formative communication of the participants be allowed to compete with the media of
money and power.
However, the nostalgia for the de-differentiated forms of existence often bestows upon
these tendencies an air of anti-modernism. They are then linked to the cult of the
vernacular and to reverence for the banal. This ideology of the uncomplicated denies the
sensible potential and the specificity of cultural modernism. The praise of the anonymous
architecture, of architecture without architects, has a price which this vitalism, having
become critical of the whole system, is willing to pay—even if it has another ‘Volksgeist’
in mind, as for example, the one whose transfiguration in its time brought the
monumentalism of the Führer-architecture to its ultimate completion.
A good deal of truth also lies in this form of opposition. It takes on the unanswered
problems which modern architecture had left in the background—that is to say—the
colonization of the human habitat by the imperatives of autonomized systems of
economic and administrative processes. However, it will only be possible to learn
something from all these oppositions if we keep one thing in mind. At a certain fortunate
moment in modern architecture, the aesthetic identity of constructivism met with the
practical spirit of strict functionalism and cohered informally. Traditions can only live
through such historic moments.
Jorgen Habermas 223