Joseph Gantner’s “Sanierung” at Das Werk 1923–1927. Representing Architecture, Elucidating Art History, Building Swissness

Das Werk is a magazine published by two professional associations, the Bund Schweizer Architekten and the Swiss Werkbund. The Swiss art historian Joseph Gantner was at its head in the years 1923–1927, a period that he defined as a completely successful Sanierung, restructuring. During Gantner’s four and half years, the magazine increased its page count, varied its content, developed heterogeneous positions, and became a well-structured and complex publication. However, this transformation occurred under the influence of conflicting authorities’ wills, entanglements, and procurements during a very unstable era: the dawn of modernism.

The constitutive elements, sections, and contents that syntactically structured Das Werk are the subject of this dissertation. Typefaces, images, texts, columns, covers, titles, and comments, though diverse in role and scope, all physically articulated the narrative of architecture in the magazine. This narrative was neither neutral nor free from the broader influences, intellectual expectations, and moral investments of the different authorities operating in the magazine.

This dissertation’s three parts show the close and reciprocal connection between associations and their public presence in the medium of the architectural magazine, the institutionalized presence of art history in the architectural profession, and the scattered appearance of Swissness in the architectural discourse and narrative. Though seldom discussed openly, the topic of national identity was crucial to the negotiation and validation of content in the magazine. A constant tension between the local, national, and international had by the end of the 1920s helped transform architecture into a topic on which conflicting national identities and expectations were projected. This dissertation connects small editorial details with broader implications and seeks to give a new account of historiographical readings of modernism, the meaning of authority in architectural history, and the understanding of Swiss modernism.

This dissertation operates from three assumptions: Das Werk was an epistemic tool actively partaking in the definition of architecture; it was far more a stabilizing tool than a purveyor of modernity, not least because the negotiation of Swiss modernity occurred within an intricate reshaping of authority in a changing professional world; and Gantner’s role as editor highlights more profound interactions between the art historical realm and the architectural professional sphere.

This dissertation examines the complex anatomy of Gantner’s Das Werk to challenge expectations about the innovativeness of modernism and its media and to open further discussion on the complex process of defining architecture.