Professional Documents
Culture Documents
earlier times,, means for wardingg off want and for helping
p g consumption;
p ;
instead, want and consumption are the means to market the inventions.
The order of things has been reversed. …The abundance of means is the
first serious danger with which art has to struggle. Where will the
depreciation of material that results from its treatment by machines, from
substitutes lead? –Gottfried Semper, 1852
H
How should
h ld ddesigners
i d
deall with
ith iindustrialization?
d t i li ti ?
How did Germany become the world leader in superior industrial design?
1890: resignation of Bismark
rise of the demand for improved design in craft and industry
Why did Germans see good design as their path to becoming an economic
powerhouse?
-raw
raw material poor
-no ready outlet for cheap goods (market already filled)
Wh did they
Why th embrace
b machine
hi production?
d ti ?
-only economically feasible way to manufacture and mass-market goods
((unlike
lik Willi
William M
Morris,
i GGermans were nott iinterested
t t d iin one-off
ff craft
ft
produced pieces for a small, well-educated, upper-class. To build their GDP,
they need to mass produce goods. The idea was to appeal to the middle
class’s desire to ‘buy up.’
up ’ Naumann reinforced this idea in his 1904 essay,
essay
“Art in the Epoch of the Machine.”)
1907: Muthesius, Naumann, and Schmidt
founded the Deutsche Werkbund
Peter
P t B Behrens.
h Fan
F Model
M d l No.
N GB 1.1
1908. Painted cast iron and brass,
mfg by A.E.G., Germany.
Behrens.
Nitralampe. 1910.
Mfg by A.E.G.
Behrens’s accepted of
industrialization as
Germany’sy destiny.y He
built “a temple to
industrial power” while
bringing to the workers a
sense of common
purpose that was lost
when they moved from
the
h farm
f to the
h city
(Frampton 111-12).
Behrens. AEG Turbine Factory. Berlin, 1908-09.
“What is Monumental Art?” –Behrens, 1908
Behrens argued that such art is an expression of the dominant power group
in any given epoch. He also rejected Semper’s theory that form comes
from technical criteria in favor of Riegl’s
g theoryy that talented individuals are
ordained to design through their ‘will to form’ (note the Nietzschian influence).
He fell on the Form (individuality) side of the Werkbund style argument (as
opposed to the advocates of Norm, or type.)
Norm Form
Hermann M
H Muthesius’s
th i ’ address
dd att th
the W
Werkbund
kb d EExhibition
hibiti advocated
d t d
Norm. He argued that architecture and industrial design can attain
significance only through the development of types that can be mass-
produced and sold to the world.
world
The Bauhaus resulted from the mergerg of the former Grand-Ducal Saxon
Academy of Art (Mackensen) with the former Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts
and Crafts (directed by Van de Velde, Behrens a teacher), and also was
influenced by the Norm ideology of the Deutche Werkbund.
The ultimate, if distant, aim of the
Bauhaus is the unified work of art – the
greatt structure
t t – in
i which
hi h th
there iis no
distinction between monumental and
decorative art. –Gropius
Vantonerloo’s construction
can be derived by
concentrating on the George
advancing and receding Vantongerloo.
Construction of
volumes A Neo
volumes. Neo-Plastic
Plastic Volume Relations.
house if arrived at by reading 1921.
the planes as forming hollow
interlocked boxes.
Rietveld’s Schroder
Ho e iis arrived
House i ed att b
by
separating some of
the planes even
further.
further
In all of these cases, a
linear and planar
clarity of separate
parts has been
combined with
continuously
i l shifting
hif i
sets of spatial
relationships. The
result
e lt iis a m
machined
hined
freedom.
IIn 1922,
1922 GGropius
i changed
h d th
the focus
f
of the school from craft to the
understanding of industrial methods
of production.
production
Metal workshop
1923 in Weimar
The classrooms/
administration offices
were built on one
side of the road,
while the studios
were across the
th
street.
These two volumes
were connected by
the bridge where the
professors had their
offices.
Itten left in 1923. His position was filled by Moholy-Nagy, who taught first
year studio with Albers. They reworked the studio so that it concentrated on
revealing the statical and aesthetic properties of free-standing asymmetrical
structures, which portray both a machined purity and a modern continuity of
space.
Albers’s student’s work. 1927-28.
The focus on craft continually gave way to the focus on deriving form from
productive method, material constraint, and programmatic necessity.
Breuer’s
Breuer s tubular steel chairs exemplified this approach to creative design
solutions.
“To
To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of
art designed for reproducibility.” (Benjamin 224)
Bauhaus
Pendant
Lamp -
Marianne
Brandt and
Hans
Przyrembel,
1925.
From the left: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, Las�zlo�
Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer,
Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stolzl and Oskar
Sc e
Schlemmer.
e