From Bauhaus to Ed’s House
That’s particularly easy to see in New York, which has one building designed by Mies (the mighty Seagram Building, designed with an assist from MoMA co-founder Philip Johnson, who helped launch Mies in America) and countless mediocre imitators which arose during the city’s postwar building boom.
Living so close to New York, on weekends, I began to take the train into the city, to visit MoMA, to see the artwork I studied in photographs firsthand. I also spent hours in its architecture and design department, studying the models, drawings and furniture. And I began to collect books on the topic from the museum’s design store.
Growing up in a house that was decorated in the early 1960s and resembled Don Draper’s home in Mad Men (just as my dad in his 40s had more than a little of Don’s sense of fashion and Brylcreem; alas I didn’t not inherit dad’s healthy follicular genes), the clean, Spartan look of MoMA, and modernism in general, was all heady stuff. But in retrospect, I was living out the passage in Allan Boom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, in which Bloom described America as morphing into “a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.”
The Rosetta Stone for Mies’s architecture was the Barcelona Pavilion, the universally-known shorthand nickname for the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. This was a building he designed relatively quickly (particularly for Mies, who was known for his laborious design efforts, spending hours and hours meditating on a project “t’inking,” as he would say in his broken English), and yet it quickly became recognized as the masterpiece of his pre-war period.
As part of the Pavilion, Mies, likely assisted by pioneering modernist interior designer Lily Reich, with whom Mies had a professional and personal partnership in the 1920s and ‘30s, designed for the Pavilion the famous Barcelona Chair. It was a symbolic throne, designed for the signing ceremony that opened the Pavilion by King Alfonso XIII and Queen Eugenia Victoria of Spain. Afterwards, Mies would use the Barcelona Chair, virtually always in pairs, in the lobbies of most of the office and apartment buildings he would design after the war. Many other modern architects would use this chair as well in a similar capacity.
The Barcelona Chair.
Back in 1987, the BBC, as part of its Design Classics series, devoted a half-hour to the chair, which I taped off the A&E Network in 1991. Unfortunately, it was taped in VHS and later saved to a DVD-R, so apologies for the less than high definition quality of the image:
The Barcelona Pavilion was leveled in early 1930, when the Exposition closed. It was eventually rebuilt in 1986, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Mies’s birth. In 2000, when my wife and I spent ten days in London, we made a weekend detour to Barcelona, and I visited the Pavilion. (We also took a tour of the rest of Barcelona’s modernist architecture, via an excellent private tour guide whom Schulze had referred me to; I had interviewed him for a couple of articles in the year prior.)
Your humble narrator in front of the Pavilion.
Tom Wolfe wrote in his 2000 anthology Hooking Up that the Bauhaus pioneered the phrase “Start From Zero” — as one of the on-air commenters says in the BBC episode above, the Bauhaus banished the past, in much the same way that political correctness, then just beginning to gather steam (and note the Weimar connection, via the Frankfurt School), would banish much of history. However, as with the totalitarian regimes that shouted some variation of “Start from Zero” during their birth, while the Bauhaus promised a new freedom for artists, eventually, it simply replaced the old rules with a rigid orthodoxy of its own. In this classic scene from the documentary Helvetica (which I wrote up extensively in 2010), graphic designer Michael Bierut is talking about print and advertising design, but the same spirit applies to American architecture in the 1950s and ‘60s as well:
Jonah Goldberg and Dennis Prager have each described progressivism as a substitute religion. The Bauhaus would attempt to give their substitute faith a substitute aesthetic. Banished in Germany when the Nazis arrived with their own substitute religion and aesthetics, eventually, much to their surprise, the socialists of the Bauhaus would find their clean and simple aesthetics adopted by the businessmen of America. The captains of industry of the Mad Men-era were able to separate modernist aesthetics and the politics that birthed them, as I’ve tried to do, trying to reconcile a past love of mid-century modern with a center right/libertarian worldview. I think I’ve been relatively successful in that regard, but the mental escape from Weimar wasn’t easy.
The aesthetic escape? Forget about it. At the start of the year, after watching a marathon session of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire to write my review for PJM’s Lifestyle blog, I remember shutting off the TV late at night and thrilled to have left the 1920s behind. Only to walk into my living room and note when all of my modernist furniture was designed. It was a reminder of the paradox of modern design: you can check out of the 1920s anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Thank you. It made me realize that a lot of what I dreamed New York to be in the late 50s grew out of that school. I was nine years old then. And even now, as I approach sixty two I marvel at how crisp and clean those cityscapes were. Mil gracias.
My first exposure to the International Style came at age six, when I first read Le Corbusier’s La Ville Radiuse (in its American edition titled The Radiant City).
It cured me once and for all of any ambition to be an architect.
The Voisin Plan for Paris, as defined in the book, would have essentially destroyed the city in pursuit of yet another of the imagined Utopias so beloved of “social engineers”. (NB; I am no fan of Paris, but this would have been worse.) The result would have looked like a cross between the Futurama at the 1939 World’s Fair and a typical Gerry Anderson puppet show set. (Both of which were at least partly inspired by this “movement”.)
For a nearly perfect example of what such a plan looks like when carried out for real, look at Brasilia, the artificially-created capital of Brazil. Built on an inland plain (because seaports make politicians nervous- far too genuinely “cosmopolitan”), with every cliche’ of Miesian and Gropius-esque and Corbusierian theory on display.
Right down to the total lack of actual sidewalks. All of the above exalted “community” and “simplicity”, but totally failed to grasp the concept of “if everybody is to travel only by public transportation to prove their proletarian credentials, they need someplace to walk where they won’t get flattened by the buses or delivery trucks”.
In fact, as with most such projects, the public transport proved financially unsupportable. Leading to people driving their own cars, even when the White Gods didn’t even want them to have same.
Also, the sort of flat roof, sheer facade’, no gutters design beloved of the White Gods (It’s so egalitarian, clean, pure, and anti-bourgeois!) is, as Wolfe observes, basically impractical outside of high desert areas. Brasilia lies on a very well-watered plain. The impact of that level of rainfall on buildings more suited to the Painted Desert is just about what any halfway-sensible building contractor would warn you about in advance.
Altogether, Brasilia is exactly what Robert Hughes accurately defined it as being in The Shock of the New in 1980;
Mile upon mile of jerry-built nowhere, infested with Volkswagens.
Plus a healthy number of Citroen 2CVs. (They built both VWs and “deux chevauxs” under license in Brazil.)
“Corbu” even claimed that his morally-superior buildings, set up above ground level on columns (excuse me, pilotis- “columns” are so bourgeois), were nearly invulnerable to air attack, with armored roofs and being high enough above ground level to not be affected by war gases. (Most chemical war agents are deliberately formulated to be slightly heavier than air, to seep into dugouts, etc. Vesicants, like mustard gas and Lewisite,are especially “heavy”, being liquids dispersed as droplets. NBC lesson over.) His belief was that the HE bombs would expend themselves harmlessly on the roof.
He apparently was careful not to visit London during the war. Nor for several years afterward.
By the way, the factories Gropius & Co. designed in Germany for the Weimar government disappeared rather quickly under Allied bombing. Steel skeletons and thin masonry and glass curtain walls don’t react well to 500-pounders, let alone the odd 4,000-pound “Cookie” here and there. Considering how many factories they designed over here from 1933 to the 1980s, it’s probably a good thing we’ve never been on the receiving end of the kind of strategic bombing offensive we inflicted on Germany.
The Seagram Building, Mies’ masterpiece, set new standards for silliness. Wide-flange beams made of bronze outside, to “express” the structure inside? Please. The Flatiron Building made more sense. (At least its peculiar floor plan was due to the available space at the building site.)
As for the Barcelona Chair, any attempt to introduce that torture device into any prison on Earth would bring an immediate outcry from Amnesty International. Which would at least mean they’d be doing something useful, for once. The medieval “Chair of Little Ease” had nothing on that monstrosity. As Wolfe says, Machines for Living must be furnished with Arguments for Sitting In. (While debating the moral and intellectual purity of the design, of course.)
According to Wolfe, the point of the International Style was to be simultaneously a bracing slap in the face to the bourgeoisie, and a visual lecture in proletarian principle. It was also intended to be baffling, undecipherable to the hoi polloi unless they were willing to come inside the compound, sit at the White Gods’ feet, and be “enlightened”.
It really only ever succeeded at the “baffling” part.
Probably the least baffling example of modern architecture is the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Solomon R. Guggenheim in 1937-38, and opened in 1939, it was designed as a showcase for modern art.
To me, it has always looked like a flush toilet. And inside, to see the art, you walk up, but mostly down, a spiraling ramp, very like the way a toilet flushes.
I’ve long suspected that, given his and the White Gods’ mutual distaste, the building’s design may have been Wright’s subtle comment on the real value of “modernism” in art and architecture.
OK, maybe not so subtle.
clear ether
eon
I find it ironic that Hitler destroyed/exiled the Dessau Bauhaus. I find Mies’ and Johnson’s work just as cold and sterile (if not massively soul-crushing) as Hitler’s and Speer’s.
Going back to Wolfe, the only thing Hitler disapproved of about Gropius’ Bauhaus style was the flat roof. He considered that only peaked roofs were “racially healthy”.
(In Germany, considering average winter snowfall figures, I’d consider flat roofs an insurance liability- consider the number of stadiums, etc., here in the northern U.S. states that have had such roofs cave in under heavy snow loads, or even heavy rain.)
The rest of the Bauhaus “industrial” look was OK with Albert Speer, if not necessarily Der Fuhrer. Hans Kammler liked it, too.
Add peaked or ridged roofs to basic Bauhaus design, and you end up with Speer & Kammler’s magnum opus-
Auschwitz.
clear ether
eon
Oddly enough, I’m very conflicted about the Bauhaus. There are some elements of design that emerged that I like. My dad was an artist/art teacher who graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and many of his instructors were Bauhaus alumni.
Oh well…
I think you would enjoy this book:
Mona Lisa’s mustache;: A dissection of modern art [Hardcover]
Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings (Author)
This was fun to read. I grew up in Chicago and saw daily the modernist high rises along Lake Shore Drive and even lived in a U of Chicago dorm facing Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. All these Chicago buildings fit the scene and fit the poet Carl Sandburg’s notion of Chicago as raw and strong and tough.
There is now, however, a seeming renaissance of Palladian architecture. I live in a neighbourhood in western Canada that consists of 5 beautiful Palladian-style high rise condos. Each condo is sited in a large green space containing formal gardens and, behind them, rough brush and woods. When seeking info about the Palladian style, I discovered that lots of new homes, especially in California, are being built in Palladian style. There seems to be a renewal of interest in this architectural style.
I find Palladian buildings comfortable and comforting. According to info on architectural web sites, Palladian style villas in Italy in the 16th century were build in the suburbs of places like Venice and Florence in order to provide a calm respite for Italian bankers and merchants. They seem to serve the same function today. My neighbours get on the skytrain for downtown Vancouver and work as accountants, engineers, and in various technical jobs in high-tech industries. In the evening they return and jog or walk their dogs on the wooded trails adjacent to the condos. I have a suspicion that engineers working in hard-edged fields and in hard-edged buildings all day want to come home to something more rounded and comforting.
Take a trip down to the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan and do a side trip down Water Street and you can get the full impact of the Bauhausification of Lower Manhattan. The movement started with the Chase Manhattan building replacing the Produce Exchange Building at No. 2 Broadway in 1959 (a building now fittingly the home of the MTA), but on Water Street the city came in and gouged out an entire half block width of old-style row houses to make way for the 1960s modern design looks, starting with the Manufacturer’s-Hanover Trust building at South Ferry and working it’s way north towards Fulton Street.
It was liberating in a way to suddenly have a wide boulevard through the lower part of the city, as opposed to the original streets, where one double-parked vehicle could shut down all traffic (and I can’t even imagine what the ultra-narrow Pearl Street must have been like when the Third Avenue el was running above it). But while the wider street and the new glass-encased buildings gave lower Water a different feel from the the rest of the financial district, they really did nothing to make that area more interesting, other than to provide additional space for the 9-to-5 workers (and to the point that once the novelty of modern had worn off of the ‘new’ Lower Manhattan by the end of the 60s, some other gimmicks were tried to make the modern towers more inviting).
The city had to wait until the Seaport development in the mid-1980s — basically finding new uses for the same buildings ripped out 25 years earlier — before there was anyplace in that area which could be called ‘people-friendly’. The modern skyscrapers may not have been as light-absorbing as their older cousins from the 1900s through the 1940s, but once they became ubiquitous, they lost the charm they little details attached to the older, and usually smaller, buildings provided.
I spent a lot of time at MOMA in the 60s mainly for the paintings. Modern Architecture has always remained relatively opaque although I know I emphatically preferred MOMA over the the Metropolitan architecturally. . As someone who has come to a center right libertarian view this critique suddenly makes sense of Modern architecture in a new way to me. But as someone who has spent his life exploring the unconscious mind I don’t see Picasso and Joyce as a primarily a defensive reaction to the obscurities of physics – although I don’t reject it outright either. Rather I think that particular pair were going inward and exploring the elusive mixture of order and chaos that exists inside us. Picasso when confronted with the resemblance of his works to those of the insane replied that the resemblance was real because they arose from the same place (i would say the unconscious) and that the difference was that he could go to that place and return at will, while the insane could not. Freud and Jung conceived of themselves as scientists exploring this inner world intellectually. Freud said that while the Romantics discovered the unconscious, he merely systematized it. And I see see Picasso and Joyce as explorers who were able to immerse themselves in significant areas of the visual and verbal unconscious and bring out reasonably coherent impressions of what they experienced. So coming from this orientation perhaps you and your readers can appreciate why I have always been bewildered by Modern architecture with its clean lines and open spaces. I can see that it is connected to Mondrian and I suspect it is a powerful expression of a kind of hyper rationality. Likewise, I can see the connection to socialism – to the vision of a just society with all its ills ‘straightened out’ by Reason. “Alle Menschen werden Bruder,
Wo dein sanfter Flugel weilt.’ And I too like Modern architecture. I feel oppressed by the neo classical grandeur of Washington DC. I often find the accretions of the Baroque tedious by comparison to the Modern although the endless decoration and elaboration sometimes reveal a gracefulness that I admire. Even the great cathedrals see far more complex than is entirely necessary when viewed by my Modern eyes. Still, I notice that their scale does not offend or oppress me. Notre Dame and I haver a long relationship going back to 1959 when I first saw Her. So thank you. You have lifted the veil that has always made my experience of Modern architecture problematic.
Bauhaus was a reaction to the Wagnerian concept that “Too much is barely sufficient.” The architects,especially, were arrogant and Totalitarian. Anecdote after anecdote discribes their cavalier lack of interest in the people who would inhabit their space.(or the people who would pay the construction costs)
Nowadays there is the inevitable reaction proposing “ecological friendly ” structures. The new ideal is the Igloo or the Yurt. (Again not people friendly).
Yes, pretty much my reaction. Also sterile, hostile surroundings furnished with guaranteed pain-in-the-ass chairs. It’s been a while, and I don’t remember Tom Wolfe’s central laments, but the torment of ‘good taste’ would have been on his list.
Ed Driscoll’s correct about how the liberating, first-person effect of musings like this. In that spirit, you may be wrong about igloo/yurt fashion — it ceased to be at the bleeding edge more than fifteen years ago, right around the time Berkeley socialists ran short of impressionable young women who could be indoctrinated with the idea that moss from river rocks worked just fine as nature’s sanitary napkin. Yurts certainly ceased to be cool by the time tree-spiking ceased to be cool, though it probably took a while to get word from the dinosaur’s brain to the other end. Who knows what they’re doing in fashionable parts of, say, Ohio today?
Puzzled by those who speak of Frank Lloyd Wright as if somehow a Bauhaus spear-carrier. AFAIK he was nothing of the kind.
And those who balk at the difficulty of bridging CP Snow’s great divide might enjoy Edward O. Wilson’s 1998 book called Consilience. It’s a challenging read (written by the smartest man alive? — certainly one of the very few capable of bridging the gap as an expert on both sides of the fence)… but he’s an optimist, that and a genius. Rare indeed.
To take the discussion a bit down market I would ask you to contemplate Ikea – home of ‘Rationel’ furnishings and pain in the butt chairs. Ah, but they LOOK so good. I don’t know about yours but our local Ikea has exhibits of tiny family living spaces proudly labeled labelled “It our home!” The idea being that it is good and social and responsible to make a virtue of living in a tiny tiny space. I visited Sweden where most everyone is expected to live in small identical state provided high rise apartments. A slightly politically incorrect lady friend told me that those who choose to move up to private ownership of still cramped semi detached housing refer to their abodes as ‘blood pudding houses’ because in order to meet the mortgage they are reduced to a diet of same. To be fair I think the Swedes do some things very well, but I came away with the impression that this – the world’s most socialist, non communist culture, was taking Reason to extremes. Which puts me in mind of another culture that puts Freedom on a similar pedestal and then ties itself in legal knots which threatens to bring the whole Grand Panjandrum to a halt. Great thread.
I always wondered when I was a kid, how come we don’t paint all that damn concrete. Thanks for the edgycation. :: ))