We are no[w here]: A social critique of contemporary theory

The retreat into form is in part a response to the disarray of contemporary society-the failure of science and technology to produce the social progress promised by the modern movement and the welfare state. This disillusionment, whether stemming from cynicism after the cruelties of Nazism, Stalinism, and Hiroshima, or from despair at the ravages of uneven development, is invoked to explain architecture’s withdrawal from social engagement into autonomous formal discourse. Thus, for example, Eisenman establishes as a premise for his House X:

an explicit ideological concern with a cultural condition, namely the apparent inability of modern man to sustain any longer a belief in his own rationality and perfectibility . . . Of course when one denies the importance of function, program, meaning, technology, and clientconstraints traditionally used to justify and in a way support formmaking-the rationality of process and the logic inherent in form becomes (sic) almost the last ‘security’ or legitimation available.1