Immediately after the Second World War there was for several years some continuing use of the modes of 1910, so to call them. This was natural because of the prolonged absence of most of the leaders of the intervening generation from the country—Gropius, Mies, and Mendelsohn never returned—and the renewed activity of so many of the older generation who had made their reputation in the period 1905-25 with which this chapter has chiefly dealt. Today it is as if Germany had lived through the stylistic developments of the twenties a second time, and now the newer sort of architecture is once again as ubiquitous there as it was in 1930.

These tidal waves of changing taste in Germany, each representing a sharp reaction against its predecessor, make difficult such a focusing of attention on a few creative and insurgent figures as gives dramatic pungency to the history of these decades in America and France. Jugendstil, Expressionismus, Neue Sachlichkeit,[[432]] these general movements, more than even so distinguished an individual as Behrens, are the real protagonists of the German story from 1900 to 1933; but in the international frame of reference they must be subordinated to the broader currents that dominated the architecture of the western world in the period. In that frame of reference the contribution of a few Austrians more than equalled that of the more prolific Germans, down at least to the First World War.

CHAPTER 21
THE FIRST GENERATION IN AUSTRIA, HOLLAND, AND SCANDINAVIA

The development of modern architecture in Austria between 1900 and the Nazi conquest has many connexions with that of Germany. The Austrian Olbrich had as much as anyone to do with setting off the reaction against the Art Nouveau in Germany after 1900. From the mid twenties, Behrens was living in Austria, not in Germany. Even so, and particularly for the years before the First World War, there is a separate and purely Austrian story, more limited than the German story yet at least equally notable for highly distinguished achievement. Two Austrian architects at least, Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos (1870-1933), if not Wagner’s pupil Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), were the equals of any of the leading German architects of their day, except perhaps Behrens. Wagner, already sixty in 1901, produced his finest work after that date. The Wiener Werkstätte, founded by Hoffmann in 1903, provided a centre of activity in the field of decoration comparable to what the Century Guild and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society had offered earlier in England. Above all, Loos—in part possibly because he, of all Europeans of his generation, knew American architecture best—demonstrated, from his earliest executed work of 1898, a determination to renew the art of building that was as revolutionary as Wright’s.

Soon after 1900 Wagner threw off all Art Nouveau influence. Yet the finest element in his masterpiece, the central hall of the Postal Savings Bank in the Georg Coch Platz in Vienna of 1904-6, still retains in the curvature of its glass roof and the tapering of its metal supports something of Art Nouveau grace (Plate [154B]). The exteriors of this massive edifice are lightened by the very original treatment of the geometrically organized wall-planes; the thin plaques of marble which provide the sheathing suggest volume, not mass, and the delicate relief of the few and simple projections quite avoids the ponderousness of most contemporary German work. As in so much of the best German work, however, the severity of form and even the specific character of certain ornamental features reflect in a stylized way the Grecian mode of a hundred years earlier. This is somewhat surprising in Vienna, where Romantic Classicism had been on the whole both unproductive and uncreative, but doubtless Wagner knew Schinkel’s work as well as did Behrens—certainly his lightness of hand is more comparable to Schinkel’s.

Not least interesting technically is the consistent employment of aluminium[[433]] in this building. The sculptured figures by Othmar Schimkowitz which crown the façade and the visible bolts that retain the granite and marble plaques are of this new metal; so also, apparently, are the structural members that support the glazed roof of the hall; at least they are completely sheathed with it. The large rear block of the bank dates from 1912, but the original vocabulary was retained by Wagner with only some slight simplification of the detailing of the plaquage.

Sankt Leopold, the cruciform church that serves as the chapel of the Steinhof Asylum on the Gallitzinberg at Penzing outside Vienna, was built by Wagner in 1904-7 at the same time as the Postal Savings Bank. This crowns his extensive hillside layout of the whole establishment, comparable in scale to the French asylums of the mid nineteenth century, but for the other buildings he was not directly responsible. Sankt Leopold is a large domed monument inviting comparison with Schinkel’s Nikolaikirche at Potsdam. However, the linear stylization of the detailing inside and out brings to mind Olbrich’s and Behrens’s buildings of its own day. There is no paraphernalia of Greek orders, yet the conceptual organization of the elements is certainly in the Romantic Classical tradition, with the four arms each quite cubic and the hemispherical dome raised on a cylindrical drum. As at Schmidt’s Neo-Gothic Fünfhaus church of the 1870s in Vienna, there are echoes of Fischer von Erlach’s Baroque Karlskirche here also, but the spirit is not at all Baroque. All the visible metalwork here, the sheathing of the dome, the statues of angels by Schimkowitz and of saints by Richard Luksch, and even the heads of the bolts that retain the marble plaques on the exterior walls, is of gilded bronze, not aluminium. This has not worn as well, for it has lost its gilt coating, peeled off many of the bolts, and streaked the walls with verdigris. Inside the church the mosaics by Rudolf Jettmar and the stained glass by Kolo Moser combine to rival the most sumptuous domestic ensembles produced by the Wiener Werkstätte, but the general effect, while light and even gay, still has a monumental dignity appropriate to a church. The walls are of plain white plaster, and narrow bands of geometrical ornament in gold and blue panel the cross vault—for, curiously enough, the central dome is not exploited internally.

Crisper in design and much simpler altogether than the Steinhof church are the blocks of low-cost flats that Wagner built in 1910-11 at 40 Neustiftsgasse and next door at 4 Döblergasse. Their walls are covered with stucco lined off to suggest plaquage, and the decoration is reduced to thin bands of dark blue tiles that merely outline the surface planes. Needless to say, these blocks have not survived as well as the expensively built bank and church. Wagner’s last works, a hospital not far from the Steinhof Asylum and his own house at 28 Hüttelbergstrasse, both in Penzing and of 1913, are typical but rather less interesting.

Hoffmann’s first architectural work of any consequence, a Convalescent Home at Purkersdorf built in 1903-4, was already simpler than Wagner’s hospital of a decade later, if considerably less architectonic in effect. The plain white stucco walls are full of ample windows almost devoid of surrounding frames and very regularly disposed; cornices and other conventional elements of detail are either omitted or reduced to an absolute minimum. The result is a structure that would still look very fresh and crisp half a century later were it not, like Wagner’s flats, in shabby physical condition.