Free Republic

For many bands, they can labour away for years developing and reshaping their sound to reach what they deem artistic perfection – most never reach this eutopia. This, however, was never a worry for post-punk’s artful vampires, Bauhaus. With their cavernous, magical debut single, ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’, they knew they had hit the nail on the head; everything after was a bonus. In 1978, Peter Murphy, Daniel Ash, Kevin Haskins and David J formed Bauhaus with the aim of bringing a sinister and more artistic edge to punk. They would employ the vibrations of glam, psychedelia, dub and prog-rock to...

A new biography traces the many lives and influences of architect Walter Gropius.Walter Gropius, one of the leaders of the early 20th-century modernist movement in architecture and a founder of one of the world’s most important schools of design, was a cowboy at heart. Before founding the internationally significant Bauhaus design school in Germany or bringing a new humanity to the design of industrial buildings, Gropius was shaped by a boyhood encounter with the Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody. As a 7-year-old boy in Berlin, Gropius went to see the European tour of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show,...

Modernists are trying to reverse trends in cultural-heritage preservation by subtle interventions in several key conservation standards of the European Union. Writing from Norway, Audun Engh of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU) warned me today that the modernists plan to “introduce recommendations that modernism (‘contemporary design’) should be a required style for new construction at EU-funded cultural-heritage sites.”

A vanity discussion of Bauhaus design in the home.