Andrew Wilshere was working on content at Designlab when he asked me to write an article about the Bauhaus.

I ended up writing something that never got published with Designlab. Instead, it was shared by the Bauhaus Movement to their Facebook followers.

The fusion of art, technology, and spirituality has been the foundation of my thinking as a designer as I have explored design practice, design education, and design philosophy.

We mistakenly focused on physical artifacts without fully realizing—and questioning—the values that were being embodied in architecture, built to reinforce our habits and behaviours into social, economic, and political systems. Technology has enabled us to scale, accelerate, and amplify these systems to envelope the globe.

We have been engaged in social architecture, a form of metaphysical design. It has been a form of colonization that has been built on individualism, specialization, and authoritarianism.

Originally published on Medium on August 29, 2019.

Bauhaus

The Tower of Babel

When I first read this manifesto, I had immediate associations with the Tower of Babel. The cathedral project of global neoliberal capitalism began as a socialist utopian project in the Weimar Republic as Germany’s first experiment in democracy. The democratic experiment failed when the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus in 1933.

The experiment continued in the United States of America as the Bauhaus diaspora spread the ideas of modernism to the art, design and architecture academies around the world.

The World Trade Center in New York City embodied the vision of modern architecture that Walter Gropius had been exploring at the Bauhaus, defining the trinity of building materials of the modern world: steel, glass, and concrete.

When the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, the modernism movement came to an abrupt end. Ever since, we have been living in a distinctly postmodern world.

I wrote about the Bauhaus for Designlab, but they did not publish my article, so I connected with the Bauhaus Movement, shared the article with their followers on Facebook, and continued my exploration of Cultural Evolution, Social Physics, and Metaphysical Design.

I wrote this article as a survey of articles about the Bauhaus.

This is a paper I wrote for ART 126 at Trinity Western University while I was studying Communications and Fine Arts in the early 90s.

New European Bauhaus

Prize Categories

• Techniques, materials and processes for construction and design
• Buildings renovated in a spirit of circularity
• Solutions for the co-evolution of built environment and nature
• Regenerated urban and rural spaces
• Products and life style
• Preserved and transformed cultural heritage
• Reinvented places to meet and share
• Mobilisation of culture, arts and communities
• Modular, adaptable and mobile living solutions
• Interdisciplinary education models

If the Bauhaus existed today, what would it look like?

What would the Bauhaus do differently, learning from the mistakes of the past and how modernism was co-opted by neoliberal capitalism.

“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)

On September 8, 2021, I received an email from Orhan Cakir, Managing Director, Bauhaus Movement:

Dear Stephen…

I wanted to let you know that from November we will be publishing the Bauhaus Movement Magazine every 3 months. I would like to have an interview with you and your activities regarding the Bauhaus in Canada. The magazine is published in several languages and regions. Can you imagine a collaboration?

Bauhaus Podcast

Let’s shape our future, together.

The Bauhaus Podcast is a place for creative thinking We officially announce the launch of our new Bauhaus Podcast.

This podcast, where experts, users and professionals share their practical knowledge and experiences, is entirely dedicated to Bauhaus architecture, design and science in all its facets.

Integrating the minimalist journal in an interface for system thinking of the personal, social, economic, political, and ecological as nested holobionts.

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

Yesterday, I found some books in the stacks at the University of the Fraser Valley Library to research the evolution of design from physical artifacts to living systems.

• The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design by Lance Hosey
• The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 by Victor Margolin
• Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism by Julia Watson
• Architecture of Thought by Andrzej Piotrowski
• Exiles and Emigrés by Stephanie Barron
• Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, Edited by Vincent Katz
• Modernism: Designing a New World, Edited by Christopher Wilk

What kind of world do we want to live in?

I think of the Bauhaus as the futurists who turned intention into pedagogy, practices, designs, artifacts, and architecture. They turned intention into the modern world. Now that we live in a postmodern world, we are thinking through the errors and mistakes in our designs and iterating on those designs with incremental changes to the way we live modern life. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

A letter to the future in the form of a manifesto:

“Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! 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.”

— Walter Gropius

Builders Collective

So, they put together a team of individuals who could collectively imagine the possibilities of building the kind of world where they could all live together in peace. They made a simple declaration:

We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.