2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

design as well as an embroiderer with work held in national and
international collecting institutio
8. The Social-Individualistic Man: Walter Gropius and
Franz Müller-Lyer
Dr Tanja Poppelreuter
This paper addresses the question of how architects during the
1920s in Northern Europe (most prominently Germany) tried to
affect, educate and “better” residents of their tenements. This
endeavour was closely related to the idea of a New Man, who
could be shaped with the help of the rational and objective
“New Architecture“. That New Man was about to emerge was a
widely accepted thought and had proponents from the medical
as well as sociological and psychological sciences. The New
Man as usually associated with the blue-collar worker who lived
in the overgrown cities, in small, unhygienic and thus unhealthy
tenements. The New Man represented a new class in society
whose needs and lifestyle were believed to have changed and
therefore no longer fit into traditional patterns. In the course
of the discussion that circled around the question of which
architecture would be the healthiest, another topic emerged.
The development of new architecture provided planners with an
opportunity to directly influence not only the health but also the
lifestyle and morals of these New Men.
To help with the latter subject sociologists, philosophers and
doctors were sought to provide prognoses on how society
would change in the near future. During the late 1920s architects
utilized those theories that described the changes in the mental,
sociological or psychological condition of the New Man. The
German architect Walter Gropius, for example, developed in
1929 a 10-storey tenement for this purpose. Gropius followed the
description of a New Man and the ways in which he would form
a new society that had been proposed by the sociologist Franz
Müller-Lyer. Gropius described the concept as an adaptation
to the changing social order, and his tenement was just one
example of many which were aimed at renewing man and society.
Critics however judged these attempts as arrogant and quixotic.
Helmuth Plessner, for example, criticises the objective new
architecture as having created a “Pole of coldness”. The efforts
to create a hygienic and healthy environment that would enhance
moral and lifestyle resulted – in Plessner’s reading – in inhumane
spaces that leave no room for individuality.
Tanja Poppelreuter is a Lecturer in the Art History Department
at Auckland University. She has previously worked as a Lecturer
at Unitec, Auckland, School of Architecture and Landscape
Architecture SCALA (part-time) since 2007. Her PhD thesis,
Das Neue Bauen fuer den Neuen Menschen, completed through
Frankfurt University, was published in 2007. She held a full time
scholarship from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 1999-2002.
9. Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale: The Poetics of the
Colonial Object
Dr D.J. Huppatz
In June 2007, Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated aluminium bungalow
known as the Maison Tropicale, was sold at auction in New York
for $4,968,000. While the multi-million dollar price tag attracted
newspaper headlines, from a design perspective, critics highlighted
Prouvé’s innovative design that utilized industrial technologies and
prefabrication techniques. Indeed, a factory-produced metallic house
such as the Maison Tropicale seemed to embody Le Corbusier’s
description of the modern house as a “machine for living in”, and
recent criticism has confirmed the Maison’s identity as an icon
of industrial modernism. However, while the Maison Tropicale
continues to be lauded as an exemplary industrial object, its identity
as a colonial object remains obscured. Prouvé’s Atelier designed
and fabricated the Maison in 1951 specifically for French colonies
in sub-Saharan Africa. Design history currently lacks a suitable
interpretive framework for understanding an artifact such as the
Maison Tropicale, an interpretative framework that could incorporate
the complexity of not only its design and manufacture, but also its
shifting meaning on its trajectory from France to colonial Africa fifty
years ago.
This paper analyses Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale as a colonial object,
both in the postwar French colonial context. A major touring
exhibition, Jean Prouvé: the Poetics of the Technical Object,
originating in Germany’s Vitra Design Museum in 2005 (and currently
still touring), both pre-empted and confirmed this interpretation of
the Maison Tropicale. In addition, the 2008 exhibition, Home Delivery:
Fabricating the Modern Dwelling at New York’s Museum of Modern
Art, featured the Maison Tropicale in the context of European and
American prefabricated housing in which it was designed and
manufactured, and in the context of its more recent “rescue” from
the Republic of Congo and subsequent display in the contemporary
capitals of design culture, New York, London, and Paris.
D.J. Huppatz is the Program Coordinator of the Interior Design
program at Swinburne University of Technology’s Faculty of Design.
He publishes on design history, contemporary art, literature and
architecture.
9