The endless influence of the Bauhaus (2017)
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And I just discovered that the amazing "Barcelona" chair is considered a Bauhaus item: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_chair
And I think Le Corbusier (he was swiss french, not german that said)'s famous "LC4" lounge chair is considered Bauhaus too (it's Bauhaus era for sure).
I still don't like Bauhaus buildings that said but thanks HN for making me realize that there are a few furnitures I own and love that are actually Bauhaus!
It's incredible how modern these furnitures from the 1920s do actually still look even today.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/oct/07/charlot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectified
To me (and please keep in mind this is of course entirely subjective) design that just screams 'we have too much money and time to think about this design' is a bit repugnant and cold and de-constructive.
I really enjoy the warmth and pragmatism of medieval architectures, for example.
"simple" has to imply neither "primitive" nor "bad workmanship". Bauhaus takes this principle, and expresses it in architectural and industrial design.
This is a timeless truth, that can be seen in everything humans create, from art, architecture, writing, up to and including software.
Nazism was nostalgic and nationalistic. The Bauhaus was cosmopolitan and avant-garde. Its international ethos made a mockery of Hitler’s racist fantasies. In a way, the persecution of the Bauhaus by the Nazis was a (very) backhanded compliment. They hated everything it stood for, but they were fearful of its power."
However, I've come to dislike it since I think that it is overu
https://www.bauhaus.eu/fileadmin/_processed_/b/9/csm_teaser-...
The minimalist and arguably crude geometry of Bauhaus looks a lot like a revolt and a reaction against nature and divinity, which makes sense when Europe had recently come out of a romantic and nostalgic period of revivals and suffocating sentimentality. Personally, I think there are deeper and more meaningful criticisms of modernism(s) than what often reduces to mere anti-cosmopolitanism. To me, the intrinsic humanism in Bauhaus buildings begins with a definition of human that is in opposition to wildness, nature, and is explicitly secular, if not atheistic, which is understandable given what was going on at the time, but Bauhaus is one of those things where what you do in opposition isn't what you do as the incumbent. Bauhaus and modernisms are a reaction and a critique, instead of say, an expression of awe, humility, generosity, or other higher virtues. When I read about this stuff back in the 90s, my impression was modernism and Bauhaus were not so much cosmopolitan novelties, but assertions of humanity, both in opposition to nature but also to european clericalism, which has some pretty deep psycho-spiritual stuff wrapped up in it, so I can see why people who hear criticisms of Bauhaus start picking around the edges to see if they can unravel underlying anti-semitic urges. The need to assert humanity begins with a presumption of disadvantage, which in many cases was true and necessary, but also not. (An irony being that it was Italian fascism and its similar ultra modern futurist design that the german fascist/national-socialists adopted for their propaganda.)
The reason I like Bauhaus is because I think it encodes a valiance, resiliance, humility, humanism, generosity, accessability, and a peculiar universality of being not-of its environment, which is arguably a beautiful echo of the Jewish experience in Europe. Criticism of Bauhaus and modernisms are difficult to fully isolate and extricate from that experience, but that shouldn't be a criteria for talking about it, and it's also a proxy for discourse about where western history comes from. In the background, I'm working on something now about how the world owes our appreciation of J.S. Bach as a pillar of the western cannon to Felix Mendelssohn's revival of his work as the effect of his conversion from judaism to christianity, likely as a means to assimilate, but it was his sadness and self denial from being born an outsider that gave the world one of the most beautiful pillars of our civilization in the form of the works of Bach. Just as we can't talk about about Bauhaus without acknowledging the experience of Jews in Europe, our notions of a western "white" "civilized" "us," stand on pillars made explicitly by people who identified as another "us," and "not-us," which I think is proof we are not "us" without "them." By definition, they were us, and necessarily, we are them. Sure, nice furniture and ugly buildings, but that's not the point. Architecture is a rich discourse about meaning and experience, and anyway, it's just a pleasure to think about.
¹ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41001.From_Bauhaus_to_Ou...
Many designers and architects that copied the Bauhaus style didn't copy the Bauhaus functionality, thus creating something that looks modern, but is actually worse in terms of functionality than what existed before. One can't really blame the Bauhaus for this tho.
Style will always be easier to copy than style + functionality
It's easy(In large quantities) to make an empty box with a tiny class D PCB in it, and add some LED fake vacuum tubes and digital correction for your crappy speaker.
Try to make a real tube amp and you might need actual quality parts and design to sound as good.
You might be able to make something better than the fake version, but just matching the fake will probably cost more.
When form and function are the same, it's almost like a closed form equation. There's not as many knobs to turn, so you're relying on the ones you have to be high quality.
You can't have much fault tolerance in a system that believes making stuff that still works when faulty is a type of lying.
Why do you think so? The whole idea of this school was to make things scalable while preserving aesthetics. It’s not yet IKEA, but it is already not Jugendstil.
Some of that was of course achieved on the back of more modern kitchen devices and electricity, but most of it was just thinking about where to put things, how they are interacted with in daily use and giving it an aesthetically pleasing form. The stated goal of e.g. that kitchen was to give the modern housewife more time by reducing unnecessary movements by clever design.
This is why I don't really get the tube amp example. Tube amps (as nearly all other electrical devices have been buily more rugged and over engineered back in the day. The dynamic that lead to the degraded build quality has been mostly societal and systemic (customers not as willing/able to pay money for quality, mamifacturers being more interested in increasing shareholder value by replacing a high quality potentiometer with a cheap membrane button while calling it progress). This is not progress it is the 20th century equivalent of a babylonian merchant selling low quality grain in 1750 BC [0] or in other words: somebody tries to get rich by selling low quality stuff. The design follows the market here — most designers I know would die for a company that finally let's them design good stuff.
Bauhaus designs were certainly not low quality stuff however. A Bauhaus stool certainly had different design parameters than e.g. a Jugendstil one, some of which also made it cheaper to manufacture, but cheaping out was not the goal here. It was to make design more accessible and more usable.
A bass player today can make the legit choice that they want to get the best sound at the needed volume for the lightest possible weight. A quality tube bass amp weighs upwards 20 kg — without a speaker cabinet. Getting yourself a good class D amp is not a bad choice in today's time and age. Of course you could also compare a top of line tube amp to a cheap knockoff class D amp operated with an even cheaper switch mode PSU, but that would be like going from 200€ cheap laptop to an M1 macbook pro and declaring all non-apple laptops shit. There are really really good class D amps out there both in terms of sound and function.
[0] See complaint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
The "Truth to materials" idea makes a lot more sense considering that cheap faux veneers and the like used to just straight up fall apart, and the "No extra ornamentation" idea makes sense when you don't have a CNC machine.
Still, it is odd that the modern minimalist movement is so similar even though the economics and engineering has changed. It seems much more philosophical than pragmatic in it's current iteration .
The best of modern design makes "Cheap trash" into a feature rather than a bug.
A cheap membrane button might wear out, and a Bauhaus engineer will think "What's wrong with a good old volume knob? I'll pay $3 for a pot that isn't scratchy".
In a more reasonable modern design you'd have something like a rotary encoder or a capacitive touchscreen, and DSP volume control , in the same chip that was also handling your real-time speaker correction and modeling, WiFi control, etc.
Obviously, there's going to be an all analog tube amp that sounds as good or better than your $2 speaker and mini supercomputer driving it to pretend it's not crappy.
But you probably won't hear the difference unless you're an elite player in a great room, so it's only relevant to the top enthusiasts.
Bauhaus encourages people to fix problems by simplifying, modern design says "I bet I can make a capacitive encoder only a little more expensive than a good pot if I make ten million of them and use some more DSP to fix the shitty signal, and in the process I'll get these 8 new features for free"
> One can't really blame the Bauhaus for this tho.
Tubular steel, for one. Tubular steel is an abomination, especially in chairs.
Modern chairs are typically terribly uncomfortable (the Eames lounge chair being one exception). This may speak to sibling's point regarding appropriation of style but with poor execution.
A nice Windsor with wedged mortise-and-tenon construction is preferable. A good Windsor conveys a sense of movement, as though it's about to stand up and walk away; those lines lead to a particularly comfortable chair. Windsors will also last 300+ years....
A real modern high tech design gets it's reliability from the design. You can built it in a sloppy way with crap parts and it will work and look fine.
Visually Bauhaus is fairly unforgiving. Dirt or scratches or just stuff that doesn't match the style really stands out in a room full of minimalist things, and even more so in modern minimalist design, and that's considered a feature rather than a bug.
It kind of sneaks in some kind of subtle Edwardian "Show off your wealth by not doing anything only poor people need" stuff in the back door.
On the opposite end is modern farmhouse, which is incredibly forgiving,because there's so many textured decorative elements.
Rustic has a slight issue because it can also hide things you are looking for, and if you let it get to be a mess it won't "tell" you like Bauhaus will, it just feels nasty and oppressive without as being obvious why, but it has a lot of flexibility.
Now we have things like resin infused wood and FEA, all kinds of new paints and coatings, and real automation, and it's no longer a guarantee that something fake will fall apart.
Lots of things are basically cardboard with a thin layer of wood, and they use less material, are very light, and hold up surprisingly well.... except for the fact we throw them away anyway because we hate "cheap trash".
Even the way we judge food could be seen as a Bauhaus-ism. The whole paleo/keto nonsense and the idea that people should eat vast quantities of meat all day fits right in with a mindset of substance and simplicity and truth to materials. But it doesn't appear to work as well as they claim. It makes sense as a reaction to some specific modern processed things, but it doesn't seem to be backed up by studies.
Apple is kind of the ultimate modern reimagining of the Bauhaus. They're all about the tech that isn't there.
As I see it an iPhone isn't meant to do anything at any time and get you out of any jam like a tricorder.
I think it's meant to feel more like an appliance with a somewhat defined set of uses, and you're supposed to adapt to that, and that's part of the selling point, you're supposed to enjoy being the kind of person that can afford a closed ecosystem, and who is smart and capable and doesn't need a device to be compatible with everything.
That's basically the same as a chair that can only work with really strong tubular steel, it's a limitation used to showcase the capabilities of something else(you).
Bauhaus also ate a lot of other movements and really killed off a lot of diversity. Probably because it looks it's best without any other styles nearby.
Tying bauhuas to keto is wonderful. As someone who just resumed the troglodiet (sic), that's a notion I must chew on. (Ha.)
Shout out to u/atoav and u/jason-phillips too. Thanks, y'all made my day.
That's one of the reasons I like minimalism: it makes it blatant when a room is overloaded instead of being a well-decorated environment where setting something down is equivalent to throwing it in the trash (except you can re-discover it six months later).
In average to crappy conditions, minimalism will be more effort and work to make sure everything is put away and straightened, much like analog video being lower quality.
Non minimalist places can function perfectly well with a moderate amount of clutter, and it's easier to work in, because things will be findable just by scanning your environment, right up until you suddenly find you can't tell the difference between the table and the dumpster.
With tech, that theoretically doesn't happen, because digital should give a "Link quality low" alert before things actually get too bad, but with your living space, it's all on you to notice things are getting bad.
It's probably about time for a more detailed theory of design that takes into account what specifically you are trying to minimize or maximize, the usual discussions don't distinguish between complexity, item count, physical volume, cost, reliability, and attention demand.
Increasing complexity can often get rid of all the rest of them(As in going all paperless), and decorations are low attention demand.
Whereas the single function analog stuff that some hardcore minimalism enthusiasts like(Like film cameras and dead tree tax papers), often have high space requirements and can easily be weapons of mass cluttering if not carefully put away.
Do you know who else hated the Bauhaus movement?
People inside the buildings adjacent to Bauhaus architecture?
If, for the sake of argument, disliking Bauhaus wasn't basically equivalent to Nazism, as the article implies, would you want to live or work in a neighborhood of buildings like those?