THE INFLUENCE OF THE BAUHAUS IN AMERICA Jessica Blemker-Ferree American Interior Design, ARTHI 5542 Historic Preservation Program, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Fall 2010 Rolf Achilles

THE INFLUENCE OF THE BAUHAUS IN AMERICA Creatively, we are a society influenced by the past. Alexander Girard wrote in 1956: “Nothing is new, but personal interpretation can often be so.” Originating from William Morris’ belief that craft can benefit society, the Bauhaus began a movement that would unite an artist’s vision with a craftsman’s skill and would eventually accept the future of industrialization. To understand the influence of the Bauhaus on America in the early 20th century, one must look at the history of art prior to the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius, who began the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany in 1919, acknowledged the schools debt to bygone movements that “consciously sought and found the first ways to the reunification of the world of work with the creative artists.”1 Many of these influential groups compare by their method of teaching through doing. Teachers and pupils learned by making things in collaboration with skilled masters, journeymen and apprentices. The Industrial Revolution in Europe brought forth machines and materials, which surpassed the traditional functions of the artist and craftsman. Although this shift in manufacturing occurred, students in the crafts trade continued to learn as if nothing outside of their classroom was developing. The British Arts and Crafts movement began around 1860 with the opening of William Morris’ design firm of Morris, Marshall, Fulkner & Co. The writings of John Ruskin and designs by Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, respectively, came to be admired not only for their inspiring words and beautiful designs but also for the quality of their products. Morris pushed his theory that everything in one’s house should not only be beautiful but functional and made by hand with an eye for true craftsmanship.                                                                                                                 1  Whitford,  Bauhaus,  23.    

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In 1898 the Vienna Secession, greatly influenced by the British Arts and Crafts movement, was founded with a concern for architecture and the crafts. In 1903, the Weiner Werkstätte opened workshops for furniture, decorative goods, textiles, and clothing. By this time, the shift in design was moving in a drastically different approach to Morris’ ornate, natureinspired pieces. The Weiner Werkstätte was identified by simple, geometric designs devoid of flamboyant ornamentation. The organization held true to Morris’ theory that the products must be made with quality craftsmanship and a functional purpose in mind. Gropius joined the Werkbund in 1912 where he met Henry van de Velde, a Belgian painter, designer, and architect whose work and ideas were of great importance to the Bauhaus. He realized the dream of co-operation between artist, craftsman, and industrialist and influenced both the Werkbund and Bauhaus manifestos.2 The Bauhaus in Germany functioned under the concept of creating a “total work of art” in which all the arts were brought together to create one piece. Like the Werkbund, the Bauhaus was inspired by Morris’ view of the artist’s relationship to the needs of society and the importance of artisanship. However, Gropius also believed that there was much potential in harnessing mass production. The Bauhaus philosophy of production eventually shifted towards a connection to modern technology. After the Nazis forced the school to close in 1933, a number of the Bauhaus masters and students immigrated to America. Their interpretation of a new architecture and a “new dwelling” was greatly accepted in Architecture programs and firms across the nation.3 Of all the design schools that were adopting the aesthetic, the schools that really pushed the envelope in design and made a name for themselves, also happened to be the ones headed by the masters from the                                                                                                                 2  Whitford,  Bauhaus,  25.   3  Bullock,  “First  the  Kitchen—then  the  Façade,”  177.    

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German school: Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Moholy-Nagy who began the “New Bauhaus” School in Chicago (later named the Institute of Design), and then Mies van der Rohe followed by heading the Armour Institute of Technology’s Architecture department which would later become the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). A less recognized school in North Carolina called the Black Mountain College is extremely important in its own right for its continued philosophy of a commitment between artist and craftsman. Anni and Josef Albers taught at the Black Mountain College for sixteen years after immigrating to the United States. Many prominent artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Wilhem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, and Franz Kline worked alongside the Bauhaus masters there. It has often been said that the modernist movement arrived in America when Walter Gropius entered as director of Harvard’s Graduate Architecture program, however architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler – both from Vienna - had already built homes in the International style on the west coast in Los Angeles and in the Midwest in Chicago. It seems that not until Breuer arrived in Massachusetts and he and Gropius built their own houses in Lincoln, Massachusetts, did the impact of modernity truly hit America. Modernism had been brewing in America for quite some time but no one could claim exclusivity for the style until Gropius and Breuer set fire to it. The media and discerning individuals took notice.

The Bauhaus should be credited with bringing a “green” sensibility to American architecture before additional acclaim is given to the U.S. Green Building Council. Before the modern movement swept across America, homes of the late 19th and early 20th century had

 

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ornate exteriors and cluttered interiors. Rethinking the excess amount of materials used to build a home, the benefits of the sun and wind, or one’s life patterns within a space, was not given much thought before. A columnist and art critic from the Chicago Daily Tribune named Louise Bargelt wrote numerous articles about this period of change where she described interiors as “old fashioned,” “worn,” and “tired.” Once new innovative concepts were introduced, the use of large windows for natural light, and bright open rooms fluid with natural ventilation became all the rage in cosmopolitan areas. During the 1920s and 30s, historic building styles remained popular while non-historic styles increasingly captured the public’s fancy. The surged interest in modern architecture was influenced by several factors. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York held a groundbreaking show in 1932 called Modern Architecture: International Exhibition that focused on the stylistic aspects of European modern architecture. The term “International Style” was dubbed by the curators and documented in a book by art historian Henry Russell Hitchcock and architect Phillip Johnson. Three different principles were identified: the expression of volume rather than mass, balance rather than preconceived symmetry, and the expulsion of applied ornament.4 Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus School and the City Employment Office in Dessau, Germany were included in the show as well as Mies van der Rohe’s Apartment House in Stuttgart, the German pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition, and the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Though hailed from France by way of Switzerland, Le Corbusier also played an extremely important role in the modernist movement and was also shown in the 1932 MoMA exhibition. Corbusier was never a student of the Bauhaus, however his imagination pushed                                                                                                                 4  Matthews,  “The  Promotion  of  Modern  Architecure."    

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design in a direction very similar to the masters of the school and influenced America greatly. The MoMA exhibit exposed a large audience, especially the creative class of New York City to the forward-thinking aesthetic of the Bauhaus. In 1938 the MoMA held a more focused exhibition entitled: The Bauhaus: 1919-1928.5 The Bauhaus School building in Weimar, with its top-floor glass studio spaces, was an influential model to the rowhouse renovations that took place in New York’s Greenwich Village. The large open spaces that artists had been creating from scratch for themselves since the late 1800s became attractive to “sub-bohemias” by the mid-teens in the Village. This slicker crowd called the “half-villagers,” moved to the area with a desire to lead a non-conformist lifestyle in art, writing, and theatre.6 In 1917, a group led by Marcell Duchamp, John Sloan, and Gertrude Drick declared the Village an independent nation while camping out on the top of the Washington Square Arch.7 However by the 1930s, the well-to-do wanted their own “artist studios” -an influence possibly jolted by the MoMA’s exhibitions. Many roofs were remodeled to be “artistic flats” where glass rooms were built on upper floor balconies or roofs, and small windows were doubled, tripled, and filled with casement windows or glass block. The burgeoning freedom of new architecture gave a glimpse of early gentrification in the city. As modern design became more popular for new construction, house remodeling and renovation became increasingly appealing. Home owners, rental property owners, and the building trades saw this as a practical means to upgrade a home especially since the Great Depression had left most American households with relatively little money to spend on new projects. Those that were built during the 1930s tended to be small and families were beginning                                                                                                                 5  Art  Digest,  “Modern  Museum  Illustrates  the  Bauhaus,”  6.   6  Sante,  Low  Life,  333.   7  Sante,  Low  Life,  336.    

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to realize the functionality of larger living spaces. Many articles in the Chicago Tribune and American Builder at the time inspired people to renovate or “renovize” their existing houses. Structures designed in the new style had very little ornament, which was seen as cheaper to build and maintain. The most common form of modern architecture had boxy frames, typically smooth white walls, curved corners were occasionally found as accents in bay windows and dining nooks. House exteriors had little or no ornament and were clad with brick or stucco and painted white. Windows in new construction were part of large curtain walls, while in renovated homes they were often filled with casement sash. Interior renovations were popularized during this time as a quick fix instead of doing an overall facade restyling. Two popular techniques for creating a modern interior were opening up smaller rooms into one large room, and updating the kitchen and bathrooms. Rethinking one’s living space anew and organizing for a new life style was considered an expression of freedom that the Bauhaus championed. The Bauhaus was more interested in the interior than the exterior and taught their students to design from the inside out and focus on making the interior as functional and seamless as possible, which would in turn guide the design of the exterior. The Century of Progress Exposition held in Chicago from 1933 to 1934 had a strong impact on society at this time as well. Being the next fair subsequent to the city’s classical World’s Fair in 1893, the Century of Progress was said to “celebrate the demise of eclecticism by entirely ignoring it.”8 A number of model houses modern in form and detailing were on display at the Expo and luckily still exist in parts of Indiana and Illinois today. The homes have a strong Bauhaus/ International style influence of unbroken planes and surfaces. Colors of bright white, blue, black, and red were used throughout the event.                                                                                                                 8  Bush-­‐Brown,  Beaux  Arts  to  Bauhaus,  90.      

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The colors used at the Exposition are reminiscent of the palette used by De Stijl -an art movement started in the Netherlands in 1917, and many designs of the 1950s by the creative team of Charles and Ray Eames. In between the two was the Bauhaus. The functionalist manifesto written by Theo van Doesbury, one of the main founders of De Stijl, had a strong influence on Gropius’ philosophical change towards a greater connection to the industry of mass production.9 This shift moved the Bauhaus into the functionalist trend of art and technology. In 1929, while on a honeymoon to Europe with his first wife, Charles Eames, an architecture student at Washington University in St. Louis, was first exposed to the work of Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Upon returning to the United States, he started his own architecture firm and softly pushed his newfound vision of modernity. In 1938, Eames received a fellowship to the Cranbrook Academy and later became head of the Industrial Design Department where he met his second wife, Ray Kaiser, a new student at the school. Charles and Ray Eames were a dynamic design duo that changed the world of design much like the Bauhaus. Their inspiration from the past was made possible by the industrial age of the present. While working in California, they designed molded-wood leg splints for the U.S. Navy. A trial run of 5,000 splints was their first experience with mass production. The splints led to the further development of their famous molded plywood furniture, which were first developed alongside fellow modernist, Eero Saarinen, in a multitude of colors as well as their famous fiberglass chairs from 1949. Around 1945, the Eames’ began work on the Case Study House Program. The program was made possible by John Entenza who proposed 34 houses to be built on land that he purchased in the Pacific Palisades in California. The houses were prefabricated structures made from wartime industrial technology with the purpose of housing                                                                                                                 9  Neumann,  Bauhaus  &  Bauhaus  People,  26.    

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returning GIs from the war and to hopefully alleviate a future housing shortage.10 Though the Bauhaus didn’t make a name for itself through the production of ready-made homes, Gropius was the first to dream about it. He called for the industrialization of housing as one of his main goals as early as 1910.11 A machine aesthetic was desired to show the “absolute beauty” in geometrical and manufactured objects.12 Gropius was aware that the mass production of houses would eliminate the relationship of ‘architect and client’ and shift the dynamic to that of ‘architect and consumers.’ By this means the production would be more profitable for the manufacturer and inexpensive for the consumer. Gropius imagined that this would lead to a plethora of designs by architects, and options for the “individual desires” and “free will” of the public.13 When the school moved to Dessau in 1925, Gropius began thinking about production methods based on what was already in place at the nearby Junkers aircraft factory. In 1923, he developed a steel-house prototype with Adolf Meyer called “Building Blocks,” which was a system of standardized flat-roofed housing. A few years later Gropius designed a famous railtrack delivery system for a prefabricated estate called Toerten Siedlung in Dessau in 1926-27. The layout of the buildings determined the layout for the rail system and the placement of the cranes to hoist the structures in place. By the late 1930s, Groupius was working with a copper manufacturer to develop prototypes for pre-made houses of copper paneling and aluminum foil insulation. This series was known as the Copper Houses and shown at the second German Building Exposition in Berlin.14                                                                                                                 10  Koenig,  Eames,  35.   11  Armstrong,  From  Bauhaus  to  m[h]ouse,  73.   12  Armstrong,  From  Bauhaus  to  m[h]ouse,  74.   13  Bergdoll,  Home  Delivery,  17.     14  Bergdoll,  Home  Delivery,  18.    

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The assembly line vision that Gropius ushered was a springboard for the Eames’ Case Study houses and the assortment of prefab house manufacturers of the mid-century and today. Families aspiring for “the good life” made Pacific Ready-Cut Homes and Sears Kit-Built Houses popular during the automobile boom of the twenties. The Lustron Corporation began producing their version of prefabricated houses made completely of steel in a wartime aircraft factory in 1948.15 Today, coined terms such as container homes, modular homes, and weehouses have become popular options for city or country homes. Historically, the craftsman and the industrialist have always been at odds; a utopian ideal of the two working in harmony can only exist in a vacuum, really (or somewhere in Europe). Today, the influence of the Bauhaus to produce a “total work of art” is desired by most American artisans and craftsmen but difficult to obtain. The industrial revolution changed the world and took the Bauhaus with it. We are now looking back at the past before the German school began in awe of what came before it.

                                                                                                                15  Armstrong,  From  Bauhaus  to  m[h]ouse,  76.      

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Bibliograhy Armstrong, Paul J. “From Bauhaus to m-[h]ouse: The Concept of the Ready-Made and the KitBuilt House.” In Without a Hitch – New Directions in Prefabricated Architecture, edited by Peggi Clouston, 72-79. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2008. Art Digest. “Modern Museum Illustrates the Bauhaus.” December 15, 1938. Bergdoll, Barry and Peter Christensen. Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008. Bullock, Nicholas. "First the Kitchen—then the Facade," Journal of Design History, Vol. I, no. 3-4 (1988): 177. Bush-Brown, Harold. Beaux Arts to Bauhaus and Beyond: An Architect’s Perspective. New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1976. Gropius, Walter. The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1965. Koenig, Gloria. Charles and Ray Eames: Pioneers of Mid-Century Modernism. New York: Taschen, 2005. Matthews, Henry. “The Promotion of Modern Architecture by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s,” Journal of Design History, Vol. 7, no. 1 (1994). Neumann, Eckhard. Bauhaus & Bauhaus People. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993. Sante, Luc. Low Life. New York: Random House, Inc., 1991. Smock, William. The Bauhaus Ideal: Then & Now. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2004. Whitford, Frank. Bauhaus. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1984.

 

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