“The Bauhaus concept, as it was transplanted to the United States, was fundamentally different from the principles upon which the experimental school had been founded in Weimar in 1919. The guiding principle of the Bauhaus was to unify all aspects of art making—painting, sculpture, handicrafts—as elements of a new kind of art, erasing the division between “high” and decorative art. Explorations of materials, color, and form were important building blocks of the curriculum. The artists and designers of the Bauhaus believed that this new type of art and design would help to create a better society, and they sought commissions to design public buildings and other elements of public life (such as flags and currency). In America, however, the Bauhaus ideas lost their social and political thrust. The emigré teachers in Chicago, Cambridge, and North Carolina who had been committed to progressive architecture and design ideas in Germany were now lionized as upholders of a pure, reductivist style.”

(Stephanie Barron, page 25)

Design for the Real World

by Victor Papanek

Papanek on the Bauhaus

Many of the “sane design” or “design reform” movements of the time, such as those engendered by the writings and teachings of William Morris in England and Elbert Hubbard in the United States, were rooted in a sort of Luddite antimachine philosophy. By contrast Frank Llloyd Wright said as early as 1894 that “the machine is here to stay” and that the designer should “use this normal tool of civilization to best advantage instead of prostituting it as he has hitherto done in reproducing with murderous ubiquity forms born of other times and other conditions which it can only serve to destroy.” Yet designers of the last century were either perpetrators of voluptuous Victorian-Baroque or members of an artsy-craftsy clique who were dismayed by machine technology. The work of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Austria and the German Werkbund anticipated things to come, but it was not until Walter Gropius founded the German Bauhaus in 1919 that an uneasy marriage between art and machine was achieved.

No design school in history had greater influence in shaping taste and design than the Bauhaus. It was the first school to consider design a vital part of the production process rather than “applied art” or “industrial arts.” It became the first international forum on design because it drew its faculty and students from all over the world, and its influence traveled as these people later founded design offices and schools in many countries. Almost every major design school in the United States today still uses the basic foundation course developed by the Bauhaus. It made good sense in 1919 to let a German 19-year-old experiment with drill press and circular saw, welding torch and lathe, so that he might “experience the interaction between tool and material.” Today the same method is an anachronism, for an American teenager has spent much of his life in a machine-dominated society (and cumulatively probably a great deal of time lying under various automobiles, souping them up). For a student whose American design school slavishly imitates teaching patterns developed by the Bauhaus, computer sciences and electronics and plastics technology and cybernetics and bionics simply do not exist. The courses the Bauhaus developed were excellent for their time and place (telesis), but American schools following this pattern in the eighties are perpetuating design infantilism.

The Bauhaus was in a sense a nonadaptive mutation in design, for the genes contributing to its convergence characteristics were badly chosen. In boldface type, it announced its manifesto: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all turn to the crafts.… Let us create a new guild of craftsmen!” The heavy emphasis on interaction between crafts, art, and design turned out to be a blind alley. The inherent nihilism of the pictorial arts of the post-World War I period had little to contribute that would be useful to the average, or even to the discriminating, consumer. The paintings of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, et al., on the other hand, had no connection whatsoever with the anemic elegance some designers imposed on products.

(Pages 30-31)

The Hidden History of the Geodesic Dome - Part 3: The Teamwork of Walter Gropius

Understanding one’s limitations leads to a recognition of the power of relationships in an interconnected and interdependent world.

The Hidden History of the Geodesic Dome - Part 3: The Teamwork of Walter Gropius

Understanding one’s limitations leads to a recognition of the power of relationships in an interconnected and interdependent world.

Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler

Related Events Guide

February 23–May 11, 1997

Los Angeles County Museum of Art