2. Theory and Experiment

MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 2. Theory and Experiment Walter Gropius, Konrad Wachsmann Published on: Apr 23, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 2. Theory and Experiment The architect and industry In Britain, the epicenter of the Industrial Revolution, the relationship between architect and industry in the period right up to World War I was essentially, and at its best, a guarded neutrality, which frequently degenerated into a frank and outspoken hostility. At the turn of the century, and in Edwardian days, the only native architectural tradition was that of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Ruskin was still a force to be reckoned with, William Morris still much admired. The great names in residential design—Charles Annesley Voysey, Mackay Hugh Baillie-Scott, Edwin Lutyens—were part of this solid tradition of an architecture rooted in conservative values and traditional building skills. Even when Art Nouveau was influential, as with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, it could not prize the architect free from the relentless grip of conventional construction methods, at least as far as domestic architecture was concerned. Industrial skills and techniques, those daring flights of structural ingenuity —the railway station roofs, the warehouses and dockyards—were the products not of architects but of engineers or of other, anonymous, designers. It is notable that in the century-long prehistory of prefabrication, when British manufacturers led the world in new techniques of industrialized building, architects played an insignificant role. In no instance did an architect initiate a new system of prefabrication or even play a creative part in its conception. Where the architect came into the picture, and this was the exceptional case, it was in a supportive role as the designer of a specific building in a prefabricated system already preconceived by others.1 It was in Germany that the first constructive links between architects and industry were assayed. Friedrich Naumann spoke at the Third German Exhibition of Arts and Crafts in Dresden in 1906 and stressed the need “to infuse mass production with meaning and spirit.”2 The following year Naumann, Karl Schmidt, of the Dresdener (later Deutsche) Werkstätten, and Hermann Muthesius were instrumental in founding the Deutscher Werkbund, when in October 1907 twelve eminent artists (many of them architects) and twelve manufacturers (involved in such applied arts as furniture making, printing, metalwork, and weaving) came to a meeting in Munich convened by Muthesius, and accepted a program whose first operative clause called for “encouragement of the fruitful cooperation of art, industry and craft.”3 It was, as it was later put, the writing of a peace treaty between art and industry.4 This was not a purely altruistic, idealistic stand but a recognition by the founders that Germany, in order successfully to compete with the industrial giants, Britain and America, had to 2 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 2. Theory and Experiment improve the quality of its industrial goods. The causal links in the chain—prosperity, mass production, industrialization, standardization, quality, design—were clearly recognized by the Werkbund and by most of the architects associated with it.5 One of these architects was Peter Behrens, who had that very month assumed his official position as artistic consultant to the AEG (the Allgemeine Electricitäts Gesellschaft) in Berlin. In this position, in which Behrens virtually became the principal industrial designer and architectural consultant to this giant firm, he had an unparalleled opportunity to realize the Werkbund’s aims and his own philosophy. His viewpoint on the central issue, art and industry, was not, however, monovalent but highly complex.6 If he was at times moved by great engineering works, he nevertheless saw them in terms of a pseudoaesthetic, and his own predelictions in architecture were toward the monumental. He was, in a sense as Wright was, both conservative and innovative. He accepted a functional relationship between art and industrial society almost reluctantly but inescapably. The architect was compelled to work within the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times; his artistic function was to transmute this spirit into an expressive force and infuse it with the eternal values of monumental architecture. He was not conservative in relation to construction techniques and went further than Muthesius in rejecting the William Morris-Arts and Crafts basis for the Werkbund: but he was conservative in his concept of the cultural role of architecture, a role he believed pure engineering could not fulfill. The challenge to Behrens, as Stanford Anderson put it, “was to bring about the synthesis of technology and art in order that modern civilization might be elevated to a true culture. He wanted . an aesthetic ‘rooted in the laws of surging life.’ He also did not want a technology that pursued its own end but one that was sensible to the artistic will of the time.”7 He viewed the technological age not with enthusiasm but with an inevitability beyond debate. One of the principal directors of AEG, Walter Rathenau, son of the founder and president of the company, Emil Rathenau, was moved by a comprehension of the times consonant with that of his architect Behrens. One could be highly critical of the mechanization of life induced by industrialization, as Rathenau was, and yet recognize industrialization and technology as obdurate facts of contemporary life, not to be wished away but to be worked with. His conclusion for Behrens or for the young Walter Gropius must have had the inescapable ring of truth: “only mechanization itself can lead us beyond mechanization.”8 Like Walter Rathenau, Gropius saw the way to a better future through the creative exploitation of industrial means. Gropius,9 who had 3 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 2. Theory and Experiment entered Behrens’ office as an assistant late in 1907 (at the time of the founding of the Werkbund, and Behrens’ new association with AEG), was one of the first architects to make a bold claim for mechanization as a way to achieve a better architecture. Like Behrens and Rathenau, he saw industrialization as a means of achieving higher cultural goals. Younger than his employer, and Rathenau their client, he was perhaps at that time a less reluctant prophet of industrial technology than they. He was burdened neither by the cultural impedance of Behrens’ classicist affinities nor by Rathenau’s ambivalence in the face of mechanization. This did not mean that he was unaware of the dangers inherent in the machine but that, filled with a youthful confidence that he could master it, his embrace of the potential of industry was much more wholehearted than that of his mentors. It was to Emil Rathenau, the president of AEG, that Gropius presented a memorandum on the industrial production of buildings, in 1910, probably through the mediation of Walter Rathenau,10 who of course stood close to both Behrens and Gropius philosophically. The importance of this document had frequently been stressed both in Gropian literature and in works on the history of prefabrication, ever since Nikolaus Pevsner drew attention to it in his 1936 edition of Pioneers.11 Its contents, however, have not been subject to rigorous analysis nor have the circumstances of its preparation (even to the limited extent to which the facts are known) been probed in any serious fashion.12 Yet such is the significance of this memorandum to our understanding of Gropius’ role in the subsequent development of prefabrication that it merits the most serious consideration. Gropius himself saw it as a foundation of his work, the bedrock on which his evolving theory of prefabrication was based. It had for him a chronological significance, establishing the priority of his claims, but more than that it was, if we may use a muchabused term, a truly seminal paper. Gropius submitted his “Programm zur Gründung einer all-gemeine Hausbaugesellschaft auf künsterlich einheitlicher Grundlage, m.b.H.” (Program for the Founding of a General Housing-Construction Company Following Artistically Uniform Principles) to Rathenau of AEG in April 1910, having presumably completed it the previous month.13 It had been in preparation for some time before that. Much research, experimenting, and testing had gone into its formulation until Gropius considered it solidly based (or, as only with the presumption of youth, he could claim, it represented “the sum total of all practical, technical, and aesthetic experience”). All house types and all component parts had been designed, drawn out, detailed, specified, and costed prior to the presentation. In other words, the entire preparation 4 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 2. Theory and Experiment had been undertaken before March 1910, perhaps even in 1909,14 while Gropius was still in the employment of Peter Behrens, and it was presented to Rathenau of AEG, Behrens’ principal client. One must assume then that it was undertaken with the knowledge and approval of Behrens.15 The more interesting question is whether Behrens participated directly in its conception or formulation. This would appear to be a likely supposition, but there is no evidence to support it; however, as Gropius later recalled: “It is possible that I sought his advice.”16 There can, however, be no doubt of the underlying influence of Behrens in the memorandum. Even if Gropius did not discuss the idea with Behrens, though it is difficult to see how he could fail to do so, the philosophy that guided it—the aspiration to a synthesis of art and technology in the interest of achieving a higher culture consonant with the Zeitgeist—is the philosophy that pervaded Behrens’ office and his work.

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