Thinking Bauhaus: 'The Mind is Like an Umbrella. It’s Most Useful When Open’

Poster for the Bauhausaustellung (1923)

The Bauhaus was a radical German art school that was based in three different locations between 1919 and 1933. Formed in the aftermath of World War I, it sought to reorder the world for the modern age, breaking down traditional barriers between disciplines, rewriting the fundamentals of creative theory and practice, celebrating functionalism and the social value of design.

'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 civilized society.’
Walter Gropius

Bauhaus had its own style: sans-serif fonts, bold geometric shapes, primary colours; blue circles, red squares and yellow triangles. Bauhaus was tubular steel furniture, metal tea infusers, graphic wallpaper and industrial lamps. It was practical materials, block-based architectural designs; steel, glass and concrete. It was flat roofs, ribbon windows and cantilevered balconies; light and airy open interiors. Bauhaus was elegant simplicity; no frills or ornamentation, no gimmicks or jokes. 

Portrait of Walter Gropius, photo: E. Bieber, c. 1928

‘An object is defined by its nature. In order, then, to design it to function correctly – a container, a chair, or a house – one must first of all study its nature: for it must serve its purpose perfectly, that is, it must fulfil its function usefully, be durable, economical, and 'beautiful.''
Walter Gropius

Bauhaus became a free-thinking international movement, a powerful force in 20th century modernism. Let us consider some of the factors that made it so influential.

1. Set Out to Create Something Completely New

The school was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919.  

Gropius had been a modernist from the outset. He subscribed to the principle that architecture and design should look forward, not back; that ‘form follows function.’  In 1910 he co-designed the seminal Fagus Werk shoe factory, with its large glass façade that flooded the workspaces with light.

Gropius’ career was interrupted by service in World War I, in which he was awarded two Iron Crosses. He emerged with an absolute conviction that everything in society had to change.

‘I still remember when I came out of the First World War I thought everything would snap back as it has been before. But all of a sudden I became aware that I would have to take part in something completely new which would change the conditions I have been living in before.’
Walter Gropius

2. Break Down the Walls

'One of the outstanding achievements of the new constructional technique has been the abolition of the separating function of the wall.'
Walter Gropius

Inspired by the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ( the total work of art) and intent on demolishing the division between the artisan and the artist, Gropius began his new school by merging Weimar’s Colleges of Fine Art and Applied Art, putting all the creative disciplines under one roof. 

‘This was just the idea of the Bauhaus to mix up these things – to see there was no barrier of any real meaning between a painting or the other things of our environment.’
Walter Gropius

3. Write a Manifesto

In order to attract students and teachers, Gropius published a Manifesto setting out his bold ambition for the project.

'Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.’

The Manifesto was a clarion call to radical thinkers all over Germany and beyond. Gropius dispensed with academic entry requirements, so that talented young people could study at the Bauhaus irrespective of their educational background, gender or nationality. Between 150 and 200 students were registered, including 18 year olds and ex-soldiers. Up to half of students were women (radical for the time) and nearly a third were foreign.

4. Build a Team

Gropius could not draw and was dependent on partners throughout his career. Consequently his school encouraged collaboration across disciplines and with each other. He determined that he could make a bigger impact on society by establishing a collective of diverse talents with its own unique culture and values.

‘I was aware after what I had done already as an architect that in order to really penetrate – that couldn’t be done by one person alone. You have to build a whole school which follows certain principals out of which it may develop – and that gave me the idea for organising the Bauhaus.’ 
Walter Gropius

In the first few years of the school Gropius recruited Swiss painters Johannes Itten and Paul Klee, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, German painter, sculptor and designer Oskar Schlemmer, and Hungarian designer László Moholy-Nagy. It was an extraordinary line-up of creative talent.

Bauhaus curriculum

5. Teach Everyone the Fundamentals 

'Specialists are people who always repeat the same mistakes.’
Walter Gropius

From 1919 to 1922 the primary syllabus was shaped by Johannes Itten. Traditionally art students had begun their studies by copying the works of the Old Masters. Itten designed the Vorkurs or ‘preliminary course’ to enable all students to explore the fundamental principles of design, considering the characteristics of basic shapes (the line, the plane, the circle, the spiral); of materials, composition, colour and movement.

‘A line is a dot that went for a walk.’
Paul Klee

This foundation course remains the basis for art education all over the world today.

6. Let Work Become Play

'Before you draw a tiger, you have to roar like a tiger.’
Johannes Itten

Itten was a strict vegetarian who taught meditation and relaxation techniques in order to create self-awareness and to gain access to one’s intuition. His students were encouraged to feel the resonances of different objects, to dance the colour blue, to draw a thistle as if one had just been pricked by it. He was interested in the creative potential of play.

'Play becomes joy - joy becomes work - work becomes play.'
Johannes Itten

7. Teach a Trade

After the six month foundation course, students were allocated to craft-specific workshops: sculpture, joinery, metalwork, ceramics, stained glass, graphic design, stagecraft, weaving. Training in the craft workshops was complemented by lectures in the arts, sciences and professional practice. 

'Art itself cannot be taught, but craftsmanship can. Architects, painters, sculptors are all craftsmen in the original sense of the word.’
Walter Gropius

Director’s office, Weimar

8. Create an Alliance Between Art and Technology

Itten became a dedicated follower of Mazdaznan, a fire cult derived from Zoroastrianism. He shaved his head, printed star shapes on his scalp and wore voluminous smocks. Many of his students followed suit and developed a cultish loyalty to him. Gradually his vision diverged from that of Gropius.

Gropius wanted to align the school with the machine age and with the broader needs of society: creating affordable functional homes; embracing mass production, standardisation and uniformity.

‘We want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars.'
Walter Gropius

In 1923 Moholy-Nagy took over Itten's preliminary course.  Setting aside the spirituality and mysticism, he made the education more rational and technical.

At the Weimar exhibition that same year, Bauhaus proclaimed: ‘Art and technology. A new unity.’

9. Learn by Doing

Tea Infuser and Strainerca. 1924 Marianne Brandt

Bauhaus students honed their skills working on real projects. They were taught to start from scratch; to learn by doing. As the head of the metal workshop, Moholy-Nagy advocated the development of prototypes and thereby the transition from manual craftsmanship to industrial technologies. 

‘Architecture begins where engineering ends.’
Walter Gropius

The shift towards functionality was also reflected in student fashion: increasingly the men wore close-fitting suits, and the women cut their hair in a bob and wore trousers or knee-length skirts.

10. Promote from Within

Gropius created such a strong, distinctive culture at the Bauhaus that the best way to sustain the institution’s identity was to promote from within.

‘The first generation of young people educated in the Bauhaus were now ready to be head of the workshop, and that’s what I did.’
Walter Gropius

Hungarian architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer and German artist Josef Albers, two of the first students, were promoted to Master in 1925.

11. Seriously Party 

Despite the Bauhaus’ high ideals and intellectual rigour, it was seriously committed to revelry.

Bauhaus parties were large-scale affairs. Sets were designed by Oskar Schlemmer’s stage workshop and dance teachers were hired to teach the latest moves. Students created their own costumes, vying with each other to be the most inventive. 

Each jamboree had a theme. There was The Kite Festival, The Beard, Nose and Heart Party, and The White Festival - for which guests were required to come ‘2/3 white, 1/3 coloured; stippled, diced and striped.’ The metal-themed event in 1929 was subtitled the ‘bells, jingling, tinkling party.’ Guests wore costumes made from tin foil, frying pans, and spoons, and entered by sliding down a chute into one of several rooms filled with silver balls.

‘Tell me how you party and I’ll tell you who you are.’
Oskar Schlemmer

Gropius appreciated the strategic value of parties: they stimulate creativity and embody interdisciplinary practice; they form memories and build community.

A 1920s Bauhaus costume party, featuring designs by Oskar Schlemmer

12. Don’t Stay Where You Are Not Appreciated

‘Limitation makes the creative mind inventive.’
Walter Gropius

The Bauhaus was inevitably caught up in the maelstrom of German politics between the wars. Weimar, a relatively conservative town, became suspicious of the students’ eccentricities, and ascendant right wing politicians dismissed the school as utopian and Bolshevist. When the nationalists took over the state legislature in 1924, the Bauhaus budget was cut by half.

Rather than moderate the school’s culture, Gropius decided to up sticks and leave. In 1925 he relocated the Bauhaus to Dessau, which had a liberal government and a Junkers engineering factory. There he designed a new school building that opened in 1926. Constructed from reinforced concrete and glass, and with a white-plastered façade, ‘it floated with a sparkling insubstantiality.’

But Gropius had had enough of political meddling, and in 1928 he resigned. Swiss architect Hannes Meyer took over as Director, and the focus shifted still further from aesthetics towards functionality. 

Bauhaus School, built by Walter Gropius (1925-1926) in Dessau, Germany

13. Put People First

'The people's needs instead of the need for luxury!’
Hannes Meyer

Meyer's approach was to research people’s needs and scientifically develop the appropriate design solution. He favoured measurements and calculations, along with the use of off-the-shelf architectural components to reduce costs.

‘These are the only motives when building a house. 1. sex life, 2. sleeping habits, 3. pets, 4. gardening, 5. personal hygiene, 6. weather protection, 7. hygiene in the home, 8. car maintenance, 9. cooking, 10. heating, 11. exposure to the sun, 12. services.’
Hannes Meyer

Meyer brought the Bauhaus its two most significant building commissions: a set of apartment blocks in Dessau and the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau-by-Berlin. Under his Directorship the school started making a profit. However his committed socialism put him at odds with an increasingly right wing local government, and in 1930 he was fired by the city council. 

14. Leave a Legacy

When German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was appointed the next Director he endeavoured to take a non-political stance. 

'I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.'
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 

Nonetheless in 1931 the Nazi Party gained control of Dessau city council and so the Bauhaus moved on again. In late 1932 Mies rented a derelict factory in Berlin as the new Bauhaus home. However the political storm was closing in here too, and the school shut for good in 1933. 

'If your contribution has been vital there will always be somebody to pick up where you left off, and that will be your claim to immortality.’
Walter Gropius

Fleeing the Nazis, oppression and imminent war, the Bauhaus group emigrated far and wide.

Gropius came to Britain, but he found it ‘a land of fog and emotional nightmares.’ After three years, and having designed just one building - the Isokon apartment complex in Hampstead - he moved on to the USA and took a job as professor for architecture at Harvard.

Moholy-Nagy and Mies settled in Chicago where the former became the founding director of the New Bauhaus Graduate School and the latter took a role as director of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute. Albers landed at the hugely influential Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Others relocated to Israel, Sweden, Canada and the USSR. 

Although the school lasted only 14 years, through teaching posts and private practice, the former students and Masters sustained the spirit of Bauhaus long into the 20th century. Bauhaus remains an inspiration to anyone who believes in the power of architecture and design to improve lives and shape a better society.

When Gropius died aged 86 in 1969 a spectacular metal-themed costume party was held in his memory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To eerie electronic music a shimmering 30‐foot dragon weaved its way through the guests. They were painted head-to-toe in silver, wearing floor-length metallic gowns, and wrapped in metal boxes, colanders and air conditioning ducts. 

In his will Gropius had called, not for mourning, but for 'a fiesta - a la Bauhaus - drinking, laughing, loving.'

The Bauhaus story is told in the fascinating BBC documentary Bauhaus 100.

'Seventy-five, the same old jive.
Christ, won't you tell me why we're still alive?
Seventy-six, no kicks, you bet.
But no, no way we ain't dead yet.
But now it's here,
Our new year.
Gonna be seventy-eight
Revolutions a minute, seventy-eight
Revolutions a minute, seventy-eight
Revolutions a minute, now.’

Stiff Little Fingers, ’78 RPM’ (J Burns / G Ogilvie)

No. 283

Frank Lloyd Wright: When the Personal Inspires the Professional

Frank Lloyd Wright Studio Library

On a trip to Chicago last year I visited the home and studio of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Hard to believe that this visionary modern building was designed in the late nineteenth century. It’s a commonplace criticism of modern architects that they wouldn’t live in the houses they design. But Wright was the exception to this rule. His home and studio were a living laboratory for his hypotheses and new approaches to living space. In his home he introduced fluid connecting rooms, built-in benches, windows located high on the wall so as to avoid prying eyes. In his studio he specified magnesite floors for comfort and sound absorption; he conducted stand-up meetings with Clients who were kept away from the working architects. Wright valued privacy, natural light, simple, organic structures. He enclosed a tree in a passageway and a baby grand piano in a wall. He believed that buildings should be designed in harmony with people and the environment. And he lived his work.

In the marketing and communications industry, what would be our equivalent of this committed approach to life and work? What would happen if we let the personal inspire the professional? How can we truly live our work?

Of course, we could begin by consuming more of the work we produce: watching, not skipping, the ads on commercial TV and YouTube; doing the weekly shop; examining the packaging; walking the High Street; listening to conversations on the bus. If brands are shared behaviours and beliefs, it’s critical that marketing and communication experts participate in shared popular culture.

I would suggest that the best and most successful creative professionals experience life in its infinite variety and infuse their work with their acquired knowledge and insight. A film or football match, a good read or bad play, a walk in the park, a dance in the dark, a word in the ear, a feast for the eyes. A life fully lived provides the material for creative thought. Random, extraneous, unrelated experiences inspire lateral leaps and imaginative connections. The personal stimulates the professional.

I once hired a young Planner whom I’d interviewed in the pub. But the new joiner wasn’t a great success. In the pub he had been a charming raconteur, a thoughtful observer. But in the office he became a conventional thinker, a Steady Eddie. I tried to persuade this Planner to bring something of the bloke I’d met down the pub into the office, but it wasn’t a transition he seemed capable of. For him the worlds of work and leisure were fundamentally separate and distinct.

Of course, for the most part the modern work-life relationship is out of balance in work’s favour. It’s normal nowadays to answer office emails at home, to catch up after the kids have gone to bed, to work at the weekend, to conference-call on Californian time.

Over-work poses problems on two fronts. On a basic level it drains the employee of energy and initiative. But it also starves colleagues of the experiences and insights that enable them to perform at their best. If you cancel that trip to the cinema, club, theatre or gallery, you deny yourself the opportunity to think, feel and see. And you deny your business your ability to imagine, leap and dream.

In my industrious youth I was often tempted to cancel social engagements because I had too much to do at the office. But I must have been rather stubborn back then and I refused to let this happen. I cut down on my sleep instead. In time fatigue forced me to be more efficient at work. It’s not an approach I’d necessarily recommend…

I believe the over-worked under-perform because they are under-stimulated. Blurring the lines between the personal and professional should not mean letting the professional dominate everything. It should mean letting one’s rich home, family, cultural and social life inform and inspire one’s work. And this should enhance both sides of the work-life equation.

‘Oh, I’m out here trying to make it,
Baby, can’t you see?
It takes a lot of money to make it,
Let’s talk truthfully.
So keep your love light burnin,’
Oh, you gotta have a little faith.
You might as well get used to me
Coming home a little late.
Oh, I can’t wait to get home to you,
I got so much work to do.’

The Isley Brothers, Work To Do

No. 80

Let's Turn That River Round: A Lesson in Creative Thinking from the City of Chicago

Sometimes the conventional tourist trail can be rewarding. In Chicago last October I joined the Chicago Architectural Foundation’s River Cruise. A charming guide (an unpaid volunteer docent) gave us a potted history of the Windy City’s magnificent skyscrapers.

We glided past the Tribune Tower of 1925, a neo gothic triumph of flying buttresses and spires. We marvelled at 1929’s Carbide and Carbon Building, all art deco elegance in black granite, green terra cotta and gold leaf. Its design was reputedly inspired by a champagne bottle. We paused to admire Mies van der Rohe’s IBM Building of 1973, a single-minded symphony in black anodized aluminium and grey tinted glass. We swooned at the rippling façade of Jeanne Gang’s eighty four-story Aqua Tower, completed in 2009.

 Mies van der Rohe - IBM Building next to the circular Marina Towers by Bertrand Goldberg

Chicago’s architecture is not just impressive, beautiful and richly diverse in style and tone. It also tells a story of bold entrepreneurism and creative problem solving.

The forty-story Jewelers’ Building of 1927 was once the highest building in the world outside New York. In a crime-challenged city the Jewelers’ Building boasted a car lift to ensure the safe transfer of diamond merchants direct to their offices.

Montgomery Ward is the oldest mail order firm in America. The beautiful Catalog House of 1908 provided two million square feet of storage and office space over its eight stories. ‘Pickers’ were issued with roller skates to traverse the vast concrete floors.

Wherever you look around Chicago you see ingenuity at work. There are skyscrapers built over railway lines and on eccentric shaped plots that posed huge engineering challenges. And urban invention continues to this day. Since 2001 the city transport authorities have been constructing a pedestrian Riverwalk along the south bank of the Chicago River. It aims to open up the riverside to the public, with floating gardens, lawns, cafes, boating lakes and fishing piers.

                                       Section of the Chicago Riverwalk

Inevitably, not all of Chicago’s architectural innovations were successful. For instance, the onion-domed Medinah Athletic Club Building of 1929 (now the InterContinental Hotel) has a blimp mooring station on its roof.

Jeanne Gang - Aqua Tower

Nonetheless, ingenuity, creativity and bold ambition seem to have driven Chicago forward from one decade to another. I was particularly impressed by the city’s endeavours to deal with its poor drainage.

Since its early years Chicago had suffered sewage and sanitation problems. In the 1850s and 1860s whole buildings and streets were raised on hydraulic jacks to accommodate new drains. And yet the still rapidly growing Chicago continued to suffer deaths from typhoid and other waterborne diseases. The city responded by building the 28 mile Sanitary and Ship Canal. The canal connected the Chicago River to the Des Plaines and Illinois Rivers. And it thereby reversed the flow of the Chicago River! Whereas previously it had discharged into Lake Michigan; now it flowed away from it.

I couldn’t help thinking that these tall tales, impressive statistics and leaps of lateral thought put modern London to shame. We don’t seem able to build an airport, a runway, a concert hall, a bridge with herbaceous borders. Our roads are congested, our streets polluted, our cyclists are always at risk. And our Government wants to sell our social housing rather than create it. All we seem capable of is stacking empty glass boxes one on top of the other, as far as the eye can see.

We often characterise such urban challenges as failings of the planning process or the political system. But, at a more fundamental level, they betray a lack of confidence and imagination. The transformational impact of creativity should not be limited to the interiors of our homes, shops and galleries. It should extend right the way across our cities: to our public buildings, our recreational space, our offices, our domestic architecture, our transport infrastructure.

Just think what we could achieve if we had the determination to turn our river round.

No. 62