type of interactions which were to mark the atmosphere of life in the big cities, described
by Benjamin as overflowing with excitement but lacking in contact. As the motorways,
airports and television towers have shown, the development of transport and
communication networks have initiated innovations time and again.
This also applied to the development for commercial communication. It not only
created the demand for a new scale of warehouses and market-halls, but introduced
unconventional construction projects as well: the department store and the exhibition hall.
Above all, however, industrial production with its factories, workers’ housing estates and
goods produced for mass consumption, created new spheres of life into which formal
design and architectural articulation was not able to penetrate at first.
In the second half of the nineteenth century those mass products for daily use, which
had escaped the stylistic force of the traditional arts and crafts, were the first to be
perceived as an aesthetic problem. John Ruskin and William Morris sought to bridge the
gap that had opened between utility and beauty in the everyday life of the industrial
world by reforming the applied arts. The reform movement was led by a wider forward-
looking architectural notion which accompanied the claim to form, from an architectural
point of view, the entire physical environment of bourgeois society. Morris in particular
recognized the contradiction between the democratic demands for universal participation
in culture and the fact that, within industrial capitalism, increasing domains of human
activity were being alienated from the creative cultural forces.
The second challenge to architecture arose from the development of new materials
(such as glass and iron, steel and cement) and new methods of production (above all the
use of prefabricated elements). In the course of the nineteenth century the engineers
advanced the techniques of construction, thereby developing new design possibilities
which shattered the classical limits of the constructional handling of planes and volumes.
Originating from greenhouse construction, the glass palaces of the first industrial
exhibitions in London, Munich and Paris, built from standardized parts, conveyed to their
fascinated contemporaries the first impressions of new orders of magnitude and of
constructional principles. They revolutionalized visual experience and altered the
spectators’ concept of space, as dramatically as the railway changed the passengers’
concept of time. The interior of the centreless repetitive London Crystal Palace must have
had the effect of transcendence of all known dimensions of designed space.
Finally, the third challenge was the capitalist mobilization of labour, real estate and
buildings, in general of all urban living conditions. This led to the concentration of large
masses and to the incursion of speculation in the field of private housing. The reason for
today’s protests in Kreuzberg and elsewhere originates in that period. As housing
construction became an amortizeable investment, so decisions about the purchase and the
sale of estate, and construction, demolition and reconstruction, about renting and vacating
property were freed from the ties of family and local traditions; in other words they made
themselves independent of use-value considerations. The laws of the building and
housing market altered the attitude towards building and dwelling. Economic imperatives
also determined the uncontrolled growth of cities. Out of these arose the requirements of
a kind of town planning which cannot be compared to baroque city developments. The
way these two sorts of functional imperatives, those of the market with those of
communal and state planning, intersect, and the way they entangle architecture in a new
system of subordinations, is demonstrated in a grand style by the redevelopment of Paris
Jorgen Habermas 217