Deutscher Werkbund vs Machine Art
ドイツ工作連盟 / マシン・アート
Both sit in Modern Design Movements, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Deutscher Werkbund
The alliance of artists and industry that made the quality and form of manufactured goods a national project. Behrens's work for AEG prefigured corporate design; the Weissenhof housing exhibition became modernism's showroom.
Machine Art
The name of an exhibition the Museum of Modern Art held in New York from March to April 1934. Springs, pots and pans and scientific instruments, all factory made and all utilitarian, were placed on pedestals and treated as sculpture. Philip Johnson screened the walls and ceilings of the museum's nineteenth century brownstone to hide its mouldings, so that undecorated objects could be seen against nothing.
| Deutscher Werkbund | Machine Art | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1907–1938 / 1950– | 1934 |
| Family | Modern Design Movements | Modern Design Movements |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Standardization with quality / Art allied with industry / Prototype of corporate identity / Experimental housing exhibitions | Utilitarian factory parts set out one to a pedestal, spaced apart / Mouldings on walls and ceilings screened over, leaving a background with no pattern in it / The objects are springs, pans and instruments, things never made to be looked at / Manufacturers' names standing where an artist's name would normally go |
| Best used for | Aligning products, printed matter and buildings under one corporate standard · Putting the design criteria for mass production into words a company can share | Shooting a set of parts or tools by stripping every pattern out of the background and the fixtures and giving each object its own plinth · Selling an undecorated product on a page that leads with the form alone and holds the feature copy back |
| Type | One typeface fixed as a standard, sizes and margins given as numbers | Only the object's name and its maker, small, in one undecorated face. No adjectives. |
| Composition | Products and advertising built on one grid and one dimensional system | One plinth per object, evenly spaced, with nothing added to the background plane. Cover over any trim or moulding rather than working around it. |
| Material | Standard industrial materials, with quality carried by the finish | Metal, glass and porcelain as they come from the factory. No paint and no pattern, so that tooling marks and sheen are all there is to see. |
| Caution | Reading standardization as sameness, making everything one shape and skipping the argument about quality, which lands in dull mass production. | Assuming the work is done once the objects are undecorated leaves the room and the fixtures decorated, and the forms lose to the pattern around them. |