the others can be reduced. It is here that the insight furnished by philosophy that no
thought can lead to an absolute beginning—that such absolutes are the products of
abstraction—exerts its influence on aesthetics. Hence music, which had so long
emphasized the supposed primacy of the individual tone, had to discover finally the more
complex relationships of its components. The tone receives meaning only within the
functional structure of the system, without which it would be a merely physical entity.
Superstition alone can hope to extract from it a latent aesthetic structure. One speaks,
with good reason, of a sense of space (Raumgefühl) in architecture. But this sense of
space is not a pure, abstract essence, not a sense of spatiality itself, since space is only
conceivable as concrete space, within specific dimensions. A sense of space is closely
connected with purposes. Even when architecture attempts to elevate this sense beyond
the realm of purposefulness, it is still simultaneously immanent in the purpose. The
success of such a synthesis is the principal criterion for great architecture. Architecture
inquires: how can a certain purpose become space; through which forms, which
materials? All factors relate reciprocally to one another. Architectonic imagination is,
according to this conception of it, the ability to articulate space purposefully. It permits
purposes to become space. It constructs forms according to purposes. Conversely, space
and the sense of space can become more than impoverished purpose only when
imagination impregnates them with purposefulness. Imagination breaks out of the
immanent connections of purpose, to which it owes its very existence.
I am fully conscious of the ease with which concepts like a sense of space can
degenerate into clichés, in the end even be applied to arts and crafts. Here I feel the limits
of the non-expert who is unable to render these concepts sufficiently precise although
they have been so enlightening in modern architecture. And yet, I permit myself a certain
degree of speculation: the sense of space, in contradistinction to the abstract idea of
space, corresponds in the visual realm to musicality in the acoustical. Musicality cannot
be reduced to an abstract conception of time—for example, the ability, however
beneficial, to conceive of the time units of a metronome without having to listen to one.
Similarly, the sense of space is not limited to spatial images, even though these are
probably a prerequisite for every architect if he is to read his outlines and blueprints the
way a musician reads his score. A sense of space seems to demand more, namely that
something can occur to the artist out of space itself; this cannot be something arbitrary in
space and indifferent toward space. Analogously, the musician invents his melodies,
indeed all his musical structures, out of time itself, out of the need to organize time. Mere
time relationships do not suffice, since they are indifferent toward the concrete musical
event; nor does the invention of individual musical passages or complexes, since their
time structures and time relationships are not conceived along with them. In the
productive sense of space, purpose takes over to a large extent the role of content, as
opposed to the formal constituents which the architect creates out of space. The tension
between form and content which makes all artistic creation possible communicates itself
through purpose especially in the purpose-oriented arts. The new ‘objective’ asceticism
does contain therefore an element of truth; unmediated subjective expression would
indeed be inadequate for architecture. Where only such expression is striven for, the
result is not architecture, but filmsets, at times, as in the old Golem film, even good ones.
The position of subjective expression, then, is occupied in architecture by the function for
Theodor W.Adorno 13