Total architecture

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Total architecture. Advocated by Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut in the 1920s, it suggested a synthesis of all the arts and crafts in a new architecture (based on the composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner's (1813–83) idea of Gesamtkunstwerke (Total Work of Art) ), but did the opposite by sundering the arts and crafts from architecture. In spite of this manifest failure of the International Modern Movement, Gropius published The Scope of Total Architecture in 1955 (revised edition 1962).

Bibliography

Bildende Kunst, xxxvi/7 (1988), 298–9;
Gropius (1962)

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