Translating Space and Mass into Danish

On Vilhelm Wanscher

Anders V. Munch

[Published with illustrations and a translation of Wanscher in Nordic Journal of

Architecture, no. 2, 2012, pp. 98-105]

There are hardly any details in this building, yet one doesn’t miss them and is, if

anything, pleased to be forced instead to look at the entirety and to consider

space, light, and people within the space; we ourselves are the details, one might

say.

—“Arkitekturen og Virkeligheden” (Architecture and Reality) (1907), 1581

The Danish art historian Vilhelm Wanscher (1875–1961) is primarily known in

architectural historiography as a theoretician of Nordic classicism, or “second

neoclassicism.” Demetri Porphyrios mentions Wanscher in his investigation of this

style paradigm in the period from 1905 to 1930, labelled a modern “Scandinavian

Doricism.”2 Wanscher would have approved the congeniality of this notion, but

preferred to highlight baroque architecture as the ideal for an alternative sensibility of

the classical tradition, if a not “counter-classical” sense of space and mass. “Baroque”

plays a peculiar metaphorical role in the text “Architecture and Reality” from 1907. It

caused a strong debate, with the young generation of architects gathering around

Wanscher. Comprehensive arguments unfolded on the pages of Architekten, the

weekly journal for Danish architects, and resulted, in 1909, in the exclusion of

Wanscher from participating in the journal. The same year his supporters formed Den

Frie Architektforening (The Free Union of Architects).

There is, however, much more to say about Wanscher’s role within modern

Danish architecture and cultural life. He is a prominent example of the complex

relations between the consolidation of art history as science and the development of

modernism in art and architecture. Wanscher introduced the modern, German

formalism of Wölfflin and Riegl in Denmark and focused on the aesthetic experience

of tensions and “dissonances” in space and mass, light and shadow as formal

architectural qualities. With stylistic elegance he translated the formalist aesthetic

sense into Danish notions, and thus paved the way for the formalist sensibility of

modernism. Architects such as Steen Eiler Rasmussen and Poul Henningsen, who

became principal writers on modernism, deeply respected his contribution. In the

internationally well-known book, Experiencing Architecture (1957), Rasmussen

points to the influence of Wanscher,3 and I suggest that the book itself could be said to

elaborate and present the “aesthetic understanding” of architecture that Wanscher

introduced and discussed with the young generation of architects around World War I.

The acknowledgment of Wanscher’s influence is, however, rare, as Wanscher

was and still is a controversial figure: a spokesman of neoclassicism but nevertheless

attacking classicism; introducing a spatial understanding of architecture, but highly

sceptical of the emancipated space of functionalism. Wanscher had been working and

even exhibiting his own artistic experiments—painting and design—together with

Poul Henningsen and others from the progressive milieu surrounding the artistic

periodical Klingen. When Henningsen, in the mid-1920s, criticized the technological

aspects of functionalism in favour of a pure artistic approach, he in fact was claiming

that Wanscher had lost his grip on reality.4 “In this sense,” says Henningsen,

“Wanscher is encouraging the invidious tendency to belligerently portray the task in

hand as ‘grandiose,’ a tendency which for the past fifty years has prevented the

healthy, natural development of residential architecture. In reality the quarrel between

adorned and unadorned has long since been laid to rest, because it is determined by

the task rather than aesthetics.”5 Wanscher didn’t take use or social considerations

into account and seemed to drift back into the grand history of architecture he had

opened and made present for the younger architects and artists.

Increasingly isolated, and with an apparently serious lack of political feeling

under the German occupation during World War II, Wanscher proposed to the Danish

Nazi party that he be the minister of education and culture, helping prepare their

possible takeover of the country. After the war he was accused of collaboration with

the enemy and imprisoned.6 This brutal fact explains the absence of Wanscher in

Danish postwar history of architecture and aesthetics, and has made his explicit

influence vague and blurry. Nevertheless, the biographical facts are that he was for

decades professor in architectural history at the Royal Academy of Art’s School of

Architecture, an influential art critic, and a frequent contributor to the progressive

newspaper Politiken until 1940. He also published thirty-three books and hundreds of

articles and edited his own journal, ARTES. Wanscher was a central figure in the most

formative period in modern Danish art and architecture. This article is therefore a

consideration on this slightly taboo-esque figure’s historical influence.

Experience as aesthetic task

It was certainly a challenge to introduce the sense of grand composition in figures,

space, and mass in a country still focusing on mostly Biedermeier landscape painting

and the narrative ornamentation and motives of national romanticist architecture.

Wanscher’s scientific approach, imported from German art historians, was turned

down at the university by peers without art historical training. Therefore, he had to

direct his ideas to a broader audience and arrange for private lectures. In his first

book, Den æsthetiske Opfattelse af Kunst (The Aesthetic Perception of Art), 1906, he

demonstrates the perception and understanding of purely aesthetic, formal elements in

art, and emphasizes the formal grammar specific to the fine arts:

What I understand by the aesthetic perception of art is thus: to gain evidence

that the impression the work of art makes on us is the right one. And you reach

that by studying the art practically, just as when you learn any other language. It

has certain effects and expressions, you will have to notice; and certain

constellations, shortenings and “force effects,” you will have to learn, even if

perhaps you are not pleased with the way they are.7

Again and again, Wanscher stresses the practical and even bodily aspect of art

perception necessary to acquire, exercise, and in the end, perhaps master this formal

grammar. Wanscher presents architecture as the first field, even though the main parts

of the book are on painting, poetry, and drama. Architecture designates the cardinal

example, as he claims that the experience of architecture is in itself an “aesthetic

task”:

We are performing an aesthetic task even when we look at a building; and since

every kind of work requires practice and skill, here as well it is necessary to

refine one’s innate abilities through frequent use. But it would seem that many

architects fail to appreciate this; for instead of developing their observational

abilities and their aesthetic sense through the study of actual buildings, they

focus most on measuring those buildings with geometric exactitude, without

regard for their natural optical effect.8

This marks the beginning of the discussions he carries further in Architekten the

following year. The exact measuring of ancient/traditional architecture was

established as a dominant design tool among the national romanticists to find and

rediscover motifs in vernacular traditions. Wanscher, however, found that this habit

had degenerated into orthodoxy, claiming that it fixed the eyes of architect on the

accuracy of details and blocked the more fundamental sense of the composition of

mass and space, lines and planes:

One remains unaware of such effects when all one does is measure buildings

individually and geometrically, thereby negating the characteristic

displacements of the surfaces and the effects of plasticity and perspective. Then

one fails to notice how superbly the lines are drawn; one misses the aesthetic

pleasure of seeing the various devices come together to form a spatial image.9

This passage clearly displays the active aspect of perception and show parallels to the

German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrandt’s Das Problem der Form in der bildenden

Kunst (1893), crucial for the new understanding of space in the arts. In the aesthetic

theories of August Schmarsow and Alois Riegl, bodily aspects of actively sensing

space, light, and context evoke a proto-phenomenological understanding, where

bodily, haptical experience profoundly conditions the optical perception.10

Wanscher’s description of the Romanesque cloister S. Trophime in Arles culminates

in his recalling his experience of leaning on a column in the arcade and feeling all

parts of the architecture warmed and lightened by the sun. One of his harshest

opponents, architect Martin Borch, of course ridicules this moment as dizziness

caused by the intoxicated description.11

Wanscher criticized the architectural hegemony, and never hesitated to assess

such major contemporary projects as the Royal Library and the new Copenhagen

Town Hall. Most provocative, perhaps, is that this is not an abstract, theoretical

critique but an attempt to reflect on the artistic practice of designing architecture.

Wanscher made his own sketches to analyse historical works and grasp aspects of

their spatial compositions. In fact, he was a bit of a renaissance man, painting,

sculpting, playing music, making graphic layout on his books and designing his own

house. He did not strive to be an artist but engaged himself fully in aesthetic

apprehension of the world around him. Christian Elling, one of the few art historians

to acknowledge the influence of Wanscher, comments on this engagement in his

obituary:

Do we not see Wanscher himself as a passionate, tense figure in the midst of a

beautiful but harsh world of forms, whose laws he felt a calling to interpret? . . .

He assesses space with his body, wrestles with sculpture and traces the sensitive

movements of the sculptor’s hands, lets himself be absorbed by colours, is

captivated by their light, and liberated by their shade.12

Wanscher did contribute to a few exhibitions, most notably the Artist’s

Autumn Exhibition of 1921, which showed artists and architects collaborating on

decorating and furnishing rooms as spatial compositions. Wanscher’s room was more

modest than the others in the show, consisting of a space with paintings and a chest of

drawers. The whole idea of the exhibition—to revitalize or modernize a tradition of

spatial art, through thoroughly composed synthesises of art and architecture—was

strongly inspired by him and is worth considering as the consistent ideal of his work

on the history of art and architecture. He might be accused of megalomania in his

highlighting of monumentality and geniality; however, throughout his texts he

searches for the often quite fragile moments, where light, colour, human bodies and

spaces perform an aesthetic synthesis. It can be seen as a backwards-looking ideal, but

it was crucial in early modernism in the demonstration of transgressive composition

of free forms and medias. Wanscher found this ideal in different epochs, but found it

was most elaborated and reflected in baroque architecture. Hence, his repeated

attempts, in “Architecture and Reality,” to describe the very sense of conflations of

form, colour, light, scale, and space in the context of reality, of a given situation, as

“baroque.”

A “function-theory” of space and mass

Most important in Wanscher’s writings is his “translation” of the formalist theories on

space and mass into Danish words and phrases. These notions were loaded with a

special aesthetic and analytical sense in Germany around 1900.

It often becomes necessary to modify concepts that have hitherto had simple

meanings, but which can only be used in new contexts if their meaning changes.

This is true primarily of the fundamental concepts of mass and space, which

throughout ancient times and up until the seventeenth century were negative

concepts; mass was inert, space empty. This is not what we feel when we add

light and shade, so as to give mass volume and space depth. And since we are

able to perceive and express the interaction of these phenomena, then,

artistically speaking, light and shade help to bring mass and space to life. They

both acquire a function.13

Again he points to the baroque as the awakening of an advanced sense of space and

mass. It was his generation of architects and art historians that developed a theoretical

discourse on these formal aspects that today seems so essential to architecture. Over

the years Wanscher struggled to develop a scientific, analytic vocabulary, and in the

quoted passage from 1913 he stresses rhythm and function. In the theoretical

postscripts to his Architecturens Historie I–III (1927–31), he introduces a “function-

theory.” This is very far from being functionalist, but means only that the aesthetic

effects of singular parts are always “functions” of the composition with other parts:

… a building consists of parts that are not independent of each other, but are all

functions of the mass, and their mutual relations can be expressed (and

measured?) as artistic tension.14

Wanscher never “measures” these relations scientifically, and rather criticizes

functionalism for being narrowly scientific and technological by reducing the total

scope of aesthetic relations:

It is only as functions of space that things exist, . . . we only ever experience

space as full, and what we refer to in aesthetics as “spatiality” consists of the

functional interplay of limitations and of the light and shade that suggest the

sculptural aspect of space.15

This appears in 1934 in a newspaper article complaining how engineering

construction has control over modern architecture rather than the art of building he

envisaged. The balance between mass, space, and construction is absent, as he sees it.

But even though he only finds such a balance in older works—he keeps referring to

the vaulted space in the front hall of Thorvaldsen’s Museum—in his very words

architectonic space is set free in its “plastic existence,” and he keeps describing spatial

tensions, contradictions, and even dissonances in complex constellations of rhythms

and differing orientations. He certainly demonstrates the analytic expression (if not

the measurement) of the complexities of spatial perception and understanding, the

changing daylight and dynamic experience of a moving spectator:

For the tension between volumes to be perceived, we have to presuppose a

viewer’s changing points of view and the contrasted directions that are felt

between the subjective, concentric space and arbitrarily shaped architectural

space.16

Baroque, classical and modern

Wanscher favoured the pure architectural forms of space, mass, lines, rhythm, and

planes. The art of building should speak through monumental forms rather than by

detail and ornamentation. Pure forms would sharpen the senses for perceiving the

complexity of spatial and formal composition, the play of light and shadow and bodily

interaction. In the epigraph, quoted from “Architecture and Reality,” he mentions how

the very lack of details “forces us to consider space, light, and people within the

space; we ourselves are the details, as one might say.” The bodily presence and

movement of the spectator or user enriches architecture and makes it alive. Certainly,

the same quote could also be turned against him, exposing how humans in a social or

political sense are only details in the monumental settings he evokes. A pertinent

question to pose is if he ever really takes humans into account as users or even

inhabitants of architecture. However, this is a potential misunderstanding totally out

of synch with his formal approach. In a later text Wanscher comments upon how

“shadows are more alive” than decorations or inscriptions.17 This critique of

ornaments and decorative details and the sharp sense of dynamics and complexities of

formal compositions are obviously in line with the growing modernist aesthetics.

Wanscher makes his point with reference to baroque architecture and wants modern

architects to build on the aesthetic knowledge of the baroque masters. As such, he

aligns with the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl, who made one of his rare

references to the relevance of his historical studies to modern art in an early article,

“Die Barockdecoration und die moderne Kunst” (1897). Riegl surprisingly claimed

that “the Roman Baroque in its nature was anti-decorative” and rather sought the

mastery of the dynamic totality of formal elements, multiplying and inflecting the

classical element of columns and entablature.18 Roman baroque masters didn’t waste

energy on inventing a new ornament, and neither should modern artists. Art nouveau-

artists should leave the discussion of ornaments and move on to the mastery of space

and mass, light, and colour.

Riegl’s studies on late antiquity art and architecture were a profound

inspiration for modern architects, notably through Peter Behrens. These studies

highlighted aspects of antiquity in conflict with normative, classical tradition and

pointed to alternative, anti-classical developments. This opening up of a new

understanding of historical development, by encircling formal aspects of space and

mass across different epochs, appealed to the modernist sensibility. Wanscher was

even more explicit in this “counter-classical” reading, praising Egyptian, Doric,

gothic and baroque architecture. Thus, he regarded eighteenth-century neoclassicism

as a fatal backlash after the baroque blossoming of spatial compositions. In Denmark

the classicism of C.F. Hansen and M.G. Bindesbøll, however, seemed to harbour the

sensibility of space, mas,s and materiality; Wanscher shared the admiration of these

architects with the young generation of new neoclassicists—just as they shared his

interest in the baroque by studying Danish mansion houses of the austere northern

baroque style. The seemingly contradictory constellation of baroque and classicism

cannot be overestimated in the development of modern architecture, most notably

perhaps in Adolf Loos, as I have shown in my book, Der stillose Stil. Adolf Loos

(2005).19 In the end, these notions of style are used mostly as catchwords for a modern

interest in specific elements across the epochs and show a more free historical

speculation inspired by new German art historians. When Loos visited Copenhagen in

1913 to lecture on “Ornament and Crime” he was drawn into the discussion of C.F.

Hansen’s Vor Frue Kirke (Our Lady Cathedral). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to

confirm that Wanscher attended Loos’s lecture. We know, however, that one of his

allies, Povl Baumann, was present, and Loos’s visit was closely reported on by

Wanscher’s newspaper, Politiken. As Loos only rarely presented his own architecture

during lecture tours, focusing instead on his theories, the Copenhagen event was

probably received as a confirmation of the critique of decoration that Wanscher and

the young neoclassicists in Copenhagen shared.

Wanscher commented on tendencies in modern architecture the same year. In

the article “Elements of Architecture” he refers to Peter Behrens and is close in line

with Behrens’ perspectives on the unification of advanced engineering constructions

and the art of formal composition in the “rational beauty” of architecture. The article

was illustrated with two photos of grain silos, probably from Walter Gropius’s

presentation of industrial building showed in a Werkbund exhibition at the Museum

of Decorative Arts in Copenhagen, where Wanscher worked part time. Wanscher

believed that

A natural foundation for the modern aesthetics of architecture would be the

thought that even we can add something to the development of architecture by

further simplifying the ideas and forms of antiquity and rendering them more

flexible, a thing we moderns can achieve by adopting the rational as the

principle of beauty even more emphatically than the artists of the baroque did.20

Wanscher contributed to the modern aesthetics of architecture by finding Danish

expressions for describing purely formal relations. He was close to the development

of modern architecture, as modernist ideas seemed to speak out of history,

emancipating new formal possibilities, before being crystallized in a modernistic

idiom.

In the glass and steel of the 1920s that made manifest modernist architecture,

he found it hard to recognize anything as having evolved from his lessons. He reacted

to the showcase House of the Future in 1930 with ironic acceptance:

I am quite willing to consider the ideas of modernism, provided I personally am

allowed to retain my few habitual ways of sitting or reclining. But (on behalf of

others) I find the experiments of converting a house into a pleasure boat on dry

land highly enjoyable. It is understandable that people who do so much sport

these days should want to transfer their experience of boats and cars onto their

houses and furniture. Thus a modern armchair is so low and reclines so steeply

that you find it as hard to get out of as a car seat. On top of which doors are

almost as low as those of cars, meaning one can no longer exit a house in the

way people used to.21

In this review he distinguishes between a “modern” architecture, which he had seen

develop out of the nineteenth century, and the modernist architecture that was

launched as a new fashion. The latter drew on exaggerated formal, artistic effects and

had lost the grip of both basic comfort and sound tradition.22 Wanscher accepted this

as a purely provocative artistic experiment, to show our basic spatial experience, and

gives a description of this transparency of free, floating space—quite similar to the

rhetorics of Moholy-Nagy or Giedion:

I view modernist architecture as an artistic style that exaggerates certain

fundamental effects, most notably the extension of the horizontal plane in space

in order to counteract our inherited notions of solidity and the sculptural shaping

of details. We “float” in space, gliding across parquet floors or lolling about in

steel-framed reclining chairs. And the eye, which encounters no obstacle in the

vertical dimension other than long glass walls, does not expect to see the

vertical load-bearing elements of our houses, such as external walls. The

occupant’s sense of the vertical is only activated in the elevator as he smoothly

ascends and descends. And having found his way down to the vestibule, he is

turned around in a revolving door in order to exit the building.23

Wanscher is able to read modernist architecture in the language of space and mass,

without accepting the House of the Future—or any other modernist building—as a

serious building. Neither does he see it as an answer to the physical or spiritual needs

of modern man. He accepts the challenge of our basic understanding of spatiality and

dwelling, but apparently sees its realization as a mature, modern art of building as

unfulfilled. “This daily practice in the aesthetic philosophy of space and dwelling is

revolutionary. But still we are only at the very beginning of a new era, for no

modernist architect has yet succeeded in solving a task to such a degree of satisfaction

that we can let go of tried and tested solutions.”24 This long-term perspective is

occurring again among the modernists; both Gropius and Giedion had assumed that a

more monumental style would mature in the long run with an ascetic functionalism as

interim. Wanscher had no such patience and saw little idea in glass architecture.

In his last years he worked on a theory of time and space in art and

architecture, without reference to Siegfried Giedion’s writing on space-time; this

might be explained either as a polemical countermove or as him just being out of

context:

We therefore ask whether time and space do not rather combine to form a single

medium in the universe, a space-time, in which light, travelling at an incredible

300,000 kilometres per second, serves as a primordial force, and in which our

terrestrial time, our terrestrial mass, and visually measurable space, are no more

than retardations resulting from various discontinuities in this space-time.25

Wanscher seems to have maintained an ambition for a kind of phenomenological

synthesis of science and art history, a project that would make him the Goethe of

modern architecture. This theory is incomplete and presents itself in fragments only.

Its main idea is to perceive and understand works of art and architecture as specific

splits in time and space, as artistic emphasis on certain splits in our living, sensing,

and acting in time and in the spatial continuum:

I have said that our human perception of time and space depends on various

discontinuities in space-time that are part of our everyday interactions with our

surroundings, and what this brings to the fore is either our temporal relationship

to things through physical contact or observation, or the inherent acoustic,

architectural, and dramatic aspects of those things.26

It is difficult to judge these fragments, but they seem in line with the earlier ideas of

the “baroque” mastering of momentary totality, the experienced continuum of space,

mass, figures, light, lines, and rhythm. In Allen de Waal’s Diversion (2006), they are

interpreted as part of a continuous artistic and critical dialogue between Wanscher,

Henningsen, and Asger Jorn.

Let me conclude this introduction by quoting Poul Henningsen, who reviewed

Wanscher’s qualities, weaknesses, and contemporary influence in Danish art and

architecture. Two months before Henningsen characterized Wanscher as an

aesthetician without any sense of the social and political reality of architecture, he

saluted Wanscher on his fiftieth birthday in 1925:

His decisive significance has been the vitality and originality with which he has

tackled diverse themes with their diverse forms. Many of his statements have

etched themselves into memory. In a small, courteous, and boring country, such

a vibrant man is a genuine treasure . . . He serves as a guide to our artistic youth,

a function the Academy should recognize by granting him the quiet and security

he needs for his work, not least because he is such an excellent lecturer. Error

and truth each has its own special way of flourishing in the heads of young

artists.27

Works by Vilhelm Wanscher

Den æsthetiske Opfattelse af Kunst. Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1906.

“P.V.J. Klint,” Architekten January 26, 1907, vol. 9. no. 17.

“Architekturen og Virkeligheden I-III,” Architekten, January 19,, 1907, vol. 9, no. 16

& November 2, 9 & 30, 1907, vol. 10 nos. 5, 6, & 9.

“Den moderne Arkitekturs Kultivering,” Politiken August 24, 1911.

“Rytmer og Funktioner i Architektur,” Architekten, February 8., 1913, vol. 15, no. 19.

“Architekturens Elementer,” Architekten, August 16., 1913, vol. 15, no. 46.

“Moderne dansk Arkitektur,” Politiken April 30., 1921.

“Byggekunstens Idealer,” Politiken May 17., 1925.

Architekturens Historie I–III. Copenhagen: P. Haase & Søn, 1927–31.

“‘Moderne’ Arkitektur,” Politiken April 25, 1930.

“Sandhed og skønhed i Arkitektur,” Politiken April 14, 1934.

“Arkitekternes Skæbnetime,” Politiken November 16, 1934.

Literature on Wanscher

Martin Borch, “Kritik,” Architekten November 16 & 30, 1907, vol. 10, no. 7

Leuning-Borch, “Kritik,” Architekten November 23, 1907, vol. 10, no. 8

Povl Baumann, “Vilhelm Wanscher,” Architekten November 23., 1907, vol. 10, no..8

Poul Henningsen, “Bygningskunstens Idé,” BT September 22. 1925

Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture. London: Chapman & Hall, 1959.

Christian Elling, “Om Vilhelm Wanscher,” in Mellemakter. Copenhagen: Thanning &

Appels Forlag, 1961.

Eva Friis, “Kunsthistorikeren Vilhelm Wanscher og den nyklassicistiske bevægelse,”

Ny Carlsbergfondets Årsskrift, 1993.

Eva Friis, “Kunstens grammatik,” I stor stil—Jens Adolf Jerichau & Co, catalogue.

Malerisamlingen Nivaagaard & Randers Kunstmuseum, 2004.

Eva Friis, “Streng disciplin og store arbejder—kunsthistorikeren Vilhelm Wanscher,”

in Over stregen—under besættelsen, ed. John T. Lauridsen. Copenhagen: Gyldendal,

2007.

Allan de Waal, Omkørsel: Et arkitekturpanoptikon. Copenhagen: Aristo, 2006.

1 “Architecture and Reality” was written in three parts and published over four issues of Architekten

(the second part is divided between two issues): vol. 9, no. 16 (January 19, 1907), and vol. 10, nos.

5, 6, and 9 (November 2, 9, and 30, 1907). The comments of Borch and Baumann appeared in nos.

7–9 (November 16, 23, and 30). See translation of part two in this issue of Nordic Journal of

Architecture.

2 Demetri Porphyrios, “Reversible Faces—Danish and Swedish Architecture, 1905–30,” Lotus International vol. 16,

no. 9 (1977): 35–41.

3 Steen Eiler Rasmussen, Om at opleve arkitektur (Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gads Forlag, 1957), 239ff.

4 Allan de Waal, Omkørsel (Copenhagen: Aristo, 2006), 106–19.

5 Poul Henningsen, “Bygningskunstens Idé,” BT, September 22, 1925. Nevertheless, Henningsen expressed the deepest

respect for Wanscher’s contribution to aesthetics and refers to their mutual work: “Throughout the years that I, as a

reader, polemicist and critic, have followed Vilhelm Wanscher’s work, both criticizing and admiring it, he and I have

also supported each other, and to me it seems fully justified that I should describe him by pointing out how unique he is

within his field and how insecure he is outside it.” Wanscher had supported Henningsen’s design of a street lamp for

Copenhagen in 1921.

6 Eva Friis, “Streng disciplin og store arbejder—kunsthistorikeren Vilhelm Wanscher,” in Over stregen—under

besættelsen, ed. John T. Lauridsen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2007).

7 Wanscher, Den æstetiske Opfattelse af Kunst [1906] (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1995), 12.

8 Ibid., 22.

9 Ibid., 28.

10 Wanscher gives few concrete references and unfortunately did not engage in discussion with his German colleagues

in art history. Heinrich Wölfflin is mentioned in Den æstetiske opfattelse af kunst, and later works refer to Alois Riegl

and Paul Frankl. A.E. Brinckmann visited the Royal Academy in 1921 to lecture on “Plastik und Raum.” The architect

and writer Paul Schultze-Naumburg is mentioned in “Architecture and Reality,” but the remark is that Wanscher is

more fond of his architecture than his theories.

11 Borch does not comment on the nuanced critique of the Andreas Church in Copenhagen, designed by Borch, with

which Wanscher had opened his trilogy of articles. Instead, Borch questions the very authority of Wanscher to comment

on architecture, not having built anything or otherwise accomplished a masterwork: “For anyone who seeks to pass

judgment and to be the teacher and critic of his contemporaries, it is not enough just to have an interest in art; he must

also have achieved something extraordinary in one way or another—otherwise his criticism is simply annoying. But this

Mr. Wanscher has in no way done.” Martin Borch, “Kritik,” Architekten, vol. 10, no. 7 (November 16, 1907): 81.

12 Christian Elling, “Om Vilhelm Wanscher,” in Mellemakter (Copenhagen: Thanning & Appels Forlag, 1961), 84.

13 Wanscher, “Rytmer og Funktioner i Architektur,” Architekten vol. 15, no. 19 (February 8, 1913): 191f.

14 Wanscher, Architekturens Historie, Copenhagen 1927–31, bd. III, 567.

15 Wanscher, “Arkitekternes Skæbnetime,” Politiken, November 16, 1934.

16 Wanscher, Architekturens Historie, Copenhagen 1927–31, bd. III, 576.

17 Wanscher, “Rytmer og Funktioner i Architektur,” Architekten vol. 15, no. 19, (February 8,,1913): 191.

18 Alois Riegl, “Die Barockdecoration und die moderne Kunst,” Mittheilungen des k.k. oesterreichischen Museums NF

XII. Jhrg., 1897, 266.

19 Under the heading “Modern Nerves and Modern Will of Art,” (Der stillose Stil. Adolf Loos), I discuss the parallels in

historical understanding between Riegl and Loos. For a broader discussion on how historicism and the new science of

art history influenced modern architecture as seen through the discourse of the notion style, see Anders V. Munch, Der

stillose Stil. Adolf Loos (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005).

20 Wanscher, “Architekturens Elementer,” Architekten, vol. 15, no. 46 (August 16, 1913): 455.

21 Wanscher, “’Moderne” Arkitektur,” Politiken, April 25,1930.

22 Poul Henningsen expressed the same reservations to Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus in his periodical Kritisk Revy,

1926–28; this is characteristic for Danish reception. Henningsen understood and accepted the social and political project

of Functionalism. It was probably the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, though, that made him more convinced of and

open to a more propagandistic use of even the fashionable elements of modernist architecture, so as to make it

widespread as part and symbol of a democratic culture.

23 Wanscher, “‘Moderne’ Arkitektur,” Politiken April 25, 1930.

24 Wanscher, “‘Moderne’ Arkitektur,”

25 Wanscher, Tiderummet (Copenhagen: Haase, 1962), 35.

26 Wanscher, Tiderummet, 35

27 Poul Henningsen, “50 Aar i morgen. Vilhelm Wanscher passerer en Milepæl,” BT July 25, 1925.