beautiful than the beautiful itself’. This statement, made by a man who was then still
young, appeared in what was a revolutionary period, i.e. one of transcendent transition,
when aesthetics provided for the humanum. Today the over-arching category of primitive
Gothic has become self-evident; it has expanded and become great through its
sympathetic reception in modern painting and sculpture, which have extended it to
encompass suspended forms and elastically dynamic space. It has become a thoroughly
ornamental style both pictorially and sculpturally: Exodus, as it turns out. Hence the
conclusion: he, Goethe, alone exerting a rebellious influence radically different than in
the first periods of modern technological art could, reconcile architecture not with the
death of imagination usque ad finem but with the other fine arts,^29 those which were truly
qualified. Then, finally, architecture would once again encompass the pictorial and the
plastic, become the main figure in the still ‘masked decorations of our innermost form’
which had already been experimented with in painting and sculpture by Kandinsky and
Archipenko. All this returns time and again to the problem of the new ornament, to
sculptural excess—in nuce when it blossoms in the details of a building, in entelechia
when it characterizes the all-encompassing principle of the entire building figure. The
magnitude of architecture’s sculptural loss can be measured precisely by the emptiness
and lack of its ornamental force. There is and remains an abrupt breach of contract, which
historically has never been fulfilled or terminated, a gap in the by no means
consummated entelechia according to which architecture was conceived. Yet this breach
can and may not stay unmediated; on the contrary, Vitruvius’s postulated unity of utilitas
and venustas (now of transparent fullness)^30 summons architecture more demandingly
than ever to the fronts—to reassume its still recoverable position as the ‘city crown’ (to
use a conceptually modified version of Bruno Taut’s term) of all the optical fine and
formative arts.^31
NOTES
1 The flavour of the German is slightly lost here since Bloch uses a proverbial expression that
we could not match in English. Unfortunately the characteristic mixture in Bloch’s rhetoric
of intricate dialectics and colloquialisms is not really conveyed by the Latinate English.
2 Literally ‘founder time’, the term used to refer to the German Empire at the end of the
nineteenth century, according to Gordon A.Craigs’ Germany: 1866–1945 (Oxford
University Press, 1978, p. 79), ‘named after the great manipulators who ‘founded’ gigantic
enterprises on the basis of paper and little else and who led millions of Germans in a frenzied
dance around the statue of Mammon that ended in exhaustion and, for many, financial ruin’.
The term is similar to the Victorian ‘Wilhelmismus’.
3’Education’ here is Erziehung, the common word used for school education. ‘Purposive-
functional form’ is Zweckform (literally ‘purpose-form’), and is generally translated as
‘functionalism’ throughout.
4‘Functionalism’ is here Zweckform.
5 The Neue Sachlichkeit movement, one of the main trends in German art in the early twentieth
century, is commonly translated as ‘New Objectivity’. The word sachlich, however, carries a
series of connotations. Along with its emphasis on the ‘thing’ (Sache), it implies a frame of
mind, of being ‘matter of fact’, ‘down to earth’.
6‘Form’ is here Gestalt, a slightly more neutral word than Bildung. ‘Purposive’ is zweckmässig,
‘according to the purpose or end of the thing’.
7‘Formation of purpose’ is Zweckgestaltung.
8 The pun is lost here. ‘Birth forceps’ are Geburtszangen and ‘sugar tongs’ are Zuckerzangen.Rethinking Architecture 48