Abstract
With the breakthrough of modernism, various efforts were undertaken to rationalize architecture and building processes using industrial principles. Few architects explored these as intensively as Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus. Before World War One, and increasingly in the interwar years, Gropius and a number of colleagues undertook various experiments that manifested in a series of projects, essays, model houses and Siedlungen. These were aimed at conceptually different goals, i.e., they followed two different categories of industrial logic: First, a flexible construction kit and, second, an assembly line serial production. This article traces the genesis of these two concepts and analyses their characteristics using these early manifestations. Compared to existing literature, this article takes into account hitherto neglected primary sources, as well as technological and construction history aspects, allowing for a distinction based not only on theoretical, but also technological and structural characteristics. This article shows that Gropius succeeds in formulating and exploring the two principles, in theory and practice, as well as drawing conclusions by the end of the 1920s. With them, he contributed significantly to the rationalization of architecture, and his principles have been picked up and developed further by numerous architects since then.
Highlights
While the Industrial Revolution had brought about radical changes in many economic sectors by the end of the 19th century, it was slow to take on in the architecture and building industries.Apart from a few fields, such as industrial buildings or the mechanized production of certain materials and components, many areas of architecture and the building industry stuck to traditional craftmanship until well into the 20th century
In the period immediately after World War One, the first initiatives for the rationalization in architecture were not undertaken by Gropius, but rather by Martin Wagner (1887–1957), who was city architect of Schöneberg from 1918–1921 and of greater Berlin from 1922–1933
Walter Gropius and his colleagues in the Weimar Republic can be counted as predecessors to and forecasters of the rationalization of design and building processes following industrials principles; they laid the foundational work for many subsequent industrialization efforts in modern architecture
Summary
While the Industrial Revolution had brought about radical changes in many economic sectors by the end of the 19th century, it was slow to take on in the architecture and building industries. Both approaches aimed at rationalizing design and building processes in order to turn the house into an industrially manufactured product in the sense of a modern machine architecture Were these experiments formulated in a series of projects and essays, but they manifested in a number of systems, structures and construction methods. In 1913–1914, Henry Ford in Detroit introduced the assembly line to develop a model of industrial manufacturing It was not until 1923, five years after the war and at the climax of the hyper-inflation, that a German translation of Ford’s autobiography was released—which significantly contributed to the long-term popularity of this production method Considerable influence was exerted, for example by Le Corbusier (1887–1965), who propagated in his publications and illustrated in his projects Taylorism, rationalization and mechanization (cf. McLeod 1983)
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