5/15/2023 0 Comments Vienna secession coke![]() We found it easily enough, but not before passing blocks of sumptuous Neoclassical and Art Nouveau apartment buildings that faced the river across Masarykovo Nabrezi. One day in Prague, we walked from the Old Town up the Vltava River, looking for a building by Frank Gehry known as the “Dancing Building,” or simply as “Ginger and Fred,” after Rogers and Astaire. (We were in a private compartment, but Victoria will verify my account.) It took me several seconds to recover my equanimity. When I realized that I’d forgotten to visit it, I cried out in dismay. And in fact, by modernist standards, Looshaus is quite attractive. With its naked walls and frameless windows, it seemed to moon the imperial residence from across Michaelerplatz. But it was his Looshaus (1911) that got him in trouble with Emperor Franz Josef. Its architect, Adolf Loos, wrote Ornament and Crime - a criminal act in and of itself, it seems to me, for which he was not imprisoned. On the train to Prague, I suddenly realized that I’d totally forgotten to visit another early modernist building in Vienna. Try that with architecture and you might walk into a lamppost, or worse. You could close your eyes and still enjoy it. At least the producers of “The Magic Flute” didn’t mess with the music. Likewise, modern architecture has purged all the cues that tell people what a building is for and how to use it. ![]() In short, the cues needed to figure out the plot of an opera in another language had been eliminated. ![]() Actors entered through square holes in the cube and in the walls and floor of the stage, and were attired so as to confuse the sexes. A huge revolving cube that changed color and belched fire and smoke dominated the set. It was staged in a severely modernist fashion. The production of “The Magic Flute” we saw was also idiotic, and for similar reasons. His effort to do so was supremely idiotic. As an early modernist, Olbrich clearly had a hard time abandoning ornamentation. I did not feel silly then, however, because on that stretch of Park Avenue all of the glass boxes looked just like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s prototypical glass box.Įven from a distance, the Secession House was a striking building, crowned by a gilded bronze dome of laurel leaves. It reminded me of the time when I couldn’t find the Seagram Building, in Manhattan. Now that I could see it, my serial misidentification of the Secession House seemed remarkably silly of me. Just before we found it, we saw the Secession House - with no time to double back. We abandoned our search for Secession House to find the opera house. When we saw an odd church down the street, we thought that might be it. On we walked, but the image of Secession House had again slipped from my mind. We happened upon a set of bollards that looked more phallic than even bollards normally do. After realizing this wasn’t it, we continued down the street. Its architect might have been trying to simplify his approach to ornament.īut I checked the guide. ![]() We found a building with huge cartoon-like parrots at each corner. There was a tiny picture of the Secession House in my guidebook, but I kept forgetting what it looked like. We had an hour to kill before seeing Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” at the Staatsoperhaus, so we decided to visit Secession House (1898), by Josef Maria Olbrich, of the Jugendstil movement, which spurned historical styles for Zweck (purpose, as opposed to mere form). In Vienna, on our recent trip, an early modernist building led us on a wild goose chase. IN VIENNA AND PRAGUE, built before the divorce of art and architecture, where buildings are encrusted with ornament and statuary, Victoria and I hunted for modern architecture. Here’s the column on my 2005 trip to Vienna linked to in my last post:
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