Abstract
Whilst the Vienna Circle had virtually no impact on the Czech-speaking philosophical community during the 1930s, one can find a curious meeting point in the field of the theory of architecture. There is now an increasing literature on Otto Neurath as a theorist of architecture and urbanism, one who emphasized the social aspects of modern building and approached architecture from his idiosyncratic view of Marxism interpreted as a physicalistic social science. It is less well known that a young Czech architecture critic and theorist, Karel Teige, cultivated strikingly similar views during the same period — the 1920s and 1930s — albeit without any knowledge either of Neurath’s thought in particular, or for that matter the Vienna Circle in general. This essay reveals both the similarities and differences between Neurath and Teige on Marxism, science, architecture and the Bauhaus, as well as a discussion of the relations of both with their contemporaries, most importantly Adolf Loos, Josef Frank and Hannes Meyer.
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Notes
- 1.
Otto Neurath, Österreichs Kleingarten- und Siedlerorganisationen. Wien: Kommissionsverlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung 1923, p. 34. On Neurath’s involvement in the Austrian settlement movement, see Nader Vossoughian, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers 2008, Part 1; and Gűnther Sandner, Otto Neurath: Eine politische Biographie. Wien: Paul Zsolnay Verlag 2014, ch. 5.
- 2.
Originally published as Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf. Berlin: E. Laub 1928. Cited from the English translation in Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, edited by Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen . Dordrecht: Reidel 1973, p. 257.
- 3.
Hannes Meyer, “building” (1928), in: Hans M. Wingler (Ed.), Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 1969, p. 153–154. (Like other avant-garde writers, including sometimes Teige, Meyer eliminates the use of capital letters.)
- 4.
Hannes Meyer, “Über marxistische Architektur” (1930), cited from the reprint in: Mayer, Bauen und Gesselschaft: Schriften, Briefe, Projekte, edited by Lena Meyer-Bergner, introduced by Klaus-Jürgen Winkler. Dresden: VEB Verlag 1980, p. 92 (my translation).
- 5.
Rudolf Carnap , The Logical Structure of the World. Translated by Rolf A. George. Berkeley , Cal.: The University of California Press 1967, p. xviii. Cf. Also the later testimony of Herbert Feigl , who wrote that “Neurath and Carnap felt that the Circle’s philosophy was an expression of the neue sachlichkeit which was part of the ideology of the Bauhaus.” Herbert Feigl, “Wiener Kreis in America”, in: Robert S. Cohen (Ed.), Inquiries and Provocations. Dordrecht: Reidel 1981, p. 637.
- 6.
Peter Galison , “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism”, in: Critical Inquiry 16, 1990, pp. 709–752. See also Peter Galison, “The Cultural Meaning of Aufbau”, in: Friedrich Stadler (Ed.), Scientific Philosophy: Origins and Developments. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 1. Dordrech: Kluwer 1993, pp. 75–94.
- 7.
All the aforementioned texts are now available in English in Karel Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings. Introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen, translations by Irena Žantovská Murray and David Britt. Los Angeles, Cal.: The Getty Research Institute 2000.
- 8.
This text came out in Czech as “K sociologii architektury“in the avant-garde revue ReD 2, 6–7, 1930, pp. 161–223. So far it remains untranslated.
- 9.
Teige, “K sociologii architektury”, op. cit., p. 171. (My translation; the elimination of capitals and bold lettering is Teige’s.)
- 10.
Cf., e.g., ibid., p. 187.
- 11.
Cited in: Elaine S. Hochman, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. New York: Fromm International 1997, p. 242.
- 12.
Josef Frank and Otto Neurath, “Hannes Meyer“, in: Der Klassenkampf: Sozialistische Politik und Wirtschaft 4/18, 1930, pp. 573–575. Quoted from the translation in Josef Frank, Schriften/Writings, Vol. 1. Edited by Tano Bojankin, Christopher Long and Iris Meder. Wien: Metro Verlag 2013, p. 439.
- 13.
For the history of Frank’s strained relations with the institutions of international architecture, see Christopher Long, Josef Frank: Life and Work. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2002, especially ch. 5. For Neurath, see Vossoughian, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis, op. cit., Part 3, and Sandner, Otto Neurath: Eine politische Biographie, op. cit., ch. 5. For Teige, see Klaus Spechtenhauser and Daniel Weiss, “Karel Teige and the CIAM: The History of a Troubled Relationship”, in: Eric Dluhosch and Rostislav Švácha (Eds.), Karel Teige, 1900–1951: L’Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 1999, pp. 216–255.
- 14.
Galison , “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism”, op. cit., p. 723.
- 15.
Eve Blau , “Isotype and Architecture in Red Vienna: The Modern Projects of Otto Neurath and Josef Frank”, in: Austrian Studies 14, 2006, pp. 227–259.
- 16.
Otto Neurath, “Rationalismus, Arbeiterschaft und Baugestaltung”, in: Der Aufbau: Ősterreichische Monatshefte für Siedlung und Stadtebau, 5, 1926, pp. 49–54. (My translation.)
- 17.
See Otto Neurath, “Das neue Bauhaus in Dessau”, in: Der Aufbau: Ősterreichische Monatshefte fur Siedlung und Stadtebau, 1, 1926, p. 49.
- 18.
Josef Frank , “Frippery of the Soul and Frippery as a Problem”, in: Schriften/Writings, op. cit., p. 293.
- 19.
Ibid., pp. 297, 299.
- 20.
Karel Teige, “Toward a New Architecture”, in: Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, op. cit., p. 309.
- 21.
Karel Teige, “Constructivism and the Liquidation of ‘Art’”, in: Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, op. cit., p. 333. (Italics in the original.)
- 22.
Ibid., p. 340.
- 23.
Vienna: Verlag Anton Schroll & Co. Translated as Architecture as Symbol: Elements of the German New Building in: Josef Frank , Schriften/Writings, Vol. 2, op. cit., pp. 9–191.
- 24.
Karel Teige, “Mundaneum”, in: Stavba 7, 10, 1929, 145–155. Quoted from the English translation by Ladislav and Elizabeth Holovsky and Lubomír Doležel, “Mundaneum”, in: K. Michael Hays (ed.), Oppositions Reader. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press 1998, p. 594.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 596.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 597. (Italics in the original.)
- 28.
Originally published as: Nejmenší byt. Praha: Petr 1932. Quoted from the English translation by Eric Dluhosh in: Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press 2002, p. 24.
- 29.
The Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, in 1935 renamed the International System of Typographic Picture Education, or ISOTYPE. See Otto Neurath, International Picture Language. Reading: University of Reading, Department of Typography and Graphic Communication 1980 (1935). Cf. Michael Twyman, “The Significance of Isotype”, in: Graphic Communication through ISOTYPE. Reading: University of Reading 1975. For the relevance of ISOTYPE in Neurath’s work on architecture, see Blau, op. cit.
- 30.
See Vossoughian, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis, op. cit., p. 102–103.
- 31.
The call for a “minimum dwelling” was issued by the Second CIAM Congress in Frankfurt in 1929. Teige’s book is a response to this as well as to the debate at the Third CIAM Congress in Brussels in 1930, in which he participated. Cf. Eric Dluhosch, “Teige’s Minimum Dwelling as a Critique of Modern Architecture” in: Dluhosch and Švácha , Karel Teige: 1900–1951, op. cit., pp. 141–193.
- 32.
Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, op. cit., p. 257.
- 33.
Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, op. cit., p. 94.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 168. (Bold in the original.)
- 35.
One of the leading Soviet promoters of collective dwelling is the architect Moisei Ginzburg; Teige discusses his and others’ designs in The Minimum Dwelling. For a recent discussion of the Soviet debate on collective dwelling, see Barbara Kreis, “The Idea of the Dom-Kommuna and the Dilemma of the Soviet Avant-Garde,” in: Oppositions 21, 1980, pp. 52–77.
- 36.
Teige, “K sociologii architektury”, op. cit., p. 217. (Teige’s lower-case typographic convention; my translation.)
- 37.
“the standardized cell makes the idea of private dwelling a concrete reality” (loc. cit.; my translation).
- 38.
Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, op. cit., p. 301. (Bold in the original.)
- 39.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 40.
Josef Frank , Architecture as Symbol, in: Frank, Schriften/Writings, Vol. 1, op. cit., p. 131.
- 41.
I should caution that by restricting my attention to Loos as a common source for Frank, Neurath, Meyer and Teige, I do not mean to ignore the diversity of sources of the modern architecture movement and its theory in the early twentieth century. Some of these other sources, including the late nineteenth-century American modern architecture (Louis Sullivan), German expressionism, and the Russian avant-garde, each of which shaped the theory and practice of the Bauhaus, are analyzed by Volker Thurm-Nemeth in his “Die Konstruktion des modernen Lebens – Ein Fragment: Wiener Kreis und Architektur,“in Idem (Ed.), Konstruktion zwischen Werkbund und Bauhaus. Wissenschaft – Architektur – Wiener Kreis. Schriftenreihe Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung und Kunst, Vol. 4, Vienna: Hőlder–Pichler–Tempsky 1998, pp. 9–78.
- 42.
Adolf Loos , “Ornament und Verbrechen” (1909), in: Loos, Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Adolf Opel. Vienna: Lesethek Verlag 2010, pp. 363–373.
- 43.
Adolf Loos, “Architektur” (1910), in: Loos, Gesammelte Schriften, op. cit., pp. 391–404. Quoted from the English translation by Wilfried Wang in Yehuda Safran (Ed.), The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts Council Exhibition, second ed. London: Arts Council of Great Britain 1987, p. 108.
- 44.
For example, one recent interpreter argues that Loos limited to domestic architecture the scope of his claim that architecture was not art, as indicated by his consistent use of the term “das Haus” (rather than “der Bau”) in his essay. (See Joseph Masheck, Adolf Loos : The Art of Architecture. London – New York: I. B. Tauris 2013.)
- 45.
Cf. Vossoughian, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis, op. cit., p. 32.
- 46.
Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, op. cit., p. 257.
- 47.
Meyer , “Über marxistische Architektur,” op. cit., p. 93 (my translation).
- 48.
When it comes to the influence of Loos ’ ideas in Czechoslovakia, it is worth mentioning that Czech was the first foreign language into which Loos’ first collection of essays, Spoken into the Void (Ins Leere Gesprochen) (1921) was translated (in 1929).
- 49.
Karel Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, op. cit., p. 129.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 129–130.
- 52.
I chose to emphasize Teige’s appreciative attitude to Loos as a precursor of radical architectural modernism. For the sake of completeness, I should add that Teige was at the same time highly critical of Loos—in particular of the latter’s architectural practice. Both in Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and The Minimum Dwelling, Teige said that Loos was by and large a bourgeois architect who designed expensive villas for the rich and, despite his theoretical dismissal of useless ornament, preferred very costly materials in his highly decorative interiors.
- 53.
Simone Hain, “Karel in Wonderland: The Theoretical Conflicts of the Thirties”, in: Manuela Castagnara Codeluppi (Ed.), Karel Teige: Architettura, Poesia, Praga 1900–1951. Milano: Electa 1996, p. 311 (my emphasis).
- 54.
Rostislav Švácha , “Before and After the Mundaneum”, in: Dluhosch and Švácha, Karel Teige 1900–1951, op cit., p. 111.
- 55.
Tomáš Hříbek, “Karel Teige and the ‘wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung’”, in: Umění/Art, 53, 4, 2005, pp. 366–384. I reuse some of the material from this earlier paper in this and the following sections of this chapter.
- 56.
Hain, “Karel in Wonderland”, op. cit., p. 312.
- 57.
Otto Neurath, “Unified Science and Psychology” (1932), in: Brian McGuiness (Ed.), Unified Science. Introduced by Rainer Hegselmann, translated by Hans Kaal. Dordrecht: Reidel 1987, p. 4.
- 58.
Hans Hahn , Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle”, in: Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology. Dordrecht: Reidel 1973, p. 317. Although I am emphasizing here the role of Neurath’s Marxist sociology in the manifesto of the Vienna Circle, I do not mean to diminish the important contribution of Carnap’s to the composition of the text, which was convincingly established by Thomas Uebel . See Uebel’s “On the Production History and Early Reception of The Scientific World Conception. The Vienna Circle”, in: Friedrich Stadler and Thomas Uebel (Eds.): Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis, Hrsg. Vom Verein Ernst Mach. Reprint der Erstausgabe. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis. Sonderband, Wien and New York: Springer 2012, p. 291–314.
- 59.
To be sure, not everybody in the Vienna Circle was excited by Neurath’s radical politics. Moritz Schlick , in particular, opposed attempts to transform logical empiricism into a “movement” with a left-wing political agenda. See Friedrich Stadler , “Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick: On the Philosophical and Political Antagonisms in the Vienna Circle”, in: Thomas Uebel (Ed.), Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle. Dordrecht: Reidel 1991, pp. 153–175, esp. p. 159–168. On the other hand, Neurath found a kindred spirit in Carnap, as evidenced in the latter’s “Intellectual Autobiography”: “One of the important contributions made by Neurath consisted in his frequent remarks on the social and historical conditions for the development of philosophical conceptions. He criticized strongly the customary view held among others by Schlick and by Russell , that a wide-spread acceptance of a philosophical doctrine depends chiefly on its truth. He emphasized that the sociological situation in a given culture and in a given historical period is favorable to certain kinds of ideology or philosophical attitude and unfavorable to others.” P. A. Schilpp (Ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap . La Salle, Ill.: Open Court 1963, p. 22.
- 60.
Incidentally, whilst the suggestion that ideology is literally meaningless perhaps lends it an extra polemical edge, it appears much less plausible than the orthodox Marxist concept of a distorted picture of the world. While the picture is distorted, it is still a picture, hence it cannot completely lack a cognitive value. Also, the class analysis implied by the text of the Vienna Circle manifesto, in which vaguely identified reactionary forces are opposed by the supporters of modern industrialism, seems less precise than the Marxist model of bourgeoisie vs. proletariat. Those on the side of industrialism and science could include progressive entrepreneurs. This might have been a concession to the non-Marxist signatories of the manifesto; Neurath himself is more orthodox in his own publications.
- 61.
Rudolf Carnap , “The Task of the Logic of Science”, in: McGuiness, Unified Science, op. cit., p. 46.
- 62.
Ibid., p. 47.
- 63.
Loc. cit.
- 64.
Neurath, “Unified Science and Psychology”, op. cit., p. 10.
- 65.
Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, op. cit., p. 295.
- 66.
Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology, op. cit., p. 349.
- 67.
See Carnap’s “Intellectual Autobiography”, in: Schilpp, op. cit., p. 24.
- 68.
Otto Neurath, “Weltanschauung und Marxismus” (1931), in: Neurath, Gesammelte philosophische und methodologische Schriften, Vol. 1. Edited by Rudolf Haller and Heiner Rutte. Vienna: Hőlder – Pichler – Tempsky 1981, p. 410–411. (My translation.)
- 69.
Neurath, “Unified Science and Psychology”, op. cit., esp. p. 11–16. In “Weltanschauung und Marxismus,” Neurath contends that behaviorism is an ideologically neutral scientific trend, pursued both in the Soviet Union and the United States. In Empirical Sociology, he marshals a lengthy quote from Marx and Engels’ German Ideology as evidence for his interpretation of Marxism as a science that explains social phenomena in terms of publicly observable movements vis-à-vis publicly observable objects.
- 70.
Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings, p. 337.
- 71.
Hain, “Karel in Wonderland,” op. cit., p. 312.
- 72.
For a critical discussion of interwar Czech positivism, see Miloš Kratochvílo’s contribution in this volume. I think it is also worth mentioning Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk’s role in popularizing, specifically in the Czech milieu, an interpretation of Marxism as a positive social science. Masaryk‘s detailed two-volume treatise, Otázka sociální: Základy marxismu filosofické a sociologické (Prague: Jan Laichter 1898; the German version published as Die philosophischen und sociologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus. Studien zur socialen Frage. Wien: C. Konegen 1899) became the essential textbook of Marxism for several generations of Czech intellectuals, Marxist and anti-Marxist alike. It is safe to say that Masaryk’s positivist slant on Marxism very likely influenced even the young Teige. (In defense of both Masaryk and Teige’s positivist reading of Marxism, it should be noted that the “humanist” manuscripts of the young Marx did not become available until the early 1930s.)
- 73.
Albert Hofmann , “Die Künstlerischen Beziehungen der Architektur zur Ingenieur-Wissenschaft,” in: Deutsche Bauzeitung 27, 1893, cited in Sokratis Georgiadis, “Introduction” to Siegfried Giedion , Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete. Translated by J. Duncan Barry. Santa Monica, Cal.: The Getty Research Institute 1995, p. 21.
- 74.
Teige, “The Mundaneum”, op. cit., p. 596.
- 75.
Teige, “Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia”, op. cit., p. 289.
- 76.
Teige, “Constructivism and the Liquidation of ‘Art’”, op. cit., p. 335.
- 77.
Teige, “K sociologii architektury”, op. cit., p. 164, and Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, op. cit., p. 22.
- 78.
Teige, “K sociologii architektury”, op. cit., p. 169 and passim.
- 79.
For the best-known empiricist criticism of the Hegelian heritage of traditional art history, see E. H. Gombrich, “In Search of Cultural History”, in: Ideals and Idols. London: Phaidon 1979, pp. 24–59.
- 80.
Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, op. cit., p. 13–16.
- 81.
It is worth noting that Teige sees as his enemy a theory that has the same roots as the philosophy of science opposed by logical empiricists. Whilst he rejects the philosophy behind the Hegelian Kunstwissenschaft, logical empiricists identified themselves, as I pointed out, as being against Kantian transcendentalism. Thus, the dominant philosophies in both the humanities and the natural sciences—at least in the German-speaking cultural milieu — that needed to be overthrown had a similar ancestry, namely German idealism.
- 82.
For a classical study of the Platonic background of Renaissance architecture, see Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. New York: W.W. Norton 1971.
- 83.
Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, op. cit., p. 289.
- 84.
Teige, “Constructivism and the Liquidation of ‘Art’”, op. cit., passim.
- 85.
Ibid., p. 335; and Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, op. cit., passim. Rostislav Švácha argues that “constructivism” and “functionalism,” rather than being interchangeable labels, correspond to two successive periods of Teige’s theorizing: namely, the doctrinaire materialism of the 1920s and the more relaxed position of the 1930s, respectively. See Švácha, “Karel Teige and the Devetsil Architects”, op. cit.
- 86.
Teige, “K sociologii architektury”, op. cit., p. 177.
- 87.
Teige, “Mundaneum”, op. cit., p. 594.
- 88.
See the anecdote about a “metaphysical“lamp design at the Bauhaus in Galison , “Aufbau/Bauhaus”, op. cit., p. 735.
- 89.
In an attempt to prove otherwise, Hain makes unfortunate remarks such as the following: “Instruments or monuments, science or art—that sounds reminiscent of the dualism of wave and particle in quantum mechanics” (Hain, “Karel in Wonderland”, op. cit., 312). It should be manifest to everybody that “instrument vs. monument,” “science vs. art” and “wave vs. particle” have absolutely nothing in common except the linguistic form of each being a contrast between two words. One need not know anything about physics to see that Hain completely misinterprets Teige’s view of the relation between instrumental and monumental architecture by insinuating that it should be seen as a kind of “dualism.”
- 90.
Teige, “Constructivism and the Liquidation of ‘Art’”, op. cit., pp. 333–334.
- 91.
See Neurath, “Weltanschauung und Marxismus,” op. cit., p. 409. (My translation.).
- 92.
Teige, The Minimum Dwelling, op. cit., p. 37.
- 93.
Thus Carnap speaks favorably of poetry, since he believes it does not pretend to be cognitively meaningful. He argues that metaphysics should be regarded as a poetic language, since its only value consists in a certain aesthetic or soothing effect, and that it would be acceptable as such. See Rudolf Carnap , “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language”, in: A. J. Ayer (Ed.), Logical Positivism. Glencoe: Free Press 1959, pp. 60–81.
- 94.
Clearly, here I give “rationalism” a wider meaning from its usual one, in which it signifies the opposite of empiricism, stating that there are some truths about the world not based on experience.
- 95.
Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia, op. cit., p. 297.
- 96.
Teige, “Mundaneum”, op. cit., p. 595.
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Hříbek, T. (2020). Minimum Dwellings: Otto Neurath and Karel Teige on Architecture. In: Schuster, R. (eds) The Vienna Circle in Czechoslovakia. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36383-3_6
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