Expressionist Architects - Underlying Ideas

Underlying Ideas

Many writers contributed to the ideology of expressionist architecture. Sources of philosophy important to expressionist architects were works by Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, and Henri Bergson. Bruno Taut's sketches were frequently noted with quotations from Nietzsche, particularly Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose protagonist embodied freedoms dear to the expressionists; freedom to reject the bourgeois world, freedom from history, and strength of spirit in individualist isolation. Zarathustra's mountain retreat was an inspiration to Taut's Alpine Architecture. Henri Van de Velde drew a title page illustration for Nietzsche's Ecce Homo. The author Franz Kafka in his The Metamorphosis, with its shape shifting matched the material instability of expressionist architecture Naturalists such as Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel contributed an ideology for the biomorphic form of architects such as Herman Finsterlin. Poet Paul Scheerbart worked directly with Bruno Taut and his circle, and contributed ideas based on his poetry of glass architecture.

Emergent psychology from Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung was important to expressionism. The exploration of psychological effects of form and space was undertaken by architects in their buildings, projects and films. Bruno Taut noted the psychological possibilities of scenographic design that, "Objects serve psychologically to mirror the actors' emotions and gestures." The exploration of dreams and the unconscious, provided material for the formal investigations of Hermann Finsterlin.

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries philosophies of aesthetics had been developing, particularly through the work of Kant and Schopenhauer and notions of the sublime. The experience of the sublime was supposed to involve a self-forgetfulness where personal fear is replaced by a sense of well-being and security when confronted with an object exhibiting superior might. At the end of the nineteenth century the German Kunstwissenschaft, or the "science of art", arose, which was a movement to discern laws of aesthetic appreciation and arrive at a scientific approach to aesthetic experience. At the beginning of the twentieth century Neo-Kantian German philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Max Dessoir founded the Zeitschift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, which he edited for many years, and published the work Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in which he formulated five primary aesthetic forms: the beautiful, the sublime, the tragic, the ugly, and the comic. Iain Boyd Whyte writes that whilst "the Expressionist visionaries did not keep copies of Kant under their drawing boards. There was, however, in the first decades of this century a climate of ideas that was sympathetic to the aesthetic concerns and artistic production of romanticism.

Artistic theories of Wassily Kandinsky, such as Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Point and Line to Plane were centerpieces of expressionist thinking.