ie School of Architecture

Deutscher Werkbund Yearbook

In 1907 The Deutscher Werkbund was founded as an organisation that was to bind together both designer and manufacturer. Among the founding member designers were Richard Riemerschmid, Peter Behrens, Josef maria Olbrich and Bruno Paul, but also included were a number of manufacturers such as Poeschel & Trepte and Peter Bruckmann & Sohne.

In 1912 the Werkbund started to publish a yearbook which included a list of addresses and specialisations of its members.

Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial Buildings," which included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain elevators in North America, in this yearbook. A very influential text, this article had a strong influence on other European modernists, including Le Corbusier.
He wrote that so far art had been lacking an intellectual ideal of such general validity, so that artists had been unable to go beyond egocentric creation. Gropius also demands that technical constructions are imbued with a sense of artistic or even poetic density and that all details should be united into a whole which made it the symbolic expression of the inner meaning of modern constructions such as "cars, trains, steamships, aeroplanes ..."

The start of the twentieth century consumer explosion meant that the only way that supply could meet demand was through the standardisation and mass production of products.

In 1924 the Werkbund published 'Form ohne Ornament' (Form without Function). This milestone publication praised industrially produced design work which showed brutally plain surfaces lacking in any form of ornamentation or decoration. The road was set irreversibly towards Functionalism.

Finally The Deutscher Werkbund was closed down in 1934 by the Nazis.

ie School of Architecture lo descubrió en diciembre de 2009

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