motive. Since what is useful and beneficial to man, cleansed of human domination and
exploitation, would be correct, nothing is more aesthetically unbearable than the present
shape of things, subjugated and internally deformed into their opposite. The raison d’être
of all autonomous art since the dawning of the bourgeois era is that only useless objects
testify to that which may have at one point been useful; it represents correct and fortunate
use, a contact with things beyond the antithesis between use and uselessness. This
conception implies that men who desire betterment must rise up against practicability. If
they overvalue it and react to it, they join the camp of the enemy. It is said that work does
not defile. Like most proverbial expressions, this covers up the converse truth; exchange
defiles useful work. The curse of exchange has overtaken autonomous art as well. In
autonomous art, the useless is contained within its limited and particular form; it is thus
helplessly exposed to the criticism waged by its opposite, the useful. Conversely in the
useful, that which is now the case is closed off to its possibilities. The obscure secret of
art is the fetishistic character of goods and wares. Functionalism would like to break out
of this entanglement; and yet, it can only rattle its chains in vain as long as it remains
trapped in an entangled society.
I have tried to make you aware of certain contradictions whose solution cannot be
delineated by a non-expert. It is indeed doubtful whether they can be solved today at all.
To this extent, I could expect you to criticize me for the uselessness of my argumentation.
My defence is implicit in my thesis that the concepts of useful and useless cannot be
accepted without due consideration. The time is over when we can isolate ourselves in
our respective tasks. The object at hand demands the kind of reflection which objectivity
(Sachlichkeit) generally rebuked in a clearly non-objective manner. By demanding
immediate legitimation of a thought, by demanding to know what good that thought is
now, the thought is usually brought to a standstill at a point where it can offer insights
which one day might even improve praxis in an unpredictable way. Thought has its own
coercive impulse, like the one you are familiar with in your work with your material. The
work of an artist, whether or not it is directed toward a particular purpose, can no longer
proceed naively on a prescribed path. It manifests a crisis which demands that the
expert—regardless of his prideful craftsmanship—go beyond his craft in order to satisfy
it. He must do this in two ways. First, with regard to social things; he must account for
the position of his work in society and for the social limits which he encounters on all
sides. This consideration becomes crucial in problems concerning city planning, even
beyond the tasks of reconstruction, where architectonic questions collide with social
questions such as the existence or non-existence of a collective social subject. It hardly
needs mentioning that city planning is insufficient so long as it centres on particular
instead of collective social ends. The merely immediate, practical principles of city
planning do not coincide with those of a truly rational conception free from social
irrationalities; they lack that collective social subject which must be the prime concern of
city planning. Herein lies one reason why city planning threatens either to degenerate into
chaos or to hinder the productive architectonic achievement of individuals.
Second, and I would like to emphasize this aspect to you, architecture, indeed every
purposeful art, demands constant aesthetic reflection. I know how suspect the word
‘aesthetic’ must sound to you. You think perhaps of professors who, with their eyes
raised to heaven, spew forth formalistic laws of eternal and everlasting beauty, which are
no more than recipes for the production of ephemeral, classicist kitsch. In fact, the
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