From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte: Marketing Domesticity with Fashionable Interior Design

Author: Rebecca Houze Year: 2006 (Intimus reprint of the essay from Design Issues, vol. 18 no. 1, Winter 2002, pp. 3–23; © 2002 MIT Press; Intimus excerpts pp. 4–23) Source type: chapter (from Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 156–162) Raw file: raw/chapters/houze-2006-wiener-kunst-im-hause.md

Summary

Houze gives a historical account of the link between design fashion and marketing in fin-de-siècle Vienna, "most profoundly asserted by the Wiener Werkstätte." Her central argument is that the success of the Secessionist campaign lay in its direction "towards the feminine": women were cast as the natural decorators of the home (the Biedermeier "artist and housewife united in a single person"), while the new style's ornament — botanical, youth-oriented, organic, extending Semper's textile-rooted Bekleidungsprinzip — was developed through and credited to women's traditional handcrafts, and then marketed as fashion through the Werkstätte's showroom-homes and the fashion press (Wiener Kunst im Hause, Wiener Mode, Das Interieur). The interior in Vienna was "regarded as a form of dressing," an account Houze traces from Semper's textile origin of the wall through both Josef Hoffmann's ornament and the anti-ornamental Adolf Loos's garment-space, which share the same theory of cladding despite Loos's hostility to the Secession. Her closing thesis: resisting and exploiting fashion were the twin poles of the modern style's emergence, and "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."

Key Claims

The editor-architect Josef Folsenics (source spelling; [Folnesics]), writing in the first issue of Das Interieur (1900), defined the "true Viennese interior" by 'Gemütlichkeit' — "a kind of cozy comfort" — epitomized by the Biedermeier style, in which "Artist and housewife were united in a single person": the young beauty who contemplated her own aesthetics in the mirror "had also, gradually… turned her home into the charming garment of her intimate life" (p. 156).
Modern architects — Otto Wagner and his students Josef Hoffmann, Josef Olbrich, Josef Urban and Otto Prutscher — embraced the Biedermeier "for its relatively simpler forms and clean lines, as well as for its association with a simpler domestic life" (p. 156).
Folsenics declared that once the (male) Secessionists had "outlined a new style," "women can return to their rightful role as interior designers" — yet he simultaneously charged women with the weakness of losing aesthetic sensibility "because of their tendency to follow fashion" in times of artistic decline, and described the new style as "much like a Viennese woman," curvy, sensuous, intimate, "ultimately more domestic than urban or cosmopolitan" (pp. 156–157) — "strong ambivalence toward women, who, on the one hand, served as models of domestic artfulness yet, on the other, were incapable of true innovation, which must be accomplished by men" (p. 157).
The journal Wiener Kunst im Hause was the "antidote to this conservative point of view": it "presented interiors that were not only designed by women, but that creatively inspired the work of male teachers at the Kunstgewerbeschule," and "provided a new model for reconciling modern art and commerce, the domestic and the urbane" (p. 157).
At the 1900 Paris Exhibition, the Kunstgewerbeschule's student room (designed by Josef Hoffmann) displayed works by female students Else Unger and Gisela von Falke "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). English critic Gabriel Mourey judged the school's display the "only truly modern and national style," crediting its "fresh and cohesive quality" to the rejection of all past and foreign influences and to "their peculiar mode of exhibiting complete 'interiors' rather than individual works" (p. 157).
Else Unger's carved secretary desk in a hydrangea motif was the exhibition's favorite object; it used "the curvilinearity and botanical patterns that had come to be associated with the modern movement in Vienna, and with 'secessionist style' in particular." Critic Ludwig Hevesi: "The motifs are taken from less frequently tread areas of botany… The plants are seen with freer eyes and depicted in a fresh, ornamental mood" — freshness and aliveness set against "the static, more historically based works of just a few years before" (p. 157).
The Secession's program proclaimed "youth, growth, and organic rejuvenation" with the motto 'Ver Sacrum' (Sacred Spring) — a Roman ritual allusion (the secessio plebis): by seceding from the Academy's exhibiting society, the young artists "pledged themselves to save culture from their elders" (p. 157 and n. 7, p. 161).
The Paris room's most striking feature — oversized ornamental motifs in appliqué textiles, the traditional embroidery technique "extended to cover the walls as well" — revealed a growing interest in "textiles and traditional handwork not only as decorative objects to be incorporated into designed rooms, but as models for the organic, flexible dressing of an interior space" (pp. 157–158).
The textile 'dressings' applied to the pavilion walls relate directly to Gottfried Semper's Bekleidungsprinzip (Principle of Dress), "of theoretical significance to Otto Wagner and his students, including Josef Hoffmann": for Semper the textile arts were "the earliest form of man's art-making tendency" — woven mats hung to divide space "eventually became structural walls, which retained the woven texture of fiber in new materials, such as brick or stone" — and lace, tapestry and embroidery, as "the seeds of artistic creativity," took a central role in applied-arts reform institutionalized at the Oesterreichisches Museum under Semper's advice (he brought his ideas to Vienna in 1864) (p. 158).
When the first Wiener Werkstätte showrooms opened in 1904, they adopted the well-furnished-home model of Wiener Kunst im Hause: soft carpets, armchairs in artistic textiles, fashion illustrations on the walls, and "felt-covered floors" on which ladies trying on clothing "could walk around the shop barefoot comfortably" — display staged as domestic interior rather than shop (p. 158).
Wealthy Secession patrons Fredericke Maria Beer and Sonja Knips (both painted by Gustav Klimt; both commissioned Hoffmann-designed, Werkstätte-outfitted apartments) "enacted the turn-of-the-century 'Gesamtkunstwerk,' in which the domestic living space became a theater of modern life" — structure, interior, furnishings and the inhabitants' costume "conceived as a single aesthetic statement," the concept originating "in the operas of Richard Wagner" (p. 158).
The Palais Stoclet (Brussels, 1905–11) is "the best-known example of the secessionist Gesamtkunstwerk": its dining and music rooms exemplified "the theatrical spaces of the Gesamtkunstwerk, celebrating sight, sound, and taste in a symphony of sensual harmonies"; Hoffmann, "particularly attuned to fashion," even "design[ed] a dress for Madame Stoclet so that she would not clash with her living room décor" (p. 158).
Adolf Loos, though "extremely hostile towards the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte… especially for the latter's reliance on excessive ornamentation," shared Hoffmann's understanding of the interior as a form of dress: both grew "out of the same architectural theories of cladding introduced by Gottfried Semper in the mid-nineteenth century, and further developed by Otto Wagner in the early twentieth" (p. 159). Loos's interiors, via Simmel, "allow one to display one's individuality, while assuming a degree of anonymity; they are both public and private; and domestic and urban" (p. 159).
Loos's "The Principle of Cladding" repeats Semper's theory: the architect's first task is "to provide a warm and livable space" (carpets on the floor, four hung to form the walls); the second is "to invent his frame" — "you cannot build a house out of carpets" (p. 159). Like Folsenics's 'gemütlich' interior, Loos desired a "warm and livable" one; the interior is "a private, domestic, feminine space – a space for intimate conversation, sexual relations, and reproduction… a protective refuge from the public space of the modern city, yet it also mediates between the two realms" — bedrooms the most intimate and feminine, dining room and library "coded masculine," the salon a boundary space where women socialized "dressed in more relaxed and intimate garments" (p. 159).
"The Wiener Werkstätte's fashionability was the secret of its success": the close relation between a specifically feminine dressing up in fancy clothes and dressing up the home "had its roots in the national Austrian decorative arts institutions, which fostered and promoted women's traditional textile arts, and recognized women's traditional role in home decoration" (p. 159).
Around 1908, Wiener Mode ran embroidery and textile designs "for comprehensive room decorations" on its back covers — colorful or black-and-white geometric motifs. Though such unattributed popular designs "may be seen as a dilution of the modernist secession style," they "cannot simply be understood as the last step in the decline of artistic idea to popular culture": the fashion magazine as a vehicle "for perpetuating both commerce and culture" was already in place when the Secessionists began marketing through the Werkstätte — Hoffmann, Kolo Moser and their students "responded to this mechanism as much as it responded to them" (p. 160).
In her note on Christopher Long's account of interwar Gemütlichkeit (Oskar Strnad, Josef Frank) as a reaction against Bauhaus-style functionalism, Houze argues the Wiener Werkstätte's general interest in domestic design "stemmed from the same Viennese desire for Gemütlichkeit" — not only from rectilinear formal unity (n. 3, p. 161).
The headnote (editors): Houze shows the Secessionist campaign "inadvertently moulded the woman of the house as a spatial artist," conflating that role "with the endorsement of visual imagery from botany, youth and organic forms," whose ornament became "the trademark for interior design… regarded as a form of dressing"; she "places interior design at the centre of the tussle between art, craft and design" (p. 156).

Connections

Concepts: gesamtkunstwerk, gemutlichkeit, biedermeier, secessionist-style, interior-as-garment, wiener-werkstatte, law-of-cladding, design-reform, the-decorative, fashion, style, consumerism, domestic-interior, gender-and-the-interior, woman-as-decoration, interior-design, comfort, flexible-interior, modernism, historiography-of-the-interior

Authors: houze-rebecca, loos-adolf, simmel-georg, taylor-mark-preston-julieanna

Debates: ornament-vs-purity, tradition-vs-innovation, interior-design-vs-architecture, werkbund-debate

Related source notes: A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the same Semper/Riegl lineage and the Loos interior/exterior split; A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the Law of Cladding's imitation hinge; Woman's Domestic Body (Gordon 1996/2006) — the woman/interior/dress conflation whose Viennese register Houze supplies; Household Furniture (Hope 1807/2006) and The Dining Room (Eastlake 1868/2006) — the reform lineage's Anglo-American wing; A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the gendered/raced reading of a Loos interior; Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006)

Direct Quotes

"Its most significant characteristic, he writes, is 'Gemütlichkeit,' a kind of cozy comfort." (p. 156)

"Artist and housewife were united in a single person. Just as the young beauty could spend hours alone in front of the mirror, in deep, naive, contemplation of aesthetic questions – which hairstyle, which posture best suited her – so had she also, gradually, according to her aesthetic experience, turned her home into the charming garment of her intimate life." (p. 156 — Folsenics, quoted)

"'These men have outlined a new style,' Folsenics wrote, in the same article, 'and now women can return to their rightful role as interior designers.'" (p. 156)

"This new style, in fact, Folsenics wrote, 'is much like a Viennese woman,' curvy and sensuous, yet intimate and ultimately more domestic than urban or cosmopolitan." (p. 157)

"Wiener Kunst im Hause provided a new model for reconciling modern art and commerce, the domestic and the urbane." (p. 157)

"The motifs are taken from less frequently tread areas of botany… The plants are seen with freer eyes and depicted in a fresh, ornamental mood." (p. 157 — Hevesi, quoted)

"Woven mats, for example, which were originally hung to divide the space of a room, eventually became structural walls, which retained the woven texture of fiber in new materials, such as brick or stone." (p. 158)

"These patrons enacted the turn-of-the-century 'Gesamtkunstwerk,' in which the domestic living space became a theater of modern life." (p. 158)

"In his designs for the Palais Stoclet, Hoffmann was particularly attuned to fashion and to the Viennese identity of the new style of interior, even designing a dress for Madame Stoclet so that she would not clash with her living room décor." (p. 158)

"The architect's general task is to provide a warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. He decides for this reason to spread out one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent his frame is the architect's second task." (p. 159 — Loos, 'The Principle of Cladding', quoted)

"Loos's interiors simultaneously, as George Simmel suggests, allow one to display one's individuality, while assuming a degree of anonymity; they are both public and private; and domestic and urban." (p. 159)

"The Wiener Werkstätte's fashionability was the secret of its success. The close relationship between a specifically feminine dressing up in fancy clothes and dressing up the home in a splendid garment had its roots in the national Austrian decorative arts institutions, which fostered and promoted women's traditional textile arts, and recognized women's traditional role in home decoration." (p. 159)

"Rather, the popular fashion magazine as a vehicle for perpetuating both commerce and culture already was well in place by the time the Secessionists began to market their new designs through the Wiener Werkstätte." (p. 160)

"The design of artistic interiors and furnishings, and the marketing of fashionable goods, must be seen, rather, as a complementary process that allowed both ends to fuel one another creatively." (p. 160)

"The modernist interest in textile arts and interior design in Vienna would not have emerged and blossomed as it did had it not been for the constant driving force of fashion, which provided a space for women to engage physically, either as designers or consumers, with the aestheticization of themselves and their living spaces through cloth and needlework." (p. 160)

"A domestic comfort was recovered in Vienna at the turn of the century by physically wrapping living spaces in pieces of embroidered cloth. The garment – especially the feminine garment – was a common metaphor for the interior living space at the turn of the century." (p. 160)

"The textile-based style of interior decoration promoted by Wiener Kunst im Hause and perpetuated by the Wiener Werkstätte was derived from women's traditional handcrafts, which the Secessionists admired, imitated, relied upon, and fostered in their educational programs, publications, and exhibitions." (p. 160)

Open Questions

If "the design of artistic interiors and furnishings, and the marketing of fashionable goods" were "a complementary process that allowed both ends to fuel one another creatively" (p. 160), can the standard art-history hierarchy (original workshop design vs. diluting popularization) survive at all — or is every modern style partly a marketing phenomenon? See secessionist-style, consumerism.
Folsenics granted women an "innate talent" for home beautification but denied them "true innovation" (p. 157); yet Houze shows Wiener Kunst im Hause's women designers inspiring the male teachers. Does the "spatial artist" role the editors say the campaign "inadvertently moulded" (p. 156) mark the historical limit of the decorator/innovator split the interior-design-vs-architecture debate still runs on?
The Semper lineage makes women's handcrafts the "seeds of artistic creativity" (p. 158) while Loos's cladding doctrine polices surface imitation (see law-of-cladding). Is the Law of Cladding — posed as a neutral materials rule — also a gendered exclusion of the textile/ornamental economy Hofmann's Vienna embraced? Houze's evidence (Loos and Hoffmann sharing the cladding theory) cuts both ways.
Hoffmann designed Madame Stoclet's dress so she "would not clash with her living room décor" (p. 158) — the Gesamtkunstwerk consuming the inhabitant's costume. Where is the limit of the total design, and is the woman inside it a co-designer (see woman-as-decoration) or its final ornament?
Houze's Gemütlichkeit note (n. 3) folds the Wiener Werkstätte itself into the Viennese desire for cozy comfort rather than into proto-functionalist rectilinearity (n. 3, p. 161). How much of the canonical functionalist genealogy of modern design — the Werkstätte's grid as proto-Bauhaus — does this dissolve? See gemutlichkeit, modernism.
The excerpt is heavily elided ("(… p 6)", "(… p 7)", "(… p 21)"); the original 2002 article (pp. 3–23) contains arguments on the journals' full run — including, presumably, the chronological development of Wiener Kunst im Hause and Wiener Mode between 1901 and 1908 — that the reprint omits. What is lost in the elisions?