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Handout L7: Europe 1900 20

Art Nouveau, Deutscher Werkbund and Expressionism
CS2

8 April, 2014

Christoph Schnoor

Towards modern architecture? At the turn of the century

Before 1914, the search for a modern architecture developed in several strands, united predominantly
through their rejection of 19th century historicism:
a) Art Nouveau and the reaction against it;
b) the Deutscher Werkbund, fostering both a more abstract, neo-classicist style and a sober traditionalist
regionalism;
c) early Expressionism in architecture.
We have two ways of reading architectural history at this point: either to see the various developments and
movements in architecture since 1750 as moving towards modernism and thus giving validity to
modernism only, or to see the styles and movements before the first peak of modernist architecture
around 1925 as independent, and to evaluate them on their own merits rather than just interpreting them
as preparatory.

Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Secession

Art Nouveau is a global style in that sense that it comprised all categories of art, from architecture and
interior design to furniture design, art of making posters, crockery, textile art, book design, even to
literature and music. It had different names in different countries:
It was called Art Nouveau in England and France (after the name of an art gallery in Paris: La maison de
lart nouveau the house of the new art), Jugendstil (youth-style) in Germany because of a
direction-setting magazine called The Youth , and Secession style in Austria (secession = splitting,
separation) since the Austrian artists involved separated themselves from the Academy, from the valid
style.1
In the late 1890s the German architect August Endell wrote of a non-historical style of pure forms
capable of moving the spirit in a manner similar to the rhythms of music:
They teach us that there can be no new form, that all possibilities have been exhausted in the styles of the past, and
that all art lies in an individually modified use of old forms. It even extends to selling the pitiful eclecticism of the last
decades as the new style.
To those with understanding, this dependency is simply laughable. For they can clearly see that we are not only at the
beginning of a new stylistic phase, but at the same time at the threshold of a completely new Art. An Art with forms
that signify nothing, and remind us of nothing, which arouse our souls as deeply and strongly as music has always
been able to do
This is the power of form upon the mind, a direct, immediate influence without an intermediary stage one of
direct empathy.2

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

Henry van de Velde (18631957), one of Art Nouveaus initiators

Henry van de Veldes hint at how to understand his work is fairly straightforward:
A line is a force , he said in his publication Kunstgewerbliche Laienpredigten of 1902.
All his early work is dominated by lines which make sinewy curves, bunched knots, or knots which
encircle, supple and tight. Objects first furniture and applied art objects, then later architectural features
are full of tight movements, on the surface as well as within the constructional framework. The principle
proved transferable, and therefore of universal significance. In van de Veldes work, however, a line is not
simply a manifestation in one dimension, but is solid, in keeping with the power attributed to it. It always
had volume: van de Veldes perceptions were never superficial, but always sculptural.5
His designs for the Maison de lArt Nouveau in Paris (1896) helped create the very style of Art
Nouveau. As important were his designs for the Folkwang-Museum in Hagen in Germany (director Karl
Ernst Osthaus). As co-founder of several art schools and artists associations he was one of the most
influential architect and theorist of the early 20th century. He directed the Kunstgewerbeschule (school of
applied arts) in Weimar that later became the Bauhaus, until 1919, when Walter Gropius took over the
directorate.

The Deutscher Werkbund

First of all, the name is difficult to translate directly:
Deutscher = German, Werk = work, as in work of art, and a Bund is a union or alliance. The
Deutscher Werkbund was a German organisation of manufacturers, architects and designers
dedicated to the improvement of design and craftsmanship in machine-made products.
It was founded in 1907 by the German architect Hermann Muthesius who, while working as Germanys
cultural attach in London, had studied the Arts & Crafts reform taking place in English architecture and
design. However, whilst Arts & Crafts workshops in England had rejected methods of machine
production, such methods were embraced in Germany.
Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 17501890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 279.
Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, p. 68.
5 Klaus Jrgen Sembach, Henry van de Velde (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989), p. 47.
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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.

Architects of the Werkbund: Behrens, Gropius, Mies

The factory as a building type received great attention by the Werkbund architects. You can see that in the
factory buildings by Hermann Muthesius, Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius shown in this lecture.
Instead of approaching factory design from a purely utilitarian, functional point of view, these architects
felt that industrial tasks must be seen as the essential cultural ones of the time. The factory thus took on a
far greater significance than it had usually possessed.7
This was in stark contrast to the Arts & Crafts ideal in England, as promoted by Ruskin and Morris.
Had Behrens been a mere functionalist, he might simply have optimized the functions and clothed the
resulting structure in cheap materials without concern for proportion, let alone the impact of forms on the
spirit; had he been an Expressionist, he might have sought to dramatize the process of movement with a
highly sculptural formal arrangement. But Behrens steered a way between these approaches in a search for
a sober, and indeed, typical form in the classical/German spirit.8

Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, p. 100.

Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, p. 102.
8 Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, p. 102.
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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.

Peter Behrens (18681940)

Painter, architect and Designer

Co-founder of the Werkbund
Mostly desgined in a stripped neo-classical architectural style
Appointed as architect and designer for the AEG (Allgemeine Electricitaets-Gesellschaft =
General Electricity Company of Germany) in 1907

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

Walter Gropius (18831969)

With their buildings at the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, both Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut
created almost sacred objects, symbolizing the modern world of the machine. They attempted to
celebrate industrialization, to reveal its capacity for poetry, and to suggest its genuine, progressive cultural
potential.10
Fagus Factory 1911-12 / Model factory, Werkbund exhibition Cologne, 1914
Sommerfeld house with Adolf Meyer and Bauhaus students, 192021
First director of the Bauhaus in Weimar 191925
Design of the new Bauhaus building in Dessau (192526)
Director of the Bauhaus in Dessau 192528
Interested in functionalism, standardization, prefabrication etc.
Emigration to USA, to teach at Harvard University, in 1934
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Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, p. 1423.

Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, p. 106

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (18861969)

Next to Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe is probably the third most influential
architect in the 20th century. As Ludwig Mies he was born in Aachen, Germany, the son of a stonemason.
After an apprenticeship in his fathers workshop, he went to Berlin to work for the architect Bruno Paul
(1907) and for Peter Behrens (190812). His first work was the house for Alois Riehl in Neubabelsberg,
designed and built 190607, in which Biedermeier (a German style from around 1800), a Schinkel-inspired
neo-classicism and a premonition of his later work are combined.
For his project for the Krller-Mller House in The Hague in Holland, Karl Friedrich Schinkel figuratively
provided him with ways for dealing with a wide range of building types (suburban villa, pavilion,
industrial structure, museum, monument), and with a radical redefinition of basic architectural elements
auch as the pedestal, the wall, the opening, the column, the pier, the pilaster, the soffit, the pergola and the
entablature.11
We will see more of Mies work in later lectures.

Austrian architects around 1900: Loos, Olbrich, Wagner

Austrian architecture played an important role in the development of Modernism. Vienna of circa 1900
was a vibrant cultural metropolis, a veritable melting pot of people and cultures. Here, many architects and
artists were able to develop new approaches to art. The architects Josef Maria Olbrich, Otto Wagner and
Adolf Loos were all very different in their aims and in the respective language of their designs, but they
were instrumental in moving architecture beyond historicism and towards abstraction.
In fact, abstraction might be the uniting factor of the work of these three designers. They used more or
less classical elements in their works (see Obrichs Secession building with its cornices and allusions to
pilasters), but they reduced ornament to (floral) surface lines, as can be seen in Olbrichs Secession
building or in Wagners Majolika-House. Adolf Loos went so far as to strip the faades of his buildings to
almost bare blankness, so much so that the Viennese were shocked when they first saw his Goldman &
Salatsch Store on Michaeler square (1910-11) because it seemed to them as if Loos had violated rules of
good faade design: the windows appeared to have no reveal, but worse, no pediment above them, hence
the name: house without eyebrows.
Like the German architects mentioned in this lecture, Wagner advocated the use of the newest technology
and of industrial means; you can see this in his Post Office Savings Bank, for eample in the glass roof
covering the main hall.

Adolf Loos (18701933)

Adolf Loos, Austrian architect-theorist, rejected the floral lines of Art Nouveau. He also criticized what he
saw as the false taste of the town-dweller and praised the unconscious sense of beauty of vernacular
houses:
May I lead you to the shores of a mountain lake? The sky is blue, the water green and everything is
profoundly peaceful. Mountains and clouds are reflected in the lake, and so are houses, farmyards,
courtyards and chapels. They do not seem man-made, but more like the product of Gods workshop, like
the mountains and trees, the clouds and the blue sky. And everything breathes beauty and tranquility.
Ah, what is that? A false note in the harmony. Like an unwelcome scream. In the centre, beneath the
peasants homes which were created not by them, but by God, stands a villa. Is it the product of a good or
a bad architect? I do not know. I only know that peace, tranquility and beauty are no more
Like almost every town dweller, the architect possesses no culture. He does not have the security
of the peasant to whom this culture is innate. The town dweller is an upstart.
I call culture, that balance of inner and outer man, which alone can guarantee reasonable thought and
action.12

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William Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, 142.

Adolf Loos, Architektur, 1910, quoted after Frampton, Modern architecture, p. 90.