This is a problematic book. Until now Anthony Alofsin was an architectural historian specializing in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. However, with the publication of When Buildings Speak, Alofsin has attempted to go beyond the largely American orientation of his scholarship by venturing into the broader and more complex fields of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Central European architecture and the multifaceted historical context that produced it. Unfortunately, neither in its ambition as a form of architectural analysis nor in its effort to illuminate the history determining the languages “spoken” by the architecture is the attempt entirely successful.

According to the preface, Alofsin's interest in these fields was first aroused by a 1990 stint as a Fulbright professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna after which, from 1992 through 1999, he threw himself into researching the architecture of the former Habsburg lands. That research included the organization of a scholarly consortium and a traveling exhibition. With his interest piqued, Alofsin decided “to focus on issues of social, political, and cultural identity embodied in the buildings themselves” (x). From this decision he ultimately began writing When Buildings Speak. The question is, however, do the buildings say anything their audience should hear? The answer is yes, but Alofsin's interpretation of what they are saying leaves something to be desired.

The majority of the book's text consists of descriptive presentations of both realized and unrealized architectural projects from across Austria-Hungary and several of the states created from its ruins. These descriptions vary in length, but all are accompanied by excellent illustrations, most of them in color. As for the architects responsible for these creations, Alofsin presents a selection that ranges from the very well known, such as Friedrich von Schmidt, Otto Wagner, and Ödön Lechner, to the less recognizable, such as Josef Zítek, Jan Kotĕra, and Franciszek Mączyński. By showcasing the work and careers of these and other architects of the empire, Alofsin attempts to make their work known outside Central Europe and to use them as a corrective to the American and Western European assumptions about what constitutes the evolution and character of modern architecture. In this regard, Alofsin has done a valuable scholarly service for which he deserves praise, but this is not his sole intention.

The analysis that accompanies Alofsin's discussion of the architects and their work is also meant to validate an approach to discovering the meaning of buildings that he calls “contextual formalism,” which deals with both the formal aspects of the architecture and the influence on it of the historical “issues of social, political, and cultural identity” mentioned above. This approach is also designed to avoid the tendentious debates that have occupied modern architectural theory, especially in recent decades. The means to this end are five architectural languages, corresponding to each of five chapters: history, organicism, rationalism, myth, and hybridity. By using these languages as analytical tools, buildings can, presumably, be understood without any theoretical obfuscation. Because of its ethnic and cultural diversity, Austria-Hungary presents itself as an ideal laboratory for experimenting with the validity of this approach. Unfortunately, the approach is only marginally successful. Yes, one can identify elements in the buildings as corresponding to these languages, but their speech is often garbled and mixed, such that Alofsin himself often admits the vagaries of trying to make these languages define the buildings being examined. Indeed, in his introduction he states that his “main point is that different languages can coexist in the same object” (15). If that is so, then the only language that is consistently present is that of “hybridity,” and the other four chapters could have been eliminated.

Finally, as a work of history, Alofsin's knowledge of Austria-Hungary is superficial, and his observations about the politics and culture of the empire and the problems of national and supranational identities, even as they may affect architecture, are commonplace. Most of the time his remarks are safely quotidian, but occasionally he goes beyond them to reveal how little he knows, such as when he says the Dual Monarchy was “contradictory because monarchs do not share realms” (13). Of course, Francis Joseph shared nothing and the Habsburgs specialized in multiple realms. Thus, as history and as a transcendence of conventional architectural theory, the book fails; but as a guide to the notable architecture of Austria-Hungary, it is recommended.