integral to the image of the new and
its success among intellectuals and·what vve would now call 'influencers'
anxious t o demonstrate that they
·were up to date.
Technology itself was also a
luxury : Schuldenfrei jumps back t o
t he years just before the First World
War to address Peter Behrens' work
for AEG. Electricity, sh e reminds us,
was far beyond the reach of the
working class; older forms of
illumination r emained much
cheaper. Although the electric fan s
and tea kettles Behren s designed
look, to us, like everyday appliances,
t h e kettles cost at least 20 times
t h e daily wage of many employees at
B erlin's leading department stor e.
The Haus am H orn, the
demonstration house erected as part
of t h e Bauhau s exhibition s staged in Weimar in 1923, was similarly
problematic: not only was its mass production constrained by
expen sive fabrication methods and materials, in Schuldenfrei's words,
'it failed also in the more general sense in that, despite the school's
ideological and social project, it remained an inaccessible luxury
object appropriate only for t h e period's wealthy'.
Paradoxically, the Neues Bauen of the 1920s and early '30s,
as Germans termed what was popularised by Henry-Russell
Hitchcock and Philip Johnson as t h e International Style, conflated
three different phenomena. First, J\IIendelsohn's dynamic
function alism, an urbane and fashionable - but largely commercial- Modernism. Second, the housing estates designed by Ernst May in
Franldurt and Bruno Taut in Berlin, which were for relatively affluent
trade union and white-collar workers. And third, the handful of
structures canonised by the end of t he 1940s as aesthetic triumphs -
including Mies's Villa Tugendhat and much of the vVeissenhof
Siedhmg, constructed under Mies's supervision in Stuttgart, which
presumed the p r esence of servants for whom live-in quarters were
often p rovided , while Mies's Barcelona P avilion was erected to receive
the King and Queen of Spain.
Mendelsohn and Mies were social climbers from modest
backgrounds; both eased the transition into a professional milieu
by marrying up, alth ough Mies event u ally separated from his vvife and
p ar t nered with Lilly R eich, an extr em ely sophisticated designer in
h er own right. Mendel sohn successfully oscillated between elegance
and Sachlichkeit, a German term that has been variously translated as
'objectivity' or 'sobriety'. As well as the Herpich Furrier s on B erlin's
premier shopping street and the equally sleek P eters dorff store in
Breslau, he design ed three
down-market department
stores for Salman Schocken.
In the year s in which he
collaborated vvith R eich, J\IIies
was less successful at working
both sides of the street.
Comparing the commissions
on which Schuldenfrei focuses - the E sters and Lange houses
in Krefeld, Villa Tugendhat
in Brno and, of course, the