Home style
The Heimatstil is an architectural style that draws on rural and regional architectural forms. It developed from the 1870s onwards.
“Heimatstil” is also an alternative designation for Heimatschutz architecture , a reform style of the first half of the 20th century, which results in a certain terminological confusion. In Switzerland the term is used exclusively in this sense. In some regions the transitions are also fluid.
This article deals with the Heimatstil in the sense of late historicism .
Designations
In the German-speaking countries, the terms half-timbered style, fretwork style, Swiss house style, Tyrolean house style, Swiss wood style and English reform style can also be found, and more rarely also chalet style and occasionally in a retransmission Norwegian style . These designations are fuzzy and lack clear definitions, but not indiscriminately interchangeable, but can at least tend to be attached to individual elements and thus also serve as a subdivision, albeit not a precise one, within the home style.
In England the Heimatstil is represented as a subgroup of the Victorian style . It is mainly referred to as carpenter style , but the term stick & shingle style is also used.
history
The origin of the Heimat style does not lie, as expected, in the rural setting of the Alps , but in the romanticism idealizing rural life and nature on the one hand and in the English horticulture of the early 18th century on the other. In contrast to the previously strictly ornamental gardens of the continent, now suddenly romanticizing scenes can be found within spacious parks. Small structures with Gothic elements, often with decorative quotations borrowed from rural architecture, are also represented in these parks, as are artificial ruins. Romanticizing landscape decorations are now part of the chic of courtly and aristocratic society.
This phenomenon was enthusiastically received on the continent, such as in Germany, but above all in Austria and the crown lands. For the nobility there, the Tyrolean or Swiss farmhouse became the epitome of healthy and natural country life - paired with the attribute of noble prestige .
distribution
With the onset of tourism and the culture of summer vacation , the new style quickly spread. This resulted in a colorful mixture of individual architectural features typical of the landscape, the buildings were, so to speak, adapted to the respective location and decorated accordingly with half-timbered structures , humpback blocks, carved elements or shutters.
The cottage movement imported from England set itself the goal of increasing the quality of living by pairing urban infrastructure with rural architecture - whole villa districts were created in the local style, such as the cottage district of the Cottage Association founded in Vienna in 1872 .
Since the petty bourgeois class had quickly found a liking for the style, at the turn of the century, based on the example of the large villas, more and more single-family houses in the local style were built. Style elements such as fretwork, humpback cubes , exposed stone elements or half-timbering were adopted one-to-one on the smaller building structures. Details such as turrets, a blended roof landscape or the symmetries were also implemented on a smaller scale. Side wings, for example , were reduced to side risalite , and turrets became wooden ridge turrets . Far away from big names in architecture, gems of respectable architectural quality were created in the urban fringes.
At the same time, the leading architects, such as Heinrich von Ferstel , brought the new design back to the country. Villas and hotels were built in the health resorts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and along the railways. The villas in Reichenau an der Rax should be mentioned here , such as the Villa Hebra or the Villa Wartholz , the villa colony on Semmering, or the railway hotels of the Südbahngesellschaft, above all the Südbahnhotel on Semmering.
Analogous to these large and luxurious hotel buildings, the spa facilities in Austria were also often built in the local style around 1900. This form of design should be reminiscent of the comforts of a palace hotel and thus take away the medical horror of the sanatorium. The famous Austrian lung sanatoriums in the eastern Alpine foothills, such as the Henriette Weiss sanatorium, the Hochegg sanatorium or the Wienerwald sanatorium, were all built in the Heimat style.
A good example of buildings of the Heimat style outside the Danube Monarchy, e.g. B. Switzerland, was about the Basel sanatorium built in Davos in 1895/96 . The main building of the Bilz sanatorium there, built in Saxony in 1895 and known as Schloss Lössnitz , was comparable to this .
World Exhibition 1873
The Vienna World Exhibition in 1873 was a highlight of the Heimatstil phenomenon . Farmhouses from almost all regions of the Alpine country have been copied and exhibited for inspection. At the same time, almost all buildings and pavilions were erected in the sense of the Heimat style and equipped with fretwork .
Finale
With the emergence of Art Nouveau , the era of late historicism around 1900 was drawing to a close. These tendencies meant that the Heimatstil was now perceived as old-fashioned in the historicist sense. In the late 19th century, a number of countercurrents emerged , culminating in the Heimatschutzstil , a modern trend that understood itself to be a reform style . But interesting hybrid forms emerged. One of the most beautiful examples of this was the library of the Semmeringer Südbahnhotel in the wing from 1912. Here, Heimatstil, Art Nouveau and early modernism were combined.
Also in Scandinavia , especially in Norway and Sweden , the so-called Swiss style (Swiss style) was adopted for the design of rural summer houses of the upper class. Here, too, Switzerland was seen as a role model for democracy, freedom and clean nature. In the Stockholm archipelago , in particular, there are numerous Swiss-style villas that were built between 1860 and 1915 and were often designed by well-known architects. Initially, these were pure summer houses without thermal insulation . Architects such as Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander and Adolf W. Edelsvärd were the driving forces behind the movement and Scholander made type drawings for timber construction in the Swiss style. There was also a mix of traditional Swedish and Swiss timber architecture. Typical, however, were the protruding roofs, glazed verandas and richly decorated wooden details such as consoles and railings as well as door and window frames.
literature
- Klaus Eggert, Géza Hajós : Country house and villa in Lower Austria 1840–1914 . Böhlau, Vienna 1982, ISBN 3-205-07191-3 .
- Wolfgang Kos (ed.): The conquest of the landscape. Semmering, Rax, Schneeberg . Falter Verlag, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-85460-062-3 , ( catalog of the Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum NF 295), (exhibition catalog of the Niederösterreichische Landesausstellung, Gloggnitz, Schloss, 1992).
- Erich Kühtmann: The farmhouse in Austria-Hungary and its border areas . Küthmann, Dresden 1906.
- Andreas Lehne : Heimatstil. On the problem of terminology . In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpflege 43, 1989, Issue 3/4, ISSN 0029-9626 , pp. 159–164.
- Monika Oberhammer: Summer villas in the Salzkammergut. The specific summer resort architecture of the Salzkammergut in the period from 1830 to 1918 . Galerie Welz, Salzburg 1983, ISBN 3-85349-098-0 .
- Eva Pusch, Mario Schwarz: The architecture of the summer resort . Verlag Niederösterreichisches Pressehaus, St. Pölten u. a. 1995, ISBN 3-85326-026-8 .
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Mario Schwarz (Ed.): SemmeringArchitektur . 2 volumes. Böhlau, Vienna a. a. 2006.
- Volume 1: Desiree Vasko-Juhasz: The Southern Railway. Your health resorts and hotels . ISBN 3-205-77404-3 .
- Volume 2: Günther Buchinger: Villa architecture on Semmering . ISBN 3-205-77431-0 .
- Isabel Termini: Building a home. Aspects to Heimat - Heimatschutz - Heimatstil - Heimatschutzarchitektur . University of Vienna, diploma thesis, 2001.
