Hermann Muthesius: Problems of Architecture

When about 15 years ago the remarkable transformation began in our artistic views — it was primarily about the artistic craft that wanted to create a new century — the famous writer, in a burst of determination for new goals, invented the term "modernity." Surely a bold word at the hour of the birth of a new movement, the hopes of which must exclusively be sought in the future, and the word was bold insofar as it was created analogously to the word "antiquity," and called for a comparison with that tremendous collection of cultural ideals, which had been our guiding star for five centuries.
Did the hopes invested in this expression come true, particularly in architecture? One can only answer negatively. The term "modern" became fixed to those phenomena that form a specific, so-called modern world of forms; it became a peculiar designation that refers to not exactly the best creations. Modernity has not yet taken the place of antiquity, and many of us have a strong feeling that we should avoid the word "modernity," because it is merely a designation for those who cling to superficial appearances.
And yet it would be erroneous now to deny all modern shaping ideas in the form of contemporary buildings, as many do, or, for example, to completely deny the present time the right to shape in its own way, which, after all, was done by all previous eras. If we were to take the position of those who obscure the poorly used term "tradition" with a recap of old styles, we would err. However, those who try to look more deeply into the workshop of the new age will surely find how quietly the way of new creation and new architectural forms is continuing and developing, corresponding to the general progress of human development.
It is only necessary to look around and choose a higher perspective than the guild limitations of the expression architecture provides. The word architecture has only recently become a designation for mere building. However, if we extend the concept to the limits of its original meaning, it is clear to us that it encompasses all visible human creation, in which rhythm and proportion live.
I preemptively point out that rhythm and proportion cannot be separated from human creation because, when we observe the history of human creation, we find rhythm and proportion already in the earliest beginnings of culture. The first ornament that a savage carved into his weapon, the first furrow that a farmer dug, the first hut of a settler — all were created by law, all were logical and rhythmic. Thus, we deduce from the first stage of human creation that this regularity is innate in man, that it is an essential component of his will in general, as necessary as the instinct by which a bee builds a hive or as the natural law according to which a crystal settles into a regular form. Therefore, rhythmic creation or, in other words, architectural creation is the foundation of human creation in general. And it can only be explained that already in the oldest cultures we observe the greatest, purest, and noblest works of human creation. Just as we find epic and poetry in the earliest expressions of speech, as Homer and the Bible stand at the forefront of our world literature, we find soaring architectural monuments in Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. It is characteristic of this early culture, of this first stage of architecture, that religion was the driving force. The building had to embody the final wishes and the highest mental objects of religious feeling.
We find Roman architecture already more advanced, more complex, and also here different leading tendencies emerged. The new driving forces were primarily social systems. Roman architecture was applied more than in the field of religion in the construction of aqueducts, baths, basilicas, etc. Then the Roman Empire dissolved, and with it its architecture, and from the ashes, like a phoenix, a new architecture emerged, expressing a new idea, enticing human layers into its circle, Christian architecture. Christianity is a reaction against the ancient world. Instead of external joy, there came a deep introspection, and the religious thought in all architecture regained its supreme influence. From the catacombs, the first acts of religious thought, arose medieval cathedrals, noble monuments of religious longing and deeply human feeling. Christianity shaped architecture for a thousand years; religion was the exclusive guide of the time, and the church the spiritual guide of the entire culture of contemporary humanity. In the mentioned periods, the tendencies of the time thus always coincided with architectural creation, and architecture was until our time the purest, most appropriate, and most noble expression of the spiritual currents of the relevant time.
With the birth of the Renaissance, the spiritual leadership that the church had held until the emergence of humanism ceased. The living need to create things according to worldly beauty again became a field of spiritual life, and the architecture began to transform anew, closely adapting itself to this contemporary aspiration. It no longer remained ecclesiastical; it became secular; it concentrated on the construction of palaces, town halls.
We have here a parallel to Roman architecture and indeed this period, drawing from Roman architecture, creates an impression of something looking back, trying to feel according to the foreign, showing something of an overvaluation of the exterior. With the onset of this retrospectively looking architecture of the Renaissance, we actually stepped into a new age.
Certainly, the architectural direction of that time was still impacted by generations of strong will and clear thinking, untouched by the weakness of thought, so we can also find in the Renaissance, although it referred back to the past, entirely independent and original creations. What was mainly the tendency of Renaissance architecture? We shall determine it best by taking out the most independent developmental component in the cultural image of the Renaissance: the power of absolute princely power. Emerging from Italy and France, it concentrated mainly in France and gained dominance even in countries that had their ruling structure in the old German representation of estates. It was most markedly concentrated at the royal court in France, where Louis XIV, under the motto: “L'état c'est moi!” allowed magnificent buildings to grow, which were intentionally created to provide an impressive foil for the royal person; thus, the escalating refined culture also gave a new task to architecture, the magnificent princely castle, as we know it from Versailles, arranged inside with the splendor developed over the centuries of French kings. We again see, therefore, in Renaissance architecture the driving force of the time, in this case princely magnificence, which, accompanied by it, walked along with the entire estate of the aristocracy, appropriating royal architecture and becoming the bearer of the culture of the time.
This image controlled culture until the end of the 18th century. During this century, there were already active forces beneath the surface that threatened to remove the existing values and prepared a completely new cultural image. New sources of education emerged and laid new foundations in the fields of natural sciences and mathematics. The entire century craved enlightenment, and this enlightenment, along with undermining the firm base of the ruling class, the aristocracy, caused the end of the century to culminate not only in a revolution of society as a whole but also in a revolution of thought in all areas of social life. At the boundary of the 18th and 19th centuries lies the most penetrating caesura that can be recorded in the cultural history of European humanity. Politically, it is significant that absolute domination was not removed in practice, but in theory, it was nevertheless rejected. Sociologically, again, a completely new state, the third estate — the bourgeoisie — emerged and pushed the previously ruling aristocracy out of cultural leadership. And scarcely had this third estate consolidated itself when the fourth estate, the working class, already appeared on the stage, fighting for recognition and beginning social struggles, in the midst of which we still stand.
In the field of spiritual work, the most significant gain was the utilization of the results of exact investigations obtained in the 18th century for technical values. The task of the century was therefore to construct machines of all kinds, steam engines, railways, and the domain of these engineering works was mainly to serve transportation. Hence we call the 19th century the "century of transportation." But transportation cannot be an end; it must have some goal, and this goal, as the most perfect tendency of the new age, was the acceleration of exchange in all areas — in trade, in travel, in intellectual journalism, etc. Thus the barriers that still divided individual centers of culture in the 18th century fell away, and thus a global economy, world trade, mass production, and large factories emerged — all phenomena that the previous world did not know at all and which stamped the 19th century. In summary, we have entered a time with a completely different way of life, with a new worldview, with new social tasks, with new production methods in all technical and artisanal bodies. — We call this period the present. The question now arises: how does the new organization of all things manifest itself in the field we observe today, in the field of architecture?
Like all times with revolutionary tendencies, this time was not very art-friendly at first. The aristocracy, the bearer of all artistic culture in the 18th century, disappeared, and in its place came the bourgeoisie, a class without artistic tradition that initially knew nothing about caring for art, love for it and the enjoyment of it, and did not even have enough time in the hustle of their income-generating activity to engage with art. Thus the art of the 19th century reveals fluctuations, blind alleys, and confused attempts that fill the entire century; a certain share of this confusion is also held by art history, a completely new phenomenon that previous times did not know. Previously, creating artists, and especially architecturally creating artists, had a certain certainty, a sense that what they created was exclusively correct and that all creations of previous times were flawed. This implies that creations and styles of the bygone eras were always treated with disdain. (I point to the word "Gothic," which was meant to denote barbaric art.) But the new science of art has invoked an understanding of the artistic efforts of previous times; we have learned to understand everything, and to understand everything means also to forgive everything, even to praise it, and ultimately to imitate it; thus, we arrive in architecture at a period of imitated styles.
In this stylistic imitation of the 19th century, which lays next to each other the most diverse styles of the furthest periods and nations, lies the greatest fatality for the architecture of the present. The first question of the broad public when it comes to architectural creations still sounds: in what style are they executed, and architects still imagine that they can learn all styles at school, and competitions are still announced with requirements for a certain style. What lies at the heart of the fate resulting from this imitation fever? The first danger is fragmentation due to multiplicity, for previously, the strength of an entire generation could be concentrated on a single task, all-controlling forms could be brought to the highest perfection. It is enough to point to the subtleties of Greek architecture, to its extraordinarily refined construction, for us to understand that immediately. Today, however, it is precisely about preparing in all aspects poor or not understood imitations. Another danger lies in the fact that the actual practical foundations of buildings are forgotten for stylistic exterior signs, to which architects have devoted their attention exclusively. Historical forms, if possible, an accurate imitation of historical shapes, was primarily on the architect's mind in the 19th century, so he slowly completely forgot that architecture has other goals, independent of external form, goals of building space, rhythm, proportion. But perhaps the worst was that the architect's self-confidence completely disappeared. He lives in the conviction that salvation lies only in a tight grip on what he mistakenly calls tradition. Progress thus occurred only in crutches after which the sick body of architecture moved slowly.
Such is the overall picture of architecture in the 19th century. However, is there simultaneously an image of the entire construction activity? Not at all, for it belongs to the peculiarities of the architecture of this century that it no longer represented itself all the activity and work of construction. After all, alongside architecture, a completely new formation emerged: engineering construction. Beyond the paths of architecture, new tasks arose, the construction of steam engines and railways, bridging rivers and sea lowlands, spanning train stations. The engineer brought new materials to solve these tasks: glass, iron, cement. Iron had already been used earlier in construction, but here it appears for the first time independently, and that in connection with glass. Exhibition halls became a new type, but iron also independently applies to bridges, docks, ship cranes, and machines. In modern times, especially iron performed wonders in combination with concrete, in which we again received a new formation, in all directions a practical matter that willingly lends itself to any shaping. We stand, indeed, in the field of engineering, construction only at the beginning of development, we have experienced only a limited time of a few decades in education, yet we can already observe that we have given the world our works of astonishing proportions, which can match in size the measure of medieval cathedrals and ancient baths. I do not want to determine immediately whether this favorable ratio also holds in artistic respect; I will return to this. In fact, there was no mention of art in these buildings; it was only about providing the necessary constructions for operations. What led the creative hand of the designing engineer were new ideas, new inventions of the 19th century, for which the foundations had already been laid in the 18th century; thus among the construction works of the 19th century, in fact, only these engineering buildings stand in the most immediate relationship with the leading tendencies of the age, in a similar relation like temples to the religious instincts of the Middle Ages or basilicas and thermae of the Romans to the ideas of that time. Embodying the spirit of the 19th century, like the aforementioned buildings represent the meaning of earlier times, they are pure, or it can be said the purest construction products of the efforts of the 19th century. Is it then not remarkable that these children of their time stood apart from all architecture? This would not have been possible in any previous time, for in Roman construction, aqueducts as heavy machines were created by the same builder, and in the Middle Ages, there was no distinction between fortification towers and temples. After all, Leonardo da Vinci was the purest representative of the artist and the engineer mastering physics, optics, fortification, and firearms as his painting.
What is the cause of this remarkable isolation, this curse that has been cast upon engineering buildings in our time? We hear answered: after all, engineering buildings are ugly, they must first be worked out aesthetically; they should belong to art; they are without feeling, they are merely a numerical task, and as for the exterior, we continually hear the answer to the question of why iron construction could not belong to art: because it has shortcomings concerning weight.
If we wanted to critically clarify all these objections, we would have to dive deeply into the realm of speculative aesthetics. But perhaps the merit of old builders was that they did not aestheticize. They created without aesthetic scruples, listening to the natural human instinct, often perhaps even without the intention to create artistically. They created merely craftily or like someone who has to solve a task, whether it is a mathematically organizational or technical task, namely engaging their best skills, with love and joy — and the result was an artistic work in which the creative spirit was manifested and which had a suggestive and artistic effect on the viewer. They created therefore from pure human instinct rhythmically according to the laws of proportion, for the eye, according to the problem of form or however all those slogans we cite today. It was precisely from the moment that speculative aesthetics entered that impoverishment in our actual creation began.
It is said that architecture is only artistic if it delivers more than mere necessity. However, when we observe this plus in today’s buildings, we often feel resistance. According to this definition, a house would not belong to the field of art, whereas an extension above a garden gate would be an artistic piece. Other aesthetic theorists wanted to entirely exclude architecture from art, of which there will still be mention. In this instance, speculative aesthetics thus remained without result. In contrast, however, it has already been shown and observation teaches us that man in general creates according to the laws of beauty and that regardless of whether consciously or instinctively, he possesses rhythmic, that is architectural creation by nature and that he cannot at all rid himself of considerations for beauty; a craftsman and builder cannot do anything other than create regularly, rhythmically according to the laws of proportions. Only that here it is necessary to make finer distinctions: the result of his creation and artistic suggestivity depend on greater or lesser innate talent, abilities, and predispositions to beauty that he brings into life. Those who acknowledge this simple sequence of thought will see the difference between architecture and engineering buildings disappear and will judge only by whether the work is infused with an artistic spirit and gives a suggestive impression. But even then we must not expect too much, for precisely in the case of architectural creations, habit, and convention mean infinitely much. If it were not so, we would not stand so incomprehensibly before richly adorned buildings, which in their respective nations were considered the pinnacle of the highest perfection and beauty.
However, engineering works are different; they are constructed according to completely new principles unknown in previous architecture; they are, especially the embodiment of static laws, and the conventions needed to evaluate these forms correctly do not yet exist. Nevertheless, we encounter in assessments, in descriptions of engineering buildings with signs from which one can infer ethical valuation. For example, we already speak of a "broadly arched" bridge, and since we assume human activity here, we have already reached the boundaries of aesthetic valuation. The lack of weight was another reproach that was constantly made especially against iron construction. But it is enough just to imagine that if we had been constructing our buildings from iron all along instead of wood and stone, provided by nature to us; we would certainly understand quite conventionally these as thin iron constructions resembling webs, which the engineer gives us. Naturally, we have to fight to ensure that the engineer is aware of his artistic impact, to create consciously artistically and have an eye for proportion, symmetry, rhythm, and indeed all the principles that we have already identified in architectural creation; then we can hope that entirely random effects we find on today’s engineering buildings will yield to conscious artistic effects.
Moreover, it is already possible today to clean up a whole series of prominent, artistically impactful engineering buildings. In these buildings, we see, therefore, an important addition to building activity in the 19th century.
Another contribution came from the specific field of architecture itself, which we call the fine craft and which had a prominent role in the 19th century. It is known that the anemic nature of all technical and architectural creation in the 19th century was first observed in industrial products. The first diagnosis was made at the World’s Fair in London in 1851, and from its undeniable results, it became apparent that the craft arts had completely gone bankrupt. This recognition began to underpin reforms, and one of its leading proponents, the German political exile in England, Gottfried Semper, developed a complete program for artistic-craft education, which was then sought to be realized in the following decades first in England and then on the continent through the establishment of museums and schools, lectures, and public teaching through exhibitions, master courses, and all the means to uplift the craft. In contrast to architecture, the fine craft succeeded in awakening a certain interest in the public, which manifested itself in the founding of numerous associations, to which various laypeople belonged, in the publication of good magazines that quickly gained a large readership among the lay audience, and in numerous professional exhibitions. It is now a completely new phenomenon that the public participates in architectural issues, albeit initially only in the narrower questions of the fine craft, whereas architecture was considered a professional science in which no one wanted to take an interest. Besides, we also find in the fine craft a conscious architectural reform program at a time when in architecture, then still confident of its own perfection, no one yet thought of the necessity for reform. The development in the fine craft (I do not wish to speak in detail about it) has been rapid and continually accelerating since 1895. It was already transitioning to new principles, for we are already hearing about materiality, authenticity of materials, etc., in which, of course, one must see only a reaction against ornamentation, previously excessively used. But soon artistic principles attached themselves to these initial principles according to which the craft sought to create, principles of rhythm, purity in color and form, proportion of individual parts; in short, we found ourselves — as long as these principles were generally recognized — once again in the midst of architectural creation, and this also manifested itself in countless artistic-industrial products. The fine industry became spatial art, which was directly marked by architectural character.
And so it remained reserved, rather than for architecture itself, precisely for the ancillary field, the fine craft, that it approached the essence of true architectural creation, whereas architecture in the true sense of the word was blocked from this path by considerations for stylistic properties. The cause was probably that the fine craft had its goal closer; it was smaller and its products could be economically better utilized.
Moreover, it had an influence that every individual brought their strong personal interest to artisan works. Just as we are most interested in our own clothing, objects in our own home are closer to us than the most splendid architecture.
The area where these two worlds meet is ultimately the house, that is the work of pure architecture, and the fine craft was therefore destined to apply the new principles that evolved in the fine craft to this field as well. England here set an example, primarily by abandoning stylistic considerations first, that the highest standards for comfort and advanced health requirements were set, which did not allow — I would say — the architect to think of stylistic exercises and required full attention by themselves. It was mainly about healthy, practical dispositions. It cannot be said enough that from practical prerequisites, beauty does not arise, but — as I said — it was precisely in the fundamental emphasis on practical needs and utility that lay in English domestic art a means against stylistic vices, and on the basis of these practical requirements, even an artistic formation arose, a new spatial ideal, standing in a certain opposition to the spatial ideals of earlier times: a sunlit, airy room. This room evolved precisely in the English house, starting from the bedroom, where certain, strongly emphasized health requirements were applied and later transitioned to other rooms in the house. The new house is characterized by having air and light, that it is kept in one color, that there are no unnecessary dust-catchers, that it does not have furniture and tools with unnecessarily heavy profiles, and that everything is, as much as possible, embedded in the walls. Thus, before our eyes grow from the new views of the 19th century also new cultural goals and forms and compel us to state the close relationship between the external forms of architecture and tendencies in the fine craft; this becoming an art in how to arrange a house merged closely with architecture, and today both of these fields are at least in domestic building connected, which gives hope that the younger forces raised in both camps will combine the tendencies of both architecture and fine craft and that from there a new possibility of development will arise.
In other narrower fields of architecture, the new era has so far provided only scant formations, but it did intervene at least where it dealt with building types unknown to the arts of earlier times. This primarily concerns buildings adequately fulfilling the enormously increased traffic activity, train station halls, markets, exhibition halls, concert and lecture halls, assembly spaces, and theaters, enormous spaces allowing for rapid passage and transport. Further principles are condensed in a completely modern type, from which probably the most modern laws of creation will emerge — in department stores. Here we find the seeds of style because here there are many modern requirements, and it is precisely here that the tendency of our time is revealed, based on transport movements, as a creative force.
We indeed only have before our eyes the seedlings of the period style, but the often-heard demand that a new style should finally be precisely developed is unreasonable. The architect is not concerned with creating a style; what we can and must demand of him can be condensed into two requests: to meet, as accurately as possible, desires and to form this desire tastefully. How simply both requests sound, and yet, upon closer examination, we recognize that each of the tasks is itself extraordinarily difficult. To meet, down to the details, a certain need is a task that requires the architect's most strenuous attention. If we want to fulfill even a tiny space the specific requirement of each individual corner of the house, what is a trifle! For example, in the music room we must establish a piano, which can only stand in a certain place where the player has light and from where the sound spreads throughout the entire room (which is even more important during singing); considerations for acoustics prevent us from using heavy materials and lead us to such space creation that meets the requirements of acoustics to the greatest extent possible. The same will happen in each individual room of the house and for each house type. If we bear in mind that the school serves exclusively education or that the library must primarily take care of readers’ comfort, then, if we seek to fulfill all the natural conditions of the construction program, we already impose a significant task on the architect. As long as a need can be expressed in tasteful form, no formula can be found for that. The artistic element will primarily manifest itself in the organized arrangement of matter, in the subordination of individual components to the leading ideas, in the attainment of purity in color and form of a higher order; in other words, in everything that pertains to the architect's own artistic creation, to artistic shaping according to internal principles. But it is not possible to sufficiently warn against intentionally constructing some prominent modern form; after all, the zeitgeist acts here unconsciously and unnoticed, and often modern creations arise entirely elsewhere than we dream of in our so-called artistic instinct. Such shaping forces we observe, for example, when we carefully examine the small details surrounding us, such as pocket watches, cigar boxes, tools, vehicles, and vehicles in general, whether on land, water, or even in the air. These forms are not made by an artist yet powerfully express a pronounced stylistic tendency that somehow arose based on the zeitgeist and therefore is the purest embodiment of the spirit of the age. This tendency means shedding all unnecessary adornments, whose place has been taken by a functional form derived from elegance, lightness, and precision, achieving certainly full artistic effects. It is enough to just point out the elegant lines of a modern ship, the bicycle, to see how these forms, created without the artist's collaboration, are tasteful. We all live under the influence of this tendency and gladly buy smooth watches, smooth cigar cases, etc. A great abyss between today and the old times in this field of architecture will be shown by comparing a cannon barrel stored in an arsenal and decorated all over with modern weapons. Who today would think of decorating a cannon barrel with acanthus? From such examples, we immediately recognize another tendency of our time, the pursuit of typicism.
This pursuit already shows in our clothing, reduced to practical and at the same time tasteful form, characterizing our democratic thinking and meeting our increased need for cleanliness and high demands for comfort, which is, after all, completely universal. Today, waistcoats of the same form are worn from the northern to the southern pole; blouses of the same form from China to South America. Of course, this demonstrates a feature of sobriety, which we could almost call from the standpoint of ancient monumental architecture, somewhat un-architectural. However, it is certain that the strict restraint of architecture, previously self-evident, is often today felt as a bond. We all know that a modern room is valued in the eyes of the public as stiff, uncomfortable, and starched, but this can be explained as clinging to the previous time of the decline of residential art, in which the sense of unity was lost and in which architecture suppressed Dionysian pleasure, terrible sentiments, sentimental, moral. But despite that, we observe that the strongly architectural sense of our time is already educating the audience and that there are already sufficiently broad circles inclined towards this tendency of spatial art. But even if we admit this, there still remains a trait of our time, in opposition to architecture, namely impressionism, which has appeared in other artistic fields. This phenomenon in the art of the 19th century certainly corresponds to modern life in its heightened spiritual differentiation. The capturing of fleeting atmospheric impressions, the presentation of mood through entirely personal interpretations and entirely personal expressions, the presentation of something only through suggestions, only capturing essential features is the art we collectively call impressionism. Impressionism has gained a wide field, painting, poetry, the entire literature, even sculpture. We cannot deny that its existence is unnecessary, but it can be argued that its influence breaks upon architecture. The only country where impressionism has been cultivated for centuries, Japan, is notable precisely because it has no architecture. Architecture cannot be impressionistic because it is inconceivable without an ending, that is without a dominating general formula. It is an art which works with the reality of defined needs, but it is nevertheless in its expressive means the most abstract. In particular, architectural forms are inexplicable, almost mysterious compared to sculpture and painting, which depict finished objects and seek their effect precisely in presenting these finished things. The question arises: can we imagine that we will move towards great monumental architecture when all other arts are impressionistic? It is difficult to answer this question today, and I am far from being a judge here. But I point out that in painting and sculpture, clear signs are already emerging of the replacement of impressionism with an extreme monumental style. It suffices to name Cézanne or Van Gogh for us to realize that even here there is a strong desire for a style bound architecturally. From these tendencies, we gain hope that architecture will again create a unity with the other arts, as it always has in the past, and that we will return to a unified expression in architecture, to a unified mode of expression.
Mere demands for tasteful forms do not yet create a style, and in architecture, the demand for its own formal expression still remains, for that which impresses the audience as style, for true functional forms; only these give the building a striking expression and only these define the building as the vital and social forms of man. In this formal aspect lies therefore the important, indeed, it can be said the most important problem of modern building. Just as impressionism gained influence everywhere in art, so too does our time mark the penetration of individualism in all areas of art. Art, colored by individuality, that of the artist, is the art of the day, and this is why our time stands out so notably from earlier times when firmly organized schools invariably prevailed, showing the same activity and striving for the same goals. It can be said that earlier artistic efforts converged into a single flow, while today’s diffuse in individual performances. Individualism surely corresponds, just like impressionism, to the zeitgeist and has indeed also achieved excellent deeds in painting and in literature, but in architecture, it has disappointed completely; for here, not only were individualist tendencies, without exception, unfortunate, but they were also accompanied by phenomena that acted directly destructively. As the last deterring example, we still feel the so-called Jugendstil that has in our architecture not yet been expelled, which latched onto the individualistic art of Van de Velde. One cannot reproach the artist Van de Velde for this, but the example itself shows how incapable individualism is of asserting itself in today’s architectural creation. The main cause is that there are so many construction and craft tasks that cannot all be solved by true artists, and we require a whole army of assistants, on whom we can only make artistic demands to a limited extent; there is no worse art than the art of such half-artists, no more frightening individualism than the individualism of these non-individuals. And these phenomena have completely distorted the image of construction work executed in the last fifty years and have often evoked what is so frequently cited as the degradation of cities and the countryside. The architectural question is not resolved by individualism, which appears as a harmful element; a more correct approach would be to win all forces for a common task on a single issue, for the elaboration of the universally dominant type so that the entire artistic strength of the entire community of architects, as in earlier times, is again channeled towards the development of period forms.
The history of formal development of the last ten years shows a gratifying progress from strongly individualistic attempts to generally valid solutions. The gradual transition from the individual to the typical is characteristic of today's time and gives us hope that even in architecture we will again reach a convention that will give it a consistent character. Dispersed beginnings are already evident in new buildings, in modern rooms, in modern department stores and transport means. Of course, we cannot already guess the final architectural forms today, but it is certain that they must correspond to the spirit of the time, that the time must directly reflect in them, and that a new style will develop in them easily, with the necessity of a natural science phenomenon. The development will be the less disrupted, the less it is influenced by finished performances; especially the effort to imitate former styles is the greatest obstacle, because we reach a style not through imitation, but when we feel ourselves only as children of our time, when we listen to its shaping forces, and when we give our best efforts in service of contemporary times. In doing so, we will not labor in search of our own style; it will come by itself and become our property only once we have formed it through our own work. It will still require the connection of the architectural spirit with the spirit of modern engineering before we reach this goal. The modern age will surely give birth to its style, for here too the words of the poet apply, who sees the world and embraces it entirely with his gaze: “Es ist der Geist, der sich den Körper schafft.”

Translated by Zdeněk Wirth