Ornament as Crisis: Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers

Ornament as Crisis explores the ways in which the novels of Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers (Schlafwandler) trilogy participate in and employ the history of architecture, architectural theory, and contemporary architectural debates.

Beginning with the visual and architectural experiences of the figures in each novel, Sarah McGaughey analyzes the role of architecture in the trilogy as a whole, while discussing work by Broch’s contemporaries on architecture. She argues that The Sleepwalkers allows us better to understand the ways in which literature responds and contributes to social, theoretical, and spatial concepts of architecture. Ornament as Crisis guides readers through the spaces of Broch’s modernist masterpiece and the architectural debates of his time.