If facts possess the word, then nothing remains but to have facts speak and preserve, in silence, the spectrum of great values. of these--and here Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, and Lugwig Wittgenstein agree--"we cannot speak," that is, without contaminating them, Loos expresses clearly.
Those who now have nothing to say, because facts have words, continue to speak. He who has something to say, step forward and be silent.
This profession has not extinguished itself.
He who adds words to facts defaces the word and the fact, and therefore is doubly dispicable.
Nor would I be able to speak any new word, for within the room where one writes the noise is so loud and if it comes from animals, babies or only trench guns, is not now important.
Let them not await from me my word.
Within the realms of the poverty of fantasy, where man dies from spiritual starvation without ever discovering his spiritual hunger, where pens are dipped in blood and swords in ink, that which is past ought to be fact, but that which is only thought is ineffable.
Too deeply rooted in me is the respect for the immutable, the subordination of language to fate.
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In the epoch one should not wait for any particular words from me, none aside from this one, which barely serves to preserve the silence of misunderstanding.
In this great epoch which I have known when it was still so small and which will again become small, if there is any time left . . . in this noisy epoch which resounds from the horrendous symphony of facts which yeild news and news which is to be blamed for the facts.
The refusal to manipulate forms, as Rossi maintains, in fact concludes a debate that was personally fought first by Adolf Loos, and which has in Karl Kraus its highest exponent.
A fundamentally important result springs forth from this, one which has in fact already been taken for granted in our contemporary culture, but which is continually cast aside.
The thread of Ariadne with which Rossi weaves his work does not reestablish the discourse, but rather dissolves it, thereby making true the tragic acknowledgement of Georg Simmel, "a for which is open to life, serves it, cannot give itself."
In this manner such research loses itself in its extreme attempt to save the institution of architecture.
Yet the accusations of fascism hurled at Rossi mean little, since his attempts at the recovery of an ahistoricizing form exclude verbalizations of its content and any compromise with the real.
Only the ghost of that lost order can today be waved about.
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If an attitude of neo-Enlightenment is found in Rossi, it is to be understood as a recovered example of an irrevesible act of the eighteenth century--the fragmentation of the "order of discourse."
This is not because of any inability of the architect, but rather because this "center" has been historically destroyed.
The result that Rossi approaches is that of demonstrating without any chance of further appeal, that by his removal of form from the domain of daily experiences, he is continually forced to circumnavigate the central point from which communication springs forth, yet is unable to draw from the source itself.
There is a precise reason for this phenomenon.
In Rossi, however, the categorical imperative lives as the absolute alienation of form, to the point of achieving an empied sacredness--an experience of the immovable and of the eternal return to geometric emblems reduced to being mere ghosts.
Yet for Mies the translation of the sign still occurred within the presence of the real, that is to say, by contrast with the city itself.
Mies van der Rohe had already experimented with the language of emptiness and silence.
But for him, it is a communication that has nothing to speak about except the finite quality of its closed system, wherein the cyclone of the "Angelus Novus" has passed, freezing words into salt pillars.
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