Nation of Norms: Designing German Worldviews One Object at a Time

Objects form environments. Stacked paper sheets on desks, screen dimensions and mobile phone displays, door handles or window frames—they all, as inconspicuous as they may seem, shape how one touches and views one’s world. This book traces histories where regulated objects and standardized processes became instruments toward materializing a new worldview, and follows actors who attempted to reshape a German nation on paper, time and time again. Architecture’s infatuation and complicit entanglements with nation building are well documented throughout history—and at a moment when the design and distribution of information has become a dominant driver of world politics and economy, the formal and material implications of regulations and norms must not remain unnoticed or unchecked. The German term Norm (in histories of technology and architecture conventionally translated as "standard") is suspended between technical regulation and social mode of conduct. Nation of Norms complicates dominant narratives of German modern architecture—and its architects. It does this very concretely by leaving the famous buildings aside, and instead introduces the object scale as its plane: seemingly inconspicuous everyday objects are centered here rather than the iconic works of German Modernism or Neue Sachlichkeit. This project moves norm-practice into the focus of architectural history by positing norms as both a design tool and an object of design itself, retrieving it from its former existence outside of formal investigations. The protagonists of this book tried to reshape the world one piece at a time: by dimensioning the window, they framed the inhabitant's view of the world; by formatting paper, they dimensioned the physical contact between citizen and state; by designing toys, they re-educated a new generation. This project investigates how institutions and their agents aimed to produce and disseminate aesthetic and societal values through the design of normed objects in three German political systems: the Weimar Republic, the National-Socialist-Regime, and the first decade of postwar reconstruction in West Germany.