Maiken Umbach, Bernd HÖ¼ppauf, eds. Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. x + 265 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8047-5343-2.

Reviewed by Thomas Lekan (Department of History, University of South Carolina)
Published on H-German (June, 2006)

Rethinking Space, Place and Modernity

This innovative collection of essays offers a critical reinterpretation of the role of vernacular art, literature and especially architecture in the development of European and American modernism from the late 1800s to the present. Since the publication of Celia Applegate's A Nation of Provincials (1990), a work of vital importance to the authors in this volume, scholars have rediscovered the vibrancy of local and regional variants of German national identity and have challenged the facile association of Wilhelmine Heimat ideals with anti-modernism, cultural pessimism and proto-fascism. An emerging consensus suggests that the Heimat enthusiasts and aesthetic reformers who sought to cultivate a sense of place through historic preservation, nature conservation or folklore studies were not anachronistic romantics. Instead, as Thomas Rohkrämer has argued effectively, they were seekers of an "other" modernity who wanted to meld the fruits of technological progress with a sensitivity to local history and landscape.[1] What has emerged in the work of Applegate, Rohkrämer, Matthew Jefferies, Kevin Repp and others[2] is a far more nuanced picture of what modernity actually meant for its participants, of the eclectic and heterogeneous process of modernization itself and of the crucial role of local identities during the "heyday of invented traditions" between 1880 and 1914.[3]

As Bernd Hüppauf and Maiken Umbach make clear in their sophisticated introduction to Vernacular Modernism, narratives about the development of modern architecture paralleled early interpretations of the Heimat movement by marginalizing grassroots vernacular styles. In this teleology of "heroic modernism," the abstract, constructivist and functionalist International Style triumphed over historicism and vernacularism because it gave physical expression to the meta-processes of modernity--rationalization, secularization and universalization--that were erasing parochial identities and a native sense of place. For modernists, vernacular styles--which linked new buildings stylistically to existing historic architecture, used local materials or displayed sensitivity to the surrounding natural environment--appeared at best as a transition phase to high modernism, at worst an expression of "blood and soil" mythology that facilitated the nazification of Heimatschutz ideals during the early 1930s. The Nazis' highly publicized vilification of Neues Bauen and closure of the Berlin Bauhaus in 1933 seemed to confirm the democratic and cosmopolitan virtues of the International Style in the aftermath of the Third Reich and to substantiate the anti-modern and politically reactionary pedigree of vernacular expression. Such a linear understanding of what constituted "modernism" also enabled postmodern architects of the 1980s and 1990s to present themselves as aesthetic mavericks for their own experimentation with historicist features and regionalist-inspired design.

The contributors to Vernacular Modernism challenge this conventional narrative about spatial modernization within a broad, transnational framework. Their essays demonstrate that vernacular spaces--both real and imagined--were constitutive of, rather than a reaction to, the modern condition. The authors attempt to show that the local and the global, and indeed vernacular expression and abstract rationalization, have existed in a dynamic, interdependent relationship since 1900. And unlike postmodernists, who have accepted an inflexible vision of modernity and modern design emphasizing linear time, serial production or rootless anomie, these authors depict modernism as a heterogeneous, indeterminate and often non-rational set of "strategies" to "cope with, make sense of, master, or create 'the modern condition'" (p. 6). There is thus little nostalgia in these pages for "authentic" places that have resisted the onslaught of rationalization and globalization; both vernacularism and abstraction, in this view, are fluid and mutually reinforcing signifiers of modern spatiality.

The volume consists of an introduction, seven core thematic chapters and an epilogue on critical regionalism by Kenneth Frampton; only one essay, Mardges Bacon's "Modernism and the Vernacular at the Museum of Modern Art, New York," has been published elsewhere. Useful cross-referencing between individual pieces facilitates a conceptual dialogue rare in most essay collections. German Studies scholars may find Hüppauf's essay on Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope and Umbach's contribution on the German Werkbund most pertinent to their research agendas, since these pieces develop recent literature on Heimat, spatiality and the local contexts of Wilhelmine modernist experimentation found in the work of Matthew Jefferies, Jennifer Jenkins and John Maciuika.[4] But the volume's major strength lies in its transnational examination of vernacular modernisms and homeland impulses in the United States, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany. As the editors suggest, "the longing for home--a Heimat--in modernity cannot be denied legitimacy. It was more general than any one political movement, any one decade or any one country. As long as modernity is exclusively equated with emancipation of ties to the specific and with embracing universal truths, an important constituent of the modern psyche is repressed" (p. 11). Such an international perspective reminds us that Germany was at the forefront of an international critique of the pace, scope and direction of spatial modernization that had little to do with a deviant path to modernity.

The introduction deftly navigates a complex theoretical literature about modernity--modernism--modernization; cultural geographies of space and place; globalization and its discontents; Heimat and anti-modernism; and modernist architectural criticism. Unfortunately, several strands of inquiry adumbrated in the introduction do not find satisfactory development in the essays that follow. Among the most important topics that deserve further investigation are the perceived dichotomy between vernacularism and the urban public sphere; Foucault's ideas of "liberal governmentality" and the urban environment; and the role of consumers and consumer culture in shaping the physical and symbolic meaning of vernacular modernism. The essays do, however, accomplish the central goal of uncovering--often in quite unexpected ways--forms of vernacular modernism in art, literature, philosophy, architecture and urban planning.

Bacon's essay provides an excellent place to begin this exploration, given the Museum of Modern Art's iconic status as the showplace for the European avant-garde in the United States. Her well-conceived essay shows that the museum's curatorial staff, especially its first director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., viewed "modern" as an elastic term that embraced European abstraction alongside American developments in folk art, realist film and photography, vernacular architecture and public housing design. Barr's attempt to "Americanize" global aesthetic currents mirrored the tensions that emerged during the Great Depression between the museum's commitment to transnational, stylistic refinement and its charge to democratize art appreciation. Another icon of high modernism, Charles Édouard Jeanneret, or Le Corbusier, is the subject of Francesco Passanti's "The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier." Le Corbusier's controversial description of houses as "dwelling machines" epitomizes the machine aesthetic associated with rootless modernism, yet Passanti demonstrates that a conceptual model of the vernacular as a specific relationship between society and its artifacts guided the architect's work at Villa Savoye and other sites. A 1911 Balkan voyage and the tutelage of regionalist painter Charles l'Eplattenier convinced Le Corbusier that a "modern vernacular" appropriate to mechanized urban life must come from the anonymous, received forms of everyday existence, rather than adherence to specific styles or architectonic features. In his view, industrially produced objects had the same ability to embody "organic" culture as pre-industrial vernacular forms.

The play of vernacular modernisms in the space of the imagination is the subject of two chapters. Michael Saler's "At Home in the Ironic Imagination: The Rational Vernacular and Spectacular Texts" challenges Theodor Adorno's model of the culture industry as mass deception for understanding late-nineteenth-century New Romance fiction in Britain and the United States. Far from encouraging readers to "escape" their humdrum, disenchanted existence under capitalism, Saler asserts, writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling created fantasy worlds that required rational, positivist techniques--what Saler terms the "rational vernacular"--to decode. The authors provided phony maps, footnotes and textual references to encourage readers to inhabit temporarily these vernacular "homes," both individually and communally, while maintaining a healthy skepticism toward the story. Such imaginative spaces allowed late Victorians to delight in the subjective possibilities of an emerging consumer culture without being duped by it. In the "vernacular utopianism" of Ernst Bloch, on the other hand, the utopian possibilities of modernity could be found in the mundane contours of the German Kleinstadt, as Bernd Hüppauf asserts in his perceptive essay "Spaces of the Vernacular: Ernst Bloch's Philosophy of Hope and the German Hometown." According to Hüppauf, Bloch's phenomenology of space portrayed an ideal typical hometown as a mobile, imaginative resource for freedom, self-determination and future possibility in a modern world bereft of metaphysical comfort. Bloch rejected both the nationalist Right's conception of Heimat as an essentialist ground for vulgar ethnic identification and leftist critical theorists' indictment of homeland sentiment as a haven for political reaction. His philosophy of hope envisioned a ceaseless process of becoming with no retreat into a pre-modern idyll or final Hegelian resolution of alienation.

Maiken Umbach's essay, "The Deutscher Werkbund, Globalization, and the Invention of Modern Vernaculars," shifts the reader's attention from imagined to concrete spaces by investigating the nexus between Heimat and globalization in the decade before World War I. Umbach argues that members of the German Werkbund, most prominently Hermann Muthesius, followed the example of the British Arts and Crafts movement in searching for a distinctive national style that could secure Germany's position in the global marketplace. In the field of domestic architecture, Muthesius and his compatriots rejected the clutter of nineteenth-century historicism in favor of streamlined, regionally inspired Heimat styles that combined vernacular idioms with attention to functional needs and familial comfort. Muthesius viewed this architecture as an expression of bourgeois social attainment and a means for transforming, rather than retreating from, the modern industrial city by infusing the public sphere with egalitarian social norms and "enlightened sentimentality." Umbach also examines the first German garden city at Hellerau as a less successful example of vernacular modernism and the ideals of "honesty, simplicity, and solidity" in the built environment. She notes that it was only after the Great War and amidst the ideological confrontations of the Weimar years that the modernist movement split into separate wings, with the "Block" favoring vernacular modernism and the "Ring" advocating the more radical constructivist style of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Bruno Taut.

Umbach's argument that vernacular expression played a dynamic role in the development of modern German architecture and design is not entirely new, though her essay considers the stylistic and social meaning of Wilhelmine domestic architecture more thoroughly than most work on this subject. In her classic Architecture and Politics in Germany (1968), Barbara Miller Lane emphasized that "two revolutions" had occurred in the development of German modernism: the pre-World War I break with Wilhelmine historicism and the postwar development of the Bauhaus, which gave the International Style a far greater influence in Germany than anywhere else in Europe. Lane also showed that the polycratic structure of cultural policy in the Third Reich resulted in an eclectic array of styles that often selectively embraced modernist principles, despite the Nazi Party's critique of the Bauhaus as "architectural Bolshevism." Umbach's claim that the Bund Heimatschutz was "wedded to a romanticized rural past that had no place for progress, urbanism, and democratic pluralism--let alone multiculturalism" (p. 117) needs qualification in light of work by Jefferies, Rohkrämer, Norbert Borrmann and William Rollins.[5] Each of these authors emphasizes the Bund Heimatschutz's environmentalist agenda, which included landscape preservation, nature conservation and land use reform, as a key part of the movement's vision of an alternative modernity. Yet environmental themes--even progressive architects' use of indigenous building materials and natural features to embed domestic and industrial structures--receive scant attention in Umbach's essay or any other contribution to Vernacular Modernism. Read in the broader context of this volume, however, Umbach's piece offers a perceptive analysis of the transfer of vernacular modernist impulses from Britain to the Continent, the uncertain boundaries between "vernacular modernism" and revivalist kitsch and the problematic legacy of Weimar cultural wars on the reception and political meaning of "modernist" architectural features in the twentieth century.

In "The Vernacular, Memory, and Architecture," Stanford Anderson uses the example of vernacular vestiges in J. J. P. Oud's Kiefhoek housing estate in Rotterdam to reflect upon the relative influence of and relationship between social and disciplinary memory in the built environment. Anderson argues that the movement from a preliterate to literate society attenuates the links between unselfconscious "embodied memory" and the "invented" vernacular traditions of historical societies. John Czaplicka documents the neglect of local idioms in the former Eastern bloc in "The Vernacular in Place and Time: Relocating History in Post-Soviet Cities." He shows that communist authorities sought to sever the material ties of memory by rejecting vernacularism in favor of an exaggeratedly uniform, cheaply manufactured and authoritarian modernism that they believed best represented "socialist progress." With the collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, Czaplicka notes, the "modernist dwellings of a communist 'future' became despised reminders of a communist past" (p. 174). Vernacular buildings in L'viv, Riga and Vilnius were re-discovered, protected and re-adapted as symbols of a suppressed "bourgeois" past vital to constructing a common "European" heritage.

Kenneth Frampton's epilogue, "Critical Regionalism Revisited: Reflections on the Mediatory Potential of Built Form" is an unfocused reflection on the possibilities and limits of architectural reform rather than a sustained examination of critical regionalism in light of the volume's major themes. Frampton does raise important issues about our contemporary built environment, such as rapacious "motopian" development and the Disneyfication of the historic urban core, which one hopes will receive more in-depth scholarly treatment in future research on vernacular modernisms. The volume's broad geographic scope and inventive exploration of diverse vernacular expressions will convince readers that modernization and modernism were far more open-ended and heterogeneous than previously acknowledged. The book contributes to a growing interdisciplinary dialogue about space and simultaneity as central components of the modern experience.

Notes

[1]. Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland, 1880-1933 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999).

[2]. Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture (Oxford and Washington: Berg, 1995); Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

[3]. Eric Hobsbawm, ed. The Invention of Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

[4]. Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003); Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871-1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); John V. Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[5]. Norbert Borrmann, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, 1869-1949: Maler--Publizist--Architekt. Vom Kulturreformer der Jahrhundertwende zum Kulturpolitiker im Dritten Reich (Essen: Richard Bacht, 1989); William Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997).

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Citation: Thomas Lekan. Review of Umbach, Maiken; HÖ¼ppauf, Bernd, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment. H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11876

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