Lecture 12
Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin (1909)
Background: the movement for artistic reformr in Germany was, from the start, deeply involved in the question of national idenity. Those participating in the movement were caught between a desire to return to their pre-industrial roots and an equally strong impulse towards modernization as the necessary condition of competing commercially with the Western Nations
Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin (1909)
Compared to the letters seen on the facade of Jacques-Germain Soufflot, Panthéon, Paris, 1758-90 and
Deutscher Werkbund
Founded in Munich 1907. Chief moving spirits behind it included Hermann Muthesius. 12 architects and 12 companies withdrew from their exisitn conservative and commercially motivated alliance for german applied arts to join new organization. IMPORTANT: werkbund's orientation towards high-quality goods for consumption, stressing the need to bridge the gap between artists and producers that had developed with machine production. Seems to have derived from the German arts and crafts movement
Form or Gestalt
In the Werkbund congress of 1908, in the design of machine products form should take precedence over function, material, and technique, which had been stressed by the Arts and Crafts and Jugenstil movements.
Walter Gropius [with Adolf Meyer, 1881-1929], Fagus Factory, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany (1911-14)
It was precisely this factory's modesty and lack of symbolic charge that enabled Gropius to follow his more down-to-earth agenda and to produce a work which would come to be seen as prophetic of the objective Modern mOVEMENT of the 1920s. The building doesn't make any of Behren's grandious symbolic claims. EX. Gropius tries to make his neccessarily massive brick peirs disappear so that the main facade of his building looks as if it is made entirely of glass. Whereas Behresn impressionistically rounds his corners, Gropius sharpens his with the precision of a surgeon's knife cut. Whereas the Trubine factory abounds in overt classicl references, teh classicism of the Fagus Factory is discreet and abstract a matter of geomtery
Muthesius and the notion of type
Only through typification, he said, can architecture recover that universal significance which was charactersitic of it in times of harmoinous culture. To him and others of the Werkbund, the degeneration of modern taste was due not as Ruskin had thought to the machine as such, but to the cultural disorder caused by the operation of the market and destabilizing effect of fashion. Firms producing goods of standardized artisti quality would be able to dominate the market and act as the sole arbitrors of taste operating as the modern equivalent of the medieval guilds
Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin (1909)
Reflected his faith in the ennobling effect of art on technology. Calimed that the architecture of the machine age should be based on classicism that in an age of speed the only appropritate buildings would be those with forms as distint as possible, with quiet, flush surfaces. He sets out to spiritualize the power of modern industry in terms of an eternal classicism. The basic metaphor at work is the factory as Greek temple.
Peter Behrens
Rejection of Jugendstil in favour of classicism in a move that paralleled teh emergence of the idea of Gestalt within the WEerbund. He writes"the Dusseldorf Schoool seeks mediation by going back to the fundamental principles of form, to take root in the artistically spontaneous, in the inner laws of perception, rather than in the mechanical aspects of work.
Bahaus
a school of architecture in Germany in the 1920s led by Walter Gropios, who emphasized the unity of art, architecture, and design
