A man of many gifts and the anti-materialistic struggle in the arts: Ferdinand Feldegg’s monographs on Friedrich Ohmann and Leopold Bauer

Abstract

The paper deals with two monographs of contemporary architects, published in Vienna in 1906-1918 by Ferdinand von Feldegg. The founder and long-time editor of the magazine Der Architekt was one of the central figures of the Central European architectural scene around 1900. As the main author of a book about Theophil Hansen from 1893, he became the founder and for a long time the most important representative of the genre of architectural biography in Austria. However, the monographs on Ohmann and Bauer are not part of historical discourse, but arose in the process of formulating the principles of modern architecture and were supposed to prove the historical legitimacy of its more conformist faction. Feldegg presents Ohmann and Bauer as the creator of the synthesis of historicism and modernity as the postulated architecture of the future. At the same time, they appear in the monographs as an antitype of Otto Wagner, whom Feldegg criticized for extreme anti-artistic rationalism. The paper shows the narrative strategies of Feldegg’s monographs and reconstructs the historical and cultural context of both works.