Wiener Werkstätte

Definition

The Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop, founded 1903; showrooms opened 1904) names the Secessionist design workshop whose historical significance, in Houze's account, is not its forms but its marketing mechanism: it was the first modern design enterprise whose product was the coordinated fashionable interior — "the link between design fashion and marketing… most profoundly asserted by the Wiener Werkstätte" (p. 156). Three claims define the concept. The showroom-as-home: the Werkstätte's first showrooms "adopted the model of the well-furnished home, which had been used by Wiener Kunst im Hause" — soft carpets, armchairs "upholstered in artistic textiles," chic fashion illustrations on the walls, "felt-covered floors" on which ladies trying on clothing "could walk around the shop barefoot comfortably" — display staged as domestic interior, inviting customers to "mentally design their own aesthetically coordinated homes" (p. 158). The fashionability thesis: "The Wiener Werkstätte's fashionability was the secret of its success" (p. 159) — the workshop's product range ran "from draperies, upholstery fabrics, and carpets to dishes, light fixtures, silverware, and shoes," spanning room and costume as one purchase. The complementary process: the Werkstätte's marketing "cannot simply be understood as the last step in the decline of artistic idea to popular culture"; rather, "the design of artistic interiors and furnishings, and the marketing of fashionable goods, must be seen… as a complementary process that allowed both ends to fuel one another creatively" (p. 160) — designers "responded to this mechanism as much as it responded to them."

The workshop thereby marks the historical threshold at which the modern interior became a branded ensemble — the ancestor of the design showroom, the coordinated lifestyle purchase, and the designer's total control of environment and costume (the Palais Stoclet, Madame Stoclet's dress). It also marks the design-reform movement's commercial destiny: the reform that began by attacking trade fashion ends, in Vienna, by organizing it.

Key Thinkers

• Rebecca Houze — the workshop's marketing historian (2002/2006): the fashionability thesis, the showroom-as-home, the complementary process, the Gemütlichkeit counter-reading (n. 3).
• Josef Hoffmann — the workshop's co-founder and designer: the Paris 1900 room, the showrooms' domestic staging, the patrons' apartments, the Palais Stoclet and Madame Stoclet's dress. (Not yet paged — see log.)
• Kolo (Koloman) Moser — the workshop's co-founder, who with Hoffmann and their students "responded to this mechanism as much as it responded to them" (p. 160). (Not yet paged — see log.)
• Adolf Loos — the workshop's hostile contemporary: his attack on its "excessive ornamentation" coexisting with a shared cladding theory (p. 159).
• Fredericke Maria Beer and Sonja Knips — the workshop's model patrons: Klimt sitters whose Hoffmann apartments and Werkstätte outfits "enacted the turn-of-the-century 'Gesamtkunstwerk'" (p. 158). (Not yet paged — see log.)

Related Concepts

• Secessionist Style — the workshop's style-product: the botanical trademark the showrooms sold.
• Gesamtkunstwerk — the workshop's maximal product: the coordinated home as total work of art, purchased room by room and garment by garment.
• Interior as Garment — the workshop's merchandise logic: interiors and dresses as one dressed system ("from draperies… to… shoes").
• Gemütlichkeit — the workshop's experiential product: domestic comfort, not functional rectitude — Houze's counter-reading against the proto-Bauhaus genealogy (n. 3, p. 161).
• Design Reform — the workshop's movement-frame and its irony: reform of trade fashion accomplished as the fashion trade's refinement.
• Consumerism — the workshop's mechanism: demand created by staging consumption as identity ("mentally design their own aesthetically coordinated homes").
• The Decorative — the workshop's stock-in-trade: ornament, textiles and dress — the "feminine" pole of design, organized into a modern enterprise.

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: the showrooms' well-furnished-home model and barefoot felt floors (p. 158); the patrons' enactment of the Gesamtkunstwerk (p. 158); "The Wiener Werkstätte's fashionability was the secret of its success" (p. 159); the Wiener Mode back-cover designs and the complementary process (p. 160); the workshop's roots in "the national Austrian decorative arts institutions" and women's handcrafts (p. 159); and the n. 3 counter-reading of its domestic design as Gemütlichkeit-driven (p. 161).

Open Questions

• Is the Werkstätte the origin point of the "designed lifestyle" — the coordinated purchase of room, object and garment that the wiki's consumerism and iconic-architecture clusters later theorize? Houze's complementary-process thesis makes 1900s Vienna, not postwar America, the plausible founding scene.
• The workshop's gender paradox: its success was built on women's handcrafts and women's consumption, yet its celebrated designers are men. Is the Werkstätte the clearest historical instance of a masculine modernism industrially dependent on a feminine decorative economy (see gender-and-the-interior)?
• Houze resists the "dilution" reading of the unattributed Wiener Mode room designs (p. 160). If popularization is constitutive rather than derivative, can the workshop's canonical design history (the numbered objects, the named designers) survive — or must it be rewritten as one node in a fashion system?
• The showroom-as-home dissolves the boundary between shop, museum and dwelling: objects displayed "as if arranged in a private home, rather than for sale in a department store, or as permanent exhibits of an art museum" (p. 157). Does the Werkstätte therefore also found the retail-theatrical interior the wiki's post-retail-space and museum pages describe — the domestication of commerce as a design strategy?
• Craft or industry? The workshop produced handmade luxury objects at artisanal prices while adopting industrial-age marketing. Where does it stand on the wiki's craft/industry axis — the last great craft enterprise or the first lifestyle brand — and does the either/or fail for it?