mutatis mutandis, of the exultation upon ornament’s death and the synthetically
manufactured lack of imagination. And so, enough said on the ornamental wasteland,
unique in spite of everything, especially when compared to the precision enchanted forest
of the primitive, of East Asian, Islamic, Gothic or Baroque art.
But will the limbs of this seriously paralysed body ever be revived? Is the laming
seizure not even more shocking and extraordinary since it has struck the once blooming
and comprehensive art of architecture? The problem is as serious as it is urgent: perhaps
it can be taken as a slight sign of improvement that the superstitious ornament taboo no
longer wields such absolute power. At least not in the way it did in Loos’s day when it
was in full strength and was employed, albeit exaggeratedly, as a medicina mentis.
Increasingly architects may no longer conceive of themselves as joyfully excused from
the demands of ornamental architectural imagination. The formations of their figures may
finally indulge in the suspect wave and sunflower contours of art nouveau, in which van
de Velde had his origins. The limbs, artificially paralysed for so long, are slowly reviving
in the wave-like interior stairways of Scharoun’s Berlin Philharmonic Hall; the
movement began even earlier, in a completely different way, in the exterior contours of
Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings. In these examples, the constraints of the late-capitalist
rat-race and alienation are confronted with something significantly new and different,
namely the transition beyond the overall railway-station character^12 of our existence.
These are mere beginnings, certainly, and they are constantly threatened; they too often
become calcified forms; a temporary return of identity takes hold and architecture
becomes for the first time merely a faceless screen, an antiflower. But now—and this is
truly amazing—how is it possible that at the same time, in the formation of the same
space, five steps from the pale glass box, contemporaneous painting and sculpture wander
off on an entirely different path, become exorbitant?^13 It is not a question here of their
special calibre—which in some cases was extremely high—but of the astonishing
contrast vis à vis the undernourished architectural imagination, of the boldness, of the
imaginative extravagance of these entire genres. Even a quick pursuit of the high and low
points^14 of the movement leads unavoidably into an open, unmarked, and therefore yet
uncritical and uncriticized voyage for the imagination. A journey from the days of the
‘Blauer Reiter’ (1912), from both before and then after, from Kandinsky, Franz Marc, de
Chirico, Picasso, Chagall, Klee, Max Ernst, from Archipenko, Boccioni, today Henry
Moore, Giacometti—to name but a few contrasts. They retrieved exotic flora from their
journey, ornamental imagination. These artists avoided above all the danger of a
damnably perspicacious talent, which had only produced a monotony of form. In any
case, the synchrony is peculiar: an architecture which needed wings, and pictorial and
plastic arts which, if anything, could have done with some ballast, given the emphatic
repulsive force that has always pushed them up and away from those ever-present
fixtures, the leaden commercial buildings (even in Expressionism they had shown signs,
surrealistic traits, of their flight away into upper, alternate and underworlds.) And so, the
revealed skeletons of our architecture share space with the literal extravagance of the
other fine, but still formative, arts.^15
PART FIVE
Ernst Bloch 45