135such consequences. What was clear was its ‘political’ role. Architecture (read: pro-
gramming and planned reorganization of building production and of the city as
productive organism) rather than revolution. Le Corbusier clearly enunciated this
alternative.”^159
According to Tafuri, then, architecture attempts to take on the impossible task
of being answerable for the technical organization of the restructuring of production
and consumption. Instead of accepting the role of a participant in an overall plan, it
presents itself as the author of this plan. This at least is how Tafuri understands the
program of the New Objectivity, which accepts “all the conclusions on the ‘death of
the aura’ with lucid objectivity” while at the same time completely failing to ac-
knowledge the contradictory character of this assumption. If architecture undertakes
to reorganize the whole field of social reality, in Tafuri’s view it is by definition doomed
to failure.
Implicit in the attitude of the architects of the New Objectivity, who accepted
the “death of the aura,” is a new attitude toward aesthetic experience: architecture
no longer has the task of producing objects to be viewed and admired in a static
fashion; rather, it must give form to a process—in other words, it must offer a dy-
namic experience. It is in these terms that Tafuri discusses Hilberseimer’s book
Grossstadtarchitektur, which treats the total structure of the modern city as an enor-
mous “social machine.” Hilberseimer starts out from the individual building as the
first element in an uninterrupted chain of production that ends with the city itself: the
city consists of a sequence of elements that no longer take the form of separate, in-
dividual “objects,” but are endlessly reproduced in an abstract, elementary montage.
Tafuri emphasizes this approach to illustrate that “in face of the new techniques of
production and the expansion and rationalization of the market, the architect as pro-
ducer of objects had indeed become an inadequate figure.”^160
Nonetheless, there were architects—the opponents of the New Objectivity—
who remained bogged down in the “crisis of the object.” Tafuri mentions Taut and
Loos as well as Poelzig and Mendelsohn. While the architects of the New Objectiv-
ity movement accepted the destruction of the object and its replacement with a
process, their opponents tried to counter this development by overemphasizing the
object. But in that respect all they were doing was to carry out a rearguard action:
they were responding to the secondary needs of the European bourgeoisie while
knowing that they could not offer any comprehensive alternatives to the approach
proposed by the New Objectivity.
According to Tafuri, the architects who subscribed to the credo of the New Ob-
jectivity had committed themselves to a concrete “politicizing” of architecture: May
and Wagner, for instance, deployed their technical knowledge within a context of
clear political and social-democratic options. In practice, however, this politicizing of
architecture turned out to have a limited success: they did not manage to control de-
velopments throughout the city, nor could they restructure the system of production.134