Inside and Outside: the Influence of the Contemporary Space and Perception Theory on Art Nouveau

It is well-known the debt of the Art Nouveau movement with the esthetical theory of late eighteenth Century Central European culture, and specially with the Viennese school: it’s not by chance that the theoretical construct of Kunstwollen, developed by Alois Riegl, has been often connected to Van de Velde or Peter Behrens and particularly to his work for the Turin Exhibition in 1902, while that of Einfühlung has been connected with the Belgian Art Nouveau; recent studies have demonstrated that in Rome Ernesto Basile got in touch with Hans von Marées and Adolf von Hildebrand, being seriously influenced by the notion of visibility. It hasn’t been tried any historiographical investigation to understand if and how the new, “fluid” Art Nouveau spatiality, as well as the new relationship between inside and outside, owe something to that set of theoretical positions, which had previously concentrated the architectural interpretation on one side on the perception and on the other side on the notion of space. Since the Seventies up to the Nineties of Nineteenth Century a great number of studies, most of all in German language (such as those of Rudolf Adamy, Adolf Göller, Adolf von Hildebrand, Konrad Fiedler, Theodor Lipps, August Schmarsow, Heinrich Wölfflin), contribute to define a new idea of space, which from many points of view takes form in the contemporary and later works of Jugendstil and Secession or, in general, of Art Nouveau: at first Robert Vischer, main theorist of the Einfühlung, who works on a theory of the perception of the space, where this space is lived as a physical experience (1873), and then with Konrad Fiedler, who writes that architecture, defined as “enclosed, covered space”, is an “art of space”, or Raumkunst (1878); hence the tendency to create interior spaces connected with each other and related with the backyard, the garden or the street, on the base of a long-view perspective. The basis of all these theoretical positions is anyway, in good or bad, Gottfried Semper’s “practical aesthetics” and his exploration of the inner structure of what had previously been achieved only from a historical point of view; from here start the careful considerations of Heinrich Wölfflin (1886), who thinks that architectural – covered or outer – space is always “exterior”, if compared to the “interior” space of perception. Finally has to be mentioned the work of August Schmarsow (1893), for whom the history of architecture is a history of the spatial sense, with a specific attention to the relationship between the building and its environment, so as to include in the notion of architecture also the external space at every scale, from gardens and courtyards to more complex urban or landscape ensambles. This theoretical tradition, and its possibility to explore the ambiguity of the notions of “interior” and “exterior” space, goes on until the first decade of the new Century with the contributions of Theodor Dahmen and Wilhelm Worringer and is developed at the same time by the different experimental lines of the Art Nouveau, in a very close relationship with the work of Van de Velde, Behrens, Olbrich, Endell, but even – through ways that are still to reconsider – of Gaudì and Horta.