Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

traditional architectural values such as harmony and permanence. It thus becomes
clear that the modernism of the modern movement was not always critical of modernity,
but rather adopted a “pastoral” attitude that aimed at smoothing out differences
and conflicts.
Chapter 3 explores ideas and attitudes that take a critical distance from this
“pastoralism.” It focuses on personalities who disagree with the notion that it is possible
to develop a harmonious culture within the bounds of a modernizing society.
The chapter opens with a short discussion of Adolf Loos’s opinions on dwelling and
architecture. Loos chronologically precedes the modern movement, but his ideas
contain the seeds of what will be worked out later as a complex critique of the movement’s
notions about architecture and modernity. Loos holds the view that modernity
provokes an inevitable rupture with tradition that has as a consequence the
disintegration of one’s experience of life. This evolution, he thinks, obliges architecture
to deploy a number of languages corresponding to a multitude of different experiences—private
versus public, interior versus exterior, intimate versus public.
Walter Benjamin, the second key figure in this chapter, takes up some of
Loos’s ideas but reworks them in an interpretation of modern architecture that goes
beyond anything written by his contemporaries. He too understands modernity in
the first instance as a condition that differs fundamentally from tradition. According
to him the difference lies in the fact that modernity generates a poverty of genuine
experiences. In Benjamin’s view modern architecture takes this crisis of experience
into account, because it creates spaces with no fixed character, where light, air, and
permeability are the dominant elements. In modern architecture therefore the impetus
is found for the creation of a desperately needed “new barbarism” that responds
to the requirements of a new society, one that would no longer be based on
mechanisms of exploitation and exclusion.
Like Benjamin, Ernst Bloch is a philosopher of the left who, between the wars,
moved in the orbit of the Frankfurt School and happened to be more than superficially
interested in architecture. Bloch’s philosophy is entirely dedicated to utopian hope.
In his opinion the disintegration of life is essentially connected with the social order
of capitalism—with its drive to a superficial rationalization and efficiency, its dislike of
fantasy and ornament, and its tendency to limit oneself to what is immediate and obvious.
Bloch sees the “poverty” of modern architecture as an extension of bourgeois
capitalism. For this reason, he argues, this architecture is incapable of offering any
utopian prospect of a future form of society. With this viewpoint, Bloch represents a
very critical voice that, unlike Benjamin’s, denies modern architecture its claim to embody
any hope for emancipation and liberation.
The concluding section of chapter 3 is devoted to the authors of the school of
Venice (Tafuri, Cacciari, Dal Co). They are well known for their radicalization of earlier
critical theories, which they integrate in a comprehensive analysis of the relation between
capitalist civilization and the culture of architecture. The Venetians have an
outlook on modernity that is rather pessimistic, not to say cynical. Their analyses of
Introduction