‘Out of All That Is Alive and Felt’: The Austrian Werkbund and the Design of Social Democracy

Abstract

This article analyses the interior designs of the Austrian Werkbund in the context of political designs for social democracy, focussing particularly on the 1932 Werkbundsiedlung as a site of aesthetic and cultural inclusion. By embracing the vernacular idioms of Central and Eastern European folk art, the Historicist style associated with nineteenth-century Austrian imperialism and the innovations of modern technology, the Werkbund represented an attempt to come to terms with the cultural legacy of the empire and to define the future of the Austrian state. In doing so, a comfortable, decidedly sentimental approach to design came to function as a site of encounter between history and ethnicity, offering a visual continuity between pre-1918 imperial Vienna and inter-war Red Vienna. Werkbund designers such as Josef Frank, Paul Fischel, Heinrich Kulka, Adolf Loos, Heinz Siller and Oskar Wlach were thus well positioned to contribute to the programme of eclectic decoration that was sponsored by the social democratic welfare initiatives of 1920s and 1930s Vienna.