Karel Teige: Posthumous Exhibition of Jan Kotěra

S. V. U. "Mánes" is organizing a comprehensive exhibition of Jan Kotěra at the Municipal House, which is a commendable act of piety and justice towards the deceased. This exhibition provides a serious opportunity to recapitulate and revise the history of the first fights and campaigns of Czech architectural modernity, to appreciate its arduous struggle, to offer criticism of its partial successes as well as its failures and misconceptions. The first epoch of the development of Czech modern architecture, often still very chaotic and unclear within itself, full more of youthful and enthusiastic belief than of firm technical scientific conviction, rational intentions, and safe experiences, has at its center a strong and penetrating personality of Jan Kotěra, a leader and organizer of young talents, the founder of modern Czech architecture and the initiator of the entire movement.
Modern Czech architecture is emerging at the turn of the century. At the same time as elsewhere in Europe, a significant historical conflict of two directions, two opinions emerges in Prague; a clash of two generations, a collision of the past and the present, which promises a rich and fruitful future. With the new century, a new Czech cultural epoch is born. When at the end of the century the dead mildew of provincialism was settling in our cultural environment, fortunately, a few innovators emerged who opened the windows wide to Europe. Czech modernity shares with the Dutch the fortunate story that right in the first years architecture takes on a leading role.
The end of the century signifies a certain bloom of barren ornamental naturalism in modern Czech architecture, which, after all, has always been the responsibility of artistic-industrial schools; impressionistic vegetative decoration overgrows buildings of outdated spirit and outdated dispositions. The taste of Viennese Secession, eclectic, moody, picturesque, and undisciplined, chasing effects and loving complex silhouettes, the unrest of a colorful surface. Artistic orgies and fantastic decorative inventions celebrate everywhere, an unstructured formalism that finds its patterns and templates in the secessionist works of Belgian, French, German, and Austrian origin. The influence of England is also evident: Morris and Ruskin were then recognized as apostles of the new opinion, although they were apostles of renewed medievalism. Artists and crafts revive in the spirit of the Middle Ages, an artistic industry arises, which being too much "art" (albeit art of lesser quality) and too little industry, is an anomaly in a mechanistic age, and its taste is one of the greatest pests of modern architectural thought. A typical representative of this fashionable eclecticism and formalism is the Viennese Friedrich Ohmann, who worked in Prague for several years at the art-industrial school. He completes the dead convention of old historical styles, attempting to adapt the modern, or rather only fashionable, essentially merely decorative form to Prague Baroque, which, for unknown reasons, is declared as genius loci and enjoys sacramental inviolability. And yet in the chaotic and constructively as well as aesthetically rather confused works of Ohmann, we can observe certain signs of novelty, although only very fragmentarily, as the burden of historicism still prevails. The work at the intersection of two life philosophies, at the boundary of two epochs, at the transition of two directions is doubly challenging, and although it stands on shaky ground in a transitional period, it is doubly responsible. Ohmann's personality was not strong enough to bear the weight of this situation and to withstand it as well. After his return to Vienna, he again became academically official. However, this eclectic completer of historical architecture of our 19th century earned recognition for several elements of secession and "Jugendstil" that he brought into his work, and whose later development led to purely non-architectural whims and distasteful decorative fancies, weakening historical copying of styles. The first, still indecisive step towards desanitation against the atavisms of the Middle Ages, a step perhaps almost involuntarily, but nonetheless commendable.
The true beginning of modern Czech architecture must be sought only in the new century, which clearly pronounced the imperative for building creation: objectivity, logic, rationality, and utility, when construction aimed to be simple and economical, to reject everything illogical, uncomfortable, and unnecessary, when Wagner showed that the foundation of architecture is not some fashion, but contemporary life, and that the task of architectural art can only be to make life pleasant through the comfort, functionality, hygiene, and cleanliness of buildings. It was recognized that economy must dictate not only the material and construction but also the layout of the building, meticulously thought out with respect to the frugality of modern life and the practicality of domestic operations. The important architectural desanitation against historicizing buildings genuinely brings a noticeable increase in the general level of construction and residential culture. Yet the official public and authorities maintained an extremely conservative and reactionary stance against new currents for a long time (Architectural Horizon; Balšánek, Cechner), and thus cultural progress slowly carved its path amid general reaction, senile helplessness, and the desert of mediocrity that Czech architecture became since the age of the National Theatre.
Jan Kotěra's historical mission was to grapple with and ultimately victoriously fight for a new architectural vision and to exemplarily and convincingly embody this new architectural idea in several of his masterworks. As Wagner's student, peer, and classmate of the Germans Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, Josef Frank, and the South Slav J. Plečnik, Kotěra facilitates the ideational connection of the Czech architectural avant-garde with Vienna, where one of the most crucial centers of modern architecture was located. Wagner's influence also successfully pervades Bohemia. However, while Wagner's Viennese practice is carried in a Renaissance spirit, which is occasionally modified by the still-latently residing Oriental mood in Vienna and slightly effeminate tendencies toward decoration, in Prague it seems as if the local atmosphere demanded a certain adherence to Baroque in modern building art, which neither Wagner's successors nor the Cubists nor the nationally decorative modes of Janák and Gočár after 1918 could escape. Wagnerian architecture here, just as in Hungary, underwent considerable nationalization over the years, which led to ethnographic picturesque-ness and folklore, and national ornamentation again threaten new architecture with provincialism; often modern architecture cowardly succumbs to this contemporary delusion and bad taste, leading to monstrous outcomes with Jurkovič and later in Kyselov's decorative painting style. Even today, a contributor to "Lidové Noviny" reproached Kotěra for having "violated the genius loci" with his best buildings.
Kotěra faces an important purifying task in Prague. And then a great, lifelong struggle. And Kotěra's fate will be a sad, indeed tragic fate of the initiator, the leader; the fate of one who nurtures and prepares the ground, who ozone-izes the atmosphere to be favorable for new work, who struggles hard to wrest favorable conditions for this work.
A person who, due to their historical mission, is compelled to lead, teach a new generation, and fight theoretically and polemically for and on behalf of it, such a person must, in dedicating their energy to the cause of a generation, impoverish their own work. Kotěra's exhibition showcases several works that we might be inclined to condemn and underestimate from today's perspective if we did not clearly acknowledge the date of their creation. This means that if we do not duly realize that at the time when Kotěra created buildings and designs that today appear so little significant and often misguided and insufficient, there was in Bohemia only a multitude of builders of the fourth or fifth rank at work. Today's bloom of Czech modern architecture, which has brought realizations often significantly ahead of Kotěra's work, owes greatly to his selfless role as a leader and initiator. Justice demands that we recognize that he who wanted to prepare a new architectural epoch in our country had to voluntarily impoverish his own work.
It was necessary to wrest a new architectural order from the new era in our land. Kotěra strives for it in every aspect. His versatility often leads him down the paths of fleeting trends. However, Kotěra genuinely soon frees himself from that Viennese-international secessionist flavor, and when naturalistic ornament is replaced by folk ornament, Kotěra shows despite the fashion and even where he partly succumbs to it, always rather a clear inclination towards pure tectonics rather than façade decorativeism. He is more subject to the delusions of artistic-industrial fashions in his furniture works, which are characterized by strange curves of a still secessionist flavor or later somewhat clashingly monumental flatness and geometric stylization; however, where either the architectural or purely industrial task is more firmly asserted (furniture making, interior architecture were generally conceived only decoratively at that time), there Kotěra operates as a truly modern architect and not a decorator. This is clearly seen in his waterworks buildings and in his cars for the Ringhofer factories. Particularly the exterior of the dining car for the Swiss railways (as well as the Prague salon tram) is remarkably more elegant, smoother, and more modern than its interior. An early work, the work at the beginning of a new architectural epoch, is Kotěra's People's Bank at Wenceslas Square in Prague (1900), where you can see that folklore and decoration play only a subordinate role, and that the desire for a distinct, clean, unembellished surface is already obvious here.
If, due to folk-nationalistic over-nationalization of architecture, many contemporaries both in our country and abroad are once again citing the danger of hypertrophy of ornamentalism, Kotěra, who moderately keeps pace with contemporary fashions, retains, as an ideal, always somewhat sempiternally classical, balanced, and harmoniously delineated mass. Folklore, just as before "Jugendstil," quickly wears out. Wagner's motto: Purpose ― Construction ― Poetry shines with new clarity. Kotěra formulated his position very progressively and truly modernly in his article (in Volné Směry) "On the New Art" back in 1900. Architectural creation, he declares, must be concerned with space and construction, not shape and decoration. The former concerns the truth of the building itself, while the latter can only be the maximum expression of this truth. A new form can arise not from aesthetic speculation, but only from a new purpose, from new construction. Any movement that does not take its origin from purpose and construction but has its inception in form remains necessarily a romantic utopia.
This creed could also be signed by today's modernity which, when calling on Kotěra in its polemics against post-war national decorativeism, had in mind Kotěra as a representative of this rational thinking. It is no surprise, then, that for these purely modern opinions, a concentrated attack against Kotěra was launched by reactionary elements. Just as intense a battle was waged against his consistent architectural realizations, simple in decoration or adorned only very moderately and geometrically, without unnecessary appendages of balustrades and gutters, etc. Although Kotěra never practically reached the consistency that his aforementioned theoretical article attests to, he however subordinated decoration, increasingly poorer, to spatial cubic solutions; he primarily concerns himself with space and structure and works with purified, ascetically strict forms. Kotěra can justifiably be considered the true creator of modern Czech monumental and social architecture. In Prague, he is what Berlage is to the Dutch and Horta to the Belgian school. Yet his modern experimenting spirit went further; it surpasses what Berlage's and Wagner's works brought. Around 1908 (which is the peak of his creative power) Kotěra suddenly stands on the same platform as his peers, the most modern architects in Europe.
His work here takes on a completely international character, the spirit of democratic Europeanism, thereby distinguishing Kotěra from the somewhat sacred overloading and elevated, outdated relevance of Plečnik. Kotěra's work stands alongside the works of Behrens and Wright. Kotěra's own villa in Vinohrady (1908-9) and the contemporary Laichtr's House are works of modern spirit that anticipate much of the subsequent development and can compare to some of Oud's or Dudok's works from ten years later. Kotěra's villa and Laichtr's House are simply the two most modern and significant buildings of the first two decades of the new age in Bohemia. The reconstruction of the castle in Radboř (1911-13) forces Kotěra to make some concessions to Empire sensitivity; it is once again mood-driven architecture, calm, indeed Empire-calm but still non-objectively, formalistically composed. The hotel design for Opatija possesses worldly elegance and modern character, just like the generous and monumental proposal for the "Koruna" palace. Fate, which caused both of these works to remain on paper, deprived us of two very significant architectural deeds. The Villa Blanka in Bubeneč has been recently renovated so poorly that nothing remains of Kotěra's original fresh building. Monument preservationists, who protect every old portal, did not protest when there was prematurely, carelessly, and unnecessarily destroyed a significant work of modern architectural art. The Hradec Museum (1906-12) suffers a certain disharmony between the older and newer parts of the building. The first somewhat shocks with a Germanic, heavy pathos of material. The new addition of large surfaces of masonry and glass bears a more distinct and modern character. Later, at the Mozarteum and Pension Institute (1912-13), Kotěra cautiously and reservedly adopts some cubist formal games; yet he does not disrupt, especially at the majestic building of the Pension Institute, the classically calm and distinguished elegant impression. In the works of the last years after the war stagnation, we again unfortunately mark a certain formal confusion and a new wave of decoration: the designs for the University and the house of the Vítkovice Extraction Company in Bredovská street cannot be considered primary works of Kotěra.
Having surveyed Kotěra's life work as a whole, accomplished in 25 years of diligent effort, as gathered in today's exhibition, we must first pay tribute to the author's strong individuality. Kotěra, a man of world outlook, a born cosmopolitan, suffered as few from the provincial small-mindedness of our conditions. Overcoming the resistance of official passéism and academicism cost him much energy that he could have devoted, under more favorable circumstances, to realizing his ideas and his own intensive work. He who, by his developmental mission as a teacher and leader, was forced to struggle against archaisms for new architectural programs had fewer opportunities for architectural realization than any average or below-average entrepreneur. A person of great personal initiative must reckon with the fact that by fighting for better working conditions for the entire movement to which he adheres, he impoverishes his own work.
Kotěra's rich oeuvre is very diverse in both character and quality. There is Laichtr's house and his own villa that are true milestones in the development of our architecture and undoubtedly possess European standards. There is the hotel design for Opatija, the palace of "Koruna," the Mozarteum, the Hradec Museum, the Pension Institute, and the colony of workers' houses in Louny, which suffice to assure the author an outstanding place in the history of new Czech architecture, along with a number of works that today appear as mediocre, sometimes even below average and insufficient. What does it matter that the latter even have a considerable majority, when the fundamental and significant works testify, with their tectonic logic, spatial clarity, constructive clarity, simple and discreet style, as well as their noble, delicate, and refined taste, to the strength of Kotěra's personality and the fruitful richness of his impulses. Let us not forget that much of what today is in the storehouse of the iron truths of our architecture was first articulated by Kotěra.
Constructively, we find little in Kotěra's work to instruct current work. It must be acknowledged that Kotěra utilized very few of the constructive possibilities of new materials, especially concrete; perhaps the most constructively interesting is his unrealized design for the "Koruna" palace. But it cannot be demanded of Kotěra what was not within reach for any of his contemporaries at that time. The council of architects, also Wagner's students, who worked concurrently with Kotěra, did not reach anything of his leadership significance. Their floor plans and constructions remained largely outdated and unchanged; the authors generally content themselves with solving certain practical, social, and hygienic needs posed by modern times without newly addressing the problem of architecture and answering it with the radical consistency that the era demands. Such an answer was left by development to the new generation of constructive architects, who embraced the work after the war and after the upheaval. The only architecturally outstanding project from Kotěra's era is the construction of a work that stands outside the narrower area of architecture, the engineering work, the beautiful iron hall of Wilson station. Otherwise, generally old building craftsmanship methods prevail among Kotěra and all his contemporaries, only slightly influenced and modified by modern achievements. With the incomplete exploitation of the possibilities of concrete constructions, architecture inevitably remains massive, oppressive with its weight.
However, Kotěra's activity signifies a certain renewal in the resolution of floor plans. The disposition of his family houses and villas, informed by English examples, is modern, lively, and malleable, demonstrating a keen sense for life's needs and an understanding of the basic, grossly neglected demands of modern residential culture. The hotel for Opatija and especially Lemberg's house in Vienna have very well-considered and modern floor plans.
Kotěra's aesthetic merit is formal asceticism and geometricism, pleasing to the modern spirit, not masking construction, honesty towards the material, and its culture.
Kotěra's influence is nearly immeasurable. If we say that Kotěra is the founder of modern Czech architecture, that he is a forerunner of the new authors who are not at all his students or epigones, we indicate his extensiveness and intensity. Although he temporarily and transiently succumbed to fashion trends and although he did not avoid some delusions and errors of artistic-industrial style, which no one among his contemporaries ― except the energetic revolutionary Loos ― managed to evade here, nevertheless, his work signifies a definitive overcoming of historical academism and non-architectural decorative secession. Precisely for this reason, modern architects striving for constructive architecture after the war and the upheaval called upon his example. They invoked Kučera, who wrote that cited article in Volné Směry in 1900, who built the Vinohrady villa and Laichtr's house in 1909, against the new decorativeism of the arch-shaped gingerbread architecture, which sought to revitalize national style when this old-new epidemic of folk ornamentation, somewhat modified by a disruptively cubist approach, spread over the Czech lands. Today, this Kyselov ornamentation in architecture has been almost liquidated, thanks to the vigorous interventions of modern architects. The vehement opposition that arose in 1921 against decorativeism called upon Kotěra and the even more consistent Loos as their predecessors. Indeed, it is fitting to see in Kotěra a creator who, throughout his life work, remained fundamentally true to modern tendencies, only being slightly deflected from the direct course by secessionist, cubist, nationalist, and formalist currents. Modern architecture in our country surely stands already beyond the reach and direct influence of Kotěra's work, whose individual projects have now become outdated and cannot serve as instruction and model. However, it must be acknowledged that the new architectural thought, as it is now formulated, was, in some aspects, anticipated by both Loos and Kotěra. Loos's teachings on economy, which actually predated modern European architectural theory by a full 20 years, were particularly fertile and impactful here. Loos, as a fundamental opponent of Ruskin, weaned a new generation from all aestheticism and artism, transforming architecture as "art"; and Kotěra then can be exemplified as an architect whose work grows entirely from life and its current conditions. ― The posthumous exhibition of Kotěra compiles much, perhaps even too much material. It is unfortunately not organized clearly enough, the chronology is jumbled, and there is still no exhibition catalog available. Many of the exhibited items, fleeting and insignificant sketches from notebooks could have been omitted, and the overall clarity of the collection would gain from such partial restriction. It is a problematic piety to exhibit works after the author's death that he would likely never have published: the quantity of designs of second and third rank in quality is a needless burden on the exhibition. Also, a number of landscape watercolors, which are completely kitschy, appear awkwardly at the exhibition. Many minor artistic industry projects would also be better left out. And missing at the exhibition is a proper photograph of Laichtr's house. This time, the organizers of the exhibition focused on a comprehensive collection and made efforts to be as detailed and complete as possible; they even included items that should have the right to be forgotten. Next time and going forward, it should be about a selection, a critical selection. The critical selection will necessarily approach a very comprehensive restriction that will exclude all less valuable, decorative second-rate works that are capable of distorting and contaminating the clear constructive profile of Kotěra's architecture. Only then can the true value of Kotěra's work be evident.