Hermann Czech

Front matter

Eva Kuss

An Architect} in Vienna

TL PARK BOOKS

Introduction

Liane Lefaivre

Although the architect Hermann Czech is a truly beloved cult figure in Vienna, he is not as well-known as he should be outside the German-speaking world. This monograph by the architect and architectural historian Eva Kuss has made his work available in full in English for the first time.

Czech stands out among the Viennese architects of his generation, a generation dominated by counterculture figures of the late 1950s and 1960s. Austrians were different from their equivalents elsewhere—Cedric Price and Archigram’s Peter Cook in Britain, Ant Farm in the US, Archizoom and Superstudio in Italy. First of all, the Austrians were far more numerous. Vienna alone had almost ten groups of them. Hans Hollein and Coop Himmelb(l)Jau are just the most well-known internationally. In addition, there were Zünd-Up (Ignite), Missing Link, Salz der Erde (Salt of the Earth), not to mention the Graz School, among others. And second, these architects could be politically radical firebrands, not just madcap pranksters. There was often an unusually angry side to their performances and visual works, not to mention their many manifestos.

This aspect of the postwar Vienna architecture scene is hardly surprising. Much has been written about Austrias “memory problem" at the time, which amounted to a denial of its role during World War II. Parallel to the Viennese architectural counterculture were artistic counterculture movements—the Wiener Gruppe and the Vienna Actionists in particular—that engaged in violent, often gruesome tactics which veered towards the scatological, bloody self-lacerating. Their rage provided these cultural guerrilla warriors with a weapon for venting their oftenobscene fury and breaking down the wall of silence and amnesia about the harrowing realities of Austrias Nazi involvement in the Holocaust. In one typical performance, Günter Brus, who has incidentally since gone on to be awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize, sang the national anthem while masturbating, then shitting. These artists were the extremely radical expression of what I have elsewhere called Vienna’s deep-seated tradition of Modernist Rebels engaged in a Kulturkampf (cultural war) against the established order, beginning with Otto Wagner (once he had written his iconoclastic, anti-historicist manifesto, Modern Architecture), Gustav Klimt, Josef Maria Olbrich, Koloman Moser and other members of the iconoclastic Secession.

In the midst of Vienna’s postwar cultural turmoil, the cerebral Hermann Czech followed his own path. He distanced himself from the confrontational, “angry young man” shock tactics of many of his contemporaries and chose instead the other extreme of the spectrum. To Hans Hollein’s supremely hyperbolic declaration that “Everything is architecture,” Czech countered with “Architecture is background, everything else is not architecture.” To the incendiary Wolf Prix, who would proclaim that “Architecture must burn,” Czech preferred the attempt of postwar, more rationally and structurally orientated architects such as Johannes Spalt, Friedrich Kurrent or Johann Georg Gsteu to study prewar Viennese modernism, in particular of Adolf Loos, in search of consistent approaches. He saw in this return a way of re-affirming what one may call the architecturalness of architecture which, in his view, would provide the foundation on which modern architecture could be built anew. Not surprisingly, Czech’s projects have always tended towards litotic understatement and reserve. Far from inflammatory, his aim is and has always been to reconstruct the world, to put it back together again with fragments of memory retrieved from under a veil of amnesia.

When I first arrived in Vienna to take up my position as the Chair of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Applied Arts, the Angewandte, in Vienna in 2003, I would often find myself invited to one or the other of Czech’s now legendary cafés and restaurants—the Kleines Café, the Salzamt, Immervoll and the MAK Café (unfortunately demolished in 2005). To an outsider Canadian like me, each appeared to be another legendary, atmospheric Viennese café. But my companions would begin to point out the meaning of the details: the mirrors, the floor tiles, the chairs, the lighting. There is no item that was not pregnant with a meaningful reference. Suddenly, almost everything required a doubletake and the place became like a riddle, or a story written in an architectural language that needed an interpreter.

Preface

Does this mean that Czech’s architecture is a nostalgic Proustian attempt to dwell in a remembered past as a form of resistance to the modern world? On the contrary. As in any creative act, memory serves as a toolbox for creative rethinking. This tendency to re-use the past in a modern construction of the present is perhaps most obvious in Czech’s large-scale projects. His housing project for Hadersdorf and in Mühlgrund with Krischanitz and Neuwirth, his Hotel Messe, his Blockbebauung in Ottakring in Vienna. As Elie Wiesel wrote in his Function of Memory: “Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no culture.”

Besides a reserve that has become legendary, another of Czech’s traits is his meticulous devotion to the smallest detail—and the more imperfect the detail the better—that characterizes his exploration into what he poetically refers to as the barely perceivable “shimmering of the real.” For all his reserve, Czech has been perhaps the most influential of the architects of his contemporaries on younger Austrian architects. Jabornegg and Palffy's work, for example, as well as Martin Feiersinger and ARTEC's Bettina Gótz and Richard Manahl. Not surprisingly, it also has inspired Eva Kusss own architectural design. All should be more well-known outside Austria.

With this book, entirely based on original research, Eva Kuss has become the one, single, indispensable interpreter of Czech's architectural language, grounded on an extensive oral history compiled from lengthy and detailed conversations with Hermann Czech himself. It is divided in two sections.

The first section sketches the cultural milieu from which Czech forma mentis emerged. Eva Kuss has an insightful and highly original way of seeing things, a good match for Czech’s own modus operandi. This section deals with the historical period from Otto Wagner until the Second World War, which formed a cultural background for Czech, that is the literary and artistic movements of Vienna, before the rise of Austrofascism, Nazism and the role of Austria in World War II, marked by Otto Wagner, marked by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus and Sigmund Freud.

For as long as I have known Eva (full disclosure: this book began as a doctorate with me), she has never tired of repeating that Czech’s architecture has its intellectual origins in the uniquely Viennese cultural movement of Sprachkritik, a reflection on the inadequacies and limits of language and the attempt to formulate a new one. This tradition goes back to the late 19*- and early 20'-century philosophical writings of Fritz Mauthner and Ernst Mach. It shaped Ludwig Wittgensteins Tractatus, which in turn influenced

Liane Lefaivre the Vienna Circle during the 1920s. One of Kuss's main contributions is to have drawn parallels between these thinkers and Czech’s way of designing, which she sees as an attempt to rethink the architectural language inherited from the great Viennese past, an architectural language that has broken down. She likens Czech in this sense to the postwar Viennese filmmaker Peter Kubelka, who strove to re-invent filmic language.

Among Czech's sources of inspiration, the book singles out the architecture and writings of the Viennese architect Josef Frank. Frank is little known in the English-speaking world. He, too, was a highly respected, individualistic and unorthodox presence in the movements of the 1920s. Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies among many others, not to mention Adolf Loos, all condemned not only ornament but also disorder as a crime. Frank embraced both on the other hand. Opposed to what he saw as an authoritarian over-regimentation and a negation of the taste of what he called ordinary people, he incorporated not only whimsical ornamentation in his designs but also an asymmetrical, almost haphazard approach to composing facades and arranging interiors, an approach which he would eventually theorize about as “accidentism.” As a Jewish émigré in New York following the Nazi takeover of Austria with the Anschluss in 1938, Frank was struggling to make a living. Still, nothing could make him conform to what he perceived as reductive architectural correctness.

The second section of Kuss’s book is a catalogue raisonné of a selection of Czech’s manifold works of different scales. He has designed shops, hotels, public and private housing and urban planning projects for Vienna, along with his furniture design, exhibition design and curatorship, and his cafés. Each work is accompanied by a close and meticulously revealing interpretation and rich visual documentation that unlocks the riddles of Czech’s architectural language and brings to the surface the subliminal references nested deep inside his designs.

This section is most significant because it makes the implicit messages of Czechs work explicit. These are up to the reader to discover. The book makes us understand the importance and originality of Hermann Czech’s architecture and design within the historical knowledge of the astonishing originality of Viennese modernity and vice versa, Vienna today by the knowledge of Hermann Czech. Eva Kuss has provided an essential introduction to both.

Preface