According to Karel Teige (1900–1951) "there is only one art: poetry, this primal creative work which begins to shine even where there is no trace of art." For Teige, poetry is the master principle that gives form to all arts and dominates them; it is an action that arises in calculated form from every material or measured manifestation of the human kind. In 1928, in his Second Manifesto of Poetism, Teige declares: "Poetism's great discovery is joy" — and he adds: "Joy lies in creation," that is, in life. Work is joyful. In truth, the matter goes further: the meaning of life is the alteration of the conditions of human existence and the new organisation of economy and society — in short, the new organisation of the world. Hence the search for joy and the organisation of production and culture is more important than anything else. This cultural revolution requires a new poetry called Poetism. In Teige's view, the social idea of building an ideal moral world and a more sincere humanity can secure its first achievements from architecture. This ideal and universal discipline holds an enormous capacity for rationalism and is in this respect comparable to physics and mathematics. In its broader meaning, architecture is a wholly logical and entirely practical operation in the external world — and so it can be considered a corner of poetic activity.
Karel Teige, a member of the left-wing Czech avant-garde, was interested in painting, graphic design, exhibition design and architecture. The work he carried out for art and publishing institutions became the foundation for the intellectual activities of the generation that followed him. Teige wrote hundreds of essays, research pieces and book reviews under various pen-names, a great many of which are devoted to architecture (especially writings of the years 1932–1937). When he was the editor and collagist of the journal Stavba (Building, the monthly of the Architects' Club, founded 1922), the magazine became a productive organ for consolidating Teige's philosophy. In addition, the works printed in Prague carried news from across Europe. In the 1930s Teige was strongly drawn to architecture. No other Czech writer has produced such excellent writing in this field, nor has had such a significant influence on the construction of his time. Teige's influence on the architecture of his contemporaries went beyond the acceptance of his designs by his peers; the disputes provoked by his theories also testify to this. He was never a neutral theorist: he was combative and polemical, and reviewed and criticised the work of modernist leaders even by stepping beyond the boundaries of architecture. Thanks to his engaging attitude towards this discipline, his theory and criticism remain interesting today and form an important chapter in the architectural history of the twentieth century.
Teige, while relying on journals and essay collections as the instruments of theoretical and aesthetic expression he favoured, ties to his own work whatever he sees as necessary for shaping his poetic theory. He blended the Indian song of standardisation (Le Corbusier's machine for living) with the design tension of the Russian constructivists; he accepted the scientific worldview of the Vienna Circle; he cited Bauhaus and Hannes Meyer manifestoes; he was equipped with a passionate faith in Adolf Loos's Platonic purism. He supported every architecture that pointed in a "clean and immediate" way to rational and social plans and programmes.
The book under discussion, on the minimum dwelling, was first published in Prague in 1932 and has now been translated into English. The book is the codification and summary of all aspects of Teige's theory: from his belief in utilitarianism and his functionalism as vital factors of architecture, to his preferred constructivism. Beyond all this, what most attracts attention is Teige's deep familiarity with the key figures of the International Style. He takes the most recent architectural tendencies as the basis for his analysis and study of the acceptability and feasibility of the ideal principles of social order. The book begins with clarity: minimum housing has become the focus of debates in modern architecture and is a fighting arena for contemporary avant-garde architecture. Yet Teige's work makes no attempt to justify radical or extreme architecture. His formal analysis does not arrive at a theory of form and figure; instead, it defines a method for design and construction, in line with an attitude that, rather than laying down purely formalist rules for new design styles, recovers and reuses elementary elements of the project. Teige does not overlook the role of modern architecture, neither as an art form nor as a knowledge with the capacity to guarantee the social continuity of poetry and life within a rational and relative framework.
The book begins by examining (sometimes statistically) the problem of the housing shortage across the world, and then offers a list of progressive solutions for each nation. Finally comes a detailed account of the construction of the minimum dwelling for the poorest workers, and in general for the working class — in the name of socialism and a pioneer culture of dwelling. The design models that the pioneers of modernism invented (in CIAM [Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne] from Frankfurt to Athens) rested on a reading of structure as a cell, and the dwelling was reckoned a starting point for the city. The minimum dwelling, in which every function is restricted to the smallest space, is from a functional standpoint considered the best unit of habitation. In Teige's view, the minimum dwelling is something more than a realistic abstract hypothesis that has been practically demonstrated; it is a cell belonging to a more complex shared organism. In this way the book is not a building manual but a pretext for global discussion and for socio-political and architectural commitments and practical architecture.
The book deals to a great extent with the principles of housing in the new social order, and recommends the use of modern and innovative methods and materials of construction (technical progress is the prelude of new architecture) as well as the standardisation of the house. In other words, design must — like construction — be considered rational and instrumental. The dwelling must be assumed to be a machine for living, technically faultless. Cities must be organised factories and houses tools precisely calculated and produced. Teige believed that all of this is possible and desirable, and that his "Poetism" — because it calls art to be part of a greater world — will become a way of life. This will lead to a way of life free of alienation and separation, in which there is no obstacle to individual growth, and which is therefore suitable for the process of free coexistence. Minimum housing (or "minimum laws") was the preparation for this aim — it was strongly bound to the "socialist" management of housebuilding, and had freed itself from all the old petty-bourgeois notions. The transformation from capitalism to socialism requires that the basic functions of houses be defined. The communal house — a concept that the utopian socialists popularised in the nineteenth century — is a system that includes apartments for a defined number of people, not "the family"; in other words, single-person apartments along with a café, a dining room, a dance hall and a public reading room. In this connection, Le Corbusier, in a famous anti-Le-Corbusian article published in Stavba in 1929–1930, was met with severe criticism. It was not, in fact, his machines for living that started the debate, but the architect himself who came under attack for placing his work in the service of a hand-picked society and bowing entirely to the demands of his wealthy clients. In Teige's view, the symbol of capitalist architecture is not the luxury house, but minimum dwelling itself […].
