The London Exchange: Hermann Muthesius and the Transnational Creation of National Identities, 1896–1903

This article concentrates on the understudied years that the German architect Hermann Muthesius spent in London from 1896 to 1903. It argues that Muthesius's interpretation of English visual culture was foundational to the national style he envisioned for his homeland. Muthesius produced a vast literature on English architecture and design and is thus often mentioned as the connector between the arts and crafts and the Werkbund in the historiography of the modern movement. This stance is problematic, however, because it frames Muthesius’s appropriation in terms of reception and assumes that one man alone can connect two heterogeneous trends. Such a view overlooks the dialectic shaping involved in a cultural transfer. Muthesius’s engagement with English architecture was an active, deliberate process of selection and reinterpretation, rather than mere absorption. As such, this article establishes how Muthesius was both an agent of this cultural transfer through the prism of his own cultural framework of Wilhelmine entanglement of cultural and political concerns, and himself subject to a complex set of emulation and reciprocal influences within the transnational construction of national aesthetics. It demonstrates that Muthesius’rs experience in Britain represents a pivotal, though often mischaracterised, episode in the evolution of modern architectural thought.