MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From “Cleanlining” to Accountability Arthur J. Pulos Published on: Apr 22, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From “Cleanlining” to Accountability We see that we are not building big or little gadgets—we are building an environment. And we designers have to work also with the scientists, engineers, technologists, sociologists and economists who have part in this reconstruction. Can we get enough of this new world strongly and fairly built in time? Walter Dorwin Teague, 1940 [95] The public’s interest in design was stimulated in the mid-1930s when the government authorized a Federal Art Project to establish an Index of American Design. The idea was proposed by Ruth Reeves, a textile designer and painter, to the New York Public Library and then carried to Washington for endorsement. With the noted American historian Constance Rourke as national editor and Ruth Reeves as the first national coordinator, the project ran from late 1935 until the United States entered World War II, covering some 35 states and employing an average of 300 artists at a time. It produced over 17,000 carefully detailed illustrations of American decorative and industrial arts as well as vernacular products dating from the earliest days of the colonies until the end of the nineteenth century. Although the project’s immediate purpose was to provide employment for commercial artists during the Depression, its end value was to record and thereby honor the indigenous arts and industries of the Americans. This important survey of the objects of everyday life served to dignify them as well as to preserve them. Constance Rourke saw an even deeper value in the collection (which is now owned by the National Gallery): “If the materials of the Index can be widely seen they should offer an education of the eye, particularly for young people, which may result in the development of taste and a genuine consciousness of our rich national heritage.” ([45], I, xxvii) The widespread interest in industrial design was forcing major schools and colleges to consider adding it as a subject. The primary question was how this was to be accomplished within a rigid, self-serving academic system. The new discipline was neither rational enough to be acceptable to engineering schools nor noble enough to be welcomed by architecture. Furthermore, well-established art schools—particularly those with strong arts and crafts programs, such as the University of Cincinnati or Cooper Union—either were too busy to take in the young orphan profession or else had already expanded their class assignments to include the design of manufactured products in overlapping areas, such as radio cabinets, lighting fixtures, or tableware. However, there was a prevalent belief that the arts and crafts schools lacked the vision that would enable them to submit to the existing capabilities of industries or to 2 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From “Cleanlining” to Accountability subscribe their work to the daily needs of any particular segment of the buying public. Once again, it appears, the stimulus to break with established habit had to come from abroad—this time not from France, but from an unexpected source in Germany. When Walter Gropius was invited to establish a school at Weimar in 1919, he accepted only on the condition that he be allowed to carry out the idea of his predecessor, Henri Van de Velde, that the fine and applied arts be combined in an academic experiment to demonstrate their fundamental unity. This bold venture attracted a distinguished faculty from all over Europe and students of all ages, incomes, and political persuasions. Gropius’s particular goal for Das Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar was to establish a “consulting art center for industry and the trades” that would break down the barriers between artists and craftsmen by means of an innovative preliminary course of six months by which he hoped to cleanse the students of their previous training, release their intuition and sensitivity, and encourage them to experiment with old and new materials. ([8], 12) This course’s methodology was a “learning by doing” experience that was more than casually related to training in the crafts. To some observers, in fact, the course was little more than an extension of the English and Viennese Arts and Crafts movements without, as Gropius pointed out in defense, their affection for romanticism or their commitment to “I’art pour I’art.” ([8], 21) 3 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From “Cleanlining” to Accountability The Index of American Design represented the work of over a thousand illustrators and produced over 22,000 plates covering the arts and crafts and everyday products of the Americans. This photograph shows a Works Progress Administration artist at work. National Archives. By 1923, as the exuberant behavior of those involved with the free mixture of the arts in the Bauhaus began to wear thin its welcome in Weimar, Gropius found it prudent to accept an invitation to move the entire school to Dessau. As the move was being made, the programs modified, and the faculty reassigned or replaced, it became evident that the philosophic emphasis of the school was shifting from Expressionism and the fine arts toward the conflict between rationalism and formalism in design. Its previous preoccupation with handicraft methods as a prelude to design for machine production was now to be concentrated, as Gropius remembered some ten years later, on averting “man’s enslavement by the machine by giving its product a content of significance and reality.” [212] Gropius saw rationalism as only a purifying force and not a cardinal 4 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From “Cleanlining” to Accountability principle, and warned that formalism was merely a fashion in modern art. Nevertheless, a mannered Bauhaus character began to appear by which products were styled to give an illusion of industrially made things whose geometric form and visibly mechanistic construction were their ornament. In this context it is interesting to remember that, some 50 years earlier, machine methods were used to manufacture products that appeared to have been made by hand. And now the Bauhaus workshops were using handicraft methods to produce objects that pretended to have been made by machines. Reyner Banham quotes Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s criticism of Wilhelm Wagenfeldt for having changed cylindrical milk jugs into drop-shaped ones: “… how can you betray the Bauhaus like this? We have always fought for simple basic shapes, cylinder, cube, cone and now you are making a soft form which is dead against all we have been after.” ([5], 282) By the time that the new building was finished and the Bauhaus was in full operation again, Walter Gropius realized that it had carried with it from Weimar the germs of its own dissolution. On one hand he regretted the formalism of the Bauhaus style as a “confession of failure and a return to the very stagnation, that devitalizing inertia, to combat which [he] had called it into being;” on the other hand he deplored what he called “spurious phrases like ‘functionalism’ (die neue Sachlichkeit) and ‘fitness for purpose equals beauty’” championed by the socialists in the Bauhaus. [212] As a result Gropius gave up the directorship of the school to Hannes Meyer, a Swiss communist, stating that its intellectual objectives had been attained, and returned to Berlin to devote his time to architecture. With him went Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, leaving the school entirely in control of the socialists. Hannes Meyer was obsessed by the extreme practicality of functionalism and instituted severe academic rules. His favor toward communist students so offended the authorities that in 1930 he was forced to resign. His place was taken by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Berlin architect who was the director of the Deutscher Werkbund. Mies promptly closed the school for a month and then reopened it, without the communists, as a school only for those interested in pure architecture. The school was finally closed permanently by the National Socialist government in 1933. The political side of the Bauhaus story takes a somewhat different tack. It suggests that the original breakup of the Bauhaus was less a matter of conflict with the National Socialists than it was an ideological disagreement between the presumed formalism of Walter Gropius and his adherents and the functionalism of Hannes Meyer and his fellow-travelers. When the formalists abandoned Dessau, Meyer took over until the Nazis ran him and his group off to Moscow. Mies’s one year as director of the Bauhaus after it was moved 5 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies • American Design Ethic From “Cleanlining” to Accountability to Berlin was merely a postscript to the history of this important shrine of design education. Over barely a decade the Bauhaus had been seeded at Weimar by the best design minds of Europe, had been brought to full bloom at Dessau, then had withered in the conflict between formalism and functionalism and finally been uprooted and trampled in the political upheavals. However, the dynamism of its principles and the plight of its adherents captured the imagination and sympathetic attention of the Western countries, and many of its most illustrious faculty members and students found a home in the United States. Anni and Josef Albers, who had been with the Bauhaus from the first days at Dessau, were the first to come. With the closing of the school in Berlin they emigrated to take a position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.