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Review: The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture, by Christopher Long

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Christopher Long The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016, 246 pp., 130 color and 114 b/w illus. $75 (cloth), ISBN… Click to show full abstract

Christopher Long The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016, 246 pp., 130 color and 114 b/w illus. $75 (cloth), ISBN 9780300218282 Until recently, critical discussions of Viennese modernism have centered primarily on the fin de siecle. Major themes have included the Wagner school, the Secessionist movement, the Wiener Werkstatte, and the rejection or remaking of ornament and symbol. By contrast, Christopher Long's The New Space: Movement and Experience in Viennese Modern Architecture offers a fresh perspective by looking closely into spatial experiments within Viennese modernism from around 1910, with the waning of the Jugendstil, until 1938, when Hitler and the Nazis annexed Austria. Long traces the evolving ideas about space articulated in the writings and buildings of three Viennese architects—Oskar Strnad, Adolf Loos, and Josef Frank—and highlights their shared investments in conceiving spaces that might elicit perceptual sensitivity. Pursing this line, The New Space opens a new and significant chapter in the history of modernist space making. Of the book's three protagonists, Loos has received the most extensive scholarly interest, especially for his rejection of modern ornament and his Raumplan concept. By contrast, Frank has remained a relatively peripheral figure, despite growing attention to his distinctive approach to architectural space.1 Strnad is the least known. Aside from a few early monographs and a recent exhibition catalogue published in German, The New Space is the first major publication in English to examine his work in depth.2 In the course of ten chapters, Long weaves the three architects' individual experiments into an account of a shared quest to create affective spatial experience. Chapter 1 summarizes key debates about architectural space in contemporary German-speaking intellectual circles and lays the theoretical groundwork for the three architects' practice. Art historian August Schmarsow is a central figure in this discussion, given his influential assertion that the essence of architectural creation is the framing of space; everything else (facade, structure, mass, and ornament) is secondary, …

Keywords: new space; space; christopher long; experience; space movement

Journal Title: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
Year Published: 2018

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