Scope of Total Architecture

Walter Gropius

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000530018
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Architecture
• Sous-sujet: History of Architecture

Originally published in 1956, this book provides a non-technical analysis of contemporary building by on the of the world's greatest architects. Published a few years after the end of WW2, it was an inspiring and constructive picture of what kind of living could lie ahead for Western industrial society. This book, the result of many year in the forefront of architectural experiment and achievement by the author, outlines in practical terms the road to improved existence through science, mass production in building and renewed emphasis on the individual.

I Education of Architects and Designers

1 Approach^*

My intention is not to introduce a, so to speak, cut and dried ‘Modern Style’ from Europe, but rather to introduce a method of approach which allows one to tackle a problem according to its peculiar conditions. I want a young architect to be able to find his way in whatever circumstances; I want him independently to create true, genuine forms out of the technical, economic and social conditions in which he finds himself instead of imposing a learned formula on to surroundings which may call for an entirely different solution. It is not so much a ready-made dogma that I want to teach, but an attitude toward the problems of our generation which is unbiased, original and elastic. It would be an absolute horror for me if my appointment would result in the multiplication of a fixed idea of ‘Gropius architecture.’ What I do want is to make young people realise how inexhaustible the means of creation are if they make use of the innumerable modern products of our age, and to encourage these young people in finding their own solutions.

I have sometimes felt a certain disappointment at being asked only for the facts and tricks in my work when my interest was in handing on my basic experiences and underlying methods. In learning the facts and tricks, some can obtain sure results in a comparatively short time, of course; but these results are superficial and unsatisfactory because they still leave the student helpless if he is faced with a new and unexpected situation. If he has not been trained to get an insight into organic development no skilful addition of modern motives, however elaborate, will enable him to do creative work.

*From a statement, made for The Architectural Record, at the start of my teaching career as Professor of Architecture at Harvard University, May, 1937.

My ideas have often been interpreted as the peak of rationalisation and mechanisation. This gives quite a wrong picture of my endeavours. I have always emphasised that the other aspect, the satisfaction of the human soul, is just as important as the material, and that the achievement of a new spatial vision means more than structural economy and functional perfection. The slogan ‘fitness for purpose equals beauty’ is only half true. When do we call a human face beautiful ? Every face is fit for purpose in its parts, but only perfect proportions and colours in a well balanced harmony deserve that title of honour: beautiful. Just the same is true in architecture. Only perfect harmony in its technical functions as well as in its proportions can result in beauty. That makes our task so manifold and complex.

More than ever before is it in the hands of us architects to help our contemporaries to lead a natural and sensible life instead of paying a heavy tribute to the false gods of make-believe. We can respond to this demand only if we are not afraid to approach our work from the broadest possible angle. Good architecture should be a projection of life itself and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical and artistic problems. But then—even that is not enough. To make a unity out of all these different branches of human activity, a strong character is required and that is where the means of education partly come to an end. Still, it should be our highest aim to produce this type of men who are able to visualise an entity rather than let themselves get absorbed too early into the narrow channels of specialisation. Our century has produced the expert type in millions; let us make way now for the men of vision.

2 My Conception of the Bauhaus Idea^*

aim. After I had already found my own ground in architecture before the First World War, as is evidenced in the Fagus Building of 1911 and in the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition in 1914, the full consciousness of my responsibility as an architect, based on my own reflections, came to me as a result of the First World War, during which my theoretical premises first took shape.

After that violent eruption, every thinking man felt the necessity for an intellectual change of front. Each in his own particular sphere of activity aspired to help in bridging the disastrous gulf between realism and idealism. It was then that the immensity of the mission of the architect of my own generation first dawned on me. I saw that, first of all, a new scope for architecture had to be outlined, which I could not hope to realise, however, by my own architectural contributions alone, but which would have to be achieved by training and preparing a new generation of architects in close contact with modern means of production in a pilot school which must succeed in acquiring authoritative significance.

I saw also that to make this possible would require a whole staff of collaborators and assistants, men who would work, not as an orchestra obeying the conductor’s baton, but independently, although in close co-operation to further a common cause. Consequently I tried to put the emphasis of my work on integration and co-ordination, inclusiveness, not exclusiveness, for I felt that the art of building is contingent upon the co-ordinated teamwork of a band of active collaborators whose co-operation symbolises the co-operative organism of what we call society.

*see: The New Architecture and the Bauhaus by W. Gropius, Faber & Faber, London, 1935. ‘Education towards Creative Design’ by W. Gropius, American Architect and Architecture, New York, May 1937. ‘The Gropius Symposium’ in The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Arts and Architecture, California, May, 1952.

Thus the Bauhaus was inaugurated in 1919 with the specific object of realising a modern architectonic art, which like human nature was meant to be all-embracing in its scope. It deliberately concentrated primarily on what has now become a work of imperative urgency—averting mankind’s enslavement by the machine by saving the mass-product and the home from mechanical anarchy and by restoring them to purpose, sense and life. This means evolving goods and buildings specifically designed for industrial production. Our object was to eliminate the drawbacks of the machine without sacrificing any one of its real advantages. We aimed at realising standards of excellence, not creating transient novelties. Experiment once more became the centre of architecture, and that demands a broad, co-ordinating mind, not the narrow specialist.

What the Bauhaus preached in practice was the common citizenship of all forms of creative work, and their logical interdependence on one another in the modern world. Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilised society. Our ambition was to rouse the creative artist from his other-worldliness and to reintegrate him into the workaday world of realities and, at the same time, to broaden and humanise the rigid, almost exclusively material mind of the businessman. Our conception of the basic unity of all design in relation to life was in diametric opposition to that of ‘art for art’s sake’ and the much more dangerous philosophy it sprang from, business as an end in itself.

This explains our concentration on the design of technical products and the organic sequence of their processes of manufacture, which gave rise to an erroneous idea that the Bauhaus had set itself up as the apotheosis of rationalism. In reality, however, we were far more preoccupied with exploring the territory that is common to the formal and technical spheres, and defining where they cease to coincide. The standardisation of the practical machinery of life implies no robotisation of the individual but, on the contrary, the unburdening of his existence from much unnecessary dead weight so as to leave him freer to develop on a higher plane.

All too often, our real intentions have been and still are misunderstood, namely, to see in the movement an attempt at creating a ‘style’ and to identify every building and object in which ornament and period style seem to be discarded as examples of an imaginary ‘Bauhaus Style.’ This is contrary to what we were aiming at. The object of the Bauhaus was not to propagate any ‘style,’ system or dogma, but simply to exert a revitalising influence on design. A ‘Bauhaus Style’ would have been a confession of failure and a return to that devitalising inertia, that stagnating academism which I had called it into being to combat. Our endeavours were to find a new approach which would promote a creative state of mind in those taking part and which would finally lead to a new attitude toward life. To my knowledge, the Bauhaus was the first institution in the world to dare to embody this principle in a definite curriculum. The conception of this curriculum was preceded by an analysis of the conditions of our industrial period and its compelling trends.

Arts and Craft Schools.

When, in the last century, the machine-made products seemed to sweep the world, leaving the craftsmen and artists in a bad plight, a natural reaction gradually set in against the abandonment of form and the submersion of quality. Ruskin and Morris were the first to set their faces against the tide, but their opposition against the machine could not stem the waters. It was only much later that the perplexed mind of those interested in the development of form realised that art and production can be reunited only by accepting the machine and subjugating it to the mind. ‘The Arts and Crafts’ schools for ‘applied art’ arose mainly in Germany, but most of them met the demand only halfway, as their training was too superficial and technically amateurish to bring about a real advance. The manufactories still continued to turn out masses of ill-shaped goods while the artist struggled in vain to supply platonic designs. The trouble was that neither of them succeeded in penetrating far enough into the realm of the other to accomplish an effective fusion of both their endeavours.

The craftsman, on the other hand, with the passing of time began to show only a faint resemblance to the vigorous and independent representative of medieval culture who had been in full command of the whole production of his time and who had been a technician, an artist and a merchant combined. His workshop turned into a shop, the working process slipped out of his hand and the craftsman became a merchant. The complete individual, bereaved of the creative part of his work, thus degenerated into a partial being. His ability to train and instruct his disciples began to vanish and the young apprentices gradually moved into factories. There they found themselves surrounded by a meaningless mechanisation which blunted their creative instincts, and their pleasure in their own work; their inclination to learn disappeared rapidly.

Difference between Handicrafts and Machine Work.

What is the reason for this devitalising process? What is the difference between handicraft and machine work? The difference between industry and handicraft is due far less to the different nature of the tools employed in each, than to sub-division of labour in the one and undivided control by a single workman in the other. This compulsory restriction of personal initiative is the threatening cultural danger of the present-day form of industry. The only remedy is a completely changed attitude toward work which, though based on the sensible realisation that the development of technique has shown how a collective form of labour can lead humanity to greater total efficiency than the autocratic labour of the isolated individual, should not detract from the power and importance of personal effort. On the contrary, by giving it the possibility of taking its proper place in the work of the whole it will even enhance its practical effect. This attitude no longer perceives in the machine merely an economic means for dispensing with as many manual workers as possible and of depriving them of their livelihood, nor yet a means of imitating handwork; but, rather, an instrument which is to relieve man of the most oppressive physical labour and serve to strengthen his hand so as to enable him to give form to his creative impulse. The fact that we have not yet mastered the new means of production and, in consequence, still have to suffer from them, is not a valid argument against their necessity. The main problem will be to discover the most effective way of distributing the creative energies in the organisation as a whole. The intelligent craftsman of the past will in future become responsible for the speculative preliminary work in the production of industrial goods. Instead of being forced into mechanical machine work, his abilities must be used for laboratory and tool-making work and fused with the industry into a new working unit. At present the young artisan is, for economic reasons, forced either to descend to the level of a factory hand in industry or to become an organ for carrying into effect the platonic ideas of others; i.e., of the artist-designer. In no case does he any longer solve a problem of his o...