Olsen, The City as a Work of Art
(all page numbers refer to Donald Olsen, The City as a Work of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986)

What does Olsen mean by the term "the city as a work of art?"

Q 1: Work of art = unified style?
An assumption underlying this book has been that a work of art is also a historical source, that the city, as the largest and most characteristic art form of the nineteenth century, has something to tell us about the inner nature of that century. (251)
A1: Differences in style
The annoying thing about nineteenth-century architecture is that neither its friends nor its enemies can agree on a name for whatever it is they are defending or attacking. (255)
The divergence of English and continental practice in this regard may suggest that the nineteenth century had not one architectural history but several…one’s first impression is that different drummers were being heard in Paris, Vienna, and London. Such stylistic variations suggest that nationalism may have been a more important aesthetic determinant than economics, technology, or broader social forces. (255)
A2: The national differences:
a. London vs. Paris, eclecticism vs. classicism:
Two things impressed the observant visitor to Paris during the second half of the nineteenth century: the magnitude of the physical and structural changes, and the persistence throughout of a single aesthetic. As England moved giddily from style to style, France remained loyal to the austere classicism it had chosen in the seventeenth century and which had served it well ever since. (260)
b. Vienna: exuberant decoration
Maria Theresa and Franz Joseph, together with their subjects, thought that an imperial residential city ought to look like what it was: a concentration of wealth and power, learning and taste. To that end they employed the resources of a florid and expressive classicism with lavish prodigality. (269)
In the four decades between the demolition of the interior fortifications and the founding of the Sezession, neither restraint nor asceticism paved much of a role in Vienna. The Ringstrasse provided unprecedented opportunities for new young architects to realize their dreams of beauty and expressiveness, unconstrained by notions of frugality or outmoded notions of aesthetic simplicity. (270)
Differences in Urban Style: The Last Word?
So far the stylistic evidence provides little support for the hypothesis of an underlying unity for nineteenth-century European civilization. Whatever common concerns and shared experiences England, France, and Austria had, they did not express themselves in the outward appearance of their respective capitals. National and local traditions of building and urban design operated seemingly independently of one another to produce cities as unlike as could be imagined. (281)

Q2: Deeper similarities? A2: The nineteenth-century’s conception of a work of art
Yet however different the outward garb, London, Paris, and Vienna in the century after Waterloo responded to and reflected assumptions and convictions shared by the makers of all three. One was that architecture was a language, capable of expressing complex and important ideas. Another was that such ideas ought to be directed to the service of public good and private morality. (281)
There was nothing esoteric or arcane about the meaning expressed by nineteenth-century buildings. Their style, ornament, structure, and inscriptions were intended to speak clearly not just to other architects or scholars, but to the ordinary man or woman. (282)

Architecture and urban design as a language
The particular style of the building might indicate what went on inside—often by a historical reference. In Vienna, the Gothic of the Votivkirche evoked the piety of the High Middle Ages, the Greek of the Parliament buildings Athenian democracy, the Northern Gothic of the Rathaus the independence of the medieval commune, the Renaissance of the University humanistic scholarship. In London the Houses of Parliament represented the Ancient Constitution, the Law Courts the Common Law…

Whose values?
The capital cities of the nineteenth century certainly ought to reveal what that century considered beautiful…But a city in its public buildings necessarily reflects the aesthetic values of the regime, in its private structures the taste of those economically strong enough to participate in “the market.” (254)

The city as a work of art: what is Olsen trying to retrieve?
What messages were buildings, cities, and other works of art expected to transmit?…What can a city, in its capacity as work of art, accomplish?…The Ringstrasse, for instance is “about” monarchy, empire, law, science, music…as an ideological statement, it is seen by Hannes Stekl as conveying the values of centralized monarchy, while Carl Schorske sees in it the values of a confident bourgeois liberalism…
Today such values are at best on the defensive, at worst obsolete and irrelevant, yet we respond to the Ringstrasse, which embodies such values, with affection and delight: the physical achievement of its builders has proved more enduring than their didactic intentions. Absolutism, multinational empires, authoritarian theology, a hierarchical social structure, even the liberalism of the 1860s have long since ceased to command general assent. We are of course used to responding aesthetically to a work of art while rejecting the intellectual foundations on which it was created. (285)

The city as a work of art: pleasure and values
What can art do, apart from existing in its own right? It can tell a story, or many stories. It can establish a mood. It can reinforce selected virtues. It can surprise and delight by unexpected juxtapositions of familiar forms, textures, colors, and movements. It can soothe and reassure by repetition of forms, textures, colors, and movements. It can stand for, or represent, ideas, qualities, institutions… (283)

>>> The city as a total environment (Gesamtkunstwerk) with a moral purpose.

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