Author: Moravanszky, Akos [Moravánszky, Ákos]
Title: Competing Visions: Aesthetic Invention and Social Imagination in Central European Architecture, 1867-1918
Description: Cambridge [MA], MIT Press, (1998). orig.cloth. 28x19cm, xv,508,(16)pp. 16pp photoplates.. Minor rubbing. VG. ¶ Competing Visions is grounded in first-hand knowledge of the architectural cultures of Central Europe, and it is supported by enviable linguistic skills that give the author access to the mail texts in the principal languages of the region. To these qualities he adds an analytical subtlety which reflects both his architectural education in Budapest, Vienna and Munich, and more recent sojourns at the Getty Center, MIT and the ETH Zürich. His hero is an architect who reconciled on the drawing board the competing claims of the local and the universal, of classicism and modernity. Joze Plecnik trained with Otto Wagner in Vienna, and built his greatest works in Prague and Ljubljana. Moravánsky's paean to Plecnik's Church of the Sacred Heart in Prague might well be applied to his own book: `It evokes the entire history of architecture, from the archaic oriental masonry structures up to the metropolitan vertigo of the bell tower's interior. Unlike the historicist assemblage, however, it does not use quotation but freely tells its tale, a richly woven epic that unwinds in space." - Iain Boyd Whyte in 'The Times Literary Supplement', October 2, 1998.

Keywords: Architectural History, Central Europe, Modern Architecture, Criticism, , , , ,