(10 minute read)
Through the life of the Bauhaus school, from 1919-1933, three directors constantly fought to find balance between tense politics, the status of art and of craft, and the necessity for new production methods. This essay seeks to investigate the directorship of the last 5 years before the school’s closure, and the relationship that these Bauhaus directors had with the school, contemporary German building style, and Bauhaus as an architectural theory.
The Bauhaus was founded through the assimilation of two previously separated schools – the Weimar Academy of Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts – with 3 main aims: to integrate the arts, to give crafts the same status held by the arts, and to create links between craft and industry. By directly connecting and involving craftsmanship with industry, the Bauhaus sought to modernise craft in line with rapidly changing production methods. It was an attempt to secure a future for craftspeople in a world prioritising affordability and profitability under capitalism (Borra, 2013).
The school’s contention with fascism existed because, in its integration of arts and crafts, the Bauhaus marked a dismantling of the untouchable upper-class artist, a prestigious role historically reserved for elite wealthy men (Willette, 2020). The existing social hierarchies were relied upon by the fascism regime and the Bauhaus inherently jeopardized this.
Taking over from Walter Gropius, the founder of the school, Hannes Meyer began as director of The Bauhaus in 1928, after Gropius became unnerved by the threat of local politics to the school. The dichotomous political climate of Germany in the late 1920s between socialism and fascism was a key factor in Meyer’s termination from the school. Though, as an article by Forgács illustrates, it was potentially a culmination of polarising views, both political and generational, that lead to his termination instead (Forgács, 2010). During his brief term, he did, however, achieve academic success and improved the Bauhaus’ financial model, for the first time turning a profit for the school (Djalali, 2015) and demonstrating the profitability achievable with industry.
Following Meyer’s dismissal after just two years, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, at the recommendation of Walter Gropius, took over directorship of the school in 1930. He refocused the school from wide-reaching, humanistic views, towards a more individualistic, experiential understanding of architecture – much more palatable for the fascist governing forces that had become dissatisfied with Meyer. While this was able to placate politicians for a time, Mies closed the school in 1933 following further pressure from the Nazi regime. Despite Mies’ more acceptable political stance, the Bauhaus had retained its ‘radicalised student body’ (Bauhaus Kooperation, 2019) following Meyer’s tenure as director, and the school’s earlier placement in Dessau, which was controlled by National Socialists.
Meyer’s directorship was ‘always part of the politics of culture but never party politics’ (Meyer, 1930). He actively prevented the school becoming party to overt political discussion in the knowledge that his influence would be greater by using the school as a device for informal political dissemination. By acting upon the abstract communist concept of reclaiming the means of production, he realised his politics through the architecture he taught and practiced at the Bauhaus.
Feeling as though the Bauhaus had abandoned its people-focused design principles, Mayer adopted the slogan “the people’s needs instead of the need for luxury.” While the Bauhaus had begun to integrate craft and industry into the elitist world of art and architecture, under Gropius, the Bauhaus still carried a prestige through its production of expensive, hard to fabricate ‘modern objects’ that were ultimately still catering for an elite class (Saletnik and Schuldenfrei, 2009). Meyer’s reprioritisation of people and society within design was an attempt to pull the school away from the exclusivity and elitism still present in the manufacture and sale of Bauhaus products.
In stark contrast, Mies Van Der Rohe’s ubiquitous lavish materiality defies Meyer’s, and indeed the Bauhaus’, original ethos of equality between high-class art and industrial craftsmanship. While he advocated the notion of ‘less is more,’ he maintained his high-cost projects for high-profile clients, and returned the school to the exclusive, intensely artistic Bauhaus products it created under Gropius. It was a far cry from the collectivist, socialist ideals that Meyer had tried to instil before him, and it was likely because of this that Mies was better received amongst fascist authority.
Mies practiced modern architecture with revolutionary concepts of spatial organisation. Alongside Lilly Reich, Mies produced several buildings that experimented with loose spatial divisions and used simplified planes to define organisation (Gudkova and Gudkova, 2017). This programmatic adaptivity was naturally adopted by his student body while teaching and allowed the Bauhaus principles to be reapplied in previously unexplored ways: industrial techniques that minimised visual structure allowed more fluid internal spaces.
Meyer experimented with spatial use in a similar manner, though more socially orientated, with Meyer instructing his students to “study life processes of the future users” (Bauhaus Kooperation, 2019). Meyer’s approach to the school’s original ethos therefore departed from the aesthetic idealism that Gropius had led with, and that Mies would later resume, and transitioned to a more pragmatic, utilitarian practice of design. This user-focused pragmatism naturally encouraged and employed the communistic ideals of efficiency and meeting needs of the many – it employed mass production.
In order to reach a stage of sustainable mass production, Bauhaus leaders had to be willing to compromise the status of ‘art’ that their designs had (Saletnik and Schuldenfrei, 2009). Only by removing this fashionable label that intrinsically tied it to exclusivity could successful mass-production be reached. Because of this, Meyer’s directorship finally brought about the realisation of the school’s programmatic declaration of fully integrated industry (Djalali, 2015).
Being born into relatively low economic standing, Mies frequently attempted to escape this past, changing his name, and exploring rich material choices. The importance of Mies’ materiality was highlighted in a transformative exhibition by Anna and Eugeni Bach who dematerialised the German Pavilion at Barcelona, covering all surfaces in a fine white skin (Werner 2017). He considered ‘material-spiritual unity’ as necessary to maintain separation between architecture and an ‘overly technological […] modern age’ (Colombo, 2017) which illustrates his tendency away from the Bauhaus’ integration of the two.
While Mies’ effects on students were architecturally profound, politically, there was little shift, and he did not have as much of a ‘calming effect’ on the school as Gropius had hoped he would. In part it was due to the well-established socialism of the Bauhaus’ ethos, from which Mies naturally diverged.
In 1928, shortly after starting as Bauhaus director, Meyer was commissioned by the city of Dessau to expand the Dessau-Törten housing estate. The settlement was created initially by Gropius as an experiment into affordable modern living and the expansion provided opportunity to test variations within a programme of high-density, low-cost modernist buildings. Meyer’s proposal presented mixed development, containing single-family houses as well as multi-story arcade apartments. The buildings did not engage with all of the typical modernist design characteristics that Gropius had used, such as the white plaster exterior finishes and ribbon windows. Instead, they were brick clad, and had typically proportioned openings, with exposed lintels that ran the length of the building. Handmade, precast concrete structural elements provided affordability, scope for mass-production, but most importantly involved craftspeople (Krämer, 2009).
From the comprehensive expansion plans, only five three-story arcade houses were constructed before Meyer’s dismissal. Their compact design provided an efficiency of material and construction that reduced costs, more so than Gropius’ two-story terraces already present on the site (Bauhaus Dessau, 2013). Meyer’s design still incorporated the flat roofed, columnar construction style that underpins early modern architecture, and with it, the modern life they were marketing to future residents. The success of the Dessau- Törten arcade houses lay in Meyer’s ability to compromise in such a way that significantly reduced costs, maintained craft involvement and still succeed in providing a modern living solution.
While the exact internal spatial layout of Meyer’s arcade apartments is unclear following subsequent renovations, the three-bedroom, 48m2 apartments were designed to fit a family of four (Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, 2021), more efficiently than Gropius’ 57, 70 and 74m2 terrace houses (Bauhaus Dessau, 2013). Meyer had already created a typology of sorts, the ‘Co-Op Interior’, that he published in the magazine Das Werk in 1928 which outlined a simplistic, modernist solution to domestic living. This prototype of internal domestic space had sparse and simplistic furnishing, and the items that were there were designed to achieve standardisation and uniformity. This was widely criticised for extreme economy (Aureli and Tattara, 2018).
This obsessive and Marxist dedication to mass-producibility and utilitarianism had begun to detract from the artistry associated with architecture and art. Meyer had heavily relied on industry and craft, but the integration between the two that underpinned the Bauhaus ethos was lost in an absolute pursuit of production scale.
For the Barcelona World Exposition in 1929, Mies Van Der Rohe and Lilly Reich were tasked with designing the German pavilion. Design began two years before Mies started as director of the Bauhaus and followed his design of modernist villas in the late 20s.
Beven describes the pavilion as essentially ‘purposeless,’ with the primary intention to grant pleasure and encourage mindfulness (Bevan, 2015). The German Pavilion at Barcelona articulates this perfectly, through its largely undefined function, loose separation of space and sparse furnishing of exhibits. The materiality then provides the luxury, with walls clad in marble and onyx, the exterior wall and floor in roman travertine, and use of colour-tinted glazing. This is perhaps the best example of Mies reliance on materiality to create experience.
Here we see Mies continue his more spatially focused modernist concepts that he had begun to explore in his villas, using slender chrome-clad cruciform columns. This scheme allowed the walls simply to serve as loose divisions of places, with a general ‘dissolution of inner space in the outer space’ (Gudkova and Gudkova, 2017). These column elements are the primary involvement of industry within the overwhelmingly artistic design of the German Pavilion at Barcelona, though the chrome finish firmly grounds this industrial structure within the self-conscious, artistic side of craft.
While it is true that this expression of industrialism both demonstrates Bauhaus characteristics as well as scope for mass-production, in truth, the chrome-cladding and other material choices make the design concepts of the pavilion too expensive to practically reproduce this on a wider scale. It is a theme of artistry over practicality that plagues Mies’ ability to fully realise Bauhaus principles in his own design of German architecture.
While the two buildings were catering to very different requirements, this in itself reflects the difference in architectural approaches to the German Bauhaus style that the two directors had. Mies produced more artistic, sculptural buildings with rich materiality, while Meyer remained grounded in utilitarian buildings such as social housing initiatives. Mies’ definition and implementation of Bauhaus principles to German building design was solely to bring industrial techniques into the architectural process, not to fully intertwine and give them equal standing. Conversely, Meyer allowed industrial concerns to consume the architectural qualities of his designs beyond a point of humanistic, experiential consideration. His proposals for the Dessau-Törten expansion embodied the Bauhaus principle of engaging with craft and industry but it was at the expense of providing user comfort within modern living.
Mies’ reluctancy to relinquish the high-end artistic status of his work ultimately caused the failure of the Bauhaus long before it closed in 1933. It was a failure to fully realise the Bauhaus’ aims where lavish comfort provided entirely no scope for mass-production or consideration of those in lower economic standing. Meyer, however, had caused the student body to become irrevocably radicalised to a point where their politics threatened the school’s existence.
The directors Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies Van De Rohe found themselves at two ends of a polarising spectrum, each taking a key element of the Bauhaus principles and creating exemplar works within it. Mies’ fixation on prestige and luxury, and Meyer’s on mass- production, prevented either from reaching the full objective of the Bauhaus which was the integration of the two. As such, both were unsuccessful in striking a balance between the emergent need for affordability and mass-production in the wake of WWI, and comfortable, well-rationed modern design. While there is no doubt that the political landscape of Germany from 1928 to 1933 played a significant role in the failure of the Bauhaus as an institution, it was in a large part due to the later directors’ architectural ideals that caused the failed execution of Bauhaus as a unifying principle of design.
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Laurence Łucasz 