Otto wagner, adolf loos, and the road to modern architecture
Lynnette Widder2002
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Abstract
published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt
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Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism
Common Knowledge, 2011
In this thesis I address the role of architectural history, criticism, and theory in the conception and practice of modernism between the early 1930s and the present. In the search for an authoritative modernity following the heterogeneous experiments of the avant-gardes in the first quarter of the 20 th century, historians played a decisive role in the definition of programs, forms, and styles, that might be seen to unify an apparently fragmented and linguistically fractured field, and, equally importantly, to provide authority in history for an architecture increasingly seen as detached from its past. Henry Russell Hitchcock's Romanticism and Reintegration (1929) and his later International Style (1932) with Philip Johnson, had attempted at once to trace the origins of modernism to the late eighteenth century picturesque and to consolidate the disparate manners of the early Twentieth Century within a single stylistic rubric modeled on the "international" Gothic of the 12th century. Emil Kaufmann, on the other hand, in his Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier of 1933, found the roots of a rationalist modernism in the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, a theme later to be developed by Colin Rowe. Pevsner's genealogy of the Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) from the Arts and Crafts revivals of the late nineteenth century to Gropius, had framed modernism within the terms of the German experience and according to functional principles. Sigfried Giedion, fresh from his study of the Baroque, his support of Le Corbusier, and his participation in CIAM, argued in his Space, Time and Architecture (1941) for an architecture of space-time fusion derived from the new physical concepts of the early Twentieth century, and later in Mechanization Takes Command for an architecture based on technological advances, setting the tone for the scientific progressivism of Reyner Banham. Each of these histories was clearly influenced by a certain partisanship towards a particular form of modernism-Hitchcock and Johnson's "white" style, Kaufmann and 9 Giedion's Corbusianism, Pevsner's support of Gropius-that, in the period after World War II, was regarded suspiciously by the next generation of historians, themselves critical of what were seen as the evident failure of the early modern movements to achieve their stated social or technical goals. Colin Rowe, studying with Wittkower, found solace in the work of Palladio for the apparent closure of Le Corbusier's modernism after the 1930s. Banham, studying with Pevsner, found that the Anglo-German prejudice and temporal limits to his study had left a gap to be filled-not only as between 1914 and 1930, but also substituting the Futurists for the Arts and Crafts movement as the "real" pioneers. Yet it is clear that Rowe and Banham, in their turn were writing history in an advocacy mode, the one with a sense of the inevitability of "mannerist" repetition, the other with an unbounded optimism in technological development. These new histories of modernism were quickly taken up by architects as authorization for their own practices and as reservoirs for references and sources. While Emil Kaufmann's Eighteenthcentury had found its admirers in architects as diverse as Philip Johnson and Aldo Rossi and Pevsner had inspired a whole group of "Victorianists" dedicated to the revival of Nineteenth Century styles and to "Townscape" as a way of envisioning urban renewal. Rowe, first as a Tutor at Liverpool, then as a professor in Texas, Cambridge, and Cornell, formed a circle including James Stirling, Robert Maxwell, and Alan Colquhoun, and was to influence whole generations of architects, first in Austin Texas, then in Cornell, New York. Banham, as a coordinator of the Independent Group, was first a supporter of the Smithsons, then, with technological enthusiasm, of Archigram and many other megastructural experimenters. The idea that the role of the historian was in some way to support contemporary practice, was to be challenged in the late 1960s by Manfredo Tafuri who castigated what he called "instrumental" or "operative" history in his Teorie e storia dell'architettura of 1968 in favor of generating a new architecture. In this sense, as it treats of many of those friends and colleagues that have touched my career at one moment or another, this thesis traces an unfinished intellectual autobiography.
History of Modern Architecture Revisited
2012
The latest work by Jean-Louis Cohen is an original contribution to the history of modern architecture. His fresh approach brings together various
Shifting the stones of little magazines: The translation and transformation of Otto Wagner’s Moderne Architektur
Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2016
Proceeding from Manfredo Tafuri’s discussion of historical writing as a process of shifting stones, this paper perceives all revisionist architectural criticism as an act of mining, to unearth the implications of both the verbal and visual discourse founded on the modern concept of architecture as language. This mining is particularly evident in the surge of European to English translations published within post-modern architectural little magazines. For the purposes of this essay, I examine the case study 9H journal, produced between 1980 and 1995 by a voluntary editorial team of Master of Science students at the Bartlett School at University College, London (UCL). 9H was one of the first British little magazines to mine Eurocentric revisionist theory to form international relationships with theorists and practitioners. In 1983, 9H translated Otto Wagner’s nineteenth-century manifesto ‘Modern Architecture’. A comparison of Wagner’s original and 9H’s post-modern publication reveal no shifts in verbal language, yet significant transformations in visual language through the editorials selection of images. Through a historic framework constructed from the writings of Kenneth Frampton, Roland Barthes and Beatriz Colomina, identifying both the text and the rhetoric of the image as transmitting linguistic and cultural meaning, this paper seeks to address the following: to what extent does the interaction of language and images in architectural publication influence the reading of the text? What post-modern interests did this translation serve through the ways the 9H editorial transformed Wagner’s visual language? Finally, what is obscured from Wagner’s language through 9H’s visual transformation? This investigation proposes mining within architectural historiography as a critical method to navigate the discursive formations that emerged within the counter-culture of mainstream post-modernism, and in a current milieu where the image dominates, it encourages theorists and practitioners to understand the important connoted meanings embedded in photography and drawing. Paper presented at GOLD: the 33rd annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) 2016.
Sonja Hildebrand, Michael Gnehm, Introduction, in: Architectural History and Globalized Knowledge: Gottfried Semper in London, Mendrisio: Mendrisio Academy Press/Zurich: gta Verlag, 2021
Architectural History and Globalized Knowledge: Gottfried Semper in London, edited by Michael Gnehm and Sonja Hildebrand, 2021
ARCH 382-001: History of Architecture IV for Art & Design Students
2018
The historic sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.-T S Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1919 How do architects and their professional colleagues (interior designers, engineers, builders) create works of significance? What conditions and values conspire to influence the making of memorable and lasting built works? British Prime Minister, historian, and writer Winston Churchill remarked that "We shape our buildings and afterward they shape us." 1 How does that cycle work? What circumstances come together to shape the design of a building? How does that building in turn influence the cultural landscape and the built environment which follow? Architecture 382-001 HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE IV READING BUILDING(S) IN CONTEXT: Examining Forces Shaping Modern Architectural Design 1850-2010 3 of 15 Reading Assignments & Exam Schedule Link to Littman Library website for posted readings: http://librarius.njit.edu/vwebv/search?browseFlag=N&instructorId=35%7CHarp%2C++Cleve&depart mentId=0&courseId=0 §ionId=0&recCount=25&searchType=5&page.search.search.button=Search For assistance, contact Littman Librarian Danielle Reay
The Historiography of Modern Architecture: Twenty-five Years Later
2015
Why reopen Panayotis Tournikiotis’ The Historiography of Modern Architecture? What for? There are two basic reasons for which Tournikiotis’ study is still a useful research tool after 25 years: first, for the historians he covers, it provides the reader with interesting references for further study; and, second, for the study of history and how it is written. In his last chapter, Tournikiotis tries to point out the lessons offered by his discussion on the histories. He emphasizes repeatedly how each history presents modern architecture and how each one tries to design the architecture of the present or even the future. Does this hold true for historiography as well? Is this book, as a discussion on nine different histories, projecting what historiography should be in the future? What is Tournikiotis’ real proposal? The aim of this study is to present how several authors have revisited the history and historiography of modern architecture after Tournikiotis’ dissertation (defended in 1988), especially after its publication in English in 1999. This essay has two main objectives: first, to reconsider the impact of Tournikiotis’ Historiography on further studies of the matter; and, second, to provide a bibliography, as complete as possible. The Historiography of Modern Architecture is a perfect manual for initiating students in the study of the histories of modern architecture. To try to ‘complete’ it, discussing what has been written since, seems like a small addition to what should be considered as a compulsory starting point for every study of architectural historiography.
In searching for the rots of minimalism in architecture: Formal silence of Adolf Loos
Arhitektura i urbanizam, 2011
Architectural examples of minimalism together with strict forms of modern movements and the possibilities offered by new materials and technologies contribute to the triumph of aesthetics, which has become a symbol of our times. Minimalism in architecture, as the most original contribution to the idea of simplicity in architecture today has its roots in different areas, as well as in the creation of prominent individuals -authors' strong individualities that do not tolerate any kind of categorization. One such author is certainly Adolf Loos. His theoretical ideas regarding decorations were sensational, because while the modernists had a dilemma about where and how to place ornaments, Loos was adamant: his drastic solution predicted the complete elimination of ornament. In our time, minimalist architecture revives the simplicity of Adolf Loos, whose design rejected historicism and its parasites, decoration, on behalf of pronounced rationalism. It is possible to follow the guiding principle of his "formal silence" from Carl Andre to Herzog & de Meuron, as well as over the Mediterranean vernacular architecture to Alberto Campo Baeza and Alvaro Siza.
From Ornament to Object. Genealogies of Architectural Modernism (Yale University Press, 2012)
In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, humble objects of everyday life—from crockery and furniture to clothes and tools—began to receive critical attention in relationship to architecture. Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism. Rather than the well-known story in which an absorption of technology and mass production created a radical aesthetic that broke decisively with the past, Payne argues for a more gradual shift, as the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken over by objects of daily use. As she demonstrates, the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier should not be seen only as the ignition point of modernism, but also as the culmination of a conversation about ornament and what constitutes architectural eloquence that goes back to the Renaissance. Payne looks beyond the “usual suspects” of philosophy, industry and science and identifies theoretical catalysts for architecture’s shift of attention from ornament to object in fields as varied as anthropology and ethnology; art history and the museum; and archaeology and psychology.
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Call for Papers: Issue #7 of Histories of Postwar Architecture
Histories of Postwar Architecture n.7 December 2020, 2020
Hélène Jannière (Université Rennes 2) and Paolo Scrivano (Politecnico di Milano), scientific coordinators of the Mapping Architectural Criticism network, are guest editing the next issue of HPA – Histories of Postwar Architecture. A call for papers has been launched on the topic Committed, Politicized, or Operative: Figures of Engagement in Criticism from 1945 to Today. Deadline for paper submission: July 31, 2020 Please find more information below Hélène Jannière (Université Rennes 2) et Paolo Scrivano (Politecnico di Milano), coordinateurs scientifiques du réseau Mapping Architectural Criticism, sont les rédacteurs invités du prochain numéro de HPA – Histories of Postwar Architecture. Un appel à contribution a été lancé sur le sujet Committed, Politicized, or Operative: Figures of Engagement in Criticism from 1945 to Today. Date limite pour l'envoi des propositions: 31 juillet, 2020 Veuillez trouver plus d'informations ci-dessous ---- Presentation In a 1995 article on the renewal of architectural criticism, French architect and critic Bernard Huet referred to Charles Baudelaire to define art criticism as necessarily – in the poet’s words – “partial, impassionate, political”. During the 1990s, perhaps as a reaction to the 1980s, when in many specialized publications architectural criticism was identified as “communication” or even as promotion of architects and architectures, it emerged an extensive nostalgia for a notion of criticism associated to the historical avant-gardes. In this “committed” criticism or in the “politicized” one it was possible to emphasize the critic’s influential and active role in discovering, promoting, and intellectually supporting groups of artists or architects. The idea of a “golden age” of criticism has thus spread, being from time to time related to the end of the 19th century, to the 1920s, and to the 1960s and 1970s. This issue of HPA intends to collect studies devoted to historical examples of “committed” and “politicized” criticism, reflecting on the real meanings of these concepts and on the themes and subjects to which they are tied. On the one hand, the figure of “committed” critic might be linked to the art and architecture avant-gardes from the end of the 19th century onward, hence defining a privileged relationship between critic and artist/architect; on the other, “politicized” criticism can be characterized as the understanding in political terms of architectural and city phenomena. Among the questions the issue wants to address are: in which way do these definitions of “committed” and “politicized” criticism come close to or differ from the definition of “operative” criticism, in the various meanings that have been attributed to it since Manfredo Tafuri? What are the theoretical tools, the rhetorical constructions, and the intellectual and political references of “committed” and “politicized” criticism? Should the latter be necessarily bound to the author’s belonging to a party or political group? What are their principal ways of circulation (specialized periodicals, journals, targeted actions)? In which measure did “politicized” criticism influence architecture’s historical narrative? And finally, what are the interlacements and the convergences between criticism’s intellectual and artistic engagement and the political commitment? The issue of HPA intends to include contributions dealing with specific case studies or themes, with a periodization that spans from the end of the Second World War to the present date. Guidelines and deadlines Please find the complete guidelines and deadlines for the submission in the pdf attached. About HPA HPA – Histories of Postwar Architecture is a biannual open-access peer-reviewed Journal that aims to publish innovative and original papers on post-war architecture, with no geographical, methodological, historiographical or disciplinary restrictions. Find more information about the journal here.
'Architecture as Autobiography': Lived Space in Heinz Emigholz's "Loos Ornamental"
This is the text of a paper delivered at the Assembling Identities Conference at the University of Glasgow in 2013. The paper considers Heinz Emigholz’s attempt to construct a biography of Austrian architect Adolf Loos through a minimally mediated encounter between architecture and cinema in his film, Loos Ornamental (2009). The film is part of Emigholz’s on-going series ‘Architecture as Autobiography’. With no voiceover Emigholz documents Loos’s buildings in chronological order using a montage of long-duration shots filmed with static cameras. The film opens with the site of Loos’s birth, now a hotel bearing a plaque in his honour, and closes with a sequence at his grave-site. Structurally speaking, in this way, the film embodies the life. However, by paying particular consideration to Emigholz’s documentation of the Müller Haus, I argue that the film’s aesthetic maps directly on to the two predominant theoretical underpinnings of the architect’s work: a departure from ‘ornament’; and the principle of ‘lived space’ which informed the design of his interiors. Drawing on the criticism of Beatriz Colomina and Andrew Benjamin, and invoking Giuliana Bruno’s writing on haptic cinema, I explore how, through attention to surface and depth, the film reproduces architectural space and thus embodies a Loosian identity.
Architecture, Its Histories, and Their Audiences
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2018
Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams, The Architecture of Art History: A Historiography. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Pp. 168. £17.49 (paper)
History of Humanities, 2020
This work by Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams examines the intellectual basis for positioning art and architecture together within the academic discipline of art history (6). It proposes a history of the interconnection between the two disciplines (history of art and history of architecture) and its dissolution in the course of twentieth-century historiography. The main question is, when and "why the dissolution of the link happened, why it was so little commented on," a point that has inexplicably been neglected in earlier historiography: "one kind of evidence is how unconcerned with this theme are even those who have reflected most cogently upon the nature of the discipline [of art history] in recent decades" (9-10). In the contemporary historiographical context, as the authors state, the separation between art history and architectural history, if acknowledged at all, is simply assumed as a matter of fact, unquestioned and untheorized. The authors sketch the cultural reasons for the loosening of this nexus in a digression that starts in the German-speaking academic world in the last decades of the nineteenth century (11). The union of the two disciplines is in fact one of the main features of Kunstwissenschaft, and it is tightly connected with the categories at the basis of the German art historical tradition, since art and architecture were seen as primary expressions of Stil, Zeitgeist, or Kunstwollen. As Crinson and Williams point out, the imbrication of architecture and art is deeply rooted in a nineteenth-century philosophical and cultural background that transcends the work of individuals who worked as both artist and architect (13). The narrative focuses then on the cultural context generated by the diaspora of German academics toward English-speaking universities in the 1930s. In the postwar decades, the idea of the imbrication of art and architecture seems to disappear. The main explanation for this could be the vulnerability of the categories of Kunstwissenschaft to cultural simplifications during the Nazi period (16). This ideological bias, together with an often only indirect knowledge of the written work of German-speaking scholars (like Alois Riegl) in the English-speaking academic world, contributed to the abandonment of a kunstwissenschaftlich methodological approach and, as a consequence, of the connection of art and architecture that it implicitly supposed. The volume examines the absence of this nexus relative to the work of two art historians, Leo Steinberg and Michael Baxandall, who were pupils of German diasporic scholars. History of architecture is read as a "ghostly" and "unconscious" presence that haunted the written work of both, even if studiously avoided as a distinct subject of research.
‘Architecture’: exploring the treatise
Architectural Theory Review, 2007
"Architecture's Historical Turn" Book Review (Long Version) 2010.
March of 2011. Regrettably, the original version was too long for inclusion in the journal, and my inexperience at the time led me to shorten it rather than submitting it elsewhere. Given my continued -if rarely explicit-interest on the topic, here is the longer version, which, contrary to the published one, may read better or at least unpack some unintended hermetism. In the first part I attempt a summary of the book based on the author's arguments and terminology. In the Jorge Otero-Pailos, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University has written a history of architectural phenomenology. This is not a history of architecture and phenomenology but of an architectural movement that freely inspired by philosophical phenomenology surreptitiously provoked architectural postmodernism's "turn to history." This movement was not a unitary one but rather a "social assemblage" of authors, institutions, and networks, whose coherence and unity can be "only understood retrospectively." Given its elusive subject, the author employs a novel "polygraphic" (as opposed to monographic) method that aims at discovering and reconstructing its theme from disparate fragments. To give cohesiveness to this fragmentariness, the book is divided into four biographical chapters, each discussing one major "architectural phenomenologist" (Jean Labatut, Charles W. Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton), each providing an independent entry to the larger field of architectural phenomenology.
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