102 PETER A . ZUS I The Style of the Present : Karel Teige on Constructivism

I 1929, K T —the leading theoretical voice of the Czech interwar avant-garde and a prolific critic of modernist literature, art, and architecture—published a review of LeCorbusier’s project for aworld cultural center called the Mundaneum. Le Corbusier had every reason to expect accolades: Teige had been a tremendous admirer and had been enormously influenced by Le Corbusier ever since their first meeting in Paris in mid-1922. But surprisingly, Teige criticized the Mundaneum project as representing, in effect, a design for an avant-garde cathedral. Teige stated that ‘‘in its obvious historicism and academicism, the Mundaneum project shows the present non-viability of architecture thought of as art.’’ That in the late 1920s Teige should accuse the doyen of avant-garde architecture of practicing ‘‘obvious historicism’’ is striking, and Le Corbusier was clearly taken aback by the criticism. Indeed Le Corbusier could only interpret this charge as the implementation of utilitarian ‘‘police measures’’ against his own ‘‘quest for harmony’’ and aesthetic efficacy. Architectural historians, invoking less judgmental yet analogous categories, have represented the Mundaneum polemic as exposing a major rift within architectural modernism: George Baird, for example, has situated Teige’s ‘‘all-encompassing ‘instrumentalization’ ’’ within a general ‘‘shift of tone . . . toward a radically matter-of-fact and materialist conception of architecture . . . ,’’ and Kenneth Frampton has written of the opposition between Le Corbusier’s ‘‘humanist’’ modernism and the ‘‘utilitarian’’ radicalism of figures such as Teige and Hannes Meyer. What such accounts overlook, however, is how Teige’s apparently strict and ungenerous evaluation of the Mundaneum was anchored in extravagant aesthetic claims Teige made elsewhere for Constructivism as the architectural ‘‘style of the present.’’ The radical antihistoricism so prominent in Teige’sMundaneumpolemic was thus driven by equally radical claims about the historical status of Constructiv-