| Cubism played an important role in the formative process of modern art and architecture around W.W.I. Most historians see this Cubistic lesson only as a foreign element in the development of architecture, temporarily diverting architecture from its direct path, from the rationalism of the 19th century, to the Functionalism and Constructivism of the 20th century. But we argue that through this Cubistic lesson architecture achieved an understanding of the essence of its own form and creativity, as it had already been uncovered by that time in the territory of instrumental, technical creativity. Through abstraction art and architecture attempted to recover the essential, direct relationship to the lived world, was destroyed by the positivistic science and modern civilization of the 19th century.; The phenomenon of Cubism in architecture remained limited, from all of Europe, to only Prague around W.W.I. There some students of Otto Wagner rejected his modernity as non-artistic, separated from direct creativity by its own submission to temporal needs as the only criteria for evaluation. Cubists, as they later became called, based their concept of architecture on the teachings of Wilhelm Worringer and Alois Riegl and were influenced by philosophy of Henri Bergson.; Architecture was envisioned as "overcoming of matter" in a process uniting abstraction and empathy in an act rendering any distinction between the "subjective" character of creativity and the "objective" character of the world as meaningless. In a proto-phenomenological manner there was present a vision of architecture uniting the chaos of modernity into a new universe by the possibility of an individual to transcend oneself through the world by authentic creative reason. The concept of abstraction provided for the ability to transform every piece of work into a sign, whereas the concept of empathy was connected with the pragmatic character of the work, never lost in Czech Cubism. To "overcome matter" was understood as being empathically involved in matter, as dealing with matter pragmatically in-order-to project a lived world and for-the-sake-of life, to produce forms, forms that emerge either within or out of the lived tradition. Architecture, rather than being merely a product of necessities, was established as having its own meaning as an object in the world present to us. |
