technological world, free from the shame of work. The second motif points beyond the
commercial world. For Loos it takes the form of the realization that the widely lamented
impotency to create ornament and the so-called extinction of stylizing energy (which he
exposed as an invention of art historians) imply an advance in the arts. He realized in
addition that those aspects of an industrialized society, which by bourgeois standards are
negative, actually represent its positive side:
Style used to mean ornament. So I said: don’t lament! Don’t you see?
Precisely this makes our age great, that it is incapable of producing new
ornament. We have conquered ornament, we have struggled to the stage
of non-ornamentation. Watch, the time is near. Fulfilment awaits us. Soon
the streets of the cities will shine like white walls. Like Zion, the sacred
city, heaven’s capital. Then salvation will be ours.^12In this conception, the state free of ornament would be a utopia of concretely fulfilled
presence, no longer in need of symbols. Objective truth, all the belief in things, would
cling to this utopia. This utopia remains hidden for Loos by his crucial experience with
Jugendstil:
Individual man is incapable of creating form; therefore, so is the architect.
The architect, however, attempts the impossible again and again—and
always in vain. Form, or ornament, is the result of the unconscious
cooperation of men belonging to a whole cultural sphere. Everything else
is art. Art is the self-imposed will of the genius. God gave him his
mission.^13This axiom, that the artist fulfils a divine mission, no longer holds. A general
demystification, which began in the commercial realm, has encroached upon art. With it,
the absolute difference between inflexible purposefulness and autonomous freedom has
been reduced as well. But here we face another contradiction. On the one hand, the purely
purpose-oriented forms have been revealed as insufficient, monotonous, deficient and
narrow-mindedly practical. At times, of course, individual masterpieces do stand out; but
then, one tends to attribute the success to the creator’s ‘genius’, and not to something
objective within the achievement itself. On the other, the attempt to bring into the work
the external element of imagination as a corrective, to help the matter out with this
element which stems from outside of it, is equally pointless; it serves only to mistakenly
resurrect decoration, which has been justifiably criticized by modern architecture. The
results are extremely disheartening. A critical analysis of the mediocre modernity of the
style of German reconstruction by a true expert would be extremely relevant. My
suspicion in the Minima Moralia that the world is no longer habitable has already been
confirmed; the heavy shadow of instability bears upon built form, the shadow of mass
migrations, which had their preludes in the years of Hitler and his war. This contradiction
must be consciously grasped in all its necessity. But we cannot stop there. If we do, we
give in to a continually threatening catastrophe. The most recent catastrophe, the air raids,
have already led architecture into a condition from which it cannot escape.
Rethinking Architecture 10