ProfessorDEBORAH Barnstone

Technology – a new unity,” expressed the revised focus for the Bauhaus School but also the sentiments shared by many progressive German architects after the First World War.  The war had paradoxically demonstrated both the terrible destructive power and the immense potential inherent in modern technology.  Gropius’ catch phrase represents the convergence of several attitudes towards art, technology, and industry in a new paradigm, and it had a multitude of permutations.  When he made this statement Gropius, like many of his contemporaries, was developing ideas that dated to the second half of the nineteenth century about ways to counter what many viewed as the inferiority of German industrial capacity and the backwardness of German society and culture.[1]  Such feelings had helped spur the formation of  theKunstgewerbebewegung  and Kunsterziehungsbewegung in the 1890s and the Deutsche Werkbund in 1907, especially the sense that the quality of German industrial design and production lagged behind other industrialized nations, in particular Great Britain and France, and that improving these would propel the nation into the modern world.[2]  From its inception, the Werkbund stressed quality as the goal for German industrial production, avoiding the difficult debates over style.  At the same time, the Werkbund couched its arguments in the culture/civilization rhetoric of the period by arguing that German industry should embrace the creative abilities of fine artists in order to develop superior approaches to industrial design and, ultimately, architecture.  For his part, Gropius took a position very similar to that of Gottfried Semper who in his well-known response to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London had advocated the unification of art and industry, society and science.[3]  Gropius’ choice of words for the slogan extended the Werkbund’s ambitions beyond the realm of industrial production into all areas of human endeavor.  

Ascher Barnstone is also leading a national project with colleagues from Australia and New Zealand titled, the Australian New Zealand Modernism Working Group. This multi-year effort aims to produce a set of shared resources for academics and students on the development of modernism in ANZ.