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Old February 9th, 2014 #1
Alex Linder
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Default #1 Bauhaus Thread: NS resort in Ruegen

[Bauhaus is an architectural ideology that amounts to: whatever the traditional position on building things is, just reverse it. The results are ugly, irrational, expensive buildings]

This Nazi resort never opened, but it will be a luxury vacation spot

By Kelly O'Mara

February 6, 2014


The Prora complex on the German island of Rügen.

On the picturesque beaches of the northern German island of Rügen, along the Baltic Sea, sits an empty 20,000-person resort. The buildings stretch nearly three miles down the coast, with all 10,000 rooms facing the beautiful bay just 500 feet from the water’s edge. Yet, no one ever used the rooms, movie theater or planned swimming pools.

Prora, known by locals as The Colossus, was built from 1936-1939 as part of the Nazi program of “Strength Through Joy.” The plan was to house workers in eight identical six-story buildings, feed them catered meals in scheduled seatings, and prepare them through propaganda and social activities to do their part in Hitler’s plan for Germany. It was also one of the largest architectural projects of the time, with 9,000 workers. The design, done in a Bauhaus style, won a Grand Prix award at the 1937 Paris World Exposition.

But the Nazi resort plans never came to fruition. The outbreak of World War II meant the project was never finished as construction workers headed to the weapons factories instead.

But finally, some plans are moving forward to turn some of the buildings into luxury apartments and vacation rentals.


A page from the brochure of the vacation apartments planned for Building 1.

Building 1 was purchased in 2012 for $3.5 million by real estate group IRIS GERD. The plan is to turn the building into 163 vacation rentals called Neues Prora (“New Prora”). The vacation apartments range from one to three bedrooms and some will even include saunas and their own private terraces and gardens. The owners claim that as of last month, 50 of the units already have contracts signed on them. A model apartment is open now and the New Prora is scheduled to open in 2015.

Parts of Building 2 were also purchased in 2012 by two Berlin investors, who planned to build luxury apartments, calling the project "Meersinfonie" (Sea Symphony). The owners claim the majority of the 60 apartments, which range from about $150,000 to $350,000, have already been sold. Renovations are under way and expected to finish by mid-2015.

A ceremony was held last June, with marketing materials advertising the completion of the buildings “73 years (sic) after the start of construction.”

During the war, the half-built structures served as training grounds and housing for Nazi policemen. Also, locals used the buildings as shelter during bombings. After the war, refugees found shelter in the unfinished resort. Parts of Prora were later was used as a military outpost, first for the Soviet Red Army and then for the East German National People’s Army. Later, it housed some police vacationers and a small number of East German conscientious objectors sent to serve as construction workers instead of soldiers.



Since German reunification, though, the buildings have largely been abandoned and fallen into disrepair. The government briefly intended to demolish the place. Instead, it gained status as a heritage site. Plans have come and gone to renovate the massive resort and make it a tourist site, but financing has fallen through more than once.

Today, the complex houses a museum (called a documentation center) that chronicles the history of Prora and a disco club. And in 2011, Europe’s largest youth hostel, with 400 beds, opened in Building 5 after a $2.3 million renovation. The youth-hostel association also runs a youth camping ground.

At the hostel’s opening, there were concerns that marketing for the hostel played up its shady history and might attract neo-Nazis.

"We will do all we can to prevent brown (Nazi) ideology from gaining a foothold here," said Rügen district councillor Kerstin Kassner to a German newspaper at the time.

Naturally, not everyone feels good about turning a place with such a dark history into a vacation spot or forgetting the past.

“We should not be following in the footsteps of Strength Through Joy,” said Jürgen Rostock, the director of the documentation center, to The New York Times in 2011. “We think this is a very important monument to the social history of the Third Reich,” he said. “It explains why the Germans were seduced by the Third Reich. This was an offer to them.”

"Prora should be left as a reminder of the past and it shouldn't become a package holiday resort. We must not forget our history," Kathrin, a shopkeeper, told the BBC.

Plans for a hotel in another building have stalled and the remaining buildings remain an empty monument to the region’s history.

http://travel.yahoo.com/blogs/compas...224346831.html

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Old February 9th, 2014 #3
Alex Linder
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Farnsworth House (Illinois) - designed by Mies van der Rohe

Notice how:

- ugly
- ridiculous
- expensive

this house is. That glass lets in huge amounts of cold in the winter. Higher heating bills. The unpitched, flat roof lets snow build up, leading to water leaks, extensive water damage, soggy messes and huge repair bills. You build flat roofs where it doesn't snow or rain much, not where it does. The stilts? why? This is not a beach house in South Carolina lifting its skirts against the shifting tides, it's a residence in the midwest.

Bauhaus is perversion. Deliberate perversion. Perversion formalized - made into an ideology, and promulgated-promoted through the relevant schools. For not just thoughts and erections sexual can be perverse, which means turned out of normal channels; thoughts and erections architectural can too. Yes, Virginia, there are perverts of construction. Bauhaus wowsers are indeed the other erection perverts.

Last edited by Alex Linder; February 9th, 2014 at 02:53 PM.
 
Old February 9th, 2014 #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post

Farnsworth House (Illinois) - designed by Mies van der Rohe
I've seen doublewides with more charm.
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Old February 9th, 2014 #5
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I've seen doublewides with more charm.
The flat roof is just killer. Just kills any kind of charm or spirit, and that is the intent. Notice how many public schools are built this way, the high school here in town is. I believe it was built back in the fifties. Bauhaus is egalitarian ideology, so would be naturally appealing to public schools promoting the various poisonous ideas gathered under 'equality.'
 
Old February 9th, 2014 #6
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I never knew there was a name for it (Bauhaus) but virtually every synagogue I've ever seen has been in that same insufferably modern stack-o-Legos style.
I thought it was merely reflective of the jews lack of taste and imagination.
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Old February 9th, 2014 #7
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jewed architecture
http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t...hlight=bauhaus
 
Old February 9th, 2014 #8
Alex Linder
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Originally Posted by MikeTodd View Post
I never knew there was a name for it (Bauhaus) but virtually every synagogue I've ever seen has been in that same insufferably modern stack-o-Legos style.
I thought it was merely reflective of the jews lack of taste and imagination.
I've got to write a review of the Jones book. I swear we've gone over this before, but a quick search didn't reveal much other than a jewed-architecture thread, very few posts.

Thought up a neologism for this perversion: cogitechture. The cog (cahj and cog) serves dual purpose of emphasize this is stuff that, as opposed to being a rational reaction to the natural circumstances in which the building will be located (igloo for iceland, or cabana for beach), and the human needs the building will serve, it is a purely ideological head-construct, in which those two traditional considerations are ignored. People become not what they are, but what the architect things they should be - cogs. In his leftist jewish ideology, people don't aspire or admire, they just eat and shit and work. Hence, the flat roof as perhaps the most significant element of bauhaus: against all beauty, against all aspiration. Think of things that stretch up, like cathedral spires, erect penises, bursting with new life, the Eiffel Tower, the space rocket taking off - nothing of that. Just flat roof. Don't get any ideas above your station, buster. Yours is to report to your cubbyhole like a good little pigeon.
 
Old February 9th, 2014 #9
Alex Linder
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from the link above...

http://thecultureenthusiast.blogspot...l#comment-form

"Architecture has for its first duty, in this period of renewal, that of bringing about a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house." - Le Corbusier

I don't know why but I have this interest on Bauhaus architecture. Maybe it's because the Bauhaus is not only architecture it's also social engineering. More precisely, as the book Living Machines - Bauhaus Architecture as sexual ideology by E. Michael Jones puts it, Bauhaus "embodied a new way of living in conscious revolution against traditional values".1

This book has a very interesting and reader friendly structure: it alternates between one chapter concerning Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius' life and ideas and a chapter examining the buildings with the Bauhaus style. The conclusion is that all these buildings brought more misery than functionality to their residents.

People living in different places like the Projects in Chicago, worker's houses in Poland or students dorms in Harvard University all experienced similar problems. A sense of isolation, imprisonment, despair and godlessness is produced by modern architecture. Not to mention problems such as alcoholism, drug abuse, violence and the destruction of families.

The same consequences happening to people in such different cities allows no space for doubts: it was intentional, it was social engineering.

Gropius was using architecture as a means for a cultural revolution. He wanted - in his own words - " to take part in a new community which is going to create the new Man in a new environment". 2

When someone starts talking about creating a new man - beware.

What do you think of the Bauhaus style of architecture? Do you see influences of it in your own city?
 
Old February 9th, 2014 #10
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The same choice between inspiring beauty & soul-destroying blandness can be applied to skyscrapers as well.

Compare these:

Chrysler Building



Burj Khalifa



Petronas Towers



To THIS....

Freedumb Tower

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Old February 9th, 2014 #11
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Originally Posted by MikeTodd View Post
I never knew there was a name for it (Bauhaus) but virtually every synagogue I've ever seen has been in that same insufferably modern stack-o-Legos style.
I thought it was merely reflective of the jews lack of taste and imagination.
That may be re synagogues, but I would assume it proceeds from a different mentality. Jew stuff tends to look like community centers, located in prime suburbs around major cities. Not easily or immediately recognizable as anything religious or jewish. Which probably is one part concealment/disguise and a second part the fact that judaism isn't a true religion. Any criminal gang would prefer its headquarters go unnoticed.
 
Old February 9th, 2014 #12
Alex Linder
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Quote:
Originally Posted by N.B. Forrest View Post
The same choice between inspiring beauty & soul-destroying blandness can be applied to skyscrapers as well.

Compare these:

Chrysler Building



Burj Khalifa



Petronas Towers



To THIS....

Freedumb Tower

Those asian ones are pretty cool, i like the water-fountain effect on the khalifa, and the others are at least elegant if not artistic.

Haven't really seen many pics of the new '9/11' thing.
 
Old February 9th, 2014 #13
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Those asian ones are pretty cool, i like the water-fountain effect on the khalifa, and the others are at least elegant if not artistic.

Haven't really seen many pics of the new '9/11' thing.
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Old February 9th, 2014 #14
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Bauhaus


The Bauhaus Dessau


1921/2, Walter Gropius's Expressionist Monument to the March Dead


Typography by Herbert Bayer above the entrance to the workshop block of the Bauhaus, Dessau, 2005

About this sound Staatliches Bauhaus (help·info), commonly known simply as Bauhaus, was a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term About this sound Bauhaus (help·info), literally "house of construction", stood for "School of Building".

The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design.[1] The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.

The school existed in three German cities: Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932 and Berlin from 1932 to 1933, under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime. The Nazi government claimed that it was a centre of communist intellectualism. Though the school was closed, the staff continued to spread its idealistic precepts as they left Germany and emigrated all over the world.[2] [note the similarity to the Frankfurt school - flushed out of Germany by Nazis, spread to America. Only difference is these top bauhaus guys were NOT jews, they were Germans. but their ideology fit jewish modernism perfectly. you see the parallel to modern art, where ideology replaces skill, taste and just plain reason]

The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. For instance: the pottery shop was discontinued when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, even though it had been an important revenue source; when Mies van der Rohe took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school, and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it.

Contents

1 Bauhaus and German modernism
1.1 Bauhaus and Vkhutemas
2 History of the Bauhaus
2.1 Weimar
2.2 Dessau
2.3 Berlin
3 Architectural output
4 Impact
4.1 The White City
5 Bauhaus artists
6 See also
7 Footnotes
8 References
9 Bibliography
10 External links
Bauhaus and German modernism


the Bauhaus Museum - Tel Aviv

For more details on this topic, see New Objectivity (architecture).

Germany's defeat in World War I, the fall of the German monarchy and the abolition of censorship under the new, liberal Weimar Republic allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, previously suppressed by the old regime. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. Such influences can be overstated: Gropius himself did not share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely apolitical.[3] [that's very interesting, i don't know what it means] Just as important was the influence of the 19th century English designer William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function.[4] Thus the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design. Yeah, except no: only if you accept the obviously warped idea of what humans are that bauhausers believed. The proof of a building is in its habitation, or its use. If the buildings made people miserable, then the form did not, in factual practice, fit the function. Humans aren't cogs. Humans aren't hamsters. Humans aren't ever any kind of government-created New Soviet man.

However, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, [think of modern art - the entartete kunst (degraded art) being celebrated at this time, and the you'll see the obvious parallels between paintings and architecture more about ideology than art] a cultural movement whose origins lay as far back as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—the radically simplified forms, the rationality (again, it's only rational if bauhaus assumptions about human nature are accurate, and all evidence shows they are not) and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded. The German national designers' organization Deutscher Werkbund was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius to harness the new potentials of mass production, with a mind towards preserving Germany's economic competitiveness with England. In its first seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the authoritative body on questions of design in Germany, and was copied in other countries. Many fundamental questions of craftsmanship versus mass production, the relationship of usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal beauty in a commonplace object, and whether or not a single proper form could exist, were argued out among its 1,870 members (by 1914).

The entire movement of German architectural modernism was known as Neues Bauen. Beginning in June 1907, Peter Behrens' pioneering industrial design work for the German electrical company AEG successfully integrated art and mass production on a large scale. He designed consumer products, standardized parts, created clean-lined designs for the company's graphics, developed a consistent corporate identity, built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory, and made full use of newly developed materials such as poured concrete and exposed steel. Behrens was a founding member of the Werkbund, and both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer worked for him in this period.

The Bauhaus was founded at a time when the German zeitgeist had turned from emotional Expressionism to the matter-of-fact New Objectivity. An entire group of working architects, including Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig, turned away from fanciful experimentation, and turned toward rational, functional, sometimes standardized building. Beyond the Bauhaus, many other significant German-speaking architects in the 1920s responded to the same aesthetic issues and material possibilities as the school. They also responded to the promise of a "minimal dwelling" written into the new Weimar Constitution. Ernst May, Bruno Taut, and Martin Wagner, among others, built large housing blocks in Frankfurt and Berlin. The acceptance of modernist design into everyday life was the subject of publicity campaigns, well-attended public exhibitions like the Weissenhof Estate, films, and sometimes fierce public debate.

Bauhaus and Vkhutemas

The Vkhutemas, the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, has been compared to Bauhaus. Founded a year after the Bauhaus school, Vkhutemas has close parallels to the German Bauhaus in its intent, organization and scope. The two schools were the first to train artist-designers in a modern manner.[5] Both schools were state-sponsored initiatives to merge the craft tradition with modern technology, with a Basic Course in aesthetic principles, courses in color theory, industrial design, and architecture.[5] Vkhutemas was a larger school than the Bauhaus,[6] but it was less publicised outside the Soviet Union and consequently, is less familiar to the West.[7]

With the internationalism of modern architecture and design, there were many exchanges between the Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus.[8] The second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer attempted to organise an exchange between the two schools, while Hinnerk Scheper of the Bauhaus collaborated with various Vkhutein members on the use of colour in architecture. In addition, El Lissitzky's book Russia: an Architecture for World Revolution published in German in 1930 featured several illustrations of Vkhutemas/Vkhutein projects there.

History of the Bauhaus

The school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 as a merger of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Art. Its roots lay in the arts and crafts school founded by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1906 and directed by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde.[9] When van de Velde was forced to resign in 1915 because he was Belgian, he suggested Gropius, Hermann Obrist and August Endell as possible successors. In 1919, after delays caused by the destruction of World War I and a lengthy debate over who should head the institution and the socio-economic meanings of a reconciliation of the fine arts and the applied arts (an issue which remained a defining one throughout the school's existence), Gropius was made the director of a new institution integrating the two called the Bauhaus.[10] In the pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition entitled "Exhibition of Unknown Architects", Gropius proclaimed his goal as being "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Gropius' neologism Bauhaus references both building and the Bauhütte, a premodern guild of stonemasons.[11] The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. In 1919 Swiss painter Johannes Itten, German-American painter Lyonel Feininger, and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, along with Gropius, comprised the faculty of the Bauhaus. By the following year their ranks had grown to include German painter, sculptor and designer Oskar Schlemmer who headed the theater workshop, and Swiss painter Paul Klee, joined in 1922 by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. A tumultuous year at the Bauhaus, 1922 also saw the move of Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg to Weimar to promote De Stijl ("The Style"), and a visit to the Bauhaus by Russian Constructivist artist and architect El Lissitzky.[12]


The main building of the Bauhaus-University Weimar (built 1904–1911, designed by Henry van de Velde to house the sculptors’ studio at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996).


Foyer of the Bauhaus-University Weimar

From 1919 to 1922 the school was shaped by the pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of Johannes Itten, who taught the Vorkurs or "preliminary course" that was the introduction to the ideas of the Bauhaus.[10] Itten was heavily influenced in his teaching by the ideas of Franz Cižek and Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. He was also influenced in respect to aesthetics by the work of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich as well as the work of Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. The influence of German Expressionism favoured by Itten was analogous in some ways to the fine arts side of the ongoing debate. This influence culminated with the addition of Der Blaue Reiter founding member Wassily Kandinsky to the faculty and ended when Itten resigned in late 1922. Itten was replaced by the Hungarian designer László Moholy-Nagy, who rewrote the Vorkurs with a leaning towards the New Objectivity favored by Gropius, which was analogous in some ways to the applied arts side of the debate. Although this shift was an important one, it did not represent a radical break from the past so much as a small step in a broader, more gradual socio-economic movement that had been going on at least since 1907 when van de Velde had argued for a craft basis for design while Hermann Muthesius had begun implementing industrial prototypes.[12]

Gropius was not necessarily against Expressionism, and in fact himself in the same 1919 pamphlet proclaiming this "new guild of craftsmen, without the class snobbery," described "painting and sculpture rising to heaven out of the hands of a million craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new faith of the future." By 1923 however, Gropius was no longer evoking images of soaring Romanesque cathedrals and the craft-driven aesthetic of the "Völkisch movement", instead declaring "we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars."[13] Gropius argued that a new period of history had begun with the end of the war. He wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. His style in architecture and consumer goods was to be functional, cheap and consistent with mass production. To these ends, Gropius wanted to reunite art and craft to arrive at high-end functional products with artistic merit. The Bauhaus issued a magazine called Bauhaus and a series of books called "Bauhausbücher". Since the Weimar Republic lacked the quantity of raw materials available to the United States and Great Britain, it had to rely on the proficiency of a skilled labor force and an ability to export innovative and high quality goods. Therefore designers were needed and so was a new type of art education. The school's philosophy stated that the artist should be trained to work with the industry.

Weimar was in the German state of Thuringia, and the Bauhaus school received state support from the Social Democrat-controlled Thuringian state government. The school in Weimar experienced political pressure from conservative circles in Thuringian politics, increasingly so after 1923 as political tension rose. One condition placed on the Bauhaus in this new political environment was the exhibition of work undertaken at the school. This condition was met in 1923 with the Bauhaus' exhibition of the experimental Haus am Horn.[14] In February 1924, the Social Democrats lost control of the state parliament to the Nationalists.[citation needed] The Ministry of Education placed the staff on six-month contracts and cut the school's funding in half. On 26 December 1924 the Bauhaus issued a press release and setting the closure of the school for the end of March 1925.[15][16] At this point they had already been looking for alternative sources of funding. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a school of industrial design with teachers and staff less antagonistic to the conservative political regime remained in Weimar. This school was eventually known as the Technical University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, and in 1996 changed its name to Bauhaus-University Weimar.

Dessau


The Bauhaus Dessau

Gropius's design for the Dessau facilities was a return to the futuristic Gropius of 1914 that had more in common with the International style lines of the Fagus Factory than the stripped down Neo-classical of the Werkbund pavilion or the Völkisch Sommerfeld House.[17] The Dessau years saw a remarkable change in direction for the school. According to Elaine Hoffman, Gropius had approached the Dutch architect Mart Stam to run the newly founded architecture program, and when Stam declined the position, Gropius turned to Stam's friend and colleague in the ABC group, Hannes Meyer.

Meyer became director when Gropius resigned in February 1928, and brought the Bauhaus its two most significant building commissions, both of which still exist: five apartment buildings in the city of Dessau, and the headquarters of the Federal School of the German Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau. Meyer favored measurements and calculations in his presentations to clients, along with the use of off-the-shelf architectural components to reduce costs, and this approach proved attractive to potential clients. The school turned its first profit under his leadership in 1929.

But Meyer also generated a great deal of conflict. As a radical functionalist, he had no patience with the aesthetic program, and forced the resignations of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and other long-time instructors. Even though Meyer shifted the orientation of the school to further left than Gropius, he didn't want the school to become a tool of left-wing party politics. He prevented a formation of student Communist cell and in the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere, this became a threat to the existence of the Dessau school. Dessau mayor Fritz Hesse fired him in the summer of 1930.[18] The Dessau city council attempted to convince Gropius to return as head of the school, but Gropius instead suggested Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies was appointed in 1930, and immediately interviewed each student, dismissing those that he deemed uncommitted. Mies halted the school's manufacture of goods so that the school could focus on teaching. Mies appointed no new faculty other than his close confidant Lilly Reich. By 1931, the National Socialist German Workers' Party was starting to gain influence and control in German politics. They gained control of the Dessau City Council and moved to close the school.[19]

Berlin

In late 1932, Mies rented a derelict factory in Berlin to use as the new Bauhaus with his own money. The students and faculty rehabilitated the building, painting the interior white. The school operated for ten months without further interference from the Nazi Party. In 1933, the Gestapo closed down the Berlin school. Mies protested the decision, eventually speaking to the head of the Gestapo, who agreed to allow the school to re-open. However, shortly after receiving a letter permitting the opening of the Bauhaus, Mies and the other faculty agreed to voluntarily shut down the school.[19]

Although neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler himself had a cohesive architectural policy before they came to power in 1933, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had already labeled the Bauhaus "un-German" and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for communists and social liberals. Indeed, a number of communist students loyal to Meyer moved to the Soviet Union when he was fired in 1930.

Even before the Nazis came to power, political pressure on Bauhaus had increased. The Nazi movement, from nearly the start, denounced the Bauhaus for its "degenerate art", and the Nazi regime was determined to crack down on what it saw as the foreign, probably Jewish influences of "cosmopolitan modernism." Despite Gropius's protestations that as a war veteran and a patriot his work had no subversive political intent, the Berlin Bauhaus was pressured to close in April 1933. Emigrants did succeed, however, in spreading the concepts of the Bauhaus to other countries, including the “New Bauhaus” of Chicago:[20] Mies decided to emigrate to the United States for the directorship of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago and to seek building commissions.[a] Curiously, however, some Bauhaus influences lived on in Nazi Germany. When Hitler's chief engineer, Fritz Todt, began opening the new autobahn (highways) in 1935, many of the bridges and service stations were "bold examples of modernism"—among those submitting designs was Mies van der Rohe.[21]
Architectural output[edit]


Bauhaus building in Chemnitz


A stage in the Festsaal


Ceiling with light fixtures for stage in the Festsaal


Dormitory balconies in the residence


Mechanically opened windows


The Mensa (Cafeteria)

The paradox of the early Bauhaus was that, although its manifesto proclaimed that the ultimate aim of all creative activity was building, the school did not offer classes in architecture until 1927. During the years under Gropius (1919–1927), he and his partner Adolf Meyer observed no real distinction between the output of his architectural office and the school. So the built output of Bauhaus architecture in these years is the output of Gropius: the Sommerfeld house in Berlin, the Otte house in Berlin, the Auerbach house in Jena, and the competition design for the Chicago Tribune Tower, which brought the school much attention. The definitive 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau is also attributed to Gropius. Apart from contributions to the 1923 Haus am Horn, student architectural work amounted to un-built projects, interior finishes, and craft work like cabinets, chairs and pottery.

In the next two years under Meyer, the architectural focus shifted away from aesthetics and towards functionality. There were major commissions: one from the city of Dessau for five tightly designed "Laubenganghäuser" (apartment buildings with balcony access), which are still in use today, and another for the headquarters of the Federal School of the German Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer's approach was to research users' needs and scientifically develop the design solution.

Mies van der Rohe repudiated Meyer's politics, his supporters, and his architectural approach. As opposed to Gropius's "study of essentials", and Meyer's research into user requirements, Mies advocated a "spatial implementation of intellectual decisions", which effectively meant an adoption of his own aesthetics. Neither van der Rohe nor his Bauhaus students saw any projects built during the 1930s.

The popular conception of the Bauhaus as the source of extensive Weimar-era working housing is not accurate. Two projects, the apartment building project in Dessau and the Törten row housing also in Dessau, fall in that category, but developing worker housing was not the first priority of Gropius nor Mies. It was the Bauhaus contemporaries Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig and particularly Ernst May, as the city architects of Berlin, Dresden and Frankfurt respectively, who are rightfully credited with the thousands of socially progressive housing units built in Weimar Germany. In Taut's case, the housing he built in south-west Berlin during the 1920s, is still occupied, and can be reached by going easily from the U-Bahn stop Onkel Toms Hütte.

Impact


Typewriter Olivetti Studio 42 designed by the Bauhaus-alumnus Alexander Schawinsky in 1936

The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Israel in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled, or were exiled by, the Nazi regime. Tel Aviv in 2004 was named to the list of world heritage sites by the UN due to its abundance of Bauhaus architecture;[22][23] it had some 4,000 Bauhaus buildings erected from 1933 on.

In 1928, the Hungrarian painter Alexander Bortnyik founded a school of design in Budapest called Miihely (also "Muhely"[24] or "Mugely"[25]), which means "the studio".[26] Located on the seventh floor of a house on Nagymezo Street,[26] it was meant to be the Hungarian equivalent to the Bauhaus.[27] The literature sometimes refers to it—in an oversimplified manner—as "the Budapest Bauhaus".[28] Bortnyik was a great admirer of Moholy-Nagy and had met Walter Gropius in Weimar between 1923 and 1925.[29] Moholy-Nagy himself taught at the Miihely. Victor Vasarely, a pioneer of Op Art, studied at this school before establishing in Paris in 1930.[30]

Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in Britain during the mid 1930s to live and work in the Isokon project before the war caught up with them. Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split. Their collaboration produced The Aluminum City Terrace in New Kensington, Pennsylvania and the Alan I W Frank House in Pittsburgh, among other projects. The Harvard School was enormously influential in America in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.

In the late 1930s, Mies van der Rohe re-settled in Chicago, enjoyed the sponsorship of the influential Philip Johnson, and became one of the pre-eminent architects in the world. Moholy-Nagy also went to Chicago and founded the New Bauhaus school under the sponsorship of industrialist and philanthropist Walter Paepcke. This school became the Institute of Design, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Printmaker and painter Werner Drewes was also largely responsible for bringing the Bauhaus aesthetic to America and taught at both Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. Herbert Bayer, sponsored by Paepcke, moved to Aspen, Colorado in support of Paepcke's Aspen projects at the Aspen Institute. In 1953, Max Bill, together with Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher, founded the Ulm School of Design (German: Hochschule für Gestaltung—HfG Ulm) in Ulm, Germany, a design school in the tradition of the Bauhaus. The school is notable for its inclusion of semiotics as a field of study. The school closed in 1968, but the "Ulm Model" concept continues to influence international design education.[31]

The influence of the Bauhaus on design education was significant. One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology, and this approach was incorporated into the curriculum of the Bauhaus. The structure of the Bauhaus Vorkurs (preliminary course) reflected a pragmatic approach to integrating theory and application. In their first year, students learnt the basic elements and principles of design,colour theory, plus experimented with a range of materials and processes.[32][33] This approach to design education became a common feature of architectural and design school in many countries. For example, the Shillito Design School in Sydney stands as a unique link between Australia and the Bauhaus. The colour and design syllabus of the Shillito Design School was firmly underpinned by the theories and ideologies of the Bauhaus. Its first year foundational course mimicked the Vorkurs and focused on the elements and principles of design plus colour theory and application. The founder of the school, Phyllis Shillito, which opened in 1962 and closed in 1980, firmly believed that "A student who has mastered the basic principles of design, can design anything from a dress to a kitchen stove".[34]

One of the most important contributions of the Bauhaus is in the field of modern furniture design. The ubiquitous Cantilever chair and the Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer are two examples. (Breuer eventually lost a legal battle in Germany with Dutch architect/designer Mart Stam over the rights to the cantilever chair patent. Although Stam had worked on the design of the Bauhaus's 1923 exhibit in Weimar, and guest-lectured at the Bauhaus later in the 1920s, he was not formally associated with the school, and he and Breuer had worked independently on the cantilever concept, thus leading to the patent dispute.) The single most profitable tangible product of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper.

The physical plant at Dessau survived World War II and was operated as a design school with some architectural facilities by the German Democratic Republic. This included live stage productions in the Bauhaus theater under the name of Bauhausbühne ("Bauhaus Stage"). After German reunification, a reorganized school continued in the same building, with no essential continuity with the Bauhaus under Gropius in the early 1920s.[35] In 1979 Bauhaus-Dessau College started to organize postgraduate programs with participants from all over the world. This effort has been supported by the Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation which was founded in 1974 as a public institution.

Later evaluation of the Bauhaus design credo was critical of its flawed recognition of the human element, an acknowledgement of “…the dated, unattractive aspects of the Bauhaus as a projection of utopia marked by mechanistic views of human nature…Home hygiene without home atmosphere.”[36]

The White City

The White City of Tel Aviv (Hebrew: העיר הלבנה‎, Ha-Ir HaLevana) refers to a collection of over 4,000 Bauhaus or International style buildings built in Tel Aviv from the 1930s by German Jewish architects who emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine after the rise of the Nazis. Tel Aviv has the largest number of buildings in this style of any city in the world. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed Tel Aviv's White City a World Cultural Heritage site, as "an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early 20th century."[37]

Established in 2000, The Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv is an organization dedicated to the ongoing documentation of the architectural heritage.[38] In 2003, it hosted an exhibition on preservation of the architecture that showcased 25 buildings.[39] To further the architectural culture in the city, a Bauhaus Museum opened in Tel Aviv in 2008, designed by Israeli architect Ron Arad [40][41]

Bauhaus artists

The Bauhaus was not a formal group, but rather a school. Its three architect-directors (Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) are the names most closely associated with it.

Furthermore a large number of outstanding artists of their time were lecturers at the Bauhaus:

Anni Albers
Josef Albers
Herbert Bayer
Max Bill
Marianne Brandt
Marcel Breuer
Avgust Černigoj
Christian Dell
Werner Drewes
Lyonel Feininger
Naum Gabo
Ludwig Hilberseimer
Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack
Johannes Itten
Wassily Kandinsky
Paul Klee
Otto Lindig
Gerhard Marcks
László Moholy-Nagy
Piet Mondrian
Oskar Schlemmer
Lothar Schreyer
Joost Schmidt
Naum Slutzky
Gunta Stölzl
See also[edit]

Bauhaus University Weimar
Bauhaus Museum, Weimar
Bauhaus Archive
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation
Bauhaus in Budapest
New Bauhaus
Form follows function
New Objectivity (architecture)
International style (architecture)
Constructivist architecture
Expressionist architecture
Ulm School of Design

Bauhaus Bauhaus

Last edited by Alex Linder; February 10th, 2014 at 02:35 AM.
 
Old February 10th, 2014 #15
Solskeniskyn
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Yeah, those soulless bauhaus commie-blocks really soddens the landscape.

The only thing worse than the gray, depressing, über-"rational" (communist "rational" that is = not rational at all = they really do suck in every conceivable sense) East-German-looking ones are the modern architecture eye-sores that delivers the same with ten times the pretentiousness and at many times the cost.

We have just had a couple of obnoxious blocks of the latter variety smacked up in the middle of our until now reasonably classy, pleasant, well-balanced city center. Even if you would for a second disregard the hideousness of the buildings themselves: absolutely NO REGARD has been taken for how it fits into the city picture. It just looks unbelievably... stupid. And it reeks of total indifference and sloth, of total disrespect for the most basic common aesthetic sense.

Idiotic on every level - about as reasonable as bringing in hordes of raping, violent, analfabet 70IQ somalians to astronomical costs to a previously white, clean, prosperous, striving society...and both examples tells a lot about the current leadership - and about the mood and the mindset of a demoralized, atomized people that has lost its spirit (and its mind).

I'm going to get a hold of that E.M Jones book.

Last edited by Solskeniskyn; February 10th, 2014 at 01:14 AM.
 
Old February 10th, 2014 #16
Alex Linder
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Solskeniskyn View Post
Yeah, those soulless bauhaus commie-blocks really soddens the landscape.

The only thing worse than the gray, depressing, über-"rational" (communist "rational" that is = not rational at all = they really do suck in every conceivable sense) East-German-looking ones are the modern architecture eye-sores that delivers the same with ten times the pretentiousness and at many times the cost.

We have just had a couple of obnoxious blocks of the latter variety smacked up in the middle of our until now reasonably classy, pleasant, well-balanced city center. Even if you would for a second disregard the hideousness of the buildings themselves: absolutely NO REGARD has been taken for how it fits into the city picture. It just looks unbelievably... stupid. And it reeks of total indifference and sloth, of total disrespect for the most basic common aesthetic sense.

Idiotic on every level - about as reasonable as bringing in hordes of raping, violent, analfabet 70IQ somalians to astronomical costs to a previously white, clean, prosperous, striving society...and both examples tells a lot about the current leadership - and about the mood and the mindset of a demoralized, atomized people that has lost its spirit (and its mind).

I'm going to get a hold of that E.M Jones book.
Yep...

EMJ doesn't get it all. As with everything, he tries to trace it back to sexual perversion. He is a one-trick pony in that regard. Enjoy your decades of licit sex, E-Mike! I mean...It just makes me wonder what a dig into these wonderful traditional architects' lives would reveal. I really find it hard to believe that sexual immorality is that much more pronounced among the commies than the conservatives. I don't think that's the pivot here. It's just ideology. A taste for degradation. An unstifled urge to rebel. A fuck-you for fuck-you's sake. Creating eyeshit just to piss everyone else off - that's the kind of thing that an intellectual sadist would do, more than a much-humping pervert.

Mencken wrote an article about the 'libido for the ugly,' bemoaning the extreme ugliness of much in America at that time, 1910-1930 period. Not merely the lack of taste, but the positive lust for ugliness. Maybe that plus jewish-modernist ideology explains the motive behind ubiquity or even popularity of bow-wow boxiness.

I mean...I remember as a kid, reading millions of books. And some of the best would be mysteries with these spooky Victorian mansions on the cover. Those things just make you tingle with excitement. House of interest and glamour and mystery - all kinds of creepy, spooky, intriguing, interesting twists and turns and convolutions and crenellations. The architecture echoes the human mind - full of odd and wonderful -- and strange and scary -- things. Just like the big old creaking house itself. That's what architecture is supposed to be; those are the feelings it's supposed to elicit. It's not about building identical boxes on the humans-are-just-supersized-hamsters theory. Jesus, kill me already.
 
Old February 10th, 2014 #17
Alex Linder
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The Libido for the Ugly, by H. L. Mencken
"Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty"

By Richard Nordquist

The Libido for the Ugly, by H. L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Journalist H.L. Mencken was renowned for his playfully combative prose style and his politically incorrect points of view. First published in Prejudices: Sixth Series (1927), Mencken's essay "The Libido for the Ugly" stands as a powerful exercise in hyperbole and invective. Note his reliance on concrete examples and precise descriptive details.

The Libido for the Ugly

by H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

1 On a Winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland county. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation. Here was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth--and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke. Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination--and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.

2 I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight. From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye. Some were so bad, and they were among the most pretentious--churches, stores, warehouses, and the like--that they were downright startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away. A few linger in memory, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer-window on the side of a bare, leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rat-trap somewhere further down the line. But most of all I recall the general effect--of hideousness without a break. There was not a single decent house within eye-range from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Greensburg yards. There was not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby.

3 The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills. It is, in form, a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly settled, but not noticeably overcrowded. There is still plenty of room for building, even in the larger towns, and there are very few solid blocks. Nearly every house, big and little, has space on all four sides. Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity in the region, they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides--a chalet with a high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter storms, but still essentially a low and clinging building, wider than it was tall. But what have they done? They have taken as their model a brick set on end. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards, with a narrow, low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous brick piers. By the hundreds and thousands these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery on their deep sides they are three, four and even five stories high; on their low sides they bury themselves swinishly in the mud. Not a fifth of them are perpendicular. They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases precariously. And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks.

4 Now and then there is a house of brick. But what brick! When it is new it is the color of a fried egg. When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring. Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color? No more than it was necessary to set all of the houses on end. Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with some dignity. Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly, especially if its trimmings are of white stone, with soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the rain. But in Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye.

5 I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. I have seen, I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N.J. and Newport News, Va. Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, God-forsaken villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the malarious tide-water hamlets of Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles. But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle along the line of the Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable in design. It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical. One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them.

6 Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners--dull, insensate brutes, with no love of beauty in them? Then why didn’t these foreigners set up similar abominations in the countries that they came from? You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in Europe save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England. There is scarcely an ugly village on the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and charming habitations, even in Spain. But in the American village and small town the pull is always toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion. It is incredible that mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror.

7 On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the lower middle class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers. Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind. They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands. They caress it as "The Palms" caresses it, or the art of Landseer, or the ecclesiastical architecture of the United States. The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as the taste for vaudeville, dogmatic theology, sentimental movies, and the poetry of Edgar A. Guest. Or for the metaphysical speculations of Arthur Brisbane. Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing) that the vast majority of the honest folk of Westmoreland county, and especially the 100% Americans among them, actually admire the houses they live in, and are proud of them. For the same money they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly there was no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of them are appreciably better. They might, indeed, have built a better one of their own. But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it, they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity. They like it as it is: beside it, the Parthenon would no doubt offend them. In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate choice. After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely impossible pent-house, painted a staring yellow, on top of it. The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it.

8 Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. The etiology of this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got. There must be causes behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act of God. What, precisely, are the terms of those laws? And why do they run stronger in America than elsewhere? Let some honest Privat Dozent in pathological sociology apply himself to the problem.

(1927)

http://grammar.about.com/od/classice...bidougly_2.htm
 
Old February 10th, 2014 #18
Alex Linder
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uncompromisingly inimical to man - that's bauhaus for you...notice no use of the word anywhere...mencken wrote while bauhaus was in its heyday.

Last edited by Alex Linder; February 10th, 2014 at 02:36 AM.
 
Old February 10th, 2014 #19
Alex Linder
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Architecture as anti-theology, March 8, 2009
By Jacob "Reformed Epistemologian" (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology (Paperback)
Bauhaus architecture can be seen in houses that have flat roofs, non load-bearing walls, and are raised above the earth. The nature of Bauhaus architecture is that of modern man: designed to be functional and nothing else. Not only in homes but in apartments as well. Bauhaus represents virtually every condominium, high-rise apartment, and college dorm in the world (is it any wonder that college dorm life is virtually synonymous with sexual orgy?).

Bauhaus architecture was the invention of Walter Gropius after the first world war. The goal of Bauhaus architecture is to design a building where man's ties to the ground and family are severed but at the same time he lives in close proximity with other people while never developing ties to these people (this is necessary for sexual liberation; p. 84). The college dorm gives one enough privacy for sexual escapades but enough proximity to other people to make the act possible. Dorms are simply cubes stacked one upon another. There is no soul there, nor can there be.

Bauhaus architecture is not merely meant to destroy the family, but to propogate an entirely new social order. It was to represent politics by design, or state socialism (107). The anti-Christian nature of Bauhaus is evident in the flat roof: a flat roof by definition is an imposition of ideology upon a reality (e.g., it will leak). But more importantly, a flat roof represents modern man's negation of God, and without God there is no future (102).

The alternative to Bauhaus, which Jones does not develop, is in the rich moral vision given us by Christianity. The Gothic cathedral, the meditarranean villa, and the Byzantium dome all represent a God who is not only truth and goodness, but beauty himself. The solution, Jones notes, is to go back to the fork in the road where we made the wrong turn and fix it (67).
 
Old February 10th, 2014 #20
Alex Linder
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Sometimes one gets the feeling that, good or bad, there's a German at the bottom of everything.
 
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