relationship with everything else and make one cosmos out of all the individual elements.
On the other hand, however, the objects remain banished in the merciless separation of
space; no particle of matter can share its space with another and a real unity of the diverse
does not exist in spatial terms. And, by virtue of this equal demand on self-excluding
concepts, natural existence seems to resist any application of them at all.
Only to humanity, in contrast to nature, has the right to connect and separate been
granted, and in the distinctive manner that one of these activities is always the
presupposition of the other. By choosing two items from the undisturbed store of natural
things in order to designate them as ‘separate’, we have already related them to one
another in our consciousness, we have emphasized these two together against whatever
lies between them. And conversely, we can only sense those things to be related which
we have previously somehow isolated from one another; things must first be separated
from one another in order to be together. Practically as well as logically, it would be
meaningless to connect that which was not separated, and indeed that which also remains
separated in some sense. The formula according to which both types of activity come
together in human undertakings, whether the connectedness or the separation is felt to be
what was naturally ordained and the respective alternative is felt to be our task, is
something which can guide all our activity. In the immediate as well as the symbolic
sense, in the physical as well as the intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who
separate the connected or connect the separate.
The people who first built a path between two places performed one of the greatest
human achievements. No matter how often they might have gone back and forth between
the two and thus connected them subjectively, so to speak, it was only in visibly
impressing the path into the surface of the earth that the places were objectively
connected. The will to connection had become a shaping of things, a shaping that was
available to the will at every repetition, without still being dependent on its frequency or
rarity. Path building, one could say, is a specifically human achievement; the animal too
continuously overcomes a separation and often in the cleverest and most ingenious ways,
but its beginning and end remain unconnected, it does not accomplish the miracle of the
road: freezing movement into a solid structure that commences from it and in which it
terminates.
This achievement reaches its zenith in the construction of a bridge. Here the human
will to connection seems to be confronted not only by the passive resistance of spatial
separation but also by the active resistance of a special configuration. By overcoming this
obstacle, the bridge symbolizes the extension of our volitional sphere over space. Only
for us are the banks of a river not just apart but ‘separated’; if we did not first connect
them in our practical thoughts, in our needs and in our fantasy, then the concept of
separation would have no meaning. But natural form here approaches this concept as if
with a positive intention; here the separation seems imposed between the elements in and
of themselves, over which the spirit now prevails, reconciling and uniting.
The bridge becomes an aesthetic value insofar as it accomplishes the connection
between what is separated not only in reality and in order to fulfil practical goals, but in
making it directly visible. The bridge gives to the eye the same support for connecting the
sides of the landscape as it does to the body for practical reality. The mere dynamics of
motion, in whose particular reality the ‘purpose’ of the bridge is exhausted, has become
something visible and lasting, just as the portrait brings to a halt, as it were, the physical
Rethinking Architecture 64