National Post (National Edition)
The man we thank (or blame) for architecture
MacCARTHY ADMIRINGLY DEFINES HER SUBJECT AS A PROFESSIONAL
MENTOR.
“Together let us create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”
That grand intention was the ambitious dream of Walter Gropius (1883-1969) as he outlined hopes for his career as a teacher. In 1919 he founded the Bauhaus (literally “House of Building”) and made it the most influential school of architecture in the world. Nothing else has equalled it.
The Bauhaus school started with a modest sum, in a set of old buildings in Weimar, Germany, that had been damaged during the First World War. Students brought a furious energy to their studies, in large part because they had suffered in the trenches of France and Belgium and barely emerged with their lives.
Fiona MacCarthy, in her new book Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus, observes that, “Art was not treated as sacrosanct. It was there to be enjoyed just as part of normal life. This was the driving force behind the original concept of the Bauhaus as envisioned by Gropius. Responding to the horrifying carnage of the First World War in which technological advances had been harnessed to destruction … the Bauhaus was Gropius’s attempt at a reversal of this process.”
Gropius did not achieve all his goals; for instance, he failed to create the practical, low-price housing he hoped for. But he believed art should play a part in every human experience, enriching and refreshing all aspects of human life. Here he was more successful.
The centennial of the Bauhaus is being richly celebrated. The art gallery at Providence, R.I., is devoting a whole year to exhibitions of artists inspired by Bauhaus ideas. The Arnoldsche publishing firm has produced, in German and English, a huge, 590-page book, titled Bauhaus Saxony, which details everything from glorious textiles woven in the Bauhaus to a collection of Bauhaus art seized by Nazi authorities for the infamous 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.
The more we study the Bauhaus, the more we realize we are studying Gropius. He’s praised, or sometimes
blamed, for the buildings, shorn of all decorations, that surround us in most cities of the 21st century. He’s also personally identified with all the ideas and manifestos the Bauhaus left behind. In 1928 Evelyn Waugh satirized him in his classic Decline and Fall as the stern, dogmatic Otto Silenus, silencing his students by repeating his rules. In 1981 Tom Wolfe ridiculed Gropius’s achievements in From Bauhaus to Our House. He assumed Gropius had ruined our cities with buildings that all look alike.
The city of Weimar, where the Bauhaus was born, decided it should claim its place in cultural history by developing a Bauhaus Museum in time for the centennial. The architect, Heike Hanada, has said she wanted to design a museum building “able to stand up to the Nazi architecture in the neighbourhood.”
Nearby the Nazis had built the death- camp Buchenwald, and a staircase leading to the museum’s top-floor galleries frames a view of the memorial site of Buchenwald. On the other side there’s a massive administrative building from the 1930s. Next year, a wing of that Nazi-era building will host a long-term display about forced labour during the Second World War. The new museum will remain a permanent home to Weimar’s collection of 13,000 Bauhaus objects, including furniture by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer.
As the Nazis tightened their grip, the Bauhaus was forced to move to the small city of Dessau, and many Bauhaus figures fled Germany. Gropius, after two years in Britain, joined the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Fiona MacCarthy admiringly defines her subject as a professional mentor. She classifies the Bauhaus as an artistic collective, a complicated place for the exchange of energy and ideas. She argues that Gropius’s true legacy was the talent he nurtured in others: Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky and the rest.
He remained proud of what he had led. He called it “this great communal work of art, this cathedral of the future.”