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Building Exhibition, Open-Air Museum, Digital Web-Exhibit: The Vienna Werkbund Estate on Display
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2015
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References
1 “Werkbundsiedlung in Lainz. Die größte Bauausstellung Europas,” Neue Freie Presse, Morgenblatt Nr. 24325, 3 June 1932, 5.
2 Virginia Wardner Bradford, Nineteenth Century Exhibition Architecture—A Myth in Architectural History (master's thesis, Columbia University, New York, 1965); Schaal, Hans Dieter, In-Between. Exhibition Architecture/Ausstellungsarchitektur (Stuttgart, 1999)Google Scholar; Schriefers, Thomas, Ausstellungsarchitektur: Geschichte, wiederkehrende Themen, Strategien (Bramsche, 2004).Google Scholar
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4 As Magali S. Larson, Paul Stevens, and Paul Jones (as representatives of a sociology of architecture following Pierre Bourdieu) make clear, architecture never is, and cannot be, an autonomous field of cultural production because architects (if they want to build) are fundamentally reliant on their client's patronage. But building exhibitions represent an exceptional case; they allow architects to realize and discuss new ideas without being restricted by the demands of clients. Therefore, building exhibitions (like professional journals) contribute to the relative autonomy of the architectural field. For Bourdieu's field-concept: cf. Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge, Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar; Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, 1996).Google Scholar
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10 Like rental accommodation in the tenement buildings of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, the Fordist standard dwelling was produced without any definite tenant in mind, for the “abstract” (mass) individual, but now conceived with “requirements” in mind, which were presumed to represent anthropological constants secured through empirical research. The modern standard home was attributed with a disciplining, ordering effect on the social body. For this reason, Fordist planning culture is inscribed with the “pretension to a ‘tutelage’ governed by experts over the broad masses,” as Klaus Ronneberger states in “Bio-Macht und Hygiene. Disziplinierung und Normalisierung im fordistischen Wohnungsbau,” in Ernst Neufert. Normierte Baukultur, ed. Prigge, Walter (Frankfurt, New York, 1999), 432–64.Google Scholar
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12 Le Corbusier displayed his first 1:1 prototypic residential cell at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925); together with his friend, the artist Amedée Ozenfant, he was one of the first in the European avant-garde art world to publicly advocate Taylorism; cf. McLeod, Mary: “‘Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (1983): 132–47Google Scholar. For the effects of scientific management on architecture in general, see: Guillén, Mauro F., The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture (Princeton, 2006).Google Scholar
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15 Regarding Josef Frank's commitment, see Long, Christopher, Josef Frank: Life and Work (London, Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar, 52ff; for the Vienna Werkbund Estate against the backdrop of the Viennese settler movement, see: Kapfinger, Otto, “Anspruch und Ausgang. Zur Projekt- und Baugeschichte der Internationalen Werkbundsiedlung Wien 1932,” in Werkbundsiedlung Wien 1932, ed. Nierhaus and Orosz, 36–63.Google Scholar
16 It was called Prince Albert's Model Lodging House, commissioned by the Society for Improving the Labouring Classes and designed by Henry Roberts. Cf. Beutler, Christian, Weltausstellungen im 19. Jahrhundert (München, 1973)Google Scholar, 25; Frederique Van Andel, “Housing in the Times of Crisis,” DASH 09: Housing Exhibitions (2014): 4–17, at 5.
17 Regarding the display of houses for workers, cf. Cremer and Gutschow, Bauausstellungen, 37–49; Andel, “Housing in the Times of Crisis,” 5.
18 The Werkbund was a forceful state-sponsored association founded in 1907 in Munich, aimed at bringing together traditional crafts and industrial mass production. Sister organizations soon arose in the rest of Europe; the Austrian Werkbund was founded in 1912 and, after years of conflict and split, the Werkbund exhibition in 1930 (accompanied by the Werkbund estate two years later) was its big architectural self-display. Gmeiner, Astrid and Pirhofer, Gottfried, Der österreichische Werkbund (Salzburg, Vienna, 1985).Google Scholar
19 Das neue niederrheinische Dorf auf der Deutschen Werkbundausstellung in Köln 1914 (Berlin, 1914).Google Scholar
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22 The Gemeinnützige Siedlungs- und Bauaktiengesellschaft GESIBA (public utility settlement and building material corporation) was founded 1921 as a self-help organization by the ÖVSK, the Austrian Republik, and the City of Vienna in order to provide settlers and housing cooperatives with construction material.
23 The complex background and planning phases: cf. Kapfinger: “Anspruch und Ausgang,” 42.
24 The single-family home was not only an important item on the agenda of bourgeois conservative parties, but also a cornerstone of Catholic social doctrine.
25 Mattl, Siegfried, “Eigenheim in Österreich—Factfinding Mission,” in Wir Häuselbauer. Bauen in Österreich (Catalague of the same-named exhibition in the Architektur Zentrum Wien, 1998), 16–23.Google Scholar
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27 Loos was chief architect of the city-run Siedlungsamt from 1921 to 1924. Frank and Lihotzky worked for the building bureau of the ÖVSK.
28 Novy and Förster, Einfach bauen, 37, 78; Allmayer-Beck, Renate, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Soziale Architektur, Zeitzeugin eines Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 1993), 22–27.Google Scholar
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30 BEST (abbreviation for Beratungsstelle für Inneneinrichtung) was founded in 1929 by the Austrian Association for Reform of Living (Österreichischer Verband für Wohnungs-Reform) and since 1930 had its showrooms in the Karl-Marx-Hof.
31 Frank, Josef, Architektur als Symbol (Vienna, 1931, reprint 1981)Google Scholar, 188.
32 Already in 1910, along with the IX International Housing Congress, the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry showed an exhibition of nonprofit small apartment buildings and organized a competition for interior decoration for workers and minor office employees; at the spring exhibition 1912, Robert Örely presented a single-family home including furnishings for the lower-income classes; the first, but less extensive and less received, exhibition entitled “Einfacher Hausrat” was shown in 1916. Concerning the same-named show in 1920, see Gmeiner and Pirhofer, Der Österreichische Werkbund, 102–4; Fischel, Hartwig, “Ausstellung einfachen Hausrates,” Kunst und Kunsthandwerk XIX (1916): 251–62Google Scholar; L. Steinmetz, “Ausstellung ‘Einfacher Hausrat,’” in Kunst und Kunsthandwerk XXIII (1920): 250–70.
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35 What Barry Bergdoll takes into account for exhibition house series in the Museum for Modern Art in New York in the 1940s and 1950s—the institution's shift from taste formation to consumer formation—already holds for presentations in the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry fifty years earlier. “I think of the 1:1 project as a discursive tool,” interview with Barry Bergdoll in DASH 09: Housing Exhibitions (2014), 66–72.
36 König, Gudrun M., Konsumkultur. Inszenierte Warenwelt um 1900 (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2009)Google Scholar, 13.
37 Eva-Maria Orosz, “Typenmöbel mit persönlicher Note. Mustereinrichtungen in der Werkbundsiedlung,” in Werkbundsiedlung Wien 1932, ed. Nierhaus and Orosz, 64–71.
38 Frank, Josef, “Die moderne Einrichtung des Wohnhauses,” in Innenräume. Räume und Inneineinrichtungsgegenstände aus der Werkbundausstellung “Die Wohnung,” insbesondere aus den Bauten der städtischen Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart. 1928, ed. Gräff, Werner (Stuttgart, 1928), 126–27Google Scholar, at 127.
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41 Here, I mention Alois Riegl, Austrian art historian and first chief conservator of the K.K. Zentralkommission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale, founded in 1850 (the today's Bundesdenkmalamt), and author of Der moderne Denkmalkultus (1903), who championed a national monument protection law, which first failed because of the resistance of the church and aristocracy, but came into force immediately after World War I (enactment of law in 1923).
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54 The author is able to talk about a closed Web site because she printed out hard copies for a course in 2010; the homepage was available at http://www.werkbundsiedlung.at.tf/.
57 Smith, Uses of Heritage, chap. 1, 11–43.
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