What a sorry mess we are in. The other week, plans to celebrate the centenary of the Bauhaus’ arrival in Dessau were met with opposition. Proposing a motion called “The Aberration of Modernity” — which was rejected — in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) argued that the art school created a cold and depersonalised style of architecture that steamrolled the regional traditions of the world into a singular, generic, global aesthetic.
The direct parallel between the AfD and the Nazis, who 90 years ago branded the Bauhaus “degenerate” and closed the school down, has prompted widespread continental commentary — along with, understandably, much defending of the Bauhaus as an exciting and progressive movement. This is presumably why the story has received any attention; otherwise architecture generally receives short shrift. But such simplistic politicisation of architecture obfuscates the issue and leaves the real thorn in its heart unplucked — that defending the Bauhaus is not as progressive as it seems.
Bauhaus is everywhere; the building you are in right now was almost certainly influenced by the movement’s ideas. Just about everything constructed on this planet since the Second World War — when the Bauhaus style became the world’s default — directly descends from those radical buildings of the Twenties. Look at the Bauhaus headquarters in Dessau, opened in 1926, or the ADGB Trade Union School, opened four years later, and you will understand. Each looks remarkably ordinary, but this ordinariness is very proof of the Bauhaus’ colossal success in shaping the architecture of the modern world.
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.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeSo…practically all modern architecture is boring, uninteresting and uninspiring, despite the occasional “award winning” boring, uninteresting and uninspiring design by a celebrity architect.
Yes we know.
Great article. I dread the sameness of the cityscape that haunts you no matter where you seem to go.
I lot of people say the same thing. All major cities are “same same”. I think that it served its purpose rebuilding after WW2 but it really is dull and when everything around it is equally as dull, it brings everything down rather than inspires. Which is the very opposite of its predecessors.
What this article misses is that the focus on architecture on the right seems to me happening at the same time as the Right is becoming more sceptical of free market commercialism and corporations.
There’s one aspect missing from this argument, and it relates to the supply side of the building industry.
It has been obvious now for decades that in the postwar period, brutalist designs were predominantly favoured by public sector clients who were responsible for building homes with taxpayers’ money. Or in other words, such designs were less favoured when the end user actually had a direct say in the matter.
Whether you want to make this a right/left argument is in a sense irrelevant, what’s being shown here is that it matters to people, beyond mere aesthetic opinion, what they’re expected to live with on a daily basis, and as a general rule people tend not to like living in the sort of designs that decision-makers may approve of from a conveniently remote sociopolitical distance.
That’s all true.
But the article is supposedly about the Dessau Bauhaus. And the fact there is that the original founders designed the modern houses they lived in (the Masters’ Houses). So they did eat their own dog food.
‘We may simultaneously acknowledge that the Bauhaus has lifted millions out of material squalor’ …..This is nonsense. Bauhaus lifted noone. And project housing condemned millions to passive consumption, and zero freedom to produce, manufacture, grow , build their own homes….The ADF are right. Just because the Nazi’s had the odd anti-modernist moment, doesn’t mean that they were anti-modern. They were socialists – and as much products of the instrumental, universalizing reason of Enlightenment as Bauhaus. Modern architecture, modernism and modernity have been an awful aberration. The sooner we get back to Natural Law, the good the true and the beautiful, family, Christian icons rather than materialist idols, a properly humble understanding the summum bonus….the better. If you want architecture, start with Christopher Alexander… (and perhaps William Morris ), a little Jane Jacobs, Colin Ward….and Ben Law’s Woodland House https://ben-law.co.uk/ecobuilding/the-woodland-house/.
Self-build, home-school, DIY, backyard chickens.,…distributism…is the only path for a human economy
But Bauhaus? Sooner forgotten the better.
“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.”
To me this sounds precisely representative of collectivism’s great leveling project, which always and everywhere mistakes centrally controlled uniformity for the implicit diversity of actual human wellbeing.
Anyone interested in this article is likely to find the following similarly interesting: https://aeon.co/essays/why-boring-streets-make-pedestrians-stressed-and-unhappy
Visited Dessau two years ago and can’t recommend a visit to the Bauhaus enough.
Architecture is only a small part of what the Bauhaus was about. It covered all aspects of design – painting, sculpture, graphic design, furniture, industrial design, …
And not all the buildings created by Bauhaus designers were white boxes. Impington Village College (just north of Cambridge) certainly isn’t.
The author’s understanding of the Bauhaus movement seems rather shaky. I suspect he’s never actually been there and done very little research. It certainly wasn’t a low cost building project as he suggests. And it certainly did include many fairly left wing staff (Marianne Brandt chose to live in East Germany after WWII).
Also intellectually lazy to pretend that there was one coherent Bauhaus movement directly responsible for everything that followed and that every modern building you don’t like is somehow the fault of Walter Gropius, Paul Klee or Marcel Breuer.
What Tom Wolfe brilliantly pointed out fifty years ago is that we aren’t really looking at Bauhaus’s influence at all. What we are looking at is the result of the academic school that monopolized architectural schools in the generation afterward, so that boring, soulless, concrete monstrosities could have some kind of claim to have an intellectual, artistic basis. In other words, its just McDonalds-level commercial mediocrity (or worse), and has no real relation to the Bauhaus movement at all.
People should find his small, very readable book “From Bauhaus to Our House” for an enjoyable look at this phenomenon.
I never know what to think of the Bauhaus. As a designer I feel I should like it. And I do. Sort of.
I do think it lacks glamour. And is a bit humourless.
It’s certainly not as good as Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. Which still looks amazing today.
Bauhaus was a revolutionary movement in 1920s Germany that led to the so-called “International Style” (think Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand) and the then much-maligned but recently re-discovered Brutalist architecture of the 1950s-1970s before Post-Modernism took off.
A very interesting experience is to watch a photograph of a Bauhaus building taken in the 1920s in Weimar or Dessau: the building looks incredibly contemporary but the cars parked along the street where said building stands look positively antique!
it just shows you how cutting-edge Bauhaus architecture was a hundred years ago and still is today!
Great to see Sheehan’s writing on UnHerd. I have been following him for some years now. Cultural tutoring excellence.