The Russian Volk and the reform of European culture – Taut, Behne and van Doesburg and patterns of international architectural exchange
Russia as cultural force and its potential impact on the rest of Europe – its ‘entry into culture’ in Nietzsche’s words – had been a subject of lively conjecture in the years before WW1 and the Russian Revolutions would further fuel the debate. The paper focuses around the way in which Bruno Taut, Adolf Behne and Theo van Doesburg viewed Russia and its potential impact on the arts and architecture in the years around the end of WW1 and the continuing reverberations of their views in the early 1920’s. The paper goes on to consider the light cast bt their reactions on the nature of the ‘internationalism’ of early architectural Modernism. The Modernism of the 1920’s presented itself as an ‘international movement’ and has been generally accepted as such, though often without much detailed analysis. The paper will conclude with a consideration of what we can learn from this episode about the nature of this ‘internationalism’.