Architectural modernism

Architectural modernism is presented as more than a visual style: it is an argument about what a house should be, what forms of life belong in it, and whether a break with the past can produce a genuinely habitable future. In the design of the Landauer House, Rainer von Abt’s rejection of ornament becomes a program of glass, steel, clean geometry, and deliberate instability; Viktor embraces the program, while Liesel and her mother give voice to its practical and domestic costs.

Rejection of the Past

The contrast appears first in the ornate suite at the Sacher Hotel, where the newly married Viktor and Liesel begin their honeymoon. Viktor loathes its silk walls and gilt plaster mouldings, calling them the kind of romantic clinging to the past that their new house must throw off. He rejects both the fortified house of turrets, towers, and Gothic windows and the house that resembles a church. To him, a home should register the twentieth century rather than reproduce older forms. The new house has not yet taken shape, but in his talk it already exists as a forceful promise: a future defined against historical convention.

That promise is bound to an inheritance and a choice. Liesel’s parents give the couple a plot of land as a wedding present, and her father, Wenzel, hopes for something good and solid. Viktor accepts the gift but refuses the implication of solidity if it means a fortress-like building. The disagreement is not simply between one taste and another: the parents’ gift establishes the house as a family home, while Viktor imagines it as a break with inherited ideas of home.

Von Abt’s Manifesto

Rainer von Abt makes that break explicit in conversation with Viktor and Liesel. He challenges the ornamental prestige associated with the Vienna Secession, asking what the style amounts to and objecting that its buildings can look like mausoleums or railway stations. His ideal building should not resemble something already familiar; it should exist as a form defined by its material and the architect’s conception. Liesel counters that an abstract building would let in the rain. Her practical objection exposes a tension that persists throughout the design: the architectural ideal seeks to free the building from familiar references, while the people who must inhabit it still judge it by the ordinary requirements of shelter.

Von Abt identifies himself as a disciple of Adolf Loos, whose work Viktor admires, and translates that allegiance into an image of escape. Human beings, he argues, have kept building caves around themselves ever since leaving caves behind. He wants instead to take people out of the cave and float them in a glass space. The phrase Glass Space, or Glasraum, gives Viktor a name for the new house’s ambition, and he asks von Abt to design one for them. Modernism is thus framed not just as the removal of decoration but as a new relation between inhabitant, structure, and environment.

Von Abt presents this approach as a manifesto for the Modern Movement, the counterpart to the Communists’ own manifesto. He will design a house for the Landauers, he says, but can offer form without ornament. In Venice, his gesture sets that proposal against one of the world’s most ornamental settings: the ornate domes and mosaics of the Basilica stand beyond the piazza, while his drawings promise their opposite. The scene makes the modernist claim vivid through contrast. The house is imagined not as an adjustment to the past, but as an alternative to it.

Geometry, Materials, and the Body

Von Abt’s drawings are sharp-lined and rectilinear, stripped of embellishment. He shows the Landauers photographs of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart and mentions architects including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Behrens, and Schneck. His own designs, he explains, refuse clients’ requests for columns, capitals, and statues; Adolf Loos’s essay “Ornament and Crime” is, for him, the Modern Movement’s manifesto. Ornament is treated not as a harmless preference but as something the new architecture must reject.

The abstract language of form takes on a strikingly bodily meaning when Viktor remarks that the drawings seem cold. Von Abt responds with a pencil line as sharp as a razor cut, calling the horizontal line the woman who lies down. He draws a vertical line through it as the man who penetrates her, and describes the resulting rectangular cross as the basis of his art. His defense of abstraction therefore does not exclude the body; it makes the body, and a gendered image of sexual union, the source of his geometry. Liesel holds his gaze a moment longer than politeness allows him to, then lights a cigarette in hopes of distracting herself and not blushing. The exchange complicates his claim that the work is pure form: the geometry carries an intimate and provocative meaning even as it refuses traditional ornament.

At the construction site, modernism is embodied in the building’s frame. On a rainy April day, the unfinished house is a maze of reddened steel horizontals and verticals, with ladders cutting diagonals through its skeletal structure. Von Abt’s design seems to grow not organically upward from the ground but outward from a central idea into material form. When the foreman argues for decent load-bearing walls and stability, von Abt rejects stability as the governing aim. The house, he insists, must float in light, shimmer and shine, and not be stable. Asked whether it is more machine than house, he agrees, naming it a machine for living in and invoking Le Corbusier. The phrase makes function and design inseparable, while the exchange shows how far the architect’s ideal diverges from the foreman’s desire for stone walls and conventional security.

The House as a Lived Experiment

As construction approaches completion, von Abt moves through the house like a sculptor working with assistants. He describes it to Liesel as both a work of art and the atelier in which that art is made, like a mother and her child at the same time. The image collapses the distinction between the designed object and the process of making it: the house is at once product, workplace, and generative space. Modernism here is not simply a finished appearance but a total arrangement in which the building and the acts of shaping it belong together.

The finished interior is carefully composed from materials and fitted elements. Black and natural Shantung silk and beige velvet curtains slide along their runners; hand-woven wool rugs are placed in precise geometrical positions. Shelves and cupboards for the bedroom, sideboards for the dining area, and shelving for the library are fitted into the scheme. The circular table is assembled, then come the steel-framed Landauer chairs for the dining table and the Liesel chairs for the sitting area. Their upholstery mirrors the carpets, and each item fits into a pattern that is intricate yet logical. The resulting house is not literally bare: its modernist order depends on chosen textiles, furniture, and workmanship, coordinated rather than assembled as independent decoration.

The family’s reactions reveal the cost of that order. Liesel’s mother sees an office, a laboratory, or a hospital, not a home, and examines the building with the disapproval of the nineteenth century. Liesel answers that it is the future. Her mother repeats the word as if it were a curse. Viktor and Liesel, by contrast, watch their future world take shape and regard it as a kind of perfection, the finest instrument for living. The disagreement turns the house into a test of competing expectations: for the older woman, domesticity demands recognizable warmth; for the couple, the new environment’s precision is itself a promise.

The Landauers move in at the beginning of December. Outside, sleet strikes the windows and snow settles in the garden; inside, air from the basement boiler rises through vents at the window bases and moves gently through the Glass Room, creating a warm, dry atmosphere. The garden and the distant Špilas fortress seem to enter the room, as though the view were part of its interior. The house’s openness is therefore not only a visual principle: its glass boundary brings the landscape into the experience of living within it. Against that broad view, the interior follows the command that ornament is crime, with a single exception: a life-size female torso by Maillol, its belly faintly swollen and its body rendered with a fecund composure.

Promise and Tension

Architectural modernism in the novel gathers its force from the distance between ideals and use. Viktor sees an escape from romanticism and an embrace of the future; von Abt pursues a glass space, formal purity, and a building that refuses stability in the conventional sense. Liesel’s question about rain, the foreman’s demand for load-bearing walls, and her mother’s comparison of the completed house to a hospital all return the abstraction to practical and emotional life. The architecture can be experienced at once as a work of art, a machine for living, a home, and something that appears not to be a home at all.

The finished Glass Room does not resolve that tension by returning to traditional decoration. Instead, it makes the environment itself part of the design: the steel frame, fitted furniture, measured textiles, heated air, garden, and distant fortress participate in a single composition. Its apparent simplicity is carefully constructed, and its openness remains an ideal that inhabitants must encounter in daily life. The house’s modernity lies in that unresolved experiment: it attempts to replace inherited forms with a new way of inhabiting space, while the novel keeps asking what such a future feels like to those who live inside it.