So, they invented the Mobile Home..........................
The second Bauhaus director, Hannes Meyer, had his own slogan: “The needs of the people instead of the need for luxury.”
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Gropius, the school’s first director, was a terrible draughtsman, a major disadvantage for an architect 100 years ago. But he had a genius for communication and propaganda. If Bauhaus remains a powerful brand, it may be down to Gropius’ instinct for slogans and inspirational formulations.
Anyone catch the gist of the above?
That makes me feel old, that was the first concert I ever went to.
When I was first married, a family in eastern Connecticut rented their 1949 Bauhaus to us in eastern Connecticut. It really stood out, as it was among mostly older Colonials. Being of a traditional bent, and finding the rent very affordable, I thought of it as an in-joke. I was grateful that it was at least unobtrusively nestled behind a lot of foliage, making it overall effect less obnoxious.
But after I carried my bride over the threshold, we realized that the floor plan was great, and the house was easily maintained. Our cat didn’t like being forced to move, but loved that the windows went all the way to the floor. It didn’t hurt that my well off landlord had appointed the kitchen with Gaggenau appliances, which were finicky, but artful and cleverly designed.
I would still prefer a Colonial, or a simple Four-Square or Ranch, but I would take that Bauhaus design over a Cape Cod and a number of modern designs.
I love it - clean, simple, functional and timeless design. I’m a fan of modernism.
The post-World War I Bauhaus changed everything and a century later, it still feels contemporary and fresh.
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
Ugly. And they threw functionality out the window. When I was in restoration, I would pass on this kind of cr@p. It was all poorly engineered, used cheap materials, and was ugly, ugly, ugly.
Flat roofs, exposed iron, cinder block .... it lasted about ten years before it started to leak, rust, and crack apart. If you did a perfect restoration, it would last another ten years.
Did I mention it is ugly?
“The needs of the people instead of the need for luxury.”
The needs of the people are best served by letting them buy what they want in a free market.
Bela Lugosi’s dead.
While I was taking the Engineering degree in the New York State College of Ceramics At Alfred University (as it was called then), I spent a lot of time relaxing in the college library by reading through the art and design magazines as a relief from the essentially artless courses that define engineering.
The College was itself an attempt to entwine the artisanship of practical design with the glass and clay-based manufacturing engineering required to bring the artistic designs to life. As corollary to its purpose, library's subscription to expensive art and design magazines of that time--late '50s and early '60s--contained a great deal of illustrations embracing the "Bauhaus" effect on architecture, furnishings, and landscaping. I felt greatly refreshed from the labors of working out engineering problems by seeing the applications in useful objects of daily life.
This "Bauhaus" post-WWI implementation cannot be dissociated from the spirit taking over the emergence of American products of artful designs with cleaner lines, and the explosion of visual reproduction. Frank Lloyd Wright (click here) was just then coming into his own, and his philosophy was quite similar:
"Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order."An excerpt from this link demonstrates that Wright was quite aware of the contemporary Bauhaus movement in Europe, and considered it competition to his own expression of practical minimalist design:
Wright was in large part responsible for creating the first indigenous American architecture, the Prairie Style, derived in part from the Arts & Crafts Movement, which reflected the flat landscape of the Midwestern United States and advocated for buildings with a strong emphasis on horizontality and natural materials, with broad, flat roofs with wide overhanging eaves.One thing that I found from temporarily residing in one of Wright's Prairie-style houses was that they were interesting in carrying out the long, lean lines that please the eye from a distance, or the photographer's composition in artful images, but they are impossible to live in, and do not satisfy the soul or help compose your desire for comfort over a long stretch of occupancy. I would think that the Bauhaus style emphasizing flat roofs, unadorned openings or fixtures, and the overwhelming whiteness that lacks bold and colorful figures, makes the implementation spiritually dry and uninteresting.
Wright's huge ego meant that he was highly individualistic, and regarded himself as the foremost, if not the only, practitioner of modern architecture. At nearly every possible chance, he polemically positioned himself against the European originators of the International Style, in particular Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, whose work he believed was merely derivative of his and not innovative.
I once lived in a Bauhaus building built by Gropius. With a few decoration changes, it could have been a prison. Not pleasant in any way, I took it as an indication of the future that leftist utopians plan for the proletariat.