Bauhaus as Cultural Paradigm Architecture)

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The Staatliche Bauhaus, founded after the cata-strophe of war, in the chaos of the revolution and

in the era of the owering of an emotion-laden,

explosive art, becomes the rallying point of all

those who, with belief in the future and with sky-

storming enthusiasm, wish to build the ‘cathedral

of socialism’.1

In 1915, as an alien citizen, Van de Velde was

forced to resign from his post as director of the

Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, a

post he had held since the School was created in1904. He proposed either Gropius, Endell or Obrist

as suitable successors. In 1916, the School of Arts

and Crafts was closed down and converted into a

military reserve hospital, but by this time Gropius

was closely involved with discussions concerning the

future of Weimar’s Academy of Art. His role as an

architect in these discussions was symptomatic of a

challenge throughout Germany to the status of ne

art and the art academies as the upholders of state

prestige. Gillian Naylor has described the way inwhich, from the 1880s onwards, ‘new concepts of

the nature, role and independence of the artist [and]

the problems of a rapidly industrializing nation

forced patrons, local and state authorities to re-

examine their priorities for design education’,2 lead-

ing initially to the establishment of several new

schools of art and craft, or schools of ‘applied

design’. By the First World War, concern had spread

to the poor state of ne art itself; it was not just in

Weimar that the idea of merging a traditional edu-

cation in ne arts with more practical craft-basedlearning was being suggested. The staleness of ‘art’

as taught in the academies was widely recognized,

even amongst academicians themselves, and in

Weimar it was they who suggested that Gropius

should be appointed as the director of a new ‘com-

posite institution’.3

The renewed attempt to bring together art and

craft was intended to benet both the ne arts

and craft production. Wilhelm von Bode, Director

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The Bauhaus as culturalparadigm

In the rst Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919, Gropius refers to the ‘new structure of the future’

which the school will conceive and create, a structure which will ‘rise towards heaven

. . . like the crystal symbol of a new faith’. While there is no shortage of literature on

the Bauhaus, the nature of the programme of redemption to which the school aspired

is seldom explored. By studying the origins of the school and focusing on the way in

which its aims were put into practice for the International Exhibition of 1923, particu-

larly through the experimental house and the Bauhaus stage, this essay attempts to look

more closely at the ‘cultural paradigm’ proposed by the Bauhaus.

© 1996 E & FN Spon 1360–2365

Diana Periton Architectural Association School of Architecture,

34–36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES, UK and

Birmingham School of Architecture, U.C.E., Perry

Barr, Birmingham B42 2SU, UK



General of the Berlin Museums, was representa-

tive of those who felt that all art students should

be required to study basic arts and crafts, before

the skilled and chosen few could then move on tone arts, which would consequently be much

improved. He was concerned with the reform of

education in general, but wrote that: ‘in hardly any

other area does the reform appear . . . a more

urgent duty than in art education, since it . . . not

only causes the state . . . unnecessary expenses and

produces insufcient achievements, but above all

withdraws thousands of hands from useful employ-

ment . . . by restricting the instruction to the upper

level by rigorous selection, there would not be ten

thousand “painters” and “sculptors” populatingthe German cities in the future . . .’.4 In 1916,

Gropius was asked by the Saxon State Ministry to

explain the kind of inuence he felt the crafts could

be expected to receive from the artistic side, if the

Academy of Art in Weimar was to be brought

together with the former school of Arts and Crafts.

An extract from his reply says much about the

educational reforms he hoped to see:

‘. . . A thing that is technically excellent in all

respects must be impregnated with an intellectualidea – with form – in order to secure preference

among the large quantity of products of the same

kind. . . . As a result of greater knowledge one now

attempts to guarantee the artistic quality of

machine products from the outset and to seek the

advice of the artist at the moment the form

which is to be mass-produced is invented. Thus a

working community is formed between the artist,

the businessman and the technician which, organ-

ised according to the spirit of the age, may in the

long run be capable of compensating for all

the elements of the earlier individual work . . . For

the artist possesses the ability to breathe soulinto the lifeless product of the machine, and his

creative powers continue to live within it as a living

ferment . . .

The teaching of “organic design” takes the

place of the old, discredited method, which was

to stick unrelated frills on the existing forms of

trade and industrial products . . . Accurately cast

form, bare of ornamentation, having clear

contrasts and consistency of form and colour,

become commensurate with the energy and

economy of modern life – the esthetic equipmentof the modern artist.’5

The terminology of these remarks is revealing both

in terms of the intentions of the future Bauhaus

and the background to its aspirations.

In stating that an object, a product, should be

‘impregnated with an intellectual idea – with form’,

Gropius seems to rely upon the Platonic afliation

of form and idea. However, here the idea or form

is no longer an essence of the object; it exists sepa-

rately from the object, so that the object can be‘impregnated‘ by it. Form then becomes both an

abstract concept, existing as an aspiration before

it exists as a tangible thing, and a copulative

metaphor for artistic making. In this Gropius

echoes the art historian and theorist Alois Riegl,

who gave paramount importance to a concept

of ‘Kunstwollen’, of ‘absolute artistic volition’, a

‘latent inner demand which exists per se, entirely

independent of the object and of the mode of

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creation, and behaves as will to form’.6 With Riegl,

Gropius has converted the paradigm of Plato or of

Aristotle, the carefully differentiated process of the

particular embodiment of the universal, into a de-nite but abstract model rooted in human know-

ledge and will.

It is hard to imagine the traditional understand-

ing of form or intellectual idea having a market

value, but for Gropius’ comments to the State

Ministry, it is essential that it should. It is deemed

necessary ‘in order to secure preference’ among the

vast range of similar products available. Gropius

does not say that it will be the best, but that its

‘rightness’ lies in its appeal to prevailing taste. This

appeal to preference or to taste is clearly not a sub-mission to popular values, since the attempt is to

guarantee the ‘artistic quality’ of the product. The

type of preference to which Gropius refers seems

to be a post-Kantian understanding of taste as

something which is beyond empirical universality,

which can make a judgement of artistic quality not

in terms of knowledge, but in terms of a shared and

pure subjective consciousness. Gadamer calls this

the ‘transcendental quality of taste’.7

Gropius, though, does refer to a ‘greater know-

ledge’ which will lead to this pure subjectiveconsciousness and the guarantee of artistic quality.

The greater knowledge can be passed on in the

teaching of ‘organic design’, which it is the role

of the reformed education to supply. The modern

artist, trained in the understanding of form and

colour, will be able to follow the ‘laws’ of nature

and ‘breathe soul into the lifeless product of the

machine’. As a Zarathustra-like ‘Übermensch’,8 the

artist will be endowed with a superior strength

which enables him to appropriate through skill the

creative powers of nature, of ‘physis’.

The ‘working community’ which is to be formed

between artist, businessman and technician seemsto be put forward as some kind of cultural totality

which will then represent the larger community.

Gropius is more explicit about its role and its origins

towards the end of his eight-page reply:

‘In this environment we could revive the happy

working community that was one of the charac-

teristic features of the Medieval Bauhütten, in

which numerous allied Werkkunstler – architects,

sculptors and craftsmen of all grades – joined

forces and, inspired by the same corporate spirit,were able to make their individual and modest

contribution to the communal tasks which they

were required to perform, out of reverence for the

unity of a corporate idea which lled their minds

and whose signicance they had understood. With

the revival of this trusted working method, which

will be adapted to meet the requirements of our

new world, the artistic statements which we make

about life today will become more and more

unied, and will eventually be condensed into a

new style!’9

Interest in the ‘Bauhütten’, the medieval guilds of

freemasons, was not new. During the nineteenth

century, communities of craftsmen, or ‘Bauhütte’,

had been established to work on cathedrals in

various German cities, such as Köln and Hamburg.

With views similar to those of William Morris

in England, August Reichensperger, editor of

the Kölner Domblatt , saw the inuence of the

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‘Bauhütte’ as essential not just to the building of

the cathedrals, but to the regeneration of art in

general. In a speech recorded in 1850, he claimed

that:

‘It could well be that the whole future of art and

its general viability depend on whether it can forge

new links with craftsmanship and whether – as has

always been the case in great creative projects –

the various branches of art are able to reunite

within the ambiance of architecture, in which they

all had their origin . . .’10

For both Gropius and Reichensperger, the

‘Bauhütten’, or lodges, are expected to rescue artfrom its decline. Gropius, though, moves away

from the nineteenth century view of the

‘Bauhütten’ as places with moral values derived

from companionship and active participation in

craftsmanship to a much more symbolic and

mystical understanding of them.

This understanding is made more explicit in the

pamphlets and records of the ‘Arbeitsrat für Kunst’,

an organization of artists founded by Gropius,

Bruno Taut and Adolf Behne immediately after

Germany’s November Revolution in 1918, whichled to the replacement of the Kaiser with the

government of the Weimar Republic. Marcel

Franciscono has amply described the utopian ideals

of the ‘Arbeitsrat’, a worker’s soviet of artists, and

its claims to the creative leadership of the post-

revolutionary age. Of its founders, he writes:

‘Taut and Behne, more than anyone else, carried

over to architecture two dominant themes that

had strongly marked German artistic thinking

throughout the 19th century: . . . that the work of

art should be the medium for the expression of

a suprapersonal, transcendent content, and that itwas the historical mission of the artist to lead

mankind to the reattainment of social and spiritual

harmony – to the organic society in which all

human and spiritual oppositions would nd their

reconciliation.’11

As early as December 1918, the ‘Arbeitsrat’ had

addressed a pamphlet to the new government

demanding a piece of land where full-scale

building experiments could be carried out. These

experiments were to be preserved as a permanentexhibition structure which would bring together all

the arts, a ‘Welt als Schaustellung’.12 A few months

later, when the ‘Arbeitsrat’ was under Gropius’

leadership, the ‘collaboration of artists on the basis

of a comprehensive utopian building project’ was

announced as ‘an important task for the imme-

diate future’.13 For Taut, this building would

presumably have been the ‘Stadtkrone’ or city

crown discussed in his treatise on city planning of

1919,14 ‘postulated . . . as the universal paradigm

of all religious building, which together with thefaith it would inspire was an essential urban

element for the restructuring of society’.15 For

Gropius, this was to become the ‘Cathedral of the

Future’ to be built by the Bauhaus. In either case,

it was seen clearly as an operative symbol, a symbol

which, by virtue of being built, would bring about

the redemption of society. The redemption implicit

in Christian eschatology, which allows for a rela-

tionship between lived time and eternity, is

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The Bauhaus as

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replaced in these aspirations with an imperative,

apparently realizeable goal.

At the same time as the call for the immediate

collaboration on this utopian project, in April 1919,Gropius obtained the agreement of the Weimar

government to change the name of the Academy

of Art to the Bauhaus. The historicist example of

the Medieval lodge has been reinterpreted as a

house, less nostalgic than the ‘hütte’, but more of

a real place where the lives of the people impor-

tant to the new society could be carried out. The

rst Bauhaus programme was produced in the

same month, its title page a woodcut by Feininger

of a crystalline cathedral (Fig. 1). In the introduc-

tion to the programme, a manifesto of the aimsof the School, the more conservative views of the

reformers of art education are brought together

with the utopian ideals of ‘Arbeitsrat’:

‘The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete

building! To embellish the building was once the

noblest function of the ne arts; they were the

indispensable components of great architecture.

Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they

can be rescued only through the conscious, coop-

erative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, paintersand sculptors must recognize anew and learn to

grasp the composite character of a building both

as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then

will their work be imbued with the architectonic

spirit which it has lost as ‘salon art’ . . .

For art is not a ‘profession’. There is no essen-

tial difference between the artist and the craftsman.

The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments

of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of

his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work

to blossom into art. But prociency in a craft is

essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime

source of creative imagination. Let us then create a

new guild of craftsmen without the class distinc-

tions that raise an arrogant barrier between crafts-

man and artist! Together let us desire, conceive and

create the new structure of the future, which will

Figure 1. Illustra

the Manifesto and

Programme of the

Bauhaus, 1919. Ly

Feininger, woodcu(Resource collectio

the Getty Center f

History of Art and

Humanities. © DA

1992.)

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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.’16

The desire for the ‘complete building’ implies a

hope that architecture might once again become

the ‘mother’ of the arts, traditionally relying on an

understanding which associates architecture with

the articulation of the daily practice of human

life.17 For Gropius, this association is to be made

operative and explicit. Architecture, or ‘the new

structure of the future’, is to be created in order

to provide the necessary conditions for this life; its

completeness is essential to bring about the per-fection of the carrying out of human existence.

The emphasis on the ‘complete’ is reminiscent of

Hegel’s demand that unity or wholeness should be

understood as man’s ultimate spiritual experience.18

‘The true is whole’, he writes, ‘but the whole is

only the essence that perfects itself in the course

of its development’.19 The truth or perfection of

something whole emulates the perfection of the

cosmos, which, as Plato says, one cannot conceive

of as being incomplete.20 For Hegel or for Gropius,

it is the creative spirit of man which is expectedto achieve such completeness.

The Bauhaus programme itself, though, makes

no mention of architecture, which did not appear

on the curriculum until 1927. The ‘complete build-

ing’ was to be achieved initially through the idea of

the ‘Einheitskunstwerk’, the combined or unied

work of art which would be ‘imbued with archi-

tectonic spirit’. Again, the other founders of the

‘Arbeitsrat’ were more specic about the meaning

of this. Adolf Behne, referring to Wagner’s concep-

tion of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, hopes to extend

Wagner’s ideal to include not simply the construc-

tion of ‘an occasional building supplied with wallpaintings by a painter and portal sculptures by a

sculptor’21 but ‘an inner transformation of all art .

. . a mutual drawing together’ of the arts to create

‘an artistic cosmos from the artistic chaos of our

day’.22 This synthesis is to be brought about by a

common basis or spirit for the arts as the expres-

sion of an immutable essence, which Behne terms

‘cubist’ or ‘architectonic’.23 It is then the ‘crystal

symbol’ which can perform the alchemical trans-

formation of art, an almost immaterial structure

obeying once again the ‘organic’ laws of theunpolluted essence of the artistic cosmos.24

The rst year of the Bauhaus was a turbulent

one. There was considerable opposition to the

new school from the people of Weimar, ranging

from those who found the students bizarre

and unapproachable to those who accused it of

‘artistic dictatorship’.25 One by one, the professors

from the earlier Academy of Art found that their

teaching methods and those of the Bauhaus

could not co-exist, until the government even-

tually re-opened the former school as a separateinstitution. Gropius himself was worried that the

work produced by Bauhaus students, while en-

thusiastic, showed little direction. In October 1920,

a series of compulsory theory courses were in-

troduced, dominated by Johannes Itten’s new

‘Vorkurs’, which each student was expected to

attend for six months before choosing the work-

shop in which he or she would become an ‘appren-

tice’.

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Itten described the ‘Vorkurs’ in a printed state-

ment which accompanied the exhibition of Spring

1922. Its aims were:

‘to free the student’s creative powers, in part by

disencumbering him of that prior learning which

would inhibit or prejudice his own solution to an

artistic problem, and to develop the student’s

artistic abilities by a three-fold training of the mind,

senses and emotions.’26

In Itten’s teaching, the idea that the student’s

‘creative powers’ might be freed, and that prior

learning was an encumbrance, had its roots in

the reform of child education of Montessori andFröbel. Their intentions, summarized by Francis-

cono, were to ‘by-pass the intellect in order to

reach . . . [the] natural, inlearned creative center’.27

The relationship of such reforms to art had been

discussed at a conference on art education in

Dresden as early as 1901, attended by a number

of the future members of the Deutsche Werkbund.

Speaking at the conference, a Hamburg teacher,

R. Ross, began by claiming that ‘the essential

conditions for the enjoyment of art are already

present in the soul of the small child’;28 througha free activity of self-learning, ‘the psycholog-

ical processes of what is usually called “empathy”

– the lending of one’s personality’,29 could be

observed.

Itten’s process of freeing the student’s natural

abilities was similarly seen to depend on rediscov-

ering his psychological empathy30 with whatever it

was he was being asked to communicate or repre-

sent. This might be a human gure, a material,

texture or shape, an emotion-laden subject such

as war or a storm, or a relationship of contrasts.31

Both the artwork and its creator then become

simply ‘intermediar[ies] in an act of transference. . . between the original subject or concept, and

the viewer’.32 In Itten’s own words, ‘to experience

a work of art is to re-create it. Because, intellec-

tually speaking, there is no great difference

between a person who experiences a work of art

and a person who outwardly represents an expe-

rienced form in a work’.33

Through empathy, the artist or the person expe-

riencing the work of art is expected to make direct

contact with the essence or idea of the form as

the ultimate and genuine reality; the way in whichit is embodied is only relevant as a vehicle to repre-

sent this reality.34

For Itten, art is the ‘spiritually emotional vibra-

tory power’.35 ‘Everything reveals itself through

movement. Everything reveals itself in forms. Thus

all form is movement and all movements the

essence of form’.36

He describes form as the result of three ‘grades’

of human movement, the physical, the emotional

and the intellectual or spiritual, each of which

we empathetically make when we experiencesomething, re-create it as art and re-experience

it through the work of art. Form, ‘gestalt’, is not

primarily concerned with the outward manifest-

ation of that thing, but its forming, creative

power.37

Itten left the Bauhaus in the Spring of 1922

after a series of disagreements with Gropius

which centred on Itten’s refusal to compromise

his emphasis on expressive rather than practical

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achievements.38 The ‘Vorkurs’ was taken over by

Moholy-Nagy. Itten’s inuence during the early

years of the School, though, was tremendous, and

by no means limited to the ‘Vorkurs’; the work-shops each had a ‘Master of Form’ as well as a

‘Master Craftsman’, and until Schlemmer and Klee

joined the Bauhaus in 1921, Itten acted as form

master to all but three of them. To some extent,

Gropius’ arguments with Itten were the result of

pressures from outside the School. Itten’s enthu-

siasm for Mazdaznan, a Western version of an

oriental cult which, beyond stressing the mystical

afnities between subject and object, spirit and

matter, encouraged its adherents to shave their

heads and eat strangely prepared vegetarian food,spread to a number of his students; this only

encouraged the inhabitants of Weimar to see them

as alien and odd. The work produced on the

‘Vorkurs’, where the stress was laid on the forming

rather than the external appearance of what was

nally formed, was often crudely made from rough

materials, leading people to question its validity.

The objects from the workshops controlled by Itten

were similarly simply made, decorated with primi-

tive patterns. In a circular to the Bauhaus Masters,

Gropius defended them by claiming that:

‘The Bauhaus has made a start in breaking with

the usual academic training of artists to be “little

Raphaels” and pattern designers, and has sought

to bring back to the people those creative talents

who have ed the artistic working life, to their

own and the people’s detriment . . . To do this, it

was necessary to rebuild from the very roots in

order to have a chance to be able to give back to

the present generation the correct feeling for the

interrelation of practical work and problems of

form. Genuine crafts also have had to be reborn

in order to make intelligible to our youth, throughhandwork, the nature of creative work.’39

In the same circular, though, Gropius insisted that

the Bauhaus should not become a ‘haven for

eccentrics’,40 and that it was essential that it should

begin to strengthen its links with industry and the

outside world.

In Gropius’ view, the School had to avoid

animosity by opening itself up to this outside

world. The International Exhibition of 1923 was

organized with this in mind, despite the concernof a number of the masters who felt that it simply

was not ready to open itself up to public scrutiny.

The exhibition lasted throughout the summer,

showing work from the ‘Vorkurs’ and the work-

shops at the same time as an international exhi-

bition of architecture. It began with ‘Bauhaus

Week’, a week of festivities, stage performances

and lectures prepared by the school.

The stage workshops had been part of the

Bauhaus since its inception. From 1921, they were

run by Lothar Schreyer, whose view of theatre wasalmost exclusively expressionistic; it was because

he could not accept that the performances for the

1923 exhibition should be xed and rehearsed that

Oskar Schlemmer was asked to take over. The

change from Schreyer to Schlemmer was similar to

that from Itten to Moholy-Nagy, from an empa-

thetic understanding which attempted to make

direct contact with a universal creative or forming

power to an understanding of that power which

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Diana Periton



was specic to the medium being formed. For

Moholy-Nagy and the ‘Vorkurs’, this meant placing

the emphasis on the disposition of objects in space,

looking at them in terms of weight displacementand balance. In Schlemmer’s theatre, the aim was

to study the relationship of man, ‘the human

organism’,41 standing within the ‘cubical, abstract

space of the stage’.42 Theatre itself is ‘representa-

tion, abstracted from the natural and directing its

effect at the human being’,47 where abstraction

functions ‘on the one hand to disconnect compo-

nents from an existing and positing whole, either

to lead them individually ad absurdum or to elevate

them to their greatest potential. On the other

hand, abstraction can result in generalization andsummation, in the construction of a bold outline

of a new totality’.44

The importance of the Bauhaus stage, then, was

its ability to create this ‘bold outline of a new total-

ity’, a new reality, and to do this by responding to

the creative forces of space and of the human

gure. ‘The laws of cubical space,’ Schlemmer

writes, ‘are the visible, linear network of planimet-

ric and stereometric relationships . . . The laws of

organic man . . . reside in the invisible functions of

his inner self: heartbeat, circulation, respiration, theactivities of the brain and nervous system . . .’45

Schlemmer’s ‘man’ is explicitly understood as a

‘cosmic being’, with formal, biological and philo-

sophical properties.46 Man as dancer, ‘Tänzer-

mensch’, ‘obeys the law of the body as well as the

law of space; he follows his sense of himself as well

as his sense of embracing space’.47 By wearing cos-

tumes which ‘re-group the various and diffuse parts

of the body into a simple, unied form’48, its

response to the surrounding space, to its own laws

or to the laws of its motion in space can be empha-

sized. Its ‘philosophical properties’, its need to cre-

ate meaning, can be discovered and demonstratedusing ‘metaphysical forms of expression . . . The star

shape of the spread hand, the ¥ sign of the folded

arms, the cross shape of the backbone’.49

Two performances were rehearsed for ‘Bauhaus

Week’ in 1923, the ‘Triadic Ballet’ and the ‘Figural

Cabinet’. The ‘Triadic Ballet’ (Fig. 2) consisted of

three parts developing from the humorous to the

serious, a gay burlesque, a ceremonious, solemn

piece and a mystical fantasy, labelled as the yellow

series, the rose series and the black series. The

introduction to the ‘Figural Cabinet’ described itas: ‘half shooting gallery, half metaphysicum

abstractum. Medley, i.e. variety of sense and non-

sense, methodized by Color, Form, Nature and Art;

Man and Machine, Acoustics and Mechanics.

Organization is everything; the most heteroge-

neous is the hardest to organize’.50

Gropius’ draft for the leaet advertising the

work of the Bauhaus stage saw it as deriving

from:

‘an ardent desire of the human soul [where] theater= show for the gods. It serves, then, to manifest a

transcendental idea. The power of its effect on the

soul of the spectator and auditor is therefore depen-

dent on the success of the transformation of the

idea into (visually and acoustically) perceivable space

. . . To be capable of creating moving, living, artistic

space requires a person whose knowledge and abil-

ities respond to all the natural laws of statics,

mechanics, optics and acoustics and who, having

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command of all these elds of knowledge, ndssovereign means of giving body and life to the

idea which he bears within himself . . . .’51

If the soul is seen as something exclusively human,

unlike the Platonic soul which goes beyond human-

ness by partaking of the world-soul, its ‘ardent

desire’ demonstrates a ‘transcendental idea’ which

has also become a human concept. It is the idea

which the actor or dancer ‘bears within himself’.

With enough knowledge of the non-human prop-erties of statics, mechanics, optics and acoustics,

the ‘Tänzermensch’ can discover the universal laws

of these things and learn to appropriate them.52

Only in this way can the ‘transcendental idea’ be

made concrete and accessible in space created by

the performer.

Schlemmer describes the theatre as one of the

elds in which the programme of the Bauhaus is

made particularly clear:

ure 2. Plan for the

Triadic Ballet. Oskar

lemmer, pencil, ink,

tercolour and gouache,

24–6. © Ramanlemmer Photoarchiv.

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‘It is natural that the aims of the Bauhaus – to

seek the union of the artistic-ideal with the crafts-

manlike-practical by thoroughly investigating the

creative elements, and to understand in all its rami-cations the essence of der Bau, creative construc-

tion – have valid application in the eld of the

theater. For, like the concept of Bau itself, the stage

is an orchestral complex which comes about only

through the cooperation of many different forces.

It is the union of the most heterogeneous assort-

ment of creative elements. Not the least of its func-

tions is to serve the metaphysical needs of man by

constructing a world of illusion and by creating the

transcendental on the basis of the rational.’53

For Schlemmer, as for Gropius, the transcendental

is something which, rather than going beyond the

human, can actually be created through human

endeavour.

One of the clearest and most literal examples of

‘der Bau’ was the experimental house, the ‘Haus

am Horn’, which was built especially for the exhi-

bition (Fig. 3). Georg Muche, an adherent of Itten,

who by 1923 was form master of the weaving

workshop, was chosen by the students to design

the house. Not unlike Tony Garnier’s houses for‘Cité Industrielle’, it was a ‘Roman house’ built

around a central ‘atrium’ or living room. The rooms

surrounding the atrium were each allotted specic

functions, designed to accommodate specic indi-

viduals (Fig. 4). The living room itself, intended to

bring the whole family together, rose above the rest

of the building to allow for clerestory windows. At

the time, it was hailed as a new ‘type of design . .

. which organically unites several small rooms

around a large one, thus bringing about a complete

change in form as well as in manner of living’.54

Its construction, carried out by Bauhaus students,

was supervised by Adolf Meyer, Gropius’ partner

from his architectural ofce. Building was made

particularly difcult by the rampant ination

suffered by Germany in the early 1920s, somethingwhich Schlemmer saw as instrumental in changing

the direction of the School:

‘. . . Originally the Bauhaus was founded with

visions of erecting the cathedral or the church of

socialism, and the workshops were established in

the manner of the cathedral building lodges . . .

The idea of the cathedral has for the time being

receded into the background and with it certain

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Figure 3. Postca

advertising the 19

Bauhaus Exhibition

Gerhard Marcks, w

From Hans M. Win(ed.) ‘The Bauhaus

(MIT, 1978).



denite ideas of an artistic nature. Today we must

think at best in terms of a house . . . a house ofthe simplest kind. Perhaps, in the face of the

economic plight, it is our task to become pioneers

of simplicity, that is, to nd a simple form for all

of life’s necessities which at the same time is

respectable and genuine . . . .’55

The economic climate was encouraging an attitude

which looked for the simplest and cheapest way

of making the necessities of life available to

everyone, but the ideals which lay behind the

necessities had not changed. One of the postcards

designed to advertize the exhibition was a woodcut

designed by Gerhard Marcks, presenting the exper-imental house as a model, held between cupped

hands, alluding to the models of cities presented

to God’s representatives in Medieval paintings (Fig.

3). The cathedral of socialism, of the future, has

here been replaced with a much more introverted

‘temple’ to the individual, culminating in the totally

internal living room, where a complete and perfect

existence can be built up through the use and

arrangement of complete and perfect artefacts.

It is through the works of the Bauhaus stage

and the experimental house that the status of theBauhaus as a cultural paradigm seems particularly

clear. The theatre was the place where an illu-

sionistic ideal could be most thoroughly presented.

In Gropius’ own proposal for the ‘Total Theatre’, a

project for the Berlin theatre director Erwin Piscator

in 1927, the stage, tted with the most up-to-date

equipment for manipulating space through the

projection of light and sound, was to be placed in

the middle of the audience. Gropius’ attempt was

to achieve a ‘unity of the scene of action and the

spectator’,56 the ‘mobilization of all three-dimen-sional means to shake off the audience’s . . .

apathy, to overwhelm them, stun them, and force

them to participate in experiencing the play’.57 The

totality of the theatre is an ideal, a reality or truth

which is ‘not found but created’,58 it is not a ‘tran-

scendental idea’ which exists a priori , but some-

thing which can and has to be actively constructed.

The theatre then becomes ‘the metaphor of man

creating his own reality’.59

ure 4. Lady’s bedroom

m the Haus am Horn,

23. (Courtesy of

haus-Archiv, Berlin.)

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The house, too, is a version of an actively

produced totality of culture. From the legitimate

concern of attempting to provide millions of people

with their basic needs, the emphasis imposed bythe Bauhaus is on the perfection that can be

brought to those millions. By presenting the house

and its products as an image of the ‘truth’ of living,

of attainable perfection, and also as something

which can be mass produced by industrial means,

the message seems to be that redemption through

these artefacts is available to all. By a thorough

knowledge of the ‘biological, physical and spiri-

tual’60 properties of man and his surroundings, a

knowledge of the ergonomic, the scientic and the

aesthetic, such redemption can be assured.This redemption rests on the assumption that

the necessities of life, or culture, can be both iden-

tied and brought to perfection, that it is possible

to produce culture as a paradigm. Anything which

cannot be so identied is left to the intuition or

genius of the artist, to be made perfect by an inde-

nable ‘leap of faith’. Such an attempt was not

exclusive to the Bauhaus; its aims, though, whether

through the analogies with the Medieval commu-

nities of the ‘Bauhütten’ or the rareed research

‘laboratories’ for the perfect product once theschool had moved to Dessau, are made particu-

larly explicit. Schlemmer, quoting Goethe, is clear

that it is such a paradigm which the Bauhaus

should both aspire to be and to create beyond its

own boundaries:

‘If the hopes materialize that men, with all their

strength, with heart and mind, with understanding

and love, will join together and become conscious

of each other, then what no man can yet imagine

will occur – Allah will no longer need to create,

we will create his world.’61

Through such an enterprise, the search for a ‘tran-

scendental idea’ which can be guaranteed by a

culture made available to all is reduced to visual

consistency and practicality, made simply general

rather than universal.

Notes and references

1. Oskar Schlemmer, Manifesto from the Publicity

Pamphlet ‘The First Bauhaus Exhibition in

Weimar, July to September 1923’. The Councilof Masters at the Bauhaus attempted to

destroy the part of the pamphlet containing

this manifesto, feeling that the allusion to the

‘cathedral of socialism’ would lead to political

misinterpretation. However, a few complete

copies of the pamphlet did reach the public,

and caused the expected vehement attacks

against the alleged political leanings of the

Bauhaus. Translated by Wolfgang Jabs and

Basil Gilbert in Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus

(MIT, 1980).2. Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed

(London, 1985), p. 15.

3. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: a

critical history (London, 1985), p. 123.

4. Wilhelm von Bode, from the Berlin newspaper

Die Woche (April 1, 1916), in Hans M. Wingler,

op.cit.

5. Walter Gropius, paper sent to Grand Ducal

Saxon State Ministry in Weimar in January

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1916, in response to its request to ‘supplement

his statement concerning architectural educa-

tion in the art academy by an explanation of

the kind of inuence the crafts would receivefrom the artistic side and from the giving of

instruction in handicrafts’, ibid.

6. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy ,

translated by Michael M. Bullock (London,

1953), p. 9. Worringer’s book was rst

published in German in 1908. It is com-

menting on Riegl’s Stilfragen, which appeared

in 1893, and his Spätrömische Kunstindustrie

of 1901. Marcel Franciscono, The Creation of

the Bauhaus in Weimar (Chicago, 1971), cites

notes from a speech from 1918–19 in whichGropius clearly mentions Riegl. Franciscono

comes close to describing the Bauhaus as a

paradigm, referring to it as ‘the very instru-

ment of social and cultural regeneration’, but

his extremely thorough and useful account

of its early years does not, in the end, explain

how it might actually be expected to work as

such an instrument, and does not attempt a

critical exploration of this goal.

7. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

(London, 1979), pp. 39–41: ‘When Kant . . .calls taste the true sensus communis, he is no

longer considering the great moral and political

tradition of the concept of sensus communis

. . . Rather, he sees this idea as comprising two

elements: rst, the universality of taste inas-

much as it is the result of the free play of all

our cognitive powers and is not limited to a

specic area like an external sense, secondly

the communal quality of taste, inasmuch as,

according to Kant, it abstracts from all such

subjective, private conditions as attractiveness

and emotion. Thus the universality of this

‘sense’ is negatively determined in both itsaspects by that from which something is

abstracted, and not positively by what grounds

communicability and creates community’.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

(London, 1961).

9. Walter Gropius, paper sent to Grand Ducal

Saxon State Ministry in Weimar in January

1916, in Hans M. Wingler, op.cit. This trans-

lation is taken from Georg Germann Gothic

Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources,

Inuences and Ideas (London, 1972).10. August Reichensperger, speech recorded in the

Kölner Domblatt (1.12.1850), translated by

Georg Germann, op.cit.

11. Franciscono, op.cit., p. 113. He goes on

to mention Novalis’ concept of the mission

of poetry to achieve a golden age in which

world and spirit will at last be united, of poetry’s

original function to ‘reveal within the world that

which is beyond it . . .’, and Friedrich Schlegel’s

statement that ‘it is time that all artists joined

together as sworn artists in eternal alliance’ tocreate a ‘community of the holy’.

12. Werner Hofmann, Das irdische Paradies: Kunst

im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Munich, 1960),

quoted in Gabriele Häusler, ‘In the Artwork

we become one . . .’ (unpublished M. Phil.

Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1989).

13. Published, among other places, in Der Cicerone

(Berlin, April 1919), quoted in Franciscono,

op.cit., p. 145.

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The Bauhaus as

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14. Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone (Jena, 1919), with

contributions from Paul Scheerbart, Erich Baron

and Adolf Behne.

15. Kenneth Frampton, op.cit.16. Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto of April

1919, translated in Hans M. Wingler, op.cit.

17. The word ‘architecture’ proposes itself as the

chief or ruling principle of ‘techne’, in Latin,

‘ars’. Alberti, in his preface to The Ten Books

of Architecture, translated by James Leoni

(London, 1755), writes: ‘But if you take a view

of the whole Circle of Arts, you shall hardly

nd one but what, despising all others, regards

and seeks only its own particular Ends: Or if

you do meet with any of such a Nature thatyou can in no wise do without it, and which

yet brings along with it Prot at the same Time,

conjoined with Pleasure and Honour, you will,

I believe, be convinced that Architecture is not

to be excluded from that Number. For it is

certain, if you examine the matter carefully, it

is inexpressibly delightful, and of the greatest

Convenience to Mankind in all respects, both

publick and private; and in Dignity not inferior

to the most Excellent’.

18. As put forward in his lectures on aesthetics,see G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics – Lectures on

Fine Art , translated by T.M. Knox (Oxford,

1975).

19. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the

Spirit , translated in Gabriele Häusler, op.cit.

20. ‘For god’s purpose was to use as his model

the highest and most completely perfect of

intelligible things, and so he created a single

visible living being . . .’. Plato, “Timaeus”, 31,

in Timaeus and Critias, translated by Desmond

Lee (London, 1965).

21. Adolf Behne, Die Wiederkehr der Künst

(Leipzig, 1919), translated in Franciscono,op.cit., p. 115.

22. ibid.

23. ibid.

24. ‘Where do the artistic forces become manifest?

Surely in the crystal, . . . the diamond, reect-

ing the virtues of a world which does not

yet exist’, Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra,

op.cit. Zarathustra himself is addressed as

‘the stone of wisdom’. Gabriele Häusler, op.cit.,

describes the opening ceremony of the Darm-

stadt exhibition of 1901, devised by GeorgFuchs and Gropius’ former employer Peter

Behrens, which involved the presentation of a

huge diamond.

25. Dr Emil Herfurth, spokesman of the ‘Citizen’s

Committee’, built up mainly from members of

the National People’s Party, in a pamphle

printed in February 1920, from Hans M.

Wingler, op.cit.

26. Franciscono, op.cit., p. 180.

27. ibid., p. 181.

28. R. Ross, quoted in ibid., p. 182.29. ibid.

30. The idea of ‘empathy’ was by this time

common currency in aesthetic theory. In

Abstraction and Empathy , op.cit., p. 4,

Worringer writes: ‘Modern aesthetics, which

has taken the decisive step from aesthetic

objectivism to aesthetic subjectivism, i.e. which

no longer takes the aesthetic as the starting

point of its investigations, but proceeds from

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the behaviour of the contemplating subject,

culminates in a doctrine that may be charac-

terized by the broad general name of theory

of empathy’.31. Some of the courses started with warming up

exercises, breathing and relaxation, ‘the rapid

drawing of simple rhythmical strokes, spirals

and circles, . . . as a means of “training the

machine for emotional functioning” ’. Francis-

cono, op.cit., p. 178, is quoting Klee’s amuse-

ment.

32. Franciscono, op.cit., p. 191.

33. Johannes Itten, Analysen der Meister , originally

published in Utopia: Documents of Reality

(Weimar, 1921), translated in Hans M. Wingler,op.cit.

34. The insignicance of the viewer except as

‘experiencing subject’ is emphasized by

Theodor Lipps, quoted in Worringer, op.cit.: ‘In

empathy, . . . I am not the real I, but am

inwardly liberated from the latter, i.e. I am

liberated from everything which I am apart

from contemplation of the form. I am only this

ideal, this contemplating I’.

35. Itten, op.cit., quoted in Franciscono, op.cit. p.

191.36. ibid.

37. In Oskar Schlemmer, The Theatre of the

Bauhaus, translated by Arthur S. Wensinger

(Wesleyan University Press, 1961), T. Lux

Feininger, who was a student at the Bauhaus,

is quoted as saying: ‘. . . the term “Gestaltung”

is old, meaningful and so nearly untranslate-

able that it has found its way into English

usage. Beyond the signicance of shaping,

forming, thinking through, it has the avor of

underlining the totality of such fashioning,

whether of an artifact or of an idea. It forbids

the nebulous and the diffuse. In its fullestphilosophical meaning it expresses the pla-

tonic “eidolon”, the “Urbild”, the pre-existing

form’.

38. Again, it is probably Franciscono, op.cit., who

explains the gradual disintegration of the rela-

tionship between Gropius and Itten most

clearly.

39. Walter Gropius, ‘The Validity of the Bauhaus

Idea’, a circular distributed to the Bauhaus

Masters in February 1922, translated in Hans

M. Wingler, op.cit.40. ibid.

41. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man as Art Figure’, in

Arthur S. Wensinger, op.cit.

42. ibid.

43. ibid.

44. ibid.

45. ibid.

46. Oskar Schlemmer, Man, from the notes for his

course on man given in Dessau, 1928–9, trans-

lated by James Seligman (London, 1971).

47. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man as Art Figure’, op.cit.48. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Theatre’, a lecture/demon-

stration delivered in Dessau in 1927, translated

by Arthur S. Wensinger, op.cit.

49. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man as Art Figure’, op.cit.

50. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘The Figural Cabinet’, trans-

lated by Arthur S. Wensinger, op.cit.

51. Walter Gropius, draft leaet on the work of

the Bauhaus Stage, 1923, translated in Hans

M. Wingler, op.cit.

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52. Gadamer, op.cit., pp. 14–15, describes this in

terms of Hegel’s understanding of ‘Bildung’:

‘Theoretical Bildung goes beyond what man

knows and experiences immediately. It consistsin learning to allow what is different from

oneself and to nd universal viewpoints from

which one can grasp the thing . . . To seek

one’s own in the alien, to become at home in

it, is the basic movement of the spirit, whose

being is only to return to itself from what is

other . . .’.

53. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Theatre’, op.cit.

54. Dr Erwin Redslob, art adviser to the Weimar

Republic, writing about the ‘Haus am Horn’

in The Bauhaus: Masters and Students by

Themselves, translated by F. Whitford (London,

1992).

55. Oskar Schlemmer, from a report on the work-

shops for wood and stone, November 1922,translated in Hans M. Wingler, op.cit.

56. Walter Gropius, quoted from ‘Convegno di

lettere’, in the journal of Reale Accademia

d’Italia (Rome, 1935), translated in Hans M.

Wingler, op.cit.

57. ibid.

58. Nietzsche, op.cit.

59. Gabriele Häusler, op.cit.

60. Schlemmer’s categories of ‘cosmic man’, in

Man, op.cit.

61. Goethe, quoted by Oskar Schlemmer, ibid.

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