Gesamtkunstwerk: When the Architect Designs Everything

Gesamtkunstwerk is German for a total work of art: a house or room in which the architecture, interior, furniture, textiles, lighting and art are designed as a single whole, often by the same architect or the same circle. The ideal belonged especially to Jugend and National Romanticism around 1900. The best-known examples are Josef Hoffmann's Palais Stoclet in Brussels, where Gustav Klimt made the frieze in the dining room, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House in Scotland and the Finnish studio villa Hvitträsk. The word is in both the architecture and the design glossary.

Facts

From the Opera to the House

The word became known through the composer Richard Wagner, who around 1850 wanted to unite music, poetry, stage design and drama in opera into a single work of art. Around the turn of the century in 1900 the idea moved into architecture. Architects and craftsmen throughout Europe were tired of 19th-century houses being filled with furniture in mixed styles from catalogues, and they wanted everything in a home to belong together, from the façade to the cutlery.

The idea was linked to the Arts and Crafts movement and to Jugend, which wanted to give craftsmanship back its value. A Gesamtkunstwerk requires a client with money and patience, and so most of the examples are private houses for rich and cultured families. What distinguishes them from an ordinary lavish villa is that the architect decides everything and that the same formal language recurs at every scale.

Brussels: Horta and the Palais Stoclet

In the Hôtel Tassel in Brussels, 1893–1894, Victor Horta let the iron column in the stair hall dissolve into tendrils that continue in the wall paintings, the mosaic of the floor and the ironwork of the railings. He also designed doors, handles, lamps and furniture, so that everything belonged together; the interior is shown in the design section under Hôtel Tassel.

The most complete example also stands in Brussels. In 1905 the banker Adolphe Stoclet gave Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte a free hand and an unlimited budget. The Palais Stoclet, completed in 1911, is a white box of thin marble slabs framed by dark bronze mouldings, and Hoffmann and his collaborators designed the garden, the furniture, the carpets, the lamps and the cutlery. Gustav Klimt made the mosaic frieze in the dining room, with the Tree of Life and the figures Expectation and Fulfilment, in the same gold and patterns as in The Kiss. The house has been a World Heritage Site since 2009 and is regarded as the Wiener Werkstätte's principal work; about the workshop there is the guide Wiener Werkstätte.

Glasgow and Vienna: Mackintosh and the Secession

In 1902 the publisher Walter Blackie had Charles Rennie Mackintosh design his home in Helensburgh. Mackintosh first studied the family's life before he drew, and he and his wife, the artist Margaret Macdonald, also made furniture, lighting, textiles and decoration. Hill House is grey and closed on the outside, but inside the drawing room and the bedroom are white and bright, with stylised roses and trellis patterns. In the bedroom stands the tall black ladder-back chair, more a line in the room than a seat. The grid in its back recurs in the windows and carpets of the house; see also the interior in the design section.

In Vienna the Secession carried the idea on. In the Secession Building Klimt painted his Beethoven Frieze directly on the walls in 1902, for an exhibition in which architecture, painting and music were to meet. Mackintosh exhibited in Vienna in 1900, and his grid influenced Hoffmann. The whole circle is described in the guide to Vienna 1900.

In the Nordic Countries: Hvitträsk, Sundborn and Dramaten

Hvitträsk outside Helsinki was built in 1901–1903 by Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen as a shared home and drawing office. Natural stone, timber and steep shingle roofs meet open fireplaces, rya rugs, furniture and textiles that the architects designed themselves, so that the house became the total work of National Romanticism; the interior is under Hvitträsk in the design section, and the city in the guide to architecture in Helsinki.

In Sweden Carl and Karin Larsson's Lilla Hyttnäs in Sundborn is a home that was built up over many years, with furniture that was built, repainted and supplemented, rather than designed all at once. Dramaten, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, completed in 1908, became a public total work of art, in which several of the leading artists of the day, among them Carl Larsson, worked on the decoration. The difference between the wholes of Jugend and National Romanticism is explained in the guide Jugend and National Romanticism.

Modernism Took Over the Idea

Gesamtkunstwerk is not something that ended with Jugend. When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919, the aim was to unite art, craft and industry in building; see the guide What Is the Bauhaus?. Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich designed the furniture for Villa Tugendhat, and Gunnar Asplund designed almost everything in the Public Library, from tables and chairs to lamps, handles and signs. The difference is that the modernists wanted the furniture to be manufacturable in series for many people, not just for one client.

Look out when you visit a house: does the same pattern recur in the façade, the windows, the furniture and the lamps? Do the door handles have the same forms as the railings? Then you probably have a Gesamtkunstwerk in front of you. More houses in the same spirit are in the guide to the most famous villas of Modernism, and the design definition of the word in the glossary of the design section.

How to recognise a Gesamtkunstwerk

Exercise

Which house is the best-known example of the Wiener Werkstätte's Gesamtkunstwerk?