Why the Bauhaus Fell Far Short of Its Ideals

The Bauhaus fell far short its ideals for basically two reasons: Its patriarchal assumptions made it impossible for its dreamers to design housing that was practical, and its obsession with creating Great Art got in the way of good functional design. It flopped, this is to say, for both social and aesthetic reasons.

Take Gropius’ dream of cheap, well-designed housing, first attempted in the Toerten subdivision for the workers in Dessau. In his emphasis on mastering the complexities of on-site prefabrication, he had to be satisfied with inferior design. Today, even after generations in the Mendelsohn neighborhood where the inhabitants have tried to gussy up the mediocre design with additions and modifications (mainly new doorways and window modifications), there is a sense of visual disaster everywhere. You’d have to be visually blind to live satisfied in such housing.And when he had a chance, for example in Dessau, to build a public ArbeitAmt, he went for Art instead of function. The glass roof still leaks I learned during a recent visit. And there was no place for workers seeking jobs to sit down and wait for their interviews. It was that circular shape that struck Gropius’s fancy. Just as the excessive glass of his Dessau Bauhaus was a cause of physical misery in heat and cold to students and teachers This new material was “hip”, only looking forward-looking.

That is why Detroit’s eminence grise, Albert Kahn, rejected their overtures at a secret meeting at the University of Michigan in 1941. Kahn was the de facto Albert Speer of the American defense industries—building on his reputation for well-designed auto factories by creating similarly idiosyncratic structures for aircraft manufactures for Glenn Martin and a tank arsenal for Chrysler. At this meeting with Mies, Gropius, and the Saarinens, father and son, Kahn (who called them scornfully the “glass house boys”) told them in effect they didn’t know how to make factories. (He said his architecture was ninety percent business and ten percent art. The Bauhustlers reversed the ratio.)

When he built an integrated production facility for Ford at River Rouge, Kahn started by carefully analyzing the problems of building a car from scratch and distributing the parts commodiously within the factory. Then he covered this production complex with an exterior that maintained maximum energy and light use. The Fagus factory Gropius built ten years began with a flashy glass shell and then stuffed the production facilities for making shoe lasts inside it. Analogously, Mies had replayed his Barcelona Pavilion shtick in Plano, Illinois which was no Barcelona!

Dr. Farnsworth ended up suing her former lover for excessive energy charges. It was basically unliveable! Recently, the State of Illinois, after trying to sell it on E-Bay, kittied up five million dollars to turn it into a Visitor Center, presumably to the great architectural genius of Mies! Unbelievable. No doctor or preacher or lawyer would ever get such a “pass” for sheer incompetence. And his Neue National Galerie in Berlin is another Barcelona Pavilion, this time a building originally designed for the Bacardi rum HQ in Havana and translated from Cuban cement to German steel.

That above ground pavilion is useless for displaying art, too much light, too little light, constantly changing the ratio, unless you consider Harley Davidson bikes as Art, as they recently did! Meanwhile back at Mies’”landmark” Weissenhof Siedlung (1927), the two storey flat by Corbusier (the architect he lobbied hardest to get in his Star List) has also been declared unfit for humane habitation—and with three million Euros of Baden-Wurtemburg Denkmal Schutz money will open next year as a, what else, Visitor Center, presumably to Corbu’s genius as an architect. You couldn’t pay me to live there.

Finally, just to spread the indictment of Ikons of Modernism equitably. When Frank Lloyd Wright brought his plans for Falling Water to Edgar Kaufmann for final approval, the wealthy department store owner asked Wright politely if he shouldn’t have his engineers check the math of Wright’s plan. The architect was outraged. Geniuses don’t kneel before engineers! Well, it’s sixty years later, and, ahem, Falling Water was falling into the water! Twenty three million dollars later, to make necessary repairs, it is opening as a—what else—Visitors Center. This leads to Rule Two of Honoring Modernism’s Ikons. You don’t tear down defective Ikons, you turn them into Visitors Centers—at great public expense! (Rule Number One is they must have a leaky roof to qualify as an Ikon.)

Later on, in America, where he and Konrad Wachsmann founded the General Panel Corporationn, they made a first fatal mistake by headquartering it on Park Avenue. Already, their overhead doomed the new corporation to fiscal anemia. They compounded this first mistake by using an abandoned aircraft factory in Los Angeles. You can’t get affordable distribution for the entire country from the West Coast. Little things like building codes and financing, which were second nature to innovators like William Levitt of Long Island and Charles Goodman of National Homes of Lafayette, Indiana, bankrupted them.

The most successful prefab set itself up in Indiana, in the middle of the country where distribution to all parts of the country was cheapest. And Levittown built an entire communities first in Long Island, then in Pennsylvania and New Jersey (next to the huge blue collar market in Philadelphia of GI’s wanting to move up from inner city Philly). In each case solutions to land acquisition and financing and building codes could be settled once and for all in each territory. Gropius & Company didn’t have a clue about surviving in such a competitive jungle. They were used to depending on Social Democratic traditions of public financing.

The other structural defect of the Bauhaus philosophy was its outdated patriarchalism. Gropius set a thirty percent quota for female applicants, so afraid was he that all the girlies studying art at the Duke’s two art schools would overflood his plans for a guys domain. And if they did get admitted, it was not to the crucial fields like architecture. They were shuttled off to lady like concerns like weaving! But here’s the supreme irony of Bauhaus history: as its architectural reputation sinks further and further into the septic tank of scorn, those weavers, Gunta Stoezl and Anni Albers are now recognized as supremely significant geniuses in world art. Sorry, Boys!

If you want to know why Mies Weissenhof apartments are flops as habitation, you should turn to “Form” (October 1927) where Germany’s first feminist, Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lueders (the Bundestag just got around to honoring her by naming its new library on the Spree after her in December 2003!), analyzed it from the point of view of a mother and wife. It was uninhabitable. Too much glass made the floors infant cold generators. There was no place to put wet clothes. Opening the kitchen door and the omnipresent hurricane generated by too much glass blew out the gas flame. And so on. How could our Platonic geniuses be so incompetent at the basics. Because they were courting Fame as Big Time Artists, not building rooms for Non-Artists to live in comfortably and safely.

So the Bauhaus flopped because of its patriarchal blind spots and its obsession with becoming Great Artists. But its social idealism is still viable—and extremely valuable. Dr. Omar Akbar, the Afghani who runs his small problem-oriented Bauhaus Kolleg in Dessau ( of midcareer profis as if were the Agora with Aristotle in charge) has just announced early results of a year devoted to improving the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Nonagenarian Philip Johnson, the soi-disant dean of American architecture, who has never seen an architectural he would decline to surf on, a half made nouveau riche from Cleveland when he was Gropius’s star student at Harvard, wrote the snottiest letters architectural history mocking Pius’s reiteration in his lectures of the need for worker housing. Finally, prescient individuals are emerging with such collaborative followups to Gropius’ ideals. Architecture for Humanity, based in London, recently held a competition for refugee housing. It was won by an Australian architect who turned a shipping container into a Kosovo temporary housing site. The Cooper Hewitt in New York displayed this innovation along with its astonishing revelation of the hidden ninteenth century mass production history of one Christopher Dresser (1834-1909) who made Bauhaus modernist metal objects fifty years before Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919.

The mystery deepens when we realize that Hermann Multhesius whom the Prussian government sent to England to pysche out why the Brits were leading the world in industry came back praising Willima Morris, who never saw a factory he didn’t hate on site. And Nicolaus Pevsner, a Jewish refugee from Germany to England, confounds the mystery of Dresser’s disappearance from view until a Milan Triennale in 2002, by twitting Dresser as a nonentity in his “Origins of Modern Design”. Dresser trained as a botanist in Glasgow, used what he learned for ornamentation of mass produced textiles and wall papers, moved to London to the forerunner of the V&A as a design school before it became a museum, went to Philadelphia for the Centennial Exposition in 1876, gave four lectures at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then went to Japan for three months. Dresser exclaimed upon his return that he had gone to Japan as an ornamentalist and returned as a designer! And how. And how did he get lost? And how ignorant could the Gropius crowd be that they chose the rabid medievalist William Morris over the factory designer Dresser?

The great German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena (just twenty kilometres from Weimar!)got Dresser an honorary doctorate at age 25 (1859, the year of Darwin’s “Origins of the Species”). I went to their archive and found that he had been honored “in absentia”, making me infer that Haeckel’s “honoring” the young botanist was politically motivated, Dresser’s two short books on botanical drawing tending to support Haeckel’s theory of evolution more than Darwin’s. In any case, the Bauhaus has earned a failing grade for lack of curiosity by not knowing about Dresser’s ideas, let alone his mass production achievements. Rather pathetically, in the new William Wagenfeld Museum in Bremen (his home town) Gropius praises the lamp designer whose work, like Marianne Brandt’s is still in production through Alessi, was the first to illustrate Gropius’ hope that factories could mass produce objects of excellent design cheaply enough for the masses.

IKEA has taken over in this sector, of course. But even there, contradictions abound. For example, the Thuringian Design Center worked long and hard to get IKEA to make contracts with the wood using furniture factories in the Thuringian Forest. Alas, once they had firmly established an IKEA connection, the Swedes found even cheaper sources in Poland and Bulgaria. This globalization is a weird phenomenon. You have to unceasingly work to expand median income for all six billion earthly inhabitants, or your own prosperity goes bust, in a deadly down cycle.

If I may say so, the patriarchally complacent Bauhustlers had no idea of how to work in such a future. Indeed, Gropius quit Dessau mainly because his Full Professors (he had tried manfully and successfully to get them elevated to such rank from the Master/Journeyman/Apprentice classifications they despised, for patriarchal reasons!) refused to take a ten per cent cut in salaries to get through a tough fiscal patch. Most of those high faultin’ new “professors” didn’t even give him the courtesy of answer! So when the local newspaper outrageously accused Pius of being on the take in the Toerten Siedlung, Gropius in effect said, “FUCK IT!) and moved to a private practice in Berlin, leaving his bastard educational child in the nefarious hands of the out and out Communist Hannes Meyer!

The right wing was closing in. The Bauhaus was de facto over. A victim of its own outmoded ideas and a hunger to be Great Artists instead of such creative human beings. That was the way their world ended,not with a Big Bang, but with a whimper from the politicians about how the Commies had taken over the Bauhaus. Mies short tenure was nothing but a futile gesture. And Mies spent five years trying to get in with Albert Speer, unsuccessfuly, until he fled to America in 1938 and became a serf for the Fortune 500. To this day, his overinflated reputation has been pumped up by Seagrams monex, endlessly.

Good Bye to all that. And Hello, Omar Akbar, a true social idealist in the Gropian mode. And Good Bye to the pseudo elitism of Philip Johnson who never got over his shame of being a yokel from Cleveland, with a German nannie who made him fluent in her language, allowing him to enjoy his homosexuality in 1920’s Berlin where he loved the boys in leather jackets so much that he flirted with their Nazi tendencies. PJ set the agenda for the so-called International Style with MOMA shows in the 1930’s. Never would MOMA, poisoned by this cheap jack elitism, make room for the likes of Charles Goodman, whose simple three bedroom, grooved redwood siding Cape Cod we moved into new as graduate students in E.Lansing in the early 1950’s, $400 down, $40 a month, accessible to a cadet teacher with an annual income of $3600. I call it the Ghost Bauhaus. I’ll never forget the vapidity of the New York intellectuals’ arrogant rejection of these realities.

At the Dedaelus Conference in 1961, where I was chosen as Gilbert Seldes’ gofer at the Annenberg School of Communication to represent the “populist” side of the debate over mass culture, Randall Jarrell literally closed the conference by waggling his beard at me and declaring in a stentorian voice, “You’re the man of the future, Mr. Hazard. And I’m glad I’m not going to be there.”

And everybody there, the cream of Manhattan egghead-hood, acquiesced—except Gilbert. I was a solitary voice for Victor Gruen, Charles Goodman, Saul Bass, Pat Weaver, Ed Murrow, Bob and Ray. No way, Jose. These bored again Trotskyites knew who it was chic to hate. It was my first epiphany that intellectuals often don’t think at all. They just herd. It’s when I first realized how hard it was going to be a humanist between the cowed eggheads above me and the rancid omelets below.