A parallel with particular reference to the artistic situation in Vienna
In my view, among the visual arts, architecture is the last to adapt to the prevailing current of the day. Painting, engraving and sculpture owe their creation to a happy idea, and the work of art spreads into the world after a few weeks or months. Building is not like that. Even the preliminary work demands intellectual and artistic activity, and its execution can take a lifetime.
But it is now easier for us to speculate on the imminent directions of architecture on the basis of the changes that the other arts have already gone through. Architecture, which is a kind of art of space and form (contrary to the view that would count architecture among the graphic arts), will be influenced above all by sculpture. We are witnessing how, in the course of this century, a social trend has revealed itself, one that has now become established in sculpture: craftsmanship has once again shown itself.
Until recently we lived in a remarkable age that took the mental worker for everything and the manual worker for nothing. By social standards, a person in a blue apron, however capable, ranked far below a lowly clerk who earned a pittance. The arts too were caught up in this madness: wherever possible, real craftsmanship was handed over to craftsmen who toiled like slaves. This may not have applied to painting. But the sculptor only copied a miniature model. The work of sculpting, technical mastery of the material, was alien to them, while the architect did not stir from their office, and produced their drawings, perhaps without ever seeing the field of their artistic activity. They handed everything over to the craftsman. The most ambitious architect, after the proposed changes had been rejected, might go to the building site. They would curse the craftsman and fly into a rage that the design intentions had not been carried out to the letter. In fact, they forgot that the craftsman is a human being and not a machine.
The Englishman effectively did away with the notion of the inferiority of craftsmanship. If you want to make a vase, do not design some abstract geometric body, but sit at the potter’s wheel yourself. If you want to make a chair, do not spend a lifetime drawing scattered designs, but take up the chisel. They took the artist to the workshop, and set the challenge before them: “Here is Rhodes, jump here”1
Now there was a response. Where once working in the workshop was considered vulgar, it had now become the height of refinement. An unknown2 sculptor will carve the bust of Danaë3 with their own hands from a block of variegated marble. The artist who was not afraid to take up hammer and chisel to learn the stonemason’s craft was at the centre of attention. Unlike before, they no longer ranked below colleagues who only drew and made models. The number of sculptors who did not want to abandon their work to a copying machine or to a stonecutter with different ideas grew ever larger.
Architecture too has no choice but to meet the demands of this age. The architect will spend more time on the building site, and will turn to decorative ornament only once the space has been created and the lighting established. The entirely superfluous and time-consuming drawing of naturalistic ornamental detail will be abandoned. In the studio itself, perhaps even right on site, the master can work out the model and the decoration from the design and carry out the corrections with their own hands, after careful study of the lighting, of course, and setting the supervisor aside. This will of course take up a great deal of their time, which means they will build less. The large building offices, the full-scale house-building factories, will disappear.
But what will buildings constructed in this way look like? We may suppose that they will present themselves in a more conservative manner than we hastily imagine. Because the art of building is bound up with emotions and habits shaped by the continuous use of existing buildings that have endured for thousands of years.
What does the architect actually want? They want, with the help of materials, to arouse emotions in people who have not yet in fact inhabited such places. They build a church. People are to be in a state of worship. They build a bar. People are supposed to feel conviviality here. How is this done? By examining how buildings in the past were able to arouse such feelings. These are the cases one must connect with. Throughout their lives, people have prayed in certain spaces and drunk in certain spaces. Feeling is learned; it is not innate. Consequently the architect, if serious about their art, must keep these learned emotions in mind.
We might imagine that what made us happy 500 years ago no longer does so today. Certainly, a tragedy that made us weep at that time today only mildly attracts our attention. A joke from that time no longer tickles us. That tragedy no longer has depth, and the joke has been forgotten. But the building remains through the changing generations to come, despite all the other changes of the spirit of the age4. The most conservative art will endure.
Because there is an emotion we cannot erase from memory: the acceptance of the superiority of classical antiquity5. Now that this is clear to us, all the Gothic, Moorish6, Chinese and other styles have come to a complete end. They may have influenced the Renaissance, and it has always been so, but a great spirit can always free architecture from alien constituent elements, and give us back the pure and classical style of building. And people praise that person again and again, because we are classicists in thought and feeling; after the great master builders of the Renaissance, countless lesser masters appeared in Germany. Full of good ideas, full of imagination; who knows their names? Schlüter7 appeared in the north, Fischer von Erlach8 in the south, Le Pautre9 in France. Men with a Roman classical sensibility, and once again we record a peak. And once again it slides downwards, once again boundless delight in form became established and produced architects whose names are recalled only with difficulty and through research. Here Schinkel10 appears, the great tamer of the imagination, and, once again, after a downward movement, Semper; so we realise that the palm of victory11 is always awarded to the artist who has made fewer concessions to their own time, and has taken up the classical position more boldly. Because the architect does not create only for their own time; the coming generation too has the right to enjoy their work. One needs only an unchanging and fixed standard, both contemporary and for the future, perhaps until a great event calls for a complete re-evaluation of classical antiquity.
Therefore many insist: the great architect of the future will be a classicist. Someone who follows not the works of their predecessors but classical antiquity directly. They will have at their disposal a richer formal language than the great master builders of the Renaissance, the Baroque or the Schinkel-Semper school. Because the old discoveries have been complemented by the more recent results of archaeology; there is also the fact that the Egyptians, the Etruscans12, the Mesopotamians13, and others, are gradually attracting our attention too. Hints of this can be seen even in the ornamentalism14 of the Wagner school.
So now we know: the architect of the future must have their own services, and be trained classically. In fact, we may expect: of all the professions, architecture is the one that demands a classical education most strictly. But in order to do justice to the material needs of their time, they must also be a modern person. They must not only be acquainted with the cultural needs of their time but must themselves be at the height of that culture. Because it is in their power to give a different character to certain cultural forms and practices. Hence they never drag culture down, but raise it up.
But the architect of the future must also be a person of distinction. The time is past when all those who did not steal were considered honest. Today’s Aristides15 are not praised for their poverty. Which is a clear matter for us. We are becoming ever more sensitive to justice and injustice. As a consequence of this fact, I conclude: the architect must not lie with respect to materials either. This expectation may be fulfilled in the fact that the architect must themselves carry out everything within the material. Because the craftsman does not know this lie. The architect became acquainted with it through the architectural draughtsman.* But since the architect cannot be a master in all fields equally (in fact each person can be master of only one), a specialisation will form, of a kind that had its supporters in earlier times: the stone architect (stonemason)**, and the brick architect (bricklayer), the stucco architect (plasterer) and the wood architect (cabinetmaker). You want a stone church. Well then, you go to the stonemason. You want a bare brick barracks. The bricklayer builds it. You want a stuccoed dwelling house. You contract with the plasterer. You want a wooden ceiling in the dining room. The cabinetmaker carries it out.
Yes, of course – someone will object – where is the corresponding artistic training given? I insist that it is not necessary. No one denies that the outstanding buildings of past times were built in just this way. A building all of whose details, down to the keyplates16, are the product of a single mind loses all its freshness and becomes tedious. Always the same ornament, always the same profile17, sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, on the façade of the building, on the front door, in the hall, in the mosaic floor, in the skylight, in the wallpaper. How splendid is the Golden Hall of the Augsburg18 Town Hall. And yet it owes its existence to two artists: the master builder Elias Holl19 for the spatial effects and the master carpenter Wolfgang Ebner20 for the superb ceiling. But the corresponding artistic training has already been illustrated by this division of labour. Most often, two or even three architects come together and form a firm, and the actual execution is handed over to an army of draughtsmen. The artist, the head, who draws the design, changes it so easily, while the details are handed over to draughtsmen who have themselves learned their craft. The head themselves may correct the work but happily agrees with the judgement of their expert colleagues. But the artist must themselves be master of one of the four crafts above.
I have understood what our intelligence can grasp, without bringing in a utopian conclusion. These impulses will apply to the present and the near future. I did not consider it necessary to examine whether social upheavals will create new forms and ideas. Because at present the capitalist view of the world still prevails. And my ideas apply only to this situation.
* In this matter we sometimes meet with apparently fair objections. Thus we can point to the brilliant stucco work of the Renaissance. Above all. It is a direct imitation of marble. My answer is that the old marble workers tried to imitate the drawing of marble rather than the material of marble. The stonemason who wants to transfer a mask, an acanthus leaf (acanthus), a festoon (festoon) to their material does the same thing. But the old marble workers, unlike their modern successors. Never tried to imitate hairline cracks. On the contrary: in working on large panels without cracks, they recognised its advantage over marble. I consider that the true and proud spirit of craftsmanship, compared with which our wretched plasterers look like pitiful tricksters. And they are always afraid of being caught in the act.
** See the complaint in the title: Friedrich Schmidt, German stonemason. As we know, Schmidt, who was a master church builder, refused to be known as an architect. Schmidt always emphasised their own artistic trade.
Footnotes:
1- Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta, meaning “Here is Rhodes, jump here!”, from the Latin version of Aesop’s fable The Boastful Athlete. Meaning: “Right now, prove what you can do”.
2- N.N
3- Danaë
4- zeitgeist
5- antiquity
6- Moorish
7- Schlüter
8- Fischer von Erlach
9- Le Pautre
10- Schinkel
11- palm
12- Etruscan
13- Mesopotamian
14- ornamentalism
15- Aristides
16- keyplate
17- profile
18- Augsburg
19- Elias Holl
20- Wolfgang Ebner
