IImpact of Modernist Architecture in Weimar

They wanted to build an architecture suited to a brand new day, an architecture that acknowledged the new technologies that had been reshaping society. The modernists rejected dependence on historical form and ornamentation. As Loos said, "ornament is crime" (quoted by Kostof 686). Art Nouveau, and most kinds of expressionism, have been far too deeply involved with ornamentation and seemed towards modernists, interested in rationality and function, being mere surface changes applied to old forms.

The newly industrialized Germany with the very first decade of the twentieth century had grown "self-consciously progressive" and also the impulse toward progressive architecture discovered its "natural center" during the Deutsche Werkbund, founded in 1907 (Giedion 479). In this association artists, craftsmen and industrialists were to collaborate within the creation of "honest products of artistic value" (Giedion 480). The association, similar in aim to the earlier English Arts and Crafts Movement and also the later Bauhaus, provided an atmosphere wherever new ideas flourished.

Behrens, Taut and Gropius all exhibited major works at the Werkbund's 1914 exhibition in Cologne. It was, however, Gropius' model office-factory complex that garnered the most attention and clearly indicated the direction architecture would eat (Fitch 38).

The modernist aesthetic, whilst it may well not make allowances for Mendelsohn's work, was not as rigid as being a brief survey may possibly make it seem. As Gropius himself said, his notion was not to generate a "cut and dried 'Modern Style'" but to give architects a process of procedure that allowed them to "tackle a trouble in accordance with its peculiar conditions . . . an attitude . . . that is "unbiased, original, and elastic" (quoted by Fitch 13). Indeed, the single time how the Weimar Republic used modernist design in "establishing its individual national architectural image" the resulting jobs was not a single that could necessarily have been predicted from Gropius' Bauhaus buildings (Tegethoff 80). This was Mies van der Rohe's German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exhibition at Barcelona (Tegethoff 83-86; Kostof 704).

Gropius seized modernism's chance when, soon after the war, he and others founded the Bauhaus School of Type in 1919. In Gropius' opinion, the rising generation of architects (and designers of all sorts) had to find out modernist principles from the beginning. The school's mission, reflecting Gropius' accomplishment in the 1914 Werkbund model factory, was to promote the concept that "the machine will probably be our modern medium of design" and it was for that reason required to "distill a new set of esthetic criteria" from that simple fact (Gropius, quoted by Fitch 11).

Outside Gropius' influence modernism created only several steps in another, expressionist, direction. Eric Mendelsohn had probably the most unusual work of all of the Weimar architects. He functioned completely outside "the patronage or influence of major teachers" and, in contrast to most expressionist architects, he had a flourishing work inside 1920s (Zevi 9).

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