21“confirms the non-existent logic of the dwelling-building-dwelling cycle and thereby
dismantles a prioriany claim that assumes such logic to be purposeful or denota-
tive.”^31 Each writer thus ascribes a completely different status to this essay.
Cacciari’s argument runs as follows: As a result of the reduction of the rela-
tionship between man and world, as a result of the forgetfulness of being, poetical
dwelling has become impossible, and therefore poetic architecture has also become
impossible. Real dwelling no longer exists, and authentic building has also dis-
appeared. The only thing left over for architecture is to reveal the impossibility of
poetical dwelling through an architecture of empty signs. Only an architecture
that reflects the impossibility of dwelling can still lay claim to any form of authen-
ticity. Sublime uselessness is the highest that architecture can attain in these
circumstances.
Cacciari discerns this silent, reflective architecture in the work of Mies: “Glass
is the concrete negation of dwelling.... From the 1920–1921 project for a glass sky-
scraper in Berlin... up to the Seagram Building in New York, one can trace this con-
stant in all of Mies’s work: a supreme indifference to dwelling, expressed in neutral
signs.... The language of absence here testifies to the absence of dwelling.”^32 The
upshot of Cacciari’s reasoning points in particular to the gulf that separates him from
Norberg-Schulz. It is difficult to conceive of a greater contrast than that between
Mies’s silent towers of glass (figure 2) and Norberg-Schulz’s figurative architecture.
The difference between the two authors has to do with the fact that their assess-
ments of modernity are in conflict at every point—the former sees the characteris-
tics of modernity as incidental and reversible, while in the view of the latter they are
fundamental and ineluctable.
Similar conflicting assessments of modernity can also be found elsewhere. A
good example is the debate conducted in the pages of Lotus International between
Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman.^33 Alexander defends the thesis that ar-
chitecture must primarily appeal to human feelings, and that its essential purpose
must be to bring about an experience of harmony. Eisenman, on the other hand, em-
phasizes the importance of reason. He considers that there is a fundamental dishar-
mony in the modern world that architecture is obliged to confront: an architecture
concerned only with making people feel good is one that has its head in the sand. In
Alexander’s view, modernity is a sort of temporary aberration, as though humanity
had gone off course and had to be persuaded to cast aside this heresy and base it-
self once more on a holistic world view. In most cultures up to about 1600, he argues,
a world view prevailed by which man and the universe were seen as more or less in-20
2
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,
project of a glass tower for
Berlin, 1921–1922.
(Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.)