CategoriesStyles and Movements
Deutscher Werkbund
German association of designers, architects, craftsmen and manufacturers, founded in 1907 to raise the standard of industrial goods.
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About
The Werkbund was founded in Munich in 1907 by twelve artists and twelve firms, spurred by the architect Hermann Muthesius, who had studied British housing and design. Its aim was practical: to bring artists and manufacturers together so that German products would be well made, sensibly designed and competitive abroad. At its 1914 exhibition in Cologne, Muthesius's call for standardised types clashed with Henry van de Velde's defence of individual artistic freedom.
Peter Behrens showed what cooperation could achieve at AEG, the electrical company, where from 1907 he shaped kettles, fans, lettering and the Turbine Factory in Berlin (1909). Walter Gropius's model factory at the Cologne show anticipated glass-and-steel modernism; the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart (1927), overseen by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, brought Le Corbusier and others together to build modern housing. The Werkbund fell under Nazi control in the 1930s and was revived after the war.
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