A Line is A Force: 

The Scientific Program of Art Nouveau 

ZHAO Yue

lecturer at the School of Architecture, Southeast University, Nanjing

PhD from the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich

Yue Zhao's research centres on exploring the interaction between the visual arts and psychology in Germany around 1900, aiming to shed light on the intricate forces involved in constructing and interpreting the modern visual environment. She has published essays, translations, comments, and interviews in various architectural journals and books, such as Architectural Journal, The Architect, and Architectural Ethnography(2018). Besides, she is also interested in testing different visual languages through making graphic novels.

Through three “architectures”— a museum, a manifest and an exhibition— designed by the architect Henry van der Velde at the turn of the twenties century, this lecture attempts to illustrate the scientific frame of the Art Nouveau movement and its cultural program. Starting from van de Velde’s famous motto “a line is a force”, the lecture intensively examines the psychological concepts and methods used by the pioneering artists of the time to discuss“linear aesthetics”, while it extensively depicts the cultural obsession with line around 1900, namely a desire to shape line into a universal language capable of communicating between science, technology, art, and architecture. Finally, the lecture attempts to find in the LINE the hidden agenda of  architectural modernism.

1.Linie und Form: Erläut. Verzeichnis der Ausstellung formenschöner Erzeugnisse der Natur, Kunst und Technik im Kaiser-Wilhelm-Museum zu Krefeld, April und Mai 1904, Krefeld: Kramer & Baum, 1904.