Karel Teige: functionalist and then some: the first exhibition in the U.S. of a leading Czech modernist illuminates the intellectual landscape of interwar Prague while adding new dimensions to the histories of design, architectural theory and the international style

Art in America, Dec, 2001 by Joseph Masheck

Ignoring Le Corbusier's sense of the engineer as a second "Hellene," Teige points to Loos's prescient as well as prior notion that the Greeks, with their deference to necessity, adumbrated the modern engineering esthetic. As for Loos's claim about the tomb and the monument, first Teige adopts it, writing, "This statement is fully consonant with the tenets of constructivism, which reduces it to the following: Architecture is not art, because the tomb and the monument, those abstract architectures, are not really part of architecture at all but rather a pure, absolute, even nonfigurative sculpture"; and then he adds the rather positivist rationalization, riffing on Loos, "The tomb and the monument are forms that will disappear with the popular acceptance of cremation (urns will replace tombs) and with the disappearance of the religious and totemic, that is, atavistic sentimentality." (20) (Nobody ever said he wasn't doctrinaire!) Teige readily finds common cause in the fact that "Loos's economy is not the economy of greed. It is a rational social economy that argues that `cheap is twice as expensive.'" Loos did not "think `like an artist,'" yet "he did not touch the problems of standardization and mass production." (21) Even though he was not himself a functionalist--especially with his penchant for luxurious materials, however pure and unadorned--Loos might be at least as vital to the cause as was that crooner of the machine style as such, Le Corbusier.

The last chapter of Teige's Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, "Toward a Theory of Constructivism," is a locus classicus for the theory of Constructivist architectural form as either (a) other than artistic, or (b) reformed-artistic. On almost every page one finds Loosian antipathy, not simply to ornament but toward the decorative arts as pseudo-artistic. "Constructivism negates traditional aesthetics and conceptions of art," Teige declares, and, with the leveling phrase "such special forms of craft--called art," even fine-arts norms are affiliated with prevailing means of production. "The constructivist aesthetic, having shed the superstition of an `art' existing a priori, does not explicate architecture as a symbol but as a craft activity," while "old architecture, architecture as art, ends where the old artisanal building methods end." Teige indulges in a typically Loosian clothing metaphor with an antibourgeois quip about man as "measure of all tailors," in declaring: "We are talking about buildings that are made to the measure of man, about humanizing architecture--not about some new "constructivist art." (22) While he sounds practically Anglophiliac-Loosian in declaring, "To intuit the psychosocial components of the housing problem does not imply satisfying sentimental notions of `hearth' and `sweet home' [in English in the original]," a divergence of sorts opens with one of the better statements of how there is still the possibility of a valid art of architecture: "Architecture in which creative intuition has not divined the unknowns and imponderables--those factors that cannot be addressed by mechanical, rational thinking--is neither architecture nor science but craftsmanship, building without spirit." (23)