Should you visit Stittgart, consider visiting the Weissenhof
Siedlung
"The Wiessenhof estate was built for the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in 1927, and included twenty-one buildings comprising sixty dwellings, designed by seventeen European architects. The German architect Mies van der Rohe was in charge of the project on behalf of the city, and it was he who selected the architects, budgeted and coordinated their entries, prepared the site, and oversaw construction. Le Corbusier was awarded the two prime sites, facing the city, and by far the largest budget.
The twenty-one buildings vary slightly in form, consisting of terraced and detached houses and apartment buildings, and display a strong consistency of design. What they have in common are their simplified facades, flat roofs used as terraces, window bands, open plan interiors, and the high level of prefabrication which permitted their erection in just five months"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissenhof_Estate
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Mies gets somewhat of a myth making pass here: he may have sounded and acted like a “Mandarin”, but his aristocratic ways were pretty much a self invention. His father was a stone mason in a small town, and his name was a reconstruction of pieces of mom’s last name and some umlaut-ing.
Also, if you remember the Mies In Berlin show at MoMA in 2001, there was a chilling sketch of a design for a facade of his competition proposal for German Pavillion for the Brussels Exposition of 1934, with a big eagle and swastika emblem centered on the otherwise “Miesian” facade, a year after the Reichstag burned. It’s not as if he didn’t try to ingratiate himself with the Nazi government; maybe his work wasn’t scary enough.
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Truly unfortunate article only focusing on the architectural legacy of the Bauhaus, dismissing Moholy-Nagy as a mere photographer and Johannes Itten as some mystic freak, failing to address the impact the Bauhaus had in the other arts and the 20th century itself. The New Bauhaus Chicago simply ignored and focusing instead on the last few months of Mies van der Rohe’s failed directorship.
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Only a superficial commentator would refer to Tom Wolfe as "right wing". He chronicled the absurdity of 20th and 21st Century American culture with a sharp eye and an even hand.
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For the masses, it led to small boxy rooms, 8-foot ceilings and flat roofs that leak. As others have said, perfect for those interested primarily in profit.
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The German Bauhaus aesthetic is cold, detached and soulless. After the war, it proved a perfect match for American corporate needs. That was probably the very last thing the European academics at the Bauhaus could have imagined or wanted.
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This is a wonderful retrospective of one of the most important aesthetic and cultural movements that redefined the way people lived in the 20th century. There is no major city in the world, be it New Orleans or Nairobi; Boston or Beijing, whose skyline has not been affected by the Bauhaus legacy.
But its most extreme simplicity and ubiquitous application led the diminution in the architecture profession's respect for context both in siting new designs and in creating internal environments people would enjoy inhabiting. The term "Miesian" came to define an austere simplicity that increasingly left society scratching its collective heads at the sculpturally harsh, minimal landscapes it promoted.
Frank Lloyd Wright was one of its most ardent critics, who defined his modernism through a richer mosaic of materials crafted to allow space to flow past corners, not be hemmed in by them. His magnum opus, Fallingwater, is a powerful counterpoint to the minimalism that grew out of the Bauhaus.
Of course, there were designers who understood the transcendent principles of spatial and material composition that the Bauhaus offered. And many were liberated to pursue a more inflected and contextual design approach. But much of last century's most brutal designs from public housing to corporate towers were legitimized under the Bauhaus aesthetic through the license it gave those who could not, or would not, distinguish between its best principles and its harshest style.
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The writer refers to Wolfe as "right-wing." Wolfe rejected that label. He told the Guardian, "I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer."
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What a bizarre comment. Why does it matter that Tom Wolfe rejected the label? Are we to take his self-evaluation as definitive? How trusting! And Zola as a “man of the left?” HE would have rejected THAT label.
Wolfe did well at skewering the more extreme intellectual fads of modernism, but he also had no interest in or knowledge of its more substantive ideas and aspirations. His tastes tended towards the familiar, the philistine and the kitsch in art.
I don’t know what his politics were, nor do I care.
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This was inhumane design that was proven to be a failure. Add some big numbers and food tray slots to the doors at the employment office and you would have any jail in the U.S. Nothing to celebrate here.
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I don't understand why there aren't even photos of all the places and buildings discussed. What is the excuse?
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"Just days before, thousands of neo-Nazis had marched in Chemnitz..."
Actual description of the march, from a New Yorker writer who was there: "People marched past Marx’s oversized face waving German flags and chanting, 'Merkel has to go.' Many looked like average citizens. Some bore the insignia of various neo-Nazi groups. A few I recognized as leaders of the AfD."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/how-a-teens-death-has-become-a-political-weapon
While it may technically be true that "thousands of neo-Nazis" marched, the Times makes it sound like ONLY neo-Nazis marched, memory-holing the thousands of ordinary citizens who marched after a German was stabbed to death by a refugee. This is one way propagandists work: by glancing references to supposedly established facts, until every right-minded person takes for granted something that's never actually been proven or is downright false. Who would dare protest mass immigration, when the Newspaper of Record treats it as axiomatic that everyone who protests mass immigration is a neo-Nazi?
He who controls the present controls the past; he who controls the past controls the future.
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The tangled legacy of the Bauhaus in India is far better exemplified by its National Institute of Design, or NID, in Ahmedabad, founded in 1961 with funding by the Ford Foundation and a blueprint provided by Charles and Ray Eames' 1957 Eames Report on the state of design and design education in India. NID's first decade hosted distinguished foreign visitors, many associated with the Bauhaus or the Ulm school. But what really makes NID such a compelling case study in the fungibility of Bauhaus' political legacy is its location in Gujarat and Ahmedabad, once home to Mahatma Gandhi, later host to the likes of Buckminster Fuller, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, and now, tragically, ground zero for Narendra Modi's fascist vision for India. As the lovely old Corbusier buildings (and BV Doshis!) there look on, and crumble ...
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Honestly, most of the Bauhaus inspired buildings
seem very, very cold.
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On purpose. As a feature, not a bug.
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@Matthew
I can only speak of the ones that I have seen
or were inspired by, and I just find them sterile.
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Architects minds may dream in modernism, but their bodies often reside in bungalows.
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I wish more structures existed here like the Laubenganghäuser.
We live in these atomized houses in atomized neighborhoods and there isn't enough daily interaction with neighbors to make friends with many of them. It's sad really. The quality of life really increases when you can have regular, unplanned encounters with your neighbors, and in America we have designed our living to exclude as much of it as possible, in the interest of privacy.
Loneliness is the result. Private, and lonely.
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I do not know much about Bauhaus, but when it is done wrong has produced some of the most depressing buildings I’ve ever seen. Ditto for Brutalist architecture.
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The Bauhaus has had an enormous influence on me
Because I met Herbert Bayer at his home in California... and I photographed him him one day, had lunch and listened!
The day has influenced me in my work for 30 years
But then I met Andreas Feininger... and over drinks and conversations he has influenced me for 20 years
The Bauhaus has had many unique moments
But nothing is more important than what you take from their concept
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The problem with Bauhaus design is its an affront to nature. Flat roof boxes pretend that gravity and water don't exist. Turning its back on the pitched roof led to nothing but futile and inane gimmicks. Form follows function my eye. Baroque architecture came nowhere near the self-indulgence of the Bauhaus.
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I didn’t know pitched roofs were found in nature.
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@Matthew
Not only do pitched roofs grow naturally, but we also all know that pitched roofs never ever leak.
And Mr. Doe:
All architecture, fanciful or austere, has the capacity for self indulgence. That’s not always a bad thing
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@John Doe
The Acoma Pueblo's flat roofed structures have sheltered inhabitants for more than 1,200 years at one of the earliest continuously occupied communities in North America.
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>>> "The Nazis perceived the Bauhaus to be, along with atonal music and Expressionist painting, yet another specimen of the globe-spanning Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy they sought to eliminate."
The Nazis were, of course, quite wrong. The Bauhaus was and is merely ugly, alienating, inhumane and unimaginative. It arose not from a conspiracy but from simple wrongheadedness and aesthetic tone deafness.
The Bauhaus ain't no human house.
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