Normierung in and After Ernst Neufert's Bauentwurfslehre (1936)
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Ernst Neufert. Bauentwurfslehre , 1936. Title page. 34 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00125 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00125 by guest on 28 September 2021 Standardization Reconsidered: Normierung in and after Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre (1936) NADER VOSSOUGHIAN During the last century, studies of standardization in architecture and design have been limited by a series of elisions between wholly different vocabularies. In the work of Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Sigfried Giedion, the term standardization tends to be equated with mechanization, prefabrication, or mass production. 1 The term is often taken to describe changes in how things are made—how the use of custom-made parts gives way to interchangeable parts. In Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and Joan Campbell’s canonic monograph on the Deutscher Werkbund (1978), standardization is conflated with typification (Typisierung ), which describes a related but ultimately distinct idea. 2 Here, I will argue that standardization must also be thought in the light of what Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault term, in French, “ normalisation .” 3 That is, the concept of standardization (“ Normung ” or “ Normierung ,” as it is most frequently named in German) expresses a dimension of normalisation that is frequently overlooked in architectural discourse. 4 Readers of Foucault in translation tend to treat the French word normalisation and the English normalization as interchangeable (they are not). They also tend to privilege the role that statistics play in gen - erating norms. What such perspectives tend to miss—and what this study aims to highlight—is precisely that technical standards also serve a normalizing function. Conventions that govern the dimensions of bricks also shape understandings of the body politic. To offer such a claim is to affirm the simple fact that standardization is also a plausible translation of normalisation , as Jürgen Link points out. 5 It is also to insist that technical standards are themselves “institutional[ized]” norms, as François Ewald remarks. 6 Architectural standards illustrate the unprecedented new powers that norms enjoyed in the twentieth cen - tury. They are also among the principal vehicles through which labor practices associated with Fordism, Taylorism, and energetics, their European equivalent, gained popular acceptance in interwar Germany. 7 As a case study in this exploration of standardization, I concen - Grey Room 54, Winter 2014, pp. 34–55. © 2014 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 35 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00125 by guest on 28 September 2021 K.W. Bührer and Adolf Saager. Die Organisierung der geistigen Arbeit durch “Die Brücke, ” 1911. Cover. trate in this essay on the role that Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre has played in normalizing the use of architectural standards. First published in 1936, this book remains a first port-of-call for most designers who rely on the metric system. 8 Along with Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper’s Architectural Graphic Standards (1932), it is the most important book on architectural standards ever written. 9 Its norms for vacuum cleaners, chicken coops, and bookshelves have been accepted as gospel by thousands of architects for decades. Since the 1930s, official translations have appeared in at least twenty languages. Now in its fortieth German-language edition, it is still listed as a best seller in architecture, design, and architectural theory on the German Amazon.de webpage, and numerous pirated editions circulate on the World Wide Web. On one level, the Bauentwurfslehre ’s principal function has always been to furnish builders, students of architecture, and practicing designers with a systematic and encyclopedic picture of architec - tural knowledge. As historian Gernot Weckherlin notes, it includes sample floor plans and drawings that create a “comfortable space between objects and in spaces of all kinds, at work or during periods of rest, without wasting space.” 10 The work’s earliest edition is divided into five sections: “Preparatory Work” ( Arbeitsvorbereitung ), “Design” (Entwurf ), “Construction Details” ( Bauliche Einzelheiten ), “Sculpting and Dimensioning of the Environment, Spaces and Domestic Furnishings” ( Gestaltung und Bemessung der Umgebung, der R äume und Einrichtungen ), and “Building Types” ( Geb äudekunde ). The Bauentwurfslehre includes a survey of normative construction; heat - ing, lighting, and fenestration systems; building components; and building types—for example, apartment buildings, row houses, cot - tages, schools, hostels, and dormitories; banks and high-rise apart - ments; factories, farms, and train stations. The book also contains exact measurements for a range of domestic items, from ironing boards to kitchen utensils and toilets. The Bauentwurfslehre has also always participated in normalizing the use of architectural standards. 11 For the better part of the 1920s and 1930s, Germany’s leading standards organizations (e.g., the Deutsches Institut für Normu ng, or DIN) paid only marginal attention to archi - tecture. 12 Designers were themselves resistant to the introduction of any regulating norms. The Bauentwurfslehre helped to change matters; moreover, its success has been such that the very practice of archi - tecture is now unthinkable in the absence of standards. Not only did architectural standards find their way more rapidly into DIN hand - books after World War II; standards manuals themselves became a ubiquitous fixture in architectural offices, libraries, and academic studios throughout the industrialized world (and even parts of the nonindustrialized world). 36 Grey Room 54 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00125 by guest on 28 September 2021 Normalizing Standardization Conceptually, Neufert’s efforts to normalize the use of architectural standards were inspired by the experiments of the Munich-based group Die Brücke (not to be confused with the expression - ist artists bearing the same name). This context explains the role that design systems played in normalizing standardization and helps us under - stand the particularities of Neufert’s approach to propagating the notion of the architectural standard in Germany. Founded in 1911, Die Brücke drew together the skills of three individuals: the merchant and advertising specialist Karl Wilhelm Bührer (1861–1917); the chemist and writer Adolf Saager (1879–1949); and the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932). Die Brücke suffered from misman - agement from the beginning, and it existed for only three years. However, its importance to the history of standards in twentieth- century Germany cannot be overstated. In its own time, its activities were synonymous with the scientific, industrial, and cultural project of standardization ( Normierung ) in much the same way that the Deutscher Werkbund was with typification ( Typisierung ).13 Moreover, DIN probably owes its existence to the marketing strategies that Die Brücke introduced. According to Ostwald, Die Brücke’s central mission was to estab - lish “a specially constructed organ to unify harmoniously and effec - tively separate intellectual undertakings that emerge on isolated islands.” 14 Its members felt that overspecialization in the natural sciences threatened the course of human progress. Its aim was thus to become, as intellectual historian Thomas Hapke notes, “the cen - tral agency in which would be created a comprehensive, collabora - tively compiled and illustrated world encyclopedia on sheets of standardized format.” 15 Die Brücke dedicated itself to eliminating unnecessary expenditure of energy (a doctrine of universal effi - ciency that Ostwald and his Belgian colleague Ernest Solvay termed energetics ). To that end, it concentrated on developing standards for producing, sharing, and consuming knowledge. 16 Ostwald argued that standardization ( Normierung ) fostered socialization (Sozialisierung ) and, more specifically, that “Socialization or social formation ( Vergesellschaftung ) cannot take place in the absence of standards or coordinated conventions.” 17 Following Aristotle, Ostwald felt that socialization was linked to self-realization, that to be human was precisely to be a “social animal.” 18 Furthermore, Normierung was the force he believed would help guarantee stability and peace. Vossoughian | Standardization Reconsidered: Normierung in and after Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre (1936) 37 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00125 by guest on 28 September 2021 Walter Porstmann, DIN Buch 1: Normformate , 1930. Cover. Ostwald and his collaborators from Die Brücke specifically lamented the fact that intellectual research lacked the quantitative standards that technical or economic work enjoyed—that it lacked the same global breadth–and they were particularly eager to coordinate and control the production of information as it circulated in and between offices, schools, government agencies, and private citizens, not just in scientific laboratories: “If one wants to organize, one can only do so if one first intervenes in the unification and coordination of the most everyday, common and thus also least reflective functional routines,” Ostwald writes. 19 Of its many undertakings, Die Brücke’s most successful was its effort to develop a system for standardizing the dimensions of paper. 20 Paper, Die Brücke