had animated genuine humanism. A new barbarism is therefore the only appropriate
answer to the challenges of technology.
While the nineteenth-century figures of the arcade and of the interior consti-
tute a form of dwelling that is in decay, the new barbarism represents a radical
change, bringing with it another notion of dwelling—one that is no longer founded in
security and seclusion, but in openness and transparency: “The twentieth century,
with its porousness and transparency, its longing for light and air, put an end to
dwelling in the old sense of the word... Art nouveau shook the etui existence to its
foundations. By now it is deceased, and dwelling is reduced: for the living by hotel
rooms, for the dead by crematoria.”^99 Dwelling as seclusion and security has had its
day. Hotel rooms and crematories teach the individual to adapt to the new conditions
of life that have more to do with transience and instability than with permanence and
being rooted (figure 61). Things no longer allow themselves to be really appropriated;
the notion of dwelling as leaving traces behind one withers away. Dwelling takes on
3
Reflections in a Mirror60
Henry van de Velde, interior
of a shop designed for the
Habana-Compagnie, Berlin, 1899.
“In van de Velde the house
appears as the expression
of personality. Ornament is
to his house what the signature
is to painting.”
(From Henry van de Velde,
Geschichte meines Lebens,
fig. 57.)