Total Design of Everyday Life: Historical Ideals and Dilemmas of the Gesamtkunstwerk

Description

The all-embracing ideal of designing the human environment throughout any scale was not only central to the high modern- ism of the 1950s, where Rogers spoke of ‘from spoon to city’ and Eero Saarinen men- tioned the scales from city plan to ash tray in 1959 (Saarinen 1962), and where Walter Gropius unfolded the Scope of Total Ar- chitecture (1955) and László Moholy-Nagy had announced ‘design-for-life’ a bit earlier. This kind of motto goes further back to Hermann Muthesius describing the ambi- tions and scope of activities of the German Werkbund as ranging ‘from sofa-cushions to city-building’ in 1911. (Muthesius 1911) The Werkbund inherited this line of think- ing from the more utopian tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk going back to Gottfried Semper and Richard Wagner and the later attempt to merge art and life in Jugendstil interiors and avant-garde experiments. The mix of artistic scrutiny and all-embrac- ing ideals sharpened the focus on minute details of everyday life, on spoons, ashtrays and sofa-cushions as part of overarching designs, plans and visions.
This heritage, however, also displayed se- vere dilemmas, and there has been an
ongoing critique and challenging of the ide- als through this tradition, e.g. Adolf Loos’ caricatures of the daily life to be expected to unfold in Secessionist interiors designed as total works of art. I will discuss cases of very different artists and designers investi- gating the dilemmas of the all-embracing design of everyday life from Peter Behrens, Kurt Schwitters and László Moholy-Nagy to Constant. This line of thinking design in totalities developed very effective creative tools to embrace design, organization and communication of everyday life across the scales of modern society. Through this, art, design and architecture could enrich life – but they could also frame and program ev- eryday life too tightly for the environments to be livable. The merging of art and life is a delicate balance. The ideal might be to serve and empower peoples, but it often turns the same people into fixed parts of a finished ‘work’ rather than independent participants of the ensemble.

Period	12. May 2023
Event title	Designing Everyday Experiences: Objects-Environments-Habits
Event type	Conference
Location	Budapest, HungaryShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International