The Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts” by Rose-Carol Washton Long, 1967

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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “The Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts” by Rose-Carol Washton Long, 1967

ROSE-CAROL WASHTON LONG -- play. Glasses and textiles, and there, they received elementary instruction in the theory of form. Now, the main purpose that Gropius insisted that all his students, whether they were painters, sculptors, or even architects, that they worked in all these workshops, is so that they could find out which materials were the most natural to them.

At the same time, he insisted, also, that even the craftsmen, the people that were going into industrial production, must also work with design. In other words, they must work with color. And this is an [Albert’s?], which was produced at the Bauhaus. It’s really a study that was done working with the different relations of color. Also, Gropius had them work with simple lines, and how you work with creating space illusionistically. [01:00] In addition, he wanted them to work with simple materials like this cardboard box at the left, so that they could see the different structures that could be made out of the most simple materials.

Gropius, of course, valued painting highly. But at the time of the Bauhaus, the founding of the Bauhaus, in 1919, he felt that painting alone was merely a salon art. It was an art for the exclusive, for the rich, and it brought benefit to no one. At the same time, he felt the industrial productions were in [bad?] shape. They lacked any kind of style, and they were not especially easy or economically to produce. And thus, he hoped, if he blended the ideas of the artists, the modern, contemporary ideas, especially their ideas concerning abstract painting and sculpture, he hoped if he could work these in to industrial production, [02:00] a style which would be formed which would be suitable for the machine age.

Now, in addition to the workshops that Gropius had, he also insisted on experimentation in music and in the theater, and the slide on the right is a design by Schlemmer, whose painting you had seen previously of the Bauhaus staircase, in which these are costume designs for one of the plays that were put on at the Bauhaus. Gropius considered the theater an integral part of the program of the Bauhaus, and here in the slide on the left is the performance of the ballet with costumes by Schlemmer, which was performed on one of the Bauhaus buildings. There was a great deal of experimentation in all the arts at the Bauhaus, and a great deal of fun and camaraderie. Living out there in the early years in the country, Weimar was a small town, and Dessau, where they moved, as I said before, [03:00] in ’25, was not much larger. And so, most of their entertainment involved in producing their own plays, their own dances themselves. I think by looking at this slide on the left, you can see the element of lightheartedness that went along with all this seriousness and determination to build a new style for the future, that went on in the Bauhaus. There are people standing on the roof, there’s somebody else on the balcony. Again, here’s the huge papier Mache head, and here’s someone with a balloon, and then someone who looks like they’re conducting down at the bottom.

Now, what exactly is this style that was developed at the Bauhaus? I think if we compare two rooms, we might see what was developed during these 14 years. On the left is an interior of a professor’s house, and actual, the house was designed by Gropius, but all of the students contributed to the design of the interior. [04:00] Here, you see on the wall is a painting by Moholy-Nagy, who’s a Hungarian who came to the Bauhaus in 1923. The chairs, here in the lower part of the picture, were designed by Marcel Breuer, who many of you might be familiar

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “The Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts” by Rose-Carol Washton Long, 1967 with now as the architect of the New Whitney Museum. The lamps in the ceiling was designed by Mary Ann Brandt. The essential feeling about this room, when one compares it with this room on the right, is the sense of simpleness and clarity, almost geometrical, hard precision among all the forms in this room. The room on the right has a feeling of clutter. There is no sense of order, or even overwhelmed feeling of design.

The emphasis among the Bauhaus [05:00] was to use material, actually taken from industry, for example -- I mean, the chairs are obviously -- steel is used in the legs, so that the back can then be [canter?] levered off. That means there’s no support here for the back of the chair, because the steel is curved in such a way that all the support can just be worked out, going down these front legs. Now, also, there was an emphasis on using synthetic materials, for example, the [flactic?] table. When natural materials were used, as the straw, the woven material in the chair, they’re used just to emphasize the natural quality of the material themselves, the simple woven quality.

The forms are all extremely simple. There is no attention to small details, no element of the handicraft at all. Because these forms were all designed, the chairs, the lamps, the chest, were all designed for mass production, [06:00] so that they could be easily and cheaply reproduced.

These are ashtrays designed by Mary Ann Brandt, who also did the lamp on the ceiling in that room, and again, they reveal some of this feeling of the machine aesthetic that the Bauhaus wished to symbolize. It wished to work everything out in the material of what they felt was the material of their age.

Now, there’s another interesting aspect to the Bauhaus, it’s their belief in the mathematical quality of forms, and the importance they attached to forms that they felt were geometric, and in essence, [Felibian?] -- Felibian meaning cubic. They felt these were the forms of the machine age, and these were the forms that were to be used. If we compare, for example, these ashtrays [07:00] with glasses done around the turn of the century in the style called the art nouveau, again, you can see quite obviously and simply the difference. There, again, in the glasses there’s great attention to intricate, linear, curving lines, to hand-painted details on the glasses themselves, all of this was determinately and obviously eliminated by the Bauhaus.

Or, if you compare two materials that were designed, both in [Woolinsville?], the one on the right is by Anni Albers, who was... And again, she stresses the simple texture of the material. This design here on the left was done in about 1880, and again, there’s attention to figures or a leaf design, and there’s not so much attention to the natural quality of the silk and the wool.

Now, it’s interesting [08:00] that as much as the Bauhaus differs in style from these curvilinear designs of the Art Nouveau, or of the curvilinear designs of those delicate glasses you saw just before, it’s very interesting that the Bauhaus style or aesthetic actually comes out of this Art Nouveau movement.

Gropius’s ideas can actually be traced back to about 1850, to the beginning of the arts and crafts movement in England, which was started by a man called William Morris. In 1851, when these textiles were exhibited at the exhibition in London at the Crystal Palace, Morris was just

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “The Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts” by Rose-Carol Washton Long, 1967 overwhelmed by their ugliness. He found that they had no attention to the design -- the feeling of the material themselves. They tried to be three-dimensional on what was essentially a flat surface, and in addition, [09:00] he felt that the exhibition at the Crystal Palace was dominated by products that were essentially ugly. Those that were designed for the masses were, he found, just impossible to use. And the great emphasis, of course, was on designs that could be used only in the homes of the wealthy. So, Morris set out to revive what he called “the handicraft arts” -- the arts and crafts -- and he set up workshops where these could be improved.

However, Morris felt that the machine, in contrast to what Gropius and others would feel later, he felt that the machine was the evil. Machine was causing all of this ugliness. So, he took it upon himself to go back to the medieval period, and here in design of his own, he took over their quality of flat patterns and intricate, woven design. At the same time, Morris emphasized that the architect must have responsibility to the society in which he lives. [10:00] And he helped to elevate these arts and crafts, the designing of textiles, the designing of pottery, the designing of lettering, to a new height.

Now, during the 1880s and the 1890s, this arts and crafts movement spread all over Europe, and in France and England, there was the flowering of a new style which was called the Art Nouveau. You can see an example of this style on the right. This is in a building that was done in about 1895 in Belgium. The one on the right is the interior of a hotel. There was a breaking away from rigid, symmetrical ideas, classical ideas. There was an attempt to express things through lines, again, through these curving lines. But, no attention was made to the idea of what industry could do. They did use the industrial materials, the steel -- that’s how they got these circular structures, that’s how they were actually [11:00] able to make some of these curving staircases, as you see on the left, but the worked them as though they were actually material, rather than emphasizing their industrial quality. But the important thing of the Art Nouveau movement is that it gave great respect to the architect.

Many artists who started out as painters at this time turned from painting, feeling it was a lost art, feeling it was only for the wealthy, and that it had no connection with life, and they became architects or textile designers or pottery makers. Van de Velde, who’s portrait you see on the right, was one of those. He started out as a painter, he’s Belgian by birth, and moved to Germany, where the arts and crafts movement flourished. The picture you see on the left is of a colony of artists in Darmstadt around the turn of the century. [12:00] The Germans picked up this arts and crafts movement, and all over Germany, in the small towns, there were established schools for the arts and crafts. But, until Gropius, as I said before, there was no connection with the fine arts -- that is, with painting and sculpture. And even though the arts and crafts were elevated to new heights -- that is, the makers of textiles -[audio cut] [fast forwarding] -- for the students.

And on the right, here was the offices and many of the classrooms. And in the upper left, where you have number two, these are actually the workshops. You had seen earlier a slide of the pottery workshop. Now, in this building, in this design, there is great emphasis [13:00] on the actually making the whole design, the whole complex have a sort of sculptural unity. Where Gropius actually flattens all his walls and makes his house into cubes, he works with the whole

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “The Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts” by Rose-Carol Washton Long, 1967 complex, as though he were actually following van Doesburg’s ideas of a painting. So, there is no longer any symmetry to the design. The design is asymmetrical. There is not one axis. You don’t enter from any one particular point of view. Again, a balance is achieved by using the special elements -- again, the open area between the building number two and the building number three, to balance with the weight of the mass down in the lower left. It’s very hard to experience how he actually makes space work as almost a material component, unless one were there [14:00] and walking around in between these different buildings. Now, in these buildings, for the first time, Gropius uses a huge, enormous expanse of glass and steel.

This is a slide of a structure by van Doesburg, which you can see, they’re not keeping pace with... On the left, you see the actual workshop of the Bauhaus. This was the item that was number two in the aerial design. And here, in this particular building, Gropius uses a great amount of glass and steel. And actually, it is for the first time that so much glass is used in a structure. Gropius wished to deny [15:00] the support of the wall, to deny, because he felt weight was a traditional aspect. Weight was not an aspect of the machine age. The machine age made possible the use of steel, it made possible great expanses of glass, and so these should be employed in a building.

Actually, these ideas go back to his earliest experience with Barons in the [German]. What you see on the right is a design he did for a factory in 1913. Where you see, there, he was using the glass for actually very functional reasons. Because, I the design of the factory, the emphasis was to do it as simply and quickly, as cheaply as possible. Now, Gropius uses similar elements in the design of the Bauhaus, but he does not use them for the purpose of functionalism. Now, many times, the Bauhaus people and their designs [16:00] had been called “functionalists.” But, when we have looked at their houses, in looking at this design for the school, one will notice that these -- the structure does not really arise out of any functional concept, but rather, Gropius chose to use these materials of glass and steel because to him, they symbolized the most dominant things about what he felt was the new age, the age of the future, the age which he felt would bring greater harmony, greater hope to mankind, in which he hoped the style that his school developed would contribute. So, this expanse of glass, and the use of steel and other modern materials are done by choice. They are not done by any determinant, beyond the architect himself, that is. [17:00]

This building, as I said before, was one of the first of the huge complexes that were to come out of the international style. Other buildings, such as the one you see in Rotterdam, done in 1929, reveal a similar aspect of design. Huge expanses of glass, tight, flat surfaces, a very rigid, almost geometric order. The Rotterdam design is slightly different in that one aspect is curved, and there is more use of, actually, rhythm in the total design, than Gropius would ever allow. Gropius still is very much a part of his old training, and his works are always very hard and rigid, and much more machinelike.

Now, in 1927, there was an exhibition in Stuttgart. It was an exhibition of housing developments, and it was sponsored by [18:00] the [Deutsche Bahn?] that Gropius had belonged to. And here, we see, for the first time, the beginning of what is called this international style, this style that was first actually symbolized by the huge Bauhaus complex, and now which we see cropping up in an exhibition, in which ten architects were invited to submit designs, and the

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “The Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts” by Rose-Carol Washton Long, 1967 curious thing is that almost all of their designs bared many similar qualities. For example, this street you see on the left, in looking at it at first glance, you would be very hard-put to tell if three architects did these buildings, or one. In fact, it was Gropius who did the building in the center, here, [Outh?], who did the buildings on the right, here, from Holland, and on the left is a building done by Mies van der Rohe, [19:00] who became a director of the Bauhaus in 1930, two years after Gropius had left.

If we look in detail at some of these designs, this is the rear of the Outh building. This is the front, and here you see the back. If we compare this to the Gropius building, you can, again, see the similarity of simple, geometric proportions using the windows and doors to create a visual but element of design on the structure -- an element of design which is very precise, but asymmetrical. The Gropius building is a little hard to see, so, I’d like to show you another design of Gropius. This was, again, done for a housing development, not, however, in Stuttgart, but in another town in Germany, but it serves to show just how close all these elements, aesthetic elements are, and why, actually, [20:00] this style was called “the international style.”

Gropius -- the only requirement that was given by Mies van der Rohe, in the design for all the buildings of the 1927 Stuttgart exhibition, was that all the rooves be flat. This was something that was done at that time, because they felt the roof should be used more economically. It should be used as an area of play. In addition, in trying to bake away from traditional ideas and traditional forms, was another reason to get rid of the old A-line roof. But this is one of the reasons why so many of the buildings of the international style have flat rooves. Another, of course, is because the line that can come from a flat roof, the more geometric and cubic quality, is much more keeping with the concept that they believed they were trying to symbolize, [21:00] again, the machine, or the quality of the machine.

Another building which was similar is this building by Corbusier, which was, again done -- he was invited to attend the Stuttgart exhibition and present a house. Again, you see the tight, flat surfaces, the use of windows as an element of visual design. Here, though, the porch is not extended into the surface, but, again, becomes part of the entire structure. You see up at the top, how he uses the porch in the design itself, in the total cubic shape. It’s very interesting that for these architects, and for these people that grew out of the Bauhaus school, again, the cube became this, again, a symbol for the machine age, rather than the interplay of cubes, as you’ve seen in the [Schrader?] house. [22:00]

These are two designs. The one on the right is by Mies van der Rohe, and this was, again, a design for a block of flats for low-cost housing, and again, it was built at Stuttgart. I compare this with the Gropius design for a year later. And, again, you see the basic similarities. You also probably are very familiar with these designs, because they’ve cropped up in housing developments all over the world. The use of large windows, but very flatly against the surface.

One of the high points of the international style is this building called the -- done for the Barcelona Exhibition in 1929. This is a building done by Mies van der Rohe, who, as I said, became director of the Bauhaus in 1930. The plan, as you can see, [23:00] is very similar to that picture I showed a little while ago with the van Doesburg, where he had different color lines intersecting. Here, actually, a painting has become somewhat of a model for the actual design of

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “The Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts” by Rose-Carol Washton Long, 1967 the building. And this building at the Barcelona Pavilion, Mies wished to culminate what he felt would be the bringing of quality to industrial design. So, all the materials used in the Barcelona Pavilion are materials, again, developed by industry. There’s a great deal of use of steel, and a great deal of use of glass. He contrasted this with the use of marble, sort of a play back and forth between using the old and the new. In this building, Mies van der Rohe goes back to some of the elements [24:00] developed by the [de Steel?] group, this element of using interlocking areas of space. So, while the surfaces of the building themselves are flat, and the walls, as you notice, are not weight-supporting at all, it is the columns, for example, such a column as this that bears the support of the roof, not the wall. The wall is a visual item here. Mies actually tried to give a greater feeling of special awareness, so that in a sense, this building becomes almost a sculpture in the sense of the Schrader house was.

This is another example of the type of materials that he uses in the interior of this famous Barcelona Pavilion. There you see in the upper right, the famous Barcelona chairs, which now appear in almost every office building. There in the lower left are stools, [25:00] again, which are very familiar to almost all industry.

When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, many of the leading members came to the United States. As I mentioned earlier, Albers came and went to Black Mountain College, and from there, he went to Yale University, where he set up the Design School. In fact, the courses -- these workshop courses, the emphasis on learning by doing, that was developed at the Bauhaus. This working with simple, basic elements of design, of color, and basic materials, can be found now in almost every art school throughout America. And if you were in art school and actually working with single strips of color, trying to arrange them by relationships of value, this is an exercise that comes directly out of the Bauhaus. [26:00] Or, when you’re sent to create a sculpture out of actually paper cardboard, again, this is a technique designed by the Bauhaus to show volume.

Now, Mies came to the United States also, as did Gropius, and here, he’s tried to formulate a school which would have been called the Bauhaus in America. This is now the Chicago School of Industrial Technology, which Mies designed the plans for. He deviates, of course, from the Bauhaus idea of asymmetry, and the asymmetry based on an attempt to show an interrelationship, a play of a form, and now goes back to a classical pattern. You can see that in the plan on the right, that if one could walk straight down the middle, there is definitely a central axis, and on either side [27:00] of the central axis, things are almost identical. However, in his buildings, they very much relate to the aesthetic of the Bauhaus. This cubic, linear, rigid, geometric aesthetic that was developed there. Gropius, in his design here -- this is a design that Gropius did for the Harvard Graduate Center, he became, when he came to America, the actual head of the Architectural School at Harvard -- still based his complex on the asymmetry and the “off” axis that he had first formulated at the Bauhaus. But again, we know, and here, these buildings are designed in 1950, that’s almost 25 years after the first Bauhaus building was designed. How, again, similar in concept they are. The same relationship of window to wall area, the same flat, geometric, [28:00] tight surface area.

This influence of the Bauhaus really affected all of our designs, or at least much of our architectural design in America. Right here in New York, you can see -- you couldn’t even

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “The Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts” by Rose-Carol Washton Long, 1967 count the number of buildings that have been influenced by a Bauhaus design. The building on the left, the Museum of Modern Art -- again, you might recognize the visual design of the structure. It’s coming very much out of the Bauhaus. And, the Seagram Building, which you see on the right, designed by Mies van der Rohe and his student, Philip Johnson. Again, although now there’s an emphasis on the vertical, on great height, which is entirely different from the horizontal designs of the Bauhaus, there is still this tight, enclosed, cubic structure, this use of glass and steel, which, to them, was the symbol of the machine age. [29:00]

Now, when we look at other buildings that have been designed since then, and the buildings that have been designed on the basis of hexagons, or the buildings that are designed on the basis of huge curves, and on far more exacting relations to developments in technology, we realize that the aesthetic of the Bauhaus was not determined by the steel and glass, but was their choice of what they felt symbolized the machine age. Whether their choice was good, or as in this Lever building, which was done by architects Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, American architects who have no direct contact with the Bauhaus now, except to have been caught up in that particular aesthetic. And then, when we look at other of the glass buildings that dominate in New York, [30:00] for example, if you think of the huge row of glass buildings on Park Avenue, or if you think of this particular Time Life building, and one thinks of how, actually, the Bauhaus aesthetic has been almost subverted, cheapened and corrupted, then one can almost question it. But still, the buildings that are good and that remain stand as monuments to what these men felt symbolized the machine age.

In the next coming weeks, we will examine in detail several of the masters of the Bauhaus, but we’ll emphasize in these next four lectures the actual developments that came from the painting school. Next week’s lecture will deal with the works of Lyonel Feininger. The following week, we’ll deal with the theories and the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky. After that, there will be a lecture on [31:00] Moholy-Nagy, and Albers. And, in conclusion, there will be a lecture dealing with the influence of the Bauhaus ideas and painting, and then their development and influence in America. Thank you very much. (applause)

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Bauhaus: Origins and Architectural Concepts / Rose Carol Washton Long. 1967/3/4. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York