Karl Marx published the Communist Party manifesto in London in 1848
In the same year, in the same city, the Pre-Raphaelite artistic movement was founded, one of the greatest exponents of which was the then twenty-four year old William Morris
The influence of Marxist theories took root on Morris, who would become one of the pioneers of socialism in the United Kingdom.
Morris, based on principles previously hypothesized by Pugin and Ruskin, began in 1861 to create artisanal works according to the methods of medieval guilds, aware of the fact that saving the quality of the work could be represented by a return to an ancient and humanistic activity. Within 20 years the idea took hold and in 1895 the movement (called arts & crafts since 1887) had 130 companies joining it. Evidently, since the founding principle of the movement is manual work in which artist and craftsman find agreement, the “enemy” is represented by industrial production.

Hermann Muthesius was born in 1861 and, after a professional apprenticeship as an architect in a German studio, which took him to Asia, upon returning to Germany he was appointed cultural attaché to the German embassy in London in 1896 by the Prussian Ministry of Public Works, and in the following six years he deepened the study of aspects linked to the English lifestyle and homes, then reporting the fruit of the study in three volumes, published in 1904, under the title of “the English house”.
Once back home, he forged intense relationships, also by virtue of the extraordinary knowledge accumulated in diplomatic activity, with eminent personalities from the German industrial world and in 1907 he founded, together with Neumann and Schmidt, the Deutscher Werkbund.
Various people from the industrial and artistic world immediately joined. Among them Peter Behrens, an eclectic and prominent architect of Berlin culture (in that year he received a detailed assignment from AEG to take care of the group’s architecture, but also of its coordinated image).
In the space of a few years, Walter Gropius (1907/10), Le Corbusier (1910), Mies (1908/13) will pass through Beherens’ studio, so at the center of these crucial dialogue activities, as young architects.