Karel Teige: functionalist and then some: the first exhibition in the U.S. of a leading Czech modernist illuminates the intellectual landscape of interwar Prague while adding new dimensions to the histories of design, architectural theory and the international style

(22.) Teige, "Toward a Theory of Constructivism," in Modern Architecture, especially pp. 287-99, here pp. 287, 289, 290-91. He continues, "Constructive `art' is in fact a contradictio in adiecto: constructivism is but a manifestation of a change in that form of human work and expression that is called `art.' Constructivism is therefore not an artistic or architectural ism but rather a guideline of universal creativity, a methodology for human work in all disciplines, a means to functionalist dialectical, materialist--in a word, socialist--thinking."

(23.) Ibid., pp. 293, 294. Given that military engineering is part of the prehistory of functionalism, consider this remark of Clausewitz, the 19th-century theoretician of war: "Of course all thought is art. The point where the logician draws the line, where the premises resulting from perceptions end and where judgment starts, is the point where art begins." Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976, p. 148 (II. iii).

(24.) For both projects, see Svacha, "Before and After the Mundaneum: Karel Teige as Theoretician of the Architectural Avant-Garde," trans. Alexandra Buchler, in Dluhosch and Svacha, pp. 106-39, especially pp. 122-29; and Dluhosch, "Teige's Minimum Dwelling as a Critique of Modern Architecture," op. cit., pp. 140-93; and Teige, "The Minimum Dwelling and the Collective House" (1930-31), trans. Alexandra Buchler, op. cit., pp. 194-215.

(25.) Because die-hard functionalists don't want to hear about art, they tend not to concern themselves with potentially telling formal connections in the art-historical dimension. I have long thought it strange that the same obliviousness extends even to what one might have supposed excitingly protofunctionalist, as against standard classical, Roman works--beyond the general modernist interest in Roman engineering of a Siegfried Giedion. A good Czech case (by an otherwise more conservative architect), which to my knowledge has not been entertained, is a bakery by Bohomil Hypsman, in the Hostivar district of Prague (1919-22), where, atop a four-cylindered silo, a boxy stack of cubes punctuated by circular openings must surely recall a well-known late Republican tomb, in Rome, of a commercial baker, its cubical upper part studded with evenly spaced, ventlike cylindrical forms.

(26.) Teige wrote a book titled Stavba a basen (Building and Poem), which was published in 1927 with covers he designed. In itself, the sporting of advertising typography on the facades of commercial buildings, indulged with modernist enthusiasm by the Devetsil (e.g., Jaromir Krejcar's Olympic department store in Pragne of 1925-26), was really a spiffy modernist inversion of former grunge: advertising lettering had been such a commonplace eyesore in Central Europe that around 1918 architecturally worthy older buildings were actually having their painted advertisements expunged by preservationists. See Werner Oechslin, "The Evolutionary Way to Modern Architecture: The Paradigm of Stilhulse und Kern," in Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave, Santa Monica, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993, pp. 362-410.