Alas, however lively, it’s a blind alley. I’ve been tortured by the filiopietistic German press ranting about the greatest art school. As a Detroiter, I would ask them to look into Cranbrook, founded in 1925, which actually achieved what the great architect Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero set out to do. With students like the Eames couple and Philadelphia’s formidable city planner, Edmund Bacon. And inspiration by that great German immigrant Albert Kahn.
And the businesswoman Florence Knoll. The German Bauhaus was fourteen years of unfulfilled dreams. There’s something pathetic about Gropius praising (on the walls of his hometown museum) Wilhelm Wagenfeld for having actually mass produced and sold his products. Gropius was a promoter rather than an architect. How much of “his” work was his, and not his “silent partner” Adolf Meyer’s, we’ll never know. He complained bitterly to his mother about his frustration at drawing.
Instructive is the conference Albert Kahn convened at the University of Michigan in 1941, to which he invited Mies and Gropius and the Saarinens. The subject was defense factories. And his thesis was that “the Glass House boys” (his sobriquet for the Bauhaus hustlers) did factories backwards. They created a dazzling façade and the stuffed the innards into their “Crystal Palace”. He taught them you had to analyse production necessities and then cover them.
This defect I call the Crystal Palace Syndrome. In 1851, the British industrial pioneers invented the world’s fair. They used the new materials of glass and iron to create a sensation generating building. It was the new cathedral of the industrial age. Gropius' Fagus shoe last factory had CPS. He was praised for being the first to have curved glass corners! Who cares? A few years later Adolf Meyer and Ernst Neufert helped him field the Dessau complex. Then appeared the evil genius of Philip C. Johnson.
Johnson was a parvenu from Cleveland. He studied art and philosophy at Harvard—no architecture until 1938, when he sat at the feet of Gropius at Harvard (simultaneously mocking the master in private letters about his obsession with working class housing.) Peter Blake in my judgment would nominate PJ as the evil eminence who skewed the history of our early modern architecture.
Pius was a flop at the prefabs for the firm he and Wachsmann founded as the General Panel Corporation. He put their sparse capital in a Park Avenue office and Konrad rented an abandoned aircraft factory in LA! I had just begun my academic career and bought a National Homes Cape Cod by Charles Goodman outside Lansing. $6000, $400 down, $40 a month. I’d still be there had I not won a Ford Fellowship to study media in New York! It was that good.
As good as the Louis Kahn I have now in Philadelphia. Who knows about Goodman today? I think Peter Blake, the Jewish refugee who became the best architectural critic of his generation, would nominate Philip Johnson. He fancied that only Capital A Architecture was worth cherishing, even though he surfed a bit on every architectural wave in his long century.
He had a Germany nanny so he could serve two masters (sex and architecture) when he prowled for the new buildings that would set him up at MOMA. There was no way to satisfy his sexual proclivities in Cleveland. There is an ugly protoNazi episode at the turn of the decade. But in 1926, from Dessau he phoned Alfred Bahr,Jr., the nominated head of MOMA opening in 1929. He had found the greatest modern building. Ha! He should have asked the Bauhaus professors about the “Gropius” building there.
They complained bitterly about the bitter cold of the winter semester and the sweats of the summer. The CPS, again!
Take Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion. And move it to Plano, IL where Mies designed a weekend retreat for his Chicago lover, Dr. Farnsworth. When their love cooled, she took him to court for excess energy costs. And lost. Double! They’ve finally given up on the unliveability of the house! It’s now a Visitor’s Center—dedicated to his genius!
In 1927, when Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders reviewd his new Weisenhof apartments from a mother’s standpoint, she noted in FORM, the quarterly of the Deutsches Werkbund, that the excess glass created a pneumonia threat for small children crawling on the floor. And the wind blew out gas flame when you opened the kitchen door! And where could you take off wet clothes? Mies was not making a home, he was making a “Work Of Art”! The old status panicky mason’s son (he used to bristle in Peter Behrens’ office where he had to report to upper class Gropius!) Incidentally, Mies regarded his greatest coup there were the Corbu apartments. They have just been demoted to Visitor Centers!
I would be remiss if I didn’t pass on Witold Rybcynski’s recent warning in SLATE that Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut suffers from the CPS Syndrome. But he adored Mies. The first modern house in Houston—for the deMenil family had a roof that leaked so often the kids in the house thought the roofer was the architect! No, no. That was PCJ! And he not only insisted on Mies furniture, but wanted it deployed Miesianly. Allegedly they never spoke to him again.
Tourism has long since trumped WG’s idealism. Where do we learn in the Gropius-Bau about the Cooper Hewitt’s award to an Australian architect for transforming shipping containers into refugee housing? Or about Cameron Sinclair’s Architecture for Humanity? Or Millard Fuller’s Habitat for Humanity?Or former Dessau chief Omar Akbar’s recent Tagung in Berlin on what our Starchitects are doing for the homeless? (NOTHING!)
Let us all sit down and reread Alice Rawsthorn’s International Trib essay on how 90% of our design professionals serve only 10% of the global population! That’s the mathematics of dysfunction. Gropius would ever accept such inhumanity. Yet the Weimar dailies proudly bleat that almost 60,000 tourists came to the opening four blockbusters—tired replays of the recent past! But not a word about the $5000 “paper” house that Kiel engineer Gerd NiemÖller and Bauhaus Uni professor Dirk Donath have devised for the Third World. (Google “The Wall Paper House”.)
Pius would have touted it to the world!
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