Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the crisis of representation could be taken as the leitmotif for the development of modern architecture. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, when the use of historical styles and forms was being questioned more and more and was proving itself to be increasingly unsuitable for new building projects and new methods of construction, the departure into modernity had already begun with a vehement rejection of historical building shapes and ornaments by the architectural avant-garde (cf. Loos 1964(cf. Loos [1908Le Corbusier 1964[1920). Such features were condemned not only because of their wastage of material, capital, and labor, but also because of their lack of content and meaning relevant to the social and spiritual reality of the time. A manifesto typical of this period puts it as follows:The sharp contrast between the modern and the ancient world originates in the fact that today, things exist that did not exist then. Elements have surfaced in our lives that people in those days could not dream of; there are material possibilities and spiritual directions with enormous consequences: a new ideal of beauty, still vague and only partially formed, but which is already beginning to fascinate even the masses. We have actually lost our penchant for the monumental, the overwhelming and the static, and have instead acquired a taste for the light and the practical, and for the transitory and the swift. We feel that we are no longer the people of cathedrals, palaces and imposing courtrooms but a people of large hotels, train stations, fantastic streets, gigantic harbors, market places, illuminated archways, reconstructions, and renovations. (Sant'Elia andMarinetti 1964 [1914]: 3) Renouncing all tradition and representation, this program for a radical new beginning in architecture, which was supported by many avant-garde architects and designers, led, in the course of the twentieth century, to complex and extremely varied creations that always circle around the Semiotica
