Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge

An Edifice of Ideas

Architectural patronage was crucial for the thinking of Aby Warburg and his circle. In Hamburg the purpose-designed Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, completed in 1926, organized Warburg’s remarkable library. From 1927 Warburg developed ideas about orientation in the radical transformation of a disused water tower into the Hamburg Planetarium. After the Warburg Institute transferred to London in 1933 this pattern of seminal architectural commissioning continued, including projects designed by the avant-garde practice Tecton during the 1930s, and culminating in the construction of the library’s present home at Woburn Square, Bloomsbury in 1958. Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge follows this history, using archive photographs, architectural drawings and a series of architectural models to show how the Warburg scholars projected a connection between their own physical occupancy of architectural space and their shared ideas about intellectual order, cultural survival, and memory.