Archival Science 1: 321332, 2001.

321
2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Archiving/Architecture

KENT KLEINMAN
University of Buffalo, School of Architecture, Hayes Hall 112A, 3435 Main Street, NY 14214
Buffalo U.S.A. (E-mail: kfk2@design.ap.buffalo.edu)

Preface

Nowhere, it can be claimed, is social memory more forcefully and publicly

enshrined than in the built monument. But the monument is a rare and special
instance, one in which two otherwise divergent and contradictory practices
come together. The two enterprises are that of the architect and that of the
archivist. The fact that architecture in and of the built environment, and
architecture in and of the archive, are so utterly different from one another
is, of course, the main arguments in favor of both collecting and building
architectural works. This divergence is also the reason why each and every
example of convergence between a conception of architecture as archive, and
a conception of architecture as built artifact, represents power, for power
typically enormous power is required to bring any built architectural work
in alignment with its archival double. This paper attempts to describe these
two modes of architecture, built and documented, and relays the story of
a contemporary restoration project in the city of Prague in which the two
versions refuse to come together.

Part I: Archives and Houses

It is conventional and useful for both architects and archivists to recog-

nize that architecture exists in two distinct modes: first, the built artifact
and second, representations of that artifact. This division is useful precisely
because it allows architecture in the second sense to be collected, catalogued
and protected by archival institutions without having to deal with the messy
business of built work. The Le Corbusier Foundation in Paris does not collect
buildings by the French master, although it is housed in one; the Mies van
der Rohe archive at the Museum of Modern Art in New York contains not a
single Mies building nor is it housed in a Mies structure. A rare and instructive
counter example is the case of a Lord in London who embarked on a project
to archive several actual buildings by Mies. The pending lawsuit by the
322 KENT KLEINMAN

Lords future heirs, who charge that the patriarch has lost his mind (and
their inheritance) suggests that the distinction between the artifact and the
document is blurred at considerable risk.
However, the distinction between built work and its representations
is more than a matter of convenience. For architects and for archivists,
built work evidences several fundamental deficiencies, and collecting and
preserving its representations is a project aimed at compensating for a lack.
This lack is not subtle and singular but glaring and multifaceted. Most
obvious is architectures inextricable relationship with change. Architecture
of the built environment ages and weathers, is subject to quotidian appropri-
ation, is modified by changing needs, and is part of a dynamic that resists
steady state descriptors. Built works always offer more dimensions than any
notion of original conception can contain. It is unruly in this respect, unres-
trained. Furthermore, built work is hardly ever a totalized, authored product;
built work has no privileged condition of finality or origin. Buildings are
products of forces and persons rather than unmediated individual inspiration
and unmediated preconception, and buildings become more mediated as they
leave the drafting room and enter the physical world. Built work is subject
to radical reconstruction socially and iconographically without changing a
single brick, and yet built work can conceivably be replicated ad infinitum
through complete reconstruction using originally specified components. Most
every built work is itself a reproduction, made of reproducible and inter-
changeable components. In short, built work has a troubled relationship to
questions of originality.
The architectural archive promises to stabilize architecture; this is the
archives task and gift. The archive confers a Benjaminian aura of originality
on artifacts that are at risk of becoming mere commodities, and allows the
conceit of authorship to gain a plausible foothold. Proximity to the creative
moment operates as a value in the archive, but significantly less so in the
built artifact; a Mies drawing, but not a Mies building, is understood as an
original (thus a reconstruction of a Mies building is not seen as problem-
atic as long as the materials used are accurate replicas, while reproducing a
Mies drawing is regardless of the authenticity of the materials used). As an
institution that arrests temporality, the archive effectively creates a parallel
discipline to built architecture, a discipline that has as its center of gravity
precisely those attributes that built work can never offer. Noble and heroic, it
is the archive that offers the fundamental means of reclaiming architectures
purity. In other words, the archive is less a record of the genesis of built or
projected work as it is a supplement for the qualities that the built work will
inevitably lack.
 ARCHIVING/ARCHITECTURE 323

The architectural archive is as much the product of desire on the part

of architects as it is the result of collecting practices on the part of arch-
ivists. For it is clear that many architectural records are produced precisely
to compensate for the same lack that the archive agrees to value. There is
a well-established tradition in the field of architecture of producing visual
material full of excess, of qualities well beyond marketing needs and the
utility of construction. Architectural images plans, sections, photographs,
sketches are almost always conceptualized in terms of the archive, as visual
arguments loaded with surplus power to resist the passage of time, the burden
of gravity, and the contingencies of use. Daniel Burnhams grand perspectives
of Chicago, Le Corbusiers sketches of white villas, Miess sparse collages:
all were done with a degree of enthusiasm fueled by justified doubt that the
executed work would attain and retain the same grandeur, the same untar-
nished whiteness, or the same sparseness. The archive is a home proper to
these passions, which demand to be accepted on their own terms.
To claim that the archive is a memory machine distorts the relationship
between architectural records and built architecture, for records are not, as it
were, infant buildings. The archive is more accurately described as a machine
for forgetting forgetting that architectural projects are ontologically distinct
from, and quite distant from, their representations. Buildings and documents
related to buildings have utterly divergent trajectories that at best cross only at
the briefest moments (during construction, for example) and diverge relent-
lessly as a function of time. The function of the archive is not to prevent
this separation but to insist upon it, to quarantine certain records from the
contamination of age, weather and abuse. Paradoxically, in the architecture
of the built environment the same qualities of age, weathering, and usage
are typically indexes of value rather than contamination. There is a discourse
proper to the archive and a parallel discourse proper to the built environment,
for the two domains tell different stories, offer different insights, and are
mediated by different forces. There is, to be sure, cross-fertilization: studying
the drawings of Louis Sullivan one learns how to see the built work of Louis
Sullivan. Seeing the weathering of a work by Carlo Scarpa one learns how to
read his cryptic drawings. But expecting the built and the drawn to be alike is
an expectation born of ideology rather than of nature.
The division between buildings and representations of buildings outlined
above is not unproblematic. In a very real sense, images of built work are
themselves constructions, and built works are themselves representations. It
has been argued that images of buildings constitute the true and most influ-
ential aspect of architecture, that architectural ideas are propagated though
secondary media (photography in particular but drawing too of course) to
the degree where the built artifact is of relatively little consequence, a mere
324 KENT KLEINMAN

byproduct of a larger project to change the fabric of the environment.1 In an

extreme version of this model, not only is architecture extended throughout
society via media channels, but the channels themselves are conceptualized
as prosthetic extensions of humankind, and these prosthetic extensions are
architecture. This was the central message and mission of architects such as
Buckminster Fuller, John McHale, and the Archigram Group, who famously
argued that the telephone, the space suit, and networks of all kinds are central
to the work of the architect. The rise of schools of environmental design in
the late 1960s signaled this expansive definition.
Additionally, it has also been argued that buildings are not just the
products of conventionalized, representational technologies (orthogonal
projections, axonometrics, perspectives, and the like) but that buildings are
a form of representational technology. To be sure, buildings should keep out
the rain, but roofs and columns participate in an irreducible semiotic web
that precludes any possibility of disinterested, unmediated apprehension. To
borrow Barthes observation on textuality, every column has already been
written, every roof is a citation, built architecture is a tissue of quotations.2
Built work is thus a record every bit as open to, and in need of, interpretation
as is a document housed in an archive.
These two formulations the (unbuilt) document is architecture; archi-
tecture is a (built) document are not mutually exclusive and are surely
both valid conceptions of the architects enterprise as the construction of
representations. Thus the documents of the archive can claim as central a
role in the definition of architecture as can the buildings themselves. The
difference between the two is not one of primacy but rather one of character,
and the argument being advanced here is that the two are mutually dependent,
like bricks and mortar. The following picture thus emerges: two parallel and
rarely intersecting conceptions of architecture exist. One, the architecture
of archival records, is framed as an architecture of fixity, originality, and
authorial voice. Cordoned off from the vicissitudes of external forces, this
architecture is cast as a touchstone of original intent, of ideation freed from
weight. The other architecture is that of the built environment. It is an archi-
tecture subject to contingent forces but nonetheless or because of this
resplendent in its material fullness and thus not at all inferior to its archival
double. Being fully present in the world, this is the architecture that moved

1 Beatrix Colomina, Mies Not, in Detlef Mertins (ed.), The Presence of Mies (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 193222.
2 Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977), 146 pp.
 ARCHIVING/ARCHITECTURE 325

John Ruskin to write . . . how many pages of doubtful record might we not
often spare, for a few stones left upon another!3
These two worlds are often separate, but not always. At moments, admit-
tedly rare, an effort is launched to bring them together, to slide the architecture
of the archive over the architecture of the built environment and to bring
the built work into conformity with its archival double. As the worlds are
typically distant from one another, the effort required to undo or reverse this
distance (or to prevent distance from occurring in the case of new construc-
tion) is monumental. In particular, I am referring here to large restoration
projects, although the same observations apply to modest works of historic
preservation. In both cases, a state of fixity is desired that is inherently foreign
to the built fabric of the world. The product of this desire can be defined
as an architectural monument, wherein the gap between the archive and the
building is closed, and architecture becomes an archive of itself.
Such products are common features of the cultural landscape: Falling
Waters by Frank Lloyd Wright, Jeffersons Monticello, the Villa Savoy by Le
Corbusier, to name a few. It is important to note that such archived archi-
tectures live highly artificial lives and that decisions regarding the nature
of these lives are deeply implicated in the fabrication of national, local,
and discipline-specific mythologies. As suggested in the opening paragraph,
archiving buildings is also a costly affair, and such projects almost always
bear the imprint of economic and political power interests often operating
under the umbrella of heritage tourism. A case in point is the current effort
in Buffalo, New York, to restore an early and mammoth residential complex
designed by Wright in 1904, the Darwin D. Martin House. The restoration
project, estimated to exceed 25 million dollars, involves a series of monu-
mental undoings, including: buying back parcels of the original site that had
been subdivided; fabricating pieces of furniture to replace missing originals
that are now far to expensive to purchase; fabricating new bricks to match
the original stones and cleaning the old bricks to look as they did when new;
imploding a three story apartment building erected in the 1960s in the middle
of the original complex; and erasing an original Wright window remodeling
done at the insistence of Mrs. Martin who could not see in her bedroom due
to lack of adequate fenestration. Guiding this work are the extensive Martin
House archives at the University of Buffalo. But the impetus for the work
lies elsewhere: at an estimated $200/day spent by the typical cultural tourist
(versus $90/day spent by the leisure tourist), the Martin House Restoration
Corporation anticipates bringing $20 million dollars annually to Buffalos

3 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1981), 169 pp.
326 KENT KLEINMAN

depressed economy.4 Architecture is going to be the great contribution to

the civilization of the future, claimed the Master, prophetically.5
A new architectural monument in the above sense was recently unveiled
in the city of Prague, the restoration of a modernist villa built in 1930 by
the architect Adolf Loos. Like all such projects, archival records played a
significant role in the restoration effort. Like all such projects, every effort
was made to determine and encapsulate a state of originality. But unlike other
such projects, unlike Wright, the architect had, as it were, set a trap designed
to prevent his work from falling prey to the monumentalizing impulse that
guided the enthusiastic researchers. The second section of this paper is dedic-
ated not so much the story of fine archival detective work (although there
was that), not so much a testament to the utility of archival records (although
they were heavily used), but rather the story of architectures revenge on its
archive.

II. Archiving Houses

The Villa Mller is a work of enormous complexity, the pinnacle of Adolf

Looss career as an architect, built for Frantisek Mller, the young and
wealthy owner of one of Europes largest construction firms. The villa was
immediately celebrated as a masterpiece and entered architectural history as
one of the canonical works of the modern period.6 The Villa Muller survived
both the war and the communistic era intact; indeed it wasnt until the advent
of post-Velvet Revolution capitalism that the buildings fate was endangered.
In the absence of any preservation regulations that would protect the interior
of the building, it appeared likely that a private owner would purchase the
masterpiece and reconstruct it.
At this point the nascent Czech government, after considerable hesitation,
purchased the villa and launched a high profile campaign to restore it. The
Villa Muller was to become a major landmark in the citys cultural identity;
the Villa Muller was to become a monument. The restoration project began
by consulting the Loos archives at the Albertina Graphische Sammlung in
Vienna. Additional valuable material was found precisely where it had been
catalogued over 70 years ago, in the local building department. The villa itself
became the site of forensic investigation.

4 Martin House Restoration Corporation, promotional materials (Buffalo, 1999).

5 Ibid.
6 Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer, The Villa Mller: A Work of Adolf Loos (New York,
Princeton Architectural Press, 1994). Recent articles on the restoration have appeared in The
New York Times, January 4, 2001, F11, and Metropolis Magazine, February 2001, 6265 pp.
 ARCHIVING/ARCHITECTURE 327

As in any architectural restoration, there were many moments of doubt

concerning the accuracy of the restoration project. The architects drawings
were consulted; period photographs were scrutinized; archeological tech-
niques were summoned. But there was doubt about the legitimacy of that
supporting evidence. Were the architects drawings in fact accurate reflections
of what was built, and if not, what should govern: the architects intentions
as drawn, or the building as realized under the watchful eye of the architect?
Were the photographs legitimate reflections of the state of inhabitation, or
were they staged? Then too, there were the typical doubts that accompany
archeological expeditions. How deeply should one dig? What if one discovers
material of historic interest buried beneath material of historic interest? And,
of course, there were doubts about comprehensiveness. Does it really matter
what lies beneath the visible surface of things? Could one make technical
improvements without sacrificing the authenticity of the work?
Every architectural restoration raises these problems. The French architect
Viollet-le-Duc who believed that his century, the nineteenth, initiated the
very notion of restoration and who considered himself among the first gener-
ation of restorers dedicated an entire chapter in his Dictionaire raisonn to
the thorny issues involved in the restoration of buildings. He anticipated many
of these problems, even those related to the then new issue of photography-as-
evidence. To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair it, or rebuild it;
he writes, it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness that could never
have existed at any given time.7 In short, to restore is always to produce a
new work. Thus, in the reconstruction of the German Pavilion in Barcelona
by Mies van der Rohe, the roof structure had to be redesigned in order to
look original while compensating for the originally inadequate construction;
drains had to be added so that the building would survive its new status
as a permanent structure.8 The story of the reconstruction of Looss Villa
Mller, no less than that of Miess masterpiece, was full of fine detective
work, dogged thoroughness, and the mental teases that required principled
judgment calls.
Notwithstanding these inherent problems, after several years of monu-
mental effort and monumental expense, the villa was brought into alignment
with much of the documentary evidence that could be found. In fact, a
veritable archive of documents was assembled during the process of recon-
7 Viollet-le-Duc, Defining the Nature of Restoration in Hearn M. F. (ed.), The Archi-
tectural Theory of Viollet-le-Duc: Readings and Commentary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1990), p. 269.
8 This and other information regarding the restoration of the German Pavilion is contained
in Rosa M. Subirana i Torrent (ed.), Mies van der Rohes German Pavilion in Barcelona 1929
1986 (Barcelona: Public Foundation for the Mies Van der Rohe German Pavilion in Barcelona,
1986), pp. 6688.
328 KENT KLEINMAN

struction, and a parallel archival version emerged from the process that ipso
facto certified the veracity of the restoration effort.
Or did it? Is it possible that the very proximity of the archival and built
version of Villa Mller produced a fraudulent work? Is it possible that in
the process of restoring the building to an original state it became less and
less authentic, that this painstaking process of seamlessly superimposing the
archival on the built inadvertently conflated two incompatible architectural
conceptions? Could it be that architecture needs to be immunized against its
archival double rather than nourished by it, that the archival impulse was a
motive foreign to this architecture?
Loos himself made certain that the answers to these questions would be
in the affirmative. In addition to designing buildings, the architect produced
a prodigious and influential body of critical essays, texts that have influenced
the field even more profoundly than his buildings. And Loos was motivated
by one issue more than any other, namely that of originality in architecture.
The thread though all his written work is an assault on all those who inap-
propriately sought to infuse use-objects with an authorial voice. His favorite
targets for critique were the members of the Wiener Werkbund: Josef Hoff-
mann, Henry van der Velde, and Josef Olbrich in particular. His credo was
simple, or at least simply stated:
Alle . . . unzeitgemen arbeiten waren von knstlern und architekten
geraten waren, whrend die arbeiten, die zeitgem waren, von
handwerkern geschaffen wurden, denen der architekt noch keine entwrfe
lieferte. . . . Fr mich stand der satz fest: wollt ihr ein zeitgemes
handwerk haben, . . . so vergiftet die architekten.
all . . . works that are inappropriate for our time were the products of
craftsmen who relied on the advice of artists and architects, whereas those
works that are in the spirit of the times were made by craftsmen who had
not received designs from an architect. . . . For me one thing was certain:
if you want products appropriate for their era, . . . poison the architects.9

Loos was preaching what he practiced. When he stated Genug der

originalgenies! Wiederholen wir uns unaufhrlich selbst! (Enough original
genius! Let us repeat ourselves endlessly),10 he was describing and advoc-
ating both his architectural and his literary modus. One finds essays dedic-
ated to the critique of originality/invention/misplaced artistry in the earliest
articles Loos published for the weekly paper Die Zeit in 1897 and in the
very last piece he penned some 36 years later, a veritable hymn to a simple,
9 Adolf Loos, Hands Off! in Trotzdem (Vienna: Georg Prachner Verlag, 1982), 132 pp.
10 Adolf Loos, Heimatkunst in Trotzdem (Vienna: Georg Prachner Verlag, 1982), 130 pp.
 ARCHIVING/ARCHITECTURE 329

vernacular wooden saltshaker, published the year of his death.11 Loos expli-
citly parodies the quest for originally in his 1900 fable Von einem armen,
reichen Man (The Poor Little Rich Man) in which a battle is staged
between what might be termed the authentic (time-tested, utilitarian objects
and environments integrated with lifes dramas) and the obsessively original.
The poor rich man is reduced to misery by an environment in which even the
slippers are matched to the decor. Twenty years later, in a moving obituary to
the furniture maker Joseph Viellich, he expressly advocates the culture of the
well-chosen copy: jede handwerkliche leistung ist kopie (every work of
craftsmanship is a copy) over the cult of nervous inventiveness: nur unter
narren verlangt jeder nach seiner eignen kappe (only among dunces does
everyone demand their own personalized cap).12
The originality that Loos so detested was not that of creative genius per
se; it was that of creative genius romping in the wrong field. For Loos, archi-
tecture was the wrong field; in fact, the appropriate domain for authorial
invention was limited to one domain only, namely art, and one of Looss
lasting contributions to 20th century theory was to divorce architecture and
art, absolutely.
As even this cursory review suggests, the name Adolf Loos and the issue
of originality in works of architecture are inextricably intertwined. And this
brings us back to the restored villa in Prague, and by extension, to the act
of archiving architecture in general. For the weight of the architects texts
make one conclusion immediately clear and inescapable: the restored Villa
Mller is no longer a house. It is not even architecture, certainly not a Loos.
It has undergone an ontological shift. It has instead all the trappings of an
oxymoron: an original Loos.
Worse still, it has become a work of art. We know that the villa is aspiring
to the status of art for the following reason: we can no longer touch it. This
precondition for art is taken from Karl Kraus via Walter Benjamin. According
to Benjamin, Kraus noted that
On reading the words with which Goethe censures the way the Philistine,
and thus many an art connoisseur, run their fingers over engravings and
reliefs, the revelation came to [Loos] that what may be touched cannot be
a work of art, and that a work of art must be out of reach.13

11 Adolf Loos, Vom Nachsalzen in Die Potemkinsche Stadt (Vienna: Georg Prachner
Verlag, 1983), 231 pp.
12 Adolf Loos, Joseph Veillich in Trotzdem (Vienna: Georg Prachner Verlag, 1982),
216 pp.
13 Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus in Peter Demetz (ed.), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 240241.
330 KENT KLEINMAN

Loos himself does not, to my knowledge, credit Goethe with this obser-
vation, but a kind of haptic test does ground both Looss and Krauss
confidence in the categorical distinction between objects of use and works
of art. Benjamin took up this theme of arts inherent distance explicitly in
his 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
In his discussion on what brings about the decay of the aura of a work
of art, Benjamin cites the publics insatiable desire for proximity. Every
day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range
by way of its likeness . . ..14 This desire to touch fulfills itself only when
the artwork is within grasp, namely through its reproduction, which in turn
destroys the works aura. One of the things that we appropriate in this manner
is architecture, which we apprehend in a distracted manner, by habit, by
use, and by touch. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of
the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building, Benjamin
notes.15 Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as
by habit. . . . The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.16
Loos embraced this distracted examiner; one might say he valorized this
character well before Benjamin theorized him. The core of so many of Looss
tales swirl around the fate of those who experience the world haptically, at
close range: Joseph Veillich, the chair maker; the poor rich man whose fall
from happiness coincides with the moment when he is forbidden to touch
anything in his home without his architects approval; the happy owner (Loos
himself) of a desk whose ink stains and scratches and other signs of wear
produce a sentimental reverie; and the saddle maker, who cannot match the
artistic fantasies of the design professor because he, the saddle maker, has
actually handled leather. Saddles, desks, rooms, objects of use in general are
there to be touched. At the risk of being branded an essentialist a risk that
bothered Looss generation not at all one can say that this is a categorical
essence.
To deny touch to original archival material is fundamental to the
archives mission. To deny touch to the villa is to transform it, not only
categorically, but also critically. We now pass through the halls of the villa, we
gaze out onto the restored living room, we admire the extraordinary tableau,
and we ask ourselves: if this work is now no longer to be appropriated in
the manner Loos considered natural to architecture, just what kind of appro-
priation is appropriate? And because we are presented with a building as

14 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Hannah
Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968),
p. 223.
15 Ibid., p. 240.
16 Ibid., pp. 240241.
 ARCHIVING/ARCHITECTURE 331

artwork, the answer, it seems, is that we should appropriate the building in

that mode long considered natural to works of art: namely absorbed contem-
plation. A man who concentrates before a work of art becomes absorbed
by it,17 Benjamin reminds us, echoing a long history which is the root of
Goethes prohibition against touching art.
But this answer is hardly satisfying for the simple reason that people dont
respond like that to buildings, even to truly great buildings. It is difficult to
imagine a visitor to the new villa frozen in suspended animation and rapt
contemplation in front of a perfectly restored Loosian bathroom (unless, as is
not all at difficult to imagine, the visitor is sneaking a photograph). The kind
of absorption produced by artworks is not produced by architecture because
this response has long been considered to be the product of works that are
themselves self-absorbed. Absorbed contemplation, at least in many schools
of thought, is an attribute of works of art, not just a description of their
reception. Balance, unity, consistency, proportionality, thematic coherence:
the kind of artwork capable of producing a trance-like state of total absorption
is said to possess these things within the context of its own frame. This is why
Loos insisted that a Beethoven symphony is different from a doorbell chiming
a Beethovian riff. As conceptualized by Loos and his compatriots, artworks
are distant; artworks do not, and should not, encourage the literal engagement
of the beholder as does a light switch or a fireplace or a doorbell.
So we may have to revise downward our already troubling observation.
No longer is Looss house architecture. We cannot get close to it now; it is
presented as a work of art. It has been rendered distant, not with a gilded
frame, but with equally effective velvet cords. But as art, it is of the very kind
that Loos repeatedly lampooned because it cannot fully produce the contem-
plative state. One might disagree with Looss conceptualization of art and
architecture, of the defining essence of use objects, and of art as distant. But
has the careful restoration, despite its physical accuracy, produced a work so
fundamentally different than Looss original that the irony of that difference
threatens to occlude its appreciation? Is irony in fact Looss final word? For
Loos, as we know, always wanted to have the final word.
Loos does not, cannot, have the final word. The above lament suggests
that if some of the energy that had gone into restoration had been spent on
designing a new use, all would be better. An essential condition, the sine qua
non of Looss original architectural conception, would be restored, and thus
the work would be more Loosian, more authentic, than in its present petrified
state. But some will immediately recoil at this formulation, for it relies quite
explicitly on the notion that there is a history proper to the building, and
other histories that are not, and the authenticating agency for that which is
17 Ibid., p. 239.
332 KENT KLEINMAN

proper is Adolf Loos. But one can argue against this allocation of legitimizing
power just as Loos implicitly argued against the legitimizing power of the
architectural archive. One can argue that it is not so much Loos who is being
represented by this project but the nascent Czech Republic, with its laudable
mission to democratize access to this and many other landmark structures
previously off-limits, a government eager to prevent the appearance of any
privileged group profiting from public expenditure, and certainly a govern-
ment anxious to demonstrate that it is protecting the publics investment by
encapsulating it. The story that is being constructed with this restoration
can also be understood as a precise undoing, a surgical negation, of the
villas status between 1968 and 1989, when it was occupied and controlled
by the Marxist-Leninist Institute of Czechoslovakia (a condition that clearly
fell outside the archival conception of originality). Certainly, when the first
wave of visitors tour the restored villa, the ghost of Villa Mllers immediate
political past will be as present as that of its architect. In short, one can
observe that works of great prominence inevitably enter into the represent-
ational machinery that turns out the building blocks of societys self-image,
namely monuments. And the final word is, of course, that the Villa Mller is
no exception.