Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
8 April, 2014
Christoph Schnoor
Art Nouveau was a very short-lived style, its heyday lasted a mere ten years, between Hortas Tassel
House of 1892 in Brussels and the Turin World Fair [Italy] of 1902, in which the excess of Art Nouveau
Please note: There is a conflict between some historians interpretations who see the Secession as part of Art
Nouveau and others (William Curtis, for example) who understand it as a reaction against Art Nouveau.
2 August Endell, quoted after William Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (London: Phaidon, 1996), p. 66.
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ornament were broadly criticized. But it proved immensely popular and represented the first architectural
style [of the 19th century] without historic precedent. Earlier architects had turned to nature for
inspiration, notably Ruskins followers, but art nouveau architects took interest in the organic world of
form as a principle of both structural form and spatial design. Viollet-le-Duc was another major
source of inspiration, and accounts for many architects celebration of revealed construction in exposed
ironwork. The whiplash line was a superficial sign of style that could be traced from poster and book
design in the 1880s to the decoration of Hortas houses in the early 1890s to furniture design, but more
important was a shared set of principles and attitudes which infused even work whose rectilinear and
abstract geometric exploration seem at odds with the organic.3
As said above, Art Nouveau was soon criticized as new style of decadence (J. M. Olbrich), as it had
become widely popular. Vienna, and a little later Berlin and Paris, were to be among the strongholds of
reaction against Art Nouveau which acquired increasing momentum in the first decade of the 20th
century. This reaction was fed in parts by the Arts and Crafts ideals of simplicity and integrity; in part
by an abstract conception of classicism as something less to do with the use of the Orders than with a
feeling for the essential classical values of symmetry and clarity of proportion; and in part by a
sense that the architect must strive to give expression to the values of modern world by frank and
straightforward solutions to architectural problems in which disciplines of function and structure
must play an increasing, and attached ornament a decreasing, role.4
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The founding group of Werkbund designers included Bruno Taut and Peter Behrens in Germany, the
Belgian Henry van de Velde, and Josef Hoffmann from Austria.
From the start this was seen as being far more than a commercial matter; rather it was involving deep
probings into the nature of the German spirit, the role of form in history and the psychic life of the
nation. Muthesius wrote:
Far higher than the material is the spiritual; far higher than the function, material and technique, stands
Form. These three aspects might be impeccably handled but if Form were not we would still be living
in a merely brutish world. So there remains before us an aim, a much greater and more important task to
awaken once more an understanding of form, and the renewal of architectonic sensibilities.
Muthesius put his faith in the cultivated industrial elite who, he hoped, could be educated to lead the
German nation on its innate mission: the elevation of a general taste to a supremacy in world markets and
affairs, and the efflorescence of an influential and genuine Kultur (culture).6
The Werkbund produced enormously influential yearbooks, the Werkbund Jahrbcher, and held occasional
exhibitions of the work of their members, most importantly those at Cologne (1914), just before the
outbreak of the First World War, and Stuttgart-Weissenhof (1927).
It was racked by controversy from the time of its foundation, and soon divided into two factions: one
group, including Muthesius and Behrens, advocated industrialisation and standardisation of design; the
other set a higher value on artistic individuality. There was a famous debate over mechanization vs. the
individual artist between Muthesius and van de Velde.
Architecture and with it the whole area of activity of the Werkbund moves towards standardisation Only standardisation
can once again introduce a universally valid, self-certain taste.
Hermann Muthesius
As long as there are artists in the Werkbund they are going to protest against any suggestion of a canon of
standardization. The artist, according to his innermost essence, is a fervent individualist, a free, spontaneous creator
Henry van de Velde
The Werkbunds activities were interrupted by First World War, but revived afterwards. It was dissolved
by the National Socialists when they came to power in 1933. It has been re-founded after the Second
World War and is still active today, but with far less influence than around 1910.
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Behrens Turbine Factory building for the AEG of 1908-09 is an outstanding example of this celebration
of the factory as a building representative of the age and its technological achievements.
It seems to be a temple dedicated to some industrial cult.
The steel frame is exposed, with the columns tapering towards the lower hinge.
There is a dialogue of lightness vs. heaviness carried out in the design.
The thin steel frame is the loadbearing part
The heavy seeming corner pylons are not loadbearing is this lying about the construction?
The temple front: tympanum without decoration, but with AEG company sign.
His office was a real training ground for several of the German modernist architects: Gropius,
Adolf Meyer, Mies and Le Corbusier worked in his atelier
For Behrens, the architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel was an important model to follow. He translated
Schinkels architectural language into a early modern neo-classical language, achieved with the technical
means of the early 1900s.
In Germany there was a paralleled tendency to invoke the epoch of neo-classicism as a lost golden age in
which higher values were supposed to have been manifest through a distillation of classical essentials.
This was the way that Behrens tended to look upon his early 19th century predecessor Schinkel,
presumably in the hope that the ideology and patronage of Deutscher Werkbund might orchestrate a
similar classic moment for the modern industrial state of Germany. The houses designed by Behrens
around the same time as his AEG factories [eg. The Wiegand house in Berlin] were markedly neo-classical
in spirit, though devices such as the striated cornice revealed the extent to which the architect was willing
to depart from any obvious precedent.9
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