PART SIX
Must it remain thus? Will disassociated formation^22 never again become allied? Must
architecture alone stop being an art, stop blossoming, indeed stop being as it once was?
That it has achieved marvellous feats of engineering technology there is no doubt; but
formative imagination is something else. This form of imagination is protean; its ever-
changing ornamental features are experiments with us, not just with the skeleton within a
building, or even with the building as such. The present dichotomy, with mechanical
emancipation and its extension into architecture on the one hand, and expressive
abundance liberated in the realms of painting and sculpture on the other, must therefore
not be made absolute, functionless, insurmountable. ‘March separately, but toward a
united front’: in the era of transition, in our truly formative,^23 i.e. progressive productions,
this should not degenerate into a mere hardening of differences. The very simultaneous
appearance of engineering and expressive forms points to a tertium, to a more
fundamental unity underlying this unfinished epoch. Its railway-station character proves
to be both tempting and open in terms of productive possibility, both directing and
experimental for each of the two factions of the fine arts^24 created by it—whereby
architecture never wants to forget that it is a fine art. This Exodus character,^25 as such
able to unite only via a processive utopian common denominator, offers a set of by no
means tranquil, least of all classicistic forms, to budding ornamentation. But even in the
sphere of pictorial, plastic and architectural formations,^26 all of the prevailing figurines
and figures, all ornamental forms, as details and as wholes, are still through and through
excerpts, departures, flights from themselves.^27 Easily movable interior spaces; anti-
barracks in the city (an idea derived from ships); spanning bridges, which aptly are called
bold; pictorial, and sculptural ciphers as drawn lines in things unfinished: all this touched
the common point of orientation, inhabitability on the front where we now find ourselves.
And only this would again constitute a true honesty of formation, a true justice done to
function (but with horizons), both of which gave rise to training in the modern technical
arts in the first place, and both of which, in spite of insistent warnings from the realms of
painting and sculpture since the days of the ‘Blauer Reiter’, have been missing from this
training thanks to the sacrificio della fantasia.
PART SEVEN
At this point, it is especially advisable to overshoot the mark in order to hit it. Beauty and
form which are more than noble simplicity and serene grandeur: without a doubt, this is
the point at stake in the present discussion. But in trying to educate by means of pleasing
(thus in the last analysis via classicistic, fixed forms) one must forget that it was precisely
the Nazis who built and painted classicistically. One must also consider the young
Goethe, standing in front of the Strasburg cathedral in the middle of classicism (to be sure
the so-called genuine one), who certainly had no conception of the purity of a glass
skyscraper in New York. Indeed, expressly, beauty à la Greque as one of a kind did not
exist for him; certainly he did not consider beauty as the entrance way to or as the
boundary or fixity of a single principle of art. Instead, the young Goethe discovered a
startling principle which arched over the gap between an as yet hardly known primitive
art and the Gothic. He daringly formulated this sweeping proposal: ‘art is long in being
formed^28 before it is beautiful, yet it is still true, great art, indeed often truer and more
Ernst Bloch 47