Before the Bauhaus - (Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity) by John V Maciuika (Paperback)

Number of Pages: 402
Genre: Architecture
Sub-Genre: History
Series Title: Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Age Range: Adult
Book theme: General
Author: John V Maciuika
Language: English

About the Book

Before the Bauhaus reevaluates the political, architectural, and artistic cultures of pre-World War I Germany.

Book Synopsis

Before the Bauhaus reevaluates the political, architectural, and artistic cultures of pre-World War I Germany. As contradictory and conflict-ridden as the German Second Reich itself, the world of architects, craftsmen and applied-arts "artists" were not immune to the expansionist, imperialist, and capitalist struggles that transformed Germany in the quarter-century leading up to the First World War. In this study, John Maciuika brings together architectural and design history, political history, social and cultural geography. He substantially revises our understanding of the roots of the Bauhaus and, by extension, the historical roots of twentieth-century German architecture and design. His book sheds new light on hotly contested debates pertaining to the history of Germany in the pre-World War I era, notably the issues surrounding "modernity" and "anti-modernity" in Wilhelmine Germany, the character and effectiveness of the government administration, and the role played by the nation's most important architects, members of the rising bourgeois class, in challenging the traditional aristocracy at the top of the new German economic and social order.

Review Quotes

Maciuika is well-informed and writes in a clear and scholarly way.
-Architectural Review

Maciuka's book provides a long overdue account of some of the diverse tenets of the modern movement in German architecture and design that foregrounds the important interplay between individual reform efforts and state institutions....an invaluable contribution to the historiography of central European architecture and design that will hopefully trigger further studies of this crucial moment....
-Sabine Wieber, Birkbeck College, University of London, H-German