The
Modernization of Architecture in Vienna
By Sara Kendall
In the 19th Century, Vienna was
a changing city. In Vienna, as
well as in the rest of Europe, the revolutionary
year of 1848 brought radical changes in the structure
of society when the bourgeoisie threatened the power of the aristocracy. The construction of the Ringstrasse
in the place of the previous walls surrounding the city in 1857 allowed for
a new social mobility within Vienna, breaking down the physical separation
of the classes. The middle class was able to enter the city from the outer
suburbs to reside close to the historical Altstadt,
which resulted in a new culture of bourgeois art, music, and entertainment,
as well the establishment of Vienna as a tourist destination.
For the first time, Vienna was able to develop as a city of modern
bourgeois culture. The city filled
with artists and intellectuals, who helped to develop new ways of living and
thinking. The buildings formed
along the Ringstrasse were primarily designed by the leading historicist
architects, and, in true eclectic style, represented numerous architectural
styles of the past. While eclecticism
seemed to take over Viennese architecture, for avant-garde architects of the
late 19th century, it seemed essential to create a unified architectural
style that would reflect its time, rejecting this established standard of
architecture in Vienna. For these architects, the eclectic buildings
became "a metaphor for the discredited liberal era that spawned them-
the token of a worldview based on makeshift pragmatism without unifying ideals,
content to pastiche rather than create."
[1]
Otto Wagner, renowned Viennese architect
and professor, represented the first step in the transition from historicism
to modernism, the Jugendstil movement, stating, "Art and artists should
and must represented their times."
[2]
His own practice spanned from 1860-1918,
in which he produced a series of increasingly modern buildings. In response to this new way of thinking,
a group of his students started the Secessionist
movement that further challenged traditional practice.
The work of Josef Hoffmann and Joseph
M. Olbrich, two of Wagner's leading students, exemplified the Secessionist
style. Olbrich and Hoffman's architecture and
decorative arts were boldly geometric and characterized by abstract decorative
schemes. One of their contemporaries,
Adolf Loos, staked out an even bolder position, dismissing
ornament altogether as he sought to rethink the ways in which architects created
space.
In looking
at these four architects, one can understand the richness of the architectural
debate in Vienna at the turn of the century, as they each in their own way
sought to define an architectural language expressive of their time. Each
goes further in the quest for a truly modern architecture, as they attempted
to break away from the accepted architectural code of Vienna. While they were
seeking an architecture that was expressive of their time, they were also
architects very much of their place, Vienna. Perhaps because Viennese architecture
was for so long a collection of borrowed styles, each with its own rules of
ornamentation, the search for an authentic and therefore modern architecture
was inevitably focused on the question of decoration. Thus, the modernization
of architecture in Vienna, centered around this question, starting as a rejection
of a decorative language that was borrowed from the past, and culminating
in a rejection of decorative language altogether. Wagner’s understanding
of the potential of industrial materials as an artistic expression led to
Hoffman and Olbrich’s use of a more rational formal language. Finally,
Loos, in his disavowal of the notion of artistic style, eliminated all forms
of ornamentation from his own work.
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| Adolf Loos |