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The Dresdner Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst (Dresden Workshops for Arts and Crafts) is a furniture company founded in Dresden in 1898 that became one of the key places in the transition from craft to industrial design. Here, at the beginning of the twentieth century, people tried to produce beautiful, solid and affordable furniture for many, combining the quality of craftsmanship with the possibilities of machines.
Karl Schmidt and the founding
The company was founded on 1 October 1898 by the young carpenter Karl Schmidt (later known as Karl Schmidt-Hellerau), with a small borrowed sum and just two employees, in the Laubegast district. Schmidt had worked in England, where he became familiar with the ideas of the Arts and Crafts movement, but unlike William Morris he did not reject the machine: he wanted to use it to make good furniture affordable. From the start he worked with artists and architects, experimented with plywood panels and even opened a toy department.
Riemerschmid's machine furniture
The workshops' most important designer was the architect Richard Riemerschmid, already a leading figure of Munich Jugendstil with the Vereinigte Werkstätten. From 1903 he developed Maschinenmöbel, "machine furniture": simply shaped pieces designed from the outset to be made by machine, in series, assembled from a few standard parts and sold at modest prices. The first range was presented in 1906 at the Third German Applied Arts Exhibition in Dresden and is considered the world's first programme of machine-made furniture. It anticipated standardisation and the modular furniture of the twentieth century.
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The Deutsche Werkstätten and Hellerau
In 1907 the company merged with Karl Bertsch's Munich Workshops for Interior Furnishing, forming the Deutsche Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst. That same year the workshops were among the founding members of the Deutscher Werkbund, the association bringing together artists and manufacturers to improve the quality of German products. In 1909 Schmidt laid the foundation stone of a new factory outside Dresden, at Hellerau, and with it Germany's first garden city was born, inspired by the English model: workers' homes surrounded by greenery, with a factory designed by Riemerschmid and a theatre, the Festspielhaus, which became a European cultural centre.
From the twentieth century to today
In the 1920s the Deutsche Werkstätten produced ranges of modular plywood furniture, such as Bruno Paul's Die wachsende Wohnung (The Growing Home), and fitted out the interiors of large passenger ships. The company survived the 1929 crisis, Nazism, the war and East Germany's planned economy, where it became the centre of a large state furniture group. After reunification it returned to private ownership and today, as Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau, it creates bespoke furniture and interiors of the highest quality. Its history shows that craft and industry can work together, an idea that passed from the Werkbund to the Bauhaus and modern design.
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