WEIMAR BAUTEN
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer: WEIMAR BAUTEN. Berlin, Verlag Ernst Wasmuth [1923]. Slim quarto. Publishers offprint in printed stapled wrappers. 36 pp. Photo illustrations, drawings and groundplans. Fragile wrappers chipped at spine with loosening and some loss. Textblock soiled and thumbed, but a good copy of this rare offprint from Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, 1923.
8.25 x 11 publishers offprint with 36 pages of work by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer produced between 1911 to 1923. Wrappers with period-correct heroic typography.
Includes the Fagus Factory, Alfeld an der Leine, Germany (19100; the Office and Factory Buildings at the Werkbund Exhibition, Cologne, Germany (1914); the Sommerfeld House, Berlin, Germany designed for Adolf Sommerfeld with interior details by Joost Schmidt (1921); the entry for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition (1922); the remodelled Stadttheater in Jena (1923); exhibition and storage buildings for the agricultural machinery manufacturer Gebr. Kappe & Co. in Alfeld an der Leine (1922–23); and other early architectural projects.
The modernist movement was alive and well in interwar Germany. Not only at the Bauhaus, which stood at the forefront of the avant-garde, under the leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, but all over the country. László Moholy-Nagy and Gropius published their famous Bauhausbücher series, El Lissitzky established his journal ABC: Beitrage zum Bauen, and Theo van Doesburg transplanted his Dutch De Stijl magazine to Germany.
Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau was something of a mixed bag, presenting traditional architectural buildings alongside some of the more avant-garde productions. Modernism, as a self-consciously international movement proposing a new universal language for architecture, sought to transcend national borders and keep their domestic audiences informed of developments abroad.
“For the first time a complete facade is conceived in glass. The supporting piers are reduced to narrow mullions of brick. The corners are left without any support, yielding an unprecedented sense of openness and continuity between inside and out. The expression of the flat roof has also changed. Only in the building [the Steiner House, Vienna] by Adolf Loos which was done one year before the Fagus Factory, have we seen the same feeling for the pure cube. Another exceedingly important quality of Gropius's building is that, thanks to the large expanses of clear glass, the usual hard separation of exterior and interior is annihilated.” — Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design
By their own admission, much of Gropius and Meyer’s design work between 1910 and 1914 had little artistic merit. After the Fagus-Werk, their next building of national and international repute was the now-famous model factory design for the 1914 Cologne Werkbund exhibition. As a member of the Werkbund Board of Directors, Karl Ernst Osthaus lobbied to obtain a good commission for Gropius. When Hans Poelzig withdrew from the project, Gropius received the commission for the model factory, which included a machine hall, offices, and a pavilion for the Deutz gas Engine Factory. Like the Fagus-Werk, this building combined modern aesthetics with abstracted neoclassicism after the manner of Peter Behrens.
The design by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer for an office and administration building for the Chicago Tribune was conceived in 1922. The context was an international competition announced by the Tribune on the occasion of the sixty-fifth jubilee. For decades already, European architects had drawn inspiration from developments in the United States, and the competition represented an initial opportunity to come to terms with the specifically American task of designing a skyscraper. Many Europeans submitted designs, although the names of such well-known figures as Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier — whom one might have expected to participate — were absent. Among the two hundred and sixty-five submissions from twenty-six different countries were thirty-seven from Germany, where debates about skyscrapers had been particularly intense, especially around the time of the 1921 competition for a high-rise building on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. In Chicago, the winners were the Americans John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, whose Neo-Gothic building was erected in 1925. The decision sparked passionate debate, instigated by critics who had preferred the modernist design of Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen.
The competition came to symbolize the heroic struggle of the modernist movement. As late as the 1949 film The Fountainhead, viewers saw Gary Cooper in the role of Howard Roark, his face filled with bitterness, viewing plans which strongly resemble those by Max Taut, Walter Gropius, and Adolf Meyer. They bear the handwritten inscription “NOT BUILT.” Roark’s rival, Peter Keating, prefers an eclectic style. Many years later, in 1950, Gropius explained in retrospect: “In 1922, when I designed the Chicago Tribune high-rise, I wanted to erect a building that avoided using any historical style, but which instead expressed the modern age with modern means; in this case with a reinforced concrete frame which would clearly express the building’s function.” The accuracy of this statement must however be called into question, as it seems to have been influenced by the design’s subsequent reception. In the 1950s, moreover, Gropius could no longer recall that in 1925, he had still presented the building in Internationale Architektur as being planned in “iron, glass, and terracotta.”
Born and educated in Germany, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) belongs to the select group of architects that massively influenced the international development of modern architecture. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such Fagus Boot-Last Factory and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, with their use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. After his emigration to the United States, he influenced the education of architects there and became, along with Mies van der Rohe, a leading proponent of the International Style.