Salutogenese – Das Jahrbuch der KIT-Fakultät für Architektur 2021

the very notion of functionalism in the built environment.
How has it come to be so pervasive? In their introduction to
Structuralism Reloaded, Tomáš Valena and Tom Avermaete
sketch out the misappropriation of functionalism in
early modernism, “which at times was ready to leave the
entire architectural production at the mercy of the dictates
of whatever scientific worldview prevailed at the time” ↘ 2 .
The leitmotif of the epistemological succession they describe
rooted planning discourse in a kind of (often pseudo-) scientific
determinism, whose implication is that all problems
could be solved by technical means, the processes of individual,
familial and community life rationalised and deconstructed.
Grand visions of urban planning were nothing new, but
these differed from the ideal cities of the Renaissance or later
Baroque absolutist palace-city-complexes in certain key
qualities. In material terms, the scalability of their implementation
was facilitated by the hitherto unprecedented
industrial capacity suddenly available for civilian use following
the World Wars, coinciding with a global population
explosion that continues to this day. The ideology that proceeds
from and within this expansion of industrial capacity
is given credence by its association with technological progress,
which is presented as being apolitical. ↘ 3 This is the
dark side of the rationalising narrative of modernity —
scientific determinism applied outside of its empirical field
of validity — and it has come to constitute a core component
of our social reality. In other terms, it could be viewed as a
secularisation of totality.
The roots of this mode of thinking can be traced back to
Gaston Bachelard’s concept of the epistemic break, in which
“the history of science is understood not so much a process
of discovery as the overcoming of the obstacles to thought
posed by knowledge itself. It thus entails not simply the addition
of new knowledge, but the reorganization of the very
possibility of knowledge.” ↘ 4 This is significant in terms of
understanding scientific progress. The assertion is that once
Lythgoe
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