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

ity against postmodern overkill of images and fragmentation. And not for nothing
Zumthor’s all-encompassing design is primarily present in indoor spaces—like
the Thermal Bath in Vals—similar to van de Velde’s meticulously crafted Gesamtkunstwerk
interiors.
If van de Velde turns against the mechanical reproduction of historic objects and
styles, then Zumthor rallies against the untrustworthiness of the things close to
us, against fakeness, irony, quotation, medialization, and digital simulation of our
second (reflexive?) modernity. While van de Velde constructs for modern man a
shelter against the “ugliness” and “amorality” of contemporaneous society with abstract
references of nature and psychological “lines of force,” aiming for a renewed
“Greek serenity” and “harmony,” it is Zumthor who searches to create “things” of
an implicitness that transcends to meditative spirituality against the all too banal
experiences of everyday life. This ethical impetus of both architects asks for some
consideration: the aim for a synthesis of the arts under exclusion of all so-called
disruptive effects, even if restricted on the limited range of the interior, carries the
allegation of control and totality (if not to say totalitarianism). Or at least the accusation
of reactionary retreat into the inner self, if we follow Walter Benjamin’s caricature
of the Art Nouveau interior as the last refuge of bourgeois interiority. 2 And
how should one understand the rhetoric of authenticity, authorship, and handcrafted
quality? Or the heavily evoked return to the (anonymous) origins, to immediacy
and to sensuality? Especially when hyper-modern technology is deployed
to achieve these effects: van de Velde uses visible iron trusses as well as reinforced
concrete and experiments with electrical light fixtures integrated into ceilings and
furniture. Zumthor operates with the most advanced building technology (as seen
in the Kunsthaus Bregenz with its free span concrete floors, and the light design
by Zumthobel blurring between “natural” and “artificial”), as well as custom-made
structural designs or high-tech material solutions, in order to stage sensual atmospheres,
where the means disappear behind the searched for effects respectively are
sublated and transcended.
If Wagner had already envisioned the Gesamtkunstwerk as a unification of the
arts in the music drama (in the footsteps of Attic tragedy) in connection with an
alternative, communitarian social order—what do the two architects say about
their political aspirations? Shall one read their holistic designed spaces as political
reactionary, as Benjamin and other Marxian critics have suspected, as insular
phantasies of well-to-do individuals, which actually hinder social change? Or shall
one interpret these designs as islands of utopia, built to prove that alternative ways
of life as much as alternative practices are possible, even within the given societal
conditions?
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