Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 1856
Entitled “Arabian Ornament”, this is one of the plates from the famous book depicting the ornamentation of numerous countries and periods; the final ten plates focus on nature, and on leaves and flowers in particular.
Charles Goodyear, Display of products in Indian vulcanized rubber, illustration from Reports by the Juries, London 1852
The exhibition displays the many uses of cast iron, iron and glass, that had recently become affordable thanks to new production techniques. Attention to new materials thus became increasingly central to the work and training of designers.
Department of Science and Art, tasked with coordinating the entire network of English design schools, still little more than the traditional drawing schools where students were trained through the copying
declared that academic institutions needed to be reformed to create new professional figures, without which national manufacturing would never be able to compete in international markets.
By the end of the 1840s the national design schools were still far from reaching the goal for which they had been founded, and Cole was charged by the Parliamentary Committee with their reorganization. He began by proposing that drawing be taught starting in elementary school, in order to develop observational skills in even the youngest students.11 The design schools’ new orientation demanded the teaching not only of drawing, but of design. This was summarized in a single principle: “Combining Science and Art” (seemingly anticipating the motto of the Bauhaus manifesto of 1923: “Art and Technology. A New Unity”).12 The educational reform project called for the introduction of Art Botany taught by Jones, in addition to single courses taught by various instructors regarding specific manufacturing processes and materials – fabrics, facings, glass, wood, ceramics, gutta-percha – as well as Semper’s course on metalworking techniques. These courses laid the foundation for what would become the Bauhaus’s organization around workshops for specific materials. Semper’s visit to the Great Exhibition convinced him that the most important novelties were changes in materials. Designers, accustomed for millennia to operating with natural materials, were now faced not only with the enormous availability of iron, cast iron, and glass, but with new procedures. Vulcanization allowed for the use of gutta-percha or rubber to simulate wood, stone, and metals, inlays included; electrotyping made it possible to reproduce objects by electrochemically depositing a metal into a mold; granite and marble could now be easily cut. The new responsibility of designers was to give shape and meaning to the artificial processes that the Industrial Revolution was developing.
1.3 Goods Old and New
The Crystal Palace was the object of fierce criticism not only on account of its architecture, but also due to the products displayed inside it. These were of the most various sorts, originating from all over the world, and they demonstrated the commercial dominion that England had achieved, having become the greatest power in the world both industrially as well as navally,
of past examples.
12 Cole began his reorganization from the London School of Design, trying to acquire works and objects for the Museum of Manufactures (initial core of what
would later become the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the library, both attached to the school as study and research tools for the students.
With these theories began a critical journey that would be developed by figures such as John Ruskin and William Morris.
Two positions thus confronted one another: the anti-technological, anti-industrial and antiurban pole of Pugin, Ruskin and Morris, who viewed the relationship between art and artifact as the foundation of the expressive freedom of the designer and the community (in the guise of the medieval village) as the ethical and esthetic reference of design; and the position of Cole’s circle, who believed that the poor quality of objects was determined by the absence of a design method suitable to the new modes of production, and that a specific methodology of design for industry needed to be developed. Or, to use Semper’s words, that “the use of machines and production for the market require new artistic forms, which man does not yet possess.”15
1.4 Ruskin, Morris, and the Arts & Crafts Movement
John Ruskin, the great art critic, writer, and lover of Italy and medieval Venice, had positions very similar to Pugin’s. He believed that the quality of a society’s artistic output was directly connected to its quality of life, and argued that contemporary social ills had been caused by industrialization, mechanization, and the division of labor. In The Nature of Gothic, he
John Henry Pepper, Embroidered housings and trappings of the elephant and howdah exhibited by her Majesty in the Great Exhibition, 1851, from The playbook of metals: including personal narratives of visits to coal, lead, copper and tin mines, Routledge 1861
An elephant with a canopied howdah in the Indian pavilion. The goods displayed by the different countries were extremely disparate.
Josiah Singer, Sewing machine, 1851
This was the first patented model of Singer sewing machine (illustrated in Scientific American, 1851). To operate the machine, Josiah Singer introduced the use of a pedal similar to those of contemporary handspinning wheels.
13 Pugin converted to Catholicism as part of his hostility toward the Protestant religion, which he accused of supporting the new socio-economic system.
14 The Gothic (style of the Goths,
meaning the barbarians, as it was labelled in 15th-century Florence) persisted in England through the end of the 17th century, while the 18th century witnessed the establishment of Neoclassicism.
15 Cited in H. Quitzsch, La visione estetica di Semper, Jaca Book, Milan 1990, p. 57 [original ed: Die ästhetischen Anschauungen Gottfried Sempers, Akademie, Berlin 1962].
16 Cf. D. Watkin, Storia dell’architettura occidentale, Zanichelli, Bologna 1990, p. 460
[English ed: A History of Western Architecture, Thames and Hudson, New York 1986].
argues that the beauty of medieval art was correlated to the pleasure (“Joy in Labour”16) that artisans took in their work when the latter had yet to be split up between different workers, as was occurring with the introduction of the division of labor in factories. It was a way of working that allowed the artisan to be proud of the skilled fashioning of an object for which he was entirely responsible, of the utility of his work for a community whose needs and goals he knew first-hand. This community was clearly the medieval village. Ruskin wrote: “It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread.”17 The polemical reference was to those studies on the capitalistic division of labor that had been conducted since the 18th century by economists such as Adam Smith18, who in one famous analysis showed the enormous increase in productivity of a pin factory thanks to the division of the manufacturing process into eighteen partial operations, each entrusted to a different worker, compared to a single artisan completing the entire procedure by himself.
In 1855 William Morris, heir to a wealthy family, was studying at Oxford when he met the painter Edward Burne-Jones, with whom he founded a social circle.19
In 1859 Morris had architect Philip Webb design his home, Red House, on the model of medieval English bishops’ residences and thus in reference to the national tradition, as opposed to the more internationalist Neoclassicism. Solid, well-integrated into its environment with its asymmetric and anti-classical floor plan, and designed with respect for traditional, local materials and construction methods, it was decorated with solid-wood furniture designed by Morris’s friends and, in part, painted by Burne-Jones himself. The latter was among the painters who defined themselves as the “Pre-Raphaelites,” and whose most eminent member was Dante Gabriele Rossetti. The label derived from their rejection of Renaissance art as symbolized by the name of Raphael, which they connected to the loss of the ability of medieval artist-artisans (whose names were often unknown) to dialogue with their community through the simplicity and immediacy of their paintings, genuine
17 Cf. R. Williams, Cultura e rivoluzione industriale. Inghilterra 1780-1950, Einaudi, Turin 1972, p. 179
[English ed: Culture and Society, 1780–1950, Chatto & Windus, London 1958].
18 Cf. Adam Smith, An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Strahan & Cadell, London 1776.
19 With them, at the age of twentyone he undertook a “Ruskinesque” cultural tour of the cathedrals of the Ile-de-France.
Philip Webb, Red House, Bexleyheath, 1859
The Red House – designed in 1859 for, and in collaboration with, Webb’s friend William Morris – was inspired by medieval stone-built bishops’ residences and is a good example of “total artwork” that continues seamlessly between the architectural design and that of the interiors.
left and right
Iron forms for moulding arm- and back-rests
The superheated wood, softened by steam, was then curved and placed in these forms. When dry, it would retain the desired curve.
Below, left Michael Thonet, Small work table, Great Exhibition, London 1851
The Great Exhibition offered an opportunity to draw attention to Thonet’s woodworking skill, as seen in this table base, highlighting his
achieved in part thanks to the simplification of the phases of construction, with the quality of detail worthy of a master woodcarver. The results would be extremely elegant pieces of furniture which, at the same time, were not excessively expensive, and the method would be patented in 1841 and enjoy long-lasting success. For while the historicist models would die out with the passing of fashions, the Thonet style survived even its founder’s death in 1871.
Emblematic of all this is his no. 14 chair of 1859, made of only six pieces (thanks to the unification of the back
production technique. At the same time, he also sought to simplify shapes, resulting in model no. 14, in 1859.
Below, right
Illustration plates from the Thonet catalogue published around 1859
The large number of designs made possible by the steam woodworking method is already evident.
and rear legs into a single piece), connected in tangency couplings via nuts and bolts. Elegant and sinuous in shape, versatile and adaptable to any space thanks to its lack of any particular historicist connotation, brilliant in its craftsmanship, it would reach the milestone of 50 million pieces sold by the end of the century, pulverizing any and all previous records. Its practicality of transport, thanks to the possibility of being sent disassembled into its component parts and easily reassembled upon reaching its destination, made it a model suitable for large public buildings destined for international meetings, even across the pond. Thonet’s first great factory opened in Moravia in 1859, followed by others in Hungary and Poland, and it became a small multinational company with retail outlets in the major European capitals.
In the 1870s Michael’s son, August, experimented with seats in bentwood slabs, years before the research of Rietveld and Aalto.27
After Michael’s death the company’s success continued with prestigious additions to the catalog, including the designs of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos. The 20th century would see the experimentation with metal tubing of Mies van der Rohe, Breuer, Le Corbusier and Stam, all of whom were greatly indebted to the vision and move toward formal reduction of the great Thonet. His chairs would be purposefully used in the presentations of many 20th-century designers and architects – from Loos to Le Corbusier to the Castiglioni brothers – as the first true example of mass-produced design.
Michael Thonet, Chair model no. 14, 1859
Model n. 14 remains an example of evergreen design thanks to its simplicity, the result of the use of only six components, which were produced in series and assembled only during the final phase of creation. The chair’s longevity and success owe much to this production process and to the ease of transport (the chairs could be sent then assembled once they reached their destination).
Thonet’s renown remains bound to the curvy and sinuous lines of his models – even those designed after his death. Models such as the Rocking Chaise Longue accorded well with Art Nouveau and Fin de Siècle tastes.
27
with
ADOLF LOOS
In 1892 Adolf Loos journeyed to the United States. He was 22 years old, born in Brno in Moravia and with a degree from the Polytechnic Institute in Dresden, Germany. In America he visited the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, held to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival and which spared no expense.3 It was entirely illuminated by electric light: one of the most visited pavilions contained the great machines that produced the alternating current perfected by physicist Nikola Tesla. There were pavilions with the latest agricultural machinery, sewing machines, typewriters, a telegraph, and the Kinetoscope, the precursor of the movie projector, invented by Thomas Edison, in a spectacle that was attended by more than 7 million visitors. During his trip Loos took in Chicago’s tall buildings with elevators, first hydraulic and then electric, the skyscrapers of New York, the great grain silos, and the infrastructure of American ports.
He realized he was witnessing the birth of a new world. The United States was emerging as one of the leaders of the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. Loos initially subscribed to the Vienna Secession movement, but soon distanced himself from it and eventually became its harshest critic: more than just a designer, he was also an intellectual and theoretician. Among his writings was the 1908 essay entitled Ornament and Crime, often remembered merely for this expression but in truth far more complex. In 1903 he directed two singles issues of the magazine Das Andere (“the other,” but also “the alien”), whose subtitle was “Journal for the Introduction of Western Civilization
in Austria.” A short story published in the magazine4 tells of a saddle-maker and an architect from the Secession movement, who drives his students to design a ‘modern’ saddle.” The architect claims he’s doing so in order to increase and renew artisanal work, and reproaches the saddle-maker for not being modern because he has no imagination. The saddle-maker reasons that, if he had had imagination, he would have become a painter or a sculptor. Then, after viewing the students’ designs, he exclaims: “Mr. Professor, if I had such little knowledge of riding, horses, leather and saddle-making, I would have as much imagination as you do.” In another story, “The Poor Little Rich Man,”5 a wealthy patron who desires an “artistic” house gives the job to a Secessionist architect (identified by some as Henry van de Velde), who designs the entire home, including the furniture, furnishings and owner’s clothing, and forbids his client to move anything because everything is already in its proper place. The house is a work of art and as such must not be modified in the slightest. After various contrasts, the architect rebukes the owner for wearing the slippers designed for the bedroom in other parts of the house. And when the client asks him where he can put some gifts from his grandchildren, the architect cries: “Have I not designed everything for you? You have everything you need. You are complete.” The poor little rich man thus realizes that he is in for a very unpleasant future. In these two moral fables Loos criticizes the idea of the home as total work of art. He argues that architects must be
Silos in Chicago, late 19th century
The silos, along with the skyscrapers, are the structures that move Loos during his trip to Unites States.
3 The fair’s artistic direction was entrusted to architect Daniel Burnham, and among other contributors were Louis Sullivan and a young Frank Lloyd Wright.
4 Adolf Loos, Das Andere. L’altro, Electa, Milan 1981, p. 81 [original ed: Das Andere, 2, 1903].
5 Adolf Loos, Parole nel vuoto, Adelphi, Milan 1972, p. 149 [English ed: “The Poor Little Rich Man,” in Spoken into the Void, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1982].
concerned with the fixed features of the residence, the walls, the closets, furniture that won’t be moved, the stair bannisters, the window gratings; the choice of furnishings belongs to those who will live there. He declares that a designer is not a painter or sculptor, in contrast with William Morris’s theory, but rather a professional who is an expert in materials, manufacturing, and the functions of use. In this sense he belonged to the school of thought that began with Semper and Dresser, as well as the Neoclassical theorist Quatremère de Quincy, who decades earlier had affirmed the value of simplicity “unless the accident of caprice diverts the form from corresponding to the use.”6
For Loos, Art Nouveau was the manifestation of a culture incapable of measuring itself against the new world whose emergence he had witnessed. He denied the possibility of inventing a new form as decoration as Art Nouveau was doing, because the establishment of industry had impoverished the artisanal world both economically and spiritually. Ornament lived and was renewed in the artisanal tradition; this had been interrupted, as he sadly believed, and it made no sense for these artist-architects to attempt to reinvent it. The only result was the humiliation of the artisan and the consolidation of the architect’s arrogance. Consequently, he declared that the quality of materials and accuracy of execution must be the values that replace decoration. If decoration is absolutely necessary, it must not be the result of “capricious” inventing but rather of the use of classical arrangements and noble materials (marble, stone, wood coffered ceilings and beams, stained glass, majolica, hardwood floors). These, in fact, are the materials and combinations in the interiors he designed for the Kärntner Bar in Vienna or Villa Karma in Switzerland: places in which he experimented, via the relationship between interior and exterior, his theory of the Raumplan, the “spatial plan,” according to which it made no sense for all rooms to be of the same height. Better a large living room be higher
Loos rejected the reinvention of ornamentation employed by Viennese architects and by the Art Nouveau style in general, considering it unwarranted and out of step with history which, with the passing of craft trades, had also decreed the end of the development of the ornamental tradition. He felt that ornamentation, where necessary, resided in the quality of the materials and in the use of the patterns of classical antiquity (coffered ceilings, marbles, mosaics etc.).
than a small studio. The interiors are thus articulated with stairs that bring together spaces of varying heights. In the 1920s Loos was in Paris, where he collaborated with Le Corbusier and Ozenfant’s magazine, L’Esprit Nouveau. His ideas regarding furnishings and the heights of interior spaces were certainly known to Le Corbusier, as evidenced particularly in L’Esprit Nouveau’s pavilion at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris.
6 Cf. Q. de Quincy, Dizionario storico di architettura, eds. V. Farinatti and G. Teyssot, Marsilio,
Venice 1985, ad vocem “Regola” [English ed: The True, the Fictive, and the Real. The Historical
Dictionary of Architecture of Quatremère de Quincy, Papadakis, London 1999, ad vocem “Rule”].
Saxony-Weimar. But such was his prestige that he was asked to indicate his successor. On his list of candidates was Walter Gropius, who in 1919 would be sent to Weimar with the task of merging the School of Arts and Crafts, which educated artisans to work in wood, metals, etc., and the Academy of Fine Arts, proud heir of the German artistic tradition. Gropius had designed the first examples of rationalist architecture, like the Fagus Factory and the factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne in 1914: geometric volumes, large windows, flat roofs that shocked a nationalist culture which considered sloping roofs to be the ethical and esthetic symbol of the traditional “German house.” For several years after the war, Gropius too was absorbed in the Expressionist revolt, such that he cofounded the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (“Art Soviet”) in Berlin along with visionary architects like Bruno Taut and Hermann Finsterlin. This, too, helps explain the Bauhaus’s founding manifesto, whose cover displays Lyonel Feininger’s xylograph of a Gothic cathedral, symbol in the 19th century of the anti-modern reforms of Pugin and Morris, but reviewed here within the culture of Expressionism. Then again, the term Bauhaus evoked the medieval term Bauhütte, the guild of builders and stonemasons of the cathedrals. The manifesto’s three stars, on the other hand, represented Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, the three arts of design according to Vasari and the Academy of the Arts of Drawing in 16th-century Florence. The text launched a proclamation of the unity between artists and artisans, evidently intended to favor the unification of the two schools, but also made reference to the cathedral of the future, a Socialist maxim used by Feininger who spoke precisely of the “Cathedral of Socialism.” After the school’s opening, a student contest was held to design
Diagram of the Bauhaus teaching programme, 1922
On the outer ring we find the foundation course (Grundkurs), followed successively by various general training subjects that accompany workshops classified by material, which are found in the third band. At the centre, the arrival point, is the architecture course that only began in 1927 under the direction of Swiss architect Hannes Mayer, a member of the ABC group that Mart Stam and El Lissitzky also belonged to.
Young women from the Weaving Workshop behind a loom, Anonymous collage, 1928
(Photo by T. Lux Feininger)
This is a photomontage with photos that can be extracted by pulling the ribbons. From 1927 to 1931, the Weaving Workshop was run by Gunta Stölzl who had worked there since 1919, when she was first accepted into the Bauhaus by Gropius.
The Expressionist manifesto of Arbeitsrat für Kunst, 1919
Artists and architets like Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut were part of Art Soviet in Berlin.
Gunta Stölzl, Drawing of a thistle, 1920 Among the exercises Itten included in the foundation course was the resumption of copying from nature practiced by the Academy of Fine Arts. Itten suggested drawing thistles, whose shape he considered stimulating because of the “delicate spikiness” of their “formal movement”.
Karl-Peter Röhl, The Thistle Prophet, 1922, for the Mecano magazine
The sentence on the right reads: “The conflict between individuals bound to nature and those directed at technology in Weimar in 1922”. In the image, the naked man with the thistle and the Ittenian sun faces the geometric man activated by a mechanism.
the institution’s logo, and the winner was a strongly esoteric proposal with references to the Egyptian pyramid of Masonic symbolism and the Hindu swastika.
To teach at the school Gropius called Johannes Itten, a theorist of color who participated in various avant-garde movements, first Cubism and then Expressionism. He became a member of the Mazdanan sect (from the name of the Persian god Ahura Mazda) in an age in which intellectuals crowded into mystico-artistic communities such as Rudolf Steiner’s in Basel or the Monte Verità in Ascona. Itten considered craftsmanship and the handmade to be important values.
He believed a school was a community in which teachers worked in order to allow students to express their interiority, not to transfer notions to them; a community whose goal was the beauty that – according to Dostoyevsky’s prophecy in The Idiot – will save the world. This would later be a source of conflict with Gropius, who wanted the courses to be linked
Joost Schmidt, Manifesto for the Bauhaus exhibition, Weimar 1923
The stylised shape of an airplane alludes to technological development; on the upper wing is the new logo devised by Schlemmer. Geometric shapes and letters have equal value in the overall composition, in accordance with Futurist teaching. The Bauhaus colours of orange, yellow and black stand out clearly. At the top of one poster, designed by Bayer and rejected because it was considered too rigid, appeared the definition of the programme: “Art/technology in a new union”.
Exercise devised by Itten for the foundation course
Based on the study of contrasts between materials, it revisits in an abstract manner the typical practical tests of the earlier School of Applied Arts.
Oskar Schlemmer, Triadic Ballet, Berlin 1926
In the ballet, conceived in 1922, the dancers, who are transformed into geometric shapes, form abstract compositions in space with their movements. Geometry becomes dance. Three dancers enact three acts composed of twelve scenes. Schlemmer directed the theatre workshop from 1923 to 1929.
founded on the analysis of the relations between painting, sculpture and architecture. A split occurred, after which Kandinsky left Russia. Between 1919 and 1920 Vladimir Tatlin, an architect, painter and sculpture, produced a design for the never-realized Monument to the Third International. It consisted of two iron spiral frameworks that would be over 400 m (1,300 ft) tall, with four transparent, rotating volumes inside. The spirals inclined symbolically upwards to express the revolution and Soviet art’s bold challenge to the future. This design aroused great interest, even outside Russia.
In 1920 two manifestos appeared, one by the Realists, written by kinetic sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner, and the other by the Productivists, penned by Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova. It’s useful to know that one of the principal debates within the INChUK concerned the difference between “composition” and “construction.” It was argued that composition was arbitrary because it was based on subjective esthetic preferences, while in construction form and meaning were founded on the use of materials, their relationships, and construction techniques. Thus the term “Constructivism” gradually came into use to refer to a specific approach to architecture, furniture, fabric and porcelain design, and theatrical set design.
Vladimir Tatlin and Alexei Sotnikov, Baby-bottle with spout for infants, 1930
The Vkhutemas Department of Ceramics also tested out objects with considerable social significance, conceived to encourage inhabitants of the enormous agricultural areas to boil their children’s milk.
El Lissitzky, Sketch for the poster of a show, 1925
After acting as cultural ambassador of the USSR in 1921 in Berlin, in 1925 El Lissitzky returned to Germany where he focused on typographical designs and organised a number of exhibitions in Dresden and Hannover.
El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919
This is one of his most famous posters, in which some of the basic geometric shapes in an abstract construction have a precise political reference, as previously tested by the Futurists: a red wedge/ triangle, the symbol of the Red Army, penetrates the while circle (the Counterrevolutionary Army), breaking it apart.
