Exploring Bauhaus: Revolutionary design school that shaped modern world
playforthoughts.com
playforthoughts.com
IKEA has some wonderful furniture that is cheap and fast, but cannot survive being moved. And Bauhaus has some cheap and fast buildings, but they cannot survive being unmaintained - which is often what happens to buildings that were built to be cheapest.
Those pieces are more expensive, usually.
Part of it was using "real screws" that screw into wood at places, instead of twist/lock fasteners or whatever those are.
Of course, if you also glue it, you get something surprisingly durable.
I mean, at least one other company took the leap a few years before Ikea did: Sauder.
> More complex forms. More craftsmanship required to create the overall decor and trim designs, and no doubt more cost compared to a bauhaus style building one could make with some chicken wire, plaster, and cheap windows.
The Empire State was built in 410 days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulinum_%28University_of_Leip...
But I heard it gets really hot inside, which sucks if you have to study there. In my opinion, functionality should always be prioritized higher than aesthetics.
It's also ironic for the author to claim that a style which peaked 100-130 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is somehow the fault of global capitalism, as if global capitalism hadn't been a thing for 100+ years by the 1950s.
And of course even though the author is claiming that the left has flaws in their approach to architecture, they still have to make the obligatory supplication about the right's alleged "ulterior motives."
For all the severe flaws in Modernist architecture, this article seems a bit of a hash, honestly. The author seems trapped inside their own ideological bubble.
Edit:
> It should be obvious to anyone that skyscrapers should be abolished. After all, they embody nearly every bad tendency in contemporary architecture: they are not part of nature, they are monolithic, they are boring, they have no intricacy, and they have no democracy. Besides, there is plenty of space left on earth to spread out horizontally; the only reasons to spread vertically are phallic and Freudian.
Oh, good effing grief.
Lol. I agree.
OTOH... An over the top, ideological take on art is kind of traditional in architecture. I could easily imagine a reincarnated Ayn Rand argueing for skyscrapers for these exact reasons. Phalic inspiration representing the taming of nature and challenge to God.
In 2024, a slapfight between Andy Warhol and a local dress designer about the colour orange... That was the kind of conflict avante garde artists had to have so the rest of us could benefit from a stream of new artistic ideas. A sacrifice.
These days... everyone gets dragged in.
I kind of like brutalism, personally. It took some bad turns, but I'm hoping for a comeback. Maybe we should do paint this time though.
For crying out loud, form follows function and sometimes a cigar is just a freaking cigar.
Also, it's a cosmic balance for all the triangle engineering of ancient times.
Cheap isn't a bad thing. The reasothat some of the best ideas in architecture are irrelevant is specifically avoiding integrating economics into them.
That said, all of modernism basically followed this path. Talented, quality work in the early 30th century. A formalisation of the ideas and principles.
Adoption by a second generation (post wwwii) who liked it mostly for its legible formality... a crappy generation of work as the principles were applied by those going for "good enough" and no more. Same thing happened to brutalism and other modernist schools.
An analogy might be open offices. An energetic reimagining of office life by early Google or whatnot. No expense spared. Reasons, ideas, ideology behind the design.
Pretty soon, all the lower tier companies were doing crappy open offices because it's cheaper, Google do it and it's better. Here read this article about idea sharing in open spaces. Did I mention it's cheaper?
In other words interesting iconic creations come from mavericks who are self-soveriegn, while go to school, get a job, work in an office type creations are a series of compromises with many requirements to fulfill and many fingers in the pot.
After all, a consumer product can win by individual choice of the consumer, with failed attempts of interpreting Bauhaus design disappearing again, which makes it easy to cite good examples of lasting Bauhaus style over time (i.e. showing similarity of Braun products with Apple design, etc.).
But a failed interpretation of Bauhaus in Architecture continues to live among us for decades, watering down the value of well-executed Bauhaus design with an appearance of being a cheap bland building...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
His other book on art was pretty good too, and both were received very poorly by their respective industries, which is probably a sign that he was on to something.
And if I remember correctly the original plans were changed and the buildings ended up much higher and denser to meet the goals of the city.
Edit: Found this article which states that the plans were modified by Wils Ebert, Gropius had no say in this. https://www.goethe.de/ins/au/en/kul/arc/bau/21319032.html
> modern architecture is very unpopular in Germany
IMHO it has much more to do with the constraints of the 50s and 60s. All major cities in Germany were destroyed and had to be rebuilt fast and cheap. Of course buildings from the late 19th/early 20th century might have looked a lot nicer but they were also massively more expensive (would you rather many cheap and ugly high density buildings or a few better looking expensive ones, it's not like there were that many other options).
Old layout won and today everybody is very happy about that. But wherever there are old stock buildings and post war reconstruction buildings in the same street, the old ones are considered much higher standard, despite best efforts to avoid modernism in the reconstruction. From today's perspective, the actual age difference between one group and the other is laughably small. But in the rush to rebuild post war, the "good enough" threshold was so much lower than pre WWI the difference echoes on through the renovations to this day.
After WW2 it was mainly cheap concrete.
But it’s untrue that only rich people live in old buildings. Maybe in some parts. But most old buildings are in the poorer regions of the inner city. Most rich people I know live in modern buildings. Some in older but very well remade ones…
Sounds like Bauhaus was better at building affordable housing than other styles.
It's interesting to contrast them with their less modernist "Gemeindebau" contemporaries in Vienna, which share some ideas and contrast in many others. In my opinion the Vienna ones deserve far more attention than they get (than they get outside Vienna?). I guess their biggest hindrance to fame is that there are so many of them, and that the biggest ones that unsurprisingly draw all the attention (e.g. the match made in heaven of Karl Marx Hof and George Washington Hof) aren't quite as interesting as their entirety, in particular the continuity through Anschluss, war and the aftermath.
I mentioned Tom Wolfe's book "From Bauhaus to Our House." I don't think he likes Bauhaus much.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41001.From_Bauhaus_to_Ou...
https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod...
Although I agree with her that traditional, ornamental design is more beautiful, something bothers me about her line of argument; it seems cheap and patronizing to take ideas expressed with rigor and good faith by talented people and dismiss them w/o engaging them intellectually. Nevertheless, its an interesting point of view
Without commenting on the overall design, the fact that this can apparently happen smacks of bad design to me, at least in the details.
Sometimes I see 'Bauhaus' style things and I think they're incredible, but then very slight variations of that same thing immediately look ghastly to me, but I can never quite put my finger on what it is. I think there's a certain kind of purity required in the design to make sure the simple look works.
I think this is also why Bauhaus design often ages terrible. Immaculate plaster walls can look nice, but the second they age, get weathered or develop a 'patina' they look awful.
I suspect this attitude spills over into what people view as their 'best' work.
I'd argue that only a fraction of well-designed buildings in your surrounding actually embody the Bauhaus ethos and its derived aesthetics, but possibly a majority of well-designed products around you do.
Apple turned bauhaus into the “premium” aesthetic, at least in the US. So many companies just copy their premium style from Apple with slight variations, I wonder how much of its presence in our world is simply due to everyone trying to associate themselves with the “premium”/minimalist aesthetic that Apple has cultivated.
My family used to take fairly regular trips up there; the LIGO planning meetings were held at the ACC, and so we'd typically lodge either there or in nearby Snowmass, which also is home to a large number of Bauhaus designs.
As if that's a good thing. I see someone else has already referenced "From Bauhaus to Our House."
The bottom line is just this: Bauhaus is ugly. It does not uplift people's spirits and it does not make us happy. The authors inadvertently give the best argument against it:
> Many also believed that only dedicated craftsman, with their hands-on approach, could produce the highest quality work. They argued that machine production inevitably led to a decline in aesthetic quality. Furthermore, they contended that individuals surrounded by such unattractive surroundings lacked an appreciation for beauty.
The cliché Bauhaus style people know is not the thing that had the impact, everything else was.
And it incorporates things like varying countertop heights, etc.
Looks workable to me - remember kitchens were not "open concept" at the time, nor made for multiple people operating in them at once.
Which is both fair and faintly damning, as what has been lost along the way (functional design that makes good use of limited space) was perhaps more important than the clean lines and shiny veneer which was retained.
Or maybe I'm just projecting. Been cooking on glass-topped stoves for the past few months and that tends to make me irritable.
Before that the typical kitchen furniture were single freestanding objects, like this stove: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/Fr...
But it is more than surface, Schütte-Lihotzky went and measured how long certain tasks were taking and optimized the layout and objects of the kitchen to minimize the waste of time, aomething that before that wasn't really a thing in residential kitchens.
Although I know a guy who takes down really old buildings and regularly sees hand-wrought nails, those are cool too
Though that may be just a variation of mortise and tenon.
However the modernism originating with bauhaus can be applied tactfully with enhanced functionality (I.e larger unobstructed spaces- but in limited fashion. Too often it strips the humanity away from our spaces.
A stunning example of such modernism: Aarhus City Hall, Denmark
The architecture of the school buildings themselves is quite remarkable, but as a school, it din't really work. The professors were acclaimed artists, but the alumni aren't all that well-known and as far as I know haven't contributed enormously to the field of arts and design.