PROMISE OF BAUHAUS, 100 YEARS LATER
Today’s urban conditions would appal social, environmental reform dreamers
On April 1, 2019, it will be exactly 100 years since the founding of the iconic Bauhaus School of Design in Weimar, Germany.
Born out of the ruins of the First World War, the Bauhaus is considered to be “one of the most important and momentous cultural manifestations of the 20th century.”
Led by its founder, architect Walter Gropius, and his successors, Hannes Mayer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus pioneered and taught a “New Architecture” that explored space and form using 20th century science and technology.
Learning from the lessons of the Industrial Revolution, Gropius and his peers, such as the Swiss/ French architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), argued that the New Architecture must embrace, not resist, standardization, prefabrication and mechanization.
The New Architecture would exploit mass produced, artificial building materials: steel, glass and concrete (beton brut).
“Glass,” Gropius said, “is assuming even greater structural importance. Its insubstantiality, and the way it seems to float between wall and wall, imponderable as air, adds a note of gaiety to our modern homes.”
This New Architecture, Gropius prophesied, would meet modern society’s urban needs through less cost and effort. It would abolish individual toil. Workers would be liberated for the pursuit of higher activities. The egalitarian dreams of the enlightenment would be fulfilled through applying the tools of Industrial Revolution to architecture. Buildings and, indeed, cities would be “machines for living.”
The New Architecture, Gropius taught, would be naturally endowed with a radical esthetic that would replace the borrowed and copied architectural “dead styles from antiquity which ceased to have significance.”
Its forms would reflect its functions. Buildings would be inherently beautiful, such as the soaring utilitarian concrete bridges designed by the Swiss Engineer Robert Maillart, or Saskatchewan’s anonymous grain elevators, the “cathedrals of the prairies” much admired by Le Corbusier. The pure forms of the New Architecture would be an epiphany for our “eyes that cannot see.” Ornamentation would be obsolete.
In addition to architecture, the Bauhaus taught painting, pottery, sculpture, industrial design, furniture design, theatre, photography, film, glassmaking, weaving, graphics, typography and bookbinding.
Its workshops were led by teaching masters that included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, Lyonel Feininger, Adolf Meyer, Oskar Schlemmer and Lilly Reich — a cast of stars who defined modernity in art and design.
The Bauhaus dream was to integrate the arts into a holistic habitat for humanity. The New Architecture, Gropius predicted, would embrace and integrate the visual arts in “one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”
UTOPIAN CITIES
Gropius advocated that the principles of the New Architecture should also be applied to city planning, “a burning and baffling problem.” He argued that “the evils that produce the chaotic organization of our towns must be permanently eradicated.”
Europe’s historic cities and architecture, congested and unsanitary, should be replaced by new cities where blocks of apartment buildings 10 to 12 storeys high, spaced evenly apart in parkland settings, would incorporate the wholesome qualities of the countryside. Flat roofs of the New Architecture “would provide opportunities for rooftop greenery that, seen from the air, would reveal an ideal ‘City Verdant’ with plenty of space for parking.”
Mechanization and standardization, not to be disparaged, “would import a homogeneous character to cities, the distinguishing mark of a superior urban culture.”
These principles were dramatically illustrated in 1925, by Le Corbusier in his exemplary urban renewal plan for downtown Paris. In the “Plan Voisin,” the historic district around the Louvre would be razed and replaced with 18 identical monumental cruciform towers set in parkland and bisected by freeways. “Paris of tomorrow” he wrote “could be magnificently equal to the march of events that is day by day bringing us ever nearer to the dawn of a new social contract.” To the relief of many, the project was never realized.
DEATH OF THE BAUHAUS Sadly, the Bauhaus was shortlived. In 1933, When Hitler’s National Socialist party seized power in Germany, the Bauhaus (now in Berlin) was forcefully shut down.
The Nazis deemed the Bauhaus to be a centre of “degenerate” art and architecture. The New Architecture with its flat roofs was denounced as “un- German,” “Bolshevik” and “desert architecture.”
Former Bauhaus staff and students were persecuted, jailed and executed. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and his colleagues fled Germany. They were welcomed in America.
Notwithstanding its rejection by the Third Reich, modern architecture, named the “International Style” by American historian Henry Russell Hitchcock, was poised to sweep the planet.
CONTINUOUS MODERNISM In the century since the birth of the Bauhaus, modern architecture has evolved from a radical counterculture movement to the orthodox default visual language of an urbanized planet. More than 5.5 billion humans (73 per cent of the planet’s population) inhabit the world’s cities built since 1919. Their visual habitat is a never-ending modernism. Designing in “historical” styles has all but been abandoned. Would Gropius be pleased?
Ironically, Gropius feared that the New Architecture, without its radical purpose and holistic goals, could become just another “style.” Modern architecture, he warned, could easily become fashionable and imitative.
Even worse, it could reflect a form of “snobbery that distorts the fundamental truth and simplicity upon which the principles of the New Architecture were founded.”
Gropius argued that if the Bauhaus evolved into just another visual “style,” its teachings will have failed.
He may have been prophetic.
MODERN HISTORY
In 1996, the Bauhaus campuses in Weimar and Dessau, Germany, were declared by UNESCO to be World Heritage Sites. One wonders what Gropius and his colleagues would have felt about this honour.
On the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, it may be worth re-examining the Bauhaus’s remarkable legacy: its revolutionary achievements and its awesome failures.
The majority of humans today live in urban conditions that would have appalled Gropius and his utopian dreams of social and environmental reform.
Is it time to admit that the solutions offered by “modern architecture” may have exhausted their usefulness?
Is it time to concede that “modern architecture” may have mutated into just another “historic style” with no intrinsic values to help us face our contemporary urban cultural and environmental challenges?
The answers may be yes.