Architecture Within Reason: Construction, Labor, and Rationalization in Weimar Germany

Abstract

World War I shattered millions of lives and left much of Europe in ruins. In postwar Germany, artists, architects, politicians, and industrialists cultivated utopian visions of the future that were motivated by hopeful optimism for renewal and redemption despite a degraded reality. Weimar never became what its greatest visionaries hoped, but the impulses for these imaginary pursuits were nonetheless real. Importantly, postwar architectural currents converged with the rise of rationalization in Weimar Germany. This dissertation contends with the “constructed meanings” of rationalization after World War I and examines how this concept came to encompass much more than a technical doctrine. Rather, rationalization is investigated as a complex cultural and technical terrain that saw the embrace of science, technology, and industry by architects, in parallel with reinvigorated beliefs in social transformation as the ultimate objective of art. Rationalization was inflected by, and also hybridized with, other cultural and artistic concepts. The legacy of older artistic ideals, such as the Romantic Gesamtkunstwerk, remained pivotal even as rationalization ascended to epistemic dominance. In turn, the concept was directed toward numerous purposes of politics and social reform. While the Gesamtkunstwerk ultimately comprised a failed framework for artistic and social renewal—what Andreas Huyssen describes as “a false totality and … an equally false monumentality”—it nevertheless exerted a powerful influence in cultural discourse after the cataclysm of the Great War and profoundly shaped the subsequent rise of rationalization in architecture. This study defines a culture of reason that was specific to architecture in Weimar Germany, plural in its manifestations, and unresolved in its ideological ambitions—a complex of thought and practice that embraced industrial techniques, state interventions, and scientific management just as fervently as it did idealist aspirations of utopian renewal and Romantic conceptions of spiritual and communal redemption. Considering historical developments as varied as colonial building, wartime resource management, state-led housing initiatives, and industrial psychotechnics demonstrates how rationalization was often taken as the means to ends not reducible to reason alone. Rather, Weimar rationalization enjoined science, technology, and construction to numerous purposes that were variously pragmatic, artistic, political, or militaristic. Historicizing rationalization as an elastic concept opens the door to a richer understanding of its multiple configurations as well as its participation in a multitude of historical domains. The dissertation pursues this project across five chapters that examine the negotiations of German Kultur and industrial Zivilisation in Weimar Germany.