I'm no expert in design, but it's really interesting to see the signs that a design "won". That is, when you see echoes and influnces of it everywhere.
It is worth to note, that more architects love the design than the average German. There is a huge district in the south of Berlin called Gropiusstadt (designed by Walter Gropius) which is so unpopular that only lower class people live there. While pre Bauhaus buildings are very popular in Germany. Bauhaus and its predecessors is more a problem than a solution.
I'd argue that this has nothing to do with Bauhaus because this district was planned to have 90% social housing. Of course cramping 30k+ low income workers (or unemployed people) into a small space is going to cause trouble.
And if I remember correctly the original plans were changed and the buildings ended up much higher and denser to meet the goals of the city.
Brutalism (which generally most/many people seem to dislike) isn't the same as Bauhaus though.
> modern architecture is very unpopular in Germany
IMHO it has much more to do with the constraints of the 50s and 60s. All major cities in Germany were destroyed and had to be rebuilt fast and cheap. Of course buildings from the late 19th/early 20th century might have looked a lot nicer but they were also massively more expensive (would you rather many cheap and ugly high density buildings or a few better looking expensive ones, it's not like there were that many other options).
Many, many, many, many of pre WWI buildings were constrained by budget and had poor inhabitants. Today they are very popular (and nobody poor can afford it anymore)
Where I live it was a close call between rebuilding in modern layouts (car-friendly and that entire "block in a park landscape" approach that I consider the biggest failure of 20th century architecture, nobody likes these "parks" that are too close to buildings to feel public and too open to feel private) and rebuilding in the old layout, with houses on the edge of the street enclosing hidden backyards, roof lines closely matching pre-war roof lines.
Old layout won and today everybody is very happy about that. But wherever there are old stock buildings and post war reconstruction buildings in the same street, the old ones are considered much higher standard, despite best efforts to avoid modernism in the reconstruction. From today's perspective, the actual age difference between one group and the other is laughably small. But in the rush to rebuild post war, the "good enough" threshold was so much lower than pre WWI the difference echoes on through the renovations to this day.
Because labour was cheap and plenty, when they were built with hand with bricks. Also some survivorship bias, as many badly build ones, did not survive the bombs so well.
I am from Germany and your point is valid. Older buildings are preferred because the alternative is those build in the 50s fast and cheap.
But it’s untrue that only rich people live in old buildings. Maybe in some parts. But most old buildings are in the poorer regions of the inner city. Most rich people I know live in modern buildings. Some in older but very well remade ones…
Might be controversial, but in my opinion the impact (and long-lasting aesthetic) of Bauhaus is much more visible in the industrial design of modern products than it is in architecture.
After all, a consumer product can win by individual choice of the consumer, with failed attempts of interpreting Bauhaus design disappearing again, which makes it easy to cite good examples of lasting Bauhaus style over time (i.e. showing similarity of Braun products with Apple design, etc.).
But a failed interpretation of Bauhaus in Architecture continues to live among us for decades, watering down the value of well-executed Bauhaus design with an appearance of being a cheap bland building...
Gropiusstadt isn't exactly the best example of Bauhaus though. IIRC Gropius original plan was changed a lot to maximize capacity/minimize cost, the buildings were only supposed to have 5 stories or less etc. I don't think those issues have anything to do with the the specific style.
For anyone that wants to read a critical take of Bauhaus and modernist architecture in general, check out the very funny From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe.
His other book on art was pretty good too, and both were received very poorly by their respective industries, which is probably a sign that he was on to something.
Those ambitious Weimar era housing estates in Berlin are all awesome, with their careful balance between efficiency and preventing excessive cookie-cutter.
It's interesting to contrast them with their less modernist "Gemeindebau" contemporaries in Vienna, which share some ideas and contrast in many others. In my opinion the Vienna ones deserve far more attention than they get (than they get outside Vienna?). I guess their biggest hindrance to fame is that there are so many of them, and that the biggest ones that unsurprisingly draw all the attention (e.g. the match made in heaven of Karl Marx Hof and George Washington Hof) aren't quite as interesting as their entirety, in particular the continuity through Anschluss, war and the aftermath.
Good article, but a weird choice to focus so much on Bauhaus architecture and so little on Bauhaus and its influence especially on industrial design (IMO a much more significant impact of Bauhaus in the modern world).
They had a teaching ethos that architecture was the center of design education, and that all skills, such as material practice, aesthetic graphic skills, color theory, etc., all lead towards building design.
I suspect this attitude spills over into what people view as their 'best' work.
Agree, but I'm not sure that explicitly Bauhaus building design actually "shapes the modern world" as stated in the title.
I'd argue that only a fraction of well-designed buildings in your surrounding actually embody the Bauhaus ethos and its derived aesthetics, but possibly a majority of well-designed products around you do.
It’s not ; ) (or are you mixing it up with brutalism?). IMHO it’s the best looking architectural style from the 20th century (not that there is a lot of competition besides maybe art deco)
> degenerate
The was another group of people in the 1930s Germany who had similar thoughts and mostly killed it.
Although I agree with her that traditional, ornamental design is more beautiful, something bothers me about her line of argument; it seems cheap and patronizing to take ideas expressed with rigor and good faith by talented people and dismiss them w/o engaging them intellectually. Nevertheless, its an interesting point of view
> it remains a symbol of a modern approach to architecture and design.
As if that's a good thing. I see someone else has already referenced "From Bauhaus to Our House."
The bottom line is just this: Bauhaus is ugly. It does not uplift people's spirits and it does not make us happy. The authors inadvertently give the best argument against it:
> Many also believed that only dedicated craftsman, with their hands-on approach, could produce the highest quality work. They argued that machine production inevitably led to a decline in aesthetic quality. Furthermore, they contended that individuals surrounded by such unattractive surroundings lacked an appreciation for beauty.
I'm not an architect or anything, and I think Bauhaus looks awesome. And sure I wish we could all live in perfect craftsman houses painstakingly put together with a hammer and nails but that's not realistic.
You probably don't know how utterly dysfunctional for example a typical kitchen looked before Bauhaus. See Magarete Schütte-Lihotzkys Frankfurt Kitchen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_kitchen
The cliché Bauhaus style people know is not the thing that had the impact, everything else was.
No I don't think you understand: before that kitchens generally looked very different and were much more dysfunctional. The reason you don't find it very spectacular from a 2024 perspective is because that kitchen design was so successful it changed how kitchens looked after it. So you will certainly find better (but also worse) kitchens today, but that kitchen design had a ton of impact on how things are looking today.
But it is more than surface, Schütte-Lihotzky went and measured how long certain tasks were taking and optimized the layout and objects of the kitchen to minimize the waste of time, aomething that before that wasn't really a thing in residential kitchens.
I think atoav was crediting Bauhaus with the modern kitchen, with the Frankfurt Kitchen as an early success story.
Which is both fair and faintly damning, as what has been lost along the way (functional design that makes good use of limited space) was perhaps more important than the clean lines and shiny veneer which was retained.
Or maybe I'm just projecting. Been cooking on glass-topped stoves for the past few months and that tends to make me irritable.
However the modernism originating with bauhaus can be applied tactfully with enhanced functionality (I.e larger unobstructed spaces- but in limited fashion. Too often it strips the humanity away from our spaces.
A stunning example of such modernism: Aarhus City Hall, Denmark
The problem is also nowadays the decoration, ornamental or pictures could be machined into wall elements quiet chiefly. Imagine a house with walls of family history moments. Today bauhaus is mostly a symbol of the terror rule of the economic over the aestetic and the suppression of individualism in architecture.
If you are ever fortunate enough to book a stay at the Aspen Institute or Aspen Conference Center in Colorado, you're in for a Bauhaus treat.
My family used to take fairly regular trips up there; the LIGO planning meetings were held at the ACC, and so we'd typically lodge either there or in nearby Snowmass, which also is home to a large number of Bauhaus designs.
I often wonder how much of the design aesthetic is due to Apple.
Apple turned bauhaus into the “premium” aesthetic, at least in the US. So many companies just copy their premium style from Apple with slight variations, I wonder how much of its presence in our world is simply due to everyone trying to associate themselves with the “premium”/minimalist aesthetic that Apple has cultivated.
I think it's the other way around. Apple was heavily inspired by Braun/Dieter Rams. When I look at this work I immediately think premium. And this was long before Apple.
Those are removable for carpet … or maybe addable for hard floors is more accurate. Someone just put them on upside down on the front and then photoshopped out all context. See https://www.knoll.com/product/wassily-chair
I think what made these good design is that they were pioneers. Consider the eames chair. Plenty of people lust after one, they are worth more than a used car. I have sat in one but there wasn’t any magic or anything. Any recliner feels the same. But that being said my perspective is from a world post eames chair. Before this chair maybe there wasn’t a comparable experience at all among what people were usually buying for chairs.
I think the real sell with bauhaus design is that it was and is super cheap. Look at these examples in the article. Simple forms. Simple materials. Cheap and fast. Compare that with an earlier building like the empire state building and we see the exact opposite. More complex forms. More craftsmanship required to create the overall decor and trim designs, and no doubt more cost compared to a bauhaus style building one could make with some chicken wire, plaster, and cheap windows. Its kind of a shame then that the international standard today has basically been the fast and cheap bauhaus inspired 5/1 style building, in a sort of race to the bottom away from the building forms that once defined a place.
Not just ikea but all the cheap melamine board furniture out there today takes inspiration from the bauhaus philosophy. And also the fact melamine board is so cheap and comes finished.
It's also the real problem with Bauhaus (and IKEA) - if you're going for cheap and fast, you're not going to stop at "cheap enough whilst still being durable, etc".
IKEA has some wonderful furniture that is cheap and fast, but cannot survive being moved. And Bauhaus has some cheap and fast buildings, but they cannot survive being unmaintained - which is often what happens to buildings that were built to be cheapest.
I think it may be unfortunate to lump Ikea in with Bauhaus. While I agree with the general sentiment that Ikea tends to be single use, the idea of the flatpack was truly revolutionary. Shipping furniture used to be crazy expensive, but the idea of designing a bookcase that could take minimal space to ship and let the customer with no tools other than a screwdriver and a hammer put it together was truly a leap that I’m not sure many at the time were prepared to take.
And to be fair to IKEA they have a decent amount of higher quality flatpack furniture (as do others in the space) that do survive a move much better than cardboard and particle board pieces do.
and their flatpack's just better. I've bought stuff off Wayfair and the like, but Ikea flatpack is better engineered to make the assembly process nicer.
The technical term for those fasteners is "cam lock fastener". They were invented specifically for flat pack furniture (I believe this 1988 patent [1] is the original), and there's not really any point to use them for anything else, since they're really inferior to most types of joints.
I don't really hate contemporary architecture, because postmodern architecture at least has some variety and style to it. Modernism (especially but not limited to Brutalism) is just soulless, totalitarian, oppressive, and depressing.
It's also ironic for the author to claim that a style which peaked 100-130 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is somehow the fault of global capitalism, as if global capitalism hadn't been a thing for 100+ years by the 1950s.
And of course even though the author is claiming that the left has flaws in their approach to architecture, they still have to make the obligatory supplication about the right's alleged "ulterior motives."
For all the severe flaws in Modernist architecture, this article seems a bit of a hash, honestly. The author seems trapped inside their own ideological bubble.
Edit:
> It should be obvious to anyone that skyscrapers should be abolished. After all, they embody nearly every bad tendency in contemporary architecture: they are not part of nature, they are monolithic, they are boring, they have no intricacy, and they have no democracy. Besides, there is plenty of space left on earth to spread out horizontally; the only reasons to spread vertically are phallic and Freudian.
> the only reasons to spread vertically are phallic and Freudian.
Lol. I agree.
OTOH... An over the top, ideological take on art is kind of traditional in architecture. I could easily imagine a reincarnated Ayn Rand argueing for skyscrapers for these exact reasons. Phalic inspiration representing the taming of nature and challenge to God.
In 2024, a slapfight between Andy Warhol and a local dress designer about the colour orange... That was the kind of conflict avante garde artists had to have so the rest of us could benefit from a stream of new artistic ideas. A sacrifice.
These days... everyone gets dragged in.
I kind of like brutalism, personally. It took some bad turns, but I'm hoping for a comeback. Maybe we should do paint this time though.
Skyscrapers are phallic because of the engineering constraints of stacking floors upon one another. Airplanes and missiles are phallic because of the engineering constraints of rocketry and aerodynamics. Guns are phallic because of the engineering constraints of using gunpowder to propel a small metal bullet.
For crying out loud, form follows function and sometimes a cigar is just a freaking cigar.
But I heard it gets really hot inside, which sucks if you have to study there. In my opinion, functionality should always be prioritized higher than aesthetics.
Maybe the pipeline that produces cheap product is actually fed by bauhaus graduates.
In other words interesting iconic creations come from mavericks who are self-soveriegn, while go to school, get a job, work in an office type creations are a series of compromises with many requirements to fulfill and many fingers in the pot.
>I think the real sell with bauhaus design is that it was and is super cheap.
Cheap isn't a bad thing. The reasothat some of the best ideas in architecture are irrelevant is specifically avoiding integrating economics into them.
That said, all of modernism basically followed this path. Talented, quality work in the early 30th century. A formalisation of the ideas and principles.
Adoption by a second generation (post wwwii) who liked it mostly for its legible formality... a crappy generation of work as the principles were applied by those going for "good enough" and no more. Same thing happened to brutalism and other modernist schools.
An analogy might be open offices. An energetic reimagining of office life by early Google or whatnot. No expense spared. Reasons, ideas, ideology behind the design.
Pretty soon, all the lower tier companies were doing crappy open offices because it's cheaper, Google do it and it's better. Here read this article about idea sharing in open spaces. Did I mention it's cheaper?
> Compare that with an earlier building like the empire state building and we see the exact opposite.
> More complex forms. More craftsmanship required to create the overall decor and trim designs, and no doubt more cost compared to a bauhaus style building one could make with some chicken wire, plaster, and cheap windows.
Also, the Empire State Building is more recent, built 1930 - 1931. The Bauhaus building in Dessau, the first picture in the article, was built 1925 - 1926.
The part that's missing is the "Art". That's one of the huge pieces of the Bauhaus really pushed. At the time, you could get "cheap and ugly" or you could get "expensive and beautiful". There wasn't anything in between. Bauhaus went counter to that by pushing the belief that you can have well designed pieces that were also affordable.
All else equal, cheap is good. Also if I'm choosing between a million unhoused and a few in beautiful mansions, and everyone housed, I'm choosing the latter. We need quantity too, not just quality.
I don't know the field all that well, but my feeling is that Bauhaus is overrated.
The architecture of the school buildings themselves is quite remarkable, but as a school, it din't really work. The professors were acclaimed artists, but the alumni aren't all that well-known and as far as I know haven't contributed enormously to the field of arts and design.
I find that there's often something very subtle in Bauhaus design that can make things awful very quickly.
Sometimes I see 'Bauhaus' style things and I think they're incredible, but then very slight variations of that same thing immediately look ghastly to me, but I can never quite put my finger on what it is. I think there's a certain kind of purity required in the design to make sure the simple look works.
I think this is also why Bauhaus design often ages terrible. Immaculate plaster walls can look nice, but the second they age, get weathered or develop a 'patina' they look awful.
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[ 0.92 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadAnd if I remember correctly the original plans were changed and the buildings ended up much higher and denser to meet the goals of the city.
Edit: Found this article which states that the plans were modified by Wils Ebert, Gropius had no say in this. https://www.goethe.de/ins/au/en/kul/arc/bau/21319032.html
> modern architecture is very unpopular in Germany
IMHO it has much more to do with the constraints of the 50s and 60s. All major cities in Germany were destroyed and had to be rebuilt fast and cheap. Of course buildings from the late 19th/early 20th century might have looked a lot nicer but they were also massively more expensive (would you rather many cheap and ugly high density buildings or a few better looking expensive ones, it's not like there were that many other options).
Old layout won and today everybody is very happy about that. But wherever there are old stock buildings and post war reconstruction buildings in the same street, the old ones are considered much higher standard, despite best efforts to avoid modernism in the reconstruction. From today's perspective, the actual age difference between one group and the other is laughably small. But in the rush to rebuild post war, the "good enough" threshold was so much lower than pre WWI the difference echoes on through the renovations to this day.
After WW2 it was mainly cheap concrete.
But it’s untrue that only rich people live in old buildings. Maybe in some parts. But most old buildings are in the poorer regions of the inner city. Most rich people I know live in modern buildings. Some in older but very well remade ones…
After all, a consumer product can win by individual choice of the consumer, with failed attempts of interpreting Bauhaus design disappearing again, which makes it easy to cite good examples of lasting Bauhaus style over time (i.e. showing similarity of Braun products with Apple design, etc.).
But a failed interpretation of Bauhaus in Architecture continues to live among us for decades, watering down the value of well-executed Bauhaus design with an appearance of being a cheap bland building...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
His other book on art was pretty good too, and both were received very poorly by their respective industries, which is probably a sign that he was on to something.
It's interesting to contrast them with their less modernist "Gemeindebau" contemporaries in Vienna, which share some ideas and contrast in many others. In my opinion the Vienna ones deserve far more attention than they get (than they get outside Vienna?). I guess their biggest hindrance to fame is that there are so many of them, and that the biggest ones that unsurprisingly draw all the attention (e.g. the match made in heaven of Karl Marx Hof and George Washington Hof) aren't quite as interesting as their entirety, in particular the continuity through Anschluss, war and the aftermath.
Sounds like Bauhaus was better at building affordable housing than other styles.
I suspect this attitude spills over into what people view as their 'best' work.
https://smarthistory.org/the-bauhaus-and-bau/
I'd argue that only a fraction of well-designed buildings in your surrounding actually embody the Bauhaus ethos and its derived aesthetics, but possibly a majority of well-designed products around you do.
https://bauhaus-center.com/bauhaus-in-tel-aviv/
> degenerate
The was another group of people in the 1930s Germany who had similar thoughts and mostly killed it.
I mentioned Tom Wolfe's book "From Bauhaus to Our House." I don't think he likes Bauhaus much.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41001.From_Bauhaus_to_Ou...
https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-mod...
Although I agree with her that traditional, ornamental design is more beautiful, something bothers me about her line of argument; it seems cheap and patronizing to take ideas expressed with rigor and good faith by talented people and dismiss them w/o engaging them intellectually. Nevertheless, its an interesting point of view
As if that's a good thing. I see someone else has already referenced "From Bauhaus to Our House."
The bottom line is just this: Bauhaus is ugly. It does not uplift people's spirits and it does not make us happy. The authors inadvertently give the best argument against it:
> Many also believed that only dedicated craftsman, with their hands-on approach, could produce the highest quality work. They argued that machine production inevitably led to a decline in aesthetic quality. Furthermore, they contended that individuals surrounded by such unattractive surroundings lacked an appreciation for beauty.
Although I know a guy who takes down really old buildings and regularly sees hand-wrought nails, those are cool too
Though that may be just a variation of mortise and tenon.
The cliché Bauhaus style people know is not the thing that had the impact, everything else was.
Before that the typical kitchen furniture were single freestanding objects, like this stove: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/Fr...
But it is more than surface, Schütte-Lihotzky went and measured how long certain tasks were taking and optimized the layout and objects of the kitchen to minimize the waste of time, aomething that before that wasn't really a thing in residential kitchens.
And it incorporates things like varying countertop heights, etc.
Looks workable to me - remember kitchens were not "open concept" at the time, nor made for multiple people operating in them at once.
Which is both fair and faintly damning, as what has been lost along the way (functional design that makes good use of limited space) was perhaps more important than the clean lines and shiny veneer which was retained.
Or maybe I'm just projecting. Been cooking on glass-topped stoves for the past few months and that tends to make me irritable.
However the modernism originating with bauhaus can be applied tactfully with enhanced functionality (I.e larger unobstructed spaces- but in limited fashion. Too often it strips the humanity away from our spaces.
A stunning example of such modernism: Aarhus City Hall, Denmark
My family used to take fairly regular trips up there; the LIGO planning meetings were held at the ACC, and so we'd typically lodge either there or in nearby Snowmass, which also is home to a large number of Bauhaus designs.
Apple turned bauhaus into the “premium” aesthetic, at least in the US. So many companies just copy their premium style from Apple with slight variations, I wonder how much of its presence in our world is simply due to everyone trying to associate themselves with the “premium”/minimalist aesthetic that Apple has cultivated.
Without commenting on the overall design, the fact that this can apparently happen smacks of bad design to me, at least in the details.
IKEA has some wonderful furniture that is cheap and fast, but cannot survive being moved. And Bauhaus has some cheap and fast buildings, but they cannot survive being unmaintained - which is often what happens to buildings that were built to be cheapest.
I mean, at least one other company took the leap a few years before Ikea did: Sauder.
Those pieces are more expensive, usually.
Part of it was using "real screws" that screw into wood at places, instead of twist/lock fasteners or whatever those are.
Of course, if you also glue it, you get something surprisingly durable.
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US4886326A/en
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contempo...
It's also ironic for the author to claim that a style which peaked 100-130 years after the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is somehow the fault of global capitalism, as if global capitalism hadn't been a thing for 100+ years by the 1950s.
And of course even though the author is claiming that the left has flaws in their approach to architecture, they still have to make the obligatory supplication about the right's alleged "ulterior motives."
For all the severe flaws in Modernist architecture, this article seems a bit of a hash, honestly. The author seems trapped inside their own ideological bubble.
Edit:
> It should be obvious to anyone that skyscrapers should be abolished. After all, they embody nearly every bad tendency in contemporary architecture: they are not part of nature, they are monolithic, they are boring, they have no intricacy, and they have no democracy. Besides, there is plenty of space left on earth to spread out horizontally; the only reasons to spread vertically are phallic and Freudian.
Oh, good effing grief.
Lol. I agree.
OTOH... An over the top, ideological take on art is kind of traditional in architecture. I could easily imagine a reincarnated Ayn Rand argueing for skyscrapers for these exact reasons. Phalic inspiration representing the taming of nature and challenge to God.
In 2024, a slapfight between Andy Warhol and a local dress designer about the colour orange... That was the kind of conflict avante garde artists had to have so the rest of us could benefit from a stream of new artistic ideas. A sacrifice.
These days... everyone gets dragged in.
I kind of like brutalism, personally. It took some bad turns, but I'm hoping for a comeback. Maybe we should do paint this time though.
For crying out loud, form follows function and sometimes a cigar is just a freaking cigar.
Also, it's a cosmic balance for all the triangle engineering of ancient times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulinum_%28University_of_Leip...
But I heard it gets really hot inside, which sucks if you have to study there. In my opinion, functionality should always be prioritized higher than aesthetics.
In other words interesting iconic creations come from mavericks who are self-soveriegn, while go to school, get a job, work in an office type creations are a series of compromises with many requirements to fulfill and many fingers in the pot.
Cheap isn't a bad thing. The reasothat some of the best ideas in architecture are irrelevant is specifically avoiding integrating economics into them.
That said, all of modernism basically followed this path. Talented, quality work in the early 30th century. A formalisation of the ideas and principles.
Adoption by a second generation (post wwwii) who liked it mostly for its legible formality... a crappy generation of work as the principles were applied by those going for "good enough" and no more. Same thing happened to brutalism and other modernist schools.
An analogy might be open offices. An energetic reimagining of office life by early Google or whatnot. No expense spared. Reasons, ideas, ideology behind the design.
Pretty soon, all the lower tier companies were doing crappy open offices because it's cheaper, Google do it and it's better. Here read this article about idea sharing in open spaces. Did I mention it's cheaper?
> More complex forms. More craftsmanship required to create the overall decor and trim designs, and no doubt more cost compared to a bauhaus style building one could make with some chicken wire, plaster, and cheap windows.
The Empire State was built in 410 days.
The architecture of the school buildings themselves is quite remarkable, but as a school, it din't really work. The professors were acclaimed artists, but the alumni aren't all that well-known and as far as I know haven't contributed enormously to the field of arts and design.
Sometimes I see 'Bauhaus' style things and I think they're incredible, but then very slight variations of that same thing immediately look ghastly to me, but I can never quite put my finger on what it is. I think there's a certain kind of purity required in the design to make sure the simple look works.
I think this is also why Bauhaus design often ages terrible. Immaculate plaster walls can look nice, but the second they age, get weathered or develop a 'patina' they look awful.