Crisis and Correspondence: Style in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In his manifesto 'Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft'(1850), Richard Wagner characterised the nineteenth century as a time of crisis. Echoing Saint-Simon, he defined this crisis as a discrepancy between the spirit of the age and the actual, historical conditions. Evoking some of the most potent concepts of modern thinking—Zeitgeist, genius, and the Gesamtkunstwerk—Wagner outlined an aesthetic theory by which the artwork (including architecture) simultaneously reflects and shapes its context, serving both as a mirror of its age and an agent of change. Wagner’s seemingly paradoxical notion of art provides an apt introduction to historicist thinking. Obsessed with the idea of correspondence (or the lack of it) between art and its times, nineteenth-century thinkers such as Heinrich Hübsch, Carl Bötticher and Gottfried Semper all responded to the perceived crisis. While Hübsch and Bötticher sought to alleviate the crisis by redefining this correspondence for a modern world, Semper presented a far more radical alternative. Not only did he see the current crisis as inevitable; he welcomed it as a necessary dissolution of an old order, out of which a new architecture could emerge. He thus anticipated modernists, such as Sigfried Giedion, for whom historicism was a necessary melt-down; an apocalypse, preparing for the advent of modernism. In this essay, I propose that crisis and style are intrinsically linked in modern thinking. To look closely at this coupling may throw new light not only on historicism but also on the noticeable unease with which the notion of style is treated in contemporary architectural history

Printing a new architectural style in mid nineteenth-century Sweden

“…62 Like many of their peers, the Swedish editors were searching for a coherent correspondence between architecture, their epoch, and their nation. 63 At the end of the manifesto, the editors expounded their view on the emergence of styles in architecture. Reproducing a common view, they claimed that the personal style of an architect could be transformed into 'a school' by the act of imitation.…”

Style: Notes on the Transformation of a Concept

“…If we wish, therefore, to attain a style that has the same qualities as the buildings of other nations that are accepted as beautiful and are much praised by us, then this cannot arise from the past, but only from the present state of natural formative factors -that is: first, from our usual building material; second, from the present level of technostatic experience; third, from the kind of protection that buildings need in our climate in order to last; and fourth, from the more general nature of our needs based on climate and perhaps in part on culture. (1992: 71) Underlying Hübsch's argument is what I, in a previous essay, have called the 'principle of correspondence': the belief that there is and must be a strict correlation between historical conditions and architectural expression ( Hvattum 2013). In Hübsch's case, those historical conditions were defined largely in material terms, yet the logic is the same as the one we encountered in Winckelmann, when he insisted on the perfect correlation between the spirit of ancient Greece and Greek artefacts.…”

Jens Thiis i Paris: Franske ervervelser på verdensutstillingen i 1900

“…Blant arkitekter og formgivere ble denne temporal-estetiske diskrepansen forstått som et symptom på en modernitet i krise, og derfor var det avgjørende å gjenopprette korrelasjonen mellom kunstens og historiens utvikling, ved å utforme en stil for sin egen tid. 60 Thiis tilskrev altså Bing en langt større betydning enn bare å vaere en pioner for moderne kunsthåndverk. Hans propagandering for «den nye stil» ble snarere en løsning på samtidens store stildebatt.…”