The inter‐war years evidently saw the appearance of hundreds of examples of modern architecture in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, but until fairly recently very few people seem to have taken much notice(Pevsner’s Penguin Dictionary of Architecture of 1966 had next to nothing to say about modernism in Eastern Europe). In the preface to this book Wojciech Lesnikowski blames the influence of Soviet Communism: Stalinist “cultural ideologies” tended to see themselves as “guardians of the Western historical heritage” by supporting architecture that was “historically derived, monumental, static, centralized” and based on “hierarchical principles”. They regarded modern architecture as “artificial, detached, speculative, unnatural and … bourgeois”.
Professor Lesnikowski has collaborated with four other Central European architectural historians to produce the eight chapters of this book. Among leading practitioners and thinkers discussed here are the Czech Karel Teige, the Hungarian József Fischer and the Polish Bohdan Lachert; I had previously come across only the first of these names, in Kenneth Frampton’s well‐known book[1]. On page 62 there are photographs of Adolf Loos’s Müller House in Prague and Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House in Bron (both completed in 1930). On page 173 there is a photograph of the tubular steel furniture that Marcel Breuer designed at the Bauhaus in the mid‐1920s (Breuer was born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1902). Most of the works discussed ‐ “housing developments, villas, sanitoriums, and sports facilities” ‐ survived the Second World War due to their location outside cities. In a chapter entitled “Functionalism in Hungarian Architecture” János Bonta remarks that “history has its ironies”: the Hungarian branch of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne was ideologically committed to improving the living conditions of the poor, but its members found themselves working exclusively for the well‐to‐do. A crucial influence on the Bauhaus came from the early Soviet Union (“constructivism”).
I counted 43 black‐and‐white illustrations of buildings and projects; at the back are brief biographies of the contributors, a four‐page select bibliography and an index of names. In the final chapter (“Holocaust and aftermath”) Professor Lesnikowski argues that Czech functionalism was responsible for “perhaps the highest … achievements in modern architecture in Europe”, and notes that the movement came to a halt on 15 March 1939, when Czechoslovakia “ceased to exist”. The Hungarian Jewish community, which “often represented the intellectual and financial force behind functionalist architecture” in that country, was wiped out by the Nazis. By 1945 Poland had lost 12 million (one third) of its population. Two of the book’s contributors (János Bonta and John Macsai) are survivors of the labour camps.
When Breuer returned to his homeland in 1933 the Hungarian Guild of Architects refused to recognize his Bauhaus diploma;he went to the USA and became one of the stars of twentieth‐century design. Professor Lesnikowski characterizes the current architectural scene as dominated by “everyday‐American pragmatism, survival‐oriented business deals and platitudes, and conceptual follies”. He suggests that we contemplate “the accomplishments and tragedies of the Central European modernists” as “a fitting example of genuine human and creative progress”.
