The Story of Architecture by Witold Rybczynski

Author:Witold Rybczynski
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

95 Sagrada Família, Barcelona. Antoni Gaudí, 1882–1926. The east transept with the Nativity facade. This postcard photograph of the unfinished church was taken in 1950, twenty-four years after Gaudí’s death.

24

Modern Life

Vienna, early twentieth century

Art Nouveau lasted several decades and involved some wonderfully inventive designers—not only Gaudí, but also Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde in Brussels, Hector Guimard in Paris, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald in Glasgow, Louis Comfort Tiffany in New York, and Louis Sullivan in Chicago (about whom more later). Perhaps the hottest hotbed of creative activity was Vienna. On May 25, 1897, a group of nineteen Viennese artists, led by the painters Gustav Klimt and Koloman Moser and the architects Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann, “seceded” from the conservative Union of Austrian Artists. The so-called Secession was more like an arts club than a narrow orthodoxy, and it brought together a variety of individuals united in their dissatisfaction with the academic revival styles that characterized art and architecture in fin-de-siècle Vienna. The young firebrands—the leaders were all in their twenties and thirties—founded a magazine and organized exhibitions.

The following year, with the financial support of the steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein (the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s father), the Secessionists built their own exhibition pavilion called the Wiener Secessionsgebäude, the Vienna Secession Building. Their brave motto, which appeared over the entrance, read “To Every Age Its Art; To Art Its Freedom.” The building, designed by Olbrich (1867–1908), was a series of interlocking white boxes housing a skylit exhibition space. The white-painted plastered brick with gold trim was a striking contrast to the gray stone architecture of central Vienna. The severe rectangularity, influenced by the Mackintoshes, who were greatly admired by the Secessionists, was different from the organic forms of French and Belgian Art Nouveau, although the floral patterns painted on the walls were likewise influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. Nothing here suggested cultural nationalism: Vienna was simply too cosmopolitan, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that included Magyars, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Croats, and Bohemians. Olbrich was born in Silesia, Hoffmann in Moravia.

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