In Stimmung in der Architektur, Lil Helle Thomas examines the modern architecture of fin-de-siècle Vienna and focuses on Josef Hoffmann and Adolf Loos as two key protagonists in the “myth of Vienna around 1900,” highlighting the requisite aestheticism, sense of unease, and general psychologism that are commonly understood to have shaped their work (9). As firmly established, canonical figures Hoffmann and Loos also represent the dramatic internal conflicts that structure this myth: their stylistic and conceptual differences have come to define them as “antagonists” in the quest for a style suited to the spirit and demands of their era. For example, Thomas reminds us that, as a representative of Secessionist ideals, Hoffmann is understood as a revolutionary who actively sought to cultivate the modern individual, while Loos is viewed as an edgy maverick who presented himself as a model of the new cosmopolitan that he believed would evolve from prior European developments (9). However, rather than seeking evidence of their oppositional stances in their designs, Thomas focuses on the striking resemblances between their respective buildings. She organizes her study around the concept of Stimmung to come to terms both with the structures’ clear similarities and with the stark conceptual divide between how each architect and the public understood these works.

Stimmung (stingily translated into the one-word English equivalent: “mood”) in architecture can be roughly understood as the effects on persons as they enter, occupy, or otherwise interact with a building. Having first delineated the many historical valences of the concept, which can be traced to Pythagoras's conception of world harmony, Thomas explores the ways that Loos and Hoffmann strove to create environments in which harmonious elements worked together to evoke specific effects—moods and experiences. She argues that both architects assumed a clear relationship between architecture and a sense of self, and that they both factored this relationship into their designs. In fact, among the central questions she seeks to answer are in what ways and to what extent the evocation of particular moods (Stimmungen) as a “pedagogically intentional intervention in the environment of others” guided the design of the final, realized buildings (19).

The realized designs that Thomas examines in detail are two villas—Hoffmann's Palais Stoclet (1905–11, Brussels, Belgium) and Loos's Villa Karma (1903–6, Clarens near Montreaux, Switzerland)—and two quasipublic buildings—Hoffmanns's private Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1904–5, Purkersdorf, Austria) and Loos's commercial and residential Haus am Michaelerplatz (1909–11, Vienna, Austria). To trace the degree of planning behind and the impact of the architects’ “pedagogically intentional interventions” that were structured to evoke particular moods and their resulting effects, Thomas mines a wealth of contemporaneous sources to reconstruct the discursive terrain that these architects navigated, providing nuanced insights into the cultural currents that informed debates about architecture in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century Vienna. She also incorporates an impressive range of recent scholarship on Loos, Hoffmann, and “Wien um 1900,” but the truly helpful contribution that her study makes—in addition to her refreshing approach to these issues by way of Stimmung—is her exhaustive overview of original sources. She draws on newspaper accounts, discussions in specialized design- and arts-related periodicals, and the architects’ own thoughts, as well as those of their colleagues. She also skillfully incorporates influential ideas of significant aesthetic, philosophical, psychological, and social theorists whose writings informed these discussions, ranging from Hermann Bahr to August Endell, from Sigmund Freud to Richard Kraft-Ebing, from Georg Simmel to Camillo Sitte, from Theodor Lipps to Heinrich Wölfflin, among many others. However, despite the relevance and usefulness of the source material that Thomas includes, the sheer amount of it seems to preclude a thorough analysis of much of it, and many of the conclusions she draws from it would benefit from further explication and substantiation. As one example, she turns to the figure of the dandy in her examination of Loos's Haus am Michaelerplatz without fully integrating the implications of what she presents into her larger interpretation of Loos and this crucial example of his work. Further, while she lays out a masterful overview of this highly aestheticized discursive environment, her survey seems to duplicate without much comment these discussions’ isolation from other, more urgent social and political realities that also defined this period. But these points do not detract from the overall quality of this book as a valuable guide to commentary on important buildings by Hoffmann and Loos and as necessary reminder of the centrality of the concept of Stimmung in these two architects’ designs—and its continued relevance to architecture in general.

Indeed, a recent issue of Architectural Design devoted to “Contemporary Moods in Architecture” (November/December 2016) underscores the validity of Thomas's approach to the work of these two architects’ substantially different, even “antagonistic” approaches to style and design: it features articles that use the concept of Stimmung as a useful critical lens through which to examine the wildly diverse range of styles, materials, ideological underpinnings, and design and production processes of the architecture of the global contemporary moment—a chronological point whose scope has yet to be delimited and whose defining characteristics have yet to be codified. In many regards, the era that we now, in hindsight, can comfortably designate the “Wiener Moderne” was as undefined, open-ended, and filled with contradictions, commonalities, and redundancies as our present, and Thomas's book demonstrates and affirms the productivity of following the permutations of Stimmung as a way of coming to terms with the complexities of the modern architecture of fin-de-siècle Vienna.