manifestation of  function, which for him 
is always historically embedded. The architectural import of  his second 
law leans more towards the claims of  history and the memorability of  
received forms of  buildings, and chimes with Plessner’s own maturing 
views by 1932 elaborated in the following section, with an inclusiveness 
and largeness of  character that leads to an ‘open’ architecture, and one, 
moreover, that is able to accommodate historical precedent. Plessner is 
reticent as to what ‘open form’ might actually mean for architecture. In 
his Werkbund speech in which he alluded to such epicentres of  avant-
garde design as Dessau, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, Plessner praised 
asymmetrical layouts and (especially) the flat roof, both emblematic 
of  Bauhaus architecture, as examples of  ‘openness.’ The flat roof, in 
particular, lacks a conventional termination, and so is open to possibilities 
of  buildings being stacked one on top of  another.40

This second law is, therefore, ambiguous regarding its implications 
for architecture. On the one hand, and of  great relevance to one strand 
of  the Neues Bauen, it has an obvious relationship with the organic 
functionalism of  Häring; on the other, with the demands of  history and 
the importance of  a continuing tradition, it represents the antithesis of  
Functionalism. Josef  Frank’s interwar work—about which more later—
comprising well-wrought buildings and pithy writings, represents perhaps 
the ideal balance between the demands of  invention and of  tradition. 
One aspect of  tradition that links Viennese aesthetics with Plessner’s 
demand for expressivity is the mask. Here one thinks of  Plessner’s 
playful and insightful essay “The Smile,” concerning the subtleties of  the 
facial expression that is for him the most human of  all our (dis)guises.41 
The mask was certainly something that Adolf  Loos railed against in his 



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writings even if  his executed buildings, with their 
spatially rich interiors of  Raumplan, their mixed 
palette of  materials, and with their owners’ eclectic 
furnishings, are all ‘hidden’ by the white-painted 
render of  their exteriors.42 His buildings, especially 
the houses, invariably have clear boundaries, even 
if  these boundaries belie complexities within. 
Loos believed that the exterior of  a building 
should have a neutral public presence. This would 
be apostrophised by the professor of  literature 
Helmut Lethen as ‘public coolness,’ which Plessner 
“[sought] to turn […] into a medium that accepts 
vitalizing boundaries.”43 The mask for Plessner 
acts as an essential distancing mechanism, a human 
mediation of  the immediacy of  the external world 
(Aussenwelt) that allows human beings to be in the 
world. For Lethen,

Plessner’s sociological discovery of  roles as a protective 
medium is informed by Nietzsche’s claim that every 
profound spirit needs a mask; his anthropology centres 
on this paradox: ‘Only masked is man entirely real’. 
Oscar Wilde’s motto – ‘Man is least of  all himself  
when he speaks in his own name. Give him a mask, 
and he will tell the truth’ – echoes through Plessner’s 
code of  distance.44

Human beings’ ex-centric positionality is due to 
the ‘membrane’ that separates them from their 
environment.45 The German architect Heinrich 
Tessenow’s executed buildings, drawings and 
writings—an oeuvre that reached its maturity 
exactly contemporaneous with Plessner’s halcyon 
years of  the 1920s—have uncanny echoes of  much 
of  the philosopher’s work.46 In an earlier essay, 
“Objectivity or Truth in Craftsmanship,” Tessenow 
(1876-1950) wrote: “It would be more beautiful, we 
would form closer human bonds, if  we were able to 
openly show our sorrows and joys or the pipes of  
our houses and streets etc, everything that concerns 
us as humans; but we lack the ability to do so, lest 
such frankness embarrass or hurt us, and so we 



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have much to hide.”47 Tessenow acknowledges the mask-like function of  
architecture that conceals the dreary if  not dire facts of  human life, and so 
makes it possible for us to live. His thinking concedes that suppression is 
necessary in order to allow meaningful expression to emerge, and concurs 
with Plessner’s view that there must be “in every artistic reading […] a 
distortion of  the work, a partisanship, a choice, an emphasis, in a word a 
distancing alienation, in order to see the object.”48

It is in the city of  Vienna, the birthplace of  psychoanalysis, that 
‘mediated immediacy’ found its most obvious outlet, though without the 
directness and polemical purity that are the hallmarks of  Weimar Germany’s 
protagonists of  the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), cognate with interwar 
modern architecture (Neues Bauen). Within Viennese critical writings, too, 
there is frequently a mismatch between texts and buildings. Texts are by 
their very nature one step removed from the objects they describe or 
analyse, and so tend to be more polemical and uncompromising than the 
buildings designed by the same author. One only has to compare Loos’s 
shrill and hectoring writings, for instance, “Ornament and Crime,” with 
the architect’s nuanced buildings and interiors, embedded in Viennese 
traditions of  Biedermeier (the comfortable bourgeois aesthetic of  Central 
Europe, between Neoclassicism and Romanticism) as they undoubtedly 
are.49 On the other hand, in the era of  ‘Red Vienna,’ exactly contemporary 
with Weimar Germany in the 1920s, we have the suave cynicism of  Frank, 
who later wrote (in his Swedish exile), in his famous essay “Accidentism”: 
“The formal rules of  art have been preserved through tradition, even 
though their validity cannot be proven; for that reason, there can be no 
art without recourse to tradition. Since these rules have been consistently 
observed from the earliest times up to the present day, one can regard 
them as axioms.”50 Frank’s pragmatic and non-partisan views clearly relate 
to Plessner’s more nuanced thinking at the dawn of  Nazi rule in Germany, 
a point that will be elaborated in the final part of  this paper. The tenor 
of  Frank’s writing is on a par with the wry wit evident in his buildings 
and other design work: his architectural thinking is always mediated 
via understandable and stylistically knowing writings and buildings. 
This accords well with Plessner’s ‘mediated immediacy’ of  his second 
anthropological law, and his recognition that culture and technology are 
key human faculties that comprise our ontology.

3. UTOPIAN STANDPOINT: NOTHINGNESS AND TRANSCENDENCE 

The third and final law of  man’s utopian standpoint is the one that 
connects Plessner most profoundly with questions of  philosophical 



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ontology. It builds on the mediating role of  the 
second law with the implication for architecture that 
it is to be located firmly within a historical tradition. 
Its subtitle, ‘nothingness and transcendence,’ seems 
more distant from the scientific underpinnings of  
the previous laws, and yet man’s ex-centric being 
can only result in a belief  in transcendence, as a 
bulwark against nothingness (i.e., the belief  in God), 
or its profane equivalent, a hope in and striving 
for a brilliant (and atheist) future. “The ex-centric 
form [of] human existence drives man to engage in 
culture, it awakens needs that can only be satisfied 
through a system of  artificial objects.”51 Buildings 
are obvious examples of  such objects, produced 
within each society’s architectural culture.

Architecture is central to Plessner’s 
Philosophical Anthropology as it simultaneously 
acts in the inner, outer, and ‘with-worlds,’ with the 
architect as ex-centric agent: “[human existence’s] 
ex-centric form compels man to engage in culture, 
it awakens needs that can only be satisfied through 
a system of  artificial objects […] Its constitutive 
rootlessness bears witness to the reality of  world 
history.”52 History, together with its twin, memory, 
is a central human faculty that affords us utopian 
transcendence, and with this third law, Plessner’s 
philosophical anthropology broadens out to 
encompass man’s historical nature. It is the law he 
expresses most succinctly (at some five pages right 
at the end of  The Levels, it is significantly shorter 
than the preceding two laws), but the one to 
which he returns in his postwar writings in a more 
expansive mode. He considers the implications 
that man’s ex-centric position has for history, and 
for historiography, in his book The Belated Nation 
where he states that “only one thing remains of  life: 
memory.”53 And in a late essay he writes:

Thus man never returns. We have to renounce the 
romanticism of  alienation and homecoming inherent 
in Marxism and admit to ourselves its illusionary 

human 
existence’s 

ex-centric form 
compels man to 

engage in culture, 
it awakens 

needs that can 
only be satisfied 

through a system 
of artificial     

objects 

“

”



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character. In its optimistic linkage of  progress and homecoming Marxism is 
based on an outmoded anthropology, which, still under Hegel’s spell, ignores the 
consequences of  insight into the impenetrability of  man and the essence of  his 
historicity.54

This is (late) Plessner, at his most hard-boiled and without any illusions. 
It is in complete contrast to the romanticism of  Heidegger that suggests 
that appropriate architecture could provide such a refuge from modernity. 
Such a homecoming, expressed in the late 1960s but harking back to 
the antagonistic polarities of  late Weimar Germany, would be satisfied 
neither by the nostalgia offered by Ferdinand Tönnies’s ‘community’ 
nor by the rigidities of  Marxist society.55 Instead, according to Lethen, 
“Plessner contrasts the identikit picture of  community as a symbiotic 
companionship with an idea of  society that lacks idyllic features. It is an 
open system of  unencumbered strangers.”56 An open political and social 
system, moreover, that finds its architectural equivalence in the open form 
typified by Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus ensemble (1925-26) at Dessau. This 
characterises Plessner’s pragmatic turn away from the abstract idealism 
inherent in Marxism to a transcendence which is just out of  our reach, 
lying in the future of  some utopian dream, or as Plessner concluded in The 
Belated Nation, “[e]ven in the apparent finality of  fundamental dogmatism 
[the philosophy of  life] remains linked to historical change and in truth 
ready to awaken those unknown forces that herald what is coming.”57

What might this mean for architecture? In his Werkbund speech, 
Plessner claimed that “we have to underline one more point that is 
important for the success of  this train of  thought: the dissolution of  the 
private ties through the technical world, the limitation of  the private space 
of  human existence, the eradication of  private relationships and in place 
of  these eradicated private relationships the gradual coming into being 
of  a public realm.”58 He went on to discuss the bankruptcy of  aesthetics, 
since

the aesthetic attitude is no longer valid, it has become in a quite definite sense a 
private matter. It is the preserve of  people of  taste, of  those who possess time, 
money and education, who take pleasure in fine things and know what to do 
with them: however, it is no longer the preserve of  the public sphere, no longer 
the preserve of  that unassuming subjectivity of  the masses, in which we all 
participate, like it or not.59

So far, so sachlich. However, in what at first sight appears to be a volte-
face on the part of  Plessner, towards the end of  his speech he appears to 
subvert, or soften, his argument:



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But the things with which we are concerned here […] 
are greater than the things of  politics and of  political 
ideology. Not only do we have the firm belief, but we 
already know that the new form-making and the 
search for new form does not rely upon the socialist 
train of  thought. The hope that this new form-
world can only be completely brought about by dint 
of  a proletarian revolution […] we can no longer 
entertain.60

Plessner’s decoupling of  the Neues Bauen from 
Marxist ideology is quite startling in the light of  his 
foregoing polemic. The views of  the Werkbundists 
present at the speech are not known, but they—
and Plessner—must have seen the writing on 
the wall: Hitler had become Chancellor by the 
end of  January 1933, and the Werkbund was 
subsequently disbanded.61 Yet had the Werkbund 
audience been familiar with Plessner’s writings, 
and with his carefully plotted development of  
his anthropological laws stemming from his 
understanding of  man’s ex-centricity, then they 
would have taken his words—prophetic, from our 
post-Communist perspective—in their stride. Nine 
years earlier, one year after the publication of  his 
The Unity of  the Senses, in 1924, he had published 
Limits of  Community: A Critique of  Social Radicalism. 
It is worth quoting some of  its opening remarks, in 
order to gain the full impact of  Plessner’s withering 
assault on dualistic thought, and on the dire 
consequences such thought would have on political 
and social life, and, by implication, on architecture:

By radicalism we mean generally the conviction that 
the truly great and good only come about by conscious 
recourse to the roots of  existence; the belief  in the 
healing power of  extremes whose method is to make a 
stand against all traditional values and compromises. 
[…] Social radicalism […] is the native world-view 
of  the impatient, sociologically: of  the lower classes, 
biologically: of  youth. […] Radicalism means 
dualism. [It is] contemptuous of  the conditional, of  the 



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limited, of  small things and steps, of  restraint, or reticence, of  unconsciousness, 
joyful, but only of  great things, devout, but only to the mighty, purist, therefore 
Pharisaic, principled, therefore inhibited, fanatic, therefore destructive. The 
enemy of  radicalism is nature.62

Plessner is here announcing a new social construct for man, one that 
recognises its artificiality while acknowledging its anthropological roots in 
the biological and the natural.

CONCLUSION

The burden of  this paper has been to introduce a relatively 
unknown philosopher, and to outline the implications his thinking had 
for architecture. Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology had little effect 
on his architect-contemporaries, although aspects of  his three ‘laws’ had 
clear resonance with the buildings of  the Neues Bauen in Germanophone 
Europe of  the interwar years. We began the paper with a passage from 
Plessner’s The Unity of  the Senses of  1923, one that seemed to presage much 
of  the ‘phenomenological’ architecture we are currently experiencing, 
followed by the postwar house designed for him and his wife Monika by 
the architect Lucy Hillebrand. We end with some examples of  the work—
writings and buildings—of  the Viennese architect Josef  Frank, already 
alluded to several times.

Frank’s ‘compromised’ architecture is less well known than the 
designs and writings of  his Viennese peers, most notably Adolf  Loos. The 
‘compromise’ (regarded by Frank as a virtue) is with stylistic purity in the 
buildings and dogmatic correctness in the writings. The latter, especially 
those of  the Viennese years before his exile, have a pithy irony that speaks 
to us directly today, as evinced by the recent translation of  his collected 
writings with the foreword written by Denise Scott Brown. In his long 
essay “Architecture as Symbol: Elements of  the German New Building” 
(1931) Frank writes about

imagin[ing] a world in which people live in small houses in meadows, growing 
tulips and pursuing arts and crafts of  that sort, cut off  from the world, peaceful 
and sedate. All they need grows in their garden, and they know nothing of  the 
rocket ship that will soon fly to the moon. Any rush is unnecessary since no one 
works more than he must, and all find their work fulfilling. Such a way of  life 
will seem strange to most today, even if  in its straightforwardness it is not absent 
of  all propagandistic pathos and as an ideal is even preferable in some respects. 
But how few will even see [any] point in shaping something lacking in any 



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pathos, even the pathos of  absolute primitivism; alas, 
very few people accept that a pleasant life is always a 
via media between all kinds of  ideals – no person has 
the same disposition all the time -; and that shaping 
a pleasant life as a composite of  all these ideals is 
a matter with goals just as consistent and absolute 
as the goals of  those who strive for a single extreme. 
The fate of  modern architecture hinges on achieving 
this ambition, for its essential function resides in the 
formation and symbolization of  our lives.63

This function of  architecture, to form and symbolise 
our lives, represents in a nutshell how it serves 
mankind’s ‘positioned’ existence, as expressed 
in Plessner’s three anthropological laws. Frank’s 
house that best exemplifies these twin architectural 
functions is the Beer House, Vienna (with Oskar 
Wlach, 1929-30; Figure 4). In its ‘white’ aesthetic, 
its simplicity and composition of  external form, 
and the ‘flow’ of  major internal spaces, it has much 
in common with the similarly undoctrinaire, yet 
unashamedly modern, Plessner house of  the early 
1950s designed by Hillebrand. While they both share 
attributes of  Modernist aesthetics and planning, 
they are equally unapologetic about their historical 
and cultural roots: they exhibit the ‘mediated 
immediacy’ of  Plessner’s second Anthropological 
Law. Frank wrote a sturdy defence of  the Beer 
House, “The House as Path and Place.” To choose 
just one extract from this admirable essay, one that 
has a clear relationship to the Plessner house, is 
difficult; nonetheless, when Frank writes that “[t]
he focus of  the house is the sitting area, its piazza,” 
we can see the connection with the doubled-height 
salon that Hillebrand designed. Frank continues:

Every living room must have a center, around which 
it is ordered, giving the space its character. In the old 
days this was more easily accomplished, as there was a 
fireplace or–even though much less characteristic–the 
oven. Today [1931], at a time when this focus is, 
more often than not, absent, the organization of  the 

The function          
of architecture, 

to form and 
symbolise our 

lives, represents 
in a nutshell 

how it serves 
mankind’s 

‘positioned’ 
existence

“

”



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plan has become more difficult, as this center has to be created in architectural 
terms. The numerous means available for this are windows, niches, columns, etc. 
It is also the absence of  the formal center that renders the rectangular room so 
uninhabitable.64

FIGURE 4: Josef Frank with Oskar Wlach, Beer House, Vienna (1929-30). View into the 
hall from the living room. The ‘path’ through the house is actually a series of 
connected ‘places,’ and while the conception as a whole is startling, there is an 
unmistakable homeliness in the familiarity and scale of the discrete spaces and 
their comfortable furnishings and fittings.  



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The concluding remarks of  Frank’s essay 
may be regarded as an architectural formulation 
of  much of  Plessner’s positional, human-centred 
philosophy:

All our commodities, and here we may include the 
house, are really a compromise between function, 
material, form, quality, price, and other things, all 
following a middle (and varying) course, yet the rules 
for the good house as an ideal do not change in principle 
and have only to be looked at afresh. How does one 
enter a garden? What does the route look like from 
the gateway? What is the shape of  an anteroom? 
How does one pass the cloakroom from the anteroom 
to reach the living room? How does the seating area 
relate to the door and the window? There are many 
questions like this which need to be answered, and 
the house consists of  these elements. This is modern 
architecture.65

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to my peer reviewers for their 
insightful and helpful comments and to my (guest-)
editors, Martin Düchs and Christian Illies, for their 
support throughout, and for inviting me to speak at 
the ISPA Bamberg Conference in the first place. I 
would like to thank Peter Bernhard who has been 
most generous in sharing with me his understanding 
of  Plessner’s thinking.

NOTES

All translations are by the author unless 
otherwise stated.

ENDNOTES

[1] Helmuth Plessner, Die Einheit der Sinne: 
Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des Geistes (Bonn: F. 
Cohen, 1923) in Helmuth Plessner, Anthropologie der 



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Sinne: Gesammelte Schriften III (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 267.

[2] For the biographical sketch of  Plessner’s life from which this is drawn 
see Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: Perspectives and Prospects, ed. Jos De 
Mul (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 12-14.

[3] Plessner has, though, featured prominently in two recent books of  
cultural history: Frederic Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History 
of  Art in Twentieth-century Germany (London: Yale University Press, 2005) 
and Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: the Culture of  Distance in Weimar Germany, 
trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley and London: University of  California Press, 
2002), especially chapter three, “The Conduct Code of  the Cool Persona,” 
33-100. Originally published as Verhaltenslehren der Kälte: Lebensversuche 
zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).

[4] Hillebrand was, like Plessner, of  mixed Jewish descent, and was unable 
to practise during the Nazi interregnum. See “Biografie,” FemBio, accessed 
June 27, 2017, http://www.fembio.org/biographie.php/frau/biographie/
lucy-hillebrand/. See also Lucy Hillebrand, Zeit-Räume der Architektin 
Lucy Hillebrand, ed. Dieter Boeminghaus (Stuttgart: Krämer, 1983) and  
Sonia Ricon Baldessarini, “Lucy Hillebrand: Architektur als Schrift der 
Beweglichkeit,” in Wie Frauen bauen: Architektinnen von Julia Morgan bis Zaha 
Hadid (Berlin und Grambin: AvivA, 2001), 93-102.

[5] See Hillebrand, Zeit-Räume, 156-7. The description of  Plessner’s house 
cites Albrecht Bürkle, “Das Haus des Professors,” in Merian 6, 1 (1953): 
41.

[6] “There were hardly any doors [in Plessner’s Wiesbaden house].” Cited 
in Heike Delitz, “Ein Bau für die modern Philosophie und Soziologie: 
Plessner in Göttingen,” in Plessner in Wiesbaden, eds. Tilman Allert and 
Joachim Fischer (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014), 133-143, cited 136, 
from original in Carola Dietze, Nachgeholtes Leben. Helmuth Plessner 1892-
1985 (Göttingen: Wallstein-Verlag, 2006), 362. The lack of  doors puts one 
in mind of  the domestic architecture of  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, of  
whom it was said that “he [Plessner] might have been Mies’s favourite 
philosopher, therefore the favourite philosopher of  one of  the three great 
heroes of  modern architecture.” (From Dietze, Nachgeholtes Leben, 138, 
citing Hans-Joachim Dahms, “Mies van der Rohe und die Philosophie um 
1930,” in Arch+ no. 161 (2002), 55.

[7] Delitz, “Ein Bau,” 133. Delitz cites Dietze, Nachgeholtes Leben, 361. For 
more on Hillebrand’s relationship to dance, see Klaus Hoffmann, “Über 
Tanz-Schrift zu Raum-Schrift” (“On Dance-Script to Space-Script”), 
in Hillebrand, Zeit-Räume, 14-15. Monika Plessner is cited by Dietze in 



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Nachgeholtes Leben.

[8] Todtnauberg in the Black Forest is the location of  Heidegger’s hut where 
he retreated in order to write, in his refuge from the world. See Adam Sharr, 
Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge: MIT, 2006).

[9] Tom Spector, in comments to this issue’s editors, and communicated to 
the author February 27, 2018.

[10] See the Beer House, Vienna (with Oskar Wlach, 1929-30) for a prime 
example of  Josef  Frank’s domestic output.

[11] Plessner, Die Einheit der Sinne, 266.

[12] A good overview of  philosophical anthropology may be found in 
Joachim Fischer, “Die ‘Kölner Konstellation,’” in Plessner in Wiesbaden, eds. 
Tilman Allert and Joachim Fischer (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014), 89-121. 
Here the three ‘stars’ alluded to are, in addition to Plessner, Max Scheler 
and Arnold Gehlen. See also Bernhard Beller, “Anthropologie und Ethik 
bei Arnold Gehlen” (Munich: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2010), 
unpublished doctoral dissertation, especially “Eine kurze Geschichte der 
philosophischen Anthropologie,” 12-41, accessed November 13, 2017, 
https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15913/1/Beller_Bernhard.pdf. For the 
distinction between the specific, 1920s movement and more a generalised 
anthropological interest for philosophy, see Joachim Fischer, Philosophische 
Anthropologie. Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg im Breisgau: 
Alber, 2009), 9. In a similar vein, the term Neues Bauen (‘New Building’) is a 
specific reference to architecture in the German-speaking lands in the 1920s, 
an aesthetic reference that cannot be used in respect of  architecture, however 
‘new,’ in, say, the 1890s or the 1950s.

[13] Helmuth Plessner, “Homo absconditus,” in Helmuth Plessner, Conditio 
humana (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 353-66, 353. First published 
in Merkur, 23rd year, vol. 11 (1969): 989-998.

[14] One is reminded of  Otto Neurath’s work in ‘Red’ Vienna and his project 
to develop a clear language of  visual communication before the semiotics 
revolution of  the 1960s. See Eve Blau, The Architecture of  Red Vienna, 1919-
1934 (Cambridge and London: MIT, 1999). 

[15] Helmuth Plessner, Die Einheit der Sinne, 7-315 and 31.

[16] Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die 
philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1928), reprinted 1975 (Berlin: 
de Gruyter), Sammlung Göschen 2200.

[17] The German term “exzentrisch” does indeed mean both eccentric and 



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“out of  the centre.” Plessner uses the term “exzentrische Positionalität” 
in the sense of  “being in a position that is out of  the centre.” So I have 
rendered the spelling in translation in order to differentiate its meaning 
from the English ‘eccentric.’ See Plessner, Die Stufen, chapter 7, “Die 
Sphäre des Menschen,” 288-346, especially section 1, ‘Die Positionalität 
der exzentrischen Form. Das Ich und der Personcharakter,’ 288-93.

[18] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927).

[19] See Auguste Choisy, Histoire de l’Architecture (Paris, 1899).

[20] Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation 
and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge: MIT, 1997).

[21] See Rolf  Sachsse, Bild und Bau. Zur Nutzung technischer Medien beim 
Entwerfen von Architektur (Braunschweig and Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1997).

[22] See Gerald Adler, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, and Gordana Fontana-
Giusti, “Introduction”, in Scale: Imagination, Perception and Practice in 
Architecture, eds. Gerald Adler, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, and Gordana 
Fontana-Giusti (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 1-9. The phenomenon 
of  flatness is explored in various scales, media, and locations in Barry 
Higman, Flatness (London: Reaktion, 2017).

[23] See, for instance, Critical Architecture, eds. Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, 
Murray Fraser, and Mark Dorrian (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007).

[24] Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York and Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1986), 3. Nagel’s is a restatement, in modern terms and 
times, of  a philosophical question that may be traced at least as far as back 
as Descartes. For Plessner, the only such creature on earth is the human 
being. 

[25] See De Mul, Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, 14-15, and Plessner, 
Die Stufen, 293, ff. (Aussenwelt, Innenwelt, Mitwelt).

[26] See De Mul, Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, 16-17.

[27] Ibid., 17.

[28] See Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen, 310. The reader who is looking for 
a shortcut to Plessner’s three main anthropological laws should refer to 
Helmuth Plessner, “Der Mensch als Lebewesen,” in Helmuth Plessner, Mit 
anderen Augen: Aspekte einer philosophischen Anthropologie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 
1982), 9-62. This essentially reprints the laws as stated in The Levels (See 
Plessner, Die Stufen, 309-46), prefaced by a short introduction. There is as 
yet no English translation of  Die Stufen.



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[29] Plessner, Die Stufen, 310-11.

[30] De Mul, Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology, 19.

[31] Arnold Gehlen, “Philosophische Anthropologie,” (1971), in Arnold 
Gehlen, Philosophische Anthropologie und Handlungslehre (Collected Works, 
Vol. 4) (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 1983), 236-46, here 240. Actual 
quote: “So erscheint der Mensch schon von Natur aus als Kulturwesen, seine 
Sonderstellung hierin begründet.” See also Arnold Gehlen, Der Mensch: seine 
Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1940).

[32] Plessner, Die Stufen, 310. 

[33] Plessner, Die Stufen, 312. Plessner embraces technology in ways that 
Heidegger found impossible. For Plessner, as for his contemporary, the 
philosopher Friedrich Dessauer, “[t]echnology is for Germany what sun is 
for Spain’s wine, for Canada’s grain, for Argentina’s pastures.” (Friedrich 
Dessauer, Philosophie der Technik: das Problem der Realisierung (Bonn: Friedrich 
Cohen Verlag, 1927), 31. 

[34] Plessner, Die Stufen, 321.

[35] Ibid., 32.

[36] Hugo Häring, Die Form, vol. 1 (October 1925): 5, cited in Peter Blundell 
Jones, Hugo Häring (Stuttgart and London: Axel Menges, 1999), 78.

[37] See Peter Bernhard, “Plessners Konzept der offenen Form im Kontext 
der Avantgarde der 1920er Jahre” (“Plessner’s concept of  open form in the 
context of  the avant-garde in the 1920s”), in Arhe IV (July 2007). There 
is by now a large bibliography on the relationship between biology and 
architectural modernism. The English-speaking reader will be more familiar 
with D’Arcy Thompson’s book On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1961). This is an abridged version of  the original book 
published in 1917. Thomson’s ideas about the relationship between biological 
and structural and architectural form were taken up with alacrity in the years 
following its re-edition.

[38] Helmuth Plessner, “Wiedergeburt der Form im technischen Zeitalter” 
(“Rebirth of  Form in the Technical Age”), in Arch+ no. 161 (June 2002): 
52-57, transcript of  Plessner’s speech on October 14, 1932 in Berlin on the 
occasion of  the twenty-fifth anniversary of  the German Werkbund, here 
54. (“Es soll schön sein! Diese malerische Blickhaltung wird irgendwie als 
überwunden empfunden. […] Ein Raum ist zum Wohnen da. Ein Stuhl 
ist zum Sitzen da.”) Translations from this speech are my own, although a 
complete English translation exists: Helmuth Plessner, “Rebirth of  Form in 



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the Technical Age,” trans. Jonathan Blower, in Art in Translation 3, 1 (2011): 
37-51. First published in German in Politik—Anthropologie—Philosophie: 
Aufsätze und Vorträge, ed. Salvatore Giammusso and Hans-Ulrich Lessing 
(Munich: Fink, 2001), 71-86. The International Style exhibition opened at 
MoMA, New York City on February 9, 1932, some eight months before 
the Werkbund’s anniversary meeting in Berlin.

[39] Plessner, Die Stufen, 341.

[40] Plessner, “Wiedergeburt der Form,” 57.

[41] Helmuth Plessner, “Das Lächeln,” in Helmuth Plessner, Mit anderen 
Augen: Aspekte einer philosophischen Anthropologie (Frankfurt am Main: 
Suhrkamp, 1982), 183-97. Originally published in 1950.

[42] See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass 
Media (Cambridge and London: MIT, 1994). “We are divided between 
what we think and what we say and do,” from Colomina, Private and 
Publicity, 33. Colomina is referring to the fin-de-siècle disjunctions 
manifested in ‘civilised’ cultures, especially visible in Vienna, between rich 
and poor, outside and inside, technology and culture, and so on. She starts 
the section with an apposite quote of  Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s (from 
his Buch der Freude): “Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface.” See 
also Janet Stewart, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf  Loos’s cultural criticism (London: 
Routledge, 2000), especially chapter four, “The display and disguise of  
difference,” 98-130.

[43] Lethen, Cool Conduct, 55, and Richard Sennett, The Fall of  Public 
Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Lethen goes on to 
account for just such ‘coolness’ in western mores and habits of  behaviour 
since the Enlightenment:  “[Richard] Sennett [in The Fall of  Public Man, 
1976] looks for orientation to public dialogue in the eighteenth century, 
while Plessner’s theory breathes the air of  seventeenth-century French 
classicism.” Since 2007, Lethen has been Director of  the International 
Research Centre for Cultural Studies in Vienna (University of  Art and 
Design Linz). Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften, 
accessed March 29, 2018, ifk.ac.at/pdfs/helmut_lethen_bibliographie.pdf.

[44] Lethen, Cool Conduct, 62, citing Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei 
Bänden vol. 2 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1963), 604. Nietzsche’s actual words 
are “[j[eder tiefe Geist braucht eine Maske,” literally, “every deep spirit 
needs a mask.” Lethen further emphasises the point: “Plessner does not 
tolerate the enactment of  ‘naked honesty’ or ‘eruptive authenticity’ either 
in contemporary design, whether the new objectivity interiors of  Bauhaus 
architecture—‘with overhead lighting and tiled walls’—or in expressionist 



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stage sets. Hygiene resides for him at the cold pole, ‘reckless sincerity’ at 
the warm. He takes aim at all forms of  unmediated directness, pleading for 
moderate temperatures and indirect lighting, for art and literature of  whatever 
type as long as they eschew intimate self-revelation in favor of  the regulating 
practice of  distance.” From Lethen, Cool Conduct, 54.

[45] Plessner must have been aware—although his writings do not attest 
to it—of  the Dessau visionary designer Siegfried Ebeling, whose tract 
“Space as Membrane” was published in 1926. See Siegfried Ebeling, Space 
as Membrane (London: Architectural Association, 2010), edited and with an 
afterword by Spyros Papapetros; introduction by Walter Scheiffele; translated 
by Pamela Johnston based on an earlier translation by Anna Kathryn 
Schoefert. Originally published in German as Der Raum als Membran (Dessau: 
Dünnhaupt, 1926).

[46] See Gerald Adler, “Energising the Building Edge: Siegfried Ebeling, 
Bauhaus bioconstructivist,” in Peripheries, eds. Ruth Morrow and Mohamed 
Abdelmonem (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 183-99.

[47] Heinrich Tessenow, “Die Sachlichkeit oder die Wahrheit in der 
gewerblichen Arbeit” (“Objectivity or Truth in Craftsmanship”), in 
Heinrich Tessenow, Hausbau und dergleichen (Weimar and Rostock: Edition 
M, 2011), Heinrich Tessenow Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2, ed. Theodor Böll, 38. 
Originally published in Berlin by Bruno Cassirer, 1916, and subsequently in 
Braunschweig by Vieweg, 1986.

[48] Helmuth Plessner, “Mit anderen Augen” (“With other Eyes”), in 
Helmuth Plessner, Mit anderen Augen: Aspekte einer philosophischen Anthropologie 
(Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1982), 171.

[49] Adolf  Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen” (“Ornament and Crime”) 
(1908), in Adolf  Loos, Trotzdem (Vienna: Prachner, 1982), 78-88. Originally 
published in Adolf  Loos, Trotzdem. 1900- 1930 (Innsbruck: Brenner-Verlag, 
1931). Loos’s writings can still appear shocking, especially “Ornament and 
Crime.” However, his buildings and interiors are remarkably and richly 
finished and furnished, in complete contrast, for instance, with the generally 
more polemical German modern architects. To take an extreme pairing, one 
need only compare, say, Loos’s famous Müller House in Prague (1930) with 
Hannes Meyer’s starkly ascetic ‘Co-op Zimmer’ installation of  1926.

[50] Josef  Frank, “Accidentism,” in Josef  Frank, Schriften/Writings, vol. 
2, trans. Christopher Long (Vienna: Metroverlag, 2012), 373. Originally 
published (in Swedish) as “Accidentism,” in Form 54 (1958): 160-65, and in 
German in Baukunst und Werkform, Year 14, Nuremberg 1961, vol. 4, 216-18. 
Frank continued:



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 A
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In our age of  scientific thinking, all traditions are gradually being lost; there is 
no longer any reason to recognize rules that cannot be proven. Thus, concepts such 
as art and beauty–which cannot even be fully defined–have come under doubt. 
A person without tradition is forced to invent his own rules of  art, which, as a 
result, must be quite arbitrary. To believe these rules himself  and to disseminate 
the belief  in them, he must base them on moral, scientific, utilitarian, or mystical 
motives.

For a pithy and concise assessment of  Frank’s centrality in Vienna’s interwar 
architecture and debates concerning aesthetics, see Friedrich Achleitner, 
“Josef  Frank und die Wiener Architektur der Zwischenkriegszeit,” in 
Friedrich Achleitner, Wiener Architektur: zwischen typologischem Fatalismus 
und semantischem Schlamassel (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Böhlau, 1996), 
81-87.

[51] Plessner, Die Stufen, 341.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Helmuth Plessner, Die verspätete Nation (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 
1959), 97. This book, originally published in 1935 with the title Das 
Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche (The Fate of  
the German Spirit at the End of  its Bourgeois Epoch) was suppressed the 
following year. It was only republished in 1959 with its new title.

[54] Helmuth Plessner, “De Homine Abscondito,” trans. Claus Mueller, in 
Social Research 36, no. 4 (Winter 1969): 509.

[55] Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Leipzig: Fues’s 
Verlag, 1887). Tönnies famously distinguished notions of  (traditional) 
‘community’ from those of  (modern) ‘society,’ paving the way for much 
of  the sociological and political thinking of  the twentieth century. 

[56] Lethen, Cool Conduct, xi.

[57] Plessner, Die verspätete Nation, 166.

[58] Plessner, “Wiedergeburt der Form,” 52.

[59] Ibid., 53.

[60] Ibid., 55.

[61] See Peter Bernhard, “Plessners Konzept der offenen Form.” This is a version 
of  a lecture given by Bernhard at the Plessner Workshop held at the TU 
Dresden in April 2005. It is essentially a commentary on the position 
‘open form’ has in Plessner’s “Rebirth of  Form” speech on the occasion 
of  the Werkbund’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1932. Bernhard alludes to 



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Plessner’s understanding of  open form in the context of  technology as well 
as of  life itself. For technical artefacts, such as machines, their ‘open forms’ 
enable them to change as needs and capabilities change. 

[62] Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen 
Radikalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 14. Originally published 
by Friedrich Cohen, Bonn, 1924. It remains untranslated into English. 
Helmut Lethen has commented that “[w]ith term ‘radicalism,’ Plessner 
attacks worldviews based on a conviction that there was any good to be had 
from ‘a return to the roots of  existence.’ To the wish projections of  ‘primary 
unity’ and radical therapies, Plessner opposes his behavioural doctrine of  
distance and bases it on the anthropological principle that every human 
being, from the moment of  birth, leads an incomplete existence. ‘That is 
why man is “by nature” artificial and never in balance.’” From Lethen, Cool 
Conduct. Embedded quotation from Helmuth Plessner, Macht und menschliche 
Natur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 199, quoted in Helmut Lethen, 
Cool Conduct: the culture of  distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau 
(Berkeley and London: University of  California Press, 2002), 53.

[63] Josef  Frank, “Architektur als Symbol. Elemente deutschen neuen Bauens” 
(“Architecture as Symbol: Elements of  the German New Building”), in Josef  
Frank, Schriften/Writings, vol. 2, trans. John Sands (Vienna: Metroverlag, 
2012), 9-191, here 27-28.

[64] Josef  Frank, “Das Haus als Weg und Platz” (“The House as Path and 
Place”), in Josef  Frank, Schriften/Writings, vol. 2, trans. Wilfried Wang Vienna: 
Metroverlag, 2012), 198-209, here 207. Originally published in Der Baumeister 
29/8 (August 1931): 316-23.

[65] Ibid., 209. See also Christopher Long, The New Space: Movement and 
Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture (New Haven and London: Yale 
University Press, 2016), with photographs by Wolfgang Thaler. Here Long 
enlarges on his earlier monograph on Frank (See Christopher Long, Josef  
Frank: Life and Work (Chicago and London: The University of  Chicago 
Press, 2002)) and relates Frank’s concept of  Weg (path) to similar concepts 
of  movement and experience in the work of  Loos and Oskar Strnad. 
Long focusses in particular on the Beer House, and cites a contemporary 
reviewer’s description of  the entry sequence that evokes the visitor’s 
experience of  entering the Plessner House: “One enters the hall [from the 
anteroom] through an unobtrusive door and is at once standing, surprised 
and moved, in the heart of  the structure. The first glance instantly offers a 
clear understanding of  the entire arrangement.” From Long, The New Space, 
140, Long’s translation, citing Wolfgang Born, “Ein Haus in Wien-Hietzing,” 



Innen-Dekoration 42 (September 1931): 364.


