Review: Adolf Loos—dílo v českých zemích / Adolf Loos—Works in the Czech Lands by Maria Szadkowska, Leslie Van Duzer, Dagmar Černoušková; Junge Meister: Architekten aus der Schule Otto Wagners in Mähren und Schlesien by Jindřich Vybíral

Abstract

Maria Szadkowska, Leslie Van Duzer , and Dagmar Cernouskova . Adolf Loos—dilo v ceských zemich / Adolf Loos—Works in the Czech Lands . Prague: Muzeum hlavniho města Prahy and Nekladatelstvi Kant, 2009, 393 pp., 302 color and 193 b/w illus. 790 Kc (paper), ISBN 9788085394634 Jindřich Vybiral . Junge Meister: Architekten aus der Schule Otto Wagners in Mahren und Schlesien . Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar: Bohlau Verlag, 2007, 319 pp., 156 b/w illus. €39 (cloth), ISBN 9783205775737 Although he is now inextricably linked with the Vienna of the first decades of the last century, Adolf Loos was not a native Viennese. Raised and educated early on in the province of Brno, in Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), he continued throughout his life to maintain a strong bond with his native land, building many of his works there. But Loos was hardly an exception. A sizeable number of the most important early modernist architects and designers in Vienna hailed from the Czech lands, among them Josef Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, Hubert Gessner, and Leopold Bauer. For many years, the secondary literature on these figures centered almost exclusively on their works and activities in Vienna, paying scarcely any attention to the buildings and projects they produced for their homeland. One of the principal reasons for this, of course, had to do with the difficulties foreigners faced when undertaking research in the former Communist Czechoslovakia. But the causes ran deeper: the forced expulsion of ethnic Germans from the Czech lands after World War II fostered a false partition between Austria and the new Czech and Slovak state. It had not always been thus, for roughly three out of seven of those living in Moravia at the turn of the century were ethnic Germans, and German speakers made up half of the population of Silesia; the remainder were Czech and Polish. What had once been a marvelously diverse and culturally rich territory, with German and Czech speakers living and creating cheek by jowl, became much less so, and although memories of the old order persisted, more and more historians on both sides appropriated their own and neglected the others. Almost nothing, for example, was written for decades about the large German-speaking community of architects working in Prague before and …