The Bank Buildings of Alexander Neumann: Prague, Vienna and Graz, 1906-20
Author(s)
McAlpine, Fiona
Leach, Andrew
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2011
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This essay considers the life and work of Alexander Neumann (b. Heinzendorf 1861, d. Wellington 1947). Trained in Vienna with a practice ranging across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its secessionist republics, Neumann brought a strong historicist education and early practice in the office of the theatre specialists Fellner und Helmer to the task of designing commercial premises for banks and insurance companies, while maintaining a vibrant practice as a domestic architect and housing developer. This essay surveys Neumann's achievements before offering close readings of three buildings for the Vienna-based Bank-Verein, ...
View more >This essay considers the life and work of Alexander Neumann (b. Heinzendorf 1861, d. Wellington 1947). Trained in Vienna with a practice ranging across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its secessionist republics, Neumann brought a strong historicist education and early practice in the office of the theatre specialists Fellner und Helmer to the task of designing commercial premises for banks and insurance companies, while maintaining a vibrant practice as a domestic architect and housing developer. This essay surveys Neumann's achievements before offering close readings of three buildings for the Vienna-based Bank-Verein, realised in cooperation with Josef Zasche, in one case, and, in another, with Ernst Gotthilf. The essay positions Neumann's practice as an encounter with modern architecture realised through a negotiation of the various polemical forces-conservative as well as progressive-in play in the decades spanning Vienna's fin de si裬e. Neumann's biography demonstrates a profound experience of modernity, but an experience that is not predicated in his architectural practice.
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View more >This essay considers the life and work of Alexander Neumann (b. Heinzendorf 1861, d. Wellington 1947). Trained in Vienna with a practice ranging across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its secessionist republics, Neumann brought a strong historicist education and early practice in the office of the theatre specialists Fellner und Helmer to the task of designing commercial premises for banks and insurance companies, while maintaining a vibrant practice as a domestic architect and housing developer. This essay surveys Neumann's achievements before offering close readings of three buildings for the Vienna-based Bank-Verein, realised in cooperation with Josef Zasche, in one case, and, in another, with Ernst Gotthilf. The essay positions Neumann's practice as an encounter with modern architecture realised through a negotiation of the various polemical forces-conservative as well as progressive-in play in the decades spanning Vienna's fin de si裬e. Neumann's biography demonstrates a profound experience of modernity, but an experience that is not predicated in his architectural practice.
View less >
Journal Title
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand
Volume
20
Issue
1
Subject
Architectural History and Theory
Architecture
Art Theory and Criticism
History and Philosophy of Specific Fields