The Architecture of Red Vienna 1919–1934 by Eve Blau (review)

512 LETTERS IN CANADA 1999 attend Northrop Frye's famous lectures because she would have had to arrange baby-sitting for her two small children. We also learn, hearteningly, of generosity and helpfulness from the legendary patriarchs of literary studies in Canada. William Henry Deacon facilitated Clara Thomas's MA thesis and made possible its publication as Canadian Novelists (an achievement, she records endearingly, that she forgot to mention to her colleagues at York University). A.5.P. Woodhouse responded cordially to her first, hastily withdrawn application to his graduate program at the University of Toronto. When she finally enrolled, seven years later, she notes, 'my welcoming by both Woodhouse and Frye was much more genial than I expected and totally contrary to the current mythology.' Here she reveals a degree of trepidation more often concealed in an account that, as the title suggests, is likely to credit luck rather than intelligence and hard work with the many successes described. We 'may think we know better as we evaluate a life that, like Clara Thomas herself, continues to awe and to charm. (NAOMI BLACK) Eve Blau. The Architecture oj Red VielHln 1919-1934 MIT Press. xviii, 510. us $60.00 For those with little familiarity with the complexities of twentieth-century architectural history, this impressively researched study of 1920S socialist housing in the former Austro-Hungarian Imperial capital may be a bit forbidding. In 'Red Vienna' the Austrian Social Democratic party attempted to make a showplace of socialist achievement, the carefully constructed prefiguration of an inevitable future. That things turned out so horrifically otherwise gives the architecture of this optimistic socialist moment a particular poignancy. Eve Blau's well-illustrated and almost encyclopedic accountmakes clear that, despite the change in political direction, there were many architectural continuities between this era and the more celebrated fin de sieele period which preceded it. Most of the architects of the bulk of the four-hundredodd multifamily apartment buildings built by the Social Democratic city administration were trained by or influenced by Otto Wagner, a key figure in prewar Vienna. The new buildings were an attempt to make a version of the luxurious urban apartment blocks of the upper classes available to the workers, and were the centrepiece of an effort to reshape Viennese working-class culture in a socialist direction. Though traditional in basic layout, the new Viennese Gemeindebauten were scattered throughout the central city as catalysts for the creation of this new culture, which also included education, health, and child care. HUMANITIES 513 Blau discusses how many of the more thoughtful Viennese architects of the 1920S, including Adolf Loos, Josef Frank, and Margarete Lihot2ky, were critical of this building program, arguing instead that garden-city-type satellite workers' settlements on the urban outskirts, such as those then being built in Weimar Germany, were a more suitable model for the new collectivist society. Loos, one of these so-called 'Big Architects for Little Houses: supported the movement for small individual houses set in allotment gardens. He was joined in this effort by Lihotzky, a few years before she designed the Taylorized Frankfurt kitchen for the more architecturally radical housing being built there under Ernst May's direction. Shilts in the city administration in Vienna ended this settlement movement by 1924, and Karl Ehn, a Wagner student, led the way towards the building of large perimeter block apartment houses, of which his Karl Marx Hof of 1928 is the best known. The urban denSity, historical references , and frequent lack of innovative spatial or technical features in these buildings made them appear regressive to advocates ofthe nascent Modern Movement in architecture. At the same time, the relative political weakness of Vienna's Social Democratic administration undermined the building program's ambitious socialist aspirations. After being stormed by Austrian fascist militias in 1934, the Red Vienna housing blocks became symbols of defeat, even as some of their architects, like Ehn, were able to continue to work under subsequent regimes. Blau's study of this historical moment provides a definitive account of the political, teclmical, economic, and cultural circumstances of the Red Vienna program. Some comparative discussion of slightly earlier Amsterdam planning efforts led by H.P...