 Thank you, Martha. I just joined the, I just do ditto, ditto, ditto, after all the thanks to the people here and our partners, Temple and Brenmar, in helping to sponsor this over the years. I'm delighted to introduce to you this afternoon Elisa Chiles, who is nearing the completion of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Elisa studied as an undergraduate at Stanford University and then moved to the Institute of Fine Arts in New York for her MA. Her dissertation is being advised by me, and on her committee is also her old advisor from the IFA Jean-Louis Cohen. Along the way, while living in New York, she served in several capacities, curatorial capacities at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department. While at Penn, she has published, well, she has published or is in the process of publishing two important essays, a one and essay on the real estate development pattern that led to the building of the James Duke House, the home of the IFA in New York, which is of course a project that goes back to her MA days. She's published a paper on the Philadelphia architect Paul Creys Extraordinary War Monuments for the American Cemetery in France, which she relates to Paul Creys' wartime experience in the French Army. She is currently a fellow at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, and next year she will hold a Mellon Fellowship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her talk today, which comes from her dissertation, is on Dules and Designs, French and German Modernism at the Deutsche Werkbund Exhibition in Paris in 1930. Well, thank you, David, for the introduction, and thank you to the Barnes Foundation, especially to Elia Palumbo for organizing the symposium. The rivalry between France and Germany predates the formation of their modern nation states and has attracted attention since the first century BC, when Caesar wrote of the competition and cultural differences between the Galli and Germany. The confrontation between these two national groups is normally identified with violent military conflict and recurring crises. Yet it also gave rise to an extremely fruitful competition in the decorative arts and architecture during the early 20th century, culminating in 1930 in the 20th annual salon of the Société des Artistes Decorateur. Held at the Grand Palais in Paris from May 14th to July 13th, this exhibition featured a display by the Deutsche Werkbund and involved major figures from both sides of the Rhine, including Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier. The exhibition reflected the enduring Franco-German rivalry, which helped to shape both the diversity of modern artistic culture and define some of its most potent commonalities. This was the first occasion when Germany officially exhibited in France since 1910. They had been kept out by the French, who were determined to maintain their international leadership in the decorative arts and traditional role as the arbiters of taste. The Société des Artistes Decorateur had been founded in 1901 to affirm this French decorative arts supremacy. And their exhibitions, notably the Gigantic 1925 Exposition of the Arts Decorative and Industrial Modern, the Art Deco Fair, promoted luxury production as the best answer to German superiority in mass production, against which the French believed they could not directly compete. German designers were in fact excluded from the 1925 Fair. It is against this background that the Germans were, perhaps surprisingly, invited to take part in the 1930s salon in Paris. While the Société's 1930 display would promote the same values of luxury and individual craftsmanship that they had in 1925, the Wirkbund's contribution in 1930, called the Section Allemande, offered a bold new social vision and the design vocabulary with which to realize it. Walter Gropius, who had been the director of the Bout House from 1919 until 1928, organized the Wirkbund display with assistance from his former Bout House colleagues, Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and Laszlo M'Hollinage. The exhibit's powerful focal point was a suite of model rooms intended to illustrate both collective and individual dwelling in a 10-story apartment, and they featured a profusion of sleek, glittery forms and spectacularly lean tubular steel furniture. In large part, this represented Gropius' determination to reintroduce himself into the post-World War I international housing debate. It was his earnest effort to proselytize for a novel way of dwelling that corresponded to a restructuring of the nuclear family and traditional notions of domesticity and placed increased value on efficiency, transparency, openness, and socialization. He aimed to make the world a better place for everyone, both aesthetically and functionally, through this new social model and the beautiful material forms that could create it. The French and German discourse during this period was therefore as much about the social and domestic ideals that encapsulated how people would live in a rapidly changing modern world as it was about the design forms and objects that would express these ideals. Rather than truly examine this, most design histories instead simply characterized the 1930s salon and the French-German debate as emblematic of a clash between French luxury production and German functionalism and standardization. Such an overly simplified nationalistic narrative also misses the important connections between decorative artists and designers in the two countries and the continuities in their work, including the use of industrial materials and simplification of form. Rather than a theatrical confrontation of polarized design aesthetics, the artistic competition between France and Germany in these decades proved mutually beneficial and actually strengthened the convergence of modern design ideas. Although the Société des Artistes Decorateur publicized the German participation in their 1930s salon, the section Allemande was buried in five awkwardly arranged rooms at the rear of the Grand Palais. Gropius rationalized this difficult space with an exhibition plan that was sequentially arranged in a progressive tour. The start and finish of the section Allemande was a swimming pool and fitness area which immediately signaled the importance placed by Gropius on communal activity and happiness and health, including physical health. The swimming pool, weight bars, hanging gymnastics equipment and washing basins, all visible behind tall rectangular panes of glass also introduced the sleek, smooth and minimalist aesthetic of the entire section Allemande. All surfaces were hard and shiny and there was no effort to conceal pipes or mechanical elements, for instance, the prominent faucets at the edge of the pool. The transparency, reflectivity and metallic glitter were very powerful elements in the overall impression created by the space, reinforcing the openness and transparency that were foundational values of the sense of community that was central to Gropius's new social model. The communal rapport meant to be fostered by the shared swimming and athletic facility and Gropius's imagined 10 story apartment block was also represented in the adjacent room designed for collective recreational activities. A hook-shaped coffee bar with a white counter surrounded by glass and tubular steel anchored the general seating area, which was furnished with tubular steel furniture designed by Marcel Breuer. The space had the appearance of an elegant modern club room with an information and news wall and a shiny high-tech coffee machine. A plan published in the section Allemande catalog highlighted both the openness of the room and its geometric purity, a harmonious syncopation of squares, circles and rectangles. To the left, a mezzanine supported by steel joists and chrome steel lattice panels provided space on top for a small library with partition spaces below intended for private study, playing cards and listening to music. Elements including an ergonomically correct desk and a glass brick floor in the library of love allowing light to infiltrate below demonstrated concern for functionality and economical use of space. The high polish of the materials, chrome, steel and glass produced a sparkling effect that photos captured well. In attempting to construct a beautiful space with scintillating effects, Gropius undoubtedly wished to make collective living attractive to French and international visitors to the exhibition. For Gropius, the advantages of collecting living were numerous. In the catalog, he described the joys of informal socialization and the new simpler forms of human interaction that sharing space could facilitate. Breuer elaborated on this further, quote, people will live in greater harmony among a hundred neighbors than they would among three. Collective rooms bring people together. They ease the burden on the individual household and service the basis for social life, unquote. Gropius also claimed that high rise living with shared facilities and central services such as heating was more cost effective while at the same time providing more of the light, air and openness that were important for one's physical well-being. A year before the Paris show at the 1929 CM conference in Frankfurt, Gropius had presented his vision of collective high rise living in a lecture titled The Sociological Foundations of the Minimum Dwelling which borrowed heavily from the German sociologist Ferdinand Müller-Lyer's 1912 work. He explained how his design responded to the evolving character of the nuclear family arguing that the new family was less self-contained and that a multi-story apartment building with centralized collective facilities suited it better than a single family house. Gropius further argued that since women had entered the workforce and were now economically emancipated, this new household arrangement appropriately treated them as equal to men. But not all spaces were to be shared in this vision of a new society. Every adult was to have his or her own room, small though it may be. In 1929 in Frankfurt, Gropius's ideas were heavily criticized by the German architects Ernst May, Bruno Taut and others. And the 1930 Salon Paris offered him an opportunity to defend and promote them. In the imagined high rise of the 1930 exhibition, the rooms that Breuer design reflected the social arrangements that Gropius had described a year earlier at the CM conference, which de-stabilized the traditional gender binary as well as the intimacy that the home normally reinforced. Breuer's design provided separate rooms for the husband and wife, which you see here, divided by a shared bathroom and kitchen. The personal rooms were equal in size and similarly furnished with Breuer's tubular steel furniture suggesting equality between the sexes and reflecting the changing role of women. Breuer explained the attention in the exhibition catalog, quote, there was one room per person for all purposes, living, reading, eating, meals, sleeping. The man and woman live independently and together, isolated and reunited by the vestibule of the bathroom and the kitchen. Although the rooms were subtly gendered through carefully chosen accessories such as a bowl of flowers and serving tray in the woman's room and a globe for the man, Breuer's design was deliberately impersonal and devoid of fine art in order to, as he explained, encourage viewers to imagine themselves living in them. Exhibition visitors were given an aerial view of the rooms by means of a specially prefabricated metal bridge. Prominently featured in the section Alamon catalog, this bridge also served as a prototype for mass-produced housing, which was of interest to Gropius. Gropius and Breuer's determination to fundamentally transform the domestic sphere which entailed rationalizing the home and liberating women was shared by other modern architects and designers working in both France and Germany in the 20s and 30s. Their efforts continued the progressive destabilization of the 19th century bourgeois interior and a retreat from the bourgeois culture of comfort and coziness, which Balter-Benjamin characterized as retaining an individual's traces. In Versenarchitecture from 1923, Le Corbusier denounced this quote, sentimental hysteria in quote, which accompanied the bourgeois urge to cocoon oneself in the home and instead he advocated houses that were machines for living in and reflected the modern industrial man. Similarly, Adolf Benna, a German architectural critic who wrote the modern functional building in 1923, also advocated wrenching people out of bourgeois comforts in order to activate a more tender human existence. He declared quote, away with comfort, gumulikkeit, only where comfort ends does humanity begin, in quote. And he endorsed using glass as a potent building material capable of improving human wellbeing. Rather than creating a psychological and physical warmth with plush curtains, cushions, and other objects that Walter-Benjamin associated with 19th century bourgeois culture, Gropius and Breuer embraced new materials, including glass and steel, and they chose to create warmth through the increased social interactions fostered by collected spaces like the swimming and recreational areas. Rooms two and four in the section in Elamon showcased a variety of theater and lighting projects at the Bauhaus and mass produced utilitarian objects arranged in sets to evoke serial production. In room five, Herbert Beyer presented large photographic panels that highlighted recent German housing estates, supporting the exhibition's focus on the benefits of collective living. These photographs were highly visible from other areas of the exhibition, emphasizing the clear link between the housing estates displayed in room five and the Gropius and Breuer model rooms for a 10 story apartment building. Despite or perhaps because of the German's lucid presentation of their vision of a new society, most French critics responded with hostility and overtly nationalistic rhetoric. They attacked both the industrial aesthetics of the German design and the collectivist society that the model rooms were planned to serve. French critics called the rooms cold and compared them to funeral chambers and quote the uniformized surgical style and quote of hospitals. Yvonne Noé Ramboussin complained that the German rooms appeared to result directly from the calculations of the engineer. They had quote air, not what we call atmosphere, this warm ambiance indispensable to wellbeing and quote juxtaposing Gropius's pool with one designed by Henri Rapin in the French section, Ramboussin lamented that Gropius's lack of black charm and art, it was a quote place of washing hygienic but that is all unquote. Other critics compared Breuer's tubular steel furniture to the apparatus used by circus acrobats and trained dogs and one reviewer said that dining off an operating table or lolling in a dentist chair was not their idea of domestic bliss. Invoking nationalist sentiments and wartime memories, the right leading urban theorist Pierre Lavon called Breuer's model rooms quote beautiful steel barracks and quote and houses without joy. Of the separate arrangements for the married man and woman he wrote quote, they really should have bad stomachs these husbands who eat alone in their bedrooms where their wives rest in theirs and quote. In these forceful denunciations of the section element the French press helped characterize the 1937 as a stark dichotomy between French and German design. A claim that has become the standard narrative in design history. In doing so however they overlook similarities between German and French designs at the 1930s salon. Chromed tubular steel furniture for instance which was so adamant in the section element was not unknown in France and it was displayed by a few of the French designers at the 1930s salon notably Renee Crevel, Joe Bourgeois and Etienne Coleman who often used materials like tubular steel glass and rubber. Critics also ignored Walter Gropius's furniture designs for the Fida department store in Berlin on view in room four of the section element which featured non-industrial materials like wood. After 1930 German designers would continue to experiment with materials and design combinations which enabled them to create what might be characterized as more comfortable or cozy interiors just as French designers would continue to embrace industrial elements. In actuality the 1930s salon was not really a story about conflict and a standoff between French artists committed to luxurious objects and German artists who promoted standardization. As one episode in a decades long series of encounters between French and German artists it should be viewed as an important moment of intellectual exchange and fruitful cross fertilization of ideas which responded to the question that many modern architects and designers opposed a few years earlier, how are we to live? Gropius's collectivist social model and polished furnishings offered one provocative suggestion. And although the 1930s salon was organized at a national level and provoked criticism from most of the French press there seems to have been greater mutual respect, appreciation and learning between individual French and German artists than has been acknowledged. It was these strong and sometimes rivalrous interpersonal connections that helped shaped modern artistic culture. Thank you.