View

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2000 by Brian Carter

VISIONS OF DIE GROBSTADT -- IDEAS OF URBANITY TO NORTH AMERICA; GODFATHER OF BRITISH MODERNISM, LESLIE MARTIN REMEMBERED; ARCHIPRIX INTERNATIONAL: CHALLENGE TO FINAL YEAR STUDENTS.

SHAPING THE EUROPEAN CITY

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Habsburg lands occupied a broad swath of Europe. The Austro-Hungarian Empire embraced 11 nationalities and many more linguistic groups, and its developing cities became sites not only for rapid development and industrialization but also of fervent searches for identity. It is the tensions between city building, architecture, increasingly pervasive concepts of Modernism and these quests for national identity which this exhibition so effectively confronts.

Organized around 'The city as form and idea' and 'Modernity and place', the exhibition documents the development of 10 cities -- Vienna Budapest, Prague, Krakow, Zagreb, L'viv, Ljubljana, Brno, Timisoara and Zlin -- between 1890 and 1937. It was designed by Frank Stepper of Coop Himmelb(1)au. The entrance is marked with a room-sized metal grid and a single monitor showing flickering black and white images of bustling city streets from the period. The mechanistic movements of anonymous, silent, urban crowds recall the preoccupations of Baudelaire and Benjamin. This combination of stark grid and moving image extends throughout the exhibition. Serving as an armature for the display of a collection of 400 architectural drawings and models, photographs, posters and books, the grid also recalls the pervasive ordering systems of municipal administration, urban infrastructure and new building types that were devised and overlaid on these historic cities.

The overlays, and their impact on the cities, are striking. By assembling a range of work developed by many architects who were speculating on design of buildings and urban form across Europe, the exhibition maps both transformations and resistances. The growing influence of the town planning profession is set against the contrasting approaches of Sitte, Wagner and numerous others who emphasized the importance of physical place as an alternative to the provision of municipal infrastructure. Otto Wagner's meticulous, visionary drawings of Die GroBstadt are, in themselves, reason to see this exhibition. Seen together with the sketches, manifestos, plans and built work of others like Molnar, Loos or Karfik, the research becomes compelling. And when situated in the context of studies by Garnier, Le Corbusier and Hilberseimer that describe a new world metropolis, and the investigations of localized sites of culture and invention in Prague, Budapest, Ljubljana or Zlin by architects such as Plecnik, Janak and Choch ol, then the creative tension between individual and collective, nation and state, building and city is made almost tangible.

This exhibition, which was first shown in Prague, is scheduled to go to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Kunstforum Wien in Vienna after the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Although some of the work is familiar, many drawings and documents are being shown for the first time. In its selections and juxtapositions, and as a record of the design and construction of these significant European cities, the exhibition gives form to ideas by using inspired loans from international collections and revealing archival material previously obscured by wars and concealed by an Iron Curtain. It also seeks to project that work into the foreground and in doing so, not only expand but re-form familiar landscapes of architecture, national character and Modernism.

Shaping the great city: Modern architecture in central Europe, 1890-1937.

At the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal until 15 October 2000. www.cca.qc.ca