Brokers of Modernity

Front matter

MARTIN KOHLRAUSCH

Cah | C ` Li EAST CENTRAL Me ` EUROPE AND THE RISE CT OF MODERNIST bel ARCHITECTS, CT — 1910—1950

LEUVEN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Table of Contents

Note on Translation Abbreviations

Introduction Brokers of Modernity Why Modernist Architects?

Modernist Architects and Modernity

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Notes

Illustration Credits

List of Illustrations

1. Film The Black Cat. Poelzig’s modernist villa above the war cemetery 32 2. Villa Tugendhat near Brno (current view) 34 3. Port of Gdynia, a symbol of the achievements of the Second Polish Republic 40 4. Statistic for the dire housing situation in Warsaw and Poland

in comparison with Western Europe. The graph stresses the

overcrowding of single room flats (below) 42 5. School of Political Science, designed by B. Lachert and J. Szanajca 46 6. CIWF, Warsaw, designed by E. Norwerth 46 y Collage of recent architectural designs from Poland for the

Triennale 1933, Milan 51 8. Artificial Fertilizer pavilion by S. Syrkus and Electrolux pavilion by

S. and B. Brukalski. PeWuKa Poznań 1929 52 9. Trade Fair Palace, Prague and staircase Café Era, Brno, both current views 53 10. Melnikov house, Moscow, front facade 58 11. Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Der Architekt 63 12. Designs by graduates of the Faculty of Architecture, WUT, 1933 73 13. ` Architects’ Ball at the Faculty of Architetcure, WUT, 1938 74 14. ` Birth years of architects awarded building commissions in Poland

between 1919 and 1939, showing (1) projected plans and (2)

completed projects. A: born before 1875, B: 1876-90, C: 1891-

1905, D: after 1906. 75 15. Final diplomas at Faculty of Architecture, WUT. 1921-1939, of

which number of women 76 16. Increase in number of organized architects in Poland and Warsaw, 1919-1938 77 17. ` Machine culture in the BLOK journal 84 18. B. Lachert, house of the architect 85 19. S. Syrkus contribution to the Machine Age exhibition 87 20. B. Brukalska’s design for a kitchen and its rational use 88 21. Apartment building, S. Syrkus, 1930s 9] 22. National planning. Map of COP, 1938 92 23. Sanatoria in Otwock and Istebna, Poland 96

Entry for League of Nations competition by Henryk Oderfeld and S. Syrkus 98

Cover of the journal Praesens 1 106 Group picture CIAM-Ost meeting at Budapest. Seated: S. Giedion,

H. and S. Syrkus 115 WSM exhibition on the minimum dwelling 122 WSM projects in Warsaw 125 Project Simultaneous Theatre, design S. Syrkus 126 The visual allure of modernism. The Brukalski couple’s own house

covered in Praesens 1930 138 The promise of reinforced concrete. Examples in Praesens 1926 and 1930 140 Cover of the BLOK journal 143 ‘Architecture today’ in Poland and exhibition on architecture in

primarily Central European countries, 44, 1930, 1933 144 S. Syrkus in 44, 1937 146 Czechoslovak modernist designs in Praesens, 1930 149 Lech Niemojewski, plans for a future Warsaw, commercial district

and street lay-out, 1925 150 Examples of interaction between picture and text. Sport facilities in AiB 152 Living modernism. Painting Two Figures, F. Molnár 160 Banquet for French architects in Warsaw 1932, in AA 162 CIAM IV, Patris II, H. Syrkus with Le Corbusier and S. Giedion 163 DOM, Campaign An Affordable Home of Your Own, 1932 166 Polish pavilion at the Paris World Fair, 1937 169

PeWuKa of 1929 in Poznan and Main pavilion of Brno Exhibition Grounds built for the Exhibition of Contemporary Culture in Czechoslovakia on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the new state (current view) 170 Anatolia Hryniewicka-Piotrowska, the Women’s Labour pavilion, PeWuKa 171 PeWuKa, ‘Picture Language’ and social questions 172 Pavilions at PeWuKa 173 Functionalist buildings on large scale in Zlín 200 Le Corbusier in Zlín, 1935 201

C. van Eesteren, Sketch of Warsaw, showing public property for

housing purposes (“Staatsgelande für Wohnzwecke”) lying north of

the city limits 205 Różański plan for Warsaw, designating residential areas and green aereas, 1928 212 Office for the Regional Plan for Warsaw at the Exhibition for

Housing Construction, Warsaw 1935 214 Starzyński and politicians visiting the Warsaw of Tomorrow

exhibition with maps of Warsaw in Poland and in Europe behind them, 1936 219

List of Illustrations

55. 56.

73. 74. 75. 76.

WArsaw, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow exhibition, 1938. Map of Warsaw showing schools and cultural institutions, map showing progress of public transportation network extrapolated into the future Warsaw, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow exhibition, 1938: S. Starzyński (left) and S. Różański

Map showing pollution in Warsaw for CIAM IV congress

Maps from Warszawa Funkcjonalna. Warsaw at the crossroads of European communication arteries

Maps from Warszawa Funkcjonalna. Communicating urbanistic information with visual shorthand

Maps from Warszawa Funkcjonalna. Clusters of future urban development Design for a Pilsudski forum for Warsaw, 1938

National Museum, Warsaw

Cover of last issue of AiB, June 1939

Cover of the book Defense of Warsaw by Teresa Zarnowerówna Prudential building Warsaw: plan, construction phase and final state Plans of housing estates for Kolo, Warsaw, H. Syrkus, 1947, initiated during wartime

Letter S. Syrkus from Auschwitz of 25 July 1944

H. Syrkus to C. van Eesteren post-war postcard of the office of PAU showing site of S. Syrkus’ capture

Destruction of Warsaw after the 1944 Uprising. Prudential building up front Members of BOS

Kolo estate built between 1947 and 1950, designed by H. Syrkus during the war

Spychalski and Dwight Eisenhower visiting the remains of the Old Town of Warsaw

Continuities of planning? First image: S. Starzyński at the Warsaw of Tomorrow exhibition, 1936. Second image: B. Bierut on 22 June 1948, being shown designs for the Trasa W-Z main traffic artery by architect Józef Sigalin. Also present is Roman Piotrowski, amongst others CDT department store (‘Smyk’), 1948-1952, the last prominent modernist design in Warsaw s inner city before the breakthrough of Socialist Realism

Telegram H. Syrkus to E Forbát of 4 July 1945

Exhibition catalogue Warsaw Lives. Destruction and reconstruction Warsaw Lives. Projected Warsaw skyscrapers

H. Syrkus, with mayor of Warsaw S. Tołwiński and his wife Joanna visiting Stockholm, 1948

H. Syrkus with Le Corbusier and Josep Lluís Sert at CIAM congress in Bergamo, 1949

267 269 272 273

Note on Translation

Translations are, by their nature, a form of compromise and when using sources from a range of languages the respective compromises are sometimes painful. In order to keep this book readable original names from languages other than English were only used or added for organizations, journals etc. and for specific terms that are hard to translate into English. Part of the compromise also applied to personal names. In a Polish context Helena Syrkus would be referred to as Helena Syrkusowa, and Barbara Brukalska and Stanislaw Brukalski, if addressed as a couple, would be named Brukalscy. In order to avoid confusion this book uses Syrkus — as was done, e.g. in the CIAM context — and the male form Brukalski is used to refer to both ‘Brukalscy’.

Translations from languages other than English are my own unless otherwise noted.

Abbreviations

L Architecture dAujourd hui

Architektura i Budownictwo (Architecture and Building)

Académie Européenne Méditerranée

Svenskt arkitektur- och designcentrum (Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, Museum of Architecture)

Archiwum Państwowe m. st. Warszawy (State Archive Warsaw)

artysci rewolucyjni, awangarda rzeczywista (revolutionary artists or real avant-garde)

Bauhaus-Archiv

Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (National Development Bank)

Biuro Odbudowy Stolicy (Office for the Reconstruction of Warsaw) Congres Internationaux d Architecture Moderne

Commission internationale de coopération intellectuelle

Committee of Architectural Experts

Comité International pour la Réalisation du Probléme Architectural Contemporain

Centralny Instytut Wychowania Fizycznego (Central Institute for Physical Excercises)

Centralny Okreg Przemystowy (Central Industrial District)

Comité Permanent International des Architectes

Dom, Osiedle, Mieszkanie (House, housing estate, apartment)

van Eesteren papers

Eidgenóssische Technische Hochschule Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich)

Forbát papers

Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur

International Federation for Housing and Town Planning Internationaler Verband für Wohnungswesen (International Federation for Housing)

KI LNA MA MARS NAI OGD

PAU

PeWuKa

PFM PZA RIA SAP SARP

SPB

SP TCPA TOR TRM TRZW

TUP TUR

UIA

Konstruktivistische Internationale (Constructivist Internationale)

League of Nations Archives

Muzeum Architektury, Wroclaw

Modern Architectural Research Group

Netherlands Architecture Institute (Het Nieuwe Instituut), Rotterdam Organizacja Gospodarstwa Domowego (Organisation for Domestic Economy)

Pracownia Architektoniczno-Urbanistyczna (Architectural-urbanistic workshop)

Powszechna Wystawa Krajowa w Poznaniu (the General National Exhibition held in Poznań)

Państwowy Fundusz Mieszkaniowy (National Housing Fund)

Powszechny Zjazd Architektów (General Convention of Architects) Reunion International dArchitectes

Stowarzyszenie Architektów Polskich (Association of Polish Architects) Stowarzyszenie Architektów Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (Association of Architects of the Republic of Poland)

Stoleczne Przedsigbiorstwo Budowlane (Building Operation of the Capital City)

Helena Syrkus papers

Town and Country Planning Association

Towarzystwo Osiedli Robotniczych (Association for Workers Settlements) Towarzystwo Reformy Mieszkaniowej (Society of Housing Reform) Towarzystwo Rozwoju Ziem Wschodnich (Agency for the Development of the Eastern Territories)

Towarzystwo Urbanistów Polskich (Association of Polish Town Planners) Towarzystwo Uniwersytetu Robotniczego (Association for Workers’ University)

Union of International Associations

WGA WSM WUT WZM ZUS ZRSS

Technical Studios)

Walter-Gropius-Archiv

Warszawska Spóldzielnia Mieszkaniowa (Warsaw Housing Cooperative) Politechnika Warszawska (Warsaw University of Technology) Warszawski Zespół Miejski (Town-complex Warsaw)

Zaklad Ubezpieczeń Społecznych (The Social Insurance Institution) Związek Robotniczych Stowarzyszeń Spółdzielczych (Federation of Workers’ Cooperatives)

Introduction Brokers of Modernity

I've reason to believe that what I find

Is gonna change the face of human kind And all these years before well I was blind That 's my conclusion

Cause I'm the architect

(dEUS, The Architect)

In 1925 a rare type of building made its appearance in the literary world: a house entirely constructed of glass, prefabricated yet individualized, light but stable, flatroofed but with walls which changed colour according to the surrounding landscape. The cavity walls allowed for the movement of water — warm in winter-time and cold in summer-time — which generated a comfortable indoor temperature while the presence of vents ensured the movement of fresh air. The circulating water also guaranteed continuous cleansing of walls and floors. Even the furniture, also made out of glass, underwent this continuous cleansing ritual: These houses of glass "spread like the plague once people found out about it. Who would want to live in a decaying, mouldy wooden sty eaten away by dry rot, or in a hovel that's a breeding ground for rheumatism, tuberculosis and scarlet fever [...]?”!

This rhetorical question is asked by one of the protagonists in Stefan Zeromski’s 1925 novel Przedwiosnie (The Coming Spring). Zeromski was one of the most influential Polish writers of that era. Although this was his last novel, it was the first novel of significance to use the new Polish state as its central theme. In the first chapter the protagonist’s father tells his son — both returning from civil-war Russia to Poland — the fantastic story of a relative. This cousin allegedly started constructing houses of glass immediately after the First World War, using sand from coastal dunes and electrical energy generated by the sea in ingenious factories. The glass houses then set offa deep social transformation. Urban standards became the norm in rural areas as a result of the cleanliness of the glass walls and water enforced on the inhabitants who were former farmers. Further still, "the old cities, those fearful banes of the old civilization’, will start to disappear, supplanted by a new kind of garden city along "the tracks of electrified trains”. This vision culminated in workers’ apartment buildings in Warsaw becoming “more comfortable, healthier, cleaner, and more beautiful than the most fanciful palaces of the aristocracy”?

Inspired by the architect Jan Koszczyc-Witkiewicz, the image of the glass house served Zeromski in a twofold way. On the one hand the houses of glass symbolized raising workers and farmers to a higher standard of hygiene, culture and education. On the other hand this ‘invention’ served as an antidote to communist tendencies represented in the novel by the son. Wise reform based on science and technology is contrasted against crude revolt and the power of innovative architecture is presented as the key to building a better society. “Engineer” Baryka, the cousin and master brain behind the comprehensive project, creates a social environment which helps end class differences and facilitates moving on from the ills of the 19th century: social deprivation, illnesses and germ-infested dwellings. Unsurprisingly, his factories, where the houses are produced, are organized as co-operatives and informed by scientific principles.’

The glass houses represent a future which made sense in an environment lacking any of the improvements these houses promised. Further, the glass houses speak to the expectations projected on architects turned engineers as builders of far more than a few walls covered by a facade. Three features of Zeromski’s literary picture were to become typical of the role modernist architects came to play in Interwar Europe. First, the notion of a tabula rasa, which would allow for the implementation of radically new solutions. Second, the decisive role of architects in reforming society and, finally, the stress placed on technology and science, including enlightened but potentially coercive forms of engaging with workers and tenants.

As Zeromski's novel and his image of the glass house suggest, and as this study will argue, these features found particular expression in East Central Europe, and Poland specifically. By focusing on developments in this region a sharper picture emerges of the impact of the rise of modernist architects on societies throughout Europe. Zeromski’s vision, presented at the very moment when far-reaching social housing schemes were developed in Poland, strongly influenced the imagination of those involved in the Polish movement for housing reform.* The metaphor ‘houses of glass’ was used in Poland in a manner which referenced discourses on hygiene, planning, and social reform in general. The image of the glass house should, therefore, be understood in a much wider context — as should the changing role of modernist architects. Providing answers to the housing crisis and to the ongoing evolution of cities turned into a central problem for Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, the newly formed states in East Central Europe. This was a question which determined their internal and external legitimacy and thus was a question of the highest social and political order. As Zeromski indirectly establishes, it was also a question which determined successful navigation between Soviet Communism and a West that was too remote to simply emulate.

Examples of buildings which in any way resembled Zeromski’s houses of glass in Poland were scarce and fewer in number than in the Netherlands or Germany, countries which are well-known as frontrunners of architectural modernism. The many striking manifestations of ‘glass modernism’ in Czechoslovakia, most famously the Villa Tugendhat, nuances the picture for the wider region somewhat. Yet, the important point to be made here is a different one. There are no streets named after maisons de verre, glass houses, or glaserne Hauser in Germany, the Netherlands, in France, Belgium or Great Britain for that matter. In the vicinity of Warsaw, however, the feminist and socialite Irena Krzywicka had an avant-garde house named Szklany Dom (House of Glass), built for herself in 1928 and even today a street in Warsaw is adorned with that name.’ In fact, the glass house had a life of its own in Poland. In the 1930s the housing co-operative Warszawska Spółdzielnia Mieszkaniowa (Warsaw Housing Cooperative, WSM) set up a self-help organization for its tenants under the name of Szklane Domy and one of its settlements had its own theatre named after Zeromski.

As these examples suggest, the metaphor and imagery evoked by Zeromski very obviously struck a chord in Poland. Yet, the houses of glass are also a revealing expression of transnational exchange. The image echoed Bruno Taut’s expressionist concepts as presented in his Glashaus for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Germany and his seminal text Stadtkrone of 1919, and more generally the Glaserne Kette (Glass Chain) association of architects.’ In 1927 Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet started building the striking Maison de Verre in Paris whilst Ludwig Mies van der Rohe began his Barcelona Pavilion in 1929, to name just a few obvious connections.’ The poet and architectural critic Paul Scheerbart published a fullyfledged vision called Glasarchitektur in 1914, a utopian text in which glass houses occupied a central place. Both in its details — the ventilators, the furniture made of glass — as in the scope of social expectations — glass as the remedy to social conflict and hatred — Scheerbart predated Żeromski and must be seen as the latter's main inspiration.?

The dynamics of intellectual exchange will have a prominent place in this book. Yet, the interesting point about Zeromski's vision is not that ideas ‘travelled’ as such. The relevance of Zeromski’s vision for this study lies in how he connects the aspirations of the new Polish state to the promise of rational and visionary ‘social’ architecture. The aesthetics of glass architecture which loom large with Scheerbarth and are central to Taut’s expressionist designs do not bother Zeromski much. His is a concrete utopia connecting the seashore acquired by the new Polish state as part of the ‘corridor’ thus a politically charged territory, with the allure of technology and the idolisation of the genius engineer-architect who will achieve no less than a great leap into the future.” The desolate, plague-stricken countryside, caught in century-long stasis, will be awakened by a new kind of architecture. The themes of 19th century early urbanist thinking — new street layouts or facades — are no longer so relevant. What is now relevant is the transformative potential of architecture understood as a tool for changing society, modernizing the country, and entering the promised realm of modernity.

This book starts with the transformative picture of the glass house and the way it is connected to a triangle of architects, society and a particular region at a particular historical moment. By so doing this book seeks to provide an answer to the question of why it was obvious for Zeromski to express his political and social vision in architectural terms — and why so many of his contemporaries found this convincing. Part of the answer is the theme of this book — the rise of a group which is rarely researched as such: modernist architects.

The cohort of architects born around 1900, who were trained in the new technologies including glass, developed a new idea of what their profession should be like and what its goals should be. Seeing themselves as modernist architects meant not only building in a modern way, that is using the latest technologies, but also radically extending the reach of what architecture should cover — not just society, but also culture and politics. This was certainly not true for all architects entering the field in the 1920s, and it was also certainly not limited to Zeromski’s Poland. Further, as Zeromski’s glass houses illustrate, the new architectural aspirations could only develop against the backdrop of changing societal expectations.

It is the latter aspect, as this book will argue, which turns modernist architects into a key group of the seminal changes of the first half of the 20th century in Europe. The promise of redemption encapsulated in glass houses was not convincing to everyone. Yet, the notion that a new holistic approach to building, based on technological progress and new scientific insights, could bring about vast improvement and cure the ills of the 19th century was widely shared. This belief points to the rise of technocratic ideas and the technocratic movement, which modernist architects were a part of, after the First World War." This said, Zeromski's houses of glass with their enforced transparency and deep interference in individuals lives also epitomize the darker side of technocracy and, in a wider sense, the modern project. Extreme rationalization, as was famously argued by Zygmunt Bauman, was also one of the paths which led to the Nazi death camps and, as Marius Turda has contended, was closely tied to eugenics." Further, the issue of prefabricated mass housing as envisioned in the 1920s (not only by Zeromski) also calls into question its long-term legacies in communist housing projects.

The question of how to build and of how building was connected to societal change was one of the crucial themes of the first half of the 20th century in Europe. Yet, Zeromski's image of the glass house is more complex. The image renders the architect as more than just simply caught between the advantages and disadvantages of hyper-rational modernization. Here the engineer-architect features as an executor of deep, transformative change, proving himself by rising to the challenge of nation-building. In this, very obviously, the engineer-architect was also subject to the transformative project of modernity and the ruptures which accompanied the politics of modernization.

After the First World War this experience was probably more dynamic and this promise more convincing in the region roughly defined as East Central Europe than in any other part of Europe.? Here, with Poland, Czechoslowakia, and Hungary, new states saw the light of the day or, as in the case of Hungary, a state was radically reshaped. All three states were successors to the empires which had crumbled during the war. Given the situation of extreme economic challenges and political turmoil, these states almost by definition had to take on the challenge of modernization and attempt to harvest the fruits which modernization promised.

It was the scope of the East Central European crisis that allowed modernist architects to achieve cultural, political and social relevance. What could be described as the modernist architects rise to new relevance was, however, much more than a simple equation of demand and supply, of societal needs and answers as provided by architects. Modernist architects, in the form of new professionals and socially-charged figures, only emerged during the very process in question, when they both shouldered expectations of change and shaped them at the same time. Modernist architects must thus be understood as a complex product of projections trussed in a profession which was attaining new weight. The figure of the modernist architect must be understood as a dynamic configuration.

In his book ABC the Polish writer and Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz introduces 'centre-periphery' as a central category. 14 Here, Miłosz, while confirming the relevance of the geographical divide spelled out earlier, also reflects on his own existence as an artist in a predefined asymmetry. This asymmetry is important on various levels to this study, starting with where it positions itself in historiography and existing scholarship. The history of modernist architecture has mostly — with the exception of the Soviet Union — been written with a western focus. Modernism in the East was only ‘discovered’ with some important exceptions, after the fall of the Berlin wall — filling a blank spot on the map of modernism and supplementing important aspects to the history of art of modernism.”

The broad scope of this book means that it relies on various strands of literature, some of which have been very dynamic in recent years and cannot be outlined here. This literature ranges from history in the narrower sense to the history of art and architecture, urban history, and the history of technology and experts, but also includes cultural output such as novels and films.! Due to its diverse nature this literature will be introduced in the individual chapters. However, some key aspects and trends in the literature and some crucial works must be mentioned here, the more so as the way modernist architecture features in research today is part of the very story being told here. This is also true for the asymmetries in assigning architectural relevance which developed in the 1920s and 1930." An important case in point is the extreme focus placed, until recently, on the short-lived Bauhaus in Weimar Germany. This attention can also be explained by the fact that leading Bauhäusler left for the US before the Second World War and thus entered American academia. The latter, after the war, became the central arena wherein architectural importance was defined and assigned.'* This tendency was already emerging in the 1920s and was somewhat deliberately brought about, for example, in Sigfried Giedion’s attempts to streamline and ‘purify’ the modernist movement by confining it to an elite of the “seven lamps of architecture"? The tendency was furthered by the influential works of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Nicolas Pevsner of 1932 and 1936 respectively.”

In recent years there have been numerous attempts to ‘even out’ this picture, by assigning East Central Europe a place in the history of modernism.” These publications, often based on exhibitions, succeeded in showing the relevance, originality, and scope of avant-garde movements in East Central Europe which far exceeded just copying or adopting western trends.” To a degree, this is also true for modernist architecture, an important part of these avant-garde movements.” There are, however, three important limitations to the respective literature. There are next to no historically informed studies on modernist architects as groups or networks for the region. Moreover, biographies of those architects central to this study are extremely scarce and there is very little research on the social impact and interaction with society and politics of these architects.

With a view to the Congrés Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne (CIAM), the last two decades have seen impressive new research, without which this book could not have been written. The works by Eric Mumford and Kees Somer on the CIAM as an organisation deserve particular mention." Moreover, in 2014 the Atlas of the Functional City, an extremely rich collection delivering far more than a mere account of the most well-known CIAM congress of 1933, considerably expanded and deepened our understanding of that organisation."

Many of the sources used for this study have so far received little attention. This book relies heavily on the correspondence of those architects from East Central Europe who were active in the CIAM and the written documentation of their engagement with this organisation. This includes, in part, correspondence directly relating to CIAM matters and, particularly from the mid-1930s onwards, correspondence stemming from the friendships and close relationships which had evolved between members of the CIAM, confirming the shared cause of modernism. For reasons explained in detail in chapters 1 and 3 the Polish case will be given particular attention, as the Polish group was by far the most active of the Eastern CIAM groups. As a result of the extreme suffering endured by both the city of Warsaw as well as most Polish CIAM members during the German occupation of the Second World War and the ensuing destruction of archives, source material on the Polish group is, however, scattered and uneven for the different architects involved.??

The perceived peripheral status of the region of East Central Europe — continuously reflected by politicians as well as by modernist architects — formed the framework which allowed both to enter into an informal modernizing alliance.” For the architects in question, however, their identification with modernism entailed more comprehensive goals, including those of personal emancipation, than for, say, a Dutch modernist architect. This book regards this point as vital to a better understanding of the implications of the modernist project. If we shift the attention from matters of style and aesthetics to the social impact and social dependencies of modernist architects, the regions where these impacts and dependences were particularly pronounced, where modernization was particularly invasive, almost logically move centre stage. The relevance of the questions this books seeks to answer is not confined to East Central Europe, and these questions do not even initially point to this region, though. By choosing the case of East Central Europe this book primarily seeks to gain a closer understanding of the rise of modernist architects and its associated implications. This also includes the relevant question famously ridiculed by Tom Wolfe as “From Bauhaus to our House”, namely under which communicative conditions were modernist architects believed???

This book does not embrace the assumption of a western model of modernization to which then, almost logically, the East had to adapt.” Yet, this book acknowledges that such assumptions existed and as such had an impact. The whole idea of modernization was always charged with an East-West asymmetry, which in East Central Europe was intensified by an idea of modernity more or less loosely linked with the notion of Europe and civilization and thus also intensely reflected.?? This reflection, in turn, should be seen as part and parcel of modernity.

Why Modernist Architects?

Architects are influenced by the fluid nature of their skill which shifted between the arts and technology. Although matters of style and built manifestations of architectural designs cannot and will not be ignored, of course, they are not central considerations here. The focus rests on modernist architects as part of a group. In this, this book distinguishes itself in two important ways from the majority of the existing literature in the field.*

First, historians of art and architecture are mostly interested in matters of style where aesthetic merits and innovative potential are the most important categories. It might be said, without doing justice to all those studies, that those architects who either did not fit into the category of outstanding artist — such as, for example, Mies van der Rohe — or into a category dealing with general innovation, such as Constructivism, tended to be ignored, though there are noteworthy exceptions even for the region under scrutiny here.”

Second, when architects are academically treated as individuals this tends to be in a biographical perspective, featuring those architects who shaped the cannon. To be sure, relevant works have long moved beyond ‘hero-worshiping’ and have made very significant attempts to understand architects, and modernist architects specifically, as much more than ‘mere’ builders. The self-fashioning of these architects in a mediated modern world has recently found increasing attention, particularly as regards the seminal figure of Le Corbusier.”

Focusing on modernist architects as a group allows us to better understand these architects’ motivations in pursuing the course of modernism beyond the limitations of one biography. More importantly, it allows us to make sense of the personal dimension of what can be understood as the rise of architects to new social, cultural and political relevance. We can study the effect of social and political change, and in particular political ruptures, on the lives of modernist architects, whose work was so closely linked with social modernity and the modernizing state and who were symbolically charged as epitomes of modernity and modernization. The biographical level thus brings into the picture the massive ruptures that were decisive for Europe's history in the first half of the 20th century, including changing citizenships, exile, forced migration, and genocide.