ABSTRACT
When Adolf Loos famously dubbed the Vienna Ringstrasse a ‘Potemkiner Stadt’, he was alluding not only to the speciousness of its historicist monuments, but also to the fact that this sumptuous architectural assemblage was designed for the moving eye. Just like the fabled stage sets along Catharine the Great’s itinerary, the architecture along the Ring was designed to be perceived en route. By means of style, each monument evoked a particular cultural reference, not intended to be understood in isolation, but as a part of a moving sequence. In this chapter, style and movement will provide our optics for looking at the architectural imagination of the nineteenth century. My material is taken not from Vienna but from Christiania, the nineteenth-century capital of Norway, now known as Oslo. Yet the issues are the same: the way the nineteenth century’s grand tableau of historical styles unfolded itself in motion, and how movement became the intermediary for a new, simulated totality; an aesthetic refuge for an era which – much like our own – understood itself to be in cultural crisis. In looking at the carefully curated landscape of Bygdøy – a public park outside Christiania, and the site of one of the world’s first open air museums – I explore modernity’s fragmented dreams of totality.
