THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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in this direction, this attempt at a new world­structure carved out of rock and stone like a human community. Its architectural image of hope was the ‘water of life’, the
‘tree of life’, of which the final chapter of the Book of Revelation spoke to medieval people. This was then to be the ‘new heaven’, but also the ‘new earth’, in the
anticipating ante­room as which the cathedral was conceived. With the huge moving vertical line of the tower and the pillars, with the painted light from window­panes
in the interior, through which a very different world, a Christian world was to emerge for medieval believers. So much, ultimately, for the aspiration to become like stone
or conversely like the tree of life in the radical fully­composed aspect of ancient architecture. The problem is simply how the guiding spaces crystal or tree can still
function, have to function, after the deduction of their religious ideology, as well as after an architecture totally nullified by late capitalism. They always represent
alternatives, alternatives which now almost without religious ideology — were abstractly appeased in Greek classicism. But the point is to overcome them in concrete
unity; in a clarity which does not destroy the profusion, in a crystal order which does not exclude the freedom of living ornamentation but makes it its content.
II. Building on Hollow Space
New houses and real clarity
Surgical tongs for delivering babies must be smooth, but sugar tongs certainly must not.
Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 1918
These days houses in many places look as if they are ready to leave. Although they are unadorned or for this very reason, they express departure. On the inside they
are bright and bare like sick­rooms, on the outside they seem like boxes on movable rods, but also like ships. They have a flat deck, portholes, a gangway, a deck rail,
they have a white and southern glow, as ships they have a mind to disappear. In fact, the sensitivity of western architecture goes so far that it sensed Hitler's war quite a
long time in advance, in a roundabout way, and prepared for it. But even the ship form, which was purely decorative, does not appear real enough to