Gemütlichkeit

Definition

Gemütlichkeit — "a kind of cozy comfort" — names the specifically Viennese ideal of domestic interiority that editor-architect Josef Folsenics (source spelling) made "the most significant characteristic" of "a 'true Viennese interior'" in the first issue of Das Interieur (1900) (Houze, p. 156). The concept is comfort elevated from a bodily provision to a national-interior identity: the gemütlich interior is warm, liveable, intimate and enveloping — in the early nineteenth century "epitomized by the Biedermeier style," in which "Artist and housewife were united in a single person" and the home was "the charming garment of [the] intimate life" (p. 156). Houze's crucial historical claim is the concept's continuity through modernism: Adolf Loos's demand for a "'warm and livable' interior space" (p. 159) is the same desire in modern dress, and — against the reading of the Werkstätte's rectilinear interiors as proto-functionalist — "the workshop's general interest in domestic design stemmed from the same Viennese desire for Gemütlichkeit that Long suggests was at the root of the more popular and eclectic designs by Oskar Strnad and Josef Frank between the world wars" (n. 3, p. 161, responding to Christopher Long). Gemütlichkeit is thus the constant beneath Vienna's stylistic turns: the interior as warm refuge, "physically wrapp[ed]… in pieces of embroidered cloth," recovered "at the turn of the century" as "a domestic comfort" against the modern city (p. 160).

The concept differs from the generic comfort of the Anglo-American advice literature: comfort there is specified (light placement, heat control, economy — de Wolfe, the Beechers); Gemütlichkeit is atmospheric and national — a character the interior has, defined against the urban and the cosmopolitan ("ultimately more domestic than urban," p. 157), and its criterion is the inhabitant's psychological enfoldment.

Key Thinkers

• Rebecca Houze — the concept's historian (2002/2006): Gemütlichkeit as the through-line from Biedermeier coziness to Loos's "warm and livable" interior and the Werkstätte's textile wrapping; the counter-reading of the Werkstätte as Gemütlichkeit-driven rather than proto-functionalist (n. 3).
• Josef Folsenics (Folnesics) — the concept's definitional voice (1900): the "true Viennese interior" whose essence is cozy comfort; women's innate talent for producing it; and the ambivalence that makes women its natural keepers but denies them innovation. (Not yet paged — see log.)
• Adolf Loos — the concept's modernist form: "Just as Josef Folsenics called for a 'gemütlich' Viennese interior, Loos desired a 'warm and livable' interior space. This interior must be comforting and sensual, allowing the viewer or inhabitant to respond to it physically and psychologically" (p. 159).
• Christopher Long — the interwar historian whose "Wiener Wohnkultur" (1997–98) reads post-war Gemütlichkeit (Strnad, Frank) as reaction against Bauhaus functionalism — the account Houze extends backwards to the Werkstätte itself. (Not yet paged — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Comfort — the generic provision-side concept (light, heat, seat); Gemütlichkeit is its atmospheric-national intensification.
• Biedermeier — the style in which the gemütlich interior was "epitomized"; the historical anchor of the modern revival.
• Domestic Interior — the site: the interior as refuge "from the public space of the modern city, yet… also mediat[ing] between the two realms" (p. 159).
• Interior as Garment — the concept's material technique: coziness physically produced "by physically wrapping living spaces in pieces of embroidered cloth" (p. 160).
• Separate Spheres — the gender structure beneath the ideal: the gemütlich interior is "a private, domestic, feminine space" (p. 159), its coziness assigned to women as innate talent.
• Gesamtkunstwerk — the concept's maximal form: Gemütlichkeit totalized into the Werkstätte's coordinated aesthetic environment.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the concept's source: Folsenics's definition ("a kind of cozy comfort," p. 156); the Biedermeier epitome and the housewife-artist (p. 156); the new style "much like a Viennese woman… ultimately more domestic than urban or cosmopolitan" (p. 157); Loos's "warm and livable" interior as the same desire (p. 159); the interior as "private, domestic, feminine space… a protective refuge" (p. 159); comfort recovered "by physically wrapping living spaces in pieces of embroidered cloth" (p. 160); and the note extending Gemütlichkeit's career from the Werkstätte to the interwar Strnad/Frank reaction against functionalism (n. 3, p. 161).

Open Questions

• Is Gemütlichkeit a design criterion (producible by plan, textile and warmth) or an ideology (the feminine-coded refuge that keeps women decorating)? Folsenics's text performs both at once — coziness as the woman's talent and as her confinement.
• Houze folds the Wiener Werkstätte into the Gemütlichkeit tradition (n. 3) and thereby into the same lineage as Loos's "warm and livable" interior. Does the concept dissolve the ornament hostility that structures ornament-vs-purity — adversaries in doctrine, allies in coziness?
• The concept is national ("a true Viennese interior," "the only truly modern and national style," Mourey, p. 157). Can a comfort-ideal be national without essentializing — and what happens to Gemütlichkeit when Viennese interiors are exported (the Werkstätte's international showrooms, Stoclet's Brussels)?
• Gemütlichkeit vs. the modernist purge: the same fabric-filled, textile-wrapped interior that Batchelor's sources demolished as decoration was, in Vienna, the definition of home. Is the wiki's natural-palette regime intelligible as an anti-Gemütlichkeit campaign?