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

4 Diller + Scofidio, The Blur Building at the Swiss National Expo 2002
in Yverdon-Les-Bains.
Space, a term that entered architectural theory only in the late nineteenth century
in connection with theories of visual perception, became in the twentieth century
a milieu of social relations and a container of noise, congestion, and pollution, and
is today a projection screen for dreams about the Alpine sublime, tropical fecundity,
or bodily dissolution. Tracing the historic development of an idea that was
long unrecognized because of the hegemony of Vitruvian values, immateriality is
an ambiguous development, both as a counter-proposal to the digital production
of images and as a further step to the total technical control of the environment
and the disengagement with social world. That would be the ominous side of the
Gesamkunstwerk legacy—the haze of the carnival candles, but not as the half-light
of the theater, where we are aware of our presence as spectators, but something we
inhale to blur our sense of judgment.
Notes
1 Charles A. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1977) 9.
2 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthtetics. A Handbook for Technicians, Artists, and
Friends of the Arts, transl. by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2004).
3 Ibid., p. 438f. “Maskenlaune athmet in Shakespears Dramen; Maskenlaune und Kerzenduft, Karnevalsstimmung (…)
trifft uns in Mozarts Don Juan entgegen; den auch die Musik bedarf (des) Wirklichkeit vernichtenden Mittels …,” in
Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik, Bd. 1: Die textile Kunst
(Frankfurt am Main 1860, Reprint Mittenwald: Mäander, 1977) 232.
4 Gottfried Semper, “Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity (1834),” in Semper,
The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, transl. by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 51. “…dass einst alle bildenden Künste in inniger Verbindung
zusammenwirkten und an Monumenten aller Art in ein ebenmässiges Ganzes verwebt, harmonisch und kräftig ineinander
griffen…” Gottfried Semper, “Vorläufige Bemerkungen über vielfarbige Architektur und Skulptur bei den
Alten,” in Semper, Kleine Schriften (Mittenwald: Mäander, 1979) 223.
5 Semper, Style, 439. “Vernichtung der Realität, des Stofflichen, ist nothwendig, wo die Form als bedeutungsvolles
Symbol als selbstständige Schöpfung des Menschen hervortreten soll,” 232.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, transl. by R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
241