cancerous ornament. Indeed, every ornament became suspect, was condemned for being
scabrous and cancerous. This bolstered a general disgust with the epigonal nature and
decadence of the Gründerzeit, an aversion to its attachment to long since faded,
indiscriminately mimicked styles that had lost their validity. But it never confronted the
question of whether the social habitus, which had posited the decayed charm of the
Gründerzeit, in the meantime had itself become any more honest. Or whether the
ornament-free honesty of pure functionalism^4 might not itself be transformed into a fig
leaf which concealed the not quite so great honesty of the conditions behind it. In any
case, from this time on, knightly castles no longer served as buffets, and entrances to
railway stations à la Palladio were no longer built to mask ticket windows and train tracks
within.
PART THREE
Of course, since there was suddenly a demand for more reality than appearance, we were
forced to give up our most prized souvenirs. The reason, according to pure purpose, was
that after all this time a smooth spoon or some other implement would be easier to handle
than a senselessly decorated one. The small devices were there precisely to be useful,
effort-saving; they and their own clear form made the break with embellishments.
Naturally, ‘honest’ clarity was praised above all in such desertions, and ranged from
naked stainless steel chairs to interior walls of unplastered rough tiles. Yet it is still
striking that such thoroughly ornamental decorations as Oriental carpets are foregrounded
with particular delight against the background of such clarity. The ‘honest’ was the trump
ever since the earlier Werkbund, even if its bareness called attention to itself and required
Kilims, Kirmans, and Kazaks to disguise it. And yet, even granting that this asceticism
and deliberate purity without false appearances are self-consistent, the question persists:
what could this kind of honesty or even ‘new objectivity’^5 mean in real terms? That is, in
terms of a less clear, perhaps even consciously opaque social life? The obscurity was
maintained even as a new clarté was being created outside of the realm of the technical
arts with their fig leaves and shadow-casting light. Claudel once sang of the new clarté,
‘Into the waves of the divine light/the building master places planfully/a stone framework
like a filter/and grants the whole construct the water of a pearl.’ Even then, no, precisely
then, the inhabitants though beautifully illuminated in this transparency, could not yet
discover their new humanity, indeed nor even their old one. For especially in the built,
exterior space of architecture, the pre-existing life-forms clouded the water of the pearl,
not only in a narrow, social sense, but also technologically. The accelerating pace, the
desire to break all records, and the restless annihilation of human interaction, all these
introduced an unprecedented problematization into the emphatic clarté of the Lichtstadt
(radiant city) itself. So much greenery, free space, hygiene, overview, serenity, visible
dignity had been projected. But time and again, the conditions within its confines and
those outside did not conform to the same ideals, and the architecture could not establish
alone a small enclave of realized inhabitability. The pace of work and its traffic, the
objectification of the means precisely by disassociating them from any purpose, end,
meaning and humane use, have largely transformed our cities into a dangerous nightmare.
In our transformed cityscapes, man has remained—or more accurately has become—at
best peripheral to the measure of things. Contradictions are deeply embedded. No
Ernst Bloch 43