The Arcades Project - Operi

Railroad stations used to be known as EisenbahnMfi.3 [F2a,4]
There is talk of renewing art by beginning with forms. But are not forms the true
mystery of nature, which reserves to itself the right to remunerate-precisely
through them-the accurate, the objective, the logical solution to a problem posed
in purely objective tenns? When the wheel was invented, enabling continuous
forward Illotion over the ground, wouldn't someone there have been able to say,
with a certain justification, "And now, into the bargain, it's round-it's in thefirm
of a wheel?" Are not all great conquests in the field of forms ultimately a matter of
technical discoveries? Only now are we beginning to guess what forms-and
they will be detenninative for our epoch-lie hidden in machines. "To what
extent the old forms of the instruments of production influenced their new forms
from the outset is shown, ... perhaps more strikingly than in any other way, by
the attempts, before the invention of the present locolllotive, to construct a loco
motive that actually had two feet, which, after the fashion of a horse, it raised
alternately from the ground. It is only after considerable development of the
science of mechanics, and accunlulated practical experience, that the form of a
machine becomes settled entirely in accordance with mechanical principles, and
emancipated from the traditional form of the tool that gave rise to it:' (In this
sense, for exanlple, the supports and the load, in architecture, are also "forms.")
Passage is from Marx, Kapital, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1922), p. 347n.' [F2a,5]
Through the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, architecture is linked with the plastic arts.
"That was a disaster for architecture. In the Baroque age, this unity had been
perfect and self-evident. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, it
became untenable." Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in FTankreich , p. 16. This not only provides a very inrportant perspective on the Ba­
roque; it also indicates that architecture was historically the earliest field to out­
grow the concept of art, or, better, that it tolerated least well being contemplated
as "art " -a category which the nineteenth century, to a previously uninlagined
extent but with hardly more justification at bottom, inrposed on the creations of
intellectual productivity. [F3,1]
The dusty fata morgana of the winter garden, the dreary perspective of the train
station, with the small altar of happiness at the intersection of the tracks-it all
molders under spurious constnlctions, glass before its time, prelnature iron. For
in the first third of the previous century, no one as yet understood how to build
with glass and iron. Tbat problem, however, has long since been solved by
hangars and silos. Now, it is the same with the human material on the inside of
the arcades as with the materials of their constmction. Pimps are the iron uprights
of this street, and its glass breakables are the whores. [F3,2]
The new 'architecture' has its origin in the moment of industry's formation,
around 1830-the moment of mutation from the craftsmanly to the industrial
production process. H Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, p. 2. [F3,3]