The poles of the contradiction are revealed in two concepts, which seem mutually
exclusive: handicraft and imagination. Loos expressly rejected the latter in the context of
the world of use:
Pure and clean construction has had to replace the imaginative forms of
past centuries and the flourishing ornamentation of past ages. Straight
lines; sharp, straight edges: the craftsman works only with these. He has
nothing but a purpose in mind and nothing but materials and tools in front
of him.^14Le Corbusier, however, sanctioned imagination in his theoretical writings, at least in a
somewhat general sense: ‘The task of the architect: knowledge of men, creative
imagination, beauty. Freedom of choice (spiritual man).’^15 We may safely assume that in
general the more advanced architects tend to prefer handicraft, while more backward and
unimaginative architects all too gladly praise imagination. We must be wary, however, of
simply accepting the concepts of handicraft and imagination in the loose sense in which
they have been tossed back and forth in the ongoing polemic. Only then can we hope to
reach an alternative. The word ‘handicraft’, which immediately gains consent, covers
something qualitatively different. Only unreasonable dilettantism and blatant idealism
would attempt to deny that each authentic and, in the broadest sense, artistic activity
requires a precise understanding of the materials and techniques at the artist’s disposal,
and to be sure, at the most advanced level.
Only the artist who has never subjected himself to the discipline of creating a picture,
who believes in the intuitive origins of painting, fears that closeness to materials and
technical understanding will destroy his originality. He has never learned what is
historically available, and can never make use of it. And so he conjures up out of the
supposed depths of his own interiority that which is merely the residue of outmoded
forms. The word ‘handicraft’ appeals to such a simple truth. But quite different chords
resonate unavoidably along with it. The syllable ‘hand’ exposes a past means of
production; it recalls a simple economy of wares. These means of production have since
disappeared. Ever since the proposals of the English precursors of ‘modern style’ they
have been reduced to a masquerade. One associates the notion of handicraft with the
apron of a Hans Sachs, or possibly the great world chronicle. At times, I cannot suppress
the suspicion that such an archaic ‘shirt sleeves’ ethos survives even among the younger
proponents of ‘handcraftiness’; they are despisers of art. If some feel themselves superior
to art, then it is only because they have never experienced it as Loos did. For Loos,
appreciation of both art and its applied form led to a bitter emotional conflict. In the area
of music, I know of one advocate of handicraft who spoke with plainly romantic anti-
romanticism of the ‘hut mentality’. I once caught him thinking of handicrafts as
stereotypical formulas, practices as he called them, which were supposed to spare the
energies of the composer; it never dawned on him that nowadays the uniqueness of each
concrete task excludes such formalization. Thanks to attitudes such as his, handicraft is
transformed into that which it wants to repudiate: the same lifeless, reified repetition
which ornament had propagated. I dare not judge whether a similar kind of perversity is
at work in the concept of form-making when viewed as a detached operation,
independent from the immanent demands and laws of the object to be formed. In any
Theodor W.Adorno 11