Tropes in Meyer and Wittwer's Project for the League of Nations

Abstract

In 1927, Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer handed in a project for the architectural competition about the League of Nations new headquarters in Geneva.. This was an important project in the history of modern architecture. According to the architects, it symbolized nothing. It merely asked to be evaluated as a structural invention. Yet since then, several forms of reference have been discovered in the project. The present article argues that this goes beyond mere symbolization. The ways the project refers to and includes meanings is better described as tropes. To develop this recognition, the article examines Meyer and Wittwers project from the point of view of the American literary theorist Kenneth Burkes article Four Master Tropes, which was published as an appendix to his influential work A Grammar of Motives in 1945. This shows that Meier and Wittwers project not merely refers to forms of meaning symbolically, it employs tropes as figures of building which play an active, fundamental role in the discovery of the form of the project. Through the use of tropes, the project enables as Reyner Banham described it a view of humans in relation to their environment.