Style Debates in Early 20th-Century German Architectural Discourse

Deborah Ascher Barnstone

doi:10.5334/ah.300

Abstract

In spite of the negative connotations ‘style’ has in contemporary architectural discourse, in early 20th-century Germany there was no consensus on the meaning or value of the concept amongst architects and critics. Although style was a dirty word for some like Hermann Muthesius, it represented the pinnacle of achievement for others like Walter Curt Behrendt. Against the backdrop of Behrendt’s famous Victory of the New Building Style, of 1927, were very diverse understandings of the term. This plurality was partly due to conceptual confusion between ‘the styles’ and ‘style’, but it was also a legacy of Gottfried Semper’s and Alois Riegl’s respective efforts to resituate style as a practical and historiographical tool. Although style was endlessly debated between 1910 and 1930 by German architects, critics, and intellectuals of all stripes, later scholars have either largely overlooked its significance or used the term as a way of describing a particular group of works with a narrow set of formal tropes. The debates, the conceptual confusion, and the incredible variety of opinion over style in early 20th-century discourse have not been addressed, especially in relation to practicing architects. This essay examines some of the intersecting positions of several important German practitioners to show how the notion of style served as a conceptual framework for divergent modern practices.

Highlights

Written in the late 1930s, Sigfried Giedion’s observations about style were based on his experiences in the decade before: There is a word we should refrain from using to describe contemporary architecture
The word style was doubly problematic because it referred to outward appearance rather than essence, the invisible and ineffable aspects of an architect’s intentions embedded in the form. In spite of these negative connotations of style, there was no consensus on the meaning or value of the concept amongst architects and critics in early 20thcentury Germany, and the subject was hotly contested
In much the same way that cathedrals embodied the essence of the Gothic period, because of their monumental scale and exemplification of social and cultural values of their time, he believed that industrial buildings were the embodiment of modernity and critical for contemporary architects to design

Summary

Introduction

Written in the late 1930s, Sigfried Giedion’s observations about style were based on his experiences in the decade before: There is a word we should refrain from using to describe contemporary architecture. In much the same way that cathedrals embodied the essence of the Gothic period, because of their monumental scale and exemplification of social and cultural values of their time, he believed that industrial buildings were the embodiment of modernity and critical for contemporary architects to design.

Results

Conclusion