CiA recommends the following new book:
When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867-1933 by Anthony Alofsin (The University of Chicago Press 2006).
This well illustrated book surveys the architectural experimentation which defined mitteleuropa at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historicist eclecticism features, but the more startling work includes Ivan Vurnik’s Cooperative Bank in Ljubljana of 1921-22, an essay in defining a Slovene architectural identity. Wagner, Hoffman and Plecnik who also figure in the book appear quite jaded in comparison.