The Bauhaus Notes Essay, Research Paper

Architecturearchitecture

When Walter Gropius resigned as the head of the Bauhaus in 1930, Ludwig

Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) became its director, moving it to Berlin

before political pressures forced it to close in 1933. In his architecture

and furniture he made a clear and elegant statement of the International

Style, so much so that his work had enormous influence on modern

architecture. Taking his motto “less is more” and calling his architecture

“skin and bones,” his aesthetic was already fully formed in the model for

a glass skyscraper office building he concieved in 1921.

Working with glass provided him with new freedom and many new

possiblities. In the glass model, three irreguarly shaped towers flow

outward from a central court. The perimeter walls are wholly transparent,

the regular horizontal patterning of the cantilevered floor panes and

their thin vertical supporting elements. The weblike delicacy of the lines

of the glass model, its radiance, and the illusion of movement created by

reflection and by light changes seen through it prefigure many of the

glass skyscrapers of major cities throughout the world.

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Architecture architecture

Georg Muche's Haus am Horn, the model house for the Bauhaus exibition in

1923, was the first house he had ever designed. It is an extraordinary

little Modernist Villa, classical in its own way. As the floor plan shows,

it was designed for a single family with young children and no servants.

The living room stands at the centre of the house, surrounded by all the

other, much smaller rooms and lit by clerestory windows above. The

surrounding rooms are linked in a logical way for middle-class households

(the man's and the woman's rooms both lead into the bathroom, the womans

room connects with the nursery and so on).

Muche became as fascinated by the idea of low cost, quick assembly

prefabricated buildings as Gropius and Meyer. In 1925 they designed a

house that could be assembled simply from steel panels.

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Architecturearchitecture

When Walter Gropius resigned as the head of the Bauhaus in 1930, Ludwig

Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) became its director, moving it to Berlin

before political pressures forced it to close in 1933. In his architecture

and furniture he made a clear and elegant statement of the International

Style, so much so that his work had enormous influence on modern

architecture. Taking his motto "less is more" and calling his architecture

"skin and bones," his aesthetic was already fully formed in the model for

a glass skyscraper office building he concieved in 1921.

Working with glass provided him with new freedom and many new

possiblities. In the glass model, three irreguarly shaped towers flow

outward from a central court. The perimeter walls are wholly transparent,

the regular horizontal patterning of the cantilevered floor panes and

their thin vertical supporting elements. The weblike delicacy of the lines

of the glass model, its radiance, and the illusion of movement created by

reflection and by light changes seen through it prefigure many of the

glass skyscrapers of major cities throughout the world.

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Architecturearchitecture

]g a l l e r y[ It was clear from Gropius's Manifesto that the ultimate

aim of the Bauhaus was architecture; the very name Bauhaus suggests it

most strongly. Each of the school's three directors, Gropius, Meyer and

Van Der Rohe, were above all an architect and, rightly or wrongly, the

Bauhaus has become strongly identified with the architectural approach

that has variously been called Modernism, The Modern Movement or the

International Style.

The debate surrounding Modernism or the new architecture was carried on in

terms heavy with moral conotations: truth, purity and honesty. Democracy

even entered into it with the attempt to suppress the predominance of one

face of the building in favor of buildings that would only be appreciated

by walking around or through them.

The structure of the building had to be expressed clearly by its outward

appearance. In formal terms, the horizontal was emphasised rather than the

imposing verticals of 19th Century public buildings; flat planes were

interlocked at right angles and surfaces were rendered white to symbolize

purity and clarity. One of the most controversial elements in the german

context was the use of the flat roof; the pitched roof was seen in

conservative circles as inalienably Germanic.

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Bauhausbauhaus

The Bauhaus is not a style; it is a collection of attitudes. The Bauhaus

was founded in Weimar Germany in 1919 by the architect [Walter Gropius].

The Bauhaus Manifesto was to unite the teaching of fine art, applied art

and architecture in order to educate creative people capable of large

sacale collaborative projects or “total works of art”. The word Bauhaus is

derived from the “hausbau” meaning construction. Bauhaus implies not only

building and construction but also reconstruction. Above all, the Bauhaus

is identified with functionalism, which is now seen as the eradication of

ornament in favour of the austere beauty of the industrial Aesthetic.

The students of the Bauhaus took part in the designing of buildings and

fittings. They were encouraged to use their imagination and to experiment

boldly yet never to lose sight of the purpose which their designs should

serve. It was at this school that tubular steel chairs and similar

furnishings of our daily use were invented.

The theories for which the Bauhaus stood for are sometimes condensed in

the slogan of “functionalism” the belief that if something is only

designed to fit its purpose we can let beauty look after itself. There is

certainly much truth in this belief. But like all slogans it really rests

on an oversimplification. The best works of this style are beautiful not

only because they happen to fit the function for which they are built but

because they were designed by men of tact and taste who knew how to make

an object or building fit for its purpose and yet right for the eye.

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Bauhausfurniture

]g a l l e r y[ Bauhaus furniture design was based on the premise that it

was necessary to develop new and radically different forms for the pieces

of furniture that were to be accepted as the basis of the modern home.

Traditional furniture types -the heavy armchair, the mahogany armoire and

the bourgeois love of ornamentation were rejected.

The functionalist approach was enthusiastically embraced by the carpentry

workshop, as was Gropius's belief that peoples needs were largely

identical. It was therefore the workshops task to provide for those needs

in the most definitive and economic way.

Given the shortage of housing space in and the mid 1920s fashion for

health and hygiene, the goal was to create lightweight, adaptable,

multi-purpose furniture in clean, hard materials, soft upholstery was

thought to harbour dust and mites.

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Bauhausfurniture

Peter Bucking used wood for this lightweight collapsable armchair in

1928.

This chair epitomises the Bauhaus aesthetic lightweight, low cost

adaptable furniture for the workers housing for which it was premium. The

advantage of this chair was that it could be stored and not seen, avoiding

the whole aspect of clutter and maximising the use of household space.

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Bauhausfurniture

When Hannes Meyer became director in 1928, and Breuer was succeeded as

leader of the furniture workshop first by Josef Albers and then by Alfred

Arndt, the workshops priorities were realigned. The aim was now to create

low-cost multi-purpose, standard furniture. A number of ingenious folding

or adjustable work chairs were designed, often using tubular steel and

plywood in conjunction. Alfred Arndts chair 1929-30 which is sometimes

attributed to Breuer, folds completely flat so that it can fold up against

a wall.

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Bibliography

The Bauhaus School