Pavel Janák: From Modern Architecture - To Architecture
At the time this monograph is published, it seems that modern architecture is reaching and maturing in its development to the stage of a pivotal moment. It appears to be concluding a defined developmental phase with a summary of its previous results, and that it is transitioning, yet in full context, to a new and further period that is thought-provoking and profound. There are indeed signs emerging in the situation of architectural creation - if it came down to just external recognition of the state - that almost physically announce the proximity of a turnaround.
First and foremost, the slowing of the developmental pace of modern architecture, which has occurred, is noticeable: the entire previous trajectory of modern architecture has been traversed in an admirably dynamic development within a relatively short span of about 15 years, and has generally been characterized by results that have been stylistically and compositional achieving; almost every work of leading artists represented a heightened, further step against the previous one, bringing new values, and almost none of them remained within the confines of the conventions set by their predecessors; and when arranged chronologically, they form a regular scale of the same ascent, without repetition of ideas already articulated.
Now this scale is loosening its ascent and new results and advancements are emerging already at greater intervals and irregularly: this means that much of what was intended to be achieved has already been attained and that many of the stimuli which induced development have been realized; thus - if the visible movement of development has come to a halt - the internal causes of development in the previous direction have either ceased or changed. However, even the discipline of creation - and this is another telling sign of the turnaround - has declined. This has so far been one of the particularly beautiful moral qualities of the movement for modern architecture, as all creation has so far voluntarily and sincerely conformed to the principles and doctrines by which the revival of architecture was promised and proclaimed. Now there is no longer that generally strict discipline of creation and deviations against principles are appearing, with even less morally steadfast individuals secretly and openly betraying old principles and romantically misusing historical forms. The most serious sign, however, is the schism that has arisen in architectural creation between the creative hand and the desire for once-accepted principles. The modern architecture movement has so far enjoyed a remarkably rare unity of both of these forces, and the dominance in their interaction has rather been on the side of the hand; the movement of modern architecture has been predominantly led by the instinctive inventiveness of the hand, and only a minority has been accompanied by spiritual speculation, despite the fact that it was founded on theoretical proclamations and intended to be explicitly rationalistic. It must therefore be distinctly notable if now, after 15 years, alongside a relaxed and weakened creativity of the hand, the speculative forces have gained a considerable prevalence: less, and especially less easily, is created, and more is thought, and within the very process of creation itself, a schism can be seen: the desire is no longer - as before - precursed and surprised by the fruitfully creative hand, but catches up with the constructing hand without supervision, evaluates it - and does not always agree with it: the hand, merely instinctively conceptualizing, loses its certainty and infallibility and enters the field of development amidst uncertainties and a suspension of theories and takes over the situation.
These signs, despite their seriousness, do not exceed the limits within which one can speak of development; they are losses of values and increments to the values with which modern architecture was born and they are not new values. It is thus truly a transition in development - as will be identified internally - and not a crisis towards different values. One might perhaps determine the conceptual and developmental differences, by reflection and comparison, by which the current state of architecture has distanced itself from the beginnings of modern architecture and finds, through a listing and summary, that they are neither a death knell for modern architecture nor a proclamation of some new modern architecture, but rather a diagnosis recognizing an established revival and a transition to a further, coherent developmental period. However, this requires critical consideration not only of the results, the very works of modern architecture that it has created during its time, but it will be necessary to consider architectural creation across the entire breadth of the creative process from conceptual principles and impulses throughout the creation journey up to the achieved work: here it will become apparent how the process of creation has been proclaimed by modern architecture and how it differs from the revised and established creative process of today.
The basis for the comparative consideration of the current situation of modern architecture can and must be Wagner's direction: it is historically the earliest in the entire movement of modern architecture and was conceptualized earliest; it is the most concrete, the most exclusive and it is in Europe leading not only by the quantity of successfully achieved results but also by the fact that all other European centers of the movement of modern architecture are either directly under its influence, or they incline towards it through development, or they remain behind it - and even this is a relational finding - visibly delayed. Wagner thus formulated his doctrine of modern architecture in a motto that defines the process of architectural creation in a binding context, stemming from purpose through construction, material to poetry, thus in conceptual shorthand: Modern architecture must be the fulfillment of purpose, construction, and poetry. The interpretation and practical activity that Wagner attached to this motto therefore places at the forefront and the starting point of all architectural creation the material purpose, defining it as the highest yet simultaneously limiting goal of architecture; its satisfaction and fulfillment must follow the creation of construction and material and must finally append, in third place, subordinate poetry.
In the construction of this tripartite motto lies - and still stands - a strict, ascetic morality: it allows and allowed the creating artist to reach for poetry only after the rational satisfaction of purpose and represented thus, when it was uttered 15 years ago during the confusion and anarchy of the architecture of the time beyond all purpose, a saving word as a revealed truth. We are quite distant from the initial utterance of the motto, and the time that has since passed has brought much insight and has also led to the testing of the motto: today it is certain that this word, demanding such exclusive purposiveness of architecture, is a remarkably moral, yet isolated anomaly in the entire history of architecture, that it is not a single truth but that it was a strong, religiously formulated idea, providing, with faith in it, the much-needed salvation at that time and that it must be departed from. In the entire previous history, architecture has never been so limitedly bound to purpose, and the purpose has always been the offering of opportunities for the artist to express his ideas through building and its means; this expression has often been such a predominant share in architecture that it has even deformed the purpose itself (we understand the last beautiful examples of this today much more deeply in the empire, to which the architectural ideal, particularly applied through antiquity, was so life-forming that it created its antiquizing ideas and concepts even when it was entirely - in our opinion - about worldly purposes). This realization that purpose in architecture is merely a stimulus has been progressively equipped through the development of modern architecture, and the more architecture has become an art and a higher human expression; it has also been confirmed incidentally by the never-ceasing infractions against the motto of purposiveness: for many of those works of modern architecture, which represent the peaks of previous architecture by their quality, transcend far beyond the bounds of purpose fulfillment and have their value precisely there.
Our reasoning about purpose has sharpened to such an extent that we no longer find the motto itself consistently logical and that it would be more logical if it were limited only to purpose and construction, devoid of poetry; for in the first two parts, the discipline for the creative process is still clearly and precisely determined, however, in the third section, poetry, all at once has no directives or boundaries for creation. This dissonance evident in the motto corresponds with many dissonances of the products of modern architecture - as we now conclude - and has a substantial share in the quality of this: That part of poetry permitted after purpose and construction is often very isolated, foreign, and only superficially fulfills purpose and construction because poetry has been appended lastly and in independent genesis. If we are able to recognize this disjointedness of the motto, we simultaneously define through this reasoning ourselves and the distinct nature of contemporary creation to which the era has developed; it signifies the need and conviction of the unity of creation and signifies that that fractional poetry, once in third place of Wagner's motto, has since developed much. Dominant theories and the emerging reality of the material purposelessness of all art, of the elevation of art above purpose, reverses in our opinion the rank order in Wagner’s motto: poetry - as the highest element - comes again to the forefront of all creation, and the subordinate construction and selected material represent a changed motto that corresponds to the generative process by which architecture arises and builds from the idea through construction and material. With this new version of the motto concerning the creative process, the walls of dissimilarity of modern architecture from historical architectures fall; modern architecture rose against these 15 years ago as a qualitatively differentiated era which forever divided itself from them with its idea of purposiveness and thus it seemed that its direction intended and was supposed to be an exception without kinship to the entire millennium of history and new, other blood. Therefore, that isolating and almost provoking epithet “modern” also had a deeper substantive, ostentatious foundation and validity and thus at the moment when we identify ourselves with historical principles, the modern architecture falls away to leave it - simply architecture. The consequences will be externally visible even in the character of further architecture: its works will no longer be so stylistically separated and will not be so incomparably distinct as “modern” from old architectures, but will be more homogeneous in character and will blend more, while remaining products of their century. However, ideas about architectural creation have meanwhile matured into more concrete ideas even about individual components of the motto. Construction and material, these components in the former phrasing of the motto equally valuable with poetry and purpose, we return to their places as mere means to the end of the idea. However, it is a place that has been assigned to them throughout history. For new, bolder, and more ingenious constructions and more advantageous materials were sought and discovered by architects when the conceived ideas no longer sufficed the old constructive methods and materials; new constructions and materials arose only in the presence of new building ideas, never in reverse. Thus, modern architecture behaved very materially if it sought to base its creation on construction and material, as the expression of construction and the enlivening of material is a materially narrowed principle and if it appeared in history, it was always at the beginnings of new developments and was soon abandoned - to transition through both to the architectural form of the whole. The expansion of architectural creation as dominant, form-giving, and spiritual creation corresponds to the silencing of the material and constructive unit and their subordination to artistic intent. Even the doctrine of modern architecture on the individualization of material, i.e., on deriving artistic form from the natural and physical properties of material, we find materialistic, aimless, and narrowing the free architectural creation to the explanation of material; it is an advice and law that must inevitably lead to the flattening and flatness of modern architecture - to this character with even further significance -; because it is not in the natural properties of marble and wood to be processed into plastically bold and tension-driven Corinthian capitals, but their properties are best suited for only being worked flatly and smoothly. Here too we find ourselves with a more developed conviction: we place above the individual characteristics of the material our own abstract ideas and forms and count - not only respect - with the strength and load-bearing capacity of the material, which we exert to the thought with certain strains and tensions.
Finally, we have more definite ideas also about poetry in architecture, which elevate that subordinate poetry from Wagner's motto. If it is necessary to be critical towards modern architecture, it can be said that it indeed has had much poetry in the sense that could be put with the saying: “poetry in architecture,” but little - architectural beauty. For poetry in architecture is the last added component to the building, diluting it, it is the poetization in architecture, sweetening and improving the erected through poetic details, such as masks, flowers, and squares (- and even if stylized! -) and applied curves, while architectural beauty is the beauty of the built, perhaps only in the construction of materials, and beauty residing in the installed and dramatized balance of materials. In the past period of modern architecture, it remained behind history: it understood and created form still much for its literary expressiveness or for the qualities derived from some theoretical morality; but it did not understand or create form as a plastic entity, as a construction of psychologically effective and acting lines, surfaces, and material details, which by their relationships, actions, and reactions become expressive of the thought for which they were built, and are subject to the common law of the filiation of form, applying logically throughout the entire work. The perception and understanding of form in this depth and in this sensory way differ from the previous use of aesthetic form for the decoration of functional buildings in today’s view contrasted with the practice of modern architecture.
The creation of modern architecture has so far had a rather purifying, social, and generally beneficial character rather than a visual one. Thus, all creation has been occupied with tasks establishing the conditions and properties that the created objects must have and must not have; it has therefore generally been a social delimitation of the necessary determination of objects and their program. This program has then been implemented technically, rationally, economically, and only on the surface of these technical and wholly logical forms has the improving poetry come. Very soon in the development, the absurdity of this added poetry was recognized - and it was therefore discarded and continued with the technical, bare skeleton. Modern architecture thus built most successfully where it was given a complex and as much difficult program of real conditions - as is the case, for example, with rental houses; here its creation could rely on and meet a series of realities and realize a work on which there were many positive answers - primarily material ones, of course. Thus, the form of rental houses emerged from the logical elimination of earlier mistakes and the realization of hygienically, economically, and technically set conditions, and is a construction form without risalits with a smooth, practically cleanable facade, equal floors, equally practically openable windows, at equal distances, and inside with the division of living spaces according to the most beneficial scheme and with everything that a plumber is capable of executing well: with running water, electric lighting, elevators, etc. - modern architecture started here primarily flawlessly as a modern technician, with taste but not as a creating artist; for there was still little created overall that would artistically realize, for instance, the space of a rental room, the typical rental apartment, or that would be a plastic artistic formulation of a rental house. And this limited reach of modern architecture becomes even more pronounced where it must fundamentally concern eminently architectural tasks - as for example in churches, monumental spaces, and urban spaces: here it has most decisively shown how the determination of air volume of a church, the number of places and seats for the faithful, and the placement of the pulpit, etc., do not yet constitute a modern church. Modern architecture has so far known only the problems of practical solution of needs - and it was a historically correct development - but it has hardly known the problem of space, the problem of mass and form at all, it has had almost no problems in this sense and has been little theoretical: here lies the field of its future activity, if it is to be architecture.
The artistic character of the previous production of modern architecture is naturally in accordance with its forthcoming principles. Because all activity has been so far quite purifying and strictly moralizing, it has reached, through the exclusion of everything that had no purpose, down to the cores of masses and forms: to parallelepipeds, to surfaces, geometric shapes, and lines, about which there could be no more doubts that it must be so. This constant - and in its time very local - prohibition of all plastic form has directly educated to undervalue, even to hate form, and has led modern architecture necessarily to flatness. There is a very lot of remarkable, ascetically-focused morality in the assertion that, for instance, “the facade of the house is a surface,” a wall; but there is also much one-sidedness in this, for the facade of the house does not have to be artistically expressed as a surface. In accordance with this principled limited direction of modern architecture, it is possible to explain how the leading figures of its time, such as Olbrich and Josef Hoffman, who led the Viennese movement with their works, must with a certain temporal distance now be more narrowly characterized; the former especially as a great linearist in architecture, the latter as a great and witty ornamentalist in furniture; for Olbrich and Hoffman, speaking for the principles and capabilities of the time, infused all their works with line and ornament, and indeed as a structural element, thus in those places where today we rightly feel that it should solely be - plastic form; therefore, conversely, Plečnik, an artist of plastic form, remained isolated in the midst of the flat period of modern architecture as a formal exotic and a non-principled romantic, and thus, everything he brought was unilaterally exploited flatly and thus now - as a turn towards plastic form approaches - he is receiving satisfaction.
It is possible to predict how architecture will proceed further: creation in which artistic thought and abstraction take over leadership after the receding purposiveness, will continue in the effort for plastic form and the plastic realization of architectural ideas. This corresponds coherently with the development of increased creative energy, which is now strengthened and capable of penetrating deeper into architectural problems and going deeper into mass to extract form from it.
First and foremost, the slowing of the developmental pace of modern architecture, which has occurred, is noticeable: the entire previous trajectory of modern architecture has been traversed in an admirably dynamic development within a relatively short span of about 15 years, and has generally been characterized by results that have been stylistically and compositional achieving; almost every work of leading artists represented a heightened, further step against the previous one, bringing new values, and almost none of them remained within the confines of the conventions set by their predecessors; and when arranged chronologically, they form a regular scale of the same ascent, without repetition of ideas already articulated.
Now this scale is loosening its ascent and new results and advancements are emerging already at greater intervals and irregularly: this means that much of what was intended to be achieved has already been attained and that many of the stimuli which induced development have been realized; thus - if the visible movement of development has come to a halt - the internal causes of development in the previous direction have either ceased or changed. However, even the discipline of creation - and this is another telling sign of the turnaround - has declined. This has so far been one of the particularly beautiful moral qualities of the movement for modern architecture, as all creation has so far voluntarily and sincerely conformed to the principles and doctrines by which the revival of architecture was promised and proclaimed. Now there is no longer that generally strict discipline of creation and deviations against principles are appearing, with even less morally steadfast individuals secretly and openly betraying old principles and romantically misusing historical forms. The most serious sign, however, is the schism that has arisen in architectural creation between the creative hand and the desire for once-accepted principles. The modern architecture movement has so far enjoyed a remarkably rare unity of both of these forces, and the dominance in their interaction has rather been on the side of the hand; the movement of modern architecture has been predominantly led by the instinctive inventiveness of the hand, and only a minority has been accompanied by spiritual speculation, despite the fact that it was founded on theoretical proclamations and intended to be explicitly rationalistic. It must therefore be distinctly notable if now, after 15 years, alongside a relaxed and weakened creativity of the hand, the speculative forces have gained a considerable prevalence: less, and especially less easily, is created, and more is thought, and within the very process of creation itself, a schism can be seen: the desire is no longer - as before - precursed and surprised by the fruitfully creative hand, but catches up with the constructing hand without supervision, evaluates it - and does not always agree with it: the hand, merely instinctively conceptualizing, loses its certainty and infallibility and enters the field of development amidst uncertainties and a suspension of theories and takes over the situation.
These signs, despite their seriousness, do not exceed the limits within which one can speak of development; they are losses of values and increments to the values with which modern architecture was born and they are not new values. It is thus truly a transition in development - as will be identified internally - and not a crisis towards different values. One might perhaps determine the conceptual and developmental differences, by reflection and comparison, by which the current state of architecture has distanced itself from the beginnings of modern architecture and finds, through a listing and summary, that they are neither a death knell for modern architecture nor a proclamation of some new modern architecture, but rather a diagnosis recognizing an established revival and a transition to a further, coherent developmental period. However, this requires critical consideration not only of the results, the very works of modern architecture that it has created during its time, but it will be necessary to consider architectural creation across the entire breadth of the creative process from conceptual principles and impulses throughout the creation journey up to the achieved work: here it will become apparent how the process of creation has been proclaimed by modern architecture and how it differs from the revised and established creative process of today.
The basis for the comparative consideration of the current situation of modern architecture can and must be Wagner's direction: it is historically the earliest in the entire movement of modern architecture and was conceptualized earliest; it is the most concrete, the most exclusive and it is in Europe leading not only by the quantity of successfully achieved results but also by the fact that all other European centers of the movement of modern architecture are either directly under its influence, or they incline towards it through development, or they remain behind it - and even this is a relational finding - visibly delayed. Wagner thus formulated his doctrine of modern architecture in a motto that defines the process of architectural creation in a binding context, stemming from purpose through construction, material to poetry, thus in conceptual shorthand: Modern architecture must be the fulfillment of purpose, construction, and poetry. The interpretation and practical activity that Wagner attached to this motto therefore places at the forefront and the starting point of all architectural creation the material purpose, defining it as the highest yet simultaneously limiting goal of architecture; its satisfaction and fulfillment must follow the creation of construction and material and must finally append, in third place, subordinate poetry.
In the construction of this tripartite motto lies - and still stands - a strict, ascetic morality: it allows and allowed the creating artist to reach for poetry only after the rational satisfaction of purpose and represented thus, when it was uttered 15 years ago during the confusion and anarchy of the architecture of the time beyond all purpose, a saving word as a revealed truth. We are quite distant from the initial utterance of the motto, and the time that has since passed has brought much insight and has also led to the testing of the motto: today it is certain that this word, demanding such exclusive purposiveness of architecture, is a remarkably moral, yet isolated anomaly in the entire history of architecture, that it is not a single truth but that it was a strong, religiously formulated idea, providing, with faith in it, the much-needed salvation at that time and that it must be departed from. In the entire previous history, architecture has never been so limitedly bound to purpose, and the purpose has always been the offering of opportunities for the artist to express his ideas through building and its means; this expression has often been such a predominant share in architecture that it has even deformed the purpose itself (we understand the last beautiful examples of this today much more deeply in the empire, to which the architectural ideal, particularly applied through antiquity, was so life-forming that it created its antiquizing ideas and concepts even when it was entirely - in our opinion - about worldly purposes). This realization that purpose in architecture is merely a stimulus has been progressively equipped through the development of modern architecture, and the more architecture has become an art and a higher human expression; it has also been confirmed incidentally by the never-ceasing infractions against the motto of purposiveness: for many of those works of modern architecture, which represent the peaks of previous architecture by their quality, transcend far beyond the bounds of purpose fulfillment and have their value precisely there.
Our reasoning about purpose has sharpened to such an extent that we no longer find the motto itself consistently logical and that it would be more logical if it were limited only to purpose and construction, devoid of poetry; for in the first two parts, the discipline for the creative process is still clearly and precisely determined, however, in the third section, poetry, all at once has no directives or boundaries for creation. This dissonance evident in the motto corresponds with many dissonances of the products of modern architecture - as we now conclude - and has a substantial share in the quality of this: That part of poetry permitted after purpose and construction is often very isolated, foreign, and only superficially fulfills purpose and construction because poetry has been appended lastly and in independent genesis. If we are able to recognize this disjointedness of the motto, we simultaneously define through this reasoning ourselves and the distinct nature of contemporary creation to which the era has developed; it signifies the need and conviction of the unity of creation and signifies that that fractional poetry, once in third place of Wagner's motto, has since developed much. Dominant theories and the emerging reality of the material purposelessness of all art, of the elevation of art above purpose, reverses in our opinion the rank order in Wagner’s motto: poetry - as the highest element - comes again to the forefront of all creation, and the subordinate construction and selected material represent a changed motto that corresponds to the generative process by which architecture arises and builds from the idea through construction and material. With this new version of the motto concerning the creative process, the walls of dissimilarity of modern architecture from historical architectures fall; modern architecture rose against these 15 years ago as a qualitatively differentiated era which forever divided itself from them with its idea of purposiveness and thus it seemed that its direction intended and was supposed to be an exception without kinship to the entire millennium of history and new, other blood. Therefore, that isolating and almost provoking epithet “modern” also had a deeper substantive, ostentatious foundation and validity and thus at the moment when we identify ourselves with historical principles, the modern architecture falls away to leave it - simply architecture. The consequences will be externally visible even in the character of further architecture: its works will no longer be so stylistically separated and will not be so incomparably distinct as “modern” from old architectures, but will be more homogeneous in character and will blend more, while remaining products of their century. However, ideas about architectural creation have meanwhile matured into more concrete ideas even about individual components of the motto. Construction and material, these components in the former phrasing of the motto equally valuable with poetry and purpose, we return to their places as mere means to the end of the idea. However, it is a place that has been assigned to them throughout history. For new, bolder, and more ingenious constructions and more advantageous materials were sought and discovered by architects when the conceived ideas no longer sufficed the old constructive methods and materials; new constructions and materials arose only in the presence of new building ideas, never in reverse. Thus, modern architecture behaved very materially if it sought to base its creation on construction and material, as the expression of construction and the enlivening of material is a materially narrowed principle and if it appeared in history, it was always at the beginnings of new developments and was soon abandoned - to transition through both to the architectural form of the whole. The expansion of architectural creation as dominant, form-giving, and spiritual creation corresponds to the silencing of the material and constructive unit and their subordination to artistic intent. Even the doctrine of modern architecture on the individualization of material, i.e., on deriving artistic form from the natural and physical properties of material, we find materialistic, aimless, and narrowing the free architectural creation to the explanation of material; it is an advice and law that must inevitably lead to the flattening and flatness of modern architecture - to this character with even further significance -; because it is not in the natural properties of marble and wood to be processed into plastically bold and tension-driven Corinthian capitals, but their properties are best suited for only being worked flatly and smoothly. Here too we find ourselves with a more developed conviction: we place above the individual characteristics of the material our own abstract ideas and forms and count - not only respect - with the strength and load-bearing capacity of the material, which we exert to the thought with certain strains and tensions.
Finally, we have more definite ideas also about poetry in architecture, which elevate that subordinate poetry from Wagner's motto. If it is necessary to be critical towards modern architecture, it can be said that it indeed has had much poetry in the sense that could be put with the saying: “poetry in architecture,” but little - architectural beauty. For poetry in architecture is the last added component to the building, diluting it, it is the poetization in architecture, sweetening and improving the erected through poetic details, such as masks, flowers, and squares (- and even if stylized! -) and applied curves, while architectural beauty is the beauty of the built, perhaps only in the construction of materials, and beauty residing in the installed and dramatized balance of materials. In the past period of modern architecture, it remained behind history: it understood and created form still much for its literary expressiveness or for the qualities derived from some theoretical morality; but it did not understand or create form as a plastic entity, as a construction of psychologically effective and acting lines, surfaces, and material details, which by their relationships, actions, and reactions become expressive of the thought for which they were built, and are subject to the common law of the filiation of form, applying logically throughout the entire work. The perception and understanding of form in this depth and in this sensory way differ from the previous use of aesthetic form for the decoration of functional buildings in today’s view contrasted with the practice of modern architecture.
The creation of modern architecture has so far had a rather purifying, social, and generally beneficial character rather than a visual one. Thus, all creation has been occupied with tasks establishing the conditions and properties that the created objects must have and must not have; it has therefore generally been a social delimitation of the necessary determination of objects and their program. This program has then been implemented technically, rationally, economically, and only on the surface of these technical and wholly logical forms has the improving poetry come. Very soon in the development, the absurdity of this added poetry was recognized - and it was therefore discarded and continued with the technical, bare skeleton. Modern architecture thus built most successfully where it was given a complex and as much difficult program of real conditions - as is the case, for example, with rental houses; here its creation could rely on and meet a series of realities and realize a work on which there were many positive answers - primarily material ones, of course. Thus, the form of rental houses emerged from the logical elimination of earlier mistakes and the realization of hygienically, economically, and technically set conditions, and is a construction form without risalits with a smooth, practically cleanable facade, equal floors, equally practically openable windows, at equal distances, and inside with the division of living spaces according to the most beneficial scheme and with everything that a plumber is capable of executing well: with running water, electric lighting, elevators, etc. - modern architecture started here primarily flawlessly as a modern technician, with taste but not as a creating artist; for there was still little created overall that would artistically realize, for instance, the space of a rental room, the typical rental apartment, or that would be a plastic artistic formulation of a rental house. And this limited reach of modern architecture becomes even more pronounced where it must fundamentally concern eminently architectural tasks - as for example in churches, monumental spaces, and urban spaces: here it has most decisively shown how the determination of air volume of a church, the number of places and seats for the faithful, and the placement of the pulpit, etc., do not yet constitute a modern church. Modern architecture has so far known only the problems of practical solution of needs - and it was a historically correct development - but it has hardly known the problem of space, the problem of mass and form at all, it has had almost no problems in this sense and has been little theoretical: here lies the field of its future activity, if it is to be architecture.
The artistic character of the previous production of modern architecture is naturally in accordance with its forthcoming principles. Because all activity has been so far quite purifying and strictly moralizing, it has reached, through the exclusion of everything that had no purpose, down to the cores of masses and forms: to parallelepipeds, to surfaces, geometric shapes, and lines, about which there could be no more doubts that it must be so. This constant - and in its time very local - prohibition of all plastic form has directly educated to undervalue, even to hate form, and has led modern architecture necessarily to flatness. There is a very lot of remarkable, ascetically-focused morality in the assertion that, for instance, “the facade of the house is a surface,” a wall; but there is also much one-sidedness in this, for the facade of the house does not have to be artistically expressed as a surface. In accordance with this principled limited direction of modern architecture, it is possible to explain how the leading figures of its time, such as Olbrich and Josef Hoffman, who led the Viennese movement with their works, must with a certain temporal distance now be more narrowly characterized; the former especially as a great linearist in architecture, the latter as a great and witty ornamentalist in furniture; for Olbrich and Hoffman, speaking for the principles and capabilities of the time, infused all their works with line and ornament, and indeed as a structural element, thus in those places where today we rightly feel that it should solely be - plastic form; therefore, conversely, Plečnik, an artist of plastic form, remained isolated in the midst of the flat period of modern architecture as a formal exotic and a non-principled romantic, and thus, everything he brought was unilaterally exploited flatly and thus now - as a turn towards plastic form approaches - he is receiving satisfaction.
It is possible to predict how architecture will proceed further: creation in which artistic thought and abstraction take over leadership after the receding purposiveness, will continue in the effort for plastic form and the plastic realization of architectural ideas. This corresponds coherently with the development of increased creative energy, which is now strengthened and capable of penetrating deeper into architectural problems and going deeper into mass to extract form from it.
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