What the AfD gets wrong about Bauhaus Capitalism has driven its success

Undecorated, box-shaped buildings with large windows and flat roofs might seem like the obvious standard now, but once upon a time they were revolutionary. That’s because the world was a very different place in the Twenties. Nobody really knew how to build with novel materials such as concrete, plate glass, and steel, and so the Bauhaus sought to create a new style, to find an aesthetic suited to industrial mass production and prefabrication, whether for houses or chairs or alarm clocks. And they succeeded. When the ravaged world of the Forties needed rebuilding, and a booming global population needed housing, the Bauhaus was waiting in the wings with an architectural style specifically prepared for rapid, cheap construction.

The AfD have therefore very obviously overlooked the essential factor in the rise of the Bauhaus, and the reason for which it really does deserve praise. During the first half of the last century, millions of people were living in not wholly un-medieval conditions — even in the world’s richest countries. Such a state of mass-misery is surely a far greater aberration than the minimalism of the Bauhaus. Better an ugly roof than no roof at all. So this was their real and quite extraordinary triumph.

And, we must remember, in an age of florid Victoriana, the clean geometry coming out of Dessau was fabulously exciting. When you see those smooth white walls and curtains of glittering glass in photographs from the Twenties and Thirties, and compare them to the terracotta finickities that otherwise filled the streets of Europe, it is hard not to get goosebumps. Here was something genuinely new.

Such context, however, must not lead us to shy away from what have become the painfully clear aesthetic failures of the Bauhaus. It was exciting once, but it has since become boring by virtue of its success. A handful of plain concrete surfaces is one thing, and most often an architectural delight; a world of plain boxes is more or less anti-human.

Thus we reach the Gordian Knot of this story — that, on the whole, people of all political alignments and social backgrounds are not much fond of the Bauhaus. Look where tourists take photos: always with older buildings that seem to embody something about the country they are visiting, never with the generic modern buildings. Studies have also proven what we instinctively know to be true: our tendency of late to build cities filled with identical architecture has made the world an anxiety-inducing place, one too frequently hostile to human nature and our most basic psychological needs.

But this fact — that people generally like older architectural styles — cannot really be tussled with. Politics stands gurgling in the way, and this current furore will only bolster its obstruction, further deluding us into thinking that modernist architectural is fundamentally Left-wing and traditional architecture is fundamentally Right-wing.

The media, unsurprisingly, have drawn comparisons between the AfD’s motion and Donald Trump and Viktor Orban’s mandates regarding neoclassical architecture in recent years. Hence the Left feels obliged to defend the Bauhaus, not on aesthetic but on ideological grounds — and thus concedes to the Right a monopoly on humanity’s pre-modernist architectural heritage.

This is a sorrowful mistake, partly because terms such as traditionalist and modernist are pathetically vague, but primarily because we all stand to lose by letting architecture, which is really the question of how we choose to design our world, be warped by blind ideological loyalties.

The Left may have grown suspicious of traditional architecture, but this is misguided. The 19th-century Gothic Revival, for example, was really a socialist endeavour, promoted by the likes of John Ruskin and William Morris precisely because of its progressive qualities. And, if the Left are wrongly suspicious, the Right are yet more misdirected. It has become a received conservative opinion that all modern — by which they mean “ugly” — architecture is a consequence of socialism. But it is only a careless consumerism, a heartless commercialism, that favours generic architecture. For who would want every corner of our rich and varied Earth to look the same? Only somebody whose exclusive goal was making money, and for whom human wellbeing an irrelevance. Capitalism, not socialism, is the real driving force behind the enduring success of the Bauhaus. A strange truth to reconcile, but obvious to anybody who will think on it.

So you see the mess. And it is so lamentable because what we might loosely call traditional architecture should be a rare place of unity. A form of architecture that celebrates local history, promotes human wellbeing over hard profit, builds community, and is much more environmentally conscious — that is the real value of traditional architecture. Such fruits would surely be welcomed by conservatives and progressives alike. For, again, who would not want to preserve and expand the majestic diversity of mankind’s global architectural heritage?

So long as we politicise architecture — whether by the misdirected hooting of the Right or the reluctant-yet-implacable defences of the Left — it shall not be possible. We may simultaneously acknowledge that the Bauhaus has lifted millions out of material squalor, and also that its philosophy has turned out to be an aesthetic failure when applied so broadly. A pitiable state of affairs when we cannot seem to say this; and, yet more pitiably, act on it.

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Sheehan Quirke is the miserable johannes factotum behind The Cultural Tutor

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