Today is a big day.
In the morning, Tate talks about Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, drawing, and alleswirdgut. Kraus was a massively influential Viennese journalist at the turn of the century, Loos was an architect who took the ball from Kraus and ran with it, drawing is something we need to be doing more of, and alleswirdgut is an architecture firm we visit in the afternoon.
Without going into too much detail, Kraus attacked things that were immoral, hypocritical, and false in Vienna at the time. Although hard to define in terms of what exactly he hated or disliked, one thing was that Kraus was impartial in his attacks. No one was safe. He would attack the disturbing trend of married men patronizing whorehouses, then he would attack psychoanalysts like Freud for trying to rationalize the hysteria that this behavior was causing, and then womens’ rights, citing a celebration of the masculine through a reduction of the feminine. He even criticized the Secession. His aim was “to regenerate culture as a whole.” Kraus was intense.
Loos is a mind I can really relate to. His life was riddled with insecurity, failure, and defeat, but somehow he managed to find something great and grab onto it. He met up with the great minds of Viennese thinking at the time and he shook the earth. His idea of raumplan was revolutionary and changed the way people moved through space in buildings, all the while staying true to form and ideology.
We spend time on drawing. I realize I need to be drawing more. Tate talks about getting a “27th wind”. I need to stop thinking about drawing and just draw. One of us has already filled one sketchbook and had to buy another one today. More is more. My sketches will help me recall what Vienna means to me when I return to the States.
After lunch, we reconvene and walk next door to the Hofburg Palace complex to visit the National Library. Upon entering, you'd think you were in some Vatican museum. It is a grand, baroque space with soaring marble corinthian columns, frescoes, statues, and over 200,000 volumes. There is a definite Austrian white-gold-red color scheme. The space is divided into two halves—the one with the entrance for the Imperial family and court represents heaven and peace, while the half with the public entrance represents earth and war. In the middle of the library is a statue of Emperor Leopold, overseeing the two sides, balancing the two. I constantly had to remind myself this was civil architecture.
The library brings up an interesting point. The books are all very expensive, but the quality is so great that they have survived for two hundred and some odd years. A standard paperback today might last thirty or forty. These books could be handed down from generation to generation. This brings up a question of quality and investment. Loos was a proponent of going expensive to achieve the maximum quality. Do you buy a $100 suit that will last a year? Or a $300 suit that will last many years? Where do you compromise? Do you compromise?
Another thing I found marvelous: the books were accessible to anyone. An attendant has to retrieve the book for you, and you have to read in an adjacent reading room, but any of these leather-bound treasures are at your fingertips.
We move on to alleswirdgut. We take the tram to a neighborhood south of the Ring. We walk a few blocks down the street and come upon what appears to be some retail space, with huge shop windows. Peering in, we see people hard at work using CAD workstations. There is type above the windows, “alleswirdgut”. A young, gaunt, friendly Austrian named Herwig greets us. We are here.
alleswirdgut is unlike any other firm I have seen, much less a design or architecture firm. The office space is on the first level of a five-story building with the aforementioned shop windows. Herwig says people will walk by and watch him work, and when he looks up they move along. It is humorous to him, it’s as if they have been caught snooping.
There is a meeting in the main office space, so we move across the street to a workshop. It is the perfect setting for our purposes. Herwig sets up a monitor and hooks it up to his laptop, and we play a “game.” He shows us images of their projects, and we are invited to inquire about them. One is a single-family home for a family with not much money, but a beautiful piece of steeply-sloped land. Their approach is to make a dwelling with a terrace that looks out on a stunning view of an Alpine valley, along with a flat roof, something that goes against tradition and style of the area, but is perfectly suited to the family’s needs. It provides flat space. It provides a garden. It provides an area for the wife to sunbathe, or space to entertain outdoors. It fits.
We also see a public space, a single-family home for a well-off family, and an experiment in living space that involves something that was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. We eat Austrian cakes and cookies and drink apple juice while Herwig shows us a kindergarten they did. It is delightful. I appreciate the way a child thinks; it is unrestrained and free of the insecurities, inhibitions, and pretenses that plague our adult minds.
I decide that part of me has to never grow up.
In the morning, Tate talks about Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, drawing, and alleswirdgut. Kraus was a massively influential Viennese journalist at the turn of the century, Loos was an architect who took the ball from Kraus and ran with it, drawing is something we need to be doing more of, and alleswirdgut is an architecture firm we visit in the afternoon.
Without going into too much detail, Kraus attacked things that were immoral, hypocritical, and false in Vienna at the time. Although hard to define in terms of what exactly he hated or disliked, one thing was that Kraus was impartial in his attacks. No one was safe. He would attack the disturbing trend of married men patronizing whorehouses, then he would attack psychoanalysts like Freud for trying to rationalize the hysteria that this behavior was causing, and then womens’ rights, citing a celebration of the masculine through a reduction of the feminine. He even criticized the Secession. His aim was “to regenerate culture as a whole.” Kraus was intense.
Loos is a mind I can really relate to. His life was riddled with insecurity, failure, and defeat, but somehow he managed to find something great and grab onto it. He met up with the great minds of Viennese thinking at the time and he shook the earth. His idea of raumplan was revolutionary and changed the way people moved through space in buildings, all the while staying true to form and ideology.
We spend time on drawing. I realize I need to be drawing more. Tate talks about getting a “27th wind”. I need to stop thinking about drawing and just draw. One of us has already filled one sketchbook and had to buy another one today. More is more. My sketches will help me recall what Vienna means to me when I return to the States.
After lunch, we reconvene and walk next door to the Hofburg Palace complex to visit the National Library. Upon entering, you'd think you were in some Vatican museum. It is a grand, baroque space with soaring marble corinthian columns, frescoes, statues, and over 200,000 volumes. There is a definite Austrian white-gold-red color scheme. The space is divided into two halves—the one with the entrance for the Imperial family and court represents heaven and peace, while the half with the public entrance represents earth and war. In the middle of the library is a statue of Emperor Leopold, overseeing the two sides, balancing the two. I constantly had to remind myself this was civil architecture.
The library brings up an interesting point. The books are all very expensive, but the quality is so great that they have survived for two hundred and some odd years. A standard paperback today might last thirty or forty. These books could be handed down from generation to generation. This brings up a question of quality and investment. Loos was a proponent of going expensive to achieve the maximum quality. Do you buy a $100 suit that will last a year? Or a $300 suit that will last many years? Where do you compromise? Do you compromise?
Another thing I found marvelous: the books were accessible to anyone. An attendant has to retrieve the book for you, and you have to read in an adjacent reading room, but any of these leather-bound treasures are at your fingertips.
We move on to alleswirdgut. We take the tram to a neighborhood south of the Ring. We walk a few blocks down the street and come upon what appears to be some retail space, with huge shop windows. Peering in, we see people hard at work using CAD workstations. There is type above the windows, “alleswirdgut”. A young, gaunt, friendly Austrian named Herwig greets us. We are here.
alleswirdgut is unlike any other firm I have seen, much less a design or architecture firm. The office space is on the first level of a five-story building with the aforementioned shop windows. Herwig says people will walk by and watch him work, and when he looks up they move along. It is humorous to him, it’s as if they have been caught snooping.
There is a meeting in the main office space, so we move across the street to a workshop. It is the perfect setting for our purposes. Herwig sets up a monitor and hooks it up to his laptop, and we play a “game.” He shows us images of their projects, and we are invited to inquire about them. One is a single-family home for a family with not much money, but a beautiful piece of steeply-sloped land. Their approach is to make a dwelling with a terrace that looks out on a stunning view of an Alpine valley, along with a flat roof, something that goes against tradition and style of the area, but is perfectly suited to the family’s needs. It provides flat space. It provides a garden. It provides an area for the wife to sunbathe, or space to entertain outdoors. It fits.
We also see a public space, a single-family home for a well-off family, and an experiment in living space that involves something that was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. We eat Austrian cakes and cookies and drink apple juice while Herwig shows us a kindergarten they did. It is delightful. I appreciate the way a child thinks; it is unrestrained and free of the insecurities, inhibitions, and pretenses that plague our adult minds.
I decide that part of me has to never grow up.
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