B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

What is now called the University of the Applied Arts was established in Vienna in 1867. It occupies a brick-and-terracotta palazzo built for the purpose on the city’s Ringstrasse, not far from Otto Wagner’s masterpiece, the Post Office Savings Bank, the Sparkasse, which was constructed forty years later. The bank, with its rooftop maidens cast from aluminium, garlands held high over their heads, its banking hall with milky glass-vaulted ceiling, and its distinctive chairs, their legs protected by chaste metal socks, was modernism’s first monument. It is just across the street from the university, which used to be known as the Kunstgewerbeschule. It was originally set up to train the artisans needed for the Austro-Hungarian economy, for manufacturers by appointment to what was known as K. & K., or Kaiserlich und Königlich, the Imperial and Royal court of Vienna. Or, as the Viennese wits scatologically called it, Kakania. It became the place that helped to shape the intellectual climate which made the design of the bank possible.

The Kunstgewerbeschule was renamed the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, before turning into a university. When I arrived in 1993 as a guest professor, if you looked at its vaulted ceilings through half-closed eyes it was possible to believe that there was still a Hapsburg on the throne. Every term began with a dauntingly carnivorous professorial breakfast of cold meat, beer and pretzels. Ron Arad and I, as the two visitors from London, would find ourselves assaulted by cries of ‘Grüss Gott!’, or ‘God greet you!’ If only we had known enough to use the sardonic response of the protestant German north: ‘Hoffentlich nicht so bald,’ which is to say, ‘Hopefully not too soon.’

Your salary could, if you asked, be paid into a numbered bank account that the tax authorities would never find. The bank card, if you chose a less surreptitious account, had a hologram of Beethoven, cupping his ear. Travelling expenses were a bit of an issue. The empire might just as well still have been there, because the Hochschule’s accounts department had yet to acknowledge air travel as a possibility. The school would refund the cost of first-class train travel from London to Vienna, but not an economy air ticket.

But an even more striking insight into the Austrian way of doing things was provided by the letter in every professorial pigeonhole, addressed to us individually from an American law firm, about the action they were bringing against the current rector of the school who, it was claimed, had wrongly attributed a number of works to Joseph Beuys.

This was Vienna, the city in which Kurt Waldheim had occupied the presidential palace and denied that he had ever been a Nazi, despite photographic evidence to the contrary. The rector admitted nothing, never apologized, and did not resign.

Vienna was a complicated place to work in. It’s the city in which my grandmother’s brother went to study law as a Montenegrin subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire back in the last years of the nineteenth century. When I got there, the professorship made me a member of the Grüss Gotting class. But in the four years I spent commuting back and forth from London, I never felt comfortable in its embrace. The Vienna whose language I shared was the city of the underclass of taxi drivers and waiters from the Balkans, the migrants who spoke the Serbian or the Croatian that I could understand much more easily than the German of the surface world.

But Vienna also seemed a place in which it was important to spend some time. This was the city that around the start of the twentieth century produced Josef Hoffmann - one of the key figures in the Hochschule’s history, and the Wiener Werkstätte - as well as Adolf Loos. It was the city that Otto Wagner reshaped into a modern metropolis. He designed its infrastructure, canalized its rivers and built its underground railway system, leaving a number of exquisite stations that were to set a model which Paris and London followed in their own idiom. Wagner gave form to new institutions, from newspapers to banks, and to new technologies, and he did it with radical new forms and radical new materials.

I had the idea for a while that it was possible to get closer to the heart of modernity as it applied to design in Vienna than anywhere else. It was here, not at the Bauhaus’s outposts in Weimar or Dessau, that modernity as a militant aesthetic ideology was born. Barcelona and Glasgow produced particularly florid manifestations of art nouveau that had as much to do with nationalism as modernism. In Vienna modernity in its earliest incarnation achieved its fully developed realization. Much of it is still there, outwardly intact. Vienna was a metropolis then, not an outpost. You can still order a Martini in Loos’s American Bar and, around the corner, find the enormous Lobmeyr showroom that sells the glasses Loos and Hoffmann designed for the company in 1910. You can still see the Steinhof, the vast city of the sick and the mentally ill that Otto Wagner planned, crowned by the extraordinary church he designed to console its inmates. You can visit the house that Ludwig Wittgenstein built for his sister. The implacable ruthlessness of its proportional logic is still clear, even if its interiors are cluttered with the evidence of its recent reincarnation as the Bulgarian Cultural Centre. And there are streets in which you can feel as though you are on the set of The Third Man.

I arrived in Vienna embracing the received wisdom that modernity was a representation of the idea of progress. What I had not understood then was that the radical qualities of Otto Wagner’s work had some far from progressive associations in Vienna’s recent history. Wagner got his chance to build from Karl Lueger, a mayor whose appointment Franz Josef I refused to confirm, despite his victory at the polls in three separate elections. The emperor believed that Lueger and the anti-Semitic policies of his Christian Social movement would damage the city and the empire.

Lueger finally took control of Vienna in 1897, and set about a modernizing agenda to address a population explosion. Municipal gas, water and electricity systems were introduced or upgraded. Vienna developed a social welfare policy and began beautifying its parks and civic spaces. It was Lueger, when he finally took office, who was behind the Post Office Savings Bank, and the Metro stations that Wagner built.

This was the same moment in time that Freud and Jung developed a new understanding of the mind, that Gustav Mahler was at the height of his powers, and when Klimt was active. Positivist readings of history attempt to associate creative leaps in all these fields with the idea of economic and social progress. But this flowering of Viennese culture took place in the last days of an imperial system that was on the edge of destruction. It was not long before Vienna’s Jewish citizens, on whom so many of these achievements depended, would have to flee their homes or perish.

In Vienna modernity was in fact associated more with the end of a society than with the beginning of a new one. Vienna at the end of the twentieth century was a city that felt maimed by the loss of the group which had done so much to create its intellectual and creative life. Cultural life in the void they left had been defined by the darkness of the Actionists - artists such as Hermann Nitsch, who worked with blood and flesh in a sustained howl of anguish, and Wolf Prix’s equally violent and troubled architecture. The remains of the first modernity may still physically be present. But the people who had called it into being are gone.