Clare Hall Tanner Lectures 2012 (1) Joseph Leo Koerner

The Viennese Interior: Architecture & Inwardness; 'The Kiss' Vienna took its interiors seriously.  Between 1898 and 1938, many of this city’s greatest minds grappled with how to structure and appoint the inner spaces of everyday life.  The result—the modern home—would possess an interior that (according to its creators) fitted another, more impenetrable interior:  the subjective inwardness of the home’s inhabitants.  Built architecture and psychic sphere, the Viennese interior was a contested matrix of human values. The novelist Hermann Broch portrayed fin-de siècle Vienna as a 'value vacuum'. These lectures explore Viennese homemaking as attempts to fill that vacuum.