Page:Preliminary Notes on Cubist Architecture in Prague.pdf/2

 This phase of Czech modernism in art, which introduced Cubist principles and adapted them for local purposes, came to an end with World War I. After the war, in the newly formed republic of Czechoslovakia, the style so popular before the war came under attack in a climate of renewed commitment to social and political causes. However, the public debates about cubism in painting, before and after the war, helped to create a discourse which, to a significant extent, architects seeking a more spiritual, imaginative style could appropriate, regardless of any intimate connections between what they were promoting and the formal properties of cubism or cubo-expressionism in the work of visual artists. To some extent, in other words, the term cubist attached itself to developments in architecture for reasons which have little to do with direct formal influence (Bois 189).

Modernist Architecture in Prague: Art Nouveau

Architecture in Prague played a central role in the National Revival once the city gained self-government and the Czech political parties won control of the city council and promoted the construction of a number of important civic buildings in traditional nineteenth century historical styles (The National Theatre, 1868–1883, the Czech Polytechnic, 1872–1873, the Rudolfinum Palace, 1876–1884, and the National Museum, 1885–1890) and all sorts of memorials, schools, and commercial buildings (Švácha, Architecture 18 ff). This concerted attempt at historical retrieval generated in the Manifesto of Czech Modernism a demand for something more distinctively new, a break with the monumental tributes in outmoded and often grandiose styles.

Modernism in Prague architecture began around 1900 with the work of Jan Kotěra (1871–1923), who had studied with Otto Wagner in Vienna. He brought to Prague architecture a demand for "truthfulness," creativity, and the need to organize the space from the point of view of the function of the building, without attaching great importance to traditional historical styles (Švácha, Architecture 48). Initially, the new style (called Sezession, a general name for a number of progressive art movements in Austria and Germany in the 1890s) had much in common with Art Nouveau—an emphasis on lyrical and dynamic curves inspired by natural forms of plants in the ornamentation, cornices, arches, and the interior of a building. These had certain affinities with the neobaroque style and in many cases could be adapted easily enough to traditional Czech folk motifs and elements of historical style (as in one of the most famous examples of Art Nouveau influence in Prague, the Municipal House, 1903–1912, designed by Osvald Polívka).

[For a picture of the Municipal House, please use the following link: ]

The work of Kotěra and his pupils, however, following the main trends in the development of modernist architecture, moved away from the natural allegory of Art Nouveau into a style more characterized by geometrical symbolism (Švácha, Architecture 63) with an increasing emphasis on function and the material structure of the building. This process, in the view of some critical young students of Wagner and Kotěra, produced an architectural style empty of spiritual purpose and filled with a sense of utilitarian sterility. The style, it was alleged, emphasized far too much the dead materiality of the structure and hence lacked vital beauty (Švácha, Architecture 100). Inextricably involved with this critical spirit was a desire to reject the Viennese origin of Kotěra's modernist style in order to create something uniquely Czech in response to what was happening in Paris. Out of this reaction came the demand for a new style.

Cubist Architecture in Prague

The development of cubist architecture in Prague is most closely associated with Pavel Janák (1882-1956), the movement's major theoretician, who, writing in 1912, rejected the geometric style of Kotěra and Wagner in favour of something which gave freer play to the imaginative powers of human creativity:

What this amounted to in practice was turning away from the orthogonal (box like) qualities of the geometric style with its emphasis on tectonics and replacing it with "a system whose logic of form consisted of a diagonal or triangular compositional place, and the Wagnerian cubes gave way to tapered quadrilaterals, pyramids, and all kind of slanted forms" (Švácha, Architecture 101), to produce a structure which embodied the human spirit's struggle with and creative triumph over inert matter. Form is not determined by the material but imposed on the material. In the words of one of the more extreme proponents of this view, Vlastislav Hofman, "form is absolute and superior to function" (quoted in Dvorak). That principle applies as much to the inside space as to the entire building.

For Janák and others reacting against Sezession-style architecture in the years before World War I, the banner of cubism was an important way of calling attention to the need for a new emphasis in the development of a truly Czech style.

The emphasis here on the continuing vitality of German and Czech tradition is an important reminder that some of the most easily recognized features of Czech cubist architecture, particularly polygonal facades on the buildings which help to created a fractured appearance which changes with one's viewpoint, may owe more to those traditions than to the direct influence of cubist art itself (Murray 52) and helps to explain why the cubist buildings in Prague seem to blend in so well with the baroque architecture of the city.

Informing a great deal of modernist discourse in painting and architecture, especially cubist architecture, are theories of and discussions about perception. In fact, as Columina points out in her analysis of Le Corbusier's attacks on cubism (152), modernism itself can be identified with revolutions in perception produced, not by shifts in art and architectural styles, but rather by the conditions of living in the large city, where a multiplicity of images constantly bombards the viewer in fragmentary and fractured ways, especially given the increasingly emphasis on seeing things while in motion (in trams and cars, for example, and in films). The process of seeing, in other words, becomes increasingly subjective and dependent upon the point of view of the observer. The characteristically jagged appearance of cubist buildings, Švácha points out, in addition to symbolizing the struggle between imaginative spirit and inert materials, tends to turn the building into a "subjectively viewed phenomenon," since the oblique facets look different when the viewer moves to a different position and thus create an experience different from that produced by a building whose structure is designed to express the physical laws of matter (Architecture 119). In addition, of course, the appearance of a building with such an outer surface changes constantly as the angle of the light falling on it alters.

Reinforcing this sense of subjective viewing were the contemporary ideas about perception developed by Theodor Lipps, according to which perception is founded on an inner reality, an empathy (Einfühlung) which

Some critics of cubist architecture rejected this distinction, seeing in the style (especially in late cubism) mere sensuality, an unhealthy emphasis on mere ornamentation. One of the most curious yet influential later reactions against cubism attacked it for its sexual decadence, seeing in the style merely a new manifestation of the very characteristics for which Art Nouveau was also savaged, sensual tendencies which sapped the sturdy masculine vigour and intellectual clarity best displayed in an increasingly pure geometric form. "If the Greek triumphed over the barbarian, if Europe, inheritor of Greek thought, dominates the world, it is because the savages like loud colors and the noisy sound of tambourines which engage only the senses, while the Greeks loved the intellectual beauty that hides beneath sensory beauty" (Ozenfant and Jeanneret [Le Corbusier], Après le cubisme [1918], quoted Colomina 151). Lurking in such criticism is a more ominous sense of later styles designed to intimidate the human spirit rather than celebrate its imaginative powers.

The rhetoric of vigor and the whole aesthetic regime it props up has to be understood in terms of this fear of the "bizarre and the original." The heroic male figure—energetic, cool and detached—is the figure of modernity. Architectural order here, the control of the senses, is first and foremost social control. Purism is puritanism, in the sense of a regime that maintains a clear distinction between straight sex and deviant sex. (Colomina 151)

The most characteristic feature of cubist architecture, the multi-faceted facade of the building is also a way of articulating a vision of space, particularly the relation of inside and outside (in Janák's words, "Wherever spirit was active, the surface is transformed, moved, as if in its folds and waves the surface were a mixture of the matter existing inside and the space on the outside" (quoted in Dvorak). The cubist design, in other words, should not celebrate the solid tectonic qualities of the material but call those into question, establishing an ambiguous relationship between the space inside and outside the structure:

It is precisely this mixture of inside matter and outside space that Cubist facades want to accomplish The crystal-like creases on the surface are not an extrinsic decoration: The viewer does not differentiate the wall from its ornamentation. The inside of the house, its mass continuously proceeds into the furrows and fractures of the splintery façade. The inside and outside, the matter and space, merge together creating a sense of continuity between the dense material core and the wavering air surrounding it The articulation of the surfaces is of decisive importance because if matter and materials blend with the surrounding open space, the borders of the building disintegrate. If the borders of a building disintegrate, the building itself vanishes. The primary straight wall, the border separating the inside from the outside,