The figure of Gottfried Semper looms large over nineteenth-century architecture. Born in the Hamburg suburb of Altona in 1803, Semper, after first studying history and mathematics in Göttingen and subsequently architecture in Munich under Friedrich von Gärtner, took a position at the Königlichen Akademie der bildenden Künste in Dresden in 1834. He left his mark on Dresden with, among other things, the Gemäldegalerie and the adjoining Hoftheater (as well as the new Hoftheater—commonly called the Semperoper—designed by Semper to replace his own earlier opera building destroyed by fire in 1869). Forced to flee Dresden in 1849 because of his revolutionary activity, Semper resided in a number of continental European cities and eventually wound up in London. Though Semper received only a few architectural commissions in London, notably for several structures of the 1851 Great Exhibition, including the Ottoman and Canadian pavilions, intellectually the period was profoundly productive. It saw the writing of a number of Semper's theoretical works, such as Die vier Elemente der Baukunst, Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst, and his magnum opus, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Ästhetik, which remain intriguing and influential even today.
In 1855, Semper was appointed professor at what has become the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH). While at the ETH, Semper became involved in elements of the design of the Vienna Ringstrasse, notably the Hoftheater and the Kaiserforum, the long-enduring and grandiose plan to expand the Hofburg complex and extend it across the Ring, thereby incorporating museums that would centralize scattered imperial collections. Semper moved to Vienna in 1871 and remained until 1876 in order to supervise these works. Although none of the numerous proposed designs ever came to complete fruition, the present-day Kunst- und Naturhistorisches Museen, along with the Maria-Theresien Platz they flank and the new wing of the Hofburg and the Heldenplatz, are fruits of Semper's creativity and pen.
The recently published Gottfried Semper und Wien. Die Wirkung des Architekten auf “Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst” explores Semper's practical and theoretical influence in Vienna. The book is the product of a Semper conference that took place at the University of Vienna in April 2005. Following Rainald Franz and Andreas Nierhaus's introduction, which briefly touches on questions of Semper's work, are fourteen essays, organized thematically and chronologically. The first six essays cover the theoretical aspects of Semper's work, focusing on his studies of materiality and the applied arts, both on his own and in relationship to his Viennese contemporaries. The next six essays focus on Semper's construction activity in Vienna, notably his partially completed Kaiserforum. Also explored are the plans' relationship to and influence on some of the architects of the day, such as Camillo Sitte and Carl Hasenauer, with whom Semper worked together on the Burgtheater and Hofmuseen, though how much responsibility each bore for the designs remains a point of dispute. The two concluding essays extend the book's reach to the present day, focusing on Semper's influence on Viennese urban planning until 1965 and the question of polychromy in historic preservation.
The lines between the theoretical and the practical blur when talking about architecture, but the organization of the book, divided into the theoretical and practical, is useful as a whole, though not without problems. Although each essay stands alone, there is repetition: All the authors focus on the same figure, thus the historical data they feel they have to give (such as I did at the start of this review) is repeated in several essays. If only one or two essays are read, the redundancy is not noticeable, but reading the entire book, all fourteen essays, reveals the repetition of much of the information. The use of a common bibliography for footnotes (the footnotes themselves are given in social science format) simply underscores the common choice of source material.
That the essays comprising this book are the result of a thematic conference is far too noticeable. Although all the authors are capable, in several of the essays there is an unfortunate superficiality to the treatment of the topic at hand, twisting what would be an interesting essay about Gottfried Semper into one that touches on Vienna whether that connection is germane or not. More often than not, I found myself wishing that the essays would go deeper into the topics about which their authors are so knowledgeable and passionate. But the book does do what it set out to do: reproduce the papers from the conference.
Physically, the book itself, while soft-bound, is quite handsome, copiously illustrated with well-selected and well-reproduced black-and-white images. The range of sources, particularly the use of several Viennese archival collections of Semper's works, again reveals the depth of research on which the authors call. Overall, the book is a fine introduction to an interesting topic, but larger works by the authors themselves, as well as many other recent monographic works on Gottfried Semper, cover the topic in greater depth.
