#1 Bauhaus Thread: NS resort in Ruegen

[N.B. Forrest]

I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer.

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.

The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it.

I too have often lamented the comparative fugliness of American architecture to that of the Old World, and wondered why it is so. Why didn't our European forefathers come here and build in the same beautiful, picturesque styles of their lands of origin? Some did, of course; living in Virginia, for example, means seeing more fine old buildings than in pretty much any other state - but even here, the majority of houses & places of business have no exciting style to speak of. Some pioneer cabins were constructed well enuf to last centuries, but most have little beauty other than that conferred by time.

[N.B. Forrest]

Give me Solvang, or give me Death!

[Alex Linder]

I had some chairs similar to these once - and hated them. I had no idea they were bauhaus until now, looking through bauhaus pics, they just came with a table. Guess what happens if you sit on them regularly? Your weight bends them backwards to the ground, because they have no support. Boom, dead, useless, throw 'em out, no way to fix them. How fucking stupid and annoying is that? I went through all six of them, and I don't weigh that much.

[Alex Linder]

Originally Posted by N.B. Forrest

I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer.

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.

The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it.

I too have often lamented the comparative fugliness of American architecture to that of the Old World, and wondered why it is so. Why didn't our European forefathers come here and build in the same beautiful, picturesque styles of their lands of origin? Some did, of course; living in Virginia, for example, means seeing more fine old buildings than in pretty much any other state - but even here, the majority of houses & places of business have no exciting style to speak of. Some pioneer cabins were constructed well enuf to last centuries, but most have little beauty other than that conferred by time.

US stuff was built quick and cheap - people were always moving on, moving west. That has to be part of it. Not many were settled and rich enought to really build something marvelous like a plantation, say Monticello, or some of the rich houses up in Rhode Island.

It's easy to romanticize Europe, but remember that Europe lacks basic functionality in stuff like toilets and showers - by our standards. I'm not kidding. In the stuff where functionality and convenience matter most, the US is better than Europe, generally. At least in countries outside of Germany. Yes, we have nothing like Europe's castles, and it is generally better kept than the US. But it's also small, heavily populated, and incrementally built up over many centuries. The US - half of it is hardly 100 years old.

[Alex Linder]

Originally Posted by N.B. Forrest

I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer.

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.

The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it.

I too have often lamented the comparative fugliness of American architecture to that of the Old World, and wondered why it is so. Why didn't our European forefathers come here and build in the same beautiful, picturesque styles of their lands of origin? Some did, of course; living in Virginia, for example, means seeing more fine old buildings than in pretty much any other state - but even here, the majority of houses & places of business have no exciting style to speak of. Some pioneer cabins were constructed well enuf to last centuries, but most have little beauty other than that conferred by time.

He was the master of the insult within the insult. The side-'sult. Like the "even in Spain." It's a great technique, used it myself a million times.

[Alex Linder]

I'll say though, it's been remarked before, there are dozens upon dozens of beautiful old Victorian houses in St. Louis and Detroit, to name two. Presumably there are similar ones in many other cities. I've seen many I would love to live in, if I had 2 million to spare.

[Alex Linder]

[bauhaus stuff]


too cool for school chair










(i think this is a 'cantilevered chair') does this chair not look like it would give you a dirty look and exclaim "as if!" if you dared to threaten to press an ass cheek upon its sleek angled surface? the chair is the occupant; it fairly shrieks: "get out of the way, you're blocking my sun!"





random thought: are Lego blocks bauhaus?




get it? bauhaus is kind of the squaring off of reality; changing it from the circular, the natural, the organic, to the computer generated, the squared the robotic: cold, angular, anti-septic, bloodless, unhuman-hence-antihuman - whatever is warm and inviting, cozy and pleasant - gemutlich, auf Deutsch - aint bauhaus



note: i forgot until now a semi-famous old book by Tom Wolfe, the originator of New Journalism. he wrote a whole book: From Bauhaus to Our House. I read it decades ago, and I don't remember a damn thing in it, but it certainly covers 20th-century architecture, the competing ideas.

Here it is online and free, in pdf. Takes a couple minutes to download.






Bauhaus Inspired Apartment Building Hamburg Germany


'glass box': Institute of Design at 350 North La Salle Drive


Skyscrapers of the Mad Men Era Flickr/leander.canaris. Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and his Bauhaus counterparts were the trendsetters of design in the mid-20th ...


The "Westmount Square" is a complex of four "skyscrapers" located in Westmount, Quebec, Canada. This project, designed by the world renown Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is a modern complex with office towers, terrace and shopping concourse. It was opened on December 13, 1967.

basically, any kind of window-dominated box structure of any height is probably bauhaus or derived from it. key is the 'load-bearing' walls, or, uh, walls, are replaced with glass. basically, they're turning a building inside out: the building goes from a fortress, with the hard, tough, heavy stuff on the outside, to a skeleton, where the glass opens everything up, and the strength comes from support poles inside and on the corners.



https://www.google.com/search?q=bauh...2F%3B280%3B318

[Alex Linder]

Themes[edit]


Wolfe prefers ornate stylings, such as in Louis Sullivan's Bayard Building (left), to the unadorned boxes of glass and steel, such as Mies van der Rohe's IBM Plaza.

Wolfe bluntly lays out his thesis in the introduction to From Bauhaus to Our House with a riff on the patriotic song "America the Beautiful"

O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?[3]

Wolfe criticizes the tendencies of modern architecture to avoid any external ornamentation. Wolfe praised architects like Louis Sullivan who, from the late 19th century to his death in 1924, built a number of ornate buildings. Wolfe turned his criticism on the International Style and Modern Architecture exemplified by architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius (the founder of the Bauhaus school in Germany, whose ideas influenced Modern Architecture, and from which the title of the book derives). Wolfe believed that the buildings of the International Style and Modern Architecture could barely be appreciated by those who had to work in them.[4]

Wolfe's critique, however, was not purely aesthetic. As in The Painted Word Wolfe was critical of what he saw as too much adherence to theory. Wolfe characterized the architecture as based on a political philosophy that was inapplicable to America, arguing, for example, that it was silly to model American schools on "worker's flats" for the proletariat. The architecture world—like an art world dominated by critics, and a literature world dominated by creative writing programs—was producing buildings that nobody liked.[5] Many architects, in Wolfe's opinion, had no particular goal but to be the most avant-garde.[6]

Wikipedia (Links)

From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House

[Gordon Green]

These Bauhaus architects want to destroy Western architecture, then they ought not to mind some gang graffitti showing up on the sides and glass windows of their own shacks.

[Clancy]

The Bauhaus is one aspect of the degenerate Weimar culture that the National Socialists aimed to (and temporarily succeeded in) stamping out.

[Alex Linder]

have to leave this for the moment to finish my DC snipers piece, but will return to it with a full review of EMJ's book about Gropius and bauhaus.

[N.B. Forrest]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

He was the master of the insult within the insult. The side-'sult. Like the "even in Spain." It's a great technique, used it myself a million times.

He was a genius wordsmith, no doubt about it.

[N.B. Forrest]

US stuff was built quick and cheap - people were always moving on, moving west. That has to be part of it. Not many were settled and rich enought to really build something marvelous like a plantation, say Monticello, or some of the rich houses up in Rhode Island.

Yeah, I've thought that that must be the reason for most of the makeshift ugliness: the itch to move on in a vast new continental nation; people in Europe were far more settled in their towns & villages.

It's easy to romanticize Europe, but remember that Europe lacks basic functionality in stuff like toilets and showers - by our standards. I'm not kidding. In the stuff where functionality and convenience matter most, the US is better than Europe, generally. At least in countries outside of Germany.

No toilet bowl shelves to facilitate the close examination of turds here, eh?

[Alex Linder]

contrast this exciting, interesting, mysterious, wonderful dwelling with any bauhaus structure (the one on lower left; the one on upper left may well be bauhaus)



interesting post on dream houses...many good pics
http://jezebel.com/whats-your-dream-...ush-1520847098

notice how people don't actually like bauhaus stuff...which is all about theory and being non-bourgeois, as i've been rereading the tom wolfe book, the pdf of which is posted upthread.

[N.B. Forrest]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

contrast this exciting, interesting, mysterious, wonderful dwelling with any bauhaus structure (the one on lower left; the one on upper left may well be bauhaus)



interesting post on dream houses...many good pics
http://jezebel.com/whats-your-dream-...ush-1520847098

notice how people don't actually like bauhaus stuff...which is all about theory and being non-bourgeois, as i've been rereading the tom wolfe book, the pdf of which is posted upthread.

Sharp gables & turrets thrusting into the sky; stone, brick, richly carved woods; a firm foundation in our unequaled architectural history: THESE are the things that make an ideal house for White people, not blank, dead Bauhaus cubes - or the ubiquitous strandboard & drywall cracker boxes, for that matter.