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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le corbusier, 1956

Le Corbusier 1959

Le Corbusier designed several variations of the unité d’habitation, the most famous of which is in Marseille, France. All were derived from Le Corbusier’s visionary 1922 city plan, known as Ville Contemporaine. The plan envisioned massive residential blocks set in open green areas—towers in parks, bringing light and air to the residents of urban housing. Like most grand modernist visions, the Ville Contemporaine was never built in its entirety. Its influence on subsequent developments in city planning, however, is clear - notably on post-war reconstruction in Europe and public housing in the United States.

The unité type was most notable for its creation of internal streets (essentially elaborate hallways) and accommodation of social and communal functions—kindergartens, medical facilities, recreational spaces—within the housing block. The Berlin unité, built between 1956-1959, lacks most of the amenities (save a shop and a post office on the ground floor), but is considered unique for its more generously sized apartments. It accommodates 530 units on 17 floors. The internal streets here are oppressive, windowless corridors. Still, the building is in quite good condition; its hilltop setting, iconic formal qualities, and polychromatic facades are very striking.

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he Staatsbibliothek forms the eastern boundary of the Kulturforum, a complex of buildings which also includes Scharoun’s Philharmonie and Kammermusiksaal and Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie. The building exhibits an architectural language familiar from Scharoun’s Philharmonie (completed in 1963), but pleasingly and appropriately adapted to the program of a library. If the Philharmonie’s sculptural interior (generated by the concert hall itself) stretches and compresses its exterior, the Staatsbibliothek’s multiple reading, research and stack spaces make for a gentler, and less agitated exterior. The spaces within are wonderfully modulated. The volumes of reading rooms, offices, and stacks are seemingly stitched together by stairways and smaller changes in level. The building beckons to be explored.

Along with the Exeter Library designed by Louis Kahn, the Staatsbibliothek is probably the most famous of modern libraries. Its contribution to architects’ understanding of a building type with a long and well-documented history has been extremely influential in subsequent library design. Scharoun’s building, while deriving its form from its function, is no mere sum of functional parts. Its expressiveness—and that of Scharoun’s other buildings in the Kulturforum—is personal and idiosyncratic in ways that mark a clear contrast to the canonical international style exhibited by its neighbor, Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie (1965-68).

ie School of Architecture lo descubrió en diciembre de 2009

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