New Objectivity (architecture)
However, in the aftermath of the war these architects (as well as others such as Bruno Taut) worked in the revolutionary Arbeitsrat für Kunst, pioneering Expressionist architecture, particularly through the secret Glass Chain group.
The turn from Expressionism towards the more familiarly Modernist styles of the mid-late 1920s came under the influence of the Dutch avant-garde, particularly De Stijl, whose architects such as Jan Wils and JJP Oud had adapted ideas derived from Frank Lloyd Wright into cubic social housing, inflected with what Theo van Doesburg called 'the machine aesthetic'.
Perhaps the earliest examples of the 'New Building' in Germany were at the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition, Georg Muche's Haus am Horn, and in the same year, Gropius/Meyer's design for Chicago's Tribune Tower competition.
That Germany had become the centre of the New Building – as it was called, in preference to 'the New Architecture' – was confirmed by the Werkbund's Weissenhof Estate of 1927, where despite the presence of Le Corbusier and JJP Oud, most of the architects were German speaking.
In Berlin, architect-planner Martin Wagner worked with the former Expressionists Bruno Taut and Hugo Häring on colourful developments of flats and terraced houses such as the 1925 Horseshoe Estate, the 1926 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (Onkel-Toms-Hütte) and the 1929 'Carl-Legien-Siedlung', through the auspices of the Trade Unionist building society GEHAG.
Taut's designs featured controversially modern flat roofs, humane access to sun, air and gardens, and generous amenities like gas, electric light, and bathrooms.
Similar experiments in municipal socialism such as the Viennese Gemeindebau were more stylistically eclectic, so Frankfurt and Berlin's authorities were taking a gamble on public approval of the new style.
It was made up of collaborators of El Lissitzky such as Mart Stam and Hannes Meyer, whose greatest work was the glassy expanse of the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam.
Many estates and projects planned in Frankfurt and Berlin were postponed indefinitely, while the architectural profession became politically polarised, something symbolised by the sacking in 1930 of the Marxist Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer—who had stressed, with his collaborators Ludwig Hilberseimer and Mart Stam, the importance of working class and collective housing—to be replaced by Mies van der Rohe, whose Barcelona Pavilion and Tugendhat House had gained him a reputation as a purveyor of luxury to the rich, and proceeded to turn the Bauhaus into a private school.
Important work within Germany continued into the early 1930s, particularly the Ring's Siemensstadt Estate in Berlin, which was planned by Hans Scharoun as a more individual and humane version of the 'existence minimum' residential housing formula.
But the political mood turned uglier through that time, with open hostile press, and direct pressure on Jewish and/or Social Democratic architects to leave the country.
Since 1920, Moscow had been the site of the Russian state-run art and technical school, a close parallel to the Bauhaus, Vkhutemas, and there had been significant cultural connection through the cross-fertilization of El Lissitzky.
Stalin's acceptance of the "retrograde" Palace of Soviets entry in the February 1932 competition provoked a strong reaction from the international modernist community, particularly Le Corbusier.
