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Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

I think the real sell with bauhaus design is that it was and is super cheap. Look at these examples in the article. Simple forms. Simple materials. Cheap and fast. Compare that with an earlier building like the empire state building and we see the exact opposite. 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. Its kind of a shame then that the international standard today has basically been the fast and cheap bauhaus inspired 5/1 style building, in a sort of race to the bottom away from the building forms that once defined a place.

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It's also the real problem with Bauhaus (and IKEA) - if you're going for cheap and fast, you're not going to stop at "cheap enough whilst still being durable, etc".

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.

I think it may be unfortunate to lump Ikea in with Bauhaus. While I agree with the general sentiment that Ikea tends to be single use, the idea of the flatpack was truly revolutionary. Shipping furniture used to be crazy expensive, but the idea of designing a bookcase that could take minimal space to ship and let the customer with no tools other than a screwdriver and a hammer put it together was truly a leap that I’m not sure many at the time were prepared to take.

> truly a leap that I’m not sure many at the time were prepared to take.

I mean, at least one other company took the leap a few years before Ikea did: Sauder.

And to be fair to IKEA they have a decent amount of higher quality flatpack furniture (as do others in the space) that do survive a move much better than cardboard and particle board pieces do.

Those pieces are more expensive, usually.

and their flatpack's just better. I've bought stuff off Wayfair and the like, but Ikea flatpack is better engineered to make the assembly process nicer.

I have a dresser from Target that came flat packed, and it was as nice as anything from Ikea.

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.

to each their own I like those twist lock fasteners

They work great until a few years later when things start to get loose (at least in my experience, when embedded in particle board).

The technical term for those fasteners is "cam lock fastener". They were invented specifically for flat pack furniture (I believe this 1988 patent [1] is the original), and there's not really any point to use them for anything else, since they're really inferior to most types of joints.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US4886326A/en

I don’t see the problem with moving IKEA furniture.

> Compare that with an earlier building like the empire state building and we see the exact opposite.

> 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.

Also, the Empire State Building is more recent, built 1930 - 1931. The Bauhaus building in Dessau, the first picture in the article, was built 1925 - 1926.

To your point:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...

I don't really hate contemporary architecture, because postmodern architecture at least has some variety and style to it. Modernism (especially but not limited to Brutalism) is just soulless, totalitarian, oppressive, and depressing.

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.

> the only reasons to spread vertically are phallic and Freudian.

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.

Skyscrapers are phallic because of the engineering constraints of stacking floors upon one another. Airplanes and missiles are phallic because of the engineering constraints of rocketry and aerodynamics. Guns are phallic because of the engineering constraints of using gunpowder to propel a small metal bullet.

For crying out loud, form follows function and sometimes a cigar is just a freaking cigar.

Yes, but also.... Phalic symbolism is a source of inspiration for all.

Also, it's a cosmic balance for all the triangle engineering of ancient times.

Everybody seems to hate it. From a pure optical perspective I find the Pualinum in Leipzig a masterpiece.

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.

>I think the real sell with bauhaus design is that it was and is super cheap.

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?

The part that's missing is the "Art". That's one of the huge pieces of the Bauhaus really pushed. At the time, you could get "cheap and ugly" or you could get "expensive and beautiful". There wasn't anything in between. Bauhaus went counter to that by pushing the belief that you can have well designed pieces that were also affordable.

Maybe the pipeline that produces cheap product is actually fed by bauhaus graduates.

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.

All else equal, cheap is good. Also if I'm choosing between a million unhoused and a few in beautiful mansions, and everyone housed, I'm choosing the latter. We need quantity too, not just quality.

Cf. IKEA

Not just ikea but all the cheap melamine board furniture out there today takes inspiration from the bauhaus philosophy. And also the fact melamine board is so cheap and comes finished.

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