Word: architecturee
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Until the last decade or so, turn-of-the-century Vienna was neglected by serious historians of architecture and art, considered somewhere between unfashionable and taboo. The architecture of Josef Hoffmann and Otto Wagner and the paintings of Gustav Klimt were camp curiosities at best -- parochial, high-strung, dead-end...
Now, with the opening of "Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design," a dense display of objects at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, the revised revisionism is official: the arts and crafts of early 20th century Vienna may have been idiosyncratic and lush, but they are products of...
In design and architecture, however, there was a strangely short period of clarity and balance just after the century turned, an aesthetic blip that coincided with the fruitful first few years of the Werkstatte. Hoffmann, Moser and its other founders, repelled by the residual fairy-tale flourishes of aging Jugendstil...
In architecture, the relative gifts of Hoffmann and Loos were reversed. Hoffmann seemed to lack a coherent, full-bodied vision: his designs were never more than the sum of their odd and luscious details. His best buildings, like the Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1904-08), stick rather intently to a naked neoclassicism...
Astute museumgoers will supply the missing history for themselves. And perhaps on their own they will also draw the tempting parallels between Vienna's fin-de-siecle and today's end-of-the-century ferment. Sometimes the connections are plain: a brooding eroticism pervaded Viennese art, and today in Manhattan...