From Bauhaus to Our House 1 of 3

FROM

TO OUR HOUSE

Do you have a book you've loaned out and never gotten back? Only to buy it again, loan it out again, and not get it back again? I've got a couple, but the one I've re-bought the most is:

(1981)

The reasons for this are simple: (1) It's one of those books I get so excited about that when I discover people I enjoy talking about books with haven't read it, I usually force it upon them. (2) In the words of  Bill Adama 'Never lend books.' This is an expensive philosophy, sometimes, but the karma feels right to me. If I give you a book to read - and you like it - then keep it, mate. Go forth and spread the gospel. And (3) Well, it's not like there isn't a relative abundance of cheap used copies out there. Not to mention free ones from the library. If Bill Adama can give away books after the Cylon holocaust, then Bryan McFrakkinMillan can find his way to doing the same.

Anyway, my days of lending this one out are probably over, as I've now re-acquired it four or five times and I'm just sick of the cycle. Moreover, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, as the saying goes. These days I pretty much just put my recs into this here blog. If my bliss coincides with yours, then yaaaaay, brother. If not, hey! 'Sall good, boys and girls. Remember the days where you'd harangue your friends to love the same stuff you did and bombard them with mix tapes and all the rest? So do I. But I'm older and wiser and lazier now.

I pulled it off the shelf a few weeks back to see if it still held up. (Well, more like I wanted something for the train that was lighter and more shoulder-bag-friendly than the huge Civil War tomes I've been reading lately. See aforementioned laziness) Did it hold up? You bet your sweet bourgeois ass it did, brother. On the long list of books that forever changed my thinking - indeed, my life - From Bauhaus to Our House is right up there with the most earth-shattering of any of them. In quick, scintalliting prose, it illuminated something I always felt was the case: namely, that there was something damn peculier about the glass-box-ification of every urban landscape. And whenever there's an anomaly in our public life, the answer is usually the same: neomarxism run amok!

More specifically, "Bauhaus" run amok. Or "compound thinking," as Wolfe describes it. Rather than review the book, I thought it'd be fun to just put up some substantial quotes from it, along with some appropriate pics - mostly from Google Image searches but some, like those two under "to our house" up there, from walking around Chicago and snapping pics of pertinent examples over the years I've lived out here. Not only from Chicago of course:

"The Avenue of the Americas in NY - row after row of Mies van der Rhoe." (More on him in a bit) Worker housing pitched up fifty stories high - la Rue de Regret."

"Building more glass boxes and covering them with plate glass so as to reflect the glass boxes next door and distort their boring straight lines into curves."

You don't need to know anything about architecture or even agree with Wolfe's wonderfully-worded strong opinions on the subject to (hopefully) enjoy this post. And full disclosure: as much as I appreciate Wolfe's take on it, I kinda love the whole glass box, minimalist, "unconcealed structure" look of these buildings. Always have! I can remember staring at the skyline of Frankfurt from the bus window as a young child and being hypnotized. And everytime I went to a new city, I said "Hey, this stuff again!" Instead of being repelled, I was drawn to it. This is interesting to me now, but more on that later, too. 

Despite such affection, the history of how this glass-box ubiquity came to be - and particularly how it came to take over the world over the course of the twentieth century is fascinating and I daresay quite important. Any similarity between "compound thinking" and its parallels with the media-academe in 2017 - particularly in the social sciences - is worth considering. 

But that's all I'll say about that. Let's let Tom - and the pics - do the rest of the talking. Take it away, Mr. Wolfe. 

"Our story begins in Germany just after the First World War. Young American architects, along with artists, writers, and odd-lot intellectuals, are roaming through Europe. This great boho adventure is called "The Lost Generation." Meaning what? In The Liberation of American Literature, VF Calverton wrote that American artists and writers had suffered a "colonial complex" through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and had timidly imitated European models - but that after World War One they had finally found the self-confidence and sense of identity to break free of the authority of Europe in the arts. In Fact, he couldn't have gotten it more hopelessly turned around. The motto of the Lost Generation was, in Malcolm Cowley (link)'s words, 'They do things better in Europe.'

"To the young American architects who made the pilgrimage, the most dazzling figure of all was Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School." 

aka The Silver Prince.

"Gropius opened the Bauhaus in Weimar, the German capital, in 1919. It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms. The young architects and artists who came to the Bauhaus to live and study and learn from the Silver Prince talked about 'starting from zero.' One heard the phrase all the time: 'starting from zero.' Gropius gave his backing to any experiment they cared to make, so long as it was in the name of a clean and pure future. And why not - the country of the young Bauhaus-ler, Germany, had been crushed in the war and humiliated at Versailles; the economy had collapsed in a delirium of inflation; the Kaiser had departed; the Social Democrats had taken power in the name of socialism; mobs of young men ricocheted through the cities drinking beer and awaiting a Soviet-style revolution from the east. Rubble, smoking ruins - starting from zero! If you were young, it was wonderful stuff. Starting from zero meant nothing less than recreating the world."

"'Painters! Architects! Sculptors! You whom the bourgeoisie pays with high rewards for your work out of vanity, snobbery, and boredom - Hear! To this money there clings the sweat and blood and nervous energy of thousands of poor hounded human beings - Hear! It is an unclean profit. We must be true socialists - we must kindle the highest socialist virtue: the brotherhood of Man.'" 

"So ran a manifesto of the Novermbergruppe which included (the other designers) who would later join Gropius at the Bauhaus. Gropius was chairman of the Novembergruppe's Arbeitsrat fur Kunst (Working Council for Art), which sought to bring all the arts together 'under the wing of a great architecture,' which would be the 'business of the entire people.' A everyone understood in 1919, 'the entire people' was synonymous with 'the workers.' 'The intellectual bourgeois... has proved himself unfit to be the bearer of German culture,' said Gropius. 'New, intellectually undeveloped levels of our people are rising from the depths. They are our chief hope.'"

"Gropius' interest in 'the proletariat' or 'socialism' turned out to be no more than aesthetic and fashionable, somewhat like the interest of President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic or Chairman Mao of the People's Republic of China in republicanism. Nevertheless, as Dostoevsky said, ideas have consequences; the Bauhaus style proceeded from certain firm assumptions. First, the new architecture was being created for the workers. The holiest of all goals: perfect worker housing. Second, the new architecture was to reject all things bourgeois."

The eyes of The Picasso statue ―"like the eyes of every slumlord who made a buck off the small and weak, and every building inspector who took a wad from a slumlord to make it possible,” in the words of the inimitable Mike Royko - in Daley Plaza, Chicago.

"Since just about everyone involved, the architects as well as the Social Democratic bureaucrats (pouring money into public housing in post-WW1 Germany), was himself bourgeois in the literal, social sense of the word, "bourgeois" became an epithet that meant whatever you didn't like in the lives of people above the level of hod carrier. The main thing was not to be caught designing something someone could point to and say of, with a devastating sneer: 'How very bourgeois.'"

"The creation of this new type of community (the compound) proved absolutely exhilarating to artists and composers, as well as architects, throughout Europe in the early 20th century. We're independent of the bourgeois society around us! (They became enamored of this term bourgeois.) And superior to it! It was the compounds that produced the sort of avant-gardism that makes up so much of the history of 20th century art. The compounds - whether the Cubists, Fauvists, Futurists, or Secessionists - had a natural tendency to be esoteric, to generate theories and forms that would baffle the bourgeoisie. The most perfect device, they soon discovered, was painting, composing, designing in code. The peculiar genius of early Cubists, such as Braque and Picasso, was not in creating "new ways of seeing," but in creating visual codes for the esoteric theories of the compound. For example, the Cubist technique of painting a face in cartoon profile, with both eyes on the same side of the nose, illustrated two theories: (1) the theory of flatness, derived from Braque's notion that a painting was nothing more than a certain arrangement of colors and forms on a flat surface: and (2) the theory of simultaneity, derived from discoveries in the new field of stereoptics indicating that a person sees an object from two angles simultaneously."

Gris (l) and Mondrian (r).

"Composers, artists, or architects in a compound began to have the instincts of the medieval clergy, much of whose activity was devoted exclusively to separating itself from the mob. For mob, substitute bourgeoisie - and here you have the spirit of avant-gardism in the 20th century. Once inside a compound, an artist became part of the clerisy, to use an old term for the intelligentsia with clerical presumptions."

Mystery Babylon.

"The battle to be the least bourgeois of all became somewhat loony. For example, early in the game, in 1919, Gropius had been in favor of bringing simple craftsmen into the Bauhaus, yeomen, honest toilers, people with knit brows and broad fingernails who would make things by hand for architectural interiors, simple wooden furniture, simple pots and glassware, simple this and simple that. This seemed very working class, very nonbourgeois. He was also interested in the curvilinear designs of Expressionist architects such as Erich Mendelsohn."

Erich Mendelsohn's Einstein Tower: expressionist architecture, soon to become heresy at the First International Congress of Progressive Art held in Dusseldorf in 1922, the first meeting of compound architects from all over Europe.

"Mendelsohn's dramatic curved shapes exploded all bourgeois conceptions of order, balance, symmetry, and rigid masonry construction. Yes - but a bit naive of you just the same, Walter! Theo van Doesburg, the fiercest of the Dutch manifesto writers, took one look at Gropius' Honest Toilers and Expressionist curves and sneered and said: How very bourgeois. Only the rich could afford handmade objects (and) as for Expressionism, its curvilinear shapes defied the machine, not the bourgeoisie. They were not only expensive to fabricate, they were 'voluptuous' and 'luxurious.' Honest toilers, broad fingernails, and curves disappeared from the Bauhaus forever."

Gerri Rietvold's Schroeder House. Rietvold was from the Dutch compound de Stijl. He covered the exterior in projections whose only function was to indicate the grid, the diagram, the paradigm, the geometric progression on which the plans were based. "The Dutch really knew how to bourgeois-proof a house."

"The definitions and claims and accusations and counter-accusations and counter-claims and counter-definitions of what was or was not bourgeois became so refined, so rarefied, so arcane, so dialectical, so scholastic (...) that finally building design itself was directed at only one thing: illustrating this month's Theory of the Century concerning what was ultimately, infinitely, and absolutely nonbourgeois." 

"The buildings became theories, constructed in the form of concrete, steel, wood, glass, and stucco. (Honest materials, non-bourgeois, theory of.) Inside and out, they were white and beige with the occasional contrasting detail in black and gray (...) Henceforth, white, beige, gray, and black became the patriotic colors, the geometric flag, of all the compound architects. Goodbye, color. on spun the holy tornado, Theory, until buildings by compound artists were aimed at very little else. They became supremely, divinely nonfunctional, even though everything was done in the name of "functionalism." (Functional being one of several euphemisms for non-bourgeois.)"

"The flat roof and the sheer facade. There was no turning back. it had become the very symbol of non-bourgeois architecture. No eaves; so that very quickly one of the hallmarks of compound work, never referred to in the manifestos, became the permanently streaked and stained white or beige stucco exterior wall. (...) No upholstered furniture with "pretty" fabrics. Furniture was made of Honest Materials in natural tones: leather, tubular steel, bentwood, cane, canvas: the lighter - and harder - the better. And no more "luxurious" rugs. Gray or black linoleum was the ticket."

Enter le Corbusier.

"Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird. Le Corbusier's instincts for the compound era were flawless. Early on he seemed to comprehend what became an axiom of artistic competition in the twentieth century. Namely, that the ambitious young artist must join a movement or a school, an "ism" - which is to say a compound. He is either willing to join a clerisy and subscribe to its codes and theories or he gives up all hope of prestige. And thus there came into being another unique phenomenon: the famous architect who did little or no building. Every time (Frank Lloyd) Wright read that Le Corbusier had finished a building, he said 'Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it.'"

Corbu: Carpenter Center, Harvard (l) and worker housing in Marseilles (r)

Corbu's "Radiant City" - design and influence

"My houses are machines for living." - Corbu

"And how did the workers like worker housing? Oh, they complained, which was their nature at this stage in history. But it was understandable. As Corbu himself said, they had to be re-educated to comprehend the beauty of 'the Radiant City' of the future. There was no use consulting them directly, since, as Gropius had pointed out, they were as yet "intellectually undeveloped." Here was the great appeal of socialism to architects in the 1920s. Socialism was the political answer, the great yea-saying, to the seemingly outrageous and impossible claims of the compound architect who insisted the client keep his mouth shut. Under socialism, the client was the worker. Alas, the poor devil was only just now rising up out of the ooze. In the meantime, the architect , the artist, and the intellectual would arrange his life for him. To use Stalin's phrase, they would be the engineers of his soul."

"Starting from zero! Well, my God! To the Americans making the discount tour of Europe, the approach of the compounds, of Gropius and the Bauhaus, of Mies *, Corbu and de Stijl, was utterly irresistible. There were several problems to be overcome, however. To begin with, the notion of starting from zero made no sense at all in the United States. The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the First World War. She had emerged from the war on top of the world. She was the only one of the combatants who had not been demolished, decimated, exhausted, or catapulted into revolution. She was now one of the Great Powers, young, on the rise, bursting with vigor and rude animal health."

"Not only that, she had no monarchy or nobility to be toppled, discredited, blamed, vilified, or otherwise reacted against. She didn't even have a bourgeoisie. In the absence of a nobility or even a tradition of one, the European concept of bourgeoisie didn't even apply. ** There was very little interest in socialism. *** There was not even interest in worker housing."

"Dazzled by the European stance, the Americans imported it anyway, like a pair of Lobb shoes or a jar of Beluga caviar. The great new European architectural vision of Worker Housing would have to be brought to America by any means necessary."

* more on Mies next time

Mies-designed Esplanada apartments along Lake Shore Drive, Chicago.

** this is very wrong in many ways. 
*** you mean yet. 

NEXT: "They achieved their goal. They succeeded in making (art) baffling to anyone who didn't want to come inside the compound and learn the theories and the codes. The twentieth century - the American century - was two thirds over, and the colonial complex was stronger than ever."