Technik und Kultur: The German Architectural Discourse on Iron, 1890-1918

By exposing the social, cultural, and ideological motives underpinning Wilhelmine architectural thought and practice, recent scholarship has revealed the complexity and paradox that often characterize this period (1890-1918). One area of investigation that has received little critical attention, however, is the meaning of iron for the architectural profession. Iron, as portrayed in existing historical scholarship, is still redolent of a mythic modernism, one in which architects readily replaced traditional modalities with those of modern science, technology, and industry. By examining the Wilhelmine architectural discourse on iron, however, one encounters an important moment in which the German architectural profession was forced to negotiate a position between modernization and the humanist values and traditional cultural ideals of their practice. Although iron was critical to the architectural renewal that many architects and critics supported, they found that iron's connections to industry and modern scientific thought made it, according to contemporary cultural criticism, an unwelcome symbol of Germany's loss of indigenous romantic values to the forces of modernity. Confronting this cultural dilemma, many promoters of iron adopted a "neoromantic" rhetoric in their writings that accommodated both avant-garde transformation and romantic cultural ideals. Contributors to this published discourse-Albert Hofmann, Hermann Muthesius, Friedrich Naumann, Alfred Gotthold Meyer, Joseph August Lux, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Peter Behrens, and Walter Gropius among others-praised iron's sachlich character while encoding their architectural discussions with such romantic, Volk ideals as subjectivity and intuition. Architectural theory was not, however, the only body of literature to engage in this project. The profession of engineering, whose cultural standing was also compromised by critical assessments of modernization, similarly faced the predicament that iron may signify qualities wholly out of character with Germany's cultural values. Sharing strategies for depicting the practice of their professions as culturally apposite, members of the fields of engineering and architecture engaged in a fluid discourse on iron as a medium of modern progress and romantic identity.