EXPRESSIONIST ARCHITECTURE

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Expressionist architecture was an architectural movement that developed in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century in parallel with the expressionist visual and performing arts.

The term "Expressionist architecture" initially described the activities of the German, Dutch, Austrian, Czech and Danish avant garde from 1910 until ca. 1924. Subsequent redefinitions extended the term backwards to 1905 and also widened it to encompass the rest of Europe. Today the meaning has broadened even further to refer to architecture of any date or location that exhibits some of the qualities of the original movement such as; distortion, fragmentation or the communication of violent or overstressed emotion.^[1]

The style was characterised by an early-modernistadoption of novel materials, formal innovation, and very unusual massing, sometimes inspired by natural biomorphic forms, sometimes by the new technical possibilities offered by the mass production of brick, steel and especially glass. Many expressionist architects fought in World War I and their experiences, combined with the political turmoil and social upheaval that followed the German Revolution of 1919, resulted in a utopian outlook and a romantic socialist agenda.^[2] Economic conditions severely limited the number of built commissions between 1914 and the mid 1920s,^[3] resulting in many of the most important expressionist works remaining as projects on paper, such as Bruno Taut'sAlpine Architecture and Hermann Finsterlin's Formspiels. Ephemeral exhibition buildings were numerous and highly significant during this period. Scenography for theatre and films provided another outlet for the expressionist imagination,^[4] and provided supplemental incomes for designers attempting to challenge conventions in a harsh economic climate.

Important events in expressionist architecture include; the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) inCologne, the completion and theatrical running of the Grosses Schauspielhaus, Berlin in 1919, the Glass Chain letters, and the activities of the Amsterdam School. The major permanent extant landmark of Expressionism is Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower in Potsdam. By 1925 most of the leading architects of Expressionism such as; Bruno Taut, Eric Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Hans Poelzig, along with other Expressionists in the visual arts, had turned toward the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, a more practical and matter-of-fact approach which rejected the emotional agitation of expressionism. A few, notably Hans Scharoun, continued to work in an expressionist idiom.^[5]

In 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, expressionist art was outlawed asDegenerate art.^[5] Until the 1970s scholars^[6] commonly played down the influence of the expressionists on the later International style, but this has been re-evaluated in recent years.

CHARCTERISTICS

Expressionist architecture was individualistic and in many ways eschewed aesthetic dogma,^[7]but it is still useful to develop some criteria which defines it. Though containing a great variety and differentiation, many points can be found as recurring in works of Expressionist architecture, and are evident in some degree in each of its works.

1. Distortion of form for an emotional effect.^[8]
2. Subordination of realism to symbolic or stylistic expression of inner experience.
3. An underlying effort at achieving the new, original, and visionary.
4. Profusion of works on paper, and models, with discovery and representations ofconcepts more important than pragmatic finished products.
5. Often hybrid solutions, irreducible to a single concept.^[9]
6. Themes of natural romantic phenomena, such as caves, mountains, lightning, crystaland rock formations.^[10] As such it is more mineral and elemental than florid andorganic which characterized its close contemporary art nouveau.
7. Utilises creative potential of artisan craftsmanship.
8. Tendency more towards the gothic than the classical. Expressionist architecture also tends more towards the romanesque and the rococo than the classical.
9. Though a movement in Europe, expressionism is as eastern as western. It draws as much from Moorish, Islamic, Egyptian, and Indian art and architecture as from Romanor Greek.^[11]
10. Conception of architecture as a work of art.^[9]

Political, economic and artistic shifts provided a context for the early manifestations of expressionist architecture; particularly in Germany, where the utopian qualities of expressionism found strong resonances with a leftist artistic community keen to provide answers to a society in turmoil during and after the events of World War I.^[12] The loss of the war, the subsequent removal of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the depravations and the rise of social democracy and the optimism of the Weimar republic created a reluctance amongst architects to pursue projects initiated before the war and provided the impetus to seek new solutions. An influential body of the artistic community, including architects, sought a similar revolutionas had occurred in Russia. The costly and grandiose remodelling of the Grosses Schauspielhaus, was more reminiscent of the imperial past, than wartime budgeting and post-war depression.^[13]

Artistic movements that preceded expressionist architecture and continued with some overlap were the arts and crafts movement and art nouveau or in Germany, jugendstil. Unity of designers with artisans, was a major preoccupation of the Arts and Crafts movement which extended into expressionist architecture. The frequent topic of naturalism in art nouveau, which was also prevalent in romanticism, continued as well, but took a turn for the more earthen than floral. The naturalist, Ernst Haeckel was known by Finsterlin^[14] and shared his source of inspiration in natural forms.

The Futurist and constructivist architectural movements, and the dada anti-art movement were occurring concurrently to expressionism and often contained similar features. Bruno Taut's magazine, Frülicht included constructivist projects, including Vladimir Tatlins Monument to the Third International.^[15] However, futurism and constructivism emphasized mechination,^[16] and urbanism^[17] tendencies which weren't to take hold in Germany until the Neue Sachlichkeit. Mendelsohn is an exception whose work bordered on futurism and constructivism. A quality of dynamic energy and exuberance exists in both the sketches of Erich Mendelsohn and futurist Antonio Sant'Elia.^[18] The Merzbau by Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, with its angular, abstract form, held many expressionist characteristics.

Influence of individualists such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Antoni Gaudí also provided the surrounding context for expressionist architecture. Portfolios of Wright were included in the lectures of Erich Mendelsohn and were well known to those in his circle.^[19] Gaudi, was also both influenced and influencing what was happening in Berlin. In Barcelona, there was no abrupt break between the architecture of art nouveau and that of the early 20th century, where Jugendstil was opposed after 1900, and his work contains more of art nouveau than that of say Bruno Taut. The circle of der Ring, did know about Gaudí, as he was published in Germany, and Finsterlin was in correspondence.^[20] Charles Rennie Mackintosh should also be mentioned in the larger context surrounding expressionist architecture. Hard to classify as strictly arts and crafts or art nouveau, buildings such as the Hill House and his Ingram chairs have an expressionist tinge. His work was known on the continent, as it was exhibited at theVienna Secession exhibition in 1900.

Many writers contributed to the ideology of expressionist architecture. Sources of philosophyimportant to expressionist architects were works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard,^[21] and Henri Bergson.^[22] Bruno Taut's sketches were frequently noted with quotations from Nietzsche,^[23] particularly Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose protagonist embodied freedoms dear to the expressionists; freedom to reject the bourgeois world, freedom from history, and strength of spirit in individualist isolation.^[23] Zarathustra's mountain retreat was an inspiration to Taut's Alpine Architecture.^[24] Henri Van de Velde drew a title page illustration for Nietzsche's Ecce Homo.^[25] The author Franz Kafka in his The Metamorphosis, with its shape shifting matched the material instability of expressionist architecture^[26] Naturalists such as Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel contributed an ideology for the biomorphic form of architects such as Herman Finsterlin. Poet Paul Scheerbart worked directly with Bruno Taut and his circle, and contributed ideas based on his poetry of glass architecture.

Emergent psychology from Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung was important to expressionism. The exploration of psychological effects of form and space^[27] was undertaken by architects in their buildings, projects and films. Bruno Taut noted the psychological possibilities of scenographic design that, "Objects serve psychologically to mirror the actors' emotions and gestures."^[27] The exploration of dreams and the unconscious, provided material for the formal investigations of Hermann Finsterlin.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries philosophies ofaesthetics had been developing, particularly through the work of KantandSchopenhauerand notions of the sublime. The experience of the sublime was supposed to involve a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might. At the end of the nineteenth century the German Kunstwissenschaft, or the "science of art", arose, which was a movement to discern laws of aesthetic appreciation and arrive at a scientific approach to aesthetic experience. At the beginning of the twentieth century Neo-Kantian German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Max Dessoir founded the Zeitschift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, which he edited for many years, and published the work Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in which he formulated five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic. Iain Boyd Whyte writes that whilst "the Expressionist visionaries did not keep copies of Kant under their drawing boards. There was, however, in the first decades of this century [20th] a climate of ideas that was sympathetic to the aesthetic concerns and artistic production of romanticism.^[28]

Artistic theories of Wassily Kandinsky, such as Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Point and Line to Plane were centerpieces of expressionist thinking.^[29]

^FORM

Form played a defining role in setting apart expressionist architecture from its immediate predecessor, art nouveau orJugendstil. Henry Van de Velde was able to shift his buildings away from ornament and like others at the time, into formal concepts of individualism and symbolic representation.^[30]While art nouveau had an organic freedom with ornament, expressionist architecture strove to free the form of the whole building instead of just its parts. Examples of this are evident in the paper projects of the movement, as well as in its built works. Hermann Finsterlin's Formspiels depict the form of buildings turned into organic amorphous massings. Bruno Tauts Alpine Architecture depicts luminescent structures whose entire fabric is moved towards a crystalline form. An example of a built expressionist project that is inventive formally is Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower. This sculpted building shows a relativistic and shifting view of geometry. Devoid of applied ornament, Form and space are shaped in fluid concrete to express concepts of the architect and the building's namesake. Mendelsohn had a powerful sense of form, exhibited in the Einstein Tower but also in his numerous sketches. "In his sketches, which were unrelated to any commission, Mendelsohn thought in terms of volume and only secondly in terms of function."^[18] Expressionist contemporary, Antoni Gaudí, was able to deviate from art nouveau's ornamental nature to make "large sculptural masses that appear as coherent formal statements."^[31]

As expressionist architecture utilised curved geometries, a recurring form in the movement is the dome. The interior of the Grosses Schauspielhaus was domed. Hermann Finsterlin'sFormspiels are a form of asymmetric, anthropomorphic domes. Many of the works of Bruno Taut were also domed, such as the Glass Pavilion and the Worpswede Käseglocke. Taut'sAlpine architecture have the exotic charm of the domed pleasure palaces of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Curved architecture requires a curved covering, so expressionist architecture's roofs were often domes. Another expressionist motif was the emphasis on either horizontality or verticality for dramatic effect, influenced by new technologies such as cruise liners and skyscrapers.

Form as revealed by law was depicted in an expressionist light by Hugh Ferris. His illustrations of the New York City 1916 zoning ordinance had an expressionist quality in their rendering. They were published in Germany, in the magazine Baukunst in 1926.^[32] In their strong contrasts of lighting, used to reveal form, they seem inspired by expressionist film. The name of Ferris' 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow, seems inspired by the 1927 Film,Metropolis.

Formalism was a tendency that expressionist architecture helped contribute to modernism. Kandinsky postulated in 1912 that form was an expression of content^[33] and in many instances form itself was the content. The work of expressionists who turned later to Neue Sachlichkeit took form as a departure but minimalized distortion of form. Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and others took on a normative form (with some exceptions), using orthogonal geometries to suggest other architectural concepts, based on regularity of geometry.

MATERIALS

A recurring concern of expressionist architects was the use of materials and how they might be poetically expressed. Often, the intention was to unify the materials in a building so as to make it monolithic. The collaboration of Bruno Taut and the utopian poet Paul Scheerbart attempted to address the problems of German society by a doctrine of glass architecture. Such utopianism can be seen in the context of a revolutionary Germany where the tussle between nationalism and socialism had yet to resolve itself. Taut and Scheerbart imagined a society that had freed itself by breaking from past forms and traditions, impelled by an architecture that flooded every building with multicolored light and represented a more promising future.[34] They published texts on this subject and built the Glass Pavilion at the 1914 Werkbund exhibition. Inscribed around the base of the dome were aphoristic sayings about the material, penned by the Scheerbart.

"Coloured glass destroys hatred","Without a glass palace life is a burden","Glass brings us a new era, building in brick only does us harm"- Paul Scheerbart, inscriptions on the 1914 Werkbund Glass Pavilion[15]

Another example of expressionist use of monolithic materials was by Erich Mendelsohn at the Einstein Tower. Not to be missed was a pun on the towers namesake, Einstein, and an attempt to make the building out of one stone, Ein stein.[35] Though not cast in one pour of concrete (due to technical difficulties, brick and stucco were used partially) the effect of the building is an expression of the fluidity of concrete before it is cast. 'Architecture of Steel and Concrete' was the title of an 1919 exhibition of Mendelsohn's sketches at Paul Cassirer's gallery in Berlin.

Brick was used in a similar fashion to express the inherent nature of the material. Josef Franke produced some characteristic expressionist churches in the Ruhrgebiet in the 1920s. Bruno Taut used brick as a way to show mass and repetition in his Berlin Housing Estate "Legien-Stadt". In the same way as their Arts and Crafts movement predecessors, to expressionist architects, populism, naturalism, and according to Pehnt "Moral and sometimes even irrational arguments were adduced in favor of building in brick".[36] With its color and pointillist like visual increment, brick became to expressionism what stucco later became to the international style.

THEATRES AND FILMS

Europe witnessed a boom in theatrical production in the early twentieth century. In 1896 there were 302 permanent theatres in Europe, by 1926 there were 2,499.[13] Cinema, witnessed a comparable increase in its use and popularity and a resulting increase in the number of picture houses. It was also able to provide a temporary reality for innovative architectural ideas.[27] Many architects designed theatres for performances on the stage and film sets for expressionist films. These were defining moments for the movement, and with its interest in theatres and films, the performing arts held a significant place in expressionist architecture. Like film, and theatre, expressionist architecture created an unusual and exotic environment to surround the visitor.

Built examples of expressionist theatres include Henry van de Velde's construction of the model theatre for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition, and Hans Poelzig's grand remodelling of the Grosses Schauspielhaus. The enormous capacity of the Grosses Schauspielhaus enabled low ticket prices, and the creation of a 'peoples theatre'.[13] Not only were expressionist architects building stages, Bruno Taut wrote a play intended for the theatre, Weltbaumeister.[4] Expressionist architects were both involved in film and inspired by it. Hans Poelzig strove to make films based on legends or fairytales.[37] Poelzig designed scenographic sets for Paul Wegener's 1920 film, Der Golem. Space in Der Golem was a three dimensional village, a life-like rendering of the Jewish ghetto of Prague. This contrasts with the setting of the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, which was painted on canvas backdrops.[38] Perhaps the latter was able to achieve more stylistic freedom, but Poelzig in Der Golem was able to create a whole village that "spoke with a Jewish accent."[37] Herman Finsterlin approached Fritz Lang with an idea for a film.[4] Fritz Lang's film Metropolis demonstrates a visually progressive 'Futurist' society dealing with relevant issues of 1920s Germany in relation to labour and society. Bruno Taut designed an unbuilt theatre for reclining cinema-goers.[39] Bruno Taut also proposed a film as an anthology for the Glass Chain, entitled Die Galoschen des Glücks(The Galoshes of Fortune) with a name borrowed from Hans Christian Andersen. On the film, Taut noted, "an expressionism of the most subtle kind will bring surroundings, props, and action into harmony with one another."[40] It featured architectural fantasias suited to each member of the Chain.[4] Ultimately unproduced, it reveals the aspiration that the new medium, film, invoked.