The vernacular modern in the shadow of totalitarianism: Hans Döllgast’s Alte und neue Bauernstuben

Abstract

The architect Hans Döllgast (1891–1974) has steadily gained in international recognition. His works of postwar reconstruction in Munich have been heralded as original contributions to modern architecture that resist historiographic classifications, such as modernist vs regionalist, avant garde vs traditionalist, or internationalist vs nationalist. Döllgast was also a revered pedagogue and prolific author, and his varied writings have yet to receive much scholarly attention. Döllgast’s books and essays present a significant body of sources that shed light on the complexity of architectural discourse in the formative years of modern architecture in Germany. This article considers Döllgast’s study of farmhouse ‘parlours’, entitled Alte und neue Bauernstuben (‘Old and New Farmhouse Parlours’) was first published in 1937. It was both his most popular book and the one that critics and historians have paid least attention to. Though it may appear antiquarian at first glance, it is in fact both critical and contemporary in spirit. Döllgast’s study sheds light upon his mature thinking about the relevance of the vernacular for the modern house. It also serves to question a general assumption in the existing literature that Döllgast only engaged with tenets of modern architecture after the war, having been a regionalist aloof from the discourse of the modern movement prior to the war. Scholars have shown that the loaded motif of the vernacular was never the sole preserve of anti-modernist conservatives and played a significant, if ambivalent, role within modernist discourse, from the late Wilhelmine period to postwar West Germany. While it reflects these wider trends, Alte und neue Bauernstuben also eschews alignment with the dominant strands of architectural discourse of its time by charting an independent-minded path in the context of imposed totalitarian uniformity. Döllgast’s text thus stands out in modern architectural discourse less for adducing the farmhouse as such, than for developing such a close, multifaceted reading of a particular vernacular interior, while alluding to more than elaborating its relevance for contemporary architecture. Ultimately, Döllgast’s study served him to develop a practical phenomenology of dwelling.