B is for Bauhaus - B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

For most of the twentieth century, there was a premier league for modern architects. Membership was limited to just four people: a Swiss-born Frenchman, Le Corbusier, and three Americans (two of whom came originally from Germany): Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. It was a list that reflected a hierarchy created in the 1920s by a self-selected group of historians, propagandists and critics. This particular gang of four did not have much in common. Le Corbusier, the closest that architecture ever came to producing its own Picasso, went from building his personal interpretation of the Arts and Crafts movement in the Swiss watchmaking town in which he was born, to the concrete sculpture of his church at Ronchamp in eastern France. Mies van der Rohe aspired to a steel-and-glass version of classicism in his minimalist towers. Frank Lloyd Wright, in his cape and beret, still trying to finish the Guggenheim Museum well into his nineties, was, as Philip Johnson, the Museum of Modern Art’s first curator of architecture, who went on to become the most prolific of postmodernists, acidly put it, ‘the greatest American architect of the nineteenth century’. Not surprisingly, the four horsemen of modernity were never entirely comfortable with each other. But they were presented by their champions as being way out in front of the rest of the field, ahead of Alvar Aalto and J J P Oud - drawn respectively from the Finnish and Dutch fringe - who constituted the first division. Assorted Austrians, Italians and Russians, notably Adolf Loos, Otto Wagner, Guiseppe Terragni and Konstantin Melnikov, came some way behind. But at least they were more visible than Pierre Chareau - responsible for the remarkable Maison de Verre in Paris, finished in 1932, but still radical enough to have inspired Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre four decades later - or Eileen Gray. Chareau and Gray were regarded by the mainstream as no better than decorators or dabblers, or both. It was a dispensation that never made much sense, but it served to define the limits of the conversation about contemporary architecture until modernism began to lose its allure.

Despite their detractors, Le Corbusier, Wright and Mies all produced architecture that half a century later has not lost its power. Walter Gropius’s place in the hierarchy is more questionable. His career was based on a series of lucky breaks, not least in the people that he was fortunate enough to work with. He met Adolf Meyer when they were both employed as assistants in Peter Behrens’s studio in Berlin and saw how classicism could be modernized to deal with an industrial economy. They watched the birth of the practice of corporate identity, the contemporary version of witchcraft. Behrens designed everything for AEG, from kettles to trademarks and entire factories. It was not only Gropius but also Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier who worked for him. Look at the German embassy in St Petersburg that Behrens gave his name to, and which Mies van der Rohe built, and you can see that Mies was wrestling with the problem of how to turn a corner lined with classical columns, which he later returned to with steel I-beams.

Meyer joined his more famous partner when Gropius left Behrens to start up on his own. Between them they had the talent to ensure that the Fagus shoe-last factory that they built just before the First World War would earn Gropius a leading role in the development of the modern movement.

After Gropius fled from Germany in the early 1930s, he created a new career for himself, but floundered without the right help. In its twilight years, the Architects’ Collaborative, as Gropius called his American practice, was reduced to designing the London outpost of the Playboy Club in lumpen concrete aggregate. Gropius’s most notorious project in Manhattan was the Pan Am tower, erected on top of Grand Central Station, where he was responsible for persuading Emery Roth & Sons, who had retained him as a consultant, to take the urbanistically disastrous decision to align it in such a way as to block the view down Park Avenue. But there was one aspect of his career that was remarkable enough to secure Gropius his reputation as a pioneer of modernism. It was not his architecture, but his role as a teacher. He created the Bauhaus, or, as he and his militantly lower-case typographers preferred to call it, the bauhaus; and made it, thanks in part to an impressive publicity campaign, the most famous art and design school of the twentieth century. As a school, it may not have represented the full creative range of modernism, but it had a prestige unmatched by any other art education institution at the time, or since. After the Bauhaus succumbed to the Gestapo and closed its doors in Berlin, its myth grew and grew, eventually coming to overshadow every conversation about design. It spawned a conveyor belt of exhibitions and books that has continued to gather speed ever since.

I was a schoolboy in 1968 when I saw my first Bauhaus exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. I could not afford the 658-page catalogue at the time. I got mine three years later, and it is still on my bookshelf. It is a kind of sacred text, rarely opened but always there, decade after decade, constantly in the background as a silent reminder of the fundamental place that the movement has played in shaping the thinking of every contemporary designer.

The catalogue has a massive three-inch-thick spine that is taken up entirely by a single word rendered all in capitals as BAUHAUS, in three overlapping colours. It looks like a fading banner proclaiming its cause to the whole room from the shelf on which it sits. The black-and-white illustrations inside reflect an impossibly exotic-looking avantgarde landscape populated by mysterious illustrations of machines, experimental photography, cubist puppets and textiles with the consistency of porridge.

One image in particular still has the power to shock. A woman, conventionally dressed for the time, in kitten-heeled shoes, stockings and a pleated skirt, sits in a tubular steel Wassily chair, designed by Marcel Breuer. So far so normal; then you see that where her head should be is a polished metal egg, into which are cut three gashes for eyes and mouth. It is a monstrous half-human-half-machine, which seems to encapsulate the anxieties and regrets of modernity rather than its optimism. What, I can remember thinking when I first saw it, had this mask made by Oskar Schlemmer to do with what my art teacher had told me about the Bauhaus, as he saw it, being the way into the modern world? How did this deeply unsettling image of a Kafkaesque hybrid fit in with a world of smooth contemporary architecture and the discreet good taste of Design Council-selected domestic appliances?

Since then, I have seen the Bauhaus portrayed with mind-numbing tedium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with rather more concision at the Design Museum in London, and most recently with some style at the Barbican’s spatially challenged art gallery, where it was only when I glimpsed Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut The Crystal Cathedral, which decorated the school’s original prospectus, that I knew I had found the starting point of a chronologically organized show.

Every generation needs its own Bauhaus exhibition. But the story always seems to be the same. The credits roll; the Bauhaus is born in 1919, in the midst of the revolutionary traumas that followed the collapse of imperial Germany. Gropius takes on the art school in Weimar, originally established by the Belgian designer Henry van de Velde, and rebrands it with a new name and a new mission. It becomes the focus for all the radical ideas about design that had been crystallizing across Europe in the previous two decades. For fourteen years it is the centre of everything; then the Nazis take over Germany, and shut the school down. But the Bauhaus idea is too strong for them to wipe it out. The Bauhaus ethic spreads everywhere, and reshapes the world in its own image, and everybody lives in tasteful simplicity ever after.

In fact there is rather less to the Bauhaus story than the myth suggests. Gropius did indeed launch his school in 1919 with a prospectus impressively emblazoned with Feininger’s woodcut. It contained a set of declamatory propositions about the unity of all the arts. But, while it suggested a coherent ideology on paper, in practice the Bauhaus really never had a single clear position. The school saw continual shifts of emphasis and accommodated different, and often conflicting, creative currents. The school’s programme was presented as the embodiment of the modern movement, but Gropius himself cited William Morris as an influence. And Morris had no love for the machine age. The school was structured much like a medieval guild, with masters, journeymen and apprentices. And that Feininger woodcut suggested more of a commitment to expressionism than to functional rationalism.

Gropius believed that the Bauhaus could erase the hierarchy between the various forms of visual culture and claimed that there was no difference between what was politely called ‘applied art’ and ‘fine art’. Less politely, in the Anglo-Saxon world, applied art was known as ‘commercial art’, in order to distinguish it from the real thing.

The Bauhaus was remarkably effective at self-promotion. It had to be to bring in the bright students, on whom any school depends for success. It had famous faculty members and an international reputation. If it was to survive in a hostile climate - and it was not only card-carrying Nazis who called it un-German - it needed to make the most of its friends, who included Albert Einstein, Marc Chagall and Oskar Kokoschka. There was also friction with potential allies, such as Theo van Doesburg, who implied that he had been invited to teach in Weimar. The Bauhaus suggested that he had invited himself and then set up offcampus with an alternative programme of his own.

Within five years of opening, the school was looking for a new home; not because it needed more space, but because it had become too uncomfortable a presence for its hosts when the local elections brought the Right to power. Several cities were interested in taking the school on. Frankfurt, with its progressive social-housing policies, might have been the most obvious place to go. But Dessau, not far from Berlin, made what Gropius saw as the most attractive offer. It had an ambitious mayor, ready to pay for a striking new Bauhaus building, designed by Gropius.

Gropius’s choice of Dessau has been interpreted by at least one architectural historian, Francesco Dal Co, as evidence of an innate conservatism that ran counter to the professed radicalism of Bauhaus cultural politics. If he had really wanted to involve the school in the transformation of society, argues Dal Co, Gropius would have moved to Frankfurt, a city that was already building a vision of the modern city on an impressive scale. Instead he was content to preserve the Bauhaus’s autonomy and stay on the sidelines in Dessau.

Gropius’s buildings for the school’s second home in Dessau, with their tautly stretched plaster skins, looked as if they had been extruded from a mould, even though they were actually made painstakingly by hand. They were a kind of billboard, an austere monochrome advertisement for the world that Bauhaus graduates would create, if only they were given the chance. And, of course, they were given that chance. For half a century, the products manufactured by every advanced industrial economy in the world looked the way that they did because of what had happened at the Bauhaus. Even America, with its addiction to a diet of market-driven built-in obsolescence, and the overripe sensuality of Elvis Presley seasoned by the Buick-and-Coke-bottle school of styling, could not escape its influence. Textiles, typography, furniture, architecture and ceramics were all indelibly marked by the Bauhaus and its chilly neutrality. It was a movement that seemed to have the prestige of historical inevitability on its side.

There is a photograph of a group of Bauhaus masters in Dessau, taken on the school’s roof shortly after it opened in 1926. Gropius stands in the centre. Like most of the men in the photograph, he is wearing a bow tie, but it is defiantly modern, cut down to a minimalist rectangle. He has a homburg and a long jacket that look conservative enough for him to pass as a businessman, but his stance (one hand in pocket, cigarette in the other), more extrovert than the pose adopted by László Moholy-Nagy, suggests something more culturally ambitious. The artist, in rimless glasses and proletarian cloth cap, is two sidesteps from the director, partly obscuring Herbert Bayer, who is wearing plus fours, not the first garment that one expects to see adopted by a radical typographer. Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee (wielding a cigar) are to the right of Gropius, and look even more conservative. Faculty members Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger and Oskar Schlemmer are all there too. A bomb detonated under this group would have left the course of visual culture in the twentieth century looking entirely different. Between them they touched everything from photography and theatre to painting and architecture.

From this image, it is hard to conceive of the Bauhaus as a living, breathing art school but, judging by the personalities involved, it must have felt quite a lot like the kind of campus life portrayed by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?. The Bauhaus was a hothouse of squabbling exhibitionists, philanderers and egotists struggling for position, a place in which Johannes Itten, who initiated the notorious Bauhaus foundation course, the forerunner of the British art school foundation year system, sported a variety of eccentric haircuts. On one occasion he had a star cropped into the fuzz on the back of his skull. He wore clothes of equal eccentricity, and pursued a strict macrobiotic diet. Itten belonged to a mystical cult, inspired by Zoroastrianism. To the dismay of those with more orthodox views, he recruited converts from his classes. The other masters seduced their students, and intrigued against each other. The students got drunk, went on strike and complained about the school. The townsfolk, as townsfolk always are, were appalled.

Gropius had clear views about design as he thought it should be practised in the machine age, but he was prepared to accept a wide variety of voices among his faculty. He put talent well ahead of adherence to any specific party line. And he was ready to make the most of the gifts of his ideological opponents. He appointed a Marxist, the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, as his successor, and when the time came for Meyer to be sacrificed to the political realities of an increasingly polarized Germany, Gropius was ready to nominate Mies van der Rohe as the director, despite their lifelong rivalry. Even after they had both moved to America, Mies never warmed to Gropius and what he regarded as his aristocratic condescension. While he, Mies van der Rohe, the son of a mason who specialized in carving tombstones, was banished from Berlin to provincial Chicago to run the school of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Gropius, the son of one architect, the great-nephew of another, and the deceived husband of Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, was able to lord it at Harvard.

Gropius’s successor had had a promising start. Meyer was asked to design social housing for Dessau. He secured a royalty for the school on the commercial output of its workshops. The bestseller was a wallpaper pattern that even Albert Speer wanted to use when he redecorated the Berlin headquarters of the National Socialists, creating a sleek backdrop for Hitler’s activists in the run-up to his seizure of power. In Meyer’s hands, the Bauhaus version of modernism became increasingly austere and materialistic. If Gropius had managed to maintain its cultural roots, it was Meyer who pushed functionalism to its logical conclusion.

In 1929 Meyer suggested that:

In every creative design appropriate to living, we recognize an organized form of existence; given proper embodiment. Every creative design appropriate to living is a reflection of contemporary society - building and design are for us one and the same, and they are a social process, as a ‘university of design’. The Dessau Bauhaus is not an artistic, but a social phenomenon. As creative designers, our activities are determined by society, and the scope of our tasks is set by society. Does not our present society in Germany call for thousands of people’s schools, people’s parks, people’s houses? Hundreds of thousands of people’s flats? Millions of pieces of people’s furniture? What are the connoisseurs’ gibberings worth when set against these after the cubistic cubes of Bauhaus objectivity? Thus we take the structure and the vital needs of our community as given.

We seek to achieve the widest possible survey of the people’s life. The deepest possible insight into the people’s soul, the broadest possible knowledge of this community. As creative designers, we are the servants of this community. Our work is a service to the people. All life is an urge to harmony. Growing means striving after the harmonious enjoyment of oxygen + carbon + sugar + starch + protein. Work means our search for the harmonious form of existence. We are not seeking a Bauhaus style, or a Bauhaus fashion. No modishly flat plane-surface ornamentation divided horizontally and vertically and all done up in neoplastic style. We are not seeking geometric or stereometric constructions, alien to life and inimical to function. We are not in Timbuctoo: ritual and hierarchy are not dictators of our creative designing. We despise every form which is prostituted into a formula.

It’s an approach which had its attractions, but it is far removed from the reality of production even at the time that it was first being formulated and when it was still possible to explore the mechanical moving parts of a duplicator, for example, or a bicycle, and use them as the basis for making a formal composition. Meyer’s successor, Mies van der Rohe, was brutally dismissive. Carbon + sugar + starch? ‘It stinks.’

Dessau’s funding for the Bauhaus building, the civic commissions and the financial subsidies it provided the school (even if it took money away from other cultural projects cherished by some influential local figures) made sense for a small city trying to put itself on the map. It was importing a high-profile educational institution that it hoped could boost its factories, and attract visitors too. But as the political climate in Germany degenerated into totalitarianism, Meyer’s beliefs triggered a crisis. A group of Communist students organized a party cell inside the school. Meyer refused to expel them, and, in so doing, threatened the survival of the Bauhaus. Gropius was consulted by the city, and recommended Mies van der Rohe to take over the running of the school. A new director was not enough to allow the Bauhaus to stay in Dessau much longer. An attempt by the National Socialists to evict the Bauhaus immediately and demolish the building was unsuccessful, but the mayor of Dessau did try to stop the Bauhaus from spelling its name without an upper-case B. In the Germany of that period, such a blatant subversion of formality was clearly understood as a calculated sign of defiance. Its provincial context had allowed the Bauhaus to flourish, but it was also what finally killed it when bigotry overcame opportunism.

In 1932, the local newspaper, the Anhalter Tagezeitung, demanded that the city should ‘tear down the oriental glass palace of the Bauhaus’. The Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was even more brutally crazed: ‘The Bauhaus that was the cathedral of Marxism, a cathedral, however, which dammed well looked like a synagogue.’

The school came to be seen as the embodiment of progressive political values. In a grotesque oversimplification, flat roofs and tubular steel furniture became the sign of radical politics while classical columns were closely associated with fascism. It was no more than a fable. While Gropius certainly left Germany as a refugee, many of his assistants stayed on. They quickly found work on the Nazi building programme; Hitler loved classical architecture but the Luftwaffe’s airbases looked like typical architectural products of the Bauhaus. Ernst Sagebiel, who built Göring’s air ministry, had been the distinguished modernist Erich Mendelsohn’s chief assistant. Mies expelled the school’s Communist students and found an escape route for the survivors to Berlin from Dessau and its politicians. But even in the capital, he could not keep the Bauhaus going for long. He arrived at the school in its new home one morning to find armed guards posted at the doors and staff and students locked out by the Gestapo.

The Bauhaus did not last long enough to turn formulaic, nor was it forced to face up to the need to re-examine its founding assumptions when the course of events challenged them. Repression in Nazi Germany helped to secure the Bauhaus’s worldwide impact. After Hitler consolidated his grip in 1933, those who refused to compromise with his views realized they had little choice but to leave the country or be silent. The final closure of the Bauhaus triggered a creative diaspora; the message of the school, its working methods and its radical approach spread in all directions, to England, to Turkey, the United States, Latin America, Japan and Israel. Certainly the Bauhaus had a sympathetic hearing in America, or at least a certain reading of the Bauhaus did. Philip Johnson, who seemed to have had something of a crush on Mies van der Rohe, sent his mother a postcard of a photograph of Gropius’s Dessau building, telling her that she had to see it. On the other side of the card, he wrote that under Meyer’s leadership the Bauhaus no longer had anything much of interest to offer.

Mies van der Rohe, whose relationship with the Nazis was more nuanced than that of his predecessors as Bauhaus directors, stayed in Germany until 1937, when he finally left for Chicago. The city was also the home of the short-lived New Bauhaus, established by László Moholy-Nagy in 1938. The Bauhaus’s most direct post-war successor was the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, the design school established by Max Bill, the graphic designer Otl Aicher and Inge Aicher-Scholl, as a memorial to Aicher-Scholl’s martyred siblings, Sophie and Hans, who started the anti-Nazi White Rose movement.

Long after Mies disbanded the Bauhaus, its legacy continued to shape the idea of design education, even if it eventually came to be seen as a model to react against rather than follow. For the Bauhaus pioneers, design, art and architecture were all part of a unified approach to culture, as demonstrated by the foundation year that every student shared before choosing a specialism. Yet art and design have drifted further and further apart. During Meyer’s time as director, the artists felt threatened. The Bauhaus, especially under Gropius and Meyer’s leadership, maintained a strong sense of social commitment. But once the survivors reached America, they began to fall out with each other. Annie Albers gossiped about Mies van der Rohe’s willingness to collaborate with the totalitarians. In Europe, the Ulm school was dissolved after bitter internal disagreements between the Aichers, who saw art as a part of its activities, and the irrascible Max Bill who rejected it as an attempt to dilute its rational principles with an element of subjectivity. In America, Gropius continued to teach architecture at Harvard, where he inspired a generation of modernists, and provoked the young Charles Jencks to start formulating the ideas that would one day lead him to declare modernism dead.

Perhaps the most remarkable of the many remarkable things about the Bauhaus in its Dessau years was how it was able to achieve so much from so provincial a setting. Even the apparently bucolic Cranbrook Academy, with Eliel Saarinen as president and Charles Eames on the staff, was actually on the edge of Detroit. Dessau is just another small town in Germany with no more than 80,000 people. As a creative centre, it hardly registers in the German context, let alone on an international scale. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, Dessau briefly had a convincing claim to being regarded as the epicentre of the design world, rather than a peripheral outpost. There wasn’t much in Dessau’s past to suggest this outcome. Hugo Junkers started his famous aircraft-building business there, and the town saw the test launch of the world’s first liquid-fuelled rocket. Kurt Weil was born in Dessau, but by comparison with Weimar, which was home to Schiller and Goethe, and which retains a certain intellectual aura, Dessau’s creative achievements had always been more limited. Set against Frankfurt, or Stuttgart, there was little evidence of the new spirit in architecture beyond the Bauhaus’s own buildings.

The residue of the refurbished Bauhaus building, emerging from its successive incarnations as a school for Nazi officials and an aircraft factory, and from Communist antipathy followed by neglect, is a key asset for the city today. The building, which was designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1999, and which is now again occupied by a school of design, is Dessau’s best hope for the future. The kind of metropolitan culture on which creative centres depend works best when populations are numbered in their millions. The ambitious and the talented congregate in fewer and fewer places that need to be larger and larger to compete. No less metropolitan a city than Berlin has had to work very hard at re-establishing itself as a place that can genuinely claim to be an international cultural leader.

Perhaps the most difficult question that the Bauhaus poses is why no subsequent art school has been able to match its impact. Many schools have managed to produce a generation of students with something to say. In London, Goldsmiths can be seen as a school which triggered off a very particular strand of British art in the 1980s, just as the Royal Academy of Arts in Antwerp created a generation of Belgian fashion designers led by Martin Margiela and Dries van Noten. The Eindhoven Design Academy redefined the nature of Dutch design. The Royal College of Art in London has a remarkable range of achievement in many fields, with students from Mary Quant to David Hockney, James Dyson to Jasper Morrison. Its design and automotive schools in particular attract gifted students from all over the world, year after year, but there is no RCA style or manifesto. This might be seen as being more helpful for the students than it is for the professors.

But what the Bauhaus had that no other school has had before or since is the combination of successive leadership from three of the leading designers of their time, a building that embodied the philosophy of its founder in a single unmistakable image, and an unshakable place at the heart of modernism, the dominant movement of twentieth-century culture. Other schools have had strong leaders who have themselves been leading practitioners, though there are fewer now than there were. A few schools have been associated with movements in design - such as the Domus Academy in Milan, which in the 1980s was closely identified with postmodernism. And there are schools with architecturally distinguished buildings - from Glasgow’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh landmark to the Art Center in Pasadena. But the Bauhaus had all three: a landmark building, a student body drawn from around the world, and a celebrated faculty which, as Tom Wolfe memorably put it, were treated like ‘Silver Princes’ by an awestruck America when they moved en masse across the Atlantic at the end of the 1930s.