Joseph Maria Olbrich Architecture

Complete reprint of the three original volume. (1901-1914).

With essays by Peter Haiko and Bernd Kritmel and a catalogue of works by Fienate Ulmer.

Joseph Maria Olbrich occupies a special place in the architecture of the early twentieth centune indeed, he might be called the exponent of the Jugendstil par excellence. More so than, the cuvre of any other artist, his works document the richness of form and formal imagination which characterize the Jugendstil to such a great and unmistakable extent.

Olbrich's talent roused Otto Wagner, the pioneer of modern architecture in Vienna, to such enthusiasm that he bired him as his assistant, be Wagner's studio Olbrich played a promisent part In creating the architectural designs for the Vienna Municipal Railway. In 1897 he built the famous Vienna Secession Building. At the same time he designed his frst villas, Impressed by these efforts, Ernst Ludwig, the Grand Duke of Hesse Invited Olbrich to Darmstadt, where he was to help create the artists' colony on the Mathil denhohe as a "Document of German Art?"

The three volumes of Olbrich's Achitektur here reprinted in their entirety, include all of the artist's essential architectural and decorative achievements from his Darmstadt period. Taken as a whole they represent a unique and invaluable record of modern artistic endeavor at the turn of the century. The first volume demonstrates the determination with which Jugendstil was committed to the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. Yet the later works also show Olbrich's gradual separation from the artistic intent of this style and his discovery of a new language of form. He was in this sense a pioneer who anticipated coming architectural developments. An early as 1902 he began to formulate the more Classicistic artistic attitude which years later would inform the work of architects like Josef Hofmann or Peter Behrens.