Customer Reviews

Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1937

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This book is a collection of short, handsomely illustrated essays on architecture in the major cities of East-Central Europe during the years 1890 to 1939. The cities were provincial capitals in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before 1918 and national or provincial capitals in the "successor states" of the interwar years.

A somewhat confusing introduction by political historian Charles Maier sets the parameters of examination for the essays by architectural historians. In each city, as urban planners and municipal leaders rebuilt their cities in this era, there was two axes of tension: traditionalist vs. modernist and imperial/centralized vs. ethnic/decentralized. Would public buildings be modernist or traditionalist? Would they symbolically defer to Vienna, the imperial capital, or would they lean on local ethnic traditions? These same debates continued into the interwar years as new countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary tried to establish national artistic and architectural styles. In some cases, they created a new style based on indigenous folk traditions, and in other cases international styles became the "national" style. Political considerations were as important or more important than strictly artistic ones. Among the cities surveyed are Budapest, Prague, Krakow, Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Lviv.

I have given the book four stars rather than five stars. First of all, virtually none of the contributors is a native English speaker, and the writing is not very good. (And the editors did not correct the writing. In fact, an essay by one of the Austrian-born editors is among the worst written.) Secondly, based on the essays, this book seems pitched at those who already have familiarity with modern European architectural history and not at a wider audience, but the production more of a popular book. It may be too glossy for academic specialists, but it is possibly too advanced for a general reader.