The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art – Henry van de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept

actually uses the German term (Umwelt)—is the primary task of architecture. Van
de Velde had complied with this by establishing “from the smallest to the largest …
the relationship between life lived and the tangible objects needed for the extension
of the physical and spiritual capacity of our experience.” Besides the images and the
words, one must provide “a convincing reality for new ideas: … which must hold
true every hour in every gesture of individual and social life.” 29
This higher goal, the construction of reality itself, was enough for Rogers to absolve
van de Velde of the highly aestheticizing tones in many of his writings and some
of his works. Because van de Velde wants to be “neither aesthetic nor utilitarian.
‘Beauty for beauty’s sake’ is not part of his notion—nor is the thought that “everything
which is perfectly useful is necessarily beautiful,” as some of his contemporaries
believed. In this regard, how Rogers interpreted the theory of empathy is also
interesting; namely, in a very concrete and anti-abstract sense of rational observation
and of personal sympathy overlapping with the things. The dialectic between
“abstraction and empathy” presented by Worringer describes rather precisely the
extremes of the Italian architectural debate in these years, which oscillates between
rationalism and organic architecture, between autonomy and contextuality. And
Rogers evidently shares van de Velde’s position, inasmuch as he attaches great value
to being able to reach the same results “in very different ways”: not only through
the abstraction of “an inorganic and dead line,” as Worringer contends, but also the
opposite, “through an organic and living concept of it.” 30 It was no coincidence that
Rogers also includes three texts by van de Velde in his issue: “Amo” from 1907, “La
Voie Sacrée” (The Sacred Way) from 1933, and “Die Linie” (The Line) from 1910,
which is translated into Italian for the first time.
“Amo” is an emphatic avowal of the affirmation of life, entirely in the spirit of
Nietzschean-Dionysian vitalism. The second text offers a balance of his own experiences.
According to Rogers, the third essay—about the line—represents van
de Velde’s most profound contribution with respect to the situation of his time, a
successful synthesis of the rational approach and personal sensibility, of classicism
and expressionism. One must keep just a few quotes from “Die Linie” in mind to
understand this assessment.
Thus in the first line we see only an expression of vitality and excitement, childlike joy,
wholehearted passion. … The ability to draw lines comes in addition and enroots itself, and
in the drunkenness of the recognition of this ability, people first had to be driven to demand
from the line a sensuality similar to that of the dance, the struggle, the caress. … Rhythm
bestows the line with ornamental character! … The lines of the new architecture … are the
lines of the engineer. 31
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