Glad someone else caught that. Saying beauty in decoration is “needless” is like saying we should only have non fiction books. Fiction - invention - creativity - fantasy - has its place both in furniture and publishing.
We live in a Bauhaus world.
We live in a Bauhaus world.
The problem statement that the Bauhaus school was founded under was along the lines of this.
The machine age is upon us. The guilds of the craftsman is holding back the training of the workers. The machine age is providing easy access to materials that are more dynamic than wood or stone. The Arts and Crafts movement is generally given credit as the step between the old world and the machine age production.
The Bauhaus was founded to train architects and designers to work with machine age production. The early days they had a hard time getting the students to understand that a machine couldn't produce a cherub. There was a deep seated belief that culture was dangerous after the Great War and peace could exist through efficient use of resources. The machine age would bring a world of abundance if resources were used efficiently.
Finally my art history teachers would have a conniption if a student referred to Bauhaus style architecture. The proper term is International Style. This name is relevant becuase it was to have no cultural preconceived notions. This would promote peace through understanding. The goal was that a human could be dropped in the space from anywhere in the world and navigate their surroundings. I see it as a worthy goal.
Not every building is successful and I admit to being indoctrinated in design since birth but I find this place people and the knowledge workers seem to thrive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex#/med...
It's funny, because I've often used an expression that's almost a perfect inversion of this in order to describe the world's best places. That you could be dropped into a place and know that you are in exactly that place, and not in any of the innumerable identity-less spaces on the planet.
This goal is dystopian.
I would recognize this place as distinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salk_Institute_for_Biological_...
It might be you would describe that as dystopian but I suppose dystopian is in the eye of the beholder.
I guess this is a good as place as any to mention that Corbusier railed against the metric system as anti-human. The reasoning was that human spaces should be defined through human proportions not power of 10 proportioning.
The lack of tolerance for other peoples preferences is considered dystopian in some circles.
It's distinctly... hideous. It looks like a prison block, not a place to encourage human happiness.
> I guess this is a good as place as any to mention that Corbusier railed against the metric system as anti-human. The reasoning was that human spaces should be defined through human proportions not power of 10 proportioning.
That is a silly argument, nothing about the metric system requires you to have power-of-10 proportions in your construction, any more than we have power-of-12 proportions in U.S. construction just because we use feet and inches.
I'm glad we agree it is distinct.
I guess I didn't make my silly argument articulate enough. Let me try again. I was trying to point on the Modernist architect's obsession with the individual over the industrial age. I was trying to point out that he thought the measurement should be in reference to the form which gets lost if people start trying to have even decimal numbers.
The Salk Institute is inarguably one of the most beautiful man made places in southern California. It was built with the explicit intent to attract and cluster the best and brightest minds in the world so they could work together to eliminate human disease. It's all human scale, calm, focused ... the concrete is somehow warm. It masterfully directs the sunlight around it and creates contrasting shadowy nooks where people can chat and take refuge from the heat on hot days. It's inspiring. You can feel the creative power within its walls.
Brilliant people from every corner of the globe still uproot their lives just to work there. There are many awful examples of brutalist architecture, but this building isn't one.
Shapes can support skilled expressions of beauty. The least effort spent on drawing a curve, by hand or mathematically, has more beauty than cube.
You know what else provides shade in hot days? Trees. Shade cloth. Umbrellas. Sails. Statues. Market stalls. Extrusions. ext.
Cube is cube.
You can feel anything when it's written. If it's a cold day and your dog just died (or whatever is enough in your personal life to make you slightly unhappy), I'd prefer to be anywhere else in the world than huddled for warmth behind a grey Cube, with the ever present discomfort of infectious disease protocols in the back of my mind.
Cube is completely submitted to the purpose of the building, it has no relation to the human body or experience.
Cube is cube.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(biology)#/media/File:Wil...
https://lonelyplanetimages.imgix.net/a/g/hi/t/a19a8469295279...
But... hey, I have some friends who still live there and enjoy it. I know people who really enjoy life there, so that's why I'm all for different architectural/urbanism styles. Too bad I also know some people who would love to move from there but can't. Life is complicated.
That is certainly a post industrialization idea. Life is complicated I only know what works for me.
This is to say, I believe a foundation to design thought is being able to accept differing aesthetics. I'm not sure if I can find a positive reference for people who simply call everything they don't like ugly, but hopefully, my acts of schadenfreude have opened a mind or two to the same perspective.
I agree with you that specificity is a worthy goal too: people like to feel their lives are unique and irreplaceable.
Minimal, aesthetic and functional things remain few and far between; the old iPod was Bauhaus, but most other things? Not so much.