Warburg Models : Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge

The buildings of the Warburg Circle as repositories of iconology and visual culture

Architectural patronage was crucial for the thinking of Aby Warburg (1866–1929) and his circle, and their cultural ideologies were integral to the buildings they created. In Hamburg, the purpose-designed Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, completed in 1926, organized Warburg’s remarkable library. 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. This book follows the concept of bilderfahrzeuge, meaning “image vehicle,” to follow these building histories using archive photographs, drawings and a series of architectural models. It shows 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.