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Comment by amicoleo | Hacker News Reader

Yes you're absolutely right that Bauhaus as a school was technical and a continuation of the Arts & Craft education. As you say though, their technical knowledge was around craftsmanship, and not in design for manufacturing (like we would refer to now).

The key example referred in the article is on a metal-working course taught by Moholy-Nagy. Students would handmade prototypes based on assumptions of what would be easier to mass-manufacture (like using basic shapes such as cylinders of spheres). But in fact products with those shapes were actually hard to make industrially.

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> a metal-working course taught by Moholy-Nagy. Students would handmade prototypes based on assumptions of what would be easier to mass-manufacture (like using basic shapes such as cylinders of spheres). But in fact products with those shapes were actually hard to make industrially.

This was cause for a good laugh, though that likely wasn't your intention. But hear me out.

What doesn't seem to be mentioned is that Bauhuas was a leftist school. Moholy-Nagy is being your typical Marxist teaching a class on industrial products without having ever even stepping foot in a factory, much less knowing the state of industrial manufacturing.

Poser of tech? Well, in a way, Bauhaus was investigating the aesthetics of Modernity and industrial society. The disregard for actual manufacturing realities is entirely in line with disregarding human psychology when proscribing utopian authoritarian societies. It is a mindset and it should be added, symptomatic of their conceit.

Your tone detracts from the intrigue of this comment I for one, have no problem with it at all. I only bring it up to make an accessory complaint about how the bland enforcement of "civility" online can stifle people who express themselves in a certain way. You could've easily disregarded the first two lines of your comment and began with the "Poser of tech?" line, but without, it's just mundane input void of any association with a human being that actually feels something about the topic at hand instead of just having a thought about it.

Anyway, I loved your critique. With all of this being said, from at least a visual perspective, how do you feel about the work inspired by Bauhaus? What sort of design do you feel appreciates the human psychology of the issues/environment it intends to involve itself with?

Products of political design schools, by key practioners, are generally good, usually strong design. The ideological framing certain can help in guiding design, providing continuity (even if the "narrative fact" is imaginal).

I generally disregard the narrative attached to design - went to arch school so am entirely jaded about that aspect of design. So I love Sant'Elia but have a few issues with the Manifesto; love some Italian Fascist buildings (they're gorgeous) but am not a fan of Duce; same goes for Bauhaus: quite a few gems came out of Bauhaus, but as you noted I did not hide my disdain for that 'wing' of the orthodox binary political spectrum.

Two dyads that have been adopted fairly generally as central to design for modern humanity are: individual vs. collective, and, man and nature.

The architects that I admire started from the I|C paradigm and ended up in M|N.

The former has an unfortunate tendency to be subsumed by a political reading of the question: what is the order and nature of the relationship between the individual and the collective. This dyad has proved to be a disaster, for example, in psuedo (poser) Marxist/Socialist approaches to mass housing, and is in no small part responsible for the distasteful Post-Modernism that followed in reaction.

So design research in Man | Nature dyad. That is my personal direction and what I think (obviously :) is the appropriate venue of further efforts. (Why: The question of unit-collective is in fact embedded in that dyad. So is the quite topically urgent question of Man | Machine.)

Thank you for this well-detailed and educational response. You've thrown a lot of good study prompts in my direction.

One last question – any book recommendations?

(Thanks for the kind note and sorry for late reply - missed this.)

No book recommendations, really. That was crystalizing my own thoughts on the matter over the years. Possibly Alexander's latest opus "The Nature of Order" may be informative:

http://www.natureoforder.com/

[Oddly enough, this was hugely influential for me as well: Godel Escher Bach.]

Could you elaborate on why you think teachers in the Bauhaus were Marxist?

I don't know about Moholy-Nagy specifically, but the founder Gropius tried many times to collaborate with industrialists to get Bauhaus objects to be produced (sometimes successfully) and his most famous architecture project was the Fagus factory. I really didn't see any Marxism in his ideas...

I didn't say all of them. Utopian Left, is that better? [see p.s.]

This is a very good read and answers your questions far better than I could:

International Communist Current: Success and failure of the Bauhaus (2012):

https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201207/5066/succes...

p.s. Actually we can answer that question based on the topic.

Bauhaus was inventing forms for industrial production. This means using machines with the inevitable reduction of human labor in the production process. As this logically would ultimately reduce workers to consumers and designers (as ultimate reduction of craftmanship), the ownership of the production means is an issue. Unless this owned by the state, Bauhaus then is guilty of pretending to socialism while helping industry tycoons retool their factories. I opt for their sincerity and thus the unspoken truth of Bauhau's social program has to be a state where non-labor capital is owned by the people/state. Otherwise, they would focus on design that required substantial human involvement.

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