Koloman Moser in Dusseldorf

Koloman Moser was an important artistic figure of the Vienna Secession - the Austrian variant of Art Nouveau. His most famous work is perhaps the group of stained glass windows he designed for the Church Am Steinhof, the magnum opus of the architect Otto Wagner. Of interest is this unexecuted scheme for the interior decoration of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Dusseldorf. The iconography is quite beautiful and calls to mind the restraint of the Beuronese school.

View toward the sanctuary

Section through the sanctuary and nave

View of the entrance wall and the choir loft

Wrightian Houseboats

As an American architecture student, I have been inundated with things Frank Lloyd Wright for time immemorial. For many, he is the American architect, and for others perhaps the only famous architect they've ever heard of. Thus, for much of my youth, relatives and friends would give me book upon book on the man, so that by the time I began studying architecture in earnest, I was quite sick of him (a feeling not uncommon among my colleagues).

It is then a special pleasure to come across a Wrightian project one has never seen before. Many of Wright's unbuilt schemes are fascinating in their fantastic, slightly whimsical formulations. One such project was his proposal for a summer resort colony on the shores of Lake Tahoe, for which he designed more conventional lodges and cabins, in addition to a rather fanciful fleet of floating cabins. I present a few images of these rustic houseboats below, courtesy of our own Library of Congress.

This project was proposed in 1923, which was after Wright's Prairie house period (though, in plan, there are certainly still similarities between the houseboats and the Prairie houses), but before his stylistic transformation into the unapologetic modernism of his later works (Fallingwater, the Usonian houses). One can sense the influence of the California textile block houses, which were being built around similar time in a relatively similar setting and climate.

The last image bears a striking resemblance to the Beth Sholom Synagogue, which wouldn't be built for another thirty years.

Liverpudlian Lutyens

In my estimation, one of the great tangential tragedies of the Second World War and the Great Depression it followed, was the end it put to good traditional design projects. Funds for projects became scarcer during the economic downturn, and after the European modernist architects had been dispersed in the postwar era, many noble project were simply discarded in favor of cheaper, more industrial, more modern, designs. The most monumental victim to this trend was Sir Edwin Lutyens' design for the Catholic cathedral of Liverpool.

Plans for a Cathedral in Liverpool date to the mid-nineteenth century, when the Catholic population swelled due to the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. Edward Welby Pugin, son of the preeminent Gothicist A.W.N. Pugin, was called on to design the structure. He finished only the Lady Chapel, which now serves as a parish church in its own right. Pugin's design was predictably Gothic, and would have more or less matched the style of the Anglican cathedral, which is quite fine in its own right.

As a visual aside, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Scottish master of the Arts and Crafts Movement, submitted his own design to the Anglican design competition, which is not without its merits. It has a muscular, sculpted quality about it that one can find echoes of in the architecture of Bertram Goodhue in early Twentieth-Century America.

I digress. Back to Lutyens. Lutyens was commissioned in 1930 to design the Catholic cathedral on a site not more than a half mile from the then newly-constructed Neo-Gothic Anglican cathedral by Giles Gilbert Scott (shown in the first image). Lutyen's proposal was a massive, vaguely Byzantine structure that would have been the second-largest church in the world. The dome would've been the world's largest, outdoing St. Peter's by some thirty feet. Below are two images showing the proposed cathedral in its urban setting. In the first, you can clearly see the architectural challenge it would have been to Scott's Gothic Anglican cathedral.

Thankfully, Lutyens' original scale model, in wood, survived the War and is preserved to this day. The model more clearly shows the immense proportions of his grand design.

Impressive, no? Lutyens, in the tradition of the great cathedral-builders of old, most likely believed that this project would outlive him for several hundred years. Though it is very unlikely to be built as planned, the sheer grandeur and subtle artistry involved in such a mature design are likely to continue to inspire architects. I think the real power in Lutyens' design was his ability to be grand without being gaudy. There is a control and restraint in the design that I think is admirable.

Lest we end this post on a high note, we must continue with the telling of the story. Lutyens' design was scrapped after the war due to its astronomical costs (estimates of what it would take to build such a structure today typically run into the £990,000,000 range), and a third design competition was held. The winning built design for the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King is shown below.

I can hear the Anglicans laughing from here.