case, I would imagine that the retrospective infatuation with the aura of the socially
doomed craftsman is quite compatible with the disdainfully trumped-up attitude of his
successor, the expert. Proud of his expertise and as unpolished as his tables and chairs,
the expert disregards those reflections needed in this age which no longer possesses
anything to grasp on to. It is impossible to do without the expert; it is impossible in this
age of commercial means of production to recreate that state before the division of labour
which society has irretrievably obliterated. But likewise, it is impossible to raise the
expert to the measure of all things. His disillusioned modernity, which claims to have
shed all ideologies, is easily appropriated into the mask of the petty bourgeois routine.
Handicraft becomes handcraftiness. Good handicraft means the fittingness of means to an
end. The ends are certainly not independent of the means. The means have their own
logic, a logic which points beyond them. If the fittingness of the means becomes an end
in itself, it becomes fetishized. The handworker mentality begins to produce the opposite
effect from its original intention, when it was used to fight the silk smoking jacket and
the beret. It hinders the objective reason behind productive forces instead of allowing it to
unfold. Whenever handicraft is established as a norm today, one must closely examine
the intention. The concept of handicraft stands in close relationship to function. Its
functions, however, are by no means necessarily enlightened or advanced.
The concept of imagination, like that of handicraft, must not be adopted without
critical analysis. Psychological triviality—imagination as nothing but the image of
something not yet present—is clearly insufficient. As an interpretation, it explains merely
what is determined by imagination in artistic processes, and, I presume, also in the
purposeful arts. Walter Benjamin once defined imagination as the ability to interpolate in
minutest detail. Undeniably, such a definition accomplishes much more than current
views which tend either to elevate the concept into an immaterial heaven or to condemn it
on objective grounds. Imagination in the production of a work of representational art is
not pleasure in free invention, in creation ex nihilo. There is no such thing in any art, even
in autonomous art, the realm to which Loos restricted imagination. Any penetrating
analysis of the autonomous work of art concludes that the additions invented by the artist
above and beyond the given state of materials and forms are miniscule and of limited
value. On the other hand, the reduction of imagination to an anticipatory adaptation to
material ends is equally inadequate; it transforms imagination into an eternal sameness. It
is impossible to ascribe Le Corbusier’s powerful imaginative feats completely to the
relationship between architecture and the human body, as he does in his own writings.
Clearly there exists, perhaps imperceptible in the materials and forms which the artist
acquires and develops something more than material and forms. Imagination means to
innervate this something. This is not as absurd a notion as it may sound. For the forms,
even the materials, are by no means merely given by nature, as an unreflective artist
might easily presume. History has accumulated in them, and spirit permeates them. What
they contain is not a positive law; and yet, their content emerges as a sharply outlined
figure of the problem. Artistic imagination awakens these accumulated elements by
becoming aware of the innate problematic of the material. The minimal progress of
imagination responds to the wordless question posed to it by the materials and forms in
their quiet and elemental language. Separate impulses, even purpose and immanent
formal laws, are thereby fused together. An interaction takes place between purpose,
space and material. None of these facets makes up any one Ur-phenomenon to which all
Rethinking Architecture 12