Architecture and History in Germany

The Bauhaus and its varied history is still prone to black-and-white accounts. While some invariably associate it with attributes like quadratic and objective, others go overboard with exaggerated interpretations of its esoteric teething troubles. The art academy (1919–1933) was more iridescent than the usual story of international modernism would have us believe. High time for a revision.

When the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the myth-enveloped Bauhaus comes round this year, a few ineradicable prejudices will be dug up again. This may already be variously seen in the inflationary production of features articles. Even half-baked experts feel themselves called upon to add something to the legend of the avant-garde art academy on the occasion of its anniversary.

On the one hand, this is reassuring, for its shows that the monumental movement, whose architectural manifestation may still be seen in Dessau and which represented a modernism in Germany that was finally impeded by the Nazis, has lost little of its explosive power. On the other hand, it is somewhat irritating that the Bauhaus must now serve as the scapegoat for all possible subjectivist visions and be spoken of, as lately for instance in a major German newspaper, as an alleged hotbed of ‘apocalyptic doctrines of salvation’. Although the Bauhaus, first established in Weimar in a jugenstil building by Henry van de Velde in 1919, has been presumably researched down to the last detail, the radically utopian search for a new, modern construction of life in particular seems to continue to ensure for confusion.

The Bauhaus as think tank

Like many artists and writers after the nineteenth century fin-de-siècle, Walter Gropius, the founding director of the Bauhaus (called the ‘silver prince’ because of his aristocratic appearance), may have been smitten for a while with esoteric temptations. But it was no accident that before joining the Bauhaus he belonged to the socially engaged Workers Council for Art, and he called for a comprehensive social vision.

After the model house Haus am Horn was built in 1923 in Weimar, these teething troubles were over and there was an end to all romantic enthusiasms at the Bauhaus. It was no longer about a union of art and crafts in a ‘cathedral of the future’, as invoked in the founding manifesto of 1919. Such medieval notions, which tended to be coupled with ideas of collaborative work and communal cooperation, were swept away by Gropius’s new motto: ‘A new unity of art and technology!’

Henceforth painters such as Vassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee no longer felt themselves at home in the laboratory of new functionalist design and withdrew more and more to the newly constructed ivory towers of their richly colour-orchestrated Master’s Houses in Dessau.

Johannes Itten, the only genuine esotericist amongst the Bauhaus masters, left the art academy consistently enough in 1923. Those that deny that the Bauhaus was infiltrated by disparate contemporary intellectual tendencies are falsifying history. But the Bauhaus was also not all quadratic, antiseptic and primary colours, as the simplifiers that have been misled by the banal post-war modern design imitations would like to imagine. The Bauhaus was a think tank whose continually rekindled controversies sometimes shook it to the very core.

House building and building house and boisterous parties

With a slightly ironic undertone, Oskar Schlemmer describes in his essay ‘Hausbau und Bauhaus!’ (i.e., House Building and Building House) how one might imagine a future architecture geared to a new need for hygiene, complete with reformed people: ‘The whole is a symphony of modern materials: mainly glass and metal ... The centre and chief attraction of the house is, by the way, the bathroom: a physical-chemical cabinet par excellence, an optical pleasure of pipes and shining things ... It is where I spend most of my time! Here I read, write, mediate – take care of my body, do exercises and think of the glory that was Greece!’

There was no single saving doctrine at Dessau. The dogmatism really first came with post-war ‘international modernism’, which was only partly derived from the Bauhaus and for which every deviation from the norm of the right angle and finally the ‘white cube’ was sacrilege. That the Bauhaus figures themselves were a fairly motley and unorthodox crew may be seen from their boisterous Dadaist parties. With their playful sense for the sculptural effects of materials, they charmed even the sceptical citizens of Dessau – for instance, with their ‘Metallic Party’ in 1929.

Once this even-numbered birthday has been celebrated, perhaps a richer, less cliché-burdened image of the Bauhaus will emerge. And if not, then we have sufficient time until the hundredth anniversary to occupy ourselves intensely with its iridescent facets. Philipp Oswalt, who in March became the new Director of the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, rightly stresses both the hybrid and the holistic character of the Bauhaus’s modernisation model: ‘There is not only one Bauhaus, but many’.