Ausblick in bessere Zukunft. Architekturreform in Graz um 1900 zwischen modernem Stil und heimischem Bauen

Contribution to Publishing Costs D 3226 Outlook on better times Antje SENARCLENS DE GRANCY 08.05.2000 Architecture in Graz around 1900 was searching for ways to overcome the "lunatic building" (0. Wagner) of historicism and to renew the art of construction and was heavily influenced by the Moderne movement in Vienna, especially from the circle surrounding Otto Wagner, on the one hand, and by the southern German variant of the "native", "homely" style of building proposed by Theodor Fischer and Paul Schultze-Naumburg. The study deals with the issues of how the various attempts made by architecture to reform itself were related to each other in Graz, a "second league" city, which topical issues and social conditions affected the processes of reception and the way in which the debate raging around the architectural reform came to be reflected in the buildings themselves. The approach used is based less on what subsequently became normative conceptions of "modernity" and "anti-modernity" but focuses more on discussions of the time, on contemporary notions of meaning and code, all of which reveal a highly ambivalent situation between the poles of modernity and tradition. The fact that this approach is based on an interdisciplinary understanding of cultural sciences that aims to deconstruct certain "sacred cows" or guiding values of modernity, to "re-contextualise", to emphasise the plurality of values, makes it a valid tool for the exploration of this issue. The study maintains that owing to its intrinsic public character, architecture in particular is the result of an extremely complex interplay of factors within a dynamic environment of forces. These factors do not merely reside in the personal decisions of the architect that had (also) been shaped by training, contacts and access to information, but that they are also revealed in the values that operated in architectural criticism at the time, in the way commissions were placed and in the social consensus that conferred models of identity on the town. Most of the proponents within this environment of forces that characterised architecture in Graz, such as the numerous pupils of Otto Wagner who were working in the town around 1900, were already integrating the reforms of the "modernist" (secessionist) and the "native" styles into their work and their ways of thinking without feeling that such ambivalence was a source of tension. It was not the backwardness of "primitive" provincial life that made the bulk of Graz architects indulge in the "native" tradition but a conscious decision to counter the negative developments caused by the "juggernaut of the big city" with a "healthy" ("German") tradition - fully in awareness of the most recent artistic innovations in international modernism. Not least, the research findings provide explanatory models for the "moderate modernity" that prevailed in Austria during the inter-war period, ascribing its roots to key artistic and social notions at the turn of the century. By analysing how the Vienna Moderne movement was modified and "imported" by Viennese architects to fit in a provincial setting, how modernist function and modernist style complemented each other in architectural genres such as the business and tradesman`s shop or the hospital, and also how the state vocational school, the technical university and the various artists` associations were aligned in an artistic sense, the study investigates the ambivalent relationships that existed between modernism and the preservation of regional customs, between innovation and tradition. The gradual shaping and discursive underpinning of "native building" along the lines of the southern German building tradition is illustrated in examples of architectural genres such as sanatorium construction or innovative housing models (garden towns, one kitchen houses).