The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
Paul Betts
Language: English
Pages: 366
ISBN: B003FGWPN6
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the Werkbund to the Bauhaus to Braun, from furniture to automobiles to consumer appliances, twentieth-century industrial design is closely associated with Germany. In this pathbreaking study, Paul Betts brings to light the crucial role that design played in building a progressive West German industrial culture atop the charred remains of the past. The Authority of Everyday Objects details how the postwar period gave rise to a new design culture comprising a sprawling network of diverse interest groups—including the state and industry, architects and designers, consumer groups and museums, as well as publicists and women's organizations—who all identified industrial design as a vital means of economic recovery, social reform, and even moral regeneration. These cultural battles took on heightened importance precisely because the stakes were nothing less than the very shape and significance of West German domestic modernity. Betts tells the rich and far-reaching story of how and why commodity aesthetics became a focal point for fashioning a certain West German cultural identity. This book is situated at the very crossroads of German industry and aesthetics, Cold War politics and international modernism, institutional life and visual culture.
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Editor of Werk und Zeit and director of Munich’s Die Neue Sammlung museum; Inge Scholl, cofounder of the Ulm Institute of Design; Tomás Maldonado, former director of the Ulm school; C. C. Cobarg of Braun AG; Gerdamaria Schwippert, widow of the architect and Werkbund president, Hans Schwippert; Mrs. Gotthold Schneider, codirector of Darmstadt’s Institut für neue technische Form; and J. C. Meilchen of Rasch-Tapeten in Bramsche. My thanks go as well to Erich Slany, Bernd Meurer, Peter Frank, Dieter.
To outward appearance or functional attributes [zweckentspechende Eignung] but rather according to the criterion of an all-encompassing inherent cultural value, whether it applies to poetry, painting and sculpture, architecture, industrial or artisan design.147 The Kunst-Dienst’s mission to infuse even the most “humble objects” with “inherent cultural value” thus aimed to help extend the dominion of Kultur into hitherto neglected recesses of everyday life. And this was taken quite seriously: In.
“cleaner attitude to production.”93 So what did it look like? All the Werkbund rhetoric about starting over could not hide the fact that this Cologne exhibition boasted precious little innovation.94 Aside from a few exceptions, such as Vera Meyer-Waldeck’s organically designed chair, the prototypes on display unavoidably recalled old-style Werkbund modernism (figure 17). Indeed, most of the featured pieces were actually old models that had been included in the 95 The Conscience of the Nation.
Ordinary design school. Its well-publicized christening as the “New Bauhaus” in 1955 illustrated the extent to which the Ulm Institute was born of noble pedigree. Indeed, both the American High Command and the West German government jointly underwrote the Ulm project in an effort to revive the once-demonized heritage of Bauhaus Modernism as a guiding polestar of West German culture. For this reason the Ulm school has been celebrated in the annals of cultural history as a blessed aerie of heroic.
April 4, 1951, the Rat für Formgebung, or German Design Council, was established by West Germany’s Bundestag as a new government agency charged with promoting “the best possible form of German products.” The creation of this national design council capped a hard-fought campaign by the German Werkbund to enlist government assistance in popularizing “good form” design. Called upon to protect the “competitive interests of both German industry and handicrafts as well as German consumers,” the council.