of seeing how to bring a conscious multiplicity into effect within the construction of the
work. I cannot propose a definite solution to this problem. But it is not true that the
classic view of the work gives criteria that are any clearer: they only appear to be so, but
in fact one has always to appeal to the Kantian genius, or in the terms we are using here,
to the artist as one aware of the multiplicity of voices and Weltanschauungen and capable
of thematizing them whilst standing outside them. This is all as regards the first point of
my conclusion.
The second point regards the concept of monumentality: the ability to listen to the
Ueberlieferung, the handing down, from the past no less than from the present, may also
be expressed in the forms of a new monumentality, or in less solemn terms, in the forms
of a new ensemble of recognizable characteristics, of a ‘recognizableness’. It is neither a
response to a nostalgia for relocalization, nor a new offer to enroot our experience in
some stable reality. It responds to a perhaps affinitive need for a symbolic and
ornamental dimension. It is as if to say that the need for monumentality makes itself felt
when architecture and planning, in their reciprocal relation, no longer respond clearly to
immediate needs—shelter, clothing...—but are left in that indefinite state that derives
from the principle of reality having been worn away. In this situation a need arises for
ornamentation, for that ornament which has been the object of polemic between, for
example, many functionalist and rationalist architects and which, in the present situation,
seems to be widely and strongly reaffirmed. We have needs that are not immediate and
vital but symbolic, and which emerge all the more when every deducible, metaphysical
reason founded on the nature of man, the needs of life, etc., is to some extent dissolved.
Viewed in this way, it is most instructive to consider what used to happen when the
architects’ clients were above all the monarch and the rich bourgoisie, in contrast to the
current proliferation of communities and value-systems. The comparison suggests—and I
come here to the third point in my conclusion—that the position of architect is
increasingly less that of ‘genius’ and more that of a ‘symbolic operator’ with a clear
awareness of what he is doing. I don’t know if, for example, the court architects that built
the hunting villa of the Dukes of Savoy in Turin were conscious of expressing in their
work the aesthetic expectations of a monarch. They probably believed they were
conforming to the classical models they had taken as guides for their activity. Today, this
conception of architectonic creation, more even than poetic or literary creation, is no
longer possible. The architect is no longer the functionary of humanity, just as the
philosopher no longer thinks of him or herself as a functionary of humanity or interpreter
of a common vision of the world, despite having more reason for doing so. The
philosopher is always the interpreter of a community. Yet this does not mean referring
back to an ethnicity, to groups or places. The real problem of the postmodern condition is
that one can no longer make any appeal to these ‘realities’, in however naive a manner.
Even when one is said to refer back to a community, one no longer does; the innocence is
lost and one has to be able to work in an intermediary zone between an enrootedness in a
place—in a community—and an explicit consciousness of multiplicity. This is what I
mean by a ‘new monumentality’: building cities where one recognizes oneself, not only
in the sense that there is a perception of shared values, but also in the sense that one
recognizes where one is, that there are distinguishing ‘marks’. We need to be able to
build in such a way that these marks are there from the beginning, and do not become
marks only subsequently, like the monuments of present cities that are, so to speak,
Rethinking Architecture 146