2018 Book Prize Finalist - Robin Schuldenfrei

Robin Schuldenfrei. Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933. (Princeton University Press)

This beautifully illustrated book provides a new interpretation of modern architecture and design in Germany during the heyday of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund, tracing modernism’s lasting allure to its many manifestations of luxury. Robin Schuldenfrei casts the work of legendary figures such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in an entirely different light, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent to modernism’s promotion and consumption.

What's the one key idea or message you want readers to take from your book?

My book argues that luxury was present in bold, literal form in modernism’s designs—represented by luxurious materials, costly technology, objects, and buildings—and in more nuanced and subtle ways, present in discourses, economic structures, ways of living, and cultural and social milieus. Modern architecture’s historic and lasting allure, thus, was its connection to many manifestations of luxury.

What got you interested in the topic of your book?

 I’ve always worked closely with objects and the materiality of modernism, and in doing so, I saw a clear disconnect between the rhetoric of modernism and its material output which I could not resolve, and so I set out to investigate this further, using the ample archives and works of the period.

Books answer questions, but they also raise new questions. What questions does your book raise? 

My book is an investigation of the case of modern architecture and its objects in Germany, but its central question of luxury in modernism could be raised for other periods and places.

What are you currently reading, in your field or just generally, and what do you like about it?

I am re-reading Walter Benjamin’s wonderful Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert (Berlin Childhood around 1900) as it sheds such light on a certain by-gone era in Berlin, but with vestiges still present in the city; and written as it was in early 1930s, it also very much resonates with the present