Chapter 14 The Bauhaus: the evolution of an idea 1919-32 Lol us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of @ million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus. 1919 The Bauhaus was the outcome of a continuous effort to reform applied art education in Ger- many around the turn of the century, first with the establishment 1898 of Karl Schmidt's Dresdner Werkstatten (which became the Deutsche Werkstatten, and moved to the garden city of Hellerau in 1908), then with the appoint mont in 1903 of Hans Poeizig and Peter Behrens to the directorships of applied art schools in Breslau and Dusseldorf, and finally, in 1906, with the founding of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar under the direction of the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde. Despite the ambitious structures that he designed for both the Fine Arts Building and the School of Arts and Crafts, Van de Velde did little more in his tenure than establish 2 rela- tively modest Kunstseminar for craftsmen After his enforced resignation as an alien in 1915, he advised the Saxon State Ministry that Walter Gropius, Hermann Obrist or August Endell would make a suitable successor. Protracted discussions took place throughout the war between the Ministry and Fritz Mackensen, heed of the Grand Ducal Academy of Fine Art, as to the relative pedagogical status of fine and applied art, with Gropius arguing for the relative autonomy of the latter, Gropius advocated 2 workshop-based design education for both designers and craftsmen, while Mac- kensen stuck to the Prussian idealist line, insisting that artist-craftsmen should be trained ina fine art academy, This ideological conflict was resolved in 1919 in compromise: Gropius became director of a composite institution, consisting of the Academy of Art and the School of Arts and Crafts, an arrangement that was to divide the Bauhaus, conceptually, throughout its existence. The principles of the Bauhaus Proclamation of 1919 had been anticipated in Bruno Taut's architectural programme for the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst, published late in 1918. Taut argued that @ new cultural unity could be attained only through a new art of building, wherein each soparate discipline would contribute to the final form. ‘At this point,’ he wrote, ‘there will be no boundaries between the crafts, sculpture and painting; all will be one: Architecture.’ This anarchic reworking of the Geseme- kunstwerk ideal was elaborated by Gropius first in the pamphlet written in April 1919 for the ‘Exhibition of Unknown Architects’, organ- ized by the Arbeitsrat fir Kunst, and then in his Bauhaus Proclamation of about the same date. Whore the one called on all fine artists to reject salon art and to return to the crafts in the service of a metaphorical cathedral of the future ~ ‘to go into buildings, endow them with fairy tales... and build in fantasy without regard for technical difficulty’ — the other exhorted the members of the Bauhaus ‘to creats a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between crafts- ‘man and artist’, Even the word Bauhaus, which Gropius persuaded the reluctant state government to adopt as the official title of the new institution, 123intentionally recalled the medieval Bauhiitte or masons’ lodge. That such connotations were deliberate is confirmed by a letter written by Oskar Schlemmer in 1922: Originally the Bauhaus was founded with visions of erecting the cathedral of socialism and the workshops were established in the manner of the cathedral building lodges [Dombeuhiitten]. The idea of the cathedral has for the time being receded into the back- ground and with it certain definite ideas of an artistic nature. Today we must think at best in terms of the house, perhaps even only think so. In the face of the economic plight, it is our task to become pioneers of simplicity, that is, to find 2 simple form for all life's necessities, which is at the same time respectable and genuine. For the first three years of its existence the Bauhaus wes dominated by the charismatic 102 Feininger, woodcut for the Bauhaus Procla- mation, 1919. Zukunfiskathedrale, the cathedral of ‘he future as the cathedral of socialism, presence of the Swiss painter and teacher, Johannes Itten, who arrived in the autumn of 1919, Three years earlier he had started his own art school in Vienna, under the influence of Franz Cizek, In a highly charged milieu, col- oured by the anarchic anti-Seccessionist activ- ities of the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the architect Adolf Loos, Cizek had developed a unique system of instruction based on stimulat- ing individual creativity through the making of collages of different materials and textures. His methods had matured in a cultural climate impregnated with progressive educational theory, from the systems of Froebel and Montessori to the ‘learning-through-doing’ movement, initiated by the American John Dewey and vigorously propagated in Gerrtany after 1908 by the educational reformer Georg Kerschensteiner. The teaching in Itten’s Vien- nese school and in the Vorkurs, ot preliminary course, that he initiated in the Bauhaus was derived from Cizek, although Itten enriched the method with the form and colour theory of his ‘own master Adolf Hélzel. The aims of Itten's foundation course, mandatory for all first-year students, were to release individual creativity and to enable each student to assess his own particular ability Up to 1920, when, at Itten’s request, the artists Schlemmer, Paul Klee and Georg Muche joined the Bauhaus, he taught, single-handed, four separate craft courses in addition to the Vorkurs, while Gerhard Marcks and Lyonel Feininger gave marginal courses in ceramics and printing respectively. Itten’s anarchic position at the time may be gleaned from his 1922 response to a referendum on the provision of state welfare for artists: The mind stands outside any organization Where it has nevertheless been organized (religion, church) it has become estranged from its innate nature. . .. The state should take care that none of its citizens starve, but it should not support art. Itten’s anti-authoritarian, even mystical, pos- ition was substantially reinforced in 1921 by his extended stay in the Mazdaznan centre at Herrliberg near Zurich, Ho returned in the middle of the year to convert his pupils and his 403. Itten, in the Mazdaznan work costume that he designed, 1921 colleague Muche to the rigours of this up- dated version of an archaic Persian religion. The cult demanded an austere life style, periodic fasting and a vegetarian diet flavoured with cheese and garlic. The physical and spiritual well-being deemed to be essential to creativity was further assured by breathing and relaxation exercises. Of this inner-directed orientation Itten later wrote: The terrible losses and horrible events of World Wer | and a close study of Spengler's Decline of the West made me realize that we had reached a crucial point in our scientific- technological civilization. For me. it was not enough to embrace the slogans ‘retum to craft’ or ‘art and technology, hand in hand’, | studied Eastern philosophy, delved into Persian Mazdaism and Indian yoga teachings, and compared them with early Christianity. | reached the conclusion that we must counter- belance our externelly-orientated scientific research and technological speculation with inner-directed thought and practice. | searched for something, for myself and my work, on which to base a new way of life. The growing division between Gropius and Itten was exacerbated by the appearance in Weimar of two equally powerful personalities: the Dutch De Stil artist Theo van Doesburg, who took up residence in the winter of 1921, and the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who joined the Bauhaus, at Itten’s instigation, in the summer of 1922. Where the former postulated a rational, anti-individualist aes- thetic, the latter taught an emotive and ultim- ately mystical approach to art, Although the two men did not come into direct conflict, Van Doesburg’s extramural De Stil polemic in- stantly appealed to many Bauhaus students. His teaching not only had an immediate impact on the production of the workshops, but also directly challenged the open-ended precepts of the original Bauhaus programme. His influence was even reflected in the furnishing of Gropius's own office, and in the asym- metrical composition of Gropius's entry for the 104 Gropius and A. Meyer, project for the Chicago Tribune Building, 1922.1922 Chieago Tribune competition, designed with Adolf Meyer. In 1922, after Van Doesburg had been proselytizing for nine months, the generally critical socio-economic situation brought Gro- pius to modify the craft orientation of the original programme. His initial attack on Itten appeared in his circular to the Bauhaus masters, where he indirectly criticized Itten’s monastic rejection of the world. This text was in effect a drait for his essay /dee und Aufbau des Staat- lichen Bauhauses Weimar (‘The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus’), published on the occasion of the first Bauhaus exhibition held in Weimar in 1923. He wrote: The teaching of craft is meant to prepare for designing for mass production. Starting with the simplest tools and least complicated jobs, he [the Bauhaus apprentice] gradually acquires ability to master more intricate problems and to work with machines, while at the same time he keeps in touch with the entire process of production from start to finish, whereas the factory worker never gets beyond the knowledge ‘of one phase of the process, Therefore the Bauhaus is consciously seeking contacts with existing industrial enterprises, for the sake of mutual stimulation. This carefully worded argument for the recon- ciliation of craft design and industrial pro- duction brought about Itten's immediate resig- nation, His position on the faculty was immediately filled by the Hungarian artist and social radical Lészl6 Moholy-Nagy. On his arrival in Berlin in 1921 (as a refugee from the short-lived Hungarian revolution), Moholy-Nagy had come into contact with the Russian designer El Lissitzky, who was then in Germany for the preparations of the Russian Exhibition of 1922. This encounter encouraged him to pursue his own Constructivist leanings, and from this date forward his paintings featured Suprematist elements, those modular crosses and rectangles soon to become the substance of his famous ‘telephone’ pictures, executed in enamelled steal, Of these he wrote: In 1922 | ordered by telephone from a sign factory five paintings in porcelain enamel. | 126 had the factory's colour chart before me and | sketched my paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the telephone the factory super- visor had the same kind of paper, divided into squares. He took down the dictated shapes in the correct position. This spectacular demonstration of programmed art production seems to have impressed Gropius, for in the following year he invited Moholy-Nagy to take over both the prelimin- ary course and the metal workshop. Under Moholy-Nagy’s leadership the products of the latter were at once orientated towards a ‘Constructivist Elementarism’, which was tem- pered over the years by a mature concem for the convenience of the objects produced. In the meantime he introduced into the preliminary course, which he shared with Josef Albers, exercises in equilibrium structures in a variety of materials, including wood, metal, wire and glass. The aim was no longer to demonstrate a feeling for contrasting materials and forms, usually assembled as reliefs, but rather to reveal the statical and aesthetic properties of free-standing asymmetrical structures. The epi- ‘tome of such ‘exercises’ was the building of his own Light-Space Modulator, on which he was to be occupied from 1922 to 1930. The ‘Constructivist Elementarist’ style, which Moholy-Nagy had partly derived from the Vkhutemas (Higher Technical and Artistic Studios) of the Soviet Union, was complemen- ted elsewhere in the Bauhaus by the De Stijl influence of Van Doesburg and by a post- Cubist approach to form, as evidenced in the sculpture workshops under Schlemmer's di rection from 1922. An early manifestation of this ‘Elementarist’ aesthetic, instantly adopted as @ house style after Itten’s resignation, was the sans serif typography used by Herbert Bayer and Joost Schmidt for the Bauhaus Exhibition of 1923 Two model houses, iargely built and fur- ished by the Bauhaus workshops, character- ize this period of transition, revealing common alements and striking dissimilarities. They are the Sommerfeld House, designed by Gropius and Meyer and completed in Berlin-Dahlem 1922, and the Bauhaus ‘Versuchshaus’ or Experimental House, designed by Muche and Meyer for the Bauhaus Exhibition of 1923 Where the first was designed as a traditional Heimatstil log house, with an interior enriched with carved wood and stained glass so as to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, the second was conceived as a sachlich, smoothly rendered object, furnished with the latest labour-saving devices s0 as to be a Wohnmaschine or living machine. This minimum-circulation house was organized around an ‘atrium’ — not an open court but a clerestory-lit living-room sur- rounded on all sides by bedrooms and other ancillary spaces. Each af these perimeter rooms was equipped in an austere manner, with exposed metal radiators, steel windows and door frames, elemental furniture and unshaded tubular light fittings. While most of these pieces were hand-made in the Bauhaus work- shops, Adolf Meyer, in his report on the house in Bauhausbiicher 3 (1923), emphasized its furnishing with standard bathroom and kitchen equipment and its construction with entirely new materials and methods The changing ideology of the Bauhaus wes further demonstrated in an article by Gropius 1108 Muche and A. Meyer, Experimental House, Bauhaus Exhibition, Weimar, 1923 in the same issue of Bauhausbiicher; entitled ‘Wohnhaus-Industrie’, it illustrated a remark- able round house projected by Kar! Fieger, the centralized, light-weight conception of which anticipated Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House of 1927. In addition, Gropius published his own ‘Serienh’user’, ot extending house units, intended as prototypes for the Bau- haussiedlung, a housing estate which he hoped to build on the outskirts of Weimar. These serial houses were finally realized as masters’ resi- dences built at the Dessau Bauhaus in 1926. After 1923 the Bauhaus approach became extremely ‘objective’, in the sense of being closely affiliated to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. This affiliation, which was reflected, despite their rather formalistic massing, in the buildings for the Dessau Bauhaus itself, was to become more pronounced after Gropius’s resignation in 1928, The last two years of Gropius’s tenure were distinguished by three major developments: the politically enforced and well-orchestrated move from Weimar to Dessau, the completion of the Dessau: Bauhaus, and finally the gradual emergence of a recog- nizable Bauhaus approach, in which a greater 108, 107 Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau, 1926-26. Exterior showing the pinwhael compo p. 138}; below, bridge linking admini workshop blocks, an inauguration day, 1926. ae108 Jucker, adjustable piano lamp, 1923, 109 Bauhaus light fittings, of pressed metal and ‘opalescent gless, mass-produced under the direction of H. Meyer. emphasis was placed on deriving form from productive method, material constraint and programmatic necessity. The furnitura workshops, under Marcel Breuer's brilliant direction, started in 1926 to roduce tubular steel light-weight chairs aid tables which were convenient, easy to clean and economical. These pieces, together with the light fittings from the metal workshop, were Used to furnish the interior of the new Bauhaus buildings. 8y 1927 the ‘licensed’ industrial Production of such Bauhaus designs was in full ‘swing, including the Breuer furniture, the tex- tured fabrics of Gunta Stadler-Stdlz| and her colleagues, and the elegant lamps and metal- ware of Marianne Brandt. In that year too, 128 Bauhaus typography finally matured with Bayer's austere layout and sans serif type, about to become world famous for its exclusion of upper-case letters. The year 1927 also saw the formation of the architectural department, under the leadership of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. A number of Breuer’s pre- fabricated house designs of around this time reflect the immediate impact of Mayer's in- fluence. Meyer brought with him his talented colleague Hans Wittwer who, like him, had been a member of the left-wing ABC group in Basle (see below, p. 132). Early in 1928 Gropius tendered his resig- nation to the mayor of Dessau and appointed Meyer as his successor. The relative maturity of the institution, the unremitting attacks on himself and the growth of his practice all con- vinced him that it was time for a change. This move radically transformed the Bauhaus and, paradoxically enough, given the growing re- actionary climate of Dessau, shifted its orien- tation still further left and even closer to tha Neue Sachlichkeit position. For a variety of reasons Moholy-Nagy, Breuer and Bayer fol- 110. Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau, 1925-26. Main hall with Breuer furniture. lowed Gropius’s lead and resigned. As Moholy- Nagy indicated in his letter of resignation, he disliked Meyer's immediate insistence on the adoption of a rigorous design method: | can’t afford a continuation on this specislized purely objective and efficient besis - either productively or humanly. Under a programme. of increased technology | can only continue if | have a technical expert as my aide, For economic reasons this will never be possible. Largely liberated from the inhibiting in- fluence of Gropius's star faculty, Meyer was able to steer the work of the Bauhaus towards ‘a more ‘socially responsible’ design programme. Simple, demountable, inexpensive, plywood furniture came to the fore and a range of wall- paper was produced. More Bauhaus designs were being manufactured than ever before, although the emphasis was now placed on social rather than aesthetic considerations. Meyer organized the Bauhaus into four major departments: architecture (now called ‘build- ing’ for polemical reasons), advertising, wood and metal production, and textiles. Supple- mentary scientific courses, such as industrial organization and psychology, were introduced into all departments, while the building section shifted its emphasis to the economic optim- ization of plan arrangements and to methods for the precise calculation of light, sunlight, heat loss/gain, and acoustics. This ambitious pro- gramme required an increase in faculty, so that Wittwer's appointment as a technician wes soon complemented by that of the architect/ planner Ludwig Hilberseimer, the engineer Alcar Rudelt and a studio staff comprising Alfred Amdt, Karl Fieger, Edvard Heiberg and Mart Stam. Despite Meyer's concer to prevent the Bauhaus from becoming a tool of left-wing party politics (he resisted an attempt to form a student Communist cell), a remorseless campaign against him finally forced the mayor to demand his resignation. Meyer revealed his understanding of the situation in an open letter to the mayor, Fritz Hesse: It was no use explaining [to you) that a Bauhaus Dessau’ group of the German Com- munist Perty was an impossibility trom the party organization point of view, no use my assuring you that my political activities were of a cultural and never 4 party character. ... Munici- pal politics require you to provide resounding Bauhaus successes, a brilliant Bauhaus facade and a prestigious Bauhaus director. Municipal politics and German right-wing reaction in the event required considerably more. They required the Bauhaus closed and its sachlich facade capped by an ‘Aryan’ pitched roof. They required the Marxists impeached and the liberal émigrés banished along with their obscure art works — later to be designated as decadent. The desperate attempt of the mayor of Dessau to shore up the Bauhaus, in the name of liberal democracy, through the patriarchal directorship of Mies van der Rohe, was doomed to failure, The Bauhaus remained in Dessau for but two more years. In October 1932 what was left of it moved into an old warehouse on the outskirts of Berlin, but by now the floodgates of reaction were open, and nine months later the Bauhaus was finally closed. 111 Yamawaki, ‘The End of the Dessau Bauhaus’, collage, 1932 129modern #2 architecture, with 362 illustrations third edition: revised and enlarged las (eX (eee thames and hudsonTo my parents ‘Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback 'ssold subject to {he condition the it shall not by way of trade wise be lent, resoid, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding > cover other than that in whieh itis published and without 2 ‘similar condition including these words b ® subsequent purchaser. eee © 1980, 1985, 1992 Thames and Hudson Lid, London Third edition fis published in the USA in 1992 by hames and Hudson Ine., 600 Fifth Avenue, Now York, New York 10110 : Ubrary of Congress Catalog Card Number 81-6673 Al Rights Reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced Sratarnted in eny form ot by any means, electronic oF mechanical 1g photocapy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without pri relia ‘Out prior permission in writing from Printed and bound in Germany by Interdruck, Leipzig, GmbH woe ACs Contents INTRODUCTION PART |: Cultural developments and predisposing techniques 1750-1939 1 Cultural transformations: Neo-Classical architecture 1750-1900 2. Territorial transformations: urban developments 1800-1909 3 Technical transformations: structural engineering 1775-1939 PART II: A critical history 1836-1967 1 News from Nowhere: England 1836-1924 2. Adler and Sullivan: the Auditorium and the high rise 1886-95 3. Frank Lloyd Wright and the myth of the Prairie 1890-191 6 4 Structural Rationalism and the influence of Viollet-le-Duc: Gaudi, Horta, Guimard and Berlage 1880-1910 5 Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School 1896-1916 6 The Sacred Spring: Wagner, Olbrich and Hoffmann 1886-191 fe 7 Antonio Sant’Elia and Futurist architecture 1909-14 8 Adolf Loos and the crisis of culture 1896-1931 9 Henry van de Velde and the abstraction of empathy 1895-1914 10 Tony Garnier and the Industrial City 1899-1918 11 Auguste Perret: the evolution of Classical Rationalism 1899-1925 12 The Deutsche Werkbund 1898-1927 13 The Glass Chain: European architectural Expressionism 1910-25 14 The Bauhaus: the evolution of an idea 1919-32 15 The New Objectivity: Germany, Holland and Switzerland 1923-33 16 De Stijl: the evolution and dissolution of Neo-Plasticism 1917-31 17 Le Corbusier and the Esprit Nouveau 1907-31 18 Mies van der Rohe and the significance of fact 1921-33 19 The New Collectivity: art and architecture in the Soviet Union 1918-32 20 ° Le Corbusier and the Ville Radieuse 1928-46 21 Frank Lloyd Wright and the Disappearing City 1929-63 12 20 29 42 51 87 64 74 78 84 96 100 105 109 116 123 130 142 161 167 178 186