The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) was a German association of architects,

designers and industrialists, an important organization in the history of architectural modernism.

The Werkbund was founded in 1907 in Munich at the instigation of Hermann Muthesius, existed
through 1934, then re-established after World War II in 1950. Muthesius was the author of the
exhaustive three-volume "The English House" of 1905, a survey of the practical lessons of the
English Arts and Crafts movement. Muthesius was seen as something of a cultural ambassador,
or industrial spy, between Germany and England.
The Werkbund was less an artistic movement than a state-sponsored effort to integrate traditional
crafts and industrial mass-production techniques, to put Germany on a competitive footing with
England and the United States. Its motto "Vom Sofakissen zum Stdtebau" (from sofa cushions to
city-building) indicates its range of interest.
The organization originally included twelve architects and twelve business firms. The architects
include Peter Behrens, Theodor Fischer (who served as its first president), Josef Hoffmann and
Richard Riemerschmid.
Other architects affiliated with the project include Heinrich Tessenow and the Belgian Henry van
de Velde. The Werkbund commissioned van de Velde to build a theatre for its 1914 Cologne
Exhibition in Cologne, the theatre which turned out to be his best work, and which only stood for
one year before being destroyed as a result of World War I. Eliel Saarinen was made
corresponding member of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1914 and was invited to participate in the
1914 Cologne exhibition.
Key dates of the Deutscher Werkbund:

1907 Establishment of the Werkbund in Munich

1914 Cologne exhibition
1924 Berlin exhibition
1927 Stuttgart exhibition (including the Weissenhof Estate)
1929 Breslau exhibition
1938 Werkbund closed by the National Socialists
1949 reestablishment

The Arts and Crafts movement was a British and American aesthetic movement occurring in the
last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Inspired by the writings of
John Ruskin and a romantic idealisation of the craftsman taking pride in his personal handiwork, it
was at its height between approximately 1880 and 1910.It was a reformist movement that
influenced British and American architecture, decorative arts, cabinet making, crafts, and even the
"cottage" garden designs of William Robinson or Gertrude Jekyll. Its best-known practitioners
were William Morris, Charles Robert Ashbee, T. J. Cobden Sanderson, Walter Crane, Nelson
Dawson, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Herbert Tudor Buckland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
Christopher Dresser, Edwin Lutyens, Ernest Gimson, William Lethaby, Edward Schroeder Prior,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustav Stickley, Charles Voysey, Christopher Whall and artists in the PreRaphaelite movement.In the United States, the terms American Craftsman, or Craftsman style are
often used to denote the style of architecture, interior design, and decorative arts that prevailed
between the dominant eras of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, or roughly the period from 1910 to
1925.
Origins and key principles: The Arts and Crafts Movement began primarily as a search for
authentic and meaningful styles for the 19th century and as a reaction to the eclectic revival of
historic styles of the Victorian era and to "soulless" machine-made production aided by the
Industrial Revolution. Considering the machine to be the root cause of all repetitive and mundane
evils, some of the protagonists of this movement turned entirely away from the use of machines
and towards handcraft, which tended to concentrate their productions in the hands of sensitive but
well-heeled patrons.Yet, while the Arts and Crafts movement was in large part a reaction to
industrialization, if looked at on the whole, it was neither anti-industrial nor anti-modern. Some of
the European factions believed that machines were in fact necessary, but they should only be
used to relieve the tedium of mundane, repetitive tasks. At the same time, some Arts and Crafts
leaders felt that objects should also be affordable. The conflict between quality production and
'demo' design, and the attempt to reconcile the two, dominated design debate at the turn of the
twentieth century.
Those who sought compromise between the efficiency of the machine and the skill of the
craftsman thought it a useful endeavour to seek the means through which a true craftsman could
master a machine to do his bidding, in opposition to the reality many believed during the Industrial
Age; humans had become slaves to the industrial machine.The need to reverse the human
subservience to the unquenchable machine was a point that everyone agreed on. Yet the extent to
which the machine was ostracised from the process was a point of contention debated by many
different factions within the Arts and Crafts movement throughout Europe.(This conflict was
exemplified in the German Arts and Crafts movement, by the clash between two leading figures of
the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), Hermann Muthesius and Henry Van de Velde. Muthesius, also
head of design education for German Government, was a champion of standardization. He
believed in mass production, in affordable democratic art. Van de Velde, on the other hand, saw
mass production as threat to creativity and individuality.)
Though the spontaneous personality of the designer became more central than the historical
"style" of a design, certain tendencies stood out: reformist neo-gothic influences, rustic and
"cottagey" surfaces, repeating designs, vertical and elongated forms. In order to express the
beauty inherent in craft, some products were deliberately left slightly unfinished, resulting in a
certain rustic and robust effect. There were also socialist undertones to this movement, in that
another primary aim was for craftspeople to derive satisfaction from what they did. This
satisfaction, the proponents of this movement felt, was totally denied in the industrialised
processes inherent in compartmentalised machine production.

In fact, the proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement were against the principle of a division of
labour, which in some cases could be independent of the presence or absence of machines. They
were in favour of the idea of the master craftsman, creating all the parts of an item of furniture, for
instance, and also taking a part in its assembly and finishing, with some possible help by
apprentices. This was in contrast to work environments such as the French Manufactories, where
everything was oriented towards the fastest production possible. (For example, one person or
team would handle all the legs of a piece of furniture, another all the panels, another assembled
the parts and yet another painted and varnished or handled other finishing work, all according to a
plan laid out by a furniture designer who would never actually work on the item during its creation.)
The Arts and Crafts movement sought to reunite what had been ripped asunder in the nature of
human work, having the designer work with his hands at every step of creation. Some of the most
famous apostles of the movement, such as Morris, were more than willing to design products for
machine production, when this did not involve the wretched division of labour and loss of craft
talent, which they denounced. Morris designed numerous carpets for machine production in
series.
History of the movement: Red House, Bexleyheath, London (1859), by architect Philip Webb for
Morris himself, is a work exemplary of this movement in its early stages. There is a deliberate
attempt at expressing surface textures of ordinary materials, such as stone and tiles, with an
asymmetrical and quaint building composition. Morris later formed the Kelmscott Press and also
had a shop where he designed and sold products such as wallpaper, textiles, furniture, etc.
Morris's own ideas emerged from the thinking that had informed Pre-Raphaelitism, especially
following the publication of Ruskin's book The Stones of Venice and Unto this Last, both of which
sought to relate the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and
designs. The decline of rural handicrafts, corresponding to the rise of industrialised society, was a
cause for concern for many designers and social reformers, who feared the loss of traditional skills
and creativity. For Ruskin, a healthy society depended on skilled and creative workers. Morris and
other socialist designers such as Crane and Ashbee looked forward to a future society of free
craftspeople. The aesthetic movement, which emerged at the same period, fed into these ideas. In
1881 the Home Arts and Industries Association was set up by Eglantyne Louisa Jebb in
collaboration with Mary Fraser Tytler (later Mary Watts) and others to promote and protect rural
handicrafts. A group of reformist architects, followers of Arthur Mackmurdo, later established the
Art Workers Guild to promote their vision of the integration of designing and making. Crane was
elected as its president.
In America in the late 1890s, a group of Boston's most influential architects, designers, and
educators, determined to bring to this country the design reforms begun in Britain by William
Morris, met to organize an exhibition of contemporary craft objects. The first meeting was held on
January 4, 1897, at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) to organize an exhibition of contemporary
crafts. When craftsmen, consumers, and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical
potential of the applied arts, the process of design reform in Boston started. Present at this
meeting were General Charles Loring, Chairman of the Trustees of the MFA; William Sturgis
Bigelow and Denman Ross, collectors, writers and MFA trustees; Ross Turner, painter; Sylvester
Baxter, art critic for the Boston Transcript; Howard Baker, A.W. Longfellow Jr.; and Ralph Clipson
Sturgis, architect.
The first American Arts and Crafts Exhibition opened on April 5, 1897, at Copley Hall featuring
over 1000 objects made by 160 craftsmen, half of whom were women. Some of the supporters for
the exhibit were Langford Warren, founder of Harvard's School of Architecture; Mrs. Richard
Morris Hunt; Arthur Astor Carey and Edwin Mead, social reformers; and Will Bradley, graphic
designer.

The huge success of this exhibition led to the incorporation of The Society of Arts and Crafts, on
June 28, 1897, with a mandate to "develop and encourage higher standards in the handicrafts."
The 21 founders were interested in more than sales, and focused on the relationship of designers
within the commercial world, encouraging artists to produce work with the highest quality of
workmanship and design.
This mandate was soon expanded into a credo, possibly written by the SAC's first president,
Charles Eliot Norton, which read: "This Society was incorporated for the purpose of promoting
artistic work in all branches of handicraft. It hopes to bring Designers and Workmen into mutually
helpful relations, and to encourage workmen to execute designs of their own. It endeavors to
stimulate in workmen an appreciation of the dignity and value of good design; to counteract the
popular impatience of Law and Form, and the desire for over-ornamentation and specious
originality. It will insist upon the necessity of sobriety and restraint, or ordered arrangement, of due
regard for the relation between the form of an object and its use, and of harmony and fitness in the
decoration put upon it."
Europe: Widely exhibited in Europe, the Arts and Crafts movement's qualities of simplicity and
honest use of materials negating historicism inspired designers like Henry van de Velde and
movements such as Art Nouveau, the Dutch De Stijl group, Viennese Secessionstil and eventually
the Bauhaus. The movement can be assessed as a prelude to Modernism, where pure forms,
stripped of historical associations, would be once again applied to industrial production.In Russia,
Viktor Hartmann, Viktor Vasnetsov and other artists associated with Abramtsevo Colony sought to
revive the spirit and quality of medieval Russian decorative arts in the movement quite
independent from that flourishing in Great Britain.The Wiener Werksttte, founded in 1903 by
Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, played an independent role in the development of
Modernism, with its Wiener Werksttte Style.The British Utility furniture of World War II was simple
in design and based on Arts and Crafts ideas.
United States: In the United States, the Arts and Crafts Movement took on a distinctively more
bourgeois flavor. While the European movement tried to recreate the virtuous world of craft labor
that was being destroyed by industrialization, Americans tried to establish a new source of virtue
to replace heroic craft production: the tasteful middle-class home. They thought that the simple but
refined aesthetics of Arts and Crafts decorative arts would ennoble the new experience of
industrial consumerism, making individuals more rational and society more harmonious. In short,
the American Arts and Crafts Movement was the aesthetic counterpart of its contemporary political
movement: Progressivism.
In the United States, the Arts and Crafts Movement spawned a wide variety of attempts to reinterpret
European Arts and Crafts ideals for Americans. These included the "Craftsman"-style architecture, furniture,
and other decorative arts such as the designs promoted by Gustav Stickley in his magazine, The Craftsman.
A host of imitators of Stickley's furniture (the designs of which are often mislabeled the "Mission Style")
included three companies formed by his brothers, the Roycroft community founded by Elbert Hubbard, the
"Prairie School" of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Country Day School movement, the bungalow style of houses
popularized by Greene and Greene, utopian communities like Byrdcliffe and Rose Valley, and the
contemporary studio craft movement. Studio pottery exemplified by Grueby, Newcomb, Teco, Overbeck
and Rookwood pottery, Bernard Leach in Britain, and Pewabic Pottery in Detroit as well as the art tiles
by Ernest A. Batchelder in Pasadena, California, and idiosyncratic furniture of Charles Rohlfs also
demonstrate the clear influence of Arts and Crafts Movement. Mission, Prairie, and the California
Craftsman styles of homebuilding remain tremendously popular in the United States today