Professor Jindřich Vybíral is the author of a large number of studies and books on the pupils of Otto Wagner who were active in the Czech lands. Of these he devoted the greatest attention to one in particular, Leopold Bauer, who was a rival of Wagner to a certain degree.

This book, however, is not merely a traditional monograph and biography. In a highly sophisticated manner, Vybíral creates a network of chapters devoted to Bauer's works, which are organized in chronological order but are very often aimed at more general questions about modernist architecture in Central Europe. He puts Bauer's important buildings into context and relates them to other similar situations. Vybíral starts from a perfect knowledge of archival material. He studied Bauer's plans and sketches in the Vienna Albertinum, and consequently Vienna serves as the natural center for a number of considerations, including a chapter on Bauer's attempts to become Wagner's successor at the Vienna Academy. It is this intermingling of the personal history of Bauer and his efforts to earn a living from architecture (197–203), which also included the need for compromises with clients, with more general theoretical-critical thoughts on the nature and sense of modern architecture, which makes this book much more than just an extensive overview of case studies on Bauer. Paradoxically, the majority of these are not familiar to the Western historiography of modern architecture. Apart from becoming acquainted with Bauer's buildings and plans, the reader has the opportunity to read reflections on more general concepts, such as biography as a method, historical, traditional, and modern (211–16); or the concept of the family house and the related “domesticity” and comfort of a house versus modernity. Vybíral successfully supplements stylistically formal analysis with Pierre Bourdieu's method of the “artistic habit” and demonstrates that Bauer was part of the struggle over the monopoly of artistic legitimacy.

Vybíral traces Bauer's path from his native town of Krnov, where he later realized important projects, through Brno, where he met with fellow student Josef Hoffman, as well as with Adolf Loos and Hubert Gessner, to the Vienna Academy, where Jan Kotěra and Josip Plečnik also appeared, among others. Vybíral devotes attention not only to early designs, mostly in neo-Renaissance and eclectic styles, but also to “simple, honest and solid furniture” (119), which became an important symbol of his moderate modernism. Vybíral works not only with the social codes of the artistic field of Pierre Bourdieu but also with the gender polarities that Bauer projected into his designs. We learn much that is new from the passages in which Vybíral follows Bauer as an architect entrepreneur.

Vybíral shows us wherein Bauer's heresy lies: in the fact that he adopted some concepts of the avant-garde, but hybridized them. This applies to the combination of a “Machine for living with an emotional charge” (435). It is this hybridization and the incompatibility of the elements that Bauer put together that formed the basis of his “displaced modernism.” One critic called this “cramped originality” (303). Colin St. John Wilson ranked such architects in an alternative stream of “other traditions” such as that of Gunnar Apslund. In this heterogeneous stream of traditionalist modernists, it would be possible to classify both Bauer and his rival in Vienna, Josip Plečnik.

Vybíral displays a vast knowledge of plans and literature, especially period literature in German. He does not, however, become the architect's uncritical apologist. He is capable of seeing Bauer's story critically, and also adopts a critical stance toward the historiography of modern architecture and art history. It is precisely because Vybíral doubts the “correct” writing of the historiography of architecture and because he has considerable self-control not to slide into easy clichés and trivial explanations that this book is definitely not a run-of-the-mill history of the development of a single architect in Central Europe.

Vybíral's book may be described as the author's magnum opus. It contains the sum of his long years of research. The author's extensive bibliography on Bauer, compiled over the course of thirty years, has yielded a generous synthesis. However, this book is equally important for the critical manner in which it traces the architecture of Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a splendid example of how to write a history of modern architecture freshly and differently. In my opinion, the book would resonate more in the discourse on architecture in the first half of the twentieth century if it were possible to publish it in German and English translation.