company trademarks and of neon-light advertisements demonstrate that differentiation
must take place by means of that other than the formal language of architecture. Another
indication that the urban habitat is increasingly being mediated by systemic relations,
which cannot be given concrete form, is the failure of perhaps the most ambitious project
of the new architecture (Neues Bauen). To this day it has not been possible to integrate
social housing and factories within the city. The urban agglomerations have outgrown the
old concept of the city which people so cherish. However, that is the failure of neither
modern architecture, nor of any other architecture.
PERPLEXITY AND REACTIONS
Assuming this diagnosis is not absolutely wrong, then it first of all merely confirms the
dominating perplexity and the need to search for new solutions. Of course, it also raises
doubts as to the reactions which have been set off by the disaster of the simultaneously
overburdened and instrumentalized architecture of the Modern Movement (Neues
Bauen). In order to at least provisionally orientate myself within the complex terrain of
counter-movements, I have distinguished three tendencies which have one thing in
common: contrary to the self-critical continuation of the Modern Movement, they break
away from the Modern Style. They want to dissolve the ties of the avant-garde formal
language and the inflexible functionalistic principles; programmatically, form and
function are to be separated once again.
On a trivial level, this holds true for neo-historicism, which transforms department
stores into mediaeval rows of houses, and underground ventilation shafts into pocket-
book size Palladian villas. As in the past century, the return to eclecticism is due to
compensatory needs. This traditionalism falls under the heading of political neo-
conservatism, not unknown to Bavaria, insofar as it redefines problems which lie on a
different level, in terms of questions of style, thus removing it from the consciousness of
the public. The escapist reaction is related to a tendency for the affirmative: all that
remains should stay as it is.
The separation of form and function also applies to the postmodern movement, which
corresponds to Charles Jencks’s definitions and which is free of nostalgia—whether it is
Eisenmann or Graves who automize the formal repertoire of the 1920s artistically, or
whether it is Hollein or Venturi, who, like surrealist stage designers, utilize modern
design methods in order to coax picturesque effects from aggressively mixed styles. The
language of this stage-set architecture indulges in a rhetoric that still seeks to express in
ciphers systemic relationships which can no longer be architecturally formulated. Finally,
the unity of form and function is broken in a different way by the ‘Alternative
Architecture’ which is based on the problems of ecology and of the preservation of
historically developed urban districts. These trends, often characterized as ‘vitalistic’, are
primarily aimed at relating architectural design to spatial, cultural and historical contexts.
Therein survive some of the impulses of the Modern Movement, now obviously on the
defensive. Above all, it is worth noting some of the initiatives which aim at a communal
‘participatory architecture’, which designs urban areas in a dialogue with the clients.
When the guiding mechanisms of the market and the town planning administration
function in such a way as to have disfunctional consequences on the lives of those
concerned, failing the ‘functionalism’ as it was understood, then it only follows that the
Rethinking Architecture 222