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William Lossow -Hermann Viehweger, Heat and power station, Dresden, 1903. From: Josef Strzygowski, Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart, Leipzig 1907, 14.
Source publication
The essay investigates the way Strzygowski, Dvořák and Tietze interpreted contemporary architecture, and also traces the basic premises of the Vienna School in their views. Viennese art historians, namely Dvořák and Tietze, shared a critical attitude toward historicism and eclecticism of he 19th century with their contemporaries. They regarded Otto...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... According to Strzygowski, the irregularity and the plurality of forms in buildings of this kind show a dominance of the 'principle of free rhythms', derived from the relief of the Nordic landscape. 16 Strzygowski pays equal respect to the -almost grotesquely -eclectic industrial constructions of Lossow and Viehweger in Dresden (Fig. 1). Clearly, the neo- romantic movement in German architecture corresponds with his notion of a wholesome Nordic art, standing in opposition to the anthropocentric classicist tradition. Leipzig 1907, 14. In order to endow his universal blueprints with an -at least apparent -aura of an objective scientific inquiry, Strzygowski attempts to ...
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Citations
... Viennese art historian Alois Riegl (1858Riegl ( -1905 stated that Modern paintings do not depict objects, but are geared to the human subject, because they try to evoke sensations and feelings in the individual viewer. 20 This simply acknowledges that art is addressed to the public. It behooves the science of interpreting works of art to posit the viewer at the starting-point of its considerations. ...
... Inspired originally by the past, especially the Baroque, Otto Wagner's work evolved toward an increasing simplification of the façade decoration. 20 He freed his buildings from sculptural ornamentation, but still designed a conventional articulation of the building volume. Wagner's flat mosaic surfaces did not result from "natural functionalism, " 21 but were separate from construction and form of the building. ...
Using empathy, as established by the Vienna School of Art History, complemented by insights on how the mind processes visual stimuli, as demonstrated by late 19th-century psychologists and art theorists, this book puts forward an innovative interpretative method of decoding the forms and spaces of Modern buildings. This method was first developed as scholars realized that the new abstract art appearing needed to be analysed differently than the previous figurative works. Since architecture experienced a similar development in the 1920s and 30s, this book argues that the empathetic method can also be used in architectural interpretation. while most existing scholarship tends to focus on formal and functional analysis, this book proposes that Modern architecture is too diverse to be reduced to a few common formal or ornamental features. Instead, by relying on the viewer’s innate psycho-physiological perceptive abilities, sensual and intuitive understandings of composition, form, and space are emphasized. These aspects are especially significant because Modern Architecture lacks the traditional stylistic signs. Including building analyses, it shows how, by visually reducing cubical forms and spaces to linear configurations, the exteriors and interiors of Modern buildings can be interpreted via human perceptive abilities as dynamic movement systems commensurate with the new industrial transportation age. This reveals an inner necessity these buildings express about themselves and their culture, rather than just an explanation of how they are assembled and how they should be used. The case studies highlight the contrasts between buildings designed by different architects, rather than concentrating on the few features that relate them to the zeitgeist. It analyses the buildings directly as the objects of study, not indirectly, as designs filtered through a philosophical or theoretical discourse. The book demonstrates that, with technology and science affecting culture and the arts deeply, Modern Architecture needs to be treated differently than earlier stylistic periods. It proposes a new chronology of Modernity that analyses this period’s own evolutionary trajectory and does not try to explain it as simply the last phase in artistic evolution since the beginning of human existence.
