Bauhaus Effects in Art, Architecture, and Design

Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Sabine T. Kriebel, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Sabine T. Kriebel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000584288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte der zeitgenössischen Kunst

Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book offers new perspectives on the impact that the Bauhaus and its teaching had on a wide range of artistic practices.

Three of the fields in which the Bauhaus generated immediately transformative effects were housing, typography, and photography. Contributors go further to chart the surprising relation of the school to contemporary developments in hairstyling and shop window display in unprecedented detail. New scholarship has detailed the degree to which Bauhaus faculty and students set off around the world, but it has seldom paid attention to its impact in communist East Germany or in countries like Ireland where no Bauhäusler settled. This wide-ranging collection makes clear that a century after its founding, many new stories remain to be told about the influence of the twentieth century's most innovative arts institution.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design history, photography, and architectural history.

1Bauhaus Housing

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003268314-2

How is the Bauhaus relevant today, a century after its faculty and students helped invent a vocabulary of forms that still seem modern? Form, and indeed even pedagogy, is only part of the story. Although the degree to which the school was inherently progressive has been much exaggerated, certainly many of those involved in integrating expressionism with craft and then abstraction with industry were motivated to address the pressing political and social issues of the day. One of these issues in 1920’s Germany, as it is today in many parts of the world, was housing. Unpicking the complex relationship between the Bauhaus, housing, and houses highlights the Bauhaus’ failure to make a more decisive and influential contribution to one of the most pressing architectural and social issues of its and our own time as well as its difficulty in aligning the industrial aesthetic it adopted early in its history with the efficiencies this was intended to foster.

Although the Dutch were the first out of the starting gates in providing substantial government support for social housing already before World War I, one of the chief achievements of Germany's Weimar Republic was the construction by city governments and trade unions of a substantial amount of social housing, much of which was designed in the abstract style associated with the Bauhaus (often termed at the time in Germany Neues Bauen or the New Building).¹ Yet, despite the commitment all three of the school's architect-directors had to designing housing, two of them – Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – were clearly torn between the aesthetic possibilities inherent in reforming the domestic life of relatively well-to-do clients and the more pragmatic approach required to provide accommodation for the masses, to which only Hannes Meyer was solely and unequivocally committed. Moreover, if housing comprised the New Building's most enduring and politically engaged success, it is also the arena in which postwar modern architecture has often been understood to have failed most decisively.² The Bauhaus’ impact on housing as opposed to houses – and the two should not be conflated – was surprisingly limited, especially considering how central the school is to the story of the New Building, in particular, and modern architecture, in general, and how important housing was in turn to them. Demonstrating this absence of an enduring effect, which should instead be credited to other German “housers,” including Ernst May, Bruno Taut, Fritz Schumacher, and Martin Wagner, is important in mapping the school's impact and the degree to which it can and should serve as a model today.

The Bauhaus addressed three very different types of housing. Single-family houses, including most notably for the school's own faculty, provided showcases for new approaches to modern middle-class domesticity. The Törten housing estate in Dessau targeted the rather different problem of providing economical housing to relatively large numbers of tenants. Finally, there was student housing. The Bauhaus building in the same city housed a small number of students in rooms furnished with products designed and made at the school, while the Federal School of the German Trade Union Federation (ADGB) trade union school in Bernau also offered both student and faculty accommodation. It is important not to conflate these distinctive types, which focused on different issues and offered different solutions. The first, not surprisingly, provided the greatest means for aesthetic experimentation, while the second offered the chance to demonstrate efficient approaches to both construction and the organization of space. The third has attracted less attention, although the clear popularity of their dormitory rooms with Bauhaus students merits a second look today at a time when some developers favor building highly profitable housing for students over units intended for the working and lower-middle classes.³

One of the great advantages of the New Building was its relative affordability, for which there were several reasons. One was the absence of ornament. Architectural critics from more prosperous nations, such as Great Britain, remarked during the 1920s on this aspect of modern German commercial architecture, which would be widely imitated in Britain only in the 1930s, after the onset of the Great Depression.⁴ Yet, there were several paradoxes at work. The absence of ornament might appear to save costs, but to be aesthetically impressive, it often required the high level of craftsmanship so clearly displayed in Lucia Moholy's original photographs of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, but which was missing in some of the parts of the Törten Siedlung designed by Gropius’ office.⁵ Moreover, the crisp white lines of the stucco boxes that Bauhaus architects favored by the early 1920s did not age well. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, not, of course, designed by a Bauhaus-affiliated architect, has famously been extremely expensive to maintain, and those Bauhaus-designed housing units that survived World War II have often also undergone multiple refurbishments.⁶ Even more central to the rhetoric supporting the New Building was the claim by its proponents, including each of the Bauhaus’ directors, that it was more efficient to construct. Mass production off-site of standardized building components as well as the Taylorization of the construction site were both upheld as ways in which the production of housing could avail the same savings in cost that the assembly line had brought to the manufacture of automobiles, most famously the Model T Ford.⁷ Yet such a rhetoric routinely outpaced actual achievement, especially until the production of partially prefabricated tower blocks commenced after World War II.⁸

The gap between an aesthetic (no ornament) and a process (construction efficiency) is clearly displayed in the difference between the houses the Bauhaus designed for its directors, its faculty, and their supporters, and the housing erected for people who have usually been described as workers but were just as likely to be white-collar clerks.⁹ Because, with one important exception, both usually shared some of the same features – including crisp unornamented volumes covered in white stucco, expansive windows, and flat roofs – the degree to which the first were actually relatively luxurious and the second quite bare bones has been largely overlooked until recently.¹⁰ Somewhere in the middle were the Bauhaus students fortunate enough to be housed in the Prellerhaus wing of the Dessau Bauhaus and the faculty and student housing incorporated into the ADGB complex. Although relatively spartan, the Prellerhaus proved enormously popular, even if the exterior balconies were photographed much more often than the interiors.

Of the Bauhaus’ three directors, two cut their teeth as architects on the design of houses for those who could afford ambitious architects. During the period when both men were employed in his Berlin office, Peter Behrens chose Gropius rather than Mies to supervise the construction of the Cuno Villa in Hagen, probably because of Gropius’ more elevated social background rather than because of his understanding of construction, which repeatedly proved faulty.¹¹ Meanwhile, throughout the German phase of his career, Mies’ practice consisted almost entirely of relatively conventional single-family houses set in ample gardens.¹² These initially clustered in Berlin's western suburbs and nearby Potsdam, although the late twenties would see him building as far afield as Krefeld, near the Dutch border, in the west and Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now the Czech Republic in the east. Although he designed four modest blocks of flats in Berlin, it was his stewardship of the Weissenhof Housing Estate, an international housing exhibition held in Stuttgart in 1927, that propelled him into the upper tier of the European avant-garde and toward the eventual directorship of the Bauhaus. Built for civil servants rather than workers, its dwellings provided more room for aesthetic experimentation than other showcases for new approaches to housing. Only Le Corbusier, however, resisted the call to experiment with efficient construction and really blew the budget.¹³

Unlike Gropius and Mies, Meyer, who led the school between 1928 and 1930, had always been a houser. Before the war, the Swiss national studied in Britain, bringing back a familiarity with the Garden City movement that he used, first as an assistant to Georg Metzendorf in Munich, and then in his own practice, which he opened in Basel in 1919. Metzendorf was best known for his ongoing work on the Margaretenhöhe in Essen, a model housing estate sponsored by the Krupp family. Surrounded by a green belt, it was executed very much along Garden City lines, with the same nostalgia for the preindustrial village that characterized the housing in Parker and Unwin's Letchworth. In the last years before World War I, large industrial employers like Krupp led the way in Germany in the provision of well-designed housing built independently of the market; only during the Weimar Republic would high-quality dwellings for this class of occupants begin to be erected by those who were not motivated by the goal of retaining and controlling their workforces.¹⁴

Despite the role that one-off houses had played in their establishing their careers, both Gropius and Mies were attracted to the issue of mass housing, which provided the best means in the 1920s for German architects to prove their social relevance during a period of great political division and instability. Throughout the Weimar Republic, there was widespread agreement, however, across the political spectrum about the importance of addressing the housing crisis created by rapid industrialization and urbanization in the last decades before World War I. Social Democrats viewed it as a necessary intervention in the free market to further the living standards of the working classes, while those on the right followed Le Corbusier's example in advocating “architecture instead of revolution.”¹⁵ Buttressed by the national government, city governments and trade unions engaged in enormous building programs. Although much of this housing, particularly in Hamburg, where exposed red brick remained the norm, was built in relatively conventional styles, many architects were willing to relinquish the quaint sentimentality that continues to make the Margaretenhöhe so endearing.¹⁶ In Berlin and Frankfurt, Bruno Taut and Ernst May led offices that created thousands of units of housing that openly espoused New Building tenets. Most were erected on greenfield sites linked to their respective city centers by subways and trams. Like almost all housing erected in interwar Europe, the apartment blocks were low-rise walk-ups, with facilities for clothes washing often located on the uppermost floor. Small two-story terraced houses were also popular.¹⁷

Although already in 1920, Gropius envisioned the possibility of a housing estate to serve the school he had established only the year before in Weimar, the Bauhaus’ first two architectural set pieces were both single-family homes. The Sommerfeld House in Berlin, designed in 1920 and completed in 1921 by Gropius and his partner Adolf Meyer, and Georg Muche's Haus am Horn in Weimar, a highlight of the Bauhaus exhibition held in 1923, were joined three years later by the director's and masters’ houses in Dessau. The relatively modest courtyard house projects, including the Lemke House in Berlin, that occupied Mies and his students during his directorship, which began in 1930 and ended with the school's closure in 1933, also merit inclusion in any consideration of Bauhaus houses. Meanwhile, across the course of the 1920s both Gropius and Mies also designed a number of other single-family houses in a modern style. Of these, only the Auerbach House in Jena of 1924 had a significant connection to the Bauhaus.

Adolf Sommerfeld, the patron of the Sommerfeld House in Berlin, was one of the Bauhaus’ earliest and most enthusiastic supporter...