RELATED TERMS: Arts and Crafts Movement; Bauhaus; Gesamtkunstwerk; Hochschule fur Gestaltung;
The Deutscher Werkbund was founded founded in Munich in 1907. It sought to bring together designers, manufacturers, writers and others in a progressive organisation that promoted modern design. The major difference between the Deutscher Werkbund and the Arts and Crafts movement was that the Werkbund, rather than simply rejecting machine production, sought to combine promotion of craft alongside industry. Acknowledging that craft and design influenced people’s lives, the Werkbund embraced technology in order to design objects and buildings that fulfilled the changing needs of society.
Important figures in the formation of the Werkbund included the liberal-democratic politician Friedrich Naumann, Karl Schmidt, the founder of the Dresdener Werkstatten fur Handwerkskunst, and the architect, educator and writer Hermann Muthesius. Other early members of the organisation were designers Richard Riemerschmid, Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens.
The ideas prevalent in the Werkbund were influential in establishing the Bauhaus, founded by Werkbund architect Walter Gropius in 1919.
One issue that concerned, yet divided, its members was that of standardisation. Muthesius, for example, was a keen advocate of standardisation while Henry van de Veide argued strongly that it severely compromised individual artistic creativity.
After the First World War the Werkbund re-emerged as an important forum for aesthetic debate, particularly through the exhibitions that it mounted which showed both handcrafted, preindustrial designs along with industrially manufactured ones. The Die Wohnung (The Dwelling) exhibition at the Weissenhof-Siedlungen in Stuttgart in 1927, however, leaned heavily towards a contemporary Machine Age aesthetic. The exhibition caused controversy among conservative furniture manufacturers and architectural critics who found some of the designs un-Germanic.
In the increasingly oppressive political climate in Germany, the Werkbund came under increasing pressure before being disbanded by the National Socialist government in 1934. After the Second World War, the Werkbund was re-established in 1947, although the organisation never regained its earlier standing.
For design history and theory, the recurring issues raised by the Deutscher Werkbund concern the relationships between:
- design as craft and as manufacture;
- design and technology;
- design and society;
- design and politics; and
- design and culture.
References
Woodham, J. M. (2004) A Dictionary of Modern Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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