the subject. Architecture would thus attain a higher standard the more intensely it
reciprocally mediated the two extremes—formal construction and function.
The subject’s function, however, is not determined by some generalized person of an
unchanging physical nature but by concrete social norms. Functional architecture
represents the rational character as opposed to the suppressed instincts of empirical
subjects, who, in the present society, still seek their fortunes in all conceivable nooks and
crannies. It calls upon a human potential which is grasped in principle by our advanced
consciousness, but which is suffocated in most men, who have been kept spiritually
impotent. Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually
are. It views them in the way they could be according to the status of their own
productive energies as embodied in technology. Architecture contradicts the needs of the
here and now as soon as it proceeds to serve those needs—without simultaneously
representing any absolute or lasting ideology. Architecture still remains, as Loos’s book
title complained seventy years ago, a cry into emptiness. The fact that the great architects
from Loos to Le Corbusier and Scharoun were able to realize only a small portion of their
work in stone and concrete cannot be explained solely by the reactions of unreasonable
contractors and administrators (although that explanation must not be underestimated).
This fact is conditioned by a social antagonism over which the greatest architecture has
no power: the same society which developed human productive energies to unimaginable
proportions has chained them to conditions of production imposed upon them; thus the
people who in reality constitute the productive energies become deformed according to
the measure of their working conditions. This fundamental contradiction is most clearly
visible in architecture. It is just as difficult for architecture to rid itself of the tensions
which this contradiction produces as it is for the consumer. Things are not universally
correct in architecture and universally incorrect in men. Men suffer enough injustice, for
their consciousness and unconsciousness are trapped in a state of minority; they have not,
so to speak, come of age. This nonage hinders their identification with their own
concerns. Because architecture is in fact both autonomous and purpose-oriented, it cannot
simply negate men as they are. And yet it must do precisely that if it is to remain
autonomous. If it would bypass mankind tel quel, then it would be accommodating itself
to what would be a questionable anthropology and even ontology. It was not merely by
chance that Le Corbusier envisioned human prototypes. Living men, even the most
backward and conventionally naive, have the right to the fulfilment of their needs, even
though those needs may be false ones. Once thought supersedes without consideration the
subjective desires for the sake of truly objective needs, it is transformed into brutal
oppression. So it is with the volonté générale against the volonté de tous. Even in the
false needs of a human being there lives a bit of freedom. It is expressed in what
economic theory once called the ‘use value’ as opposed to the ‘exchange value.’ Hence
there are those to whom legitimate architecture appears as an enemy; it withholds from
them that which they, by their very nature, want and even need.
Beyond the phenomenon of the ‘cultural lag’, this antinomy may have its origin in the
development of the concept of art. Art, in order to be art according to its own formal
laws, must be crystallized in autonomous form. This constitutes its truth content;
otherwise, it would be subservient to that which it negates by its very existence. And yet,
as a human product, it is never completely removed from humanity. It contains as a
constitutive element something of that which it necessarily resists. Where art obliterates
Rethinking Architecture 14