MADE BY BAUHAUS: REMEMBERING THE EXTRAORDINARY ARCHITECTS
Bauhaus, one of the most influential design and architecture ideologies of the 20th century, came to India via two brilliant young architects. Its buildings — sleek, linear, geometrical — are still with us
Birthing any new art form is about clearing ground, and building from zero. And German teacher architect and visionary Walter Gropius did so in the Europe of the 1920s, with the teaching programme he introduced in the Staatliches Bauhaus, a new design school founded just after World War I, in 1919. Due to its efforts, the house style of the rich – the highly ornamental Art Nouveau wrought-iron railings, smiling cherubs on the ceilings, elaborate stairways – was no longer high style or even aspirational for the street. The new look was greys and whites for interiors, simple industrial fixtures and concrete flat-roofed houses that let in light and air. Bauhaus also insisted on the unity between art and technology, and the cooperation among the different disciplines of painting, industrial design, typography, and, of course, architecture.
Not architecture or engineering. According to Gropius, architecture begins “where engineering ends” but they feed off one another. In short, Bauhaus is the name of that enterprise through which Gropius tried to bring under one umbrella, the art of everything.
The Bauhaus takeover of Europe, then the Americas, and its spread in India from the ’40s to the ’80s, however, happened for a reason. Bauhaus’ battles, points out American critic Paul Goldberger, in an essay in The New York Times, were won not simply “for aesthetic reasons, but for economic ones”. After the two world wars, modern houses were cheaper to build.
The reason they are still with us is that any architect can fall back on the basic Bauhaus design philosophy – form must follow function – and build a striking, sturdy house. A house is determined, said the Bauhaus teachers, by who would move into the building and what was going on inside.
Expressionist masters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and other important artists of the European avantgarde, were some of the teachers associated with the Bauhaus school. Public and workers’ housing was also a key focus. And all this made perfect sense to two young Indians sent by the British Indian government in the 1940s to the US. They were assigned to bring back new design thoughts suited to a country with limited resources and a huge population, and which, they knew would soon be an independent nation in search of a new design language.
Achyut Kanvinde of Delhi and Habib Rahman of Bengal were both taught by Gropius at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where the German and other Bauhaus teachers had fled, to escape Hitler’s Germany.
At least a thousand buildings such as the The Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Delhi, and the Nehru Science Centre, Mumbai, were built by Kanvinde, inspired by the Bauhaus philosophy. Rahman’s Bauhaus-inspired housing models were replicated in India’s cities in lakhs; his other projects, numbering around 150, included Rabindra Bhawan with the three National Akademis; the Calcutta Secretariat and the University Grants Commission of India in Delhi.
Kanvinde and Rahman brought Bauhaus, one of the most influential design movements of the 20th century, to India. They also brought “architectural modernism to India in the mainstream and public institutions, before Corbusier”, says architect Sanjay Kanvinde, the late Achyut Kanvinde’s son.
“Rahman made Gandhi Ghat in 1949, Kanvinde’s first Bauhaus building, the Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association, was conceived in 1950. Chandigarh, whose masterplan was developed by Corbusier, had its main components completed in the ’60s.”