Glued together, dusty, uncomfortable, impractical: the textures of the built environment often play a central role in critical analyses of capitalism and consumption. This particularly applies to the writing practice of author Lu Märten (1879-1970). During the first decades of the 20th century, she wrote about the textures of the “workers’ home”, talking for example of ornamental stucco, decorated household appliances, and dark tenements. To set up her critical practice in working-class spaces was due to Märten’s idea of “social aesthetics”. The author wrote resolutely against bourgeois notions of art and aesthetics, which in her eyes were too strongly determined and shaped by classist property relations. Instead, Märten focused on their emancipative possibilities. From her perspective, the aesthetically precious was located where room for action opened up.
This dissertation on architectural history takes Märten’s “social aesthetics” as a starting point for questioning the role of architectonic textures in the context of other socialist-motivated positions of her time.
Based on Märten’s remarkable reference to textures of the domestic sphere, I would like to examine the connection between the critical design of alternative, emancipative aesthetics, and their rhetorical-poetic use of textures from the built environment. The project revolves around material and spatial points of reference and the question of how these were reflected and processed in critical aesthetic theories and practices.