While the Modern Movement recognized the challenges of the qualitatively new
requirements and the new technical design possibilities, and while it essentially
responded correctly, it reacted rather helplessly to the pressures of the market and the
planning bureaucracies.
The broadened architectural concept, which had encouraged the Modern Movement to
overcome a stylistic pluralism that stood out against everyday reality, was a mixed
blessing. Not only did it focus attention on the important relations between industrial
design, interior design and the architecture of housing and town planning, but it also
acted as a sponsor when the theoreticians of the New Architecture (Neues Bauen) wanted
to see total forms of the life completely subjugated to the dictates of their design tasks.
However, such totalities extend beyond the powers of design. When Le Corbusier finally
managed to realize his design for a ‘unite jardin verticale’, it was the communal facilities
that remained unused or were eradicated. The utopia of preconceived forms of life which
had already inspired the designs of Owen and Fourier could not be filled with life. Not
only because of a hopeless underestimation of the diversity, complexity and variability of
modern aspects of life, but also because modernized societies with their functional
interdependencies go beyond the dimensions of living conditions, which could be gauged
by the planner with his imagination. The crisis which has become apparent today within
modern architecture cannot be traced back to a crisis in architecture itself, but to the fact
that it had readily allowed itself to be overburdened.
THE COMPULSION OF THE SYSTEM. ARCHITECTURE AND
THE WILL TO LIFE
Moreover, modern architecture, with the indistinctions of functionalist ideology was
poorly armed against the dangers brought about by the post-Second World War
reconstruction, the period during which the International Style broadly asserted itself for
the first time. Gropius certainly emphasized the close relations that architecture and town
planning had with industry, commerce, politics and administration. In those early days he
already perceived the character of the process of planning. However, within the Bauhaus,
these problems only appeared in a ‘format’, which was tailored only to didactic purposes.
Furthermore, the success of the Modern Movement led the pioneers to the unjustified
expectation that ‘unity of culture and production’ could be achieved in another sense as
well. The economic and politico-administrative limitations to which the design of the
environment was subjected appeared in this transfigured viewpoint to be a mere question
of organization. When in 1949 the American Architects Association sought to insert in its
statute the condition that architects should not operate as building contractors, Gropius
protested—not against the insufficiency of the means, but against the purpose and reason
for the proposal. He persisted in his belief:
Art, that has become a cultural factor in general, will be in a position to
give the social environment the unity, which will be the true basis for a
culture embracing every object, from a simple chair to a house of prayer.Within this grand synthesis, all the contradictions characterizing capitalistic
modernization, especially in the field of town planning, disappear—the contradictions
Rethinking Architecture 220