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

Realizing the Minimum Dwelling

I said that there were two extraordinary features of the Wolfsonian exhibition. The second was a brilliant twofold realization of Teige's pet architectural concept, the "Minimum Dwelling"--or Nejmensi byt in the Czech, which is also the title of his 1932 book with a cover photomontage showing a spiffy new collective dwelling beside an old tenement in ruins. The Minimum Dwelling was to be a basic private studio apartment for each adult living a communal life, without bourgeois marriage, in a collective koldom (borrowed Soviet term) with common services, each pair of efficiency units sharing a little galley kitchen and a john with tiny shower. The idea seemed interesting but unrealistic until one was convinced with the help of two effective exhibition devices. Inscribed on the floor was a full-size floor plan of a pair of units with their common mini-facilities--based on a 1932 design by Jan Gillar, related in turn to a double studio that Jaramir Krejcar produced for Teige as an interior remodeling of an existing apartment in 1927-28 (before Teige and his companion were joined by a second woman). (24) One could pace out, without crowding, how compact the little units were. There was also a full-scale, open-sided mock-up of one such interior with furnishings, everything painted a hypothetical white. This was a good way of suggesting the experience of the diminutive interior within the public context of gallery; besides, any thought of today's urban homeless would have to make the Minimum Dwelling only the more plausible.

It happens that the doubled Minimum Dwelling also exemplifies the ahistoricism that readily attends a task-focused functionalism. Teige's Siamese-twinning of studio apartments finds its chief determinant in economy, to be sure; yet, in its avant-garde aspect, it also echoes a series of twinned, semi-detached pairs of artists' houses, such as Josef Hoffmann's double house outside Vienna for Carl Moll and Koloman Moser (1900-01), Theo van Doesburg's project for a double house outside Paris for himself and his wife and Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1927), and (if artisans matter) Loos's twin semi-detached suburban Viennese houses for the Austrian Werkbund (1932). (25)

Poetism and Photomontage

Extending beyond architecture into the life of the metropolis, and thus not wholly divorced from concerns of functionalism, was Teige's theory and practice of "poetism." Not just another easy, would-be scandalous gambit of counting everything art, poetism sought an exhilaration of life in the modern present; it was upbeat in a proletarian, urban way but noticeably more peaceable than Futurism. (26) The notion embraced all sorts of quasi-artistic virtuosity: "Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, [Vlasta] Burian [a Czech film comic], a director of fireworks, a champion boxer, an inventive and skillful cook, a record-breaking mountain-climber--are they not even greater poets?" (27) A critical question remains of how the mundane might become extraordinary except by the idealistic implication "for its own sake." The answer, for architectural functionalism as well as general poetism, seems to have concerned doing things for what the 18th century considered the general "felicity" of the people. The Teige exhibition conveys the flavor of poetism nicely in a quotation (translated as part of a display) from an essay on "New Proletarian Art" in Devetsil: revolueni sbornik (Devetsil: Revolutionary Anthology), 1922, where Teige dismisses aristocratic notions of privileged poetic (or general artistic) inspiration: "The muses of a poet are not a bit more `divine' than those of an engineer or a carpenter. Perhaps the only thing that can be admitted is that they are possibly more human, since art is really a humanizing science."