The Architectural Structuring of Administration: Visualization of non-material work during the Weimar Republic

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The project addresses the architecture of public administration buildings, a genre which has largely been neglected in research. Such buildings served to organize the non-material work of public administration, whose procedures and contacts with democratic society underwent a far-reaching efficiency drive starting in the 1910s. The central question of how modern architecture both structured and symbolically shaped administrative processes re-conceived by scientific management has not yet been systematically explored. This question is rooted in architectural designs and buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, which for the purposes of this project are viewed as a movement- and process-oriented variety of ‘functionalism’. The interface between such concepts and specialist literature is to be seen in the administration itself, which responded to the possibilities of modern architecture and sought with its help to redesign work processes. Significant networking (epistemic communities) is apparent in the practice of construction, which is examined during this project using the example of the Ruhr region. Consequently, a crucial link in the question of ‘functionalism’ can be reassessed, while (inter)national comparisons will enable a gap to be filled in our understanding of architectural modernism.