العربية
Gesamtkunstwerk.
It’s a word I’ve always particularly loved in the German language. Not only for its aural beauty (try saying it, if you can get your tongue around it), but also for its meaning. Translating into English as ‘total work of art’, it conjures up images of those early-20th-century architectural landmarks like Josef Hoffmann’s Stoclet Palace in Brussels and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, or Le Corbusier’s later eponymous pavilion on the shores of Lake Zurich.
In each case, the architect was responsible for the entirety of the project, on both a macro and a micro level – the overall structure, the interiors, the fittings, the furniture. The ultimate in architectural authorship, you might say.
Of course, in the age of serial production, contemporary practitioners more often than not specify existing products for their projects, rather than designing everything from scratch themselves. (That’s where Architonic comes in, developed to gi…
