In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

332 CODES
You flee the dark woods of incredible forms.
Your reach extends no further than your grasp.
(Garcia Lorca, 619)
Rather than ornaments and nonfunctional forms, the counterprinciples
of Sobriety are Exuberance, proliferation, and eclecticism. Almost logically,
therefore, the artistic historicism of the late nineteenth century is
emerging as the epitome of bad taste: "Sao Paulo is an architectural
salad. All possible and impossible styles are represented there. And all of
them are in tension with the natural environment. The public and private
buildings both clash with the context in which they are constructed. The
city thus has the flavor of a world's fair" (Alcantara Machado, 171).
Sobriety has become so internationally accepted that it forms a common
thread between the polemical discourse of the Brazilian journalist Antonio
Alcantara Machado and an academic lecture by the German art
historian Karl Holl. But Holl goes one step further than Alcantara
Machado: he sees the economic and aesthetic Exuberance of the previous
generation as a main reason for the present crisis. "Their leather-bound
volumes of intimate poetry mark the low point of a boring period that
was mired in content and that tried to hide its intellectual and moral
emptiness under the colored garments of the past. We are confronted
with the very moment in German history that was blown up like a
bubble by its military victories and by the subsequent streams of capital-until
the bubble finally burst with a tremendous noise" (Holl, 549).
Outside the realm of aesthetic experience, the forms and functions of
everyday objects become frames of reference for the taming of unstructured
plenitude. Bureaucrats and intellectuals alike are intent on avoiding
empty discourses and tautologies-on establishing and maintaining
a referential relation between discourses, ideas, and the world of things.
This concern is as central for the Spanish government, which prides itself
on rejecting "convoluted traditions of philosophy" (Garda-Nieto, 149),
as for the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, who are reaching out for
intellectual exchange with the Bauhaus (Galison, 715f£.). Ludwig
Wittgenstein amiably agrees that the villa he has designed for his sister
is hausgewordene Logik, or "logic-become-house" (Galison, 727). Fashion
designers claim to follow the functional necessities of the new professional
roles open to women, while geometrically designed clothes and