Leopold Bauer

Leopold Bauer: The Modernist Who Changed His Mind

In 1913 the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts appointed a new professor of modern architecture. The chair had belonged to Otto Wagner, the most consequential architect in the German-speaking world, and it went to one of his own former students. It should have been a coronation. Instead it was a disaster: Wagner's supporters rejected the appointment, the students rejected it, and after an extensive strike Leopold Bauer was forced out in 1918–19. He had committed the unforgivable offence. He had stopped believing in modernism.

Krnov

He was born on 1 September 1872 in Krnov, in Austrian Silesia, into an artistic family — his grandfather a violin maker and musician, his father an accomplished pianist. The provincial Silesian origin never left him; a large share of his built work would end up back in the region he came from.

He studied at the higher state vocational school in Brno, in company that is almost comic in retrospect: his fellow students there included Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos. He then went to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts from 1892, studying under Carl Hasenauer and, from around 1894 to 1896, under Otto Wagner. Jan Kotěra was a classmate in Wagner's studio. In Wagner's office he worked on the Vienna Metropolitan Railway stations alongside Joseph Maria Olbrich.

It is difficult to overstate how central this places him. Hoffmann, Loos, Olbrich, Kotěra, Wagner — Bauer trained beside or under nearly every figure who would define Central European modernism. In 1895, together with Olbrich and Hoffmann, he helped found what became the Secession.

The First Modern House

For roughly a decade he was one of them, and more than one of them. He joined the Vienna Secession formally in 1900 and remained a member until his death. In 1901 he took one of the three third prizes in the famous House for an Art Lover competition — the one whose entries by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Baillie Scott were selected for publication alongside his. He designed interiors and furniture, winning a gold medal at the 1904 St Louis World Exhibition, and was invited to Alfred Grenander's Berlin furniture exhibition in 1905.

And in 1901–02 he built the Reissig villa in Brno, a house frequently described as the first modern house in the Habsburg monarchy.

At the turn of the century Bauer belonged among the leading representatives of modern architecture in Central Europe. Then he turned around.

The Turn

From 1905 a shift toward classicism became visible in his work, and it deepened into a fully historicising approach to architecture. The Petr Bezruč House of Culture in Opava, built 1908–10, is neo-Renaissance — and is today a protected national cultural monument of the Czech Republic, which is to say the conservative work is among the most valued things he made.

His other major buildings cluster in Silesia, Moravia, Bohemia and Vienna: the Priessnitz sanatorium palace at Jeseník (1908–10), the Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Opava, the Breda department store there, and the Church of St Hedwig. He built villas, townhouses, offices and banks, wrote architectural treatises, and contributed to the liberal *Neue Freie Presse*.

The change was not merely aesthetic. It made him rich in commissions — traditionalism appealed to conservative clients — but it cost him his companions, Otto Wagner most of all.

The Chair, and the Strike

The 1913 professorship was intended as a compromise: a Wagner pupil who was not a Wagnerian. Compromises of that kind rarely satisfy anyone, and this one satisfied no one. Wagner's followers saw an apostate installed in their master's chair; the students saw a man teaching modern architecture who had publicly abandoned it. He resigned in 1919 after the strike.

During those years he produced what is often counted his most recognised work: the Austro-Hungarian Bank printing building on the Alser Kaserne site, developed between 1912 and 1919. Only the printing works itself was built. His ambitious plans to redesign the surrounding quarter were never realised — a pattern that recurs in his later career.

Why Leopold Is Called a Genius

The strongest sourced claim is a real one: around the turn of the century Bauer belonged to the leading representatives of modern architecture in Central Europe, and the Reissig villa of 1901–02 is regularly named the first modern house in the Habsburg monarchy. To have built the first of anything, in that place at that moment, is not a small thing.

The quality involved was speed of synthesis. Bauer was in the room where modernism was assembled — Wagner's studio, the founding of the Secession, the Metropolitan Railway stations with Olbrich — and he converted what he learned into finished, inhabited architecture faster than almost anyone, at an age when his contemporaries were still theorising. The 1901 Art Lover prize, judged alongside Mackintosh, and the St Louis gold medal for furniture show a designer operating credibly at international level across scales, from a chair to a house.

The counter-case is unusually damaging, because it comes from his own behaviour. He abandoned the position that constitutes his claim to significance. After 1905 he moved to classicism and historicism, and the sources are blunt about the motive: the shift let him appeal to conservative clients and succeed economically, at the price of breaking with his former companions and his teacher. His best-regarded surviving building is neo-Renaissance. He was installed in the chair of modern architecture at Vienna and driven out of it by students who did not accept him. His grandest urban schemes went unbuilt. And the end is bleak: after standing for the bourgeois-democratic Labour Party in Vienna in the interwar years and being initially rather opposed to National Socialism, he applied for NSDAP membership following the 1938 Anschluss, dying in October of that year before any approval came.

The honest verdict is that Bauer was a highly gifted architect who was present at the creation of something historic and then declined to see it through. Whether that is genius interrupted, or talent without conviction, is exactly the argument his students were having in 1918.

The Silesian Afterlife

He died in Vienna on 7 October 1938, aged sixty-six. His last project had been a modest wooden summer villa for Hana Larischová in Krnov, in 1936 — a return, at the end, to the town where he was born. That same year his architectural work was entered in the art competition at the Berlin Olympics.

His reputation faded, then partially recovered. In the Czech Republic, where most of his surviving buildings stand, he is recognised as a significant regional figure and the Opava house of culture is protected at national level. In the history of European modernism he occupies an odd, instructive slot: the man who built the Habsburg monarchy's first modern house, helped found the Secession, inherited Otto Wagner's chair — and is remembered mainly for having walked away from all of it.

Achievements

• Notable work: Church of St. Hedwig
• Notable work: Vogelweidhof
• Trained at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna