The New Objectivity (a translation of the German ''Neue Sachlichkeit'', sometimes also translated as New Sobriety) is a name often given to the Modern architecture that emerged in Europe, primarily German-speaking Europe, in the 1920s and 30s. It is also frequently called ''Neues Bauen'' (New Building). The New Objectivity remodeled many German cities in this period.
Werkbund and Expressionism
The earliest examples of the style date to before the First World War, under the auspices of the
Deutscher Werkbund's attempt to provide a modern face for Germany. Many of the architects who would become associated with the New Objectivity were practicing in a similar manner in the 1910s, using glass surfaces and severe geometric compositions. Examples of this include
Walter Gropius and
Adolf Meyer's 1911
Fagus Factory
The Fagus Factory ( German: ''Fagus Fabrik'' or ''Fagus Werk''), a shoe last factory in Alfeld on the Leine, Lower Saxony, Germany, is an important example of early modern architecture. Commissioned by owner Carl Benscheidt who wanted a radical ...
or
Hans Poelzig
Hans Poelzig (30 April 1869 – 14 June 1936) was a German architect, painter and set designer.
Life
Poelzig was born in Berlin in 1869 to Countess Clara Henrietta Maria Poelzig while she was married to George Acland Ames, an Englishman. Uncert ...
's 1912 department store in
Breslau (
Wrocław
Wrocław (; german: Breslau, or . ; Silesian German: ''Brassel'') is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the River Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, r ...
). However, in the aftermath of the war these architects (as well as others such as
Bruno Taut
Bruno Julius Florian Taut (4 May 1880 – 24 December 1938) was a renowned German architect, urban planner and author of Prussian Lithuanian heritage ("taut" means "nation" in Lithuanian). He was active during the Weimar period and is kno ...
) worked in the revolutionary
Arbeitsrat für Kunst, pioneering
Expressionist architecture, particularly through the secret
Glass Chain group. The early works of the
Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the Bauhaus (), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., 20 ...
, such as the Sommerfeld House, were in this vein. Expressionism's dynamism and use of glass (whether for transparency or colour effects) would be a mainstay of the New Objectivity.
Effects of De Stijl and Constructivism
The turn from Expressionism towards the more familiarly Modernist styles of the mid-late 1920s came under the influence of the Dutch avant-garde, particularly
De Stijl, whose architects such as
Jan Wils
Jan Wils (22 February 1891 – 11 February 1972) was a Dutch architect. He was born in Alkmaar and died in Voorburg.
Wils was one of the founding members of the De Stijl movement, which also included artists as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg ...
and
JJP Oud had adapted ideas derived from
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...
into cubic social housing, inflected with what
Theo van Doesburg called 'the machine aesthetic'. Also steering German architects away from Expressionism was the influence of
Constructivism, particularly of
Vkhutemas and of
El Lissitzky
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (russian: link=no, Ла́зарь Ма́ркович Лиси́цкий, ; – 30 December 1941), better known as El Lissitzky (russian: link=no, Эль Лиси́цкий; yi, על ליסיצקי), was a Russian artist ...
, who stayed in Berlin frequently during the early 1920s. Another element was the work in France of
Le Corbusier, such as the proposals for the concrete 'Citrohan' house. In addition,
Erich Mendelsohn had already been veering away from Expressionism towards more streamlined, dynamic forms, such as in his
Mossehaus newspaper offices and the
Gliwice Weichsmann factory, both 1921–2.
Early houses and estates
Perhaps the earliest examples of the 'New Building' in Germany were at the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition,
Georg Muche
Georg Muche (8 May 1895 – 26 March 1987) was a German painter, printmaker, architect, author, and teacher.
Early life and education
Georg Muche was born on 8 May 1895 in Querfurt, in the Prussian Province of Saxony, and grew up in the Rhön ...
's
Haus am Horn, and in the same year, Gropius/Meyer's design for Chicago's
Tribune Tower competition. However, the fullest early exploration of a new, non-expressionist avant-garde idiom was in the 1923–24 'Italienischer Garten' in
Celle by
Otto Haesler.
This was the first Modernist ''Siedlung'' (literally "settlement", though
"estate" would be more precise), an area of new-build
social housing characterised by flat roofs, an irregular, asymmetrical plan, with houses arranged in south-facing terraces with generous windows and rendered surfaces. Contrary to the 'white box' idea later popularised by the
International Style, these were frequently painted in bright colors. The strongest proponent of color among the housing architects was
Bruno Taut
Bruno Julius Florian Taut (4 May 1880 – 24 December 1938) was a renowned German architect, urban planner and author of Prussian Lithuanian heritage ("taut" means "nation" in Lithuanian). He was active during the Weimar period and is kno ...
.
New Frankfurt
The major expansion of this came with the appointment of
Ernst May to the position of city architect and planner by the
Social Democratic administration of
Frankfurt-am-Main. May was trained by the British
garden city planner
Raymond Unwin, and his ''Siedlungen'' showed garden city influence in their use of open space: they totally repudiated the nostalgic style of Unwin's projects such as
Hampstead Garden Suburb. May's 'New Frankfurt' would be enormously important for the subsequent development of the New Objectivity, not only because of its striking appearance but also in its success in quickly re-housing thousands of the city's poor.
However, their advanced techniques often alienated the building profession, much of whom were made superfluous by the lack of ornament and speed of construction. May would also employ other architects in Frankfurt such as
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (where she developed the
Frankfurt kitchen) and
Mart Stam. The immediate effect of May's work can be seen in Gropius's 1926 Siedlung Dessau-Törten in
Dessau (built around the same time as the more famous
Bauhaus building), which also pioneered prefabrication technology. That Germany had become the centre of the New Building – as it was called, in preference to 'the New Architecture' – was confirmed by the Werkbund's
Weissenhof Estate of 1927, where despite the presence of
Le Corbusier and
JJP Oud, most of the architects were German speaking. Further, Werkbund Estate-exhibitions were mounted in
Wrocław
Wrocław (; german: Breslau, or . ; Silesian German: ''Brassel'') is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the River Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, r ...
and
Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
in subsequent years.
Functionalism and the Minimum Dwelling
The architects of the New Objectivity were eager to build as much cost-effective housing as possible, partly to address Germany's postwar housing crisis, and partly to fulfill the promise of Article 155 of the 1919
Weimar Constitution, which provided for "a healthy dwelling" for all Germans. This phrase drove the technical definition of ''Existenzminimum'' (subsistence dwelling) in terms of minimally-acceptable floorspace, density, fresh air, access to green space, access to transit, and other such resident issues.
At the same time there was a massive expansion of the style across German cities. In Berlin, architect-planner
Martin Wagner worked with the former Expressionists
Bruno Taut
Bruno Julius Florian Taut (4 May 1880 – 24 December 1938) was a renowned German architect, urban planner and author of Prussian Lithuanian heritage ("taut" means "nation" in Lithuanian). He was active during the Weimar period and is kno ...
and
Hugo Häring on colourful developments of flats and terraced houses such as the 1925
Horseshoe Estate
The Hufeisensiedlung ("Horseshoe Estate") is a housing estate in Berlin, built in 1925–33. It was designed by architect Bruno Taut, municipal planning head and co-architect Martin Wagner, garden architect Leberecht Migge and Neukölln garden ...
, the 1926 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (Onkel-Toms-Hütte) and the 1929 'Carl-Legien-Siedlung', through the auspices of the Trade Unionist building society
GEHAG. Taut's designs featured controversially modern flat roofs, humane access to sun, air and gardens, and generous amenities like gas, electric light, and bathrooms. Critics on the political Right complained that these developments were too opulent for 'simple people'. The progressive Berlin mayor
Gustav Böss defended them: "We want to bring the lower levels of society higher." Similar experiments in municipal socialism such as the Viennese ''
Gemeindebau'' were more stylistically
eclectic
Eclectic may refer to:
Music
* ''Eclectic'' (Eric Johnson and Mike Stern album), 2014
* ''Eclectic'' (Big Country album), 1996
* Eclectic Method, name of an audio-visual remix act
* Eclecticism in music, the conscious use of styles alien to th ...
, so Frankfurt and Berlin's authorities were taking a gamble on public approval of the new style.
Elsewhere, Karl Schneider designed Estates in
Hamburg
Hamburg (, ; nds, label=Hamburg German, Low Saxon, Hamborg ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (german: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg; nds, label=Low Saxon, Friee un Hansestadt Hamborg),. is the List of cities in Germany by popul ...
,
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed low-cost houses in Berlin's Afrikanische Strasse (and in 1926, a monument to
Rosa Luxemburg and
Karl Liebknecht) while straight-aligned, and to their critics, schematic ''Zeilenbau'' flats were built to the designs of Otto Haesler, Gropius and others in Dammerstock,
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe ( , , ; South Franconian: ''Kallsruh'') is the third-largest city of the German state (''Land'') of Baden-Württemberg after its capital of Stuttgart and Mannheim, and the 22nd-largest city in the nation, with 308,436 inhabitants. ...
. The term ''
Functionalism'' began to be used to denote the rather severe, nothing superfluous ethos of the New Objectivity, being used as early as 1925 by
Adolf Behne in his book ''Der Moderne Zweckbau'' ("The Modern Functional Building"). In 1926, practically all Modernist German architects organised themselves into a group known as
Der Ring, which attracted criticism from soon to be-
Nazi architects like
Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who formed in response. In 1928 the
CIAM had formed, and its earliest conferences, dedicated to questions of ''Existenzminimum'' were dominated by the social programmes of German architects.
Spread of the New Objectivity
A leftist, technologically oriented wing of the movement had formed in Switzerland and the Netherlands, the so-called ABC Group. It was made up of collaborators of
El Lissitzky
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (russian: link=no, Ла́зарь Ма́ркович Лиси́цкий, ; – 30 December 1941), better known as El Lissitzky (russian: link=no, Эль Лиси́цкий; yi, על ליסיצקי), was a Russian artist ...
such as
Mart Stam and
Hannes Meyer, whose greatest work was the glassy expanse of the
Van Nelle Factory
The former Van Nelle Factory ( nl, Van Nellefabriek) on the Schie in Rotterdam, is considered a prime example of the International Style based upon constructivist architecture. It has been a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014. Soo ...
in
Rotterdam
Rotterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Rotte (river), Rotte'') is the second largest List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and List of municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Netherlands. It is in the Prov ...
. The clean lines of the New Objectivity were also being used for schools and public buildings, by May in Frankfurt, in
Hannes Meyer's
ADGB Trade Union School in
Bernau and
Max Taut's Alexander von Humboldt School in Berlin, as well as police administration and office buildings in Berlin under Martin Wagner. Cinemas, which would be very influential on
Streamline Moderne picture palaces, were designed by Erich Mendelsohn (Kino-Universum, now
Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz
The Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (Theatre on Lehniner Square) is a famous theatre in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, located on the Kurfürstendamm boulevard. It is a conversion of the ''Universum'' cinema, built according to plans design ...
, Berlin, 1926) and
Hans Poelzig
Hans Poelzig (30 April 1869 – 14 June 1936) was a German architect, painter and set designer.
Life
Poelzig was born in Berlin in 1869 to Countess Clara Henrietta Maria Poelzig while she was married to George Acland Ames, an Englishman. Uncert ...
(
Kino Babylon
The Kino Babylon is a cinema in the Mitte neighbourhood of Berlin and part of a listed building complex at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz opposite the Volksbühne theatre. The building was erected 1928–29. It was designed by the architect Hans Poelzig ...
, Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse, Berlin, 1928–29) A composite style that used the new forms with more traditional masonry building was developed by Poelzig with his
Haus des Rundfunks
The Haus des Rundfunks ("Broadcasting House"), located in the Westend district of Berlin, the capital city of Germany, is the world's oldest self-contained broadcasting centre. Designed by Hans Poelzig in 1929 after he won an architectural compe ...
in Berlin and
IG Farben Building
The IG Farben Building – also known as the Poelzig Building and the Abrams Building, formerly informally called The Pentagon of Europe – is a building complex in Frankfurt, Germany, which currently serves as the main structure of the We ...
in Frankfurt, and by
Emil Fahrenkamp
Emil Fahrenkamp (November 8, 1885, Aachen – May 24, 1966, Ratingen-Breitscheid) was a German architect and professor. One of the most prominent architects of the period between the first and second World Wars, he is best known for his 1931 ...
in his undulating Berlin
Shell-Haus. Meanwhile, Erich Mendelsohn's architecture had developed into a 'dynamic functionalism' for commerce, seen in his curvaceous department stores such as the Columbus-Haus in Berlin (demolished in the 1950s) and in the
Schocken Department Stores, in
Stuttgart
Stuttgart (; Swabian: ; ) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is located on the Neckar river in a fertile valley known as the ''Stuttgarter Kessel'' (Stuttgart Cauldron) and lies an hour from the Sw ...
(demolished in the 1960s)
Chemnitz and
Wrocław
Wrocław (; german: Breslau, or . ; Silesian German: ''Brassel'') is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the River Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, r ...
. In
Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and ...
Robert Vorhoelzer and
Robert Poeverlein founded the "Bayerische Postbauschule" and built many modernist post offices while the architectural mainstream of 1920s and 1930s Munich still preferred the nostalgic "Heimatstil".
The
Great Depression
The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
, beginning in 1929, had a disastrous effect on the New Building, because of Germany's financial dependence on the USA. Many estates and projects planned in Frankfurt and Berlin were postponed indefinitely, while the architectural profession became politically polarised, something symbolised by the sacking in 1930 of the
Marxist Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer—who had stressed, with his collaborators
Ludwig Hilberseimer and
Mart Stam, the importance of working class and collective housing—to be replaced by Mies van der Rohe, whose
Barcelona Pavilion
The Barcelona Pavilion ( ca, Pavelló alemany; es, Pabellón alemán; "German Pavilion"), designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, was the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. This building ...
and
Tugendhat House
Villa Tugendhat is an architecturally significant building in Brno, Czech Republic. It is one of the pioneering prototypes of modern architecture in Europe, and was designed by the German architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. It ...
had gained him a reputation as a purveyor of luxury to the rich, and proceeded to turn the Bauhaus into a private school.
Dispersal and exile
Important work within Germany continued into the early 1930s, particularly the Ring's
Siemensstadt Estate in Berlin, which was planned by
Hans Scharoun as a more individual and humane version of the 'existence minimum' residential housing formula. But the political mood turned uglier through that time, with open hostile press, and direct pressure on Jewish and/or Social Democratic architects to leave the country. Many prominent German modernists went to the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
. Since 1920, Moscow had been the site of the Russian state-run art and technical school, a close parallel to the Bauhaus,
Vkhutemas, and there had been significant cultural connection through the cross-fertilization of
El Lissitzky
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (russian: link=no, Ла́зарь Ма́ркович Лиси́цкий, ; – 30 December 1941), better known as El Lissitzky (russian: link=no, Эль Лиси́цкий; yi, על ליסיצקי), was a Russian artist ...
. Russia had colossal plans for entire cities of worker housing, and an eye on acquiring German expertise. Ernst May, Stam, and Schütte-Lihotzky moved there in 1930 to design New Towns like
Magnitogorsk, with Hannes Meyer's so-called 'Bauhaus Brigade' and Bruno Taut soon to follow.
But the Russian experiment was over almost before it started. Working conditions proved hopeless, supplies impossible to get, and the labor unskilled and uninterested. Stalin's acceptance of the "retrograde"
Palace of Soviets entry in the February 1932 competition provoked a strong reaction from the international modernist community, particularly
Le Corbusier. The modernists had just lost their biggest client. Internal Russian politics led to vicious in-fighting among Russian architects' unions, and an equally vicious campaign against foreign 'specialists'. Some designers did not survive the experience.
Others would leave Germany for Japan, or for the sizable German-exile community in Istanbul. Major architects in the modernist community ended up as far afield as Kenya, Mexico, and Sweden.
Others left for the
Isokon Project and other projects in England, then eventually to the United States, where Gropius, Breuer and Berlin city planner
Martin Wagner would educate a generation of students at the
Harvard Graduate School of Design.
More popularly, in the United States, the publication of
Philip Johnson and
Henry-Russell Hitchcock's groundbreaking
International Style MOMA exhibition and book of 1932 established an official "canon" of the style, with an emphasis on Mies, Gropius, and Le Corbusier. Attention to these three came as the expense of the Social Democratic context of ''Neues Bauen'', and the architectural logic of state-sponsored mass-produced dwellings. Johnson and Hitchcock derided 'fanatical functionalists' like Hannes Meyer for building for "some proletarian superman of the future". Although stripped of its social meaning and intellectual rigor on import to the USA, the New Objectivity would nevertheless be enormously influential on the postwar development of Modern architecture worldwide.
Characterization of
New Objectivity as an architectural style to begin with would have provoked strong disagreement from its practitioners. In the words of Gropius, they believed that buildings should be "shaped by internal laws without lies and games," and that the practice of building would transcend the use of ornament and any stylistic categorization. In German the phrase ''Neues Bauen'', dating from a 1919 book by
Erwin Gutkind, captures this idea, because ''Bauen'' connotes 'construction' as opposed to 'architecture'.
[Gutkind built e.g. the residential complex of Neu-Jerusalem (Berlin) in forms of the New Objectivity.]
Gallery
Image:Tomhuette gehag.jpg, Bruno Taut
Bruno Julius Florian Taut (4 May 1880 – 24 December 1938) was a renowned German architect, urban planner and author of Prussian Lithuanian heritage ("taut" means "nation" in Lithuanian). He was active during the Weimar period and is kno ...
, Onkel-Toms-Hütte, Berlin
File:Mosseverlagshausberlin.jpg, The "Rudolf Mosse Publishing House" altered by Erich Mendelsohn in 1923. Jerusalemer St., Berlin
Image:DH Kameleon.jpg, Erich Mendelsohn, Petersdorff Store, Wrocław
Wrocław (; german: Breslau, or . ; Silesian German: ''Brassel'') is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the River Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, r ...
SM Wrocław Ofiar Oświęcimskich 38-40 ID 599147.jpg, Department Store by Hans Poelzig
Hans Poelzig (30 April 1869 – 14 June 1936) was a German architect, painter and set designer.
Life
Poelzig was born in Berlin in 1869 to Countess Clara Henrietta Maria Poelzig while she was married to George Acland Ames, an Englishman. Uncert ...
, Wrocław
File:Berlin, Mitte, Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse 30, Wohnanlage und Kino Babylon.jpg, Kino Babylon
The Kino Babylon is a cinema in the Mitte neighbourhood of Berlin and part of a listed building complex at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz opposite the Volksbühne theatre. The building was erected 1928–29. It was designed by the architect Hans Poelzig ...
, Berlin. Designed 1928-29 by Hans Poelzig
Hans Poelzig (30 April 1869 – 14 June 1936) was a German architect, painter and set designer.
Life
Poelzig was born in Berlin in 1869 to Countess Clara Henrietta Maria Poelzig while she was married to George Acland Ames, an Englishman. Uncert ...
Notes
References
* Banham, Reyner, "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"
* Droste, Magdalena, "Bauhaus"
* Frampton, Kenneth "Modern Architecture: a critical history''
* Gropius, Martin, "International Architecture"
* Henderson, Susan R., "Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative, 1926-1931"
* Pevsner, Nikolaus, "Pioneers of Modern Design"
* Teige, Karel "The Minimum Dwelling"
External links
Detailed Photo Profile of the New ObjectivityBauhaus-Archiv in BerlinMies in Berlin-Mies in AmericaBritz/Hufeisensiedlung in Berlin by Bruno Taut & Martin Wagner(with drawings and photos)
*
ttps://www.theguardian.com/weekend/story/0,,1742906,00.html Guardian article on the Frankfurt kitchenFostinum: German Modernism and Neues Bauen
{{DEFAULTSORT:New Objectivity (Architecture)
20th-century architectural styles
N
Architecture in Germany
Weimar culture