Proto-Feminist Trumps Patriarchitecture: Marie-Elisabeth Lüders

Not surprisingly, the first critic to take the true measure of Weissenhof was a woman. The Kinder, Kirche, and Kueche crowd was dreaming of a perfect building; the baby tender was worried about the effect of all that glass on her children! Marie-Elisabeth Lüders mocked the efforts of Mies in the Weissenhof development in an essay called A Construction, Not a Dwelling, Die Form (October 1927, p.6. (In Anton Kaes et al., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (University of California Press, 1995),pp.468-9.)

Whoever has carefully examined the houses in the Weissenhof development is forced to pose the astonishing question of whether the majority of them have not been designed and executed in complete ignorance of all the things a family needs to make a dwelling a home. One asks if the builders know nothing about the daily requirements of running a household. Just a couple of examples: There are houses there (built by Mies van der Rohe) with gigantic casement windows on the staircases, going all the way down to ground level, which when opened completely block the landings and represent an unheard-of danger to children in the house. In front of one of these windows there is even a deck extending over the front door without a railing. These windows themselves have three horizontal bars at the level of the landing, which, however, are set so far apart that children six years and older can very easily climb through them. Inhabitants of two- and three-room apartments generally do not have nannies to conduct each child carefully down the stairs or to get scooters, sleds,etc. past the ground-level windows.

To Ms. Lüders it was apparent that these dreamers never put down their T-squares long enough to think about how people would live in their tabula rasa visions. She notes that the Bauhaus motto of bringing the landscape into the house results in apartments that have windows extending all the way down to the ground. (Neat for the Ezra Stollers of this world, but a palpable pain for mere living inhabitants.) Some of these walls are made entirely of glass to the north and the south in the same room. (Where was Doctor Farnsworth when she was needed!) In such rooms, she pointed out, there is a constant draft over the floor, a cause for no little concern when small children are present.

These rooms, whose windows cannot be outfitted with shutters because they are too big and set too high, are burning hot in the summer, and the light is so blinding that small children in the daytime and somewhat older children in the early evening hours cannot sleep in them. In some of the apartments the landscape has been brought into the larder as well. The window except for a very narrow socle at the bottom, takes up the entire wall, and the larders are facing south! If the builders are perhaps assuming that man lives by curdled milk alone in the summertime, they are mistaken. Dazzled visitors to Gropius masterpiece in Dessau are disconcerted to learn that in the winters teachers and students had to wear woolen socks and boots to keep from freezing to death! So much were these innovators uncritically in love with glass.

And site planning was equally defective. To a kitchen with windows to the south, there can be no dispute as to the temperature. . .in the summer. This kitchen, however, suffers from a further serious error: the gas stove quite small for the number of people intended for the apartments located opposite the window against a narrow wall between two doors arranged at right angles to each other. First of all, one turns one’s back to the light while cooking; second, every time one of the doors is opened the gas flame is disrupted; and, third, it is a miracle if everyone who goes through the door does not knock a pot off the stove or come too close to the flame. Alas, the two bedrooms are half buried underground and face north. Talk about insensitivity to temperature.

She goes on with her checklist of architectural howlers a large window behind a tub that can’t be opened for cleaning. You’d need a ladder for the inside and professional cleaners for the outside. And she notices the complete absence of a place for storing wet coats, galoshes, or umbrellas---while at the same time there is a sixty square foot terrace! (Gotta use those flat roofs.) The apartments were fully furnished with expensive furniture and art works but lacked washstands and comfortable bathrooms. When apartments are shown fully furnished, as is universally the case with the Weissenhof development, it seems to us that the goal should not be to display expensive furniture (which, incidentally, would certainly be too expensive for the inhabitants of these houses); rather the visitors should be taught something about the practical possibilities for furnishing their homes; they should be trained in the tasteful satisfaction of daily needs, as things are and not as they are imagined by the aesthetic sense of Mr. So-and-So. Alas, what would Ms. Lüders have made of Mieslater neurotic obsessions in Tugenhat and elsewhere of leaving the furniture where I left it! (And he meant right where he left it!)

Indeed the flexible Ms. Lüders had silently identified the major vice of the New Architecture, what I call the Procrustean Bed Syndrome. When I first visited Weissenhof (in my and its 75th year), I had been looking forward to such a visit for as long as I had taken architecture seriously. I can't tell you how disappointed I was with a few exceptions: Behrens, Oud, Stam. You could pay to live in a Mies bin. And the ludicrous balcony were so tiny, it was hard to imagine embracing a lover in the moonlight on such a travesty. Especially repugnantly cold and unlivable were the two storey Corbu houses.

This year it has been officially designated as unlivable, its the tourist center for the Weissenhof visitors, who come in droves, like they were visiting the Holy Land. I am still trying to work out the etiology of this disease of illusions. How can so many genuflect so witlessly before such an egregious collection of architectural misfits! Oddly, when my first visit was over, I wandered across the street to the Friedrich Ebert Houses (named after the President of the Weimar Republic). It was also a coop, funded by the Social Democratic administration of Stuttgart. Built in the same year, 1927, about which the docent in the Weissenhof Visitors Center had not a clue. It turns out the SPD head had asked Mies to collaborate he was having hassles with the city administration over his casual attitude about little things like water and sewer lines.

But Mies wanted to fly solo. He had assembled an A-list of the Modernists, and he wasn’t going to have his party crashed by any old Social Democrats. When you visit Weissenhof, cross the street and ask yourself: Where would you rather live? The only thing that astonished me more than my disappointment with this world famous Ikon was the willful ignorance of the Weissenhoffers about the Friedrich Ebert Siedlung. That seems to me incorrigible ignorance, stemming from an almost theological belief in the Bauhaus heritage, unexamined. Perhaps the Germans need cultural heroes after the artistic disasters of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the Teutonic preferences of that weather vane of world architecture, Phillip Johnson, who's never seen a New Wave he wouldn’t surf on, canonized Mies and Gropius. Johnson, a Cleveland steel millionaire’s son, had a German nanny, and he found his first homosexual experiences in the wide open Berlin of the 1920s, when he even flirted with Nazism in its earliest phases. Whatever the source of the Bauhaus-inflated reputation, the constant recycling of the warehouse of memorabilia in the Berlin Bauhaus Archive, the Weimar Bauhaus Museum’s deeper and deeper scraping of its barrel for new and more and more under-unattended exhibitions. Only the Bauhaus College in Dessau, under the innovative direction of the Afghani Dr. Omar Akbar, offers a significant future for the idealism of the Bauhaus--and he is the object of a spiteful campaign by the latest (last?) generation of Bauhustlers.

My own eye tells me the Bauhaus originals were anally retentive ideologues. All the more so when I see exhibitions like the recent one on Gio Ponti at the London Design Museum and of Denmark's centennial celebration of Arne Jacobsen.