The Death and Life of the Total Work of Art – Henry van de Velde and the Legacy of a Modern Concept

with a cooking nook,” were “not simply commensurate variants and alternatives”—
rather each corresponded “to a different lifestyle and a different social content” and
represented “a manifestation of a different cultural level and a different socially
determined world.” 20 Teige and Meyer both believed they were effecting political
change by refuting bourgeois individualism absolutely—they, like other modern
architects, believed that carefully designed spaces would allow for a new kind of
society to emerge—but they, and others, were, effectively, simply creating another
way of thinking about design that could and would be appropriated by the middle
and upper classes.
Gropius’s architectural office had also been working on the issue just before his
emigration in 1934 (although in a vein more directed towards solving needs pragmatically
through modern means, without the strong political convictions behind
Meyer or Teige’s assessment of mass housing and production). In an unpublished
manuscript titled “Minimal Dwelling and Tower Block” (1934), Gropius advocated
a reduction in floor space in part achieved by increasing the window size so
that the overall room size could be decreased. He summed up with a call for an
“objective minimum and a standard dwelling unit.” 21 In collaboration with Franz
Möller, a former employee who had emigrated to Buenos Aires, he proposed the
“Gropius Standard,” a small, one-bedroom unit. 22
Existenzminimum as a problem for both architects and planners was also discussed
collectively in professionalized environments. For example, the second CIAM
(Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) met in Frankfurt in 1929, taking
up as its theme “Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum,” the problem of the
minimal dwelling. There, important protagonists of the modern movement offered
solutions. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, promoted “standardization, industrialization,
and taylorization,” while Frankfurt architect and city planner Ernst May
appealed for affordable rental units “just satisfying the material and mental needs
of their occupants.” 23
Gropius, lecturing at the congress on the “Sociological Foundations of the Minimum
Dwelling,” described a process in which households were splitting up into
smaller units and called for a commensurate increase in the number of ever-smaller,
self-contained dwelling units. 24 He also acknowledged the inherent difficulties in
getting the populace to embrace architects’ and planners’ new proposals for living,
noting that the modern industrial population of the city originated from the
countryside. These new urban dwellers, he lamented, lived as yet in a reduced form
in the city, retaining earlier “primitive demands upon life,” rather than adhering
to “the totality of the new form of life.” 25 Like Meyer and Teige, Gropius believed
that modern life might be transformed through mass production, standardization,
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