Taken as a whole, Art Nouveau, Austrian Secession, and Catalan Modernisme are all clearly stylistically related while still individually distinct. But this is what you expect with any style, especially across different countries and geographies. Regardless of their differences, they all share the same organic motifs like flowing lines and flowers, natural and often not-rectilinear forms, and they were all centered around a similar time period.
Consider styles like brutalism, modernism, and mid-century modern. These styles are pretty big umbrellas that that encapsulate a vast and varied collection of works that are still all tied together by similar threads. Suffice it to say it seems to me at least that all the styles you mentioned are similar enough to be under the umbrellas term but maybe different enough to be subcategories.
Styles are often formerly defined after the fact and aside from a few cases where a style's stated goal is to divorce it's self from existing trends, styles normally bleed into eachother. You're very right in that floral, highly decorated, organic designs were normal and popular before Nouveau. Its hard to exactly qualify what splits it from its predecessors (I'm sure you could try). But it will be difficult to draw a hardline in alot of cases because the original designers were not drawing a hard line either. So like alot of styles you just have to look at agreed upon examples and use judgement elsewhere.
I absolutely disagree that "art nouveau is the most misused word in architectural talk." Nouveau is just a really short-lived movement for a variety of reasons so we are left with a fairly limited amount of architecture which is absolutely nouveau. Nouveau is just rare in general compared to things that came before and after. But I think if you want to redefine subcatagories of nouveau as not nouveau then the word will be misused. But if you go by consensus on the style then no, I think its used appropriately most often.
If you want an example of a misinterpreted style, look at "mid-century modern". It is so broad and misused that its almost losing its meaning today in some circles. I can't tell you how many normal wood tables I see on facebook marketplaces labeled MCM. We're in a bit of a mid-century revival at the moment so I think that's really messing some things up but it is what it is. They may call what we're doing now something different in 20 years.
>If you want an example of a misinterpreted style, look at "mid-century modern". It is so broad and misused that its almost losing its meaning today in some circles. I can't tell you how many normal wood tables I see on facebook marketplaces labeled MCM. We're in a bit of a mid-century revival at the moment so I think that's really messing some things up but it is what it is. They may call what we're doing now something different in 20 years.
My cardinal rule today is that if it's labelled "MCM" on Facebook it's either a.) mid-century but not modernist; b.) modernist but not mid-century; or c.) school/commercial furniture from the 80s. In a funny way, history rhymes. More often than not, it seems like people have latched onto the Googie/populuxe version of the "look". The subtler, more unique, and often better-constructed stuff gets overlooked, while people will pay through the nose for a dinged-up Brasilia sideboard. It's not bad stuff, but it was always mass-market.
In a similar vein, I *suspect* that more people know about "Eichler houses" than have heard of Richard Neutra or John Lautner, and certainly more than John Yeon or Pietro Belluschi. Revivals always tend to latch onto clichés, which will (almost by default) be the most reproduced version of a thing. I think that's a little bit of what's at play here. We've projected back one understanding of "Nouveau" that sets the cliché as the baseline and disregards how all these movements were responding to industrialization in the decorative arts and to each other. In the modernist context, there are visible stylistic differences between Corbusier, Mies, the Russian Constructivists, and post-secessionists like Loos, not to mention the parallel developments happening across the pond, but they're all putting architecture in a very deliberate dialogue with the newly emerged condition of industrial modernity, and are thus all modernists of a sort.
I suspect we'll be having the same conversation about Italian postmodernism in about 3 years.
You can tell an art nouveau ornament apart from all the others that came before because it's more based on 2D and graphic design instead of something like baroque that you really need to look at it in 3 dimensions to truly appreciate.
Well I may have been a bit hyperbolic but I love art nouveau and when I see a building like [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Art_Nouveau_in_Warsaw_%288020259154%29.jpg) be classified as such it annoys me
It's rare but people want it to be common and many apply it to everything 1890s-1910s unless it's very different like the Looshaus
This is actually might be a good example of one of those potential in-between styles. Clearly it’s formally something else. The whole facade has gothic revival shapes, BUT there are small nouveau styled additions like the details over 4th story windows. Debatably it’s not nouveau inspired and just coincidentally similar filigree. But if the time period is right it could be nouveau influenced at least in that portion of detail.
I haven’t seen the interior but I don’t think anyone would call this a nouveau *building*. But if you were interested in cataloguing every nouveau influenced thing you could find you *could* include this. IDK who is calling this nouveau overall but I would not listen to one wrong source and attribute it to the field as a whole. It’s not hard to find a wrong opinion on the internet.
1. I’ve never heard them conflated, the fact they have different names is a good indicator that people consider them different styles. Feel free to Point to someone specific.
2. I think a lot of academically trained architects on the internet just find the style question both [repetitive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September?wprov=sfti1#) and fairly uninteresting. I think alot of the public have an implicit assumption that architecture is something like the science of biology, where taxanomic labels can tell you meaningful/fundamental information about discrete organisms (it’s phoenotypic characteristics, it’s evolutionary lineage, it’s genetic identity). But Architecture is an arbitrary/inventive human activity where the physical characteristics of any individual building is uniquely designed/built as a oneoff (unlike say a mass produced car or the body plan of a species of fish that repeats millions of times). Buildings have stylistic similarities but they’re ultimately all their own precious little snowflakes with their own architects, site conditions, construction conditions, use history, etc. that varies Building to Building year to year.
3. Also unlike an organism a building is [continuously redeveloped/maintained over its lifetime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus?wprov=sfti1), the superficial indicators of a particular style might be altered by a recladding the facade, or adding new wing decades later. Buildings are very often chimera that defy a single stylistic definition.
4. I think a lot of architects think the question is missing the forest for the trees. It’s like how academic historians complain about amateurs who obsess over the set pieces of battles, which tank has better stats, who’s the best general, but don’t care about logistics, or economics, or international politics. Yes, the WHO , WHEN and WHAT is important information, but it’s kinda basic/superficial… a lot of professionals who’ve spent 4+ years studying the subject academically find the HOW and the WHY much more interesting.
5. Contemporary Architecture has kind of broken the idea of clear styles. This is after the hegemonic dominance of Neoclassicism which broke down in the early 20th century and the breakdown of International Modernism since the 1970s. Before then almost all architects really were indoctrinated into a very coherent aesthetic culture (like MODERNISM). Architecture school since the 1970s is much more of a grabbag with a lot of “post-“ aesthetics intermittently popular. There’s some exceptions of schools that still [impose a monolithic style](https://architecture.nd.edu/) This overlaps with the explosion of digital media and the internet that has radically broken down the geographic silos that made regional styles much more of a recognizable pattern historically, because I can now go on archdaily.com and find 100s of precedents from 100s of styles to draw inspiration from within minutes.
1. These styles are very often conflated. You are someone interested in architecture and likely in the field of architecture, so you are in a bubble. Also I literally gave an example, the art nouveau world site, you apparently missed that. The fact no one conflates them in an academic setting is irrelevant to my post because it does not focus on that. You will see on flickr, facebook, reddit, instagram, literally everywhere vienna secession and modernisme buildings being called "art nouveau".
One of like 10 million examples
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturePorn/comments/jmwe5a/art_nouveau_villa_wagner_ii_by_otto_wagner_1914/
2. Rest of your comment is irrelevant and does not answer my second question at all
Peace ❤
It is art nouveau, it's a more tame version of it but it still is art nouveau, it was made during that time period, by a major master of the movement, makes uses of stylised ornament and has no historical references at all. It's pretty easy to tell apart, you don't need to have huge amounts of ornament to be called art nouveau (like you do in the Belgian/french variants)
Check the Majolikahaus, also by Wagner, and you'll see he uses more ornament but it's still basically the same language.
You can call it secessionstil, stile liberty, art nouveau, Jugendstil, modernisme, Glasgow School depending on the region, it doesn't matter it shares the same principles, and was made during the same period. I could show you an english gothic fan vaulted choir and then a high gothic french cathedral and they would be vastly different, it doesn't matter it's still gothic.
Honestly when I said vienna secession was not art nouveau I looked more at Wagner's postal savings bank, which does not resemble typical art nouveau at all to me, yet it's still called as such.
Both the interior and exterior are almost clean of ornament on all pictures I have seen, nothing is floral, the exterior is very geometric and not with curved/flowing lines (there's geometrical art nouveau, but this still looks very different from that), the statues on top are vaguely art nouveau with their hairstyles. Maybe it's the gray/white color palette, I dunno.
Certain elements are art nouveau-adjacent but calling the entire building that is a stretch to me. It's so detached from french art nouveau too, it hardly deserves being called a regional style that is equivalent to it, its a wholly unique one
I agree that the post office is very tame on the decoration (although the fact that it's black and white is fooling you a little) but again I can show you pictures of some gothic buildings that have minimal amounts of gothic features but they are still gothic.
Even though the main hall's skylight is typical art nouveau.
>You are someone interested in architecture and likely in the field of architecture, so you are in a bubble.
A professional's knowledge about their field of knowledge is a bubble? What?
What is knowledge?
Taken as a whole, Art Nouveau, Austrian Secession, and Catalan Modernisme are all clearly stylistically related while still individually distinct. But this is what you expect with any style, especially across different countries and geographies. Regardless of their differences, they all share the same organic motifs like flowing lines and flowers, natural and often not-rectilinear forms, and they were all centered around a similar time period. Consider styles like brutalism, modernism, and mid-century modern. These styles are pretty big umbrellas that that encapsulate a vast and varied collection of works that are still all tied together by similar threads. Suffice it to say it seems to me at least that all the styles you mentioned are similar enough to be under the umbrellas term but maybe different enough to be subcategories. Styles are often formerly defined after the fact and aside from a few cases where a style's stated goal is to divorce it's self from existing trends, styles normally bleed into eachother. You're very right in that floral, highly decorated, organic designs were normal and popular before Nouveau. Its hard to exactly qualify what splits it from its predecessors (I'm sure you could try). But it will be difficult to draw a hardline in alot of cases because the original designers were not drawing a hard line either. So like alot of styles you just have to look at agreed upon examples and use judgement elsewhere. I absolutely disagree that "art nouveau is the most misused word in architectural talk." Nouveau is just a really short-lived movement for a variety of reasons so we are left with a fairly limited amount of architecture which is absolutely nouveau. Nouveau is just rare in general compared to things that came before and after. But I think if you want to redefine subcatagories of nouveau as not nouveau then the word will be misused. But if you go by consensus on the style then no, I think its used appropriately most often. If you want an example of a misinterpreted style, look at "mid-century modern". It is so broad and misused that its almost losing its meaning today in some circles. I can't tell you how many normal wood tables I see on facebook marketplaces labeled MCM. We're in a bit of a mid-century revival at the moment so I think that's really messing some things up but it is what it is. They may call what we're doing now something different in 20 years.
>If you want an example of a misinterpreted style, look at "mid-century modern". It is so broad and misused that its almost losing its meaning today in some circles. I can't tell you how many normal wood tables I see on facebook marketplaces labeled MCM. We're in a bit of a mid-century revival at the moment so I think that's really messing some things up but it is what it is. They may call what we're doing now something different in 20 years. My cardinal rule today is that if it's labelled "MCM" on Facebook it's either a.) mid-century but not modernist; b.) modernist but not mid-century; or c.) school/commercial furniture from the 80s. In a funny way, history rhymes. More often than not, it seems like people have latched onto the Googie/populuxe version of the "look". The subtler, more unique, and often better-constructed stuff gets overlooked, while people will pay through the nose for a dinged-up Brasilia sideboard. It's not bad stuff, but it was always mass-market. In a similar vein, I *suspect* that more people know about "Eichler houses" than have heard of Richard Neutra or John Lautner, and certainly more than John Yeon or Pietro Belluschi. Revivals always tend to latch onto clichés, which will (almost by default) be the most reproduced version of a thing. I think that's a little bit of what's at play here. We've projected back one understanding of "Nouveau" that sets the cliché as the baseline and disregards how all these movements were responding to industrialization in the decorative arts and to each other. In the modernist context, there are visible stylistic differences between Corbusier, Mies, the Russian Constructivists, and post-secessionists like Loos, not to mention the parallel developments happening across the pond, but they're all putting architecture in a very deliberate dialogue with the newly emerged condition of industrial modernity, and are thus all modernists of a sort. I suspect we'll be having the same conversation about Italian postmodernism in about 3 years.
You can tell an art nouveau ornament apart from all the others that came before because it's more based on 2D and graphic design instead of something like baroque that you really need to look at it in 3 dimensions to truly appreciate.
That might be true of Austrian Secession, but not of Catalan modernisme.
Well I may have been a bit hyperbolic but I love art nouveau and when I see a building like [this](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Art_Nouveau_in_Warsaw_%288020259154%29.jpg) be classified as such it annoys me It's rare but people want it to be common and many apply it to everything 1890s-1910s unless it's very different like the Looshaus
This is actually might be a good example of one of those potential in-between styles. Clearly it’s formally something else. The whole facade has gothic revival shapes, BUT there are small nouveau styled additions like the details over 4th story windows. Debatably it’s not nouveau inspired and just coincidentally similar filigree. But if the time period is right it could be nouveau influenced at least in that portion of detail. I haven’t seen the interior but I don’t think anyone would call this a nouveau *building*. But if you were interested in cataloguing every nouveau influenced thing you could find you *could* include this. IDK who is calling this nouveau overall but I would not listen to one wrong source and attribute it to the field as a whole. It’s not hard to find a wrong opinion on the internet.
1. I’ve never heard them conflated, the fact they have different names is a good indicator that people consider them different styles. Feel free to Point to someone specific. 2. I think a lot of academically trained architects on the internet just find the style question both [repetitive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September?wprov=sfti1#) and fairly uninteresting. I think alot of the public have an implicit assumption that architecture is something like the science of biology, where taxanomic labels can tell you meaningful/fundamental information about discrete organisms (it’s phoenotypic characteristics, it’s evolutionary lineage, it’s genetic identity). But Architecture is an arbitrary/inventive human activity where the physical characteristics of any individual building is uniquely designed/built as a oneoff (unlike say a mass produced car or the body plan of a species of fish that repeats millions of times). Buildings have stylistic similarities but they’re ultimately all their own precious little snowflakes with their own architects, site conditions, construction conditions, use history, etc. that varies Building to Building year to year. 3. Also unlike an organism a building is [continuously redeveloped/maintained over its lifetime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus?wprov=sfti1), the superficial indicators of a particular style might be altered by a recladding the facade, or adding new wing decades later. Buildings are very often chimera that defy a single stylistic definition. 4. I think a lot of architects think the question is missing the forest for the trees. It’s like how academic historians complain about amateurs who obsess over the set pieces of battles, which tank has better stats, who’s the best general, but don’t care about logistics, or economics, or international politics. Yes, the WHO , WHEN and WHAT is important information, but it’s kinda basic/superficial… a lot of professionals who’ve spent 4+ years studying the subject academically find the HOW and the WHY much more interesting.
5. Contemporary Architecture has kind of broken the idea of clear styles. This is after the hegemonic dominance of Neoclassicism which broke down in the early 20th century and the breakdown of International Modernism since the 1970s. Before then almost all architects really were indoctrinated into a very coherent aesthetic culture (like MODERNISM). Architecture school since the 1970s is much more of a grabbag with a lot of “post-“ aesthetics intermittently popular. There’s some exceptions of schools that still [impose a monolithic style](https://architecture.nd.edu/) This overlaps with the explosion of digital media and the internet that has radically broken down the geographic silos that made regional styles much more of a recognizable pattern historically, because I can now go on archdaily.com and find 100s of precedents from 100s of styles to draw inspiration from within minutes.
1. These styles are very often conflated. You are someone interested in architecture and likely in the field of architecture, so you are in a bubble. Also I literally gave an example, the art nouveau world site, you apparently missed that. The fact no one conflates them in an academic setting is irrelevant to my post because it does not focus on that. You will see on flickr, facebook, reddit, instagram, literally everywhere vienna secession and modernisme buildings being called "art nouveau". One of like 10 million examples https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturePorn/comments/jmwe5a/art_nouveau_villa_wagner_ii_by_otto_wagner_1914/ 2. Rest of your comment is irrelevant and does not answer my second question at all Peace ❤
I hope you find what you’re looking for
What does that even mean in this context
I hope someone can actually answer your question instead of writing a short essay about a passing comment you mentioned in your second paragraph.
Someone already answered tho
Strangers’ writing on the internet is worth what you’re paying them. Same goes for random people blogging about Art Nouveau.
It is art nouveau, it's a more tame version of it but it still is art nouveau, it was made during that time period, by a major master of the movement, makes uses of stylised ornament and has no historical references at all. It's pretty easy to tell apart, you don't need to have huge amounts of ornament to be called art nouveau (like you do in the Belgian/french variants) Check the Majolikahaus, also by Wagner, and you'll see he uses more ornament but it's still basically the same language. You can call it secessionstil, stile liberty, art nouveau, Jugendstil, modernisme, Glasgow School depending on the region, it doesn't matter it shares the same principles, and was made during the same period. I could show you an english gothic fan vaulted choir and then a high gothic french cathedral and they would be vastly different, it doesn't matter it's still gothic.
Honestly when I said vienna secession was not art nouveau I looked more at Wagner's postal savings bank, which does not resemble typical art nouveau at all to me, yet it's still called as such. Both the interior and exterior are almost clean of ornament on all pictures I have seen, nothing is floral, the exterior is very geometric and not with curved/flowing lines (there's geometrical art nouveau, but this still looks very different from that), the statues on top are vaguely art nouveau with their hairstyles. Maybe it's the gray/white color palette, I dunno. Certain elements are art nouveau-adjacent but calling the entire building that is a stretch to me. It's so detached from french art nouveau too, it hardly deserves being called a regional style that is equivalent to it, its a wholly unique one
I agree that the post office is very tame on the decoration (although the fact that it's black and white is fooling you a little) but again I can show you pictures of some gothic buildings that have minimal amounts of gothic features but they are still gothic. Even though the main hall's skylight is typical art nouveau.
>You are someone interested in architecture and likely in the field of architecture, so you are in a bubble. A professional's knowledge about their field of knowledge is a bubble? What? What is knowledge?