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Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his impact on some Czech architects of the Viennese school

Světlana Obenausová

Department of English, Faculty of Education, Olomouc, Czech Republic

svetlana.obenausova@upol.cz

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to present Charles Rennie Mackintosh as the most influential Scottish architect and leading figure of the Art Nouveau period and one of the founding figures of the Modernist movement. Although he was not fully appreciated in his own country, his impact on the Continent cannot be overlooked. He was especially warmly accepted in Vienna and his influence can be seen in the work of some architects of the Viennese architectural circle. This paper attempts to present his sources of inspiration and some similarities and parallels between his work and the work of some Czech architects who studied in Vienna in the architectural school of Otto Wagner, and to show that besides the whole European movement sharing similar sources of inspiration, Mackintosh himself became one such source of inspiration for many architects in Central Europe. It will be pointed out that there was a similarity of artistic expression between Mackintosh and some of them.

Key words: architecture; Mackintosh; Art Nouveau; Secession; Kotěra

Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his impact on some Czech architects of the Viennese school

The morning of May 24th 2014 brought tears to the eyes of art lovers, not only in Scotland but all over the world. The previous afternoon a fire swept through the Glasgow School of Art, completely destroying its library and partially damaging some other parts of the building.[1] This masterpiece of Charles Rennie Mackintosh was not only loved in Britain but recognised as one of the first and finest examples of art nouveau architecture in the world and his masterpiece. But it had not always been so. Today, Charles Rennie Mackintosh is considered the most influential Scottish architect and designer, and some even claim he is the most important British architect of the last 150 years according to polls,[2] yet in his time he gained greater recognition in Vienna than at home, to be rediscovered there only in the 1960s and 1970s, too late for all of his buildings to be saved to be admired by future generations. Some of them were partially altered or disappeared completely. The same thing could have happened to Mackintosh’s own house, but luckily its complete interior was preserved and reassembled in the Hunterian Art Gallery before the house was demolished in the 1960s.

In the official guidebook to Glasgow from 1960 only one of Mackintosh’s buildings is mentioned – the Glasgow School of Art. Mackintosh is regarded as the “enigmatic personality who made notable contributions to the evolution of the modern functional style” and the school was described as “the most important architectural monument to the new movement in Europe”, but it is admitted that Mackintosh had a much greater influence on German architecture.[3]

The architectural guide to Central Glasgow from 1989 devotes many pages to Mackintosh and describes all of his preserved buildings,[4] all of which became listed buildings.

Although Mackintosh was unique in Scotland, internationally he was part of a big movement that spread all over Europe and affected even America. The movement had different names in different countries all through Europe, and they often suggested modernity[5] – Art Nouveau, Modern Style, Modernismo, Moderne Stille, Jugendstil, Secession, les Beaux Arts, etc. According to Hardy,[6] the beginnings of this style, whatever its name, can be found in Victorian England, as a reaction against Victorian eclectic revivalism in architecture, as well as the mass production caused by the Industrial Revolution. It was inspired by a romantic understanding of the Middle Ages, and called for the revival of arts and crafts and the reintroduction of aesthetic qualities to everyday objects.

Not only were the sources of inspiration of the new Art Nouveau movement similar all over Europe (Japanese art, traditional vernacular architecture, pre-historicism with functional layout of houses, and in Britain also the Celtic revival), but the artists and architects also influenced one another. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look at the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and some similarities and parallels with the work of some Czech architects and to show that besides the whole European movement sharing similar sources of inspiration, Mackintosh himself became one such source of inspiration for architects in Central Europe – the Vienna group, which also comprises Czech and Moravian architects. It will be pointed out that there was a similarity of artistic expression between some of them, namely Josef Hoffmann and Jan Kotěra.

Although Mackintosh had no formal academic schooling, just evening classes in the architectural section of the School of Art and practice as an architectural draughtsman, he was well read and followed the architectural writings of the time, while at the same time he celebrated the Scottish Baronial style as very modern in its functionalism combined with beauty.[7] He was well aware of the cultural heritage of his native country as he had spent many holidays travelling round Scotland because of his poor health as a child. A great sense of patriotism and admiration for Scottish vernacular architecture remained with him throughout his life.[8] Another big source of inspiration was Celtic ornaments, as seen in old Celtic jewellery and illuminated manuscripts.[9] Even if Mackintosh learnt from the past, he never imitated it.

Mackintosh’s other driving force, beside his talent, was his non-conformism. In art as well as in life. He wanted to become an architect yet he did not exactly toe the line when building his professional career. To his employer’s displeasure he was building up his name as a modernist architect outside their architectural business, and moreover he broke off his engagement to his employer’s sister,[10] which was hardly forgivable, especially in Victorian Britain with its strict moral values.

He then married Margaret Macdonald, his colleague in the Glasgow Four. Their home was far from a conventional Victorian home; it was the fruit of their love and artistic harmony, and they designed every single piece of their furniture there. In fact, their marriage was also a harmonious working partnership, with Margaret’s input probably being very high. This comment of Mackintosh about his wife is often quoted: “Margaret has genius, I have only talent”.[11]

Their later house, to which most of the interior fittings and furniture of their first home were transferred, was an artistic and personal statement where every room was a jewel. Although their home was located in a typical Victorian terrace, the changes they made to the interior were so radical that the Victorian spirit of the house was completely annulled. The tall rooms were optically lowered by wall stencils and low hanging lights. Unlike the dark and sombre Victorian houses, the spirit of their house is one of light and harmony. The main impression when entering the living room is radiant light.

The purity and spirituality evoke Japanese interiors,[12] while the white bedroom with its sculptural furniture is more a work of art than an architectural interior. Everything in the house meets their needs, yet the variety of furniture in the living room suggests it may also have served as a display for potential clients, because Mackintosh had no showroom. One such cabinet is a nice example of that – the outside is white, and when it is opened, the onlooker is impressed by beautiful stylised ornaments.

Margaret Macdonald, Mackintosh, his friend Herbert McNair and Margaret’s sister Frances became known as ‘The Four’. This influential artistic group gained a reputation not only for their original works of art but also for their eccentricity and bohemian way of life; they were nicknamed the ‘Spook School’ in Glasgow. It seems they simply did not fit into the norms of Victorian society.[13]

In Britain, they were mostly ridiculed or ignored, and yet they were celebrated on the Continent, especially in Vienna, as we will see later.

Abroad, their artistic work was highly esteemed. They were known in Europe thanks to illustrated essays published in artistic journals, and after the London Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1899, where they presented their decorative and interior work,[14] they were also invited to Vienna, where their “Scottish Room, a collaborative design for the Secession House, was in the main hailed as a triumph.”[15] They were never again invited to the London exhibition, yet many more times to Vienna. They kept in touch with the Viennese group and exchanged letters even later on, and it is known that because of his strange Glaswegian accent and letters from his Viennese friends Mackintosh was considered a spy in Suffolk when the war broke out in 1914. In fact, it was due to the war that their contacts stopped.[16]

The visit of the Four to Vienna took place after the first section of the new Glasgow School of Art was built according to Mackintosh’s design. However, there was almost no press coverage in Scotland and even if there were, the glory would probably have gone to his employer John Keppie, who took charge of the construction and was willing to take credit for the design too. Yet there was no glory and the half-building was perceived as odd in Glasgow.[17] The Viennese Secessionists knew better and they celebrated the young architect, as well as the other members of The Four. The Glasgow style made a big impact on the Secessionists, “especially on Josef Hoffmann, who seemed to be working along the same lines”[18] and on Josef Maria Olbrich and Koloman Moser, and some of its features can be traced in their later work. They influenced not only architects but also artists such as Gustav Klimt, whose “designs for his Beethoven frieze of 1902 were, in particular, stylistically inspired by Margaret Macdonald-Mackintosh’s gesso panels.”[19]

The architect Rudolf Schindler, one of Wagner’s students, wrote that modern architecture started with Mackintosh in Scotland, Otto Wagner in Vienna and Louis Sullivan in Chicago.[20]

The next exhibition of the Glasgow school in Vienna in 1900 was the last stimulus for the Viennese Secessionists in their move towards radically modern art. This exhibition went far beyond the floral secession, then so popular in Europe; the Secessionists were enthralled by the simple shapes, slim proportions, frail impressions and bright colours of their furniture with its distinctive simple geometric ornamentation. Some of the Secessionists were inspired to the extent that they changed their style of designing.[21] “Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser […] were acutely affected by the distinctive Glasgow style and both corresponded with Mackintosh after his return to Scotland from Vienna. Certainly, the use of geometric motifs, latticework panelling and painted white surfaces in the later work of the Secessionists was directly influenced by Mackintosh.”[22]

The next encounter of the Secessionists with Mackintosh’s work took place in 1901 during the competition “House for an Art Lover”. It was a competition launched by Alexander Koch, a publisher from Darmstadt. In the jury there were famous architects of the time – Otto Wagner, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Henry van de Velde, and others. No first prize was awarded, but Mackintosh received a special prize for his entry.[23] It was emphasised in the rules of the competition that the designs should be genuinely original and modern, and “as if addressing the Mackintoshes directly, the conditions stated that collaboration between an architect and an applied artist of modern tastes was not only permitted but explicitly desired.”[24]

Mackintosh worked on the submission jointly with Margaret and they followed their holistic approach to the design; their house was a true Gesamtkunstwerk. Yet unfortunately they entered an incomplete design, with some of the required interior perspectives missing. After they had submitted these, their design was awarded a special prize for ‘their pronounced personal quality, their novel and austere form and the uniform configuration of interior and exterior’.[25]

Hermann Muthesius, a leading architectural critic of the day, writing in the preface to the Mackintosh portfolio, praised the design of the House: “….. it exhibits an absolutely original character, unlike anything else known.”[26]

Although it was an ideas competition, not a competition for building a real house, the design became so iconic that the house was eventually built in the 1990s, according to the original design, in Bellahouston Park in Glasgow.

Although the aim of this paper is not the enumeration of all Mackintosh’s works, nevertheless, the most influential should be mentioned here.

He designed tea-rooms for Miss Cranston in Buchanan Street and Argyle Street. He followed the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, designing all the interior furniture and fittings, including the silverware and the uniforms of the waitresses.

Hill House in Helensburgh is the masterpiece of Mackintosh’s domestic architecture. In it he combines the tradition of English country houses as set by the Arts and Crafts movement with his admiration for the Scottish baronial style and vernacular architecture; although the house shares many characteristics of his design for the House for an Art Lover, “it is less international and more Scottish in spirit”.[27] He radically followed the new tradition of English country houses, starting with designing the interior first to the utmost detail and with respect to the future inhabitants’ needs and wishes, and working on the exterior elevations only later. In his time most architects worked in the opposite order, designing the exterior elevation first. It is clear to any visitor to the house that the interior was planned to suit particular people, not just an anonymous client. In fact, Mackintosh had spent some time with the clients to see what they really needed.

When he handed over the house to the Blackies, he famously said: “Here is the house. It is not an Italian villa, an English mansion house, a Swiss chalet, or a Scotch castle. It is a dwelling house.”[28] And it was. The Blackie girls, daughters of the owner of Hill House, had fond memories of the house. When talking about their childhood in Hill House they said it was a very nice house to be in, they liked playing there and hiding in special nooks. They recollected the lovely feeling of space and light.[29]

Even if Mackintosh did not have any children of his own, he liked children very much and got on well with them,[30] and he took their needs into consideration, which was not so common in Victorian times. This approach to children’s needs can be also seen in the Scotland Street School, where Hopscotch was part of the floor design in the school corridors for children to be able to play during the breaks.

After Hill House his style started changing away from “organic ornament, sensuousness, and hints of symbolism towards clarity, rectilinear forms, and the decorative use of squares,”[31] which affected his design of the second section of the Glasgow School of Art and the Scotland Street School.

It has already been mentioned that the Viennese group drew on similar sources of inspiration to Mackintosh and that they were also inspired by the style of the Glasgow Four.

Josef Hoffmann was one of the Viennese architects with a Czech birthplace who drew direct inspiration from Mackintosh. His geometric patterns, high-backed chairs and other furniture in his own house, and even some of his designs, are reminiscent of Mackintosh’s. It is documented that his journey to England in 1900 had an enormous impact on Hoffmann’s artistic development. During his stay in London in 1902 he even made a journey to Glasgow to see the Mackintoshes. He often combined his own furniture designs with their ideas.[32]

However, the inspirational value of the Four and especially Mackintosh went beyond the architects of the Vienna circle who had been in direct contact with them. As for architects working in the Czech part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later Czechoslovakia, two more should be mentioned here.

According to Zderadičková, the Slovak architect Dušan Jurkovič was nearest to Mackintosh’s style in the Czech environment in the way he combined traditional folklore features with a modernist style in his designs.[33]

Another Czech architect who worked in a similar line was Jan Kotěra, who studied architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna from 1894 to 1897. His teacher was Otto Wagner and his peers there were Leopold Bauer, Hubert Gessner, Josef Plečnik, Josef Hoffmann and Josef Maria Olbrich, and he remained in close contact with them.[34]

There was an interesting parallel between the life and work of Mackintosh and Kotěra that is worth mentioning here as neither of them was fully recognised by the society he lived in and their importance was rediscovered only after their death.

When Kotěra got a position as a teacher at the School of Decorative Arts in Prague in 1898, he was set in the hostile environment of the Prague petit-bourgeois mentality as Prague was full of the eclectic decorativism of the neo-Baroque. Yet he was hailed as a “fresh breath of spring” by both young artists and theoreticians from the Mánes circle, who saw in him a great artist.[35]

His first design for Peterka’s house on Wenceslas Square (1899-1900) showed his search for new form and new decoration. It is in the style of Wagner’s school, with the influence of a Czech touch. The decoration is an integral part of the dynamics of the façade and the exterior starts reflecting the interior of the house. That was new in Prague at the time.[36]

Like Mackintosh, and maybe as a result of his influence, in his later works he freed his buildings of “naturalistic Secessionist decoration”[37] and avoided ornamentalism per se. His buildings were conceived as an organic whole, with all the ornaments and even the smallest details underlying the harmony of the larger picture, not stealing the attention but in accord with the rest.

In public buildings, the symmetry of the layout, which adds grandeur and monumentality to the edifice, was sacrificed to respecting the inner function of the space. This approach was very modernist and was later developed further by the functionalists. The Museum in Hradec Králové, whose asymmetric layout was a novelty in our country then, is considered by many to be inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.[38] But a resemblance to Mackintosh can be spotted here too. Although its monumental entrance had to be central, because of the requirements of the 1897 competition, it is not symmetrical, and the whole design of the school was generated by its function, that is, from the interior to the exterior. And since Kotěra surely knew the School of Art from architectural journals, it is highly probable that he also gained inspiration there. Moreover, Mackintosh and Wright had so much in common that it is hard to say whose influence was stronger here. As Pamela Robertson stresses in her lecture, the importance of the plan was overriding for both Mackintosh and Wright. “For both men, providing a functional well-ordered house that responded to the needs and wishes of the families was paramount. Plans were generally agreed first, before the development of the elevation.”[39]

Another public building of great importance was Kotěra’s National House in Prostějov, which also exhibits features of simplified geometry in its elevation and decoration. Here again, the asymmetrical ground plan reflects the three different functions of the building – the theatre, the conference hall and the restaurant.

In houses for private clients Kotěra also strove meticulously to meet the needs of their future inhabitants and every little detail was designed with respect to comfort and well-being, as well as the aesthetic harmony of the whole. According to Novotný, he was impressed by the English country house tradition, especially by theoreticians and architects such as William Morris, John Ruskin, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, Charles Harrison Townsend, Charles Voysey, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and others, and their sense of house culture. Kotěra’s designs pay similar attention to all the details and fittings, such as windows, doors, bars and light fittings. In Prague it was very uncommon for an architect to also design the interior of a building at that time.[40] Šlapeta also admits that Kotěra was deeply interested in British residential architecture and read articles about it; he also saw Mackintosh’s presentation in Vienna in 1903 and later visited England in 1905 and 1906.[41]

Kotěra attempted to find new forms and ideas in the field of private homes. Like all his colleagues of his generation, he studied English and Scottish architects such as Morris, Baillie Scott and Mackintosh. These architects had an undoubtable impact on the development of the design of private homes. In the case of Kotěra, the forms of Czech vernacular architecture and vernacular ornamentation are used together with a modernist approach. His houses built for Sucharda (1904) and Tonder (1905) are nice examples of that. His own house (1908) is ranked as his most progressive design.

As for furniture design, some analogies with Mackintosh’s design can also be found, yet, according to Karasová, Kotěra’s furniture designs are “more austere, more functional in their essence.”[42]

Kotěra can be seen as the founder of Czech modern architecture, seeking to change the system of architectural thinking and creation. He brought the spirit of European modernity, giving it local colour. Although this concept was not totally new in other countries, it was new in the Czech milieu.[43]

It can be concluded that Mackintosh played, both directly and indirectly, a relevant role in the development of Czech modern architecture. In Britain, in his lifetime he did not get the recognition he surely deserved. Yet he was respected by many of his compatriots. In the obituary published in the Times on December 13, 1928, it reads: “…his influence is great on architecture both at home and on the Continent; it is, indeed, hardly too much to say that the whole modernist movement in European architecture looks to him as one of its chief originators.” [44]

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