In the second half of the nineteenth century those mass products for daily use, which had escaped the stylistic force of the traditional arts and crafts, were the first to be perceived as an aesthetic problem. John Ruskin and William Morris sought to bridge the gap that had opened between utility and beauty in the everyday life of the industrial world by reforming the applied arts. The reform movement was led by a wider forward-looking architectural notion which accompanied the claim to form, from an architectural point of view, the entire physical environment of bourgeois society. Morris in particular recognized the contradiction between the democratic demands for universal participation in culture and the fact that, within industrial capitalism, increasing domains of human activity were being alienated from the creative cultural forces.
The second challenge to architecture arose from the development of new materials (such as glass and iron, steel and cement) and new methods of production (above all the use of prefabricated elements). In the course of the nineteenth century the engineers advanced the techniques of construction, thereby developing new design possibilities which shattered the classical limits of the constructional handling of planes and volumes. Originating from greenhouse construction, the glass palaces of the first industrial exhibitions in London, Munich and Paris, built from standardized parts, conveyed to their fascinated contemporaries the first impressions of new orders of magnitude and of constructional principles. They revolutionized visual experience and altered the spectators' concept of space, as dramatically as the railway changed the passengers' concept of time. The interior of the centreless repetitive London Crystal Palace must have had the effect of transcendence of all known dimensions of designed space.
Finally, the third challenge was the capitalist mobilization of labour, real estate and buildings, in general of all urban living conditions. This led to the concentration of large masses and to the incursion of speculation in the field of private housing. The reason for today's protests in Kreuzberg and elsewhere originates in that period. As housing construction became an amortizeable investment, so decisions about the purchase and the sale of estate, and construction, demolition and reconstruction, about renting and vacating property were freed from the ties of family and local traditions; in other words they made themselves independent of use-value considerations. The laws of the building and housing market altered the attitude towards building and dwelling. Economic imperatives also determined the uncontrolled growth of cities. Out of these arose the requirement of a kind of town planning which cannot be compared to baroque city developments. The way these two sorts of functional imperatives, those of the market with those of communal and state planning, intersect, and the way they entangle architecture in a new system of subordinations, in demonstrated in a grand style by the redevelopment of Paris by Haussmann, under Napoleon III. The architects played no noteworthy part in these plans.