What the Bauhaus Meant

The standard story goes that service in World War I politicized Walter Gropius, that he founded the Bauhaus in Weimar out of disillusionment with the Machine Culture that brought on the Great War. He dreamed of a new kind of art school that melded the idealism of art with the practicalities of mass production. Sure enough he was a leftie after the war. His first work of art in Weimar was a Denkmal for the victims of the Kapp Putsch. Although he was canny enough not to march at its dedication, about which lack of courage Alma Mahler teased him. It was a bad rep that the growing right wingers in the Thuringen legislature got more and more critical of---just as Mies's monument to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg (1926) would haunt him when he tried to appease the Nazis after they took over in 1933.

But Pius, as his friends nicknamed him, was obsessed with building decent homes for the masses long before the war. He actually went to Walter Rathenau in 1910, then head of the Allgemeine Elektricitaets-Gesellschaft, the German equivalent of General Electric,to see if he could interest him in mass producing houses. Peter Behrens, that polymath of German art and culture in the early twentieth century, surely had a lot to do with the young architects blending of social idealism and art. Independently wealthy, Behrens was a role model not only for Gropius, Mies, and Corbu, all of whom cut their eye teeth in his Berlin office, he was always on the leading edge of design and society in Europe.

He began as a painter, morphed into a designer (his Jugendstiliana at the centennial exhibition of the Darmstadt Kunstler Kolonie in 1998 still stuns my senses). And as the head of design at AEG, he showed Gropius by example that any object could be well designed, from the companys advertising, to toasters and fans, to his splendid factory for making turbines. Even in Weimar, in the midst of the worst economic crisis that inflation brought on in 1923, he dreamed of a neighborhood of cheap housing. Georg Muches model house was all they could swing amidst the crisis, but it showed where their hearts were: later Muche pioneered the design of a model steel house.

It wasn't until Gropius got to Dessau that he was able to field a real neighorhood in Toerten, where workers from the nearby Junker aircraft factory and others could afford to live. (Everybody wonders, mystified, why he cut out from Dessau so abruptly: to me it was clear that it was the hectoring of a local newspaper editor, accusing him of Toerten financial hanky panky, that made him give up that and the hotshot artists for whom he had moved heaven and the local legislature to be renamed PROFESSORS (they scorned that low class apprentice/journeyman/master mumbo jumbo) who ignored his pleading letter to take a 10% salary cut to lift the Bauhaus out of a financial crisis.

At least when he got back to Berlin he could build apartments in Siemenstadt which satisfied his Social Democratic ideals. (Their design, alas, never knocked me out; nor did the Toerten flats; and his entry in the 1923 Chicago Tribune Tower competition is altogether visually gauche to my interested eye.) Indeed, if you pressed me to the wall, Id have to admit no design besides the Dessau complex really satisfies that enquiring eye. (And I was amused to read recently that professors and students in the 1920s had to wear heavy sox and big boots in the winter to keep from freezing their muses. Glass, alas, looks better than it plays.)

One index to how obsessed Pius was with mass housing comes from that Cleveland, Ohio nouveau millionaire Phillip Johnson's snide and snotty private letters about Gropius lectures on the subject while he was a student of Gropius at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Architecture with a Capital A to the Great Weathervane of American Architecture he's never seen a New Wave he wouldn't surf on was ART, Period. Stop fretting about the workers was Johnson's complacent complaint. Like Tom Wolfe later on. There's no one like a nouveau riche to sneer at the undeserving poor.

Well, Gropius couldn't stop fretting. Take his relations with Konrad Wachsmann. Wachsmann achieved early notoriety by building a summer home outside Potsdam for Albert Einstein. And in his twenties he became head designer of a concern mass producing wooden housing. He was clearly headed for the top of his profession until Hitler came to power. Einstein and Gropius ultimately wangled him a visa to the United States where he helped found the General Panel Corporation on Park Avenue in New York City. They built one model, but were nonplussed about local financing and complex code compliances. After all, there was a war going on. But if you knew your way around the bureaucracies, you could help satisfy the real need for war worker housing. I live next to some Louis Kahn/Oscar Stonorov war worker housing in Philadelphia that has held up amazingly well Pennypack Gardens.. Our second home was in Levittown, Pennsylvania, where we learned, with the help of Penn colleague Herbert J. Gans, that the Big Thinkers were dead wrong about Levittown. Drive through those neighborhoods now, fifty years later, and see how the folk artists (read inhabitants) have individualized their mass products horticulturally and structurally.

General Panels big mistake was moving after the war to California to an abandoned aircraft factory. (Pius must have thought, shades of the old Junker assembly line.) Except that the most successful maker (and seller) of well designed prefabs was National Homes of Lafayette, Indiana. Their factory was equidistant from all the potential markets across the country. General Panel failed because the devil was in such details all but invisible to immigrants with their eyes on the T-Square, not the bottom line. We had the good fortune as a just married couple in graduate school of stumbling on those prefabs designed by Charles A.Goodman simple Cape Cods, with grooved redwood siding, a fixer upper from the start we had to attach the linoleum tiles to the cement floors. But at $6000, $400 down and $40 a month, what a Gropius dream come true it was.

Unlike the Weissenhof Siedlung, where the highly touted Corbu house has been reduced to a Visitors Center. (Old icons are never razed they become Visitor Centers to praise the geniuses who designed them-- to be uninhabitable! The Farnsworth House, Falling Water, and so on.,) Since I was born in the same year as that Mies venture, 1927, I was eager to pay my respects. Oh me, oh my. Mies's apartments look like warehouses, with dinky little balconies you couldnt even smooch comfortably on. A few of the works pleased my eye Behrens, J.J.P.Ouds, Sharouns. But mostly they were blah.

Oddly, facing the back of the settlement, were the Friedrich Ebert Apartments. Pleasantly post Jugendstil rusticated stone dwellings. I asked at the Weissenhof visitors center about their neighbor. Drew a complete blank. Only at the 75th anniversary symposium did I find out why. The Social Democrats who ran Stuttgart housing tried to get Mies to collaborate. He wouldn't give them the tilt of his T-Square. He wanted notoriety to snag Corbu was his biggest aim. Meanwhile the Stuttgart architecture professors , among whom there were notable pros like Paul Bonarts who designed the luminous main train station, joshed Mies for not taking things like water and sewer connections seriously. They built a counter-settlement (all in wood, with no flat roofs!) three years later. How childish our eggheads can sometimes be.

I didn't get a real take on Weissenhof until I accidentally discovered Marie-Elisabeth Lueders, who most belatedly was honored last year when the new library of the Bundestag was named after her. (Kinder, Kuche, Kirche patriarchalism dies hard!) What a woman! She is surely the UrFeminist of twentieth century Germany. She directed womans work during the First World War. She then became a member of the Reichstag where she promoted her ideas until she was benched by the Nazis. She then headed a female academy in Dusseldorf.

But what really endeared me to her was the essay she wrote on the Weissenhof experiment in the magazine Die Form in 1927. All those geniuses had their eyes on future fame. Ms. Lueders wanted to know what it was like raising a baby in one of those Mies flats. Terrible, it turns out. The excessive glass windows on facing walls created windstorms unsuitable for the health of children. Some great looking glass walls faced South making them too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. (Shades of the Farnsworth House.) There were no provisions for wet clothes and rain gear. Door placement in the kitchen made it easy for the stoves gas flame to be blown out. In other words, Kinder, Kuche, and Kirche prevailed. The patriarchal designers had no idea what they were doing. They were designing for Eternity. Housewives had to be content with changing diapers and cooking evening dinner-- for the geniuses.. And on time!

Where does the Dream of Mass Housing stand today? Well, it has been said that the turning point was Pruitt-Igo in St. Louis, where Minoru Yamasaki had his first high rises blown up. (He designed the World Trade Center a generation later.) It was generally conceded that the dream of mass high rise housing was a wrong turn on the road to housing the less than middle class. Wrong. There are social housing estates in Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin, and elsewhere from the 1920s which are still beautiful and functioning communities. Where you get into trouble is when you dump undesirables out of sight of the respectable classes blacks in America, Muslims in France. The trouble came from not supporting the buildings inhabitants with an adequate social network.

How does the Bauhaus tradition serves these purposes today? In my judgment not very well. It concentrates, with one exception, on the artifacts left from its fourteen years of experimentation. In Weimar, the plan is to assemble more and more artifacts, of to my eye lesser and lesser merit, to justify creating a new and bigger museum. Heh, the inheritors of Bauhaus artifacts like to learn that their ancestors were part of a Great Movement, and easily flattered into contributing some of those objects for the Greater Glory of the Bauhaus. The pressure builds for a new Bauhaus Museum worthy of its subject.

No matter that there is a city surfeit of unused museum space: the so-called New Museum (new, that is in the l860s) is the most mediocre modern museum I have ever visited, based as it is on the questionable collection of a single Maecenas, a Schiller Museum that is mostly abandoned, a gloriously inventive Ernst Neufert Box (designed by visionary Gelmeroda architect Peter Mittmann to honor an architect who did more for modern architecture than all of the Bauhustlers combined) now mostly empty, a tiny but vibrant exhibition space for the Thurigen Design Center aptly on Rathenau Square whose mission it is to trigger economic growth in the state through good design, and a closed city museum which has a higher IQ than all the other competing museums combined. Thus does tourism corrupt the spiritual center of Germany, where city fathers rotely praise Goethe rather than try to be as creative about their present as he was about his.

And yes, there are those glorious van der Velde buildings now used by the Bauhaus Uni, a name whose marketing ploy may some day justify the city's architectural heritage. Then, there's the new Bauhaus neighborhood next to the former Russian Caserne. Funded by Hannover Exposition money, it is a parody of the Bauhaus dream of inexpensive housing of commendable design. An embarrassment to the unbeholden eye. Whereas the first Bauhaus abused glass as a glitzy material, the second abuses concrete. Colder looking structures I have never seen unless it is Corbu's flats at Weissenhof. Many of the buildings have been designed and built by Bauhaus Uni grads. (At least their children won't catch colds!)

And the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. Mostly unexceptionable exhibitions, if a bit too nonjudgmental to its subjects blind spots. In its recent tribute to Bauhaus furniture, it failed to point out that the only patrons were upper class bohemians, hardly the traditions putative focus. And in a run through of Mies short and unhappy Berlin experience, a video of the genius as an old man allows him to blather on about his fighting the Nazis when it is clear that he tried until 1938 to work for them and finally gave up and moved to America. I chided Peter Hahn for fielding major takes on mediocre men like Herbert Bayer but never fielding one on Marianne Brandt. He countered by showing me the set of photographs you could buy of her photography for several hundred dollars!It is a scandal that such a great artist has never been honored by such a show. When I first visited her home town Chemnitz in 1999, they promised a retrospective. I understand the grandchildren are fighting over the rights. If so, they should be ashamed

In 2003, the Chemnitz Museum of Industry inaugurated an annual world-wide competition for designers under 40, and named it after Marianne Brandt (1893-1983). Charmingly, its building is the rehabbed Erich Mendelsohn (1887-1953) masterpiece, the Schocken department store (1928/9).

Speaking of retrospectives, the inevitable has happened: There is now a museum in Dresden to honor the memory of the Plattenbau, Kruschev's gift to the DDR, courtesy ,of course, of a long sabbatical in Moscow of Hannes Meyer, booted out of the Dessau Bauhaus for his Marxist ideas. Nikita it turns out issued a fatwa on Stalinesque Wedding Cake Architecture according to a graduate student in Dresden doing a dissertation on the subject because it cost too much. (He had no idea how much it was going to cost to eventually tear down the despised PB high rises!) Actually, former Weimar neighbors of ours have recently moved into a 23rd floor PB high rise in Berlin. And successive visits there make me less and less PB-phobic.

Perhaps contemporary architects and interior designers should lead a movement to humanize the PBs with up to date interiors and clever external makeovers. There are PBs in Oberweimar that are now more than pleasing to the eye. One NeuHornHaus architect-owner explained to me that most Germans want an Eigentum, one they can pass on to their children and grandchildren. Americans, he chided me obliquely, look upon their houses as cars they can turn in when a new model strikes their eye. Yet surely the increasing need for more old peoples housing in Germany could give many PBs a second life.

But Retrospectives are not what the Bauhaus heritage needs. It needs Prospectives! This first dawned on me when I was reviewing an exhibition on the work of Jose Caldas Zanine at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs for Connoisseur in 1990. Zanine, a poor boy from Recife, had started out as a maquette maker for Oscar Niemeyer in Brasilia. Then he graduated to furniture, and finally to full fledged architecture. Oscar told him in awe on his seventieth birthday. Jose, you started out as a lowly macquette maker and now you're a full fledged architect! In all of his work, the pieces that interested me most were his Refuse Works. Eager to house the poor people in the favelas more humanely, he started a series of prototypes of housing made of refusewood, stone, whatever left over from other projects. Now that's a Prospective.

Incidentally, Zanine was a prophet without honor in his own Brazil. He had never had up to that point an exhibition anywhere! He came to France to fight more effectively for his rain forests. When our luncheon conversation reached a peak of agreement, he disappeared into the wings of the museum to retrieve for me a souvenir for our new acquaintance, two slices of rainwater wood, a tree whose deep fissures lets mosquitoes flourish, thereby making it harder for economic vandals to raid his forests. Alas, a bad car accident forced him back to his native country where they belatedly honored him with a retrospective at the University of Sao Paolo shortly before his death. His ideas are expressed with gusto and persuasion in the catalog for the Paris exhibition, Forms and Feelings (1990).

Perspectives on the prospects of a humanistic architecture must resolve the literally ugly dilemmas of urbanization in the Third World and save the First and Second Worlds from their thoughtless misallocation of urban resources. I hear that is what the Kolleg of the Dessau Bauhaus,founded 1996, is now up to. Needless to say, the old style Bauhustlers find this kind of thinking a terrible betrayal of their Real Bauhaus. I don't think Gropius would. Mies might, in light of his never having met an authority he wouldn't kow tow to. Its past time to start once again putting that Social Democratic idealism and artistic skill together again. The Bauhaus wasn't about savouring souvenirs. It was about creating a better world, and for more the better. Saving monuments is easy. Saving lives is tougher. We need an Architects Without Borders is what we need.

Since making this proposal I have found that Architecture for Humanity was founded in England in1999, for architects who give a damn. Its annual competition was first won by an Australian Sean Goodsell for his Future Shack, a sea shipping container devised for instant portability to crisis areas as temporary housing. Solar powered, its interior was elegantly simple. The display was in the garden of the Cooper-Hewitt (the design museum of the Smithsonian Institution), on the former Fifth Avenue estate of Andrew Carnegie. The old Scot would have dug it.

Incidentally, coincident with this exhibition is Paula Antonellis Humble Masterpieces at the MOMA/Queens. She has gathered 120 simple objects, from ice cream cones to post-it notes, showing how brilliance need not radiate only from a Michelangelo. And IKEA in Sweden, MANUFACTUM in Germany, and Alessi in Italy, just to name three successful enterprises, have solved the Bauhaus problem of good interior designs for the masses. What has not been solved is the lives of 2 billions living on less than a dollar a day. Were Gropius dreaming of a more humane future for the huddled masses of the twenty-first century (to cite Emma Lazarus and our Statue of Liberty), he would be seeking ways of raising the minimum wage in the poorest countries and other methods of creating a social net. Obscenely, the Wall Street Journal went into a conniption fit of glee that new millionaires had risen by 14% in America last year. Talk about whistling in the dark.

The Bauhaus was a Social Democratic vision for broadening equality. Every economic or social policy that bifurcates the human race into rajahs and peons is backward looking and ultimately suicidal. Starchitects, to use an interesting German neologism, are no answer either (The Pritzker Prize is an advertising stunt for a big hotel chain.). They have turned architecture in the Overdeveloped World into a bauble lottery for the rich and powerful. Gropius would have scorned it as anti-humanistic just as whethervain Philip Johnson scorned his teacher Gropius for being obsessed in his Harvard lectures with mass housing.

Richard Saul Wurman, Louis Kahn's most creative design offspring, before he brought his genius to simplifying difficult concepts in better designed books, created a public school curriculum in Philadelphia for teaching future consumers of architecture (all of US) to choose more wisely. Alas, this initiative of the reform Democratic mayoralty of Joe Clark was simply avoided by the bureaucrats running the harassed school system. His ideal remains crucial: we need a Ralph Nader of commoner criticism to fulfill the Bauhaus ideal. Instead we have ambitious young architects hitting it BIG, of becoming the next Gehry, Meier, or Liebeskind, to cite three of my least favorite Stars. Architecture for Humanity needs a constituency. Especially in the architecture graduate school and the public schools.

Walt Whitman used to say for great poetry you need great audiences. (He managed without them!) But we will never have pervasively great architecture in the world without great consumers with insight into the art and enough income to become its patrons. Instead we grope futilely and fatuously for another Bilbao Guggenheim. Great architecture is for living in day by day, not for visiting, once in a lifetime.