| This dissertation examines the relationship between social scientific propositions and architecture and planning in Germany during the late Wilhelmine empire, with attention to the use of historical forms as models for modern community. Chapter One, Sociology Finds Its Subject, surveys the processes of urbanization in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and examines the coeval formation of the social sciences in the period. Chapter Two, Past and Present, looks more closely at spatial conceptions of community articulated in the sociological theories of Ferdinand Tonnies, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, and Peter Kropotkin. Chapter Three, Discovering the Vernacular, investigates the use of traditional building forms in historical discourse and architecture of the Wilhelmine era. The chapter considers philological and ethnographic studies by Rudolf Henning, August Meitzen, Otto Lauffer, and Willi Pessler. It also explores use of the traditional German farmhouse as model by reformers and architects Karl Ernst Osthaus, Hermann Muthesius, Richard Riemerschmid, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Karl Henrici, Heinrich Tessenow, Georg Metzendorf, Fritz Schumacher, and Paul Schmitthenner. Chapter Four, Cellular Form and Collective Life, looks at the melding of social science and biology in the application of cellular structures and metaphors in modern planning. The chapter examines sociologist Albert Schaffle's evolutionary schema of human society as organism, Ernst Haeckel's Monist philosophy, biologist Oscar Hertwig's extension of the Zellenstaat (cell-state) idea into the social sphere. The chapter discusses biologistic models in modern city planning, including garden city proposals of Theodor Fritsch and Ebenezer Howard, utopian and built projects of Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Theodor Overhoff, and Richard Kauffmann, the Central Place Theory of Walter Christaller, and community planning theories of Gottfried Feder and others in the Third Reich. The conclusion offers a brief exploration of architecture and planning projects of the Wilhelmine era and beyond, which sought to reconcile the spatial and temporal dislocations of modernity by creating environments that promised to foster close community relations within the urban milieu. This analysis of the village-in-in-the-city idea includes Berlin project by Alfred Messel, Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Heinrich Lassen, Paul Jatzow, and others. |
