Bauhaus

statler

statler

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This (to my uneducated eye) seems like a pretty good overview of Bauhaus. Is it accurate?

ForbesLife
Haus Proud
Jonathon Keats, 09.21.09

Paying tribute on the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus movement.

The Bauhaus was made famous by its enemies. First the Nazis condemned the school for "cultural Bolshevism." Then came the Stalinists, who denounced the curriculum as decadent and cosmopolitan. Starting in the 1960s, the postmodernists rejected neo-Bauhaus styling as suffocatingly functional. And finally Tom Wolfe let loose a literary wrecking ball, proclaiming that the whole 20th century had been laid to waste, architecturally speaking, by a global academic cabal building "architecture for architects only."

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus' founding in 1919. The occasion is being celebrated worldwide, with major exhibitions in Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, and New York City. Even UNESCO has gotten in on the act, declaring the Bauhaus buildings of Dessau and Weimar World Heritage sites.

Ninetieth anniversary? It's hardly the sort of number to inspire such pomp, especially for an institution officially shut down in 1933. But that's just the point: In spite of all the death blows--indeed partly because of them--the Bauhaus legacy has never been more vibrant. Architects from Toyo Ito to Zaha Hadid reference the style. Merchandisers from Martha Stewart to Ikea employ it. Fashion houses from Lagerfeld to Joop evoke it. And corporate logos from iPod to the New York Philharmonic echo it. But exactly what is it? Clearly the Nazis, Communists, and postmodernists could not agree, and there is still not an inkling of consensus about the movement that even the most casual student of architecture associates with the phrase "form follows function."

There are many views of the Bauhaus," says Ulrike Bestgen, curator of the Weimar Bauhaus exhibition. "What the Bauhaus stood for was never completely realized, and that's opened the floodgates for all sorts of misconceptions." Yet paradoxically the manifold interpretations have been the secret of its against-all-odds resilience. A version of the Bauhaus is always germane, and all versions are genuine, given its storied past. In the brief 14 years of its existence, the Bauhaus was situated in three different cities guided by three distinct directors. It was at once an art academy and an architectural college, a design lab and a manufacturing facility. If you dig deep enough, you will find a precedent for such things as Arts and Crafts Expression-ism, mechanical fetishism, and Marxist functionalism.

The school's mood swings reflected the turmoil in Germany between the Armistice and the rise of the Nazis. The German industrial architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus (literally "building-house") as a place to teach basic craftsmanship after German manufacturing was decimated by World War I. As industry was rebuilt, he repositioned the school to teach and produce design keyed to emerging technologies, most famously in the tubular steel furniture of Bauhaus student Marcel Breuer. However, political extremism increasingly dominated German national life, and by 1925 the Bauhaus was forced to move from conservative Weimar to friendlier Dessau, while becoming more and more politicized in its own right. In 1928 Gropius turned the directorship over to the Marxist architect Hannes Meyer, who drilled students in Soviet-style social engineering projects, marginalizing the Bauhaus so much that within three years he was replaced by the "apolitical" architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Yet even Mies, who recast the Bauhaus as a traditional architecture school in cosmopolitan Berlin, couldn't withstand the noxious politics as the Nazis seized power. The Bauhaus fell, as it had risen, with the Weimar Republic.

At the time, nobody could have predicted that the end would be only the beginning. "You could say that the Bauhaus was more famous after it ceased to exist," observes Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of the architecture and design departments of the Museum of Modern Art and co-curator of MoMA's encyclopedic Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity. "Partly it's martyrdom. The fact that the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis gave it a whole ideological imprint. But also it was raided and dismantled, dispersing an incredible concentration of people in many directions."

What came to be known as the "Bauhaus diaspora" can readily be seen in New York City, where Mies designed the Seagram building and Breuer the Whitney Museum. There also are outposts in Russia,Turkey, and Israel, where Tel Aviv was dubbed the White City for its 4,000 Bauhaus buildings. (One owned by Ronald Lauder opened as a Bauhaus museum in 2008.) The vast gulf between Tel Aviv's modest white homes and the grandiose glass Seagram tower bears witness to the staggering mix of Bauhaus influences. But even in light of different needs and resources, a nearly infinite number of outcomes are possible when you start with such a richly varied history. Indeed were it not for the Bauhaus name, there would be nothing to hold these strains of modernism together.

Mies considered the coining of Bauhaus to be Gropius' greatest achievement. Gropius may have agreed: He ensured that the Bauhaus trademark would survive the Weimar Republic by brokering a New Bauhaus in Chicago, run by one of his ex-Bauhaus colleagues, and by promoting the defunct original while head of the Harvard architecture department. He proved a brilliant propagandist. Somewhat disingenuously (given his early socialist sympathies) Gropius successfully pitched the Bauhaus as an emblem of modern American liberalism.

MoMa played no small part in the transmission of this image. Enthralled by the European sophistication of Gropius (who had once been married to Alma Mahler), MoMA's young architecture curator Philip Johnson in 1932 set about canonizing him and Mies, as well as representatives of other European countries such as the French architect Le Corbusier. Johnson accomplished this through one of his first shows, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated with Henry Russell Hitchcock. This became known as the International Style exhibition and set the stage for the landmark Bauhaus 1919-1928, curated by John McAndrew with Alfred Barr six years later.

There was no "international style," strictly speaking, just as there was no single Bauhaus aesthetic, but the concept stood in convenient contrast to nationalist dictatorship (especially once nationalists from Hitler to Stalin made such a point of rejecting internationalism). Personified by elegant Gropius and touted by hyperconnected Johnson, the Bauhaus became a ready standard-bearer for International Style architecture. Americans didn't need to concern themselves with the architectural intricacies separating Gropius the polemicist from Mies the poet, let alone Le Corbusier the theoretician. Whether built with delicate sensitivity to materials or dull adherence to principles, the glass box became an icon of Cold War capitalism, a symbol of modernist cosmopolitanism befitting a global superpower in the making.

More important in terms of actual building, the glass boxes were economical compared to Beaux Arts marble, a crucial consideration in the period of postwar inflation. Relatively inexpensive to manufacture, steel and glass components were also comparatively simple to assemble because the buildings were designed to "express" their materials. That means the architecture followed from engineering considerations such as the tensile strength of steel rather than, as in the case of Beaux Arts, originating from a sculptural ideal. And, as a bonus, the unadorned structure of these buildings also served as their decor. Buffeted by the building boom, the increasingly generic glass boxes-- the sort that dominate certain sweeps of Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan--came to seem ubiquitous, even inescapable, guaranteeing their place in history and serial rejection by factions all the way from the Supreme Soviet to the postmodernists.

The glass-box architects themselves deserve some of the blame for the growing dissatisfaction with so-called mousetrap modernism, particularly as the International Style became the house style for megafirms such as Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Most of the greatest glass boxes were designed by Mies, who realized the potential of suspending a "glass curtain" on a steel frame as early as 1928 with his Barcelona Pavilion: Since all the support needed was provided by the metal, the architect could use walls to sculpt space, as Mies did brilliantly with a delicate balance of transparent and reflective surfaces. In his most famous structure, the 1958 Seagram building (for which the ever-industrious Philip Johnson did the interior spaces), Mies' lyricism is given epic form. The underlying steel structure plays off the tinted glass, counterbalancing the building's mass with layers of reflected light. Compare this to the superficial, ill-proportioned W. R. Grace building just 12 blocks away on West 42nd Street, completed by Skidmore, Owings architect Gordon Bunshaft in 1974 and condemned as "overbearing" by then New York Times critic Paul Goldberger. Why the fall from grace? (Bunshaft was no slouch. In 1951-52, he'd built Lever House, one of Manhattan's first glass-curtain buildings, rightly hailed by Goldberger as "a vision of a new world.") Perhaps the best answer was provided by Bunshaft himself, responding to criticism of his glass-box repetitiveness: "Yes, and I'm going to keep on doing boxes until I do one I like." A dearth of new ideas was hardened by arrogance.

Today, at age 90, with Gropius and his generation buried, the Bauhaus has outgrown all of that. In retrospect, no longer caught inside the glass box, we can see that the Bauhaus anticipated and surpassed the best attributes of postmodernism, which architect Robert Venturi, dean of the postmodernists, famously characterized as "complexity and contradiction." Bauhaus experimentalism naturally led to a legacy of bewildering inconsistency. Moreover, for all the rhetoric of functionalism, even in their own time the most notable 1920s and '30s Bauhaus buildings and objects were really aesthetic explorations of new materials and techniques, or conceptual critiques of life in an industrial age--rather than technological inventions or discoveries in the scientific sense. There are artifacts of sublime beauty, such as Breuer's enduring chairs, which seem to defy gravity using simple geometry. But there are no eternal truths to be found in the past.

This helps explain why German architect Philipp Oswalt, newly appointed director of the reopened Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, dismisses the old design solutions of the Bauhaus. Oswalt is no renegade: He expresses the position of design schools from the Cooper Union to the Delft University of Technology when he denigrates "the fetishizing of objects and freezing of ideas by an army of art historians, museums, and manufacturers of design items." He declines to name names, but the appropriation of the Bauhaus "New Man" icon on scarves, and even the Bauhaus-style typography in iPod promotions serve as examples. Oswalt is determined that the Dessau school counteract historical ossification by applying "the Bauhaus approach" to addressing the world's ills. "We need to overcome the separation of design and political questions," he contends. So while Ikea is hardly radical, its emphasis on furnishings for affordable living puts the company in this class.

For other architects, the Bauhaus holds other implications. Most major practitioners now esteem the Bauhaus, in contrast with the postmodern architects of Venturi's era--an era that includes Michael Graves and Robert A. M. Stern--who sought to make a name for themselves by attacking their modernist predecessors. (Venturi at least had the virtue of wit, countering Mies' famous dictum "less is more" by declaring that "less is a bore.") Many of today's important names have set the superficial postmodernist complaints firmly in the past. (See "5 Contemporary Designers on the Bauhaus Legacy," page 71.) The diversity of views is the embodiment of Venturi's "messy vitality." In the case of Kiesler Prize recipient Toyo Ito, the influence has been aesthetic in the broadest sense, motivating his "desire to pursue spaces of simplicity and transparent nature." For Pritzker winner Zaha Hadid, the crucial lesson comes from the Bauhaus as laboratory. "It is essential to find key collaborators to work on new discoveries and push them into the mainstream," she says, citing the potential crossover between architecture and industry, such as car making. Another Pritzker winner, Thom Mayne, says: "It demands that we question the status quo...commit to research and to continual innovation, but most importantly to a social idealism that provides integrity and relevancy in our work."

These ideas belong to the present. The buildings of today's architects would have been unfathomable to Gropius, yet he would have understood their impetus, just as these architects understood his. When he dedicated the Bauhaus to "building the future anew" in 1919, he did not specify a completion date. In 2009, on the 90th anniversary, the work is still only beginning.

5 Contemporary Designers on the Bauhaus Legacy

Stephen Doyle
Doyle Partners

"At first gasp, I shrink from the Bauhaus, thinking of strong Gropius modernism and lots of squared-up Helvetica type, but on a moment's reflection, it is not about that at all. The Bauhaus with which I am more familiar is about embracing humanistic traits, and exercising them on a human scale so as to capture the 'spirit' that was being lost in the mechanization of processes. My own experiments in design embrace the handmade and bear the evidence, the memory, of being 'handcrafted,' which is something that has a different resonance in the information age."

Steven Heller
School of Visual Arts

"The idea of the designer as entrepreneur is a direct connection to the Bauhaus. Their philosophy of the whole work of art is key to the multiplatform design being done today."

Paula Scher
Pentagram Design

"The Bauhaus influence permeates most of my work almost involuntarily. I respond to the strength, organization, spirit, intelligence, and power of the graphics produced by Bauhaus designers and find it nearly impossible not to draw on some element that they had previously established."

Seymour Chwast
Pushpin Group

"I've been inspired by Bauhaus with the kind of forced perspective practiced by designers such as Herbert Bayer."

Erik Adigard
M-A-D

"My teen years in design were strongly influenced by a search for 'ideal forms'...but quickly I understood that contemporary art and design are informed more by the day's context than by history.... Incidentally, that is also reflected in the Bauhaus philosophy."
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Great read, Statler, thanks for posting. It was interesting to see what current designers had to say about the Bauhaus. I'm always sort of struggling with Modernism. Reading pieces like this helps me to organize it in my mind-how funny, even my thinking process is influenced by the Bauhaus.

In certain situations, like civic and cultural institutions as well as mass-housing (dormitories), I like the Bauhaus aesthetic and the formalism it brings. Just look at the today's art galleries, they're almost always designed with a heavy Bauhaus influence. Renzo Piano's museums have always been attractive. I always associate them with this alternate universel; a James Bond shaken-not-stirred, black tie gala with people from the early-to-mid 20th century dress, in a thoroughly 21st century environment.

I'm making a design for a contemporary, Classical Greek temple with a significant Bauhaus influence (I'm even trying to throw in some Mid-Century Mod elements). It's truly unbelievable how one of the most influential architectural styles ever (Bauhaus) can be used with any style to create a solid identity.

Can anyone answer me this; what is the next Bauhaus?
 
The pseudo green design the AA over in Bedford Square is pushing might be. Although I do find their work inherently misguided, there is a consistency in doctrine being applied to all forms of design which does put it on par with Gropius' minions.... I mean disciples.
 
By stripping architecture down to the basics, we've slowly begun to learn what is and isn't important. Sometimes you have to forget everything you learned to figure out what you know. Or, uh, something like that....
 
unterbau said:
By stripping architecture down to the basics, we've slowly begun to learn what is and isn't important. Sometimes you have to forget everything you learned to figure out what you know. Or, uh, something like that....
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Or one forgets history, which is essential a few thousand years worth of lessons learned from trial and error, only to repeat the same stupid mistakes someone already figured out eons ago.
 
Eh, this is as good a place as any to post this, no reason for a new thread.

From today's Wall Street Journal.

Joan of Architecture Speaks
By Julia M Klein
Montreal

Early afternoon sunlight pours into the conservatory of Shaughnessy House, a restored Victorian mansion with Grecian columns, ornamented plaster ceilings and marble floors. A little table is set, quite elegantly, for tea. The mood is calm, tranquil, refined. Then Phyllis Lambert strides in?still, at 83, a powerful, blunt-spoken and somewhat intimidating presence.

Ms. Lambert, dubbed "Joan of Architecture" and "Citizen Lambert," has charted an uncompromising course in the cultural world. "I don't believe in compromise," she says. "I think it's a terrible word."

The daughter of Samuel Bronfman, who founded the Seagram's liquor empire, this Montreal native chairs the board of the Canadian Centre for Architecture?a museum she launched in 1979. She is also a leader in urban planning and preservation. But she first earned a place in architectural history when she handpicked Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in collaboration with Philip Johnson, to design the Seagram Building (1958) in New York.

"What was important was the plaza. It changed the design of the city," recalls Ms. Lambert, who is writing a book titled "Building Seagram." She describes it as "a cultural history of architecture and art?the alliance between the two?in New York" between 1950 and 2000.

The outlines of the Seagram story are familiar to architectural cognoscenti: How, at just 27, Ms. Lambert overruled her father's choice and traveled the country asking famous architects who should design the headquarters building. How she settled on Mies because of his generous praise of Le Corbusier, her emotional reaction to his 860 Lake Shore Drive building in Chicago?and the way other architects defined themselves in terms of Mies's achievement.

But how, at that age and lacking any architectural credentials, did she summon the confidence to override her powerful father and take charge of such a massive undertaking?

"I didn't have that kind of confidence at all," says Ms. Lambert, who will rarely agree with a statement if she can contradict it instead. "I just knew what had to happen. It was just so clear to me. Architecture was changing, so why would you do something that was looking toward the past?"

Inspired by the Seagram adventure, Ms. Lambert trained as an architect at Yale and the Illinois Institute of Technology and apprenticed with Mies in Chicago. She later designed the award-winning (and "Miesian," she admits) Saidye Bronfman Center of the YM-YWHA in Montreal and bought and renovated Los Angeles's Biltmore Hotel.

Returning permanently to Montreal after the deaths of her father and Mies, she began photographing the city's gray limestone ("greystone") buildings. An indefatigable civic activist, she was instrumental in founding a preservation group called Heritage Montreal; the Investment Fund of Montreal, which revitalizes medium- and low-income housing; the Montreal Institute of Policy Alternatives, an independent think tank; and a roundtable dedicated to renewing Montreal's western downtown neighborhood. Ms. Lambert has helped save some of Montreal's best-beloved neighborhoods and buildings, including the one we're sitting in.

In the course of her work on neighborhood preservation, she recalls, "One person said to me, 'We all come from people who are always fighting. You've always known winning.' But I didn't really, because my family was not exactly considered great when I was a child?because it was Jewish, because my father had a background of whiskey."

Educated at Vassar, she was married for three years in her 20s to a French banker, Jean Lambert, whose surname she kept. It was, she says, "the wrong marriage," but it came at the right time: "It set me free from my family."

Today, Ms. Lambert is known, somewhat paradoxically, for her patronage of both historical preservation and architectural innovation. "It's all the same thing," she says?all part of her longtime interest in cities.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture, at the once- decrepit, highway-ringed western edge of Montreal's downtown, exemplifies both her concerns. The museum, completed in 1989, incorporates the restored Shaughnessy House, a Second Empire-style mansion that Ms. Lambert purchased in 1974 to prevent its demolition.

Ms. Lambert had founded the architectural center a decade earlier, in part to house her own collection of rare architectural photographs and drawings, dating from the 16th century. Since then, the center has become a repository for the archives and drawings of such 20th-century masters as Frank Lloyd Wright, Gordon Matta-Clark, James Stirling, Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, Le Corbusier and, not surprisingly, Mies van der Rohe.

In 1985, Ms. Lambert hired the Montreal architect Peter Rose to design a museum building for which she would serve as client, consulting architect and funder-in-chief. It was an unlikely collaboration, she says, since "Peter and I came from such different backgrounds architecturally. He trained with a Postmodernist at Yale, and I thought that was heresy."

The resulting building, in a muted Postmodernist style that has aged well, relies on local materials, including greystone, anodized aluminum, granite and blond Canadian maple. The museum's skylights and light-bathed interiors reflect Ms. Lambert's influence. "My real concern was, 'How would a person visiting the building feel?'" she says. "I wanted light and air."

A catalyst for neighborhood transformation, the museum is flanked by a public park and Melvin Charney's allegorical garden, whose Surrealist- inspired sculptures have architectural motifs.

The center is committed to both cutting-edge scholarship and public outreach. "We're not a museum that puts things out and says, 'This is architecture.' We try to make people think," Ms. Lambert says.

She herself is a critical thinker about architecture. In the battle between Modernism and Postmodernism, she says, "I think that Modernism prevailed?but in a different way, because it became very much engaged with the city." But she is dismissive of many neo-Modernists, including Pritzker Prize-winner Renzo Piano, the go-to architect for museum expansions. "The first museum he did for the Menil [Collection, in Houston] was wonderful," she says. But she calls his other work just "nice, polite, good stuff."

She praises Moshe Safdie's "fabulous" Habitat 67 apartment complex, one of Montreal's icons, but since then, she asks: "Can you name me anything decent he's done?"

What about Daniel Libeskind, known for his Deconstructivist fantasies? "I don't like his work," she says flatly. Including his award-winning Jewish Museum Berlin? "I think the idea was terrific," she concedes. "But it's not a good building. The best part of it is downstairs, when you go into the dark room [representing the Holocaust]. But the rest of it is an indulgence."

Whom, then, does she admire?

"The people I think are great are Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman," she says. "Rem is a person who sees very large, and he uses materials wonderfully." She calls Eisenman's cemetery-like Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, "incredible" and "mind-boggling."

What about Frank Gehry, whose Guggenheim Bilbao has been universally acclaimed? "Frank's like Frank Lloyd Wright," she says. "He's a great individual architect. People try to imitate him all the time and it doesn't work."

The architects she admires all "push the edges," she says. "Why should you do anything else?"
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