The Weimar Era
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The Weimar era provided a vital opportunity for the development of modernist architecture. The short-lived Weimar Republic (1919-1933) was Germany's first attempt at democratic governance. Prior to the First World War German architects had been leaders in the development of both the expressionist and the rationalist trends in architectural modernism. The end of the war produced an outpouring of pent-up talent as older architects, such as Bruno Taut and Ernst May, and younger men, such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, created a new, rationalist architecture that was to have a lasting impact on this century. Among the expressionist architects, however, only Eric Mendelsohn met with significant success and his designs stressed a union of functionalism and expression. When the Nazis finally drove out most modernist architects in the early 1930s, these men took their ideas to more receptive regions as Gropius, Mies, and, eventually, Mendelsohn continued their endeavors in the United States. The "formulation of a new twentieth-century idiom" in architecture was the work of an international group of architects: Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner (Austria), Hendrik Petrus Berlage (Holland), Auguste Perret (France), and Peter Behrens (Germany) (Kostof 686). Though the Art Nouveau movement gained a great deal of attention among architects between 1890 and 1910, "this streak of European antirationalism did not run deep or wide" (Kostof 687). To the emerging rationalist
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rporate clients, mostly state agencies and public bodies" of various kinds (Kostof 695). Housing, for example, had "taken on the status of a public utility" in many European nations and provided one of the primary sites for experiments in architectural modernism (Kostof 698). Ernst May's Wiessenhof Settlement of 1927 (Giedion 480) and Gropius' 1930 Am Lindenbaum housing development in Frankfurt (Kostof 699) are examples of the modernist aesthetic applied to public works.
These public commissions had the salient effect of limiting the degree to which extravagant, expressionist experiments could be conducted. The public works had strictly controlled budgets within which the architects had to achieve maximum formal impact combined with complete utility. These requirements meshed perfectly with the developing design aesthetic of Gropius and others. Kostof has summarized the basic tenets of modernist architecture of the Weimar period. Aside from the rejection of old forms, the modernists believed that buildings should always look "fresh and immaculate," reflecting a "spiritual newness" (Kostof 702). They held that architecture should be non-monumental. It should reject the appearance of permanence and present itself as "light
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Approximate Word count = 1790
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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