therefore, to discuss the state of the project, and of the architectonic project in particular,
in the light of a situation that in my view may be defined ‘postmodern’—a term that is
today still not in common usage, although this varies according to geographical area. By
1987, J.F.Lyotard had already declared the term ‘postmodern’ outworn, but listening to
the topic of discussion in conferences and debates, there is reason enough not to consider
the postmodern thematic obsolete, at least not in certain areas of mittel-europaisch
culture. I believe, then, that one can still say in all seriousness that we shall—or do—find
ourselves in a postmodern condition. Moreover, its character may be such as to give the
impression that the very notion of a project has become problematic.
To begin a general definition of the postmodern condition, which I have already
spoken about on many occasions in my books and essays, I would like to refer to two
lines from Hölderlin, often cited by Heidegger;
Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet
Der Mensch auf dieser ErdeFull of merit, yet poetically, man
Dwells on this earth.These lines from Hölderlin define the condition of man in the moment of transition to the
postmodern; the doch, the ‘yet’, is what signals the turn. One can think of modernity,
then, as defined by the idea of a dwelling voll verdienst, of a life ‘full of merit’—which is
to say, full of activity. The most conventional image of modernity is certainly that
according to which modern man has taken his destiny into his own hands. He has
abandoned the transcendence, superstition and faith of the past and has taken his own fate
upon himself. One could indeed take this voll verdienst to be the most conventional—but
perhaps also the truest—representation of modernity. A vast historical and philosophical
tradition concurs in this vision of modernity as immanentism, laicization, secularization.
As is well known, this tradition began with Kant and his definition of Aufklarung. The
doch, then, altogether beyond Hölderlin’s intentions and perhaps those of Heidegger too,
could mean the turn, the change in direction which brings us into the postmodern
condition. Whereas, that is, modernity was characterized by an existence defined
essentially in terms of projective activity and a drive towards the rationalization of reality
by means of structures founded on thought and action, the postmodern would be the time
when ‘poetic’ characteristics are rediscovered: ‘doch dichterisch, wohnet/der Mensch auf
dieser Erde’—yet poetically man/Dwells on this earth.
I would like to underline just one feature of the ‘poetic’, namely, its indefiniteness. To
dwell poetically does not mean to dwell in such a way that one needs poetry, but to dwell
with a sensitivity to the poetic, characterized by the impossibility, in a sense, of defining
clear-cut boundaries between reality and imagination. If there is a passage from
modernity to postmodernity, it seems to lie in a wearing away of the boundaries between
the real and the unreal, or, at the very least, in a wearing away of the boundaries of the
real. Without entering into a sociological analysis, we can nonetheless say that
contemporary reality seems to exhibit a tendency to posit itself entirely at the level of
simultaneity. Contemporary history is that phase of history in which everything tends to
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