Habermas on Modern Architecture

The broadened architectural concept that had encouraged the Modern Movement to overcome a stylistic pluralism that stood out against everyday reality was a mixed blessing. Not only did it focus attention on the important relations between industrial design, interior design, and the architecture of housing and town planning, but it also acted as a sponsor when the theoreticians of the New Architecture (Neues Bauen) wanted to see total forms of life completely subjugated to the dictates of their design tasks. However such totalities extend beyond the powers of design. When Le Corbusier finally managed to realize his design for a "Unite Jardin Verticale", it was the communal facilities that remained unused or were eradicated.

The utopia of preconceived forms of life that had already inspired the designs of Owen and Fourier could not be filled with life, not only because of a hopeless underestimation of the diversity, complexity, and variability of modern aspects of life, but also because modernized societies with their functional interdependencies go beyond the dimensions of living conditions that could be gauged by the planner with his imagination.

The crisis that has become apparent today within modern architecture can be traced back not to a crisis in architecture itself, but to the fact that it had readily allowed itself to be overburdened.

The problem of town planning are not primarily problems of design, but problems of controlling and dealing with the anonymous system-imperatives that inluecnce the spheres of city life and threaten to devastate the urban fabric.

After a century's criticism of the large city, after innumerable, repeated, and disillusioned attempts to keep a balance in the cities, to save the inner cities, to divide urban space into residential areas and commercial quarters, industrial facilities and garden suburbs; private and public zones; to build habitable satellite towns; to rehabilitate slum areas; to regulate traffic most sensibly, ect. --the question that is brought to mind is whether the actual notion of the city has not itself been superseded.

However, by the 19th century at the latest, the city became the intersection point of a different kind of functional relationship. It was embedded in abstract systems, which could no longer be captured aesthetically in an intelligible presence.

Once cannot recognize the functional relations whose point of intersection they form. The graphics of company trademarks and of neon-light advertisements demonstrate that differentiation must take place by means other than that of the formal language of architecture.

Another indication that the urban habitat is increasingly being mediated by systemic relations, which cannot be given concrete form, is the faliure of perhaps the most ambitious project of the New Architecture. To this day, it has not been possible to integrate social housing and factories within the city. The urban agglomerations have outgrown the old concept of the city that people so cherish. However, that is neither the failure of modern architecture, nor of any other architecture.

The colonization of the human habitat by the imperatives of autonomized systems of economic and administrative processes. However, it will only be possible to learn something from all of these oppositions if we keep one thing in mind: At a certain foutunate moment in modern architecture, the aesthetic identity of constructivism met with the practical spirit of strict functionalism and cohered informally. Traditions can only livc through such historic moments.