Luxury and modern architecture in Germany, 1900--1933

Robin Schaefer Schuldenfrei

This dissertation examines the tension between the modern movement's theories and self-conceptions and its artistic output by studying the discourses of intellectuals and architects who framed the period debates and the architectural and domestic objects the movement produced. The lens through which it examines them is the period notion of luxury, rarely thought central to modernism given its interest in mass housing and mass production. The dissertation argues instead that modernism was conceived and sold through a combination of conformity to bourgeois expectations of luxury and redefinition of them--responding to and seeking to satisfy, but also reshape, the norms and desires of elites. It considers the foremost artists and architects of the period, who discussed the object's role in society while designing products, looking specifically at the design and marketing of electrical...