Jaromír Krejcar: Made in America

Oh Janovan! Your dream! Your dream; after centuries when you lay in your grave, the land you discovered realizes Your dream.

It would be necessary to create a new word to replace the academic meaning of the word BEAUTY with a new meaning that does not recall the classical beauty, as formulated in the "fine arts," so that we could precisely determine the aesthetic relationship of modern people to new forms born outside the "fine arts" and yet beautiful. Let us call it NEW BEAUTY.
If we look at a perfect automobile, whose shape reminds us of the 150 horsepower of its machine and 100 km speed, an airplane, a machine, etc. evokes in us the same impression as the sight of a beautifully perfectly cultivated athlete's body.
This is the aesthetic feeling flowing from


This harmony is the essence of the aesthetic impressions that modern forms of new things, constructed for specific purposes and needs, provide modern people. Things whose existence has been given by today's demands, which have no historical analogies. The form of these things, which has arisen from their construction, function, and purpose, tells everything about their qualities without trying to change their meaning or conceal anything.
It is exceedingly candid, for it has no reason to appear to be anything other than what it is. It is impersonal, because individualism cannot be conceived where fulfilling a purpose is the only goal, which leads to a single common path for all.
It has characteristics characterizing the era of great stylistic unity: it is


because it is the result of the work of thousands of people pursuing a common goal:


It is a manifestation of


All artistic expressions of the past were likewise the best works of contemporary technology. Not only buildings but also paintings and sculptures.
Lastly, it is a form that plastically

thus something that, as we know, only a few modern artists strive for very arduously with success. The harmony of purpose and form, which fully satisfies modern people aesthetically, can mainly be found in the products


It cannot be said that relatively 1% of modern beautifully painted pictures, sculptures, architectures are made, while thousands of perfectly modernly beautiful things are produced daily, whose sum defines the form


Plastic. Architecturally. - Thus fundamentally.

AMERICA, a world without artistic traditions. Its products, constructions, do not withstand the aesthetic standard of the academic but stand firmly when evaluated from the perspective of modern beauty.**) The establishment of the first skyscraper marked an act in modern construction that signifies the beginning of a new era, the primal mother of all arts — architecture.
Let us put aside the glasses of academic delusion that hold our gaze on the external tasteless details of the façade of the American skyscraper. A series of details that have simply been used as immediate nearby decoration have nothing in common with the own new architecture that has been born here, more than a bad painting of a room wall has with its space. If the space of the room is good in architectural terms, proportionally, rhythmically, no amount of poor painting can fundamentally change these properties, and it is enough to simply scrape the painting for the space to emerge in the bare rhythm of its three dimensions. But architecturally poorly dimensioned space cannot be saved by good wall painting. It is fundamentally a bad space further.
The same is true for the skyscraper. It is entirely secondary whether it is adorned with remnants of senseless Renaissance profiling; the main thing is that it is a
a concept purely modern, constructively given by the possibilities of modern engineering technology.
The skyscraper is a work of construction.
All architectures of previous epochs were, first and foremost, achievements of the highest constructibility of their time.
The Assyrian palaces, pyramids, Acropolis, Parthenon, Cathedral, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, etc. are splendid evidence of the building technology possibilities of that time, serving the construction of a space whose dimensioning conditioned its purpose. Achieving purpose by the most perfect technical means has been, is, and will be the primary principle of good architecture.
A skyscraper born from this principle is typically modern architecture, a logical sequence of spaces for the needs of modern life. Its modernity is not in a few centimeters of façade plaster; it lies within its spaces, just as the Gothic cathedral is not contained in the roses and window arches, but within the vertical rise of the nave space.
The invention of the skyscraper fundamentally impacted the overall disposition of the city, which adopted an orthogonal character corresponding to the straightforward nature of modern humans, for whom clear practical disposition is the primary obvious requirement for the environment in which they are to live.***)


The machine definitively ended the era of classical forms. By changing the system of work, it also changed its result. The machine opened a new chapter in human history and established the form of its products. There is no longer a danger of a renaissance of old forms. Two worlds, the past and the modern era are sharply delineated from the moment the machine produced its first product, whose form it indelibly impressed with its character, that is, when
the machine proved to be a more perfect, precise creator of form than mere manual production.
America is the homeland of the machine. It does not have art in the academically aesthetic sense, but the form of its products speaks a new language, incomprehensible to art historians. The dried aristocratism, which up to now has hindered fine arts from participating in the technical achievements of the new age, has caused art to be separated from life and its rhythm, stagnating on expressive means that sufficed for the medieval artist to paint an altar piece. Thus, until now, the only interpreter of new beauty has been photography. Photography (the impact of the machine on painting) has become for the modern person what small painting was in earlier times. Cinema has become, among other properties, partially also what fresco was before. There can be no doubt that the development of photography impacted painting as directly as the machine impacted every other manual work. It has denounced, at least forever, naturalism in painting. The question is how painting will cope with this new factor, which is too modernly equipped,
and is a significant competition. Photography has taken much from painting's previous holdings. If it is to drive it out from there, it must be armed as modernly as it is.
We acknowledge that it is conceivable for painting to convey more about New York with a single picture than a series of photographs, yet until now, photography remains the only pictorial interpreter of the new form of things. It works precisely and truthfully. It is impersonal, scientific, has all the qualities that fraternal align it with modern art, with new beauty.

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The accumulating obstacles are the best friends of the artist. The machine cannot be removed from the world; it is and will remain a pioneer of democracy, which is the ultimate goal of our hopes and desires. The architect of our time should know of no more important task than the use of this tool, as far as it is possible. But what does he do instead! He abuses this tool to create forms that arose in other times under distant skies, forms that today torment us, because we cannot escape them anywhere, and all this is done with the help of a machine, whose main task is to destroy these forms.
*) See the senseless masking of the construction with decoration, which has finally become an end in itself in architecture.
**) It is no coincidence that cinema, this solely purely modern art, found its best representatives in Americans, W. Hart, Fairbanks, Pickford, etc.
***) Picturesque romanticism, which had and has influence in resolving the dispositions of today's new colonies or regulatory plans of existing cities, is in direct opposition to the nature of modern man. America has no "artistic" prejudices that have given rise to such a reactionary institution as the "Club for Old Prague," which stands against any progress and makes impossible any modern initiatives in construction. Let us consider the absurdity of the whole thing. If someone had recalled in the 14th century and established a similar institution to conserve the existing appearance of the old city, which would stubbornly cling to the immutability of the city center, there could be an interesting view today of an intersection where, instead of the lively frequency of cars and trams, the citizenry would jump from stone to stone across unpaved streets.
Similarly, it seems ridiculous today to oppose modern progress, regardless of the fact that it is pointless work to try to hold back the surge of modern life with old Prague reminiscences. As far as we know, progress has never been prevented if it has proven to be effective. If it turns out that the placement of a skyscraper in Prague, right in the city center (for it would make little sense to build skyscrapers somewhere in Krč) is practical, it will be built, even if all old Prague citizens, out of despair, traditionally threw themselves from the stone bridge into the Vltava.