Test your design IQ

Who is the Austrian architect who authored the textbook Modern Architecture and co-founded the Vienna Secession artistic group?

He was born in Penzing, a suburb of Vienna, and studied in Berlin and Vienna. In 1864, he started designing his first buildings in the historicist style. In the mid- and late-1880s, like many of his contemporaries in Germany, Switzerland and France, he became a proponent of Architectural Realism. It was a theoretical position that enabled him to mitigate the reliance on historical forms. In 1894, when he became professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he was well advanced on his path toward a more radical opposition to the prevailing currents of historicist architecture.

By the mid-1890s, he had already designed several Jugendstil buildings. He was very interested in urban planning. In 1890, he designed a new city plan for Vienna, but only his urban rail network, the Stadtbahn, was built. In 1896, he published a textbook entitled Modern Architecture in which he expressed his ideas about the role of the architect; it was based on the text of his 1894 inaugural lecture to the Academy. His style incorporated the use of new materials and new forms to reflect the fact that society itself was changing. In his textbook, he said that “new human tasks and views called for a change or reconstitution of existing forms.” In pursuit of this ideal, he designed and built structures that reflected their intended function, such as the austere Neustiftgasse apartment block in Vienna.

In 1897, he, together with Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, founded the “Vienna Secession” artistic group. From the ideas of this group he developed a style that included quasi-symbolic references to the new forms of modernity.

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Last week’s question: Who is the Chinese-Australian chef who gave a fresh perspective to Chinese cooking in her My China book?

Answer: Kylie Kwong

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