rooms, for the use of materials and methods of production and organization.
‘Functionalism’ is based on the conviction that forms should express the use-functions
for which a building is produced. But the expression ‘functionalism’ also suggests false
concepts. If nothing else it conceals the fact that the qualities of modern buildings result
from a consistently applied autonomous system of aesthetic rules. That which is wrongly
attributed to functionalism it owes in fact to an aesthetically motivated constructivism,
following independently from new problem definitions posed in art. Through
constructivism, modern architecture followed the experimental trail of avant-garde
painting.
Modern architecture found itself at a paradoxical point of departure. On the one hand
architecture has always been a use-orientated art. As opposed to music, painting and
poetry, architecture cannot escape from its practical contextual relations any more than
prose of a high literary standard can evade the use of colloquial speech. These arts remain
tied to the network of common practice and everyday communication. It is for that reason
that Adolf Loos considered architecture, together with anything else that serves a
purpose, to be excluded from the sphere of art.
On the other hand architecture is dominated by the laws of modern culture—it is
subject, as is art in general, to the compulsion of attaining radical autonomy. The avant-
garde art, that freed itself from perspective perception of the object and from tonality,
from immitation and harmony, and that turned to its own means of representation, has
been characterized by Adorno with keywords like construction, experiment and montage.
According to Adorno, the paradigmatic works indulge in an esoteric absolutism,
at the expense of real appropriateness, within which functional objects, as
for example bridges and industrial facilities, seek their own formal
laws.... On the contrary, the autonomous work of art, functional only
within its immanent teleology, seeks to attain that which was once called
beauty.Thus Adorno contrasts the work of art, functioning ‘within itself’, with the use-object,
functioning for ‘exterior purposes’. However, modern architecture in its most convincing
examples does not comply with the dichotomy outlined by Adorno. Its functionalism
rather coincides with the inner logic of a development of art. Above all, three groups
worked on the problem which had arisen out of cubist painting: the group of purists
around Le Corbusier, the constructivists around Malevich, and in particular the De-Stijl
movement (with van Doesburg, Mondrian and Oud). Just as de Saussure had analysed
language structures at that time, the Dutch Neoplasticists, as they called themselves,
investigated the grammar of the means of expression and design of the most general
techniques used in the applied arts in order to incorporate them in a total work of art
involving the comprehensive architectural articulation of the environment. In Malevich’s
and Oud’s very early house plans one can see how those objects of the functionalist
Bauhaus architecture emerge from the experimental approach using pure means of
design. It is precisely in Bruno Taut’s catch-phrase: ‘what functions well, looks good’,
that the aesthetic significance of functionalism, expressed so clearly in Taut’s own
buildings, is lost.
Jorgen Habermas 219