Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
same motifs could be found on buildings, garments, eating utensils—food,
clothing and shelter all resonated together. During the subsequent indus-
trial age diverse efforts were made to re-integrate the visual environment.
In several labor and craft movements the alienated worker's creativity was
re-united to his product. Likewise, the citizen was re-united with his home
that had become nothing but a compartment to house a worker; streetscape
and city were coaxed to become, again, more than a giant, apparently
uncontrollable machine. Much of this campaign was understood a cen-
tury ago when various programs were proposed to remedy the new urban
and industrial malaise. Attempts to unify the built environment in modern
times have arisen, basically, in three waves and each of these has its reso-
nance in the present situation.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Art Nouveau, basically a decora-
tive program with different national expressions, employed the new indus-
trial technologies in a holding action against drably oppressive Victorian
clutter. Employing craftsmen to ornament every imaginable surface from
buildings to bookbindings,Art Nouveau was practiced with great success in
Scotland, Bohemia, France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Spain, and the United
States.This commercial movement had no manifesto or intellectual under-
pinning, but spontaneously informed a deeply felt reaction against the jet-
tisoning of generations of accumulated knowledge of craft and the richness
of the visual environment which that craft was prone to enliven.What Art
Nouveau produced was not for the masses, was not inexpensive, and,
though visible as typography everywhere, was not generally accepted—
with the notable exception of Thonet's bentwood designs which are man-
ufactured to this day as well as his other furnishings in the Austrian version
of Art Nouveau, called
Jugendstil.
This easy-going disregard of the masses
while creatively advancing industrial production (as exampled by Thonet or
by Tiffany) was not true of Art Nouveau's successor.
Begun in 1919, the Bauhaus employed up-to-date technological and
mass-production procedures and systems, in conjunction with the modern
materials of the industrial age, and unified these materials and techniques
under the rubric of “design.” The detachment of the formal concept of a
work from its execution may have been among the first examples of con-
ceptual art, but the social program of the Bauhaus and its grimly earnest
doctrine were as organized (and Germanic) as carefree Art Nouveau was a
mercantile product for the middle and upper classes. Nevertheless, despite
their brilliant compositional, motific, and stylistic triumphs, neither Art
