Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

During the period before World War I, the German Werkbund was at the center of attempts to forge new theories of architecture and design in light of the momentous technological and economic developments of modernity. In this fascinating book, Frederic J. Schwartz explores the ideological and aesthetic positions at the core of debates that embroiled the prominent architects, critics, sociologists, economists, and politicians who had united in the Werkbund during this pivotal era.

Taking the Werkbund out of the shadow of 1920s developments in architecture and design that have received more attention, Schwartz casts new light on this earlier historical movement. He shows that the concerns of the group went far beyond aesthetics, as design became a major testing ground for a new self-consciousness about the effects of consumerism and commodification in modern culture. Schwartz explores how a theoretical dialogue developed between the Werkbund and sociologists such as Georg Simmel and Werner Sombart, how economists' ideas about the cultural nature of the consumer market led to an ill-fated call for the development of "types," and how a group of "individualists" within the organization developed an opposing position by taking into account changes in copyright and trademark laws that had begun to govern the economic use of visual form in quite concrete ways. It is to the debates in and around the Werkbund, Schwartz asserts, that we must look to find important roots of the mass culture theory associated with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other thinkers of the Frankfurt School.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. vi)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• I. Style Versus Fashion: The Werkbund and the Discourse on Culture in Germany
• 1. Culture (p. 13)
• 2. Style (p. 18)
• 3. Fashion (p. 26)
• 4. Commodity, Culture, Alienation (p. 44)
• 5. The Dialectic of the Commodity (p. 61)
• II. The Spiritualized Economy and the Development of "Types"
• 1. Political Economy (p. 75)
• 2. Exchange and Dystopia (p. 82)
• 3. Production and Visual Form (p. 96)
• 4. Production and Economic Form (p. 106)
• 5. The Type (p. 121)
• III. Magical Signs: Copyright, Trademarks and "Individuality"
• 1. Cologne 1914 and the Response of the Individualists (p. 147)
• 2. Individuality (p. 151)
• 3. Exchange and Utopia (p. 164)
• 4. Commodity Signs (p. 192)
• Epilogue (p. 213)
• Notes (p. 223)
• Bibliography (p. 249)
• Index (p. 259)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The aim of the German Werkbund, a Bauhaus precursor founded in 1907, was to improve the quality of industrial production "through the union of art, industry and handicraft." In complex analyses, Schwartz (University College, London) argues that the theories generated--including those of sociologists, art theorists, and practitioners--represent "the first ... sustained discussion of the nature of culture in a consumer-oriented capitalist economy." He probes such concepts as style versus fashion, style as a corollary of culture (implying a unified vision of the spiritual life of an epoch), and "types" as a solution. Legal theory, notably trademark law, as well as the changing relationships among producers, retailers, and consumers are examined, as are the arguments at the 1914 Cologne exhibit between those who favored the development of "types" and the opposing "individualists." Schwartz convincingly proposes that certain terms, familiar in both Werkbund and post-WW II Bauhaus discourse, in fact had different meanings and effects after WW I, that the theories propounded in Cologne also laid the groundwork for post-WW I dadaists and surrealists, as well as for theories of Walter Benjamin and other students of mass culture. Of interest to historians of social, cultural, and economic theory as well as to those of architecture and art. Graduate; faculty. J. J. Poesch; emeritus, Tulane University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Frederic J. Schwartz is lecturer in art history at University College, London