But now: is this temporal coincidence of ice and fire mere chance? In general, after all,
there does exist a connection between sober purification and the place made free by it for
something quite different, not unlike the relationship between emancipation from the
inessential made possible by technological automatization and the leisure achieved
thereby for the essential. And yet, if we look more closely at the case at hand, it seems
that the split between mere dwelling cubicles^16 and that which had once allowed those
buildings to participate in the fine arts (those which form the essential)^17 is a split out of
context, without connection. But is, or better, does the split remain unmediated if we take
into account those signs which could be grouped under the heading ‘march separately,
but toward a united front’ (even if those signs were often undesired and certainly unused,
above all, still unused architecturally)?^18 This could form a possible, certainly not yet
conscious conspiracy which makes the temporal coincidence of the dwelling machine and
the excessive plastic and pictorial arts in the end essentially more than mere chance.
‘Railway-station character’ already disappeared as a slogan; but the more internal
transition, namely of the unity of the fine arts as a whole, is still buried and obscure,
another contributing factor to the ornamental bareness of architecture. But Klee, of all
people—yet not really of all people—was at the Bauhaus; Lenbach could certainly never
have been there. Or, as another sign of rapprochement, a Chagall painting hangs
inappropriately, although not as an absolutely foreign body, in the glass foyer of the new
Frankfurt theatre; this is possibly a more authentic home for it than in the epigonal
rigidity of an old Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church. And above all, an especially
remarkable simultaneity: in the midst of the first functionalist^19 buildings the Folkwang
Museum was opened in Essen; it was stuffed full of displays of expressionisms—only, of
course, in the company of primitive and atavistic art, apart from any kind of metallurgic
new world functions and forms. To make up for this, however, purely technological
forms, especially metals, are extending increasingly further into contemporary sculpture;
we need only think of the perforated hollow bronze statues by Henry Moore, or the
stylized fine mechanics of even as ‘literary’ a sculptor as Zadkin. To no less a degree, as
Hans Curjel has correctly emphasized, the rebellion in form by Picasso, Kandinsky,
Boccioni, Kirchner, et al. has exerted an influence back on its origins, on Werkbund and
Bauhaus, on pure architecture that focused only on the technical. However, the effect has
been limited to frame construction and can hardly be said to have aroused a renaissance
of ornament, except in a few cases, here and there, where mere evolutionary reform
produced revolutionary reversals. This even took place through the channel of literature;
for example, Scheerbart’s influence on Bruno Taut. At least this new frame painting did
engender an inclination for what we might call qualitative, as opposed to quantitative,
construction—to such an extent that, although the effort was never pursued and in fact
was even eradicated, veritable living creatures intervened in and emerged from the lines
on the drawing board, from a geometry which did not want to remain inorganic. There
were a few hopeful signs—but, as can be seen clearly in the conventional figures of the
high-rise and the newest of new Brasilia, they have still never retrieved what was lost: the
caresses of a Muse. The juxtaposition of pure technology in architecture and the
Chagallian in the isolated remaining fine arts^20 never overcame the mere contiguity of the
latter’s ability to facilitate and emancipate on the one hand and the former’s power of
essence on the other.^21
Rethinking Architecture 46