to a “school of resistance.” Unlike the members of the first group, their resistance
is not rooted in a nostalgic longing for coherence and harmony; on the contrary, it is
based on a lucid and disillusioned grasp of the reality of nihilism. It is a resistance that
materializes in design projects and which gives form to a critique and to a radical
questioning. What is questioned and criticized is the oversimplification and one-
dimensionality implicit in the attitude of “nihilism fulfilled.” Loos’s projects are based
on the idea of composition as involving a listening to the differences. Meaning can-
not be postulated as something that is universal and given in advance. What one can
do is to create a suggestion of meaning by exposing the differences. In this stance
Cacciari does apparently discern a possibility of reacting to the condition of moder-
nity in an authentic and critical fashion.
Dwelling and the “Places” of Modernity
Francesco Dal Co comes to similar conclusions, if by a different route. In the first
chapter of Figures of Architecture and Thought, a book that he dedicates to Cacciari,
Dal Co investigates contrasting notions about “Dwelling and the ‘Places’ of Moder-
nity.” His point of departure here is Hermann Bahr and the ideal of reconciliation that
Bahr proposes in his essay on “The Modern.” According to Dal Co, this pastoral ideal
of an integration between the self and the world, of an unbroken, harmonious tran-
sition between inner and outer worlds, is also the dominant tendency in modern ar-
chitecture. Dal Co contrasts this ideal of unity and reconciliation with Nietzsche’s
diagnosis of modernity. Nietzsche talks of an irreparable rupture: with modern man
there is no longer any correspondence between inner and outer; and this is a situa-
tion that cannot be remedied. A number of authors have gone along with this idea of
Nietzsche’s and have used it as a starting point for their interpretation of modernity.
Hermann Hesse, for instance, constructs a notion of “home” on the basis of a re-
flection on the nomadic nature of existence in the metropolis. The Heimat, the home-
land, belongs irrevocably to the past, and its image is cherished in memory: modern
man is called to an adventurous existence of journeying and migrations. This journey
does have a goal, but this goal does not have the fullness and sweetness of the
Heimat. Nevertheless, the journey is guided by a longing for a home, as distinguished
from the homeland, a “shelter within myself where my ego alone resides.”^173 The
longed-for home is based on a rejection of the rest of the world, on renunciation. The
gap between world and home is unbridgeable; inner and outer are divorced from
each other. Dwelling in Hesse’s view is therefore seen not as an integration with the
world but as separation from it.
Hesse’s intuition that there is a distinction between home and homeland, ac-
cording to Dal Co, has not been taken up in architecture, however. Modern architec-
ture, Dal Co writes, attempts to create a space for dwelling that would reconcile
tensions and where the original meaning of homeland—the sense of unity with one’s
country, with the soil, with the history of the nation and the spirit of the people—
3
Reflections in a Mirror