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From Rikli's light-and-air hut to Tessenow's Patenthaus: Körperkultur and the modern dwelling in Germany, 1890–1914

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 13; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13602360802327646

1466-4410

Didem Ekici,

German Social Sciences and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I would like to thank Claire Zimmerman, Sun-Young Kim and the two anonymous readers for The Journal of Architecture, who have generously read and commented on earlier drafts of this article. My research has been funded by scholarships from DAAD (the German Academic Exchange) and the University of Michigan. Finally, I am grateful to Michelangelo Sabatino and Peter Gibbs-Kennet for their editorial feedback. Notes On the Life Reform movement, see Janos Frecot, Johann Friedrich Geist and Diethart Kerbs, Fidus, 1868–1948; zur ästhetischen Praxis bürgerlicher Fluchtbewegungen (Munich, Rogner & Bernhard, 1972); Eva Barlösius, Naturgemässe Lebensführung: Zur Geschichte Der Lebensreform Um Die Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt, New York, Campus, 1997); Diethart Kerbs and Jürgen Reulecke, eds, Handbuch Der Deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880–1933 (Wuppertal, P. Hammer, 1998); Kai Buchholz and Institut Mathildenhöhe, eds, Die Lebensreform: Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900 (Darmstadt, Institut Mathildenhöhe: Häusser, 2001); Matthew Jefferies, ‘Lebensreform: A Middle-Class Antidote to Wilhelminism?’, in Wilhelminism and its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930, eds, Geoff Eley and James N. Retallack (New York, Berghahn Books, 2003). The emphasis in italics is mine. ‘Zurück Zur Natur’, Deutsche Volksstimme, 1, no. 8 (1896), p. 92. In his 1767 novel Emile, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) called for a return to nature. Rousseau believed that only in nature could men be emancipated and achieve moral autonomy. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trs., Barbara Foxley (London, J.M. Dent, 1955). David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984). See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1984); Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine Andere Moderne?: Zivilisationskritik, Natur Und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933 (Paderborn, Schoningh, 1999). Recent articles that analyse the relationship between the healthy body cult and modern architecture are Fritz Neumeyer, ‘Der neue Mensch: Körperbau und Baukörper in der Moderne’, in Moderne Architektur in Deutschland 1900 bis 1950: Expressionismus und Neue Sachlichkeit, eds, Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani and Romana Schneider (Stuttgart, Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994); Beatriz Colomina, ‘The Medical Body in Modern Architecture’, in Anybody, ed., Cynthia Davidson (New York, Anyone, 1997); Christopher Wilk, ‘The Healthy Body Culture’, in Modernism 1914–1939: Designing a New World, ed., Christopher Wilk (London, V&A Publications, 2006). Giedion wrote that ‘the latest studies on the medical side of the construction of hospitals were definitely in conformity with the desire that extended over the whole branch of architecture, for even the doctors called for the greatest possible dissolution of walls into glass and the freest possible access of light.’: Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen (Zürich, Leipzig, Orell Füssli Verlag, 1929), p. 57. Another early study that presents the hospital building as a model for modern architecture is Richard Döcker, Terrassentyp: Krankenhaus, Erholungsheim, Hotel, Bürohaus, Einfamilienhaus, Sieglungshaus, Miethaus, und die Stadt (Stuttgart, F. Wedekind, 1929). See also the exhibition catalogue for a recent exhibition, Quintus Miller, Das Sanatorium: Entstehung eines Prototyps der modernen Architektur (Lausanne, Ecole polytechnique féderale de Lausanne, Département d'architecture; Zürich, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, 1992). On Naturopathy, see Cornelia Regin, Selbsthilfe und Gesundheitspolitik. Die Naturheilbewegung im Kaiserreich, 1889–1914 (Stuttgart, Steiner, 1995); Karl E. Rothschuh, Naturheilbewegung, Reformbewegung, Alternativbewegung (Stuttgart, Hippokrates Verlag, 1983); Robert Jütte, ‘Naturheilkunde’, in Die Lebensreform: Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, ed., Kai Buchholz, et al. (Darmstadt, haeusser-media/Verlag Häusser, 2001). Hermann Muthesius, Das Moderne Landhaus und seine innere Ausstattung (Munich, F. Bruckmann A.-G., 1905), p. 1. Journals of the era are full of commercials that advertise nature-cure resorts, sanatoria and medicines against such big city diseases. Hermann Muthesius, ‘U¨ber häusliche Baukunst’, Deutsche Bauhütte 8, no. 31 (1904), p. 206. Arnold Rikli, Die Grundlehren der Naturheilkunde einschliesslich die atmosphärische Cur ‘Es werde Licht.’ (Leipzig, 8. umgearb. Aufl., 1895). Frecot, Geist, and Kerbs, Fidus, op. cit., p. 29. P. Jaerschky, ‘Der Heilwert des Licht-Luftbades’, Kraft und Schönheit, Das Sportluftbad. Special Issue, Sonderheft 4 (1905), p. 2. Adolf Just, Kehrt zur Natur zurück! Die neue wahre naturgemässe heil und Lebensweise. Wasser, Licht, Luft, Erde, Früchte -Geist und Körper, 6th ed. (Jungborn-Stapelburg a. Harz, Rudolf Just Verlagshandlung, 1905), p. 60. Ibid., p. 52. Frecot, Geist, and Kerbs, Fidus, op. cit., p. 29. Just argued that they should be wooden, since stone houses held humidity leaving the air inside neither pure nor fresh. Adolf Just, Return to nature! The true natural method of healing and living and the true salvation of the soul. Paradise regained., trs., Benedict Lust (New York, B. Lust, 1903), p. 67. The light-and-air hut resorts to the modern utopia of humanity's unmediated relationship to nature. Around the same time as Rousseau published his novel Emile, architects such as William Wrighte and Jean Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) designed huts for hermetic retreat and Marc-Antoine Laugier published his ground-breaking Essai sur l'architecture, which established the primitive hut as the embodiment of the true principles of architecture. During the nineteenth century, the hut was turned into a decorative garden element symbolising a return to nature. In England, some aristocrats went so far as to seek ‘ornamental hermits’ to be placed in remote parts of their estates. See Marc Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (Los Angeles, Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977); William Wrighte, Grotesque Architecture or Rural Amusement (London, Printed for H. Webley, 1767); Edith Sitwell, The English Eccentrics (London, Faber & Faber, 1933), pp. 37–67. On the primitive hut, see also Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1981); Jo Odgers, Flora Samuel and Adam Sharr, eds, Primitive: Original Matters in Architecture (London, New York, Routledge, 2006); Antje von Graevenitz, ‘Hütten und Tempel: Zur Mission der Selbstbesinnung’, in Monte Verita: Berg der Wahrheit, ed., Harald Szeemann (Milan, Electra Editrice, 1978). Mark Anderson, Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (Oxford, New York, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 84. His friend and biographer Max Brod wrote: ‘Fundamentally he saw in the efforts to create a new healthy man and to use the mysterious and freely proffered healing powers of nature something extremely positive which agreed with many of his own instincts and convictions, and which he widely put into practice too. He slept with the window open all the year round. When you went to his place to see him, the cool fresh air there was a thing that struck you. He always wore light clothing, even in winter, went for long periods without eating meat and drank no alcohol.’ Brod, cited by Anderson, Kafka's Clothes, op. cit., p. 77. Kafka visited several nature-cure resorts besides Jungborn. In August, 1903, he stayed in Lahmann's nature-cure resort. What he wrote on a postcard, which depicted half naked light-air bathers at the resort, reflects the contemporary obsession with air as a health imperative: ‘Here one drinks air instead of beer, bathes in air instead of water and it surely feels good.’ See postcard with a photograph of air-bathers from the nature-cure resort sent on 23rd August, 1903, reprinted in Hans-Gerd Koch, ed., Franz Kafka Briefe, 1900–1912, Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe (Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer, 1999), p. 24. Max Brod, ed., The diaries of Franz Kafka (New York, Schocken Books, 1948). Der Anfang (September, 1913), p. 138: cited in George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, H. Fertig, 1985), p. 56. Ida Hofmann, the founder of Monte Verita, the best-known Life Reformist colony and nature-cure resort, explained their previous bourgeois lives in such terms: Ida Hofmann-Oedenkoven, Monte Verita: Wahrheit ohne Dichtung (Lorch-Württemberg, 1906), p. 1. See the analysis of fashion in Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 26–43. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: a Contribution to Anonymous History (New York, Oxford University Press, 1948). Gustav Möckel, ‘Mode, Kleidung und Gesundheit’, Kraft und Schönheit. Das Kleidungsheft. Special issue, 5 (1905), p. 11. ‘Lichtluftbäder’, Kraft und Schönheit. Das Sportluftbad. Special issue, 4 (1905), pp. 33–36. In a letter from 1906, Karl Schmidt (1890–1957), the owner of the furniture factory, German Workshops for Handcrafted Art (Deutsche Werkstätten für Handwerkkunst) and the founder of Hellerau, asked the architect Richard Riemerschmid to reserve space for air-bathing in the master plan of the garden city. The letter, written on 17th September,1906, is reprinted in Winfried Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid vom Jugendstil zum Werkbund: Werke und Dokumente (Munich, Prestel, 1982), p. 477. Wolf Dohrn, ‘U¨ber die Badeeinrichtung in der Dalcroze-Schule’, Mitteilungen für die Gemeinde Rähnitz-Hellerau, no. 32 (1913). Wolf Dohrn, Die Gartenstadt Hellerau und weitere Schriften (Dresden, Hellerau-Verlag, 1992), p. 16. ‘Vorträge in der Bildungsanstalt’, Mitteilungen für Hellerau 3 (1912), unpaged. Following Nietzsche's dictum ‘The savage… is a return to nature and in a certain sense his recovery, his cure from culture’, Körperkultur advocates called for a return to Naturmensch. They regularly retreated to nature in order to take long walks and, often, nude baths. At once complementary and antagonistic to this primitive body was the mechanised body. The body was enhanced through machines, such as fitness equipment, medical tools and electric-light baths, precursors of today's tanning booths. Quoted in Jefferies, ‘Lebensreform: A Middle-Class Antidote to Wilhelminism?’, op. cit., p. 93. Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, op. cit., pp. 22, 112. Naturmensch can be translated as ‘primitive man’ or ‘natural man’. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, op. cit., p. 679. Hermann Muthesius, Wie baue ich mein Haus?, 2nd ed. (Munich, F. Bruckmann, 1917), p. 206. Ibid., p. 200. Hermann Muthesius, The English House, ed., Dennis Sharp, trs., Janet Seligman (New York, Rizzoli, 1979), p. 163. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 404. Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or, Practical Aesthetics, trs., Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2004), pp. 247–48; Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and other Writings (Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 254. On Semper's principle of dressing, see also Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 180–81, 85–88, 293–302. In her article ‘Undressing Architecture’, Mary McLeod refers to Semper as an important figure, who drew an analogy between clothing and architecture. Yet she states that Semper's interest in dress was hardly unique among nineteenth century European architects. Mary McLeod, ‘Undressing Architecture: Fashion, Gender, and Modernity’, in Architecture: In Fashion, ed., Deborah Fausch, et al. (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), pp. 46–51. In his book White Walls, Designer's Dresses, Mark Wigley also referred to Semper as a leading architect, who identified ‘the textile essence of architecture, the dissimulating fabric, the fabrication of architecture, with the clothing of the body.’: Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: the Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995), p. 12. See also Mark Wigley, ‘White Out: Fashioning the Modern’, in Architecture: In Fashion, op. cit., p. 173. Arnold Rikli, Die Thermodiätetik oder das tägliche thermoelectrische Licht- und Luftbad in Verbindung mit naturgemäßer Diät, als zukünftige Heilmethode, sowie als Fingerzeig für den Lehrer-, Turner- und Soldatenbestand in physischer wie moralischer Beziehung (Berlin, Grieben, 1871). Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses, op. cit., pp. 127–53. In their designs, refusal of the corset emerges as a significant Life Reformist influence. Ferdinand Avenarius, ‘Zehn Gebote zur Wohnungseinrichtung’, Kunstwart, 13, no. 9 (1900). Ibid., p. 341. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Häusliche Kunstpflege (Leipzig, Eugen Diederichs, 1903), p. 13. Hermann Muthesius, Kultur und Kunst: Gesammelte Aufsätze über künstlerische Fragen der Gegenwart (Leipzig, Eugen Diederichs, 1904), p. 35. The Health Exhibition Literature: Health in the Dwelling, vol. 3, International Health Exhibition (London, W. Clowes & Sons, 1884), p. 119. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, op. cit., p. 216. Joseph August Lux, Das moderne Landhaus: ein Beitrag zur neuen Baukunst (Wien, Anton Schroll, 1905), p. 4. Ibid. Hermann Muthesius, ‘Die Entwicklung des künstlerischen Gedankens im Hausbau’, Schriften der Centralstelle für Arbeiter-Wohlfahrtseinrichtungen, 29 (1906), p. 8. August Schmarsow, ‘The Essence of Architectural Creation’, in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed., Harry Francis Mallgrave (Santa Monica, CA, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 1994). The prominence of space and body in German architectural discourse originates from the empathy theory, first formulated by Robert Vischer in 1873. Vischer explained space perception as a bodily experience. Focusing on the body, the art historians Heinrich Wölfflin and August Schmarsow formulated a new understanding of architecture in the late nineteenth century, which had a psychological effect and depiction. They were both influenced by the aesthetic theory of empathy and perception psychology. While Schmarsow regarded architecture as a spatial creation, Wölfflin theorised it through the body. The synthesis of these two theories formed an architectural discourse based on the body. The production and reception of architecture was explained via the interaction of the body with the built space. See Cornelis Van de Ven, ‘Ideas of Space in German Architectural Theory 1850–1930’, Architectural Association Quarterly, 9, no. 2–3 (1977); Harry Francis Mallgrave, ‘Introduction’, in Empathy, Form, and Space, op. cit. Hermann Muthesius, Style-Architecture and Building-Art: Transformations of Architecture in the Nineteenth Century and its Present Condition, trs., Stanford Anderson (Santa Monica, CA, Chicago, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). Muthesius, The English House, op. cit., p. 213. Baugewerkszeitung, ‘Die Tessenow-Wand’, Zeitschrift für das Baugewerbe, 57, no. 2 (1913). Tessenow, who was from northern Germany, was inspired by vernacular houses in that region. To minimise the adverse effects of wind and rain, these houses had brick walls with two layers and space in between. The space in between helped the outer layer to get dry and prevented the inner layer from getting wet. ‘Die Tessenow-Wand’, op. cit., p. 12. The letter from 17th September,1906, is reprinted in Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, op. cit., p. 477. Cited in Ulrike Schlosser, ‘“Maschinenhäuser” — Holzhäuser aus und in Hellerau’, Dresdner Hefte, 15, no. 51 (1999), p. 20. ‘Die Tessenow-Wand’, op. cit., p. 12. Schlosser, ‘“Maschinenhäuser”…‘, op. cit., pp. 20–21. Karl G. L. Storck, E. Jaques-Dalcroze: seine Stellung und Aufgabe in unserer Zeit (Stuttgart, Greiner & Pfeiffer, 1912), p. 89. G. Ferchland, ‘Heinrich Tessenow’, Mitteilungen für die Gemeinde Rähnitz-Hellerau, 37 (1913), p. 1; Martin Wagner, ‘Gartenstadthäuser’, Neudeutsche Bauzeitung, 6, no.7 (1910), p. 84. Heinrich Tessenow, Der Wohnhausbau (Munich, Georg D. W. Callwen, 1908), pp. 2–3. The emphasis in italics is mine. Heinrich Tessenow, ‘Housebuilding and such Things’, in 9H (1989), p. 11. Lux, Das moderne Landhaus, op. cit., p. 7. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten Dörfer und Kolonien, v. 3 (Munich, Georg D. W. Calwey, Kunstwart Verlag, 1903), pp. 16–17; Paul Mebes, Um 1800. Architektur und Handwerk im letzten Jahrhundert ihrer traditionellen Entwicklung (Munich, F. Bruckmann, 1908). Karl Scheffler, ‘Heinrich Tessenow’, Kunst und Künstler, 11, no. 1 (1912), p. 44. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy; a Contribution to the Psychology of Style (New York, International Universities Press, 1953), p. 17. Tessenow, ‘Housebuilding and such Things’, op. cit., p. 11. Like clothing reformers and nudists, Tessenow differentiated between truth and appearance. Heinrich Tessenow, Hausbau und dergleichen (Braunschweig, Wiesbaden, F. Vieweg & Sohn, 4. Aufl., 1986), p. 19. Muthesius, Style-Architecture and Building-Art, op. cit., p. 79. On Sachlichkeit, see Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Form Follows Fetish: Adolf Behne and the Problem of “Sachlichkeit” ‘, Oxford Art Journal, 21, no. 2 (1998). It is omitted in standard studies on the history of prefabricated housing. For example, see Kurt Junghanns, Das Haus für alle: zur Geschichte der Vorfertigung in Deutschland (Berlin, Ernst & Sohn, 1994). Moreover, with the exception of such studies as Marco de Michelis’ book, Heinrich Tessenow 1876–1950: Das architektonische Gesamtwerk (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlags-Amstalt, 1991), Tessenow has been portrayed mostly as a reactionary architect. For example, see Michael Hays, ‘Tessenow's Architecture as National Allegory: Critique of Capitalism or Protofascism?’, Assemblage, 8 (1989).