Creative Combinatorics

Wilhelm Ostwald and the Werkbund

In 1912 Ostwald joined the Werkbund which aimed at standardising industrial design. He published a paper on “standards” in the yearbook of the Werkbund in which he called art a “social product” which made it necessary to standardise it.

• Wilhelm Ostwald, ‘Normen’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes 3 (1914) 77-86