Descrizione

Although they left an impressive body of architectural works behind, the activities of the brothers Alois (1872–1969) and Gustav Josef Ludwig (1876–1952) are hardly known outside South Tyrol. Originally from Brno, they studied under Otto Wagner as well as in the USA, and opened offices in Munich and Bolzano. As the Ludwig Brothers (Brüder Ludwig) they realized numerous villas before the First World War, e.g. for Thomas Mann in Munich. In Vienna, they built a large administrative building and in South Tyrol remarkable Grand Hotels. In 2022, original plans by the Ludwig Brothers were rediscovered by the project applicant. Most of the office's designs can probably be traced back to Alois Ludwig. He studied with Wagner in Vienna, and subsequently carried out buildings in a partnership that were committed to Jugendstil. Around 1905 he came to Munich and soon after to Bolzano. In the joint offices with his brother and in contrast to previous projects, he increasingly oriented himself towards the Baroque and also incorporated influences from the USA and England into his designs. Yet before the First World War, in the heyday of nationalism and Heimatschutz, the eclecticism of his work was not seen as alien, but rather as a continuation of local Baroque building traditions, as for instance in South Tyrol. Only in 1928 a local art historian pointed out that these were "foreign modernized baroque forms" – and thus shaped a leitmotif and starting point for this two-part research project. The first part of this scientific work maps all buildings and projects of the Ludwig Brothers, an index forming the basis for the second part: an analysis of the baroqueizing formal language of their architecture. At the time when, for example, the Secessionists were already propagating a radical shift away from historicism, the Ludwig Brothers reworked and "updated" an existing architectural basic material towards a partly expressive, "universal" Baroque. This raises the following questions: Did this generate "another Modernism" resulting from a language doubt (Sprachzweifel) in a transitional period of architecture? What was the objective of overhauling this historical vocabulary? The working hypothesis assumes that the architectural production of the Ludwig Brothers does not represent an intrinsic Neo-Baroque, but instead a new phenomenon in architecture. In this context the modernization of familiar motifs, already introduced in visual traditions, probably occurred for complex reasons of instrumentalization. The projects of the Ludwig Brothers allow to interdisciplinary investigate different aspects: the instrumentalization of architecture through the lens of politics ("Germaness"); an architecture geared for the travel industries (Reklamearchitektur), and in relation to Heimatschutz and vernacular building traditions.

Partner

Lead Partner Università di Innsbruck, Partner Azienda Musei provinciali, Touriseum