THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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of course certainly sought, it was mostly called one with the ‘laws of the universe’ half in terms of engineering technology, half without any proper rhyme or reason: but
however interesting the results in painting and also sculpture may have been, a Taut and Scheerbart approach in architecture remained fruitless. Precisely because the
latter, far more than the other pictorial arts, is and remains a social creation, it cannot blossom at all in the hollow space of late capitalism. Only the beginnings of
another society will make genuine architecture possible again, one both constructively and ornamentally permeated on the basis of its own artistic aspiration. The
abstract engineering style never becomes qualitative on any account, despite the catchphrases which its literati pin on it, despite the bogus freshness of ‘modernity’ with
which polished death is administered like the gleam of morning. The technology of today, itself still so very abstract, does not lead us out of the hollow space even as an
aesthetically cultivated technology, as an artistic substitute; on the contrary, this hollow space permeates the so­called art of engineering, just as the latter necessarily
increases it through its own emptiness. The only significant thing about it is the trend towards departure in these contemporary phenomena of their own accord, the
house as ship in fact. Of course, further factors of sudden change are preparing themselves here too, to the same extent as the blossoming new relations to man and
nature in a new society are mature and clear enough also to find expression in architectural ground plans and ornaments. Full of heritage, without historicism, especially
— as now goes without saying — without the infamous stylistic copies, the gnarled romanticism of the Gründerzeit. In contrast to the Extreme Box and kitsch, what
counts is simply the purification of all surviving sources, the cultivation and river­bed preparation of all rising sources into sculptural abundance. This is preceded by the
radical differentiation of architecture from the machine. And even the relatively most interesting aspect of today or yesterday: the utopia of the glass structure, needs
forms worthy of transparency. It needs formations which retain man as a question and crystal as an answer still to be mediated, still to be erected. The builder will then
perhaps give his work ‘the water of a pearl’, but finally also a lost, less transparent cipher: sculptural abundance in nuce — ornamentation.