Reforms as a Means of Liberation

• In Event: Liberated Architecture for Liberated Society

Abstract

Until 1918, the imperial-royal Ministry of Public Works, responsible among other things for all state-building projects in the Cisleithanian half of the Danube Monarchy, was confronted with current social, economic, (national) political, sanitary, and health-related as well as cultural problems. To meet these challenges, the ministry's officials were open to various reforms that demonstrate a high level of social responsibility on the one hand and follow the architectural discourse of modernism on the other.
The paper aims to ask what liberation may encompass and how far it can reach, namely which topics were to be solved with which reform ideas and how broad the scope of action of a ministry in a monarchy before 1918 was.

Author

• Richard Kurdiovsky, Austrian Academy of Sciences (Austria)