LEFT vVindow display
structures, 1928. From
Schaufensterkunst und
Technik, a supplement to
Die Ko~fektion trade journal
BELOW LEFT AEG electric
tea kettles displayed in
Peter Behrens' stores, 1909,
would have cost some 20
times the daily wage for
most store workers
Barcelona Pavilion - with the relative frugality of 860-880
Lake Shore Drive and his buildings for the lllinois
Institute of Technology, suggests that it was only in
Chicago that Mies learned to build for the middle classes,
reverting once again to realluxury-vvhen the Bronfman
family entrusted hiin with the commission for the Seagram
Building, completed in 1958.BELOW RIGHT A 1954 ad
shows Mies's Barcelona
chair implemented in service
of king capitalist Coca-ColaGropius gained much of the authority 'vith which he
ran the Bauhaus by having a much more distinguished
pedigree as a scion of a family of architects, civil servants,
army officers, politicians and landed gentry. He fully
realised the utility of marketing the Neues Bauen as
embodying the empowerment of the masses. His Weimar-era oeuvre
included pragmatic housing estates in Berlin, Dessau and Karlsruhe.
However, when publishing the Director's House for the Bauhaus in
Dessau (of which he and his wife were the first inhabitants), he had
Lucia ~!l:oholy's photograph of the double sink in the bathroom
retouched, so the marble fixture would appear to be merely porcelain.
The story Schuldenfrei uncovers is not without precedent. Since
at least the emergence of Neo-classicism as an alternative to Rococo
ornamental exuberance (one thinks as well of Katsura, the self-
consciously rustic Japanese villa created in 17th-century Kyoto),
genteel understatement has served as potent alternative to the
taste of those both ·with more and with less money. Despite John
Ruskin and William Morris's commitment to the dignity of labour,
the Arts and Crafts movement flourished on both sides of the Atlantic
in the space between the kitsch embraced by the urban working class
and the ostentation favoured by the nouveau riche. In the United
States, progressive middle-class women and men who could trace
their ancestry back to 17th and 18th-century immigrants from Britain
were particularly dravvn to what they saw as uniquely moral designs
with an appropriate undertone of Puritan austerity. In Germany
through the first third of the 20th century, design reformers exploited
the new style as an alternative to both imperial pomp and mass-
produced ornament.
~Iodern architecture and design could offer inexpensive alternatives
to historicism allied to progressive goals, such as social housing.
This was key to their postwar ubiquity
although, in recent decades, they have often
functioned as less than subtle indicators
of social and intellectual status, r esolutely
focused on objects and materials rather
than theory, much less the movement's own
rhetoric. The story Schuldenfrei tells
underscores that this is nothing new. Owners
of capitalist enterprises, whether the AEG and
Schocken concerns or the Esters, Lange and
Tugendhat families (all of whom were involved
in the textile industry) quickly embraced
Neues Bauen. It was both good business and
a means to create an appropriate backdrop
for their comfortable, yet modern, lifestyles.
Schuldenfrei's book is likely to spur further
in sights into the degree to which the
dissemination of Neues Bauen internationally
was more closely tied to fashion than previous
scholars have chosen to admit. At the sameen UJ
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time, it may also help liberate us to t:
Luxury and Modernism
Robin Schuldenfrei
Princeton University
Press, 2018
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create an architecture of true equality, ~ UJ
something the ~Iodern Movement ~ ::>
seldom truly offered. 8~lime. ... and fl'rlenda
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