humanitarian planning or just regulation of work has yet been able to manage even the
chaos of the traffic, not to mention the termite existence in box houses. A modern urban
planner, Doxiadis, no romantic reactionary, bears witness in his book Architecture in
Transition: monstrous, schematically rigid skyscrapers project out of a raging sea of
lacquered tin. This life and its built space are clearly and painfully distant from the
humanitarian clarté of the kind Le Corbusier had once intended for his ‘new Attica’
constructed in steel, glass and light. And time and again, in a realm of general alienation,
where clarity is merely an ideology of monotonous vacuity, precisely the purposively
pursued form^6 of implements and buildings increasingly forfeits all differentiation
involved in differing formations of purpose.^7 Forms are no longer differentiated
humanely, true to purpose: bungalow, airport (minus runway), theatre, university,
slaughter house—all are rendered uniform in the domineering form of the glass box. An
unquestionably high price has been paid by this kind of clarity for its dissociation from
the patchwork of decorative kitsch of the Gründerzeit; geometrical monotony, alienated
from purpose, together with an undernourishment of the imagination and extreme self-
alienation, all represented by this coldness, this vacuous nonaura.
PART FOUR
From this arises another position, another posture; other ideas begin to come to mind. It
was implied above that the Gründerzeit has not yet been superseded if it still serves as a
necessary foil, if it is still allowed to dictate the poverty of any richness, to force the
hypocritical reaction of total bareness. But this is no longer the architectural task, as it
was for Loos, when an urgent medicina mentis was needed against the raging scabs and
cancers.
So it was too, and probably remains, a necessary remedy in other places against a Red
Gründerzeit and its corresponding Stalinist style. And yet, something else, the sentence
published forty years ago in The Spirit of Utopia is still valid: ‘Birth forceps must be
smooth, but by no means sugar tongs.’^8 This is valid, that is, for all birth forceps. The
strictly functional^9 implement serves and emancipates us best, indeed only when it is free
of decoration. Art in general, furthermore, is not there for decoration: it is in principle too
good for that. And so it is correct that art has been liberated from this merely luxurious
employment of decoration. However, this assertion has nothing in common with the
application to all interior and exterior architecture of forceps purity, which serves only to
elevate the depravity of ornamental imagination so as to justify the egg cartons or glass
boxes. And we must be reminded and warned, objectively, again and again:
circumstances do not allow a general extension and maintenance of the sanitary purity of
pure functionalism.^10 Sociologically, such purity, an ideological kind of clarity, is and
remains a distracting, deceptive smokescreen. It is not without reason that it occasionally
joined forces with other arts outside of architecture which also strove for the smoothness
of neoclassicism, as if the latter’s external regularity once and for all excused a lack of
imagination. It is true, of course, that genuine classicism, ever since the nobler times of
simplicity and peaceful grandeur,^11 had no special fecundity when it came to ornaments.
Yet now it plays a different role, accompanying the supposedly pure geometrization
arising in a void together with the artificially advanced death of ornament. ‘Duke, this
Mortimer happened to die conveniently,’ is the line from Maria Stuart; the same is true,
Rethinking Architecture 44