The Long Shadow of Modernism
The Bauhaus: or, How a Short-Lived School Shaped a Century of Design, Part II
In Part I, we looked at the unique methods the Bauhaus used to train the next generation of architects in pursuit of the building as a ‘total work of art’. In Part II, we’ll look more closely at the school’s influence and ask whether the application of those skills amounted to a better style.The Continuing Influence of the Bauhaus
By exposing students to practical skills in a multiplicity of arts, and offering heuristics that could apply across disciplines, the Bauhaus program taught a kind of universal creativity, representing not simply a course in architecture but the first education in “design” as a general discipline. The teachers and graduating students of the Bauhaus were able not only to create compelling buildings, but to produce work across media. This potential became clear after the school's dissolution, when its alumni dispersed across Europe and the U.S., bringing with them what they had learned.
The influence of this diaspora is everywhere: lamps, tables, chairs, watches, and cars, to name a few.
One story perfectly captures how this pervading influence came to be. Herbert Bayer, who had been the school's lead for printing and advertising, arrived in New York in 1938, where he met Walter Paepcke, a Colorado industrialist. Paepcke was beginning to invest in the Colorado town of Aspen to convert it into a skiing hub and global cultural destination. He convinced Bayer to move to the city to help lead his artistic projects there.
In Aspen, Bayer became the lead architect, artistic director, and principal designer for the Aspen Institute, one of the most important and enduring think tanks of the last century; the Aspen Music Festival, one of the top classical music festivals in the U.S.; and the International Design Conference in Aspen. The last of these institutions, although now closed, likely had the most lasting effects. In 1981, a young Steve Jobs, in the early years of leading Apple, visited the conference and discovered the principles of the Bauhaus, especially their theories on the total work of art and standardisation. A few years later, speaking at the IDCA in a building that Bayer had designed, Jobs had this to say:
By 1986 we're going to ship more computers than automobiles in this country. ... One of the reasons I'm here is that I need your help. If you look at computers they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or off designing buildings but hardly any of them are designing computers. But we're going to sell 10 million computers in 1986 whether they look like a piece of shit or they look great ... and people are going to spend more time interacting with these machines than they do their automobiles today. We have a chance to make these things beautiful and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves. We need help, we really really need your help.
Bauhaus’s influence on Apple would later became even more ingrained when Jobs promoted Jony Ive, an admirer of the school, to lead the company’s industrial design in the 1990s.
Ive brought the Bauhaus focus on simplicity and functionality to Apple design. And, that design has gone on to influence every computing device in the world. It’s fair to say, that your very experience of reading this essay is shaped by the Bauhaus.
Nonetheless, the most important and lasting impact, has been on our buildings. In 1958, Mies van Der Rohe completed the Seagram Building in New York—a building so influential, it’s hard to imagine what New York, or any other major city in the world, would look like today without it. The design choices that the Seagram Building emphasized—the main building set back from a plaza, a double-height main floor, and complete standardization of the facade from the top of the first floor to the mechanical area—became the default for skyscrapers for decades after it was completed. It continues to influence every new large building in major cities today.
The Bauhaus “Style”
"Our guiding principle was that artistic design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life." – Walter Gropius
Today, looking at the Bauhaus influence on modern design, people will talk about a Bauhaus “style”, which emphasizes mechanization, simplicity, a conscious display of functionality, and muted colors. These elements are what allow you to look at a Braun shaver, an Apple computer, the Seagram Building, and the Wassily Chair and recognize a family resemblance.
However, creating a style in this manner was never the original intention. In a history of the Bauhaus, Gropius insisted that "associations with any kind of 'style' were studiously avoided," and that "a 'Bauhaus Style' would have been a confession of failure and a return to that very stagnation and devitalizing inertia which I had called [the school] into being to combat". The Bauhaus was first and foremost an educational institution for training creativity as a skill. It did not want to propagate a style, system, dogma, or vogue but simply to "exert a revitalizing influence on design."
Yet if we look at the products that were influenced by the Bauhaus, they have unmistakably similar aesthetics. No matter how Gropius may protest, it is clear that a particular style did take root. Still, he is correct that it was not a style of the Bauhaus making. It was the style that was in the air: Modernism. The Bauhaus achieved their goal of revitalizing design, but this new energy was released primarily through providing momentum to this new style.
Long before the Bauhaus was formed, the seeds of Modernism had already been planted in Europe. Otto Wagner (1841–1918) and his disciple Adolf Loos (1870–1933) had begun to reframe the practice of architecture with an emphasis on function and simplicity. And architects everywhere were beginning to focus on new building types that were possible as a result of “modern” materials such as concrete, steel, and glass.
Gropius was no stranger to these movements. His first job was in the office of leading Modernist Peter Behrens, who would also teach Le Corbusier—perhaps the single most important Modernist architect. Here, Gropius was steeped in the currents of Modernism, as was clear in his first solo commission: the Fagus shoe factory that he designed and built with Adolf Meyer (later one of the masters at the Bauhaus) between 1911 and 1913.
The factory not only included a Modernist focus on function and simplicity, but was also the first European example of “curtain wall construction,”, where the outer layer of the building is non-structural, allowing it to use any materials the designer or architect wishes. Today, we are all intimately familiar with this technique, as it defines the glass towers in our city centers.
In the same year that the factory was finished, Gropius made a trip to America, where he encountered the new industrial architecture of grain silos and large-scale infrastructure. When he returned to Germany, he published a book with photos of the silos, calling for architects to emulate the “style” that they embodied: "clear contrasts, orderly articulation in the arrangement of every part, and unity of form and color.”
Even with this rallying cry, though, it would be wrong to overstate the degree to which a Bauhaus focus on Modernism was simply due to Gropius's interests. By the beginning of the 1920s, it was the water that the Bauhaus teachers and students were swimming in. To go in a different direction would have required a serious departure from the zeitgeist of European architecture.
Why did no such departure take place? In his critique of Modernism, From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe argues that the fundamental reason was precisely the Modernists’ insistence on newness and a process of original creativity at all costs—or as he puts it, their decision to "start from zero." The style’s simplicity was just the inability to have a dialogue with traditional forms. As he puts it in parody when describing the Bauhaus preparatory course:
[The teacher] would walk into the room and deposit a pile of newspapers. … [T]hey were to turn them into works of art. When he returned he would find Gothic castles made of newspaper, yachts made of newspaper … train terminals, amazing things. But there would always be some student who would simply have taken a piece of newspaper and folded it once and propped it up like a tent and let it go at that. [The teacher] would pick up the cathedral and the airplane and say: “These were meant to be made of stone or metal — Not newspaper.” Then he would pick up the absentminded tent and say “But this! – this makes use of the soul of paper. Paper can fold without breaking. Paper has tensile strength. This! — is a work of art in paper.” And every cortex in the room would spin out. So simple! So beautiful! – starting from zero!
The Bauhaus set up an environment that mimicked the old apprenticeship formats, and this allowed them to impart complex tacit knowledge to their students. But in their attempt to “break free” from the architectural tradition, they fell into a kind of conformist mimetic double bind that was simply the opposite of the tradition.
Alongside a distrust of tradition, Modernism was skeptical of ornament in general. There was a belief that all ornamentation was frippery, a dressing up of the fundamental form for the building, a way to lie about what was actually being built. Instead, they preferred to emphasize the function of the building, leaving no barriers between the people that used a building and what the building was for. But if you cannot reference traditional forms or use any kind of ornamentation, what can you build other than a box?
Another challenge was the misguided Modernist assumption that the aesthetics of mechanization would be unstoppable. Mechanization and factories did, of course, eventually become essential elements of construction, the economies of scale were unbeatable. But, there are no constraints on what a factory can produce. The Modernists looked at the majority of products associated with mechanization, such as cars, tanks, bunkers and grain silos, and assumed that the aesthetic was a natural result of the process of industrialisation. In fact, in the decades preceding the rise of Modernism, the amount of ornamentation on buildings had increased dramatically precisely because mechanization had been applied to the creation of ornament, bringing down its price.
Beyond going against the revealed preferences of the users of architecture, stripping ornament from buildings and objects has also led to Modernism stripping places of the kind of design that gave them a unique character. Historically specific application of ornament was an essential part of marking out buildings as being part of a local style. Something that could participate in the unique character of a country, town, or city. Without that ornament those buildings could be anywhere.
Ultimately, the Modernist style has a mixed history at best. Many of the objects that fell within the Bauhaus sphere of influence are beautiful and have great charms: typefaces, watches, lamps, and cars. Some Bauhaus-produced architecture, such as the Seagram Building or the TD Centre, are daring works with their own kind of austere attractiveness. And a few objects, such as MacBooks are a testament to the possibility of bringing together craftsmanship and scale, through profound simplicity and a focus on effortless functionality.
On the whole, however, the products of Modernism are not looked on kindly, and this is clearest in the realm of architecture. In poll after poll, 70 to 80 percent of people significantly prefer traditional buildings1, and this preference appears to be true across age, gender, and political leaning. Before the rise of Modernism, highly ornamented, colourful buildings characteristic of a place were the norm. Now, they are a rarity. Despite all of the challenges it faced, for the last hundred years, Modernism won.
The Bauhaus Legacy
Wolfe thinks that the primary cause of the victory of Modernism was a kind of conspiracy among elite architects, architecture schools, corporations, governments, and groups with a socialist political leaning. There may be some truth to this, but it is not the whole story. It seems likely that the unique program of the Bauhaus played an essential role in the movement achieving the prominence that it did.
The Bauhaus was a catalyst that gave the Modernist style the ability to enter every aspect of our lives. By training their students to treat a building as a total work of art and putting them through a rigorous apprenticeship program, they produced a generation of architects who could create a total picture of what a building could be, and execute on that picture in economically sound ways, coordinating across all of the relevant arts and trades. That this vision was Modernist was decisive for the final outcomes but incidental to the approach.
At the same time, by emphasizing the need for a total artist and training their students in many media, the Bauhaus cemented the idea of design as a general discipline that could be practiced across multiple domains. The flexibility was not simply ideological but came from a place of genuine capability and allowed the Bauhaus alumni to transform every dimension of our world in pursuit of a cohesive Modernist vision.
Today, many would say that the Modernist style associated with the Bauhaus is fundamentally flawed. But, if we want to build a better world with different kinds of architecture and design principles, we must learn from the Bauhaus how to develop the skills needed to achieve it.
Takeaways
The Total Work of Art. No aspect of a building, piece of craft, or ‘product’ in the most general sense exists in a vacuum. To create comprehensively good products we need to be intentional with all of the associated arts.
The Total Artist. To be able to pursue a total work of art across multiple disciplines we need to have some capacity in those disciplines - it is not good enough to manage others. Instead we should aim to build a comprehensive set of tacit knowledge across multiple domains.
Standardization. Deciding ahead of time to optimize a product for standardization will allow you to plan effectively, reducing complexities, costs, and risks.
Design as a discipline. There are skills common to the design of all objects at all scales. Training people in these design principles gives them an edge as they explore various domains.
‘No style’ is a style. If you are unwilling to take a stand on the kind of product you want to create you will inevitably become trapped in the zeitgeist you find yourself part of. If you want to avoid a kind of unintentional mimesis you must take a a thoughtful position.
Style is context dependent. A style that works well in one domain, like the industrial design of laptop computers, can be disastrous in another domain, like building people’s homes.
Skill is not enough. If you apply skill with a bad theory of what good looks like it is easy to end up providing energy to an ultimately harmful outcome.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Robert Bellafiore and Brian Hagood, for reading early versions of this essay and providing edits and comments.
All of the quotes for the section headings are from Gropius’s manifesto The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. I found the ABC’s of Triangle, Square, Circle: The Bauhaus and Design Theory particularly helpful for understanding how education at the school operated. Although familiar with the general distaste for Modernism previously I found From Bauhaus to Our House really helpful for refining the nature of that critique. I was also heavily influenced by Samuel Hughes article for Works In Progress, The Beauty of Concrete. And Brian Hagood’s work, Believing in Beauty.
There are literally dozens of examples