Toronto Star File Photos
Products of the Bauhaus design movement are more findable than you might expect from such an avant-garde, long-ago phenomenon. One example is the Toronto Dominion Centre by architect Mies van der Rohe.
BERLIN—It’s curious to see a building as a living, breathing thing.
That was my first thought some weeks ago on visiting the Bauhaus home of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, which has been renovated and turned into a museum in Dessau, the small German city on the Elbe River where the artists lived and worked between 1925 and 1932.
Former critics of the Bauhaus – of which there were many – charged that the buildings had an “alien” effect on viewers and “scarred” the landscape. Hitler’s National Socialists called the cubic white structures “un-German” with “culturally Bolshevist, Marxist-Jewish intentions,” and dissolved the movement in Berlin in 1933.
In the years following World War II, Soviet leaders in the German Democratic Republic condemned the design as cosmopolitan and formalistic, letting the buildings decay for decades before they started to restore them in the 1970s.
Now, with the opening this past Friday of the permanent exhibition “Bauhaus Dessau: Workshop of Modernism,” Germany looks with new eyes at the insides and the outsides of these once-revolutionary buildings, re-examining the explosive seven-year period that defined one of the great architecture and design movements of our time.
To the average sightseer, Dessau may seem a modest cultural pit stop en route from today’s Euro-Mecca, Berlin, to Bach’s and Wagner’s hometown of Leipzig, and on to Goethe’s and Schiller’s Weimer a little further south.
But for a country that has achieved a lot in recent years struggling to come to grips with its past, the show marks an important step forward. By returning to celebrate the Bauhaus as a high point in modern German culture – and assuring it permanent recognition on its native landscape – the former East Germany repudiates another piece of the legacy that Nazism, and later Communism, left behind.
Beginning in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus (which means “architecture house”) shifted for political reasons to Dessau in 1925 before moving to Berlin in 1932, where one year later it was disbanded. The movement – whose visionary leaders Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe sought to blend functional, practical designs with an organic aesthetic that harmonized humans with the industrial age – gained worldwide followers after its bold designs were featured at the 1932 International Style exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Its strongest legacy today remains “The White City,” Tel Aviv, where more than 5,000 Bauhaus buildings dot the shoreline metropolis. Other of its offspring include the Chicago Institute of Design (founded as the New Bauhaus in 1937 by former Dessau teacher László Moholy-Nagy) and New York’s Whitney Museum. Mies van der Rohe’s Toronto Dominion Centre is one of Canada’s celebrated urban landmarks, but Bauhaus principles turn up in forms and places across the land, for instance the Taiga Garden next to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and Vancouver’s Robson Square waterfall, both built by the landscape architect and Gropius-protégé Cornelia Hahn Overlander.
The movement had further ripple effects at Black Mountain College in Ashville, N.C., where émigré Josef Albers taught Bauhaus principles to two future giants of the New York art world, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg.
So it’s not a little ironic, given the architecture’s global scope, that here in the place where it took root and flourished, the Bauhaus’s resurrection has only recently begun. Ten years ago, you couldn’t even get a guided tour through the Kandinsky/Klee House and the buildings neighbouring it (homes to artists Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy) because they hadn’t yet been renovated.
That has changed, as 80,000 tourists are now making their way here each year to see the bright, spacious, communal-minded buildings that earned Dessau a spot on UNESCO’s World Heritage list back in 1996. Last year, about 40,000 people took part in guided tours, which are being offered in half a dozen languages.
Riding the wave of interest, Kirsten Baumann, the exhibit’s curator, hopes the show deepens people’s understanding of the Bauhaus legacy – not only highlighting the buildings that its architects produced, but exploring the interdisciplinary approach to learning for which the school became renowned.
“North Americans tend to focus on the architecture,” says Baumann. “But the Bauhaus is much more.” As a laboratory of ideas that strove for innovations, it had a “social impact and a technical impact (especially) in the way its workshops brought together the different disciplines of fine arts, crafts and architecture.”For this, you can find your viagra delivery canada from online pharmacies. Since, it inclines to improve the get cialis overnight situation without any adverse effects. You can place your order online with us, to buy sildenafil tablet any medicine. Salmon- Omega-3 acid is order cialis online one among some extremely essential minerals for great sexual health.
Some of the featured original products of those workshops are now to become key features on display at the central Bauhaus Building, the luminously windowed, jigsaw-shaped structure (itself an icon of Classical Modernism). These include Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s Bauhaus Lamp (made in 1924), Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair (1925-26), and a famous collection of ashtrays designed by Marianna Brandt. From clothing, tools and appliances to furniture and wallpaper – the Bauhaus teachers and their students dabbled in it all.
What’s really special about the exhibit is that it represents the first time these one-of-a-kind objects will be on display in the actual place where they were produced. Beyond that, visitors will see works by some of the talented unknown students from the school. A guiding principle of the Bauhaus (which encouraged its pupils to “forget everything” they had learned before entering its halls) was the co-operative, symbiotic approach to learning between the teachers and those they taught. (Not to mention that at its founding, half the 700 students enrolled at the Bauhaus were women, which represented the highest rate at any school in Europe at the time.)
As Paul Klee – who, apart from painting, taught design classes in bookbinding, stained glass and weaving – once told his students: “It’s not that making draftsmen or painters out of you is our first priority. But we must draw and paint together, because these activities force us to come into contact with the essential laws of nature.”
People think they already know what they want to see when they come to Dessau, says Baumann. But as Dessau visitors grasp the socialist, even utopian, mood that was at the backbone of the school – the integration of education and production, usefulness and beauty, building and art – they’re “probably astonished that it is much more than they expected.” “The interesting point is the way they worked: the students were versatile, and able to deal with all sorts of different materials.
“It’s not the pinnacle of modernism – there was modern architecture without the Bauhaus,” she adds. “(But) this is where all the ideas of the European avant-garde collected.”
Indeed, it’s a little hard to imagine our modern world without the influence of the Bauhaus – in particular the way that it joined art, media and industry under one roof. Think of the iMac as one of its descendants: pleasing to look at, simple to operate, the round, human-friendly machine epitomizes our enthrallment to the technology-driven age.
The Bauhaus put itself at the forefront of Western culture by positing this basic condition of modern mankind: that we can only turn back toward nature by moving forward, through technology, into it. Which meant embracing the industrial age and creating our own functional, harmonious design, or as Gropius called it, our “design for living.”
When you come today to Dessau, an economically depressed city of 78,000, you’re likely to make a quick tour of the main sites and get out. You’ll see the sweeping Bauhaus Building with its curtain wall of glass, the Steel House (composed, as you might guess, entirely of steel), shards of the Törten Estate with its hundreds of terraced worker houses, and maybe you’ll order coffee or a meal at the Kornhaus, a restaurant that Carl Fieger built in 1929-30 with a rounded glass wing looking out over the Elbe, and again a fashionable eating spot.
And then, if you’re like me, you’ll dawdle on the ochre-coloured floors and the pastel-painted stairwells of Kandinsky’s former home, which he moved into after showing his work with the Brücke school in Dresden and founding the Blue Rider group of artists in Munich.
The house is where Kandinsky crafted his famous 1926 text, “Points and Lines in the Plane,” while teaching courses in abstract art, mural painting and analytical drawing at the Bauhaus workshops. It is also where he developed a theory that assigned shapes and sensibilities to primary colours. His “Assigned forms of primary colours” suggested an angular yellow triangle for “highest intellect,” a red square for “pride, anger, and sensuality,” a blue circle for “high spirituality, devotion to noble ideals.” (The shapes became Bauhaus symbols and are incorporated into the graphic on the front of today’s Ideas section).
Standing in the great artist’s residence which he shared with Klee, I thought not only about his work, which I had always admired, but also about his commitment to a movement that embraced democratic learning – that had, in response to the post-War crisis in Europe, ambitiously remodelled Westerners’ relationships to art and building.
Like Kandinsky’s oil paintings, the Bauhaus was about a love of detail, clean design, strong materials, wise proportions and functional shapes.
In a more abstract sense, it was about a revolution in aesthetics and a redesigning of purpose for the things we surround ourselves with every day. You could say, elevated to beyond the material. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists supported the asymmetrical, glowing experiments in art and architecture that the Bauhaus proposed. Those regimes wanted structures that they easily recognized, and they did their best to see that a Bauhaus way of creating and thinking did not survive.
“The Bauhaus was occupied by the Western world,” Baumann says, referring to the way Europe and North America embraced the avant-garde movement – and the communist German Democratic Republic, in reaction to the “imperialist” adoption, rejected it.
Now, perhaps, with “Bauhaus Dessau: Workshop of Modernism,” and the growing recognition of this movement, maybe those artists and architects who imposed their imaginations on our landscape long ago can help us imagine new, Earth-loving designs to suit a planet – and a species – so much in need of them today.