Modern Architecture and Other Texts.
Parenthesis| N° d'inventaire | 22012 |
| Format | 15 x 23 |
| Détails | 160 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Marseille, 2019 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782863646816 |
Written as Otto Wagner was about to take up his post as professor of architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1894, the work "Modern Architecture" is organized into five parts: the architect, style, composition, construction, and artistic practice. To these, we have added a fundamental text on the future of the European metropolis (Die Großstadt) published in 1911. The collection brings together most of the architect's writings, which were literally one with his teaching and professional activity, in a militant effort to overcome the academicism and political conservatism omnipresent in Habsburg Austria at the end of the 19th century. After a rather academic start to his career, Otto Wagner constantly defended new aesthetic and conceptual values, aspiring to a form of democracy where the ideal great city and well-thought-out architecture would best defend these new moral values. A critical stance that led him, at the end of his professional life, to often being excluded from official commissions and to become the symbol of a hoped-for renewal of Austrian architecture. To this symbolic heaviness and the complicit inaction of many of his peers, Otto Wagner opposed the figure of the architect as a providential man, a follower of the only total art capable of changing material life by imagining buildings and cities truly in line with the aspirations of modern man. The principles he defended: a new architectural language that does not exclude decorative motif but revitalizes its sources, that calls for new materials (iron, aluminum, concrete, ceramics) and new construction techniques and that seeks the functionality of buildings. Author of numerous projects that continue to mark Vienna today with their beauty, Otto Wagner chose to also be a fundamental (and optimistic) theoretician and a (valued) professor in order to act on all possible levers. His texts are the expression of great optimism and, at the end of the 19th century, set out creative principles that are still relevant today: against all forms of conservatism, to make the city and its architecture conform to the challenges of the contemporary world.
Written as Otto Wagner was about to take up his post as professor of architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1894, the work "Modern Architecture" is organized into five parts: the architect, style, composition, construction, and artistic practice. To these, we have added a fundamental text on the future of the European metropolis (Die Großstadt) published in 1911. The collection brings together most of the architect's writings, which were literally one with his teaching and professional activity, in a militant effort to overcome the academicism and political conservatism omnipresent in Habsburg Austria at the end of the 19th century. After a rather academic start to his career, Otto Wagner constantly defended new aesthetic and conceptual values, aspiring to a form of democracy where the ideal great city and well-thought-out architecture would best defend these new moral values. A critical stance that led him, at the end of his professional life, to often being excluded from official commissions and to become the symbol of a hoped-for renewal of Austrian architecture. To this symbolic heaviness and the complicit inaction of many of his peers, Otto Wagner opposed the figure of the architect as a providential man, a follower of the only total art capable of changing material life by imagining buildings and cities truly in line with the aspirations of modern man. The principles he defended: a new architectural language that does not exclude decorative motif but revitalizes its sources, that calls for new materials (iron, aluminum, concrete, ceramics) and new construction techniques and that seeks the functionality of buildings. Author of numerous projects that continue to mark Vienna today with their beauty, Otto Wagner chose to also be a fundamental (and optimistic) theoretician and a (valued) professor in order to act on all possible levers. His texts are the expression of great optimism and, at the end of the 19th century, set out creative principles that are still relevant today: against all forms of conservatism, to make the city and its architecture conform to the challenges of the contemporary world.