Der Architekt (Wiener Monatshefte für Bauwesen und decorative Kunst)

November 15, 2022 at 10:01 pm

It is often stated that Egyptian pyramids are something that our modern civilization cannot repeat. Even using our most powerful and effective building tools such an undertaking is beyond the capacity of our cheap-and-fast era societies.

But it is not only ''the wonders of the world'' that are beyond our abilities. Even an average 5-story Art Nouveau-style building of brick and mortar is something nobody would dare to undertake nowadays. First of all - the esthetic tradition of this style would prove too demanding for most of the architects who lack the necessary schooling in the art of proportion, style, and taste. Secondly - It would nowadays take half of the budget of a state to pay the bricklayers, sculptors, carpenters, etc, involved in making such a building. And lastly - there would be only a handful of craftsmen capable of working with traditional building techniques qualitatively enough not to mention the quality and cost of the available building materials themselves.

A German bricklayer, 1928

The Parquet Planers (The Floor Scrapers), Gustave Caillebotte, 1875

On this background, the journal ''Der Architekt'' is an encapsulated treasure. It invokes a pleasant nostalgia (or better- anemoia ), dreaminess and wonder. Even if you do not read German and thus cannot fully grasp the studies of traditional and historic architecture or presentations of buildings and projects, you will not escape the fascination of the illustrations. The tasteful, crafty and harmonious hand drawn sketches and plans are wonder in their own right for our times of digital imaging. And those masterfully taken axonometric projection photos long before the proliferation of drones is something beyond us. In their finely designed pages these hefty journals hold yet many other kinds of gems for us to discover. A must-have on our modern day coffee tables (digital coffee tables at least)!

Altogether ''Der Architect'' was issued once a year starting from 1895 to 1922. Below we list the links to the digitalised issues we have managed to find. In our opinion the Internet Archive holds the best versions, in them one can still ''feel'' also the creamy coloured paper. There are also the versions digitalised by Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (https://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno-plus?apm=0&aid=arc). These are in sterile black-and-white and some of the magic is thus lost in them, but again - they are arranged in a clear order and they have almost all issues, what cannot be said about Internet Archive's versions.

1895: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125014895128/mode/2up

1896: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006200899/mode/2up

1897: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006200907/mode/2up

1898: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006200915/mode/2up

1899: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006200923/mode/2up

1900: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125014895185/mode/2up

1901: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006200931/mode/2up

1902: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006263079/mode/2up

1903: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006200949/mode/2up

1904:

1905: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125006200956/mode/2up

1906: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125014895243/mode/2up

1907: https://archive.org/details/gri_33125014895300/mode/2up

1908: https://archive.org/details/derarchitekt14fell/mode/2up

1909: https://archive.org/details/derarchitekt15fell/mode/2up