It goes without saying that communist functionalism is not synony-
mous with a version of late capitalist functionalism minus the element
of exploitation. On the contrary, when exploitation no longer exists...
the white blocks of rented flats in which our contemporary lower-class
beasts of burden are housed will become colorful and will have a
completely different geometry that will correspond to a genuine
collective.^123Bloch takes up a number of these arguments once more in the essay that he
devoted to modern architecture in Das Prinzip Hoffnung, entitled “Building on Hol-
low Space.”^124 “Hollow space” (Hohlraum) is his term for the space of capitalism
where the glimmering surface is no more than an empty shell with no interior truth
corresponding to the hollow pretense of its exterior display. Capitalism hollows life
out, perverting the energy produced by hope into a meaningless pursuit of empty val-
ues. This can be seen in the architecture, which is the image of sterility: “These days
houses in many places look as if they are ready to leave. Although they are un-
adorned or for this very reason, they express departure. On the inside they are bright
and bare like sick-rooms, on the outside they seem like boxes on movable rods, but
also like ships.”^125
Modern architecture, in Bloch’s view, was initially intended to create open-
ness and to provide room for light and sun. Dark cellars should be broken open and
vistas opened up. The aim was to create an interchange between interior and out-
side; private space should be brought into relationship with the public realm. This
drive toward openness was premature, however. During the fascist period nothing
in the world outside was capable of enriching and improving the interior: “The broad
window full of nothing but outside world needs an outdoors full of attractive
strangers, not full of Nazis; the glass door right down to the floor really requires sun-
shine to peer and break in, not the Gestapo.”^126 Under the social conditions of that
time, people’s longing for intimacy and security was more than justified, and the
openness of modern architecture threatened to become a farce. Superficiality was
the result: “The de-internalization [Entinnerlichung] turned into hollowness; the
southern pleasure in the outside world did not, at the present sight of the capitalist
outside world, turn into happiness.”^127 Since genuinely rational social relations that
might correspond to the rationalism of the New Objectivity do not exist, the “hous-
ing machines” of Le Corbusier will in all probability be things without history. They
exist, to be sure, and they impose their character on their environment, but they are
so abstract and schematic that the people who live in them cannot really engage in
any relation with them. “Even the townplanning of these stalwart functionalists is
private, abstract; because of sheer ‘être humaine’ the real people in these houses
and towns become standardized termites, or within a ‘housing machine,’ foreign
bodies, still all too organic ones, so remote is all this from real people, from home,
contentment, homeland.”^128
3
Reflections in a Mirror