Architecture and truth in Vienna, 1894-1912: An historical account with four case studies

This dissertation is a study of the notion of "truth" in modern architecture in turn-of-the-century Vienna. It traces the various meanings carried by the notion of architectural truth (and related concepts such as realism, honesty and authenticity) beginning with Otto Wagner's 1894 speech to the Academy of Fine Arts and ending with the opening of Adolf Loos's Michaelerplatz building in 1912. The first chapter offers a discussion of the notion's roots in nineteenth-century architectural theory and its place in the Viennese architectural renewal of the 1890s. The subsequent four chapters each concentrate on a specific building and seek to answer two questions: What role did the desire for truth in architecture play in each building? And, how was the determination of this role affected by non-architectural forces such as the buildings' clients?;Chapter two focuses on the Secession building (1898), designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich as a gallery for the "Secession" group led by Gustav Klimt. The Secessionists saw the building as simultaneously embodying the higher truth of artistic subjectivity and a pragmatic truth to functional requirements. The coexistence of these two contradictory notions of truth is discussed in the context of artistic and philosophical pluralism in the Secession. The Purkersdorf Sanatorium, the topic of the third chapter, was built from 1904 to 1905 by Josef Hoffmann as part of a sanatorium for nervous ailments. Its design, I argue, sought to convey a fact-based, scientific necessity, derived from and reinforcing the attitudes of the beleaguered school of psychiatry which was followed at Purkersdorf. Chapter four deals with Otto Wagner's Postal Savings Bank (1904-6, 1910-12), the headquarters of a public office which offered banking services to the mass of the Austrian population. Wagner's design took as its starting point not stylistic concern but the functional necessities of the building, and was inspired and restricted by the rigorously pragmatic attitude of the bank's directors. Lastly, Adolf Loos's Michaelerplatz building (1909-12), which housed an exclusive men's tailoring firm, is interpreted in chapter five as an "honest mask," whose form was determined by the desire to distinguish it from the modern type of the department store.