Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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riety, or simply to orientate it in that direction, would be like trying to reduce electricity
to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed.”
111 It is rather a question of constructions that contain all kinds of vistas of the
future, wish fulfillments, and images of hope: the form in which utopia appears in art
is multilayered and very diverse. Sometimes the utopian moment is only recognizable
in the absence of a direct reference to a better future: a meditation on absence
and void can, after all, imply the desire or hope for everything. However that may be,
utopian thought consists in the first place of a critique of everything that is: the critical
function of utopia is fundamental to it, and the same is true of art. 112
For Bloch it is clear that Marxism is the embodiment of this philosophy of
hope: he sees socialism as representing the praxis of utopia, and for a long time he
believed that the political practice of the Eastern European countries was its concrete
manifestation. However, he was not an orthodox Marxist in every respect. 113
His ideas about the relation between infrastructure and superstructure were too subtle
for that. In Erbschaft dieser Zeit (1935), for instance, he puts forward the thesis
that the legacy of bourgeois culture cannot be uncritically rejected when one is engaged
in drawing up a socialist program for culture. On the contrary, it is necessary
to investigate the utopian potential that it actually contains. The utopian content that
is inherent in both existing practices and in those of previous ages should be understood
as containing worthwhile stimuli for the development of a socialist culture. 114
Bloch’s vision of architecture also is based on these fundamental premises.
He describes architecture as “an attempt to produce a human homeland.” 115 The aim
of great architecture is to build an image of Arcadia: it exploits the potential that is
present in the natural surroundings of a site to create an environment that is in harmony
with the aspirations of the human subject. Even when—in Gothic art, for instance—beauty
and pleasure are infused with melancholy and a sense of the tragic,
the promise of a better world can be discerned in its complex harmony:
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The encompassing element furnishes a homeland or touches on it: all
great buildings were sui generis built into the utopia, the anticipation of
a space adequate to man. . . . The better world, which the grand architectural
style expresses and depicts in an anticipatory fashion, thus
consists very unmythically, as the real task vivis ex lapidibus, of the
stones of life. 116
The anticipation of a better world—that is the achievement of the great architects
of the past. Bloch discerns two prototypical styles that in his view constitute
expressions of the utopian principle in contrasting fashions. Egyptian architecture
embodies the longing for the perfection of the crystal: it is a frozen architecture,
which in the sheer weight of the crystalline geometry of the pyramid expresses the
desire for perfection by way of a symbolism of death. The Gothic style, on the contrary,
makes use of the symbolism of the human body and the tree of life: in Gothic