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CHAPTER 1
CONSUMPTION
PETER BEHRENS AT THE AEG AND THE LUXURY OF TECHNOLOGY
It is tempting to view Peter Behrens's 1907–14 tenure at the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) as the paradigmatic example of modern architecture's involvement with industry. The logo-emblazoned turbine factory, completed in 1909, is often described as the high point of his activities, which ranged from redesigning the AEG logo and advertising materials to the design of objects and buildings. For potential consumers of modern design, however, Behrens's work at the AEG should be considered in the context of the sumptuous showrooms he designed in Berlin for the firm in 1910 and 1911 (fig. 1.1).
The AEG's hiring of Behrens could not have been foretold given the trajectory of his career to that point. Originally trained as a painter, he had additionally worked as an illustrator and bookbinder in Munich. It was then that he received his first major opportunity to design on a larger scale. In 1899, the Grand Duke of Hesse invited him to join the newly founded Darmstadt Artists' Colony, where experiments in the period's prevailing Jugendstil were carried out by its artist members. Given the chance to design his own house and all of its contents, he was able to develop his prodigious, wide-ranging talents. He went on to direct the School of Arts and Crafts in Düsseldorf, from 1903 to 1907, and then moved to Berlin to begin work for the AEG, whose founder and general manager was Emil Rathenau. He was not hired as a direct employee, but instead served as an artistic consultant. In the same year, 1907, he helped to form the German Werkbund, a group of designers, industrialists, and politicians dedicated to improving the quality of German manufactured goods. The AEG afforded a crucial early chance to test the many ideals of Werkbund members regarding the merging of art and design with modern industrial practices, one of which was the recommendation that companies employ artists to improve their goods (figs. 1.2, 1.3, 1.4).
Behrens's role in the promotion of modernism, however, runs deeper than the design of important factories or well-known teakettles: to be examined here are his contributions to the creation of Kauflust, or "desire to purchase," for modern products of industry as singularly manifested in AEG shops. And also key is the situating of technology, especially electricity, as luxury, in relation to these products and stores.
The ground-level facade of Behrens's first store, opened in the fall of 1910 at number 4 Königgrätzer Strasse, was sheathed almost entirely in glass. An immense floor-to-ceiling pane formed the display window, flanked to the right by a pair of glazed entrance doors with an enormous, three-paneled clerestory light above. Set in from the building's flat plaster surface, this ensemble of windows was held by a severely beveled "frame" — an enormous, hammered sheet-copper border, edged with beading (see fig. 1.1, esp. the right side). Allowed to oxidize to a powdery green, this burnished frame would have contrasted with the highly polished AEG wares on display. Half-height marble panels placed at the back of the window acted as a screen, creating an interstitial display space between the street and the store's main space, enticing pedestrians into the partly visible interior beyond it. Simultaneously, the marble panels created a serene realm for the customers within by shielding them from the commotion of the busy thoroughfare outside. Full-length silk curtains hung from the ceiling behind the window, emphasizing the great height of the space and forming a proscenium, which heightened the drama of the products on display. Across the top of the window, modern, sans-serif gold lettering identified the company by its full name and the subset of electrical products "for household and workshop" on "display" (Ausstellung für Haushalt und Werkstatt). To the right of the window, the entrance door featured the famous hexagonal logo with the company's initials, which were also painted on the three panes of its oversized light. The logo on the door is the only eyelevel indicator of the store's identity; all other text, placed high up on the glass panes, directed the viewer's attention to the entirety of the store's facade. This assemblage of text, floor-to-ceiling drapes, and plate glass especially emphasized the soaring height of the space, and yet, along with the frame, confined and encapsulated it, directing attention toward the gleaming goods on display.
Inside, smart leather club chairs set in mirror-glass niches were interspersed between shiny metal and glass vitrines and side tables (fig. 1.5). The upper white walls, topped by exaggerated dentils over the niches, added an element of reserved classicism to the opulent modernism of the interior. On the ceiling, bare bulbs simply set in shiny metal sockets emphasized the store's intent — an interior designed to sell modern products, but also to celebrate industry and technology.
For the second store, which opened in the spring of 1911 at 117 Potsdamer Strasse, Behrens again employed a combination of traditional and sumptuous modern materials (fig. 1.6). A vocabulary of even more stripped-down forms and a greater emphasis on flat surfaces distinguished this store. Framed by monolithic, lightly veined, white marble slabs on three sides, the storefront was a simple portal beckoning in the affluent consumer. Chiseled on the marble like a Roman epitaph, the company name and a list of its most important products was inscribed in clear, elegant typography. Each of these marble slabs was surmounted by a faintly projecting cornice of green marble resting on a richly veined plinth of the same material. The door and the window frames were painted green, resulting in a unified, tasteful ensemble. Deeply set in the store's marble proscenium was a tall, narrow entrance door crowned by a beveled clerestory window and a large plate glass display window. At the very bottom of the window, on low white plinths and shelving, Behrens placed an array of small, shiny AEG products; they twinkled like jewels, dwarfed by the majesty of this white marble proscenium. This green-and-white scheme with its rectilinear use of flat marble also stylistically connected this store with commissions Behrens executed just prior to it, namely, the early Christian–style AEG pavilion for the German Shipbuilding Exhibition in Berlin (1908), the early Florentine Renaissance–style pavilion designed for the Northwest German Art Exhibition in Oldenburg (1905), and a crematorium in Hagen (1905–8). The latter two buildings both show the influence of San Miniato in Florence, and they both feature a round, beveled clerestory window, in addition to similarities in materials and color. Working in a pared-down, modern idiom, Behrens nevertheless connected his buildings, and the products he designed for the AEG, to the representative grandeur and elegance of previous stylistic periods.
Inside the store, Behrens deployed architectural elements and rich materials to evoke a luxurious world into which AEG goods were to be placed. Immediately upon entering, visitors encountered a rich, generously sized brown leather sofa set into a niche of geometrically paneled cabinetry in dark wood (fig. 1.7). A built-in, horizontal vitrine extended the length of the salesroom; installed at eye level, its parade of objects would have immediately caught the attention of potential buyers entering the store. Above the vitrine, punctuated only by a large AEG wall clock, dark green, patterned wallpaper ran to the ceiling. As in Behrens's first store, classical elements are utilized in conjunction with restrained modernism. Here the dentils are more diminutive, ringing the square coffers, each of which features a single light bulb set into a bare metal holder. In both stores, then, recognizable, tasteful classical forms and materials (coffers, dentils, plinths, marble) were carefully combined with the materials and elements of industry (glass, metal, light bulbs, electricity).
Thus the visual vocabulary of these two select, high-visibility shops — with their ample plate glass, and spare, repetitive elements — represented key visual and material aspects of modernism. But they went further than merely visually and materially representing modernism's ideals. Indeed, as early as 1911, observers commented on the stores' overall sachlich, or spare, qualities and on their eliciting a sense of consumer desire. In selling modern technology, the AEG enlisted visual design and modern architecture in the endeavor of commodification. The carefully conceived stores were among the places where the company did so, representing an early and select method by which industry displayed and sold modernism to the public.
Exhibited in Behrens's modern stores, AEG products were staged to spur consumption by invoking a luxurious — and for most, elusive — world enhanced by modern technology and electricity (see fig. 1.5). For many modernists, and for companies that subscribed to modernism, creating consumer desire became a crucial goal of widening the audience for its machine mass-produced objects. The company could have elected to produce its objects more cheaply. Instead, the AEG did not market its electrical goods as advanced technology or rationalized, functional products. Rather, the firm displayed and sold its goods as alluring, even lavish, domestic objects. This has larger implications for a new understanding of the way that modern objects and architecture were conceptualized and sold in the period. In the words of Peter Jessen, a prominent German Werkbund member writing in 1912, Behrens's entire body of work at the AEG represented "a single spirit of true modernity." Behrens's oeuvre has long been viewed in this unifying capacity. Examining the stores and the goods on display brings some much-needed complexity back into the picture, for they functioned as a crucial intermediary between the elite world of modern design with its theory, practitioners, materials, and alignment with industry and actual consumers. A key characteristic of the AEG's consumers is that they came very largely from affluent circles. As forerunners to the broader public that modernism aspired to transform, these buyers had to be convinced to consume modern products. Evoking a sumptuous world, the stores showcased the products and conjured the luxurious modern environments for which they were intended. They were aimed at the affluent consumers that the AEG sought to woo, and window-shoppers at large.
At the end of the nineteenth century, electricity itself was a privileged, urban phenomenon, which had long been linked to luxury in the public eye because it had been used to illuminate important, preeminent shopping and public streets of cities. The cleaning of the street's arc lamps on Unter den Linden in Berlin, the great public boulevard, was a public spectacle. In Germany, from its earliest availability, electricity had been generally confined to public locations, especially spaces of commerce and entertainment: lighting elegant cafés, restaurants, and hotels; big department stores; and small luxury shops. The evening illumination would be described by Ernst Bloch as late as 1928, who marveled at "the overly lavish lighting of which you have heard so much, the new cafés, the theaters, Berlin as the leading edge." Citizens out at night generally would have enjoyed electrical illumination, but the vast majority would have retired to nonelectrified homes. Electricity was linked to places of evening entertainment in particular. Theaters and private clubs, for example, acquired it early on. Initially, these establishments purchased AEG generators and produced their own electricity privately in their basements. Often they banded together so that a single basement generator worked to supply a few locales as well as the neighboring streetlights. As local power stations were established, entire neighborhoods were eventually connected to the electric grid. The AEG's manifold business model allowed for a profit from the sale of generators for the self-production of electricity, as well as a large array of energy-consuming machines and appliances. Income brought in by the sale of electricity from its subsidiary company, the Berlin Electricity Works (Berliner Elektricitäts-Werke) also buoyed the company's profits. This was the context in which the AEG opened its stores in 1910–11.
Before consumers could even cross the thresholds of these stores, they had to either have electricity at home or at least be contemplating its acquisition. In the AEG's formulation, good-looking designs sold in centrally located stores that were easily accessible to individual consumers, rather than aimed at industrial tradesmen, would spur first the sales of electrical appliances and also, crucially, raise electricity consumption once they were brought home. Different pricing structures were in effect for different uses: electricity used for appliances was more expensive than that which provided lighting, necessitating the installation of two meters in the home, one for hardwired lighting and the other for appliances, which also explains the AEG's emphasis on appliances rather than lamps. It was important to the company that the electrical products it produced were highly desirable; thus, in this period, its electrical household appliances should be viewed as luxury objects. Businesses and workshops running electrical machines were given deep discounts and rebates for high volume, while domestic consumers paid a much higher rate. Electricity was expensive — in 1904, the charge was 40 pfennig per kilowatt-hour. This was about the hourly wage for a day worker at the Wertheim department store in Berlin. The AEG sought to put kilowatt-hours into perspective for consumers, and its examples are insightful: a single kilowatt-hour could provide the energy to electrically light three thousand cigars, or supply thirty trips up four floors in an elevator, or bring nine liters of water to boil. A hair dryer used about 250 watts, and curling tongs consumed about 60 watts. In this period, the AEG's profit was derived not only from the sale of the objects themselves but from their potential energy consumption, which was provided by the Berlin Electricity Works, which was held privately by the AEG from 1887 until it was taken over by the city of Berlin in 1915. The installation fees also posed an entrance barrier; in 1906, the household connection fee and installation of an electricity meter was between 25 and 100 marks for 1 to 5 kilowatts. Additionally, to connect the house from the street customers paid 6 marks per meter of cable, after the first two (free) meters. They also had to rent the electricity meter, which cost up to 5 marks per year. Furthermore, there was an annual fee for the first ten years, based on the number and type of hardwired lighting; each small incandescent lamp required a 2-mark fee, while the larger sizes were 4 marks each.
The AEG's products, although industrially produced, were not inexpensive to acquire. For example, the teakettles were priced by size, ranging from 18 to 26 marks ($95.40–$138 today); a kitchen motor cost 200 marks ($1,060); and a vacuum cleaner — brought out in 1913 and tellingly named the "Dandy" — cost 300 marks ($1,590). A cigarette lighter for one's automobile seems like a bargain at 8 marks, but a car was still an extraordinary luxury in 1907 Germany. In contrast, a pair of men's good shoes cost 12 to 15 marks. Through industrial fabrication techniques, prices had fallen for some products; an arc lamp that would have cost 350 marks in the 1880s was priced at 60 marks by 1909.
Given that electric objects produced by the AEG were expensive, as was the installation and consumption of electricity itself, the question of who had electricity in Berlin in this period is pertinent. Household connections grew steadily but only at about a rate of 100 to 150 per month so that about eighteen thousand houses were connected by September 1911, at a time when the city had a population of more than 2 million. Appallingly overcrowded and squalid conditions characterized the majority of Berlin dwellings, with families often lacking separate rooms for sleeping and eating. Amenities such as private bathrooms within these apartments were rare; instead, multiple units shared common facilities off of the stairhall. Therefore, it is not surprising that Berlin lagged behind other industrialized cities in terms of electricity connections: in 1910, 3.5 percent of Berlin apartment houses were connected to the electricity grid, but that rose to only 6.6 percent by 1918. In comparison to other American and European cities, universal electricity came to Berlin late; for example, by 1927 only 50 percent of the apartments in Berlin had electricity, compared with 96 percent of the apartments in Chicago and 99 percent in Zurich according to a 1928 report by the Berlin municipal electricity works.
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Excerpted from "Luxury and Modernism"
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