Bauhaus at 90: Tourism Trumps Idealism

As a homeless waif in Depression Detroit (1930-44), one historical fact bowled me over in graduate school: Nikolaus Pevsner, a Jew who fled in Britain, wrote in his pioneering book on modern architecture that Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 to bring “good design to the working classes.” I vowed one day to explore his idealism. So when Weimar became the Cultural Capital of Europe in 1999, at 72 and retired from teaching, I decided to look into the school he founded to undo the waste of World War I.

What a disillusion awaited me! And when the Martin-Gropius-Haus in Berlin just racked up 166,000 visitors to an exhibition celebrating its 90th(!??) anniversary, my skepticism was fully developed! The “Show” is now at MOMA, a thousand artifacts in search of an explanation of how his idealism got lost in the shuffle. Its move there means more than they realize: For it was Philip C. Johnson’s MOMA exhibition in 1938 that began the triumph of commercialism over idealism.

The Cleveland parvenu Johnson was the son of the legal counsel for United States Steel. He had a German nanny so was a fluent bilingual. He was also gay—with no outlet for his desires in the prudish Midwestern city. (I took my Ph.D. there at Western Reserve in 1957, with one field in American architecture.) Johnson picked up his hyper-estheticism studying humanities at Harvard.(His architectural studies under Gropius began only in 1938, where he grossly libeled his teacher in private letters for being obsessed with worker class housing).

In 1926, the year the Bauhaus complex was opened in Dessau, he excitedly phoned Alfred Barr, Jr. in Berlin to come and see the greatest modern building yet! (Barr was cruising looking for new modernist hits to glorify his impending opening of MOMA in 1929.) Johnson should have asked the professors and students first. Excess glass, which made a great impression in black and white publicity photos, made professional life inside intolerably cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Johnson had inadvertently stumbled on to what I have called the Glass Pavilion Syndrome.

This systemic fault of many modernist icons derived from emulating the famous main building of the first world industrial exhibition in London, 1851. His master Mies is most infamous for this generic fault, beginning with Barcelona in 1928, but achieving most infamous notoriety in the 1950 Plano, IL weekend house for his Chicago sweetheart Dr. Farnsworth. She sued him for excess energy costs when their love affair cooled! For three generations architectural mavens tried to make the mosquito plagued river plain house livable—to no avail! Finally, it was reduced to a Visitors Center touting Mies’ greatness as an architect! Johnson also messed up the tricky question of architectural reputations with his exhibitionist publicity.

(Peter Behrens, the greatest polymath designer in modern Germany has been eclipsed by the three Azubis he was training in his 1910 office, Mies, Grius, and Corbu!) It was there that Mies, the son of a mason in Aachen, revealed his lower class anxieties by hating to have to report to the upper class Pius! Incidentally, in a frantic attempt to gain an international rep by assembling world class architects to create Weissenhof in 1927, one of Corbu’s entries just became an uninhabitable Visitors Center! Old icons never die they go VC. The first great feminist of 20th century Germany, Dr. Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, by the way, nailed Mies’s apartments there from a feminist and mother’s point of view as too much glass for tykes: they got pneumonia from scrabbling the floors.

In 1950 PCJ created the first modern house in Houston for the art collecting deMenils and insisted as well they use Miesian furniture deployed as the Master insisted. They told him to get lost! Their kids thought the ever returning roofer was the architect-- he visited so often. He was just trying to stop the rain. Which led me to formulate Hazard’s Law. To be a true Modernist Icon, you must have a certifiable leak. Which reminds me of my habit of assigning a term paper on a Great American Building to my Am Lit classes. To get them in the mood I took them to visit the nearby Frank Lloyd Wright synagogue. After one visit a mature student tugged at my coat and confessed:It’s a great building except when your daughter gets married in the rain.

But back to Gropius! I was astonished to discover that he had a silent partner to do the heavy lifting! Indeed he used to whine bitterly that he hated drawing. Huh? Perhaps that’s why there was no architecture workshop until 1928! He assigned the task to the Swiss Communist whom he made director when he got fed up and abruptly quit! (Probably because his Staff of Stars didn’t answer his plea to take a 10% salary cut—they had bullied him into revoking the apprentice/journeyman/master Medievalism so they could exult in the good ole Patriarchal “Professor”, and because the editor of the local paper was harassing him for double dipping—director’s salary and pay for his advising the Törten Junker workers suburb. It is the ugliest suburb I have ever visited, made all the more distasteful by the add-ons local inhabitants believe will make it less ugly.

In 1954 we bought our first National Homes prefab. $6000, $400 down and $40 a montm. Charles Goodman was the architect, ignored by PCJ because he served the working class, but a world class designer. In 1956, finishing a Ford grant in New York, a triumphirate from the English Department of Trenton State offered me a job on the spot for my lecture at the Freshman English convention. That led us to three years in Levittown. More excellent affordable worker housing. By the at the Annenberg School and teaching a course on architecture, I was chosen as the only) PRO speaker at a conference on Mass Culture organized in the Poconos by Daedalus magazine.

That mindless PCJ mob actually closed the three day seminar with the poet Randall Jarrell intoning,”You’re the man of the future, Mr. Hazard. And I’m glad I’m not going to be there!”) Alas he committed suicide a few months later in South Carolina. It saddened me because I like teaching his poems. I mention this conference to warn against blaming him alone for the corrupt commercialization of architecture. The Jewish refugee architectural critic, with his nom anglais, Peter Blake, figured the loss of idealism really caught on in the 1970’s.

I would offer the speculation that it was really a massive trahison des clercs. We often hear the elite universities in America as the best in the world—at gaining Nobel prizes. But as for massively inculcating the habits needed in this new mass culture, they were not there. They were busy succeeding in those elite precincts, whilst the basic infrastructure rotted away. Their trahison from the public school began after World War I, and never improved. Gropius really wanted to tackle the basic problems and that is why it was so disappointing to see him fail. My first double take occurred when he didn’t have the courage to attend the installation of his Memorial for the Victims of the Kapp Putsch (also not being celebrated like its contemporaneous Bauhaus.) His wife chided him as they watched it “safely” from their window. I was reminded of this moral failure when the students of the Ulm Design School asked him to help them stop the closing of the school, often cited as Max Bill’s successor to the Bauhaus. He wouldn’t see them and declared:”There is no connection between art and politics.” Imagine.

He had a tendency not to follow through. Early on he declared the ukase that photos be made of all their work. In 1955, the Weimar fire department found some 400 of them in the attic of the great Van de Velde building which now houses the Bauhaus Uni. They are being published seriatim in hit and miss albums. As for the ideal of mass producing great design, there’s a pathetic Gropius admission on the wall of the Wilhelm Wagenfeld Museum in Bremen (his home town)that ww was one of the very few who came through.

Marianne Brandt was another such (her metal work is still for sale at Alessi). She quit and followed Gropius to Berlin in 1928. There has never been a Brandt metal exhibition! The Nazis and DDR blipped her careers so she went to Chemnitz, unhonored at 91.Gropius wasted scarce money for a Park Avenue address for the General Panel Corporation (Think GE and GM!)And Konrad Wachsmann, the Jew that Gropius an Einstein got an exit visa for, rented an abandoned aircraft factory in LA to produce the prefabs, the worst possible location for a business that requires easy national access.

It was a death notice to turn the reins over to the Swiss Communist Hannes Meyer as the Dessau city counsel drifted more and more to the right. Mies had his problems. His first national rep was based on his cemetery monument to the founders of the German Communist party! Bertrand Goldberg, the great Chicago architect who was in Mies’ last class told me in our last meeting in1995 that he was constantly trying to reassure Alfred Rosenberg that his ideas had changed when he wasn’t sucking up to Albert Speer for commissions! In April 2008 when Dessau celebrated the 75th anniversary of the closing of the school, Dr. Peter Hahn gave a speech honoring Mies. When I told him what Mies’ best student told me about Mies’ last days at the Bauhaus he simply refused to believe it. The Bauhaus crowd are engaged in hagiography not scholarship. If they had any conscience, they’d give Goldberg, a much greater architect in achievement if not in phony reputation tan Mies.

As a Detroiter, who teethed architecturally on Cranbrook, I found the press patter about the Bauhaus being the greatest design school twaddle. The great architect Eliel Saarinen as director, his wife a major textile artist, Carl Milles as sculpture teacher. And brilliantly productive designers like Charles and Rae Eames and the major city planner Edwin Bacon as students.

This overestimation of the Bauhaus achievement is propagated by Michael Siebenbrodt who has directed the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar for the past decade. He claims that because he has amassed 11,000 artifacts when he was handed a mere (mostly first rate) 800, he deserves a 20 million euro (and counting) for a museum to display them. A farcical competition for where this Museum will be located between two Operators, Helmutt Seemann, president of the Weimar Classic Foundation (his last art show in Frankfurt was on “Shopping”) and Gerd Zimmermann, an unpublished architectural historian, who as Rektor has parlayed the tag “Bauhaus” onto an aspiring building trades school where the goofier the innovations are, the more credence they’re given.