Mind the design.
Hays, K. Michael
If the legacy of modernism has emerged in recent years as the
central preoccupation of contemporary art and architecture, interest in
the Bauhaus and its key proponents has only intensified. Accordingly, as
the storied design school celebrates the ninetieth anniversary of its
founding in Weimar, Germany, an impressive array of retrospective
exhibitions has been mounted this year in Europe and the United States,
including "The Bauhaus Comes from Weimar" at five Weimar
institutions (April 1-July 5), "Marcel Breuer: Design and
Architecture" at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence
(April 17-July 19), "Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model" at the
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (July 22-October 4), and "Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy" at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (October 8,
2009-February 7, 2010). Looking ahead to the Museum of Modern Art's
major survey "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,"
which opens in New York on November 8, Artforum asked architectural
historian K. Michael Hays to consider what more the Bauhaus might have
to offer after nearly a century of unprecedented influence in virtually
every field of art and design.
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PRESENT QUESTIONS ABOUT MODERNISM end up being philosophically akin
to questions about the self: How does who I am now relate to who I was
before, and how do I know whether I can apply the same interpretations
and appraisals to the different conditions? What does the consciousness
mean, as William James asked, "when it calls the present self the
same with one of the past selves which it has in mind"? As in
thinking about the self, we do not consider the present to be simply and
inevitably a continuation of the past, a past that in turn functions
only to provide assurance of ongoing identity. The present is, rather, a
condition precipitated through the actualization of multiple connections
among contingent events of all sorts, which have released new powers to
act in ways different from before. As in thinking about the self, so
with modernism do we face the necessary contradiction that, in order for
it to be relevant for us in the present, we must grasp it as
irretrievably past. Modernism is our legacy, an inaugural event we need
to construct and represent as different precisely in order to move
forward on its terms, insisting on its lost time if we are to hope for
any of our inheritance at all.
In the fields of modern architecture and design, questions about
the Bauhaus bring this contradiction into a focus as sharp as the
cantilevered glass corner of the famous workshop wing in Dessau. For the
influence of the Bauhaus has been intense and extraordinarily long
lasting. Adolf Behne, an architecture critic of the period, noted early
on that the primary features of the Bauhaus's success were
international marketing and avant-garde star power; by 1923, its faculty
roster included figures like Josef Albers, Johannes Itten, Wassily
Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Oskar Schlemmer.
Architecture historians like Henry Russell Hitchcock and Nikolaus
Pevsner canonized the school and its members. The 1938 exhibition
"Bauhaus: 1919-1928," at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,
did preparatory work for postwar America's assimilation of Bauhaus
stylistic ideals. But it was through the spread of its key educators to
design schools across the United States that its theories and techniques
were disseminated. Moholy took control of the New Bauhaus in Chicago;
Mies van der Rohe, the third and last head of the Bauhaus (1930-33),
founded a new program at the Armour Institute in Chicago (now the
Illinois Institute of Technology), where he was joined by Bauhaus
photographer Walter Peterhans; Ludwig Hilberseimer, who taught at the
Bauhaus from 1929 to 1933, went to the School of Industrial Design in
New York and later to IIT to teach regional planning; Albers and Xanti
Schawinsky introduced Bauhaus pedagogy at Black Mountain College in
North Carolina; and Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, who served as the
Bauhaus's director from its founding in 1919 until 1928, ended up
at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Meanwhile, in Germany, Max
Bill, a Bauhaus student, founded the Ulm School of Design, which
developed the tradition of the Bauhaus from 1953 to 1968. Many other
schools adopted some modified form of Bauhaus pedagogy, and many have
not fundamentally altered it to this day. No designer practicing in the
United States or Europe has escaped its aura. The Bauhaus is the Design
Self that oversees and authorizes all our designing selves. A
self-declared "summary of all that is contemporary," it
represents the original institutionalization of an avant-garde art
practice that is wholly integrated with the design, manufacture,
distribution, and marketing of the environments and equipment of daily
life--which would not be a bad characterization of our own present
design ideal.
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How, then, do we insist on the pastness of that venerable
institution? What are the terms of difference between the Bauhaus and
ourselves? The first is technology. Gropius's pedagogical principles with regard to technology were based on arguments of earlier
theorists like Gottfried Semper, who stressed the materials and
processes that determine forms of architecture and objects of daily use,
and Hermann Muthesius, who encouraged the use of standardized types in
domestic design. At the same time, however, Gropius gave full weight to
the pictorial accomplishments of contemporary international avant-garde
artists; indeed, seven of his first eight faculty appointments were
painters. Gropius sought to join two types of instruction seemingly at
odds--that of the Werkmeister (the skilled craftsman with a deep
understanding of materials, rigorously adhering to practical techniques)
and that of the Formmeister (the individual artist guiding form toward
invention). The famous Bauhaus Vorkurs, or preliminary course, was
devised to dissolve the distinction between these two masters under the
school slogan of 1923, "Art and Technology. A New Unity."
Painting presented a crucial paradox in Gropius's Bauhaus, for
it was the most theoretically accomplished of the arts, yet the most
recalcitrant to technological advance. It is symptomatic in these terms
that Gropius was so impressed with the example of Moholy-Nagy, who in
1924 showed at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin a series of "enamel
pictures executed by industrial methods," produced by dictating
instructions for the making of the pictures "to a head of a
coat-of-armsshop." "In 1922," Moholy writes, "I
ordered by telephone from a sign factory five paintings in porcelain
enamel. I had the factory's color chart before me and I sketched my
paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the telephone the factory
supervisor had the same kind of paper, divided into squares. He took
down the dictated shapes in the correct position." As a simple
metaphor for a supposed radically interventionary procedure and uniting
of art and technology, which Gropius hoped to realize practically in the
Bauhaus, this anecdote shows how remote design could in fact remain from
technology, and how far the Bauhaus ideology was from a real sublation of traditional art. The meaning of this example, which even contemporary
critics recognized as "Constructivism remade as applied art,"
is subtly different from a seemingly similar text published by Hans Arp
and El Lissitzky in their primer on modern art, Die Kunstismen (The Isms
of Art, 1925): "With the increasing frequency of the square in
painting, the art institutions have offered everybody the means to make
art. Now the production of art has been simplified to such an extent
that one can do no better than order one's paintings by telephone
from a house painter while one is lying in bed." In contrast to the
latter text, which implies a complete renunciation of the individual
artist and his specialized vision and expertise, Moholy's example
gives us art as mediated but still completely within the artist's
control, resisting the clutter of technical externalities, its maker
persisting in his mastery despite rather than because of technology.
Under the Swiss Marxist architect Hannes Meyer's tenure as
director of the Bauhaus (he served, after Gropius, from 1928 until
1930), traditional art practice was thoroughly denounced. "The
Bauhaus will reorient itself in the direction of architecture,
industrial production, and the intellectual aspect of technology,"
Schlemmer wrote of Meyer's appointment. "The painters are
merely tolerated as a necessary evil now." Technology under the new
dispensation meant not only the exploration of materials and techniques
but also the scientific reconceptualization of the human subject.
"Building is a biological event," Meyer insisted. For him,
design through technology brought the smallest molecular elements and
events together with the largest global organizational structures.
Architecture was "organization: social, technical, economic,
psychological organization." Sociology, economics, and psychology
therefore entered the school's curriculum. Projects were evaluated
for their psychological and social effects, not just their visual form.
Meyer's appointments at the school included important young
architects, typographers, and photographers who were expanding and
transgressing traditional practices, blurring the boundaries between
fine art and commercial design and between architecture and territorial
planning. Theoretical discussions were fueled by a roster of guests that
included philosophers Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Otto Neurath, as
well playwright Ernst Toller and filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Instruction was
now organized in collective, collaborative "vertical brigades"
and "cooperative cells" (the communist connotations were quite
intentional). Artistic individualism was shunned. "I never design
alone," wrote Meyer. "That is why I consider the choosing of
suitable associates to be the most important act in preparing for a
creative work in architecture. The more contrasted the abilities of the
designing brigade, the greater its capabilities and creative
power."
For Gropius, technology meant the individual, artful control of
standardized objects made of newly available materials. For Meyer,
technology was a code word for "socialism." In either case,
technology for the Bauhaus functioned conceptually as a vanishing
mediator--a propelling and synthesizing idea that never found full
expression in its own right. In our time, to the contrary, technology
seems almost too immediate, too present everywhere--in our gadgets and
environments, challenging old behaviors and determining new ones,
channeling our moods, organizing our daily activities. Designers today
do not struggle to find adequate representations for a modern technology
not yet fully arrived so much as they use existing technologies as a
representational system to evoke other states--a hyperreal, animated
surface that gives us access to all manner of fascination and fantasy.
Which is to suggest, too, that present technology is inextricably linked
to our ability to conceptualize not just our objects but our selves, our
place in the world, our own subjectivity.
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The ultimate expression of Bauhaus subjectivity, in contrast, was
formal abstraction. An oft-repeated story told by Alfred Arndt about the
1921 Vorkurs stakes out the territory of abstraction and subjective
experience. Johannes Itten asked his students to "draw the
war." One war veteran with a "shattered arm" and
"shot-up hand" dutifully depicted barbed wire, guns, and
soldiers from firsthand encounters. Meanwhile, another student whose
youth had kept him from joining the military "rushed the chalk back
and forth with his fist, breaking it several times, making sharp points
and zigzags, hammering it down upon the paper," then quit in
frustration. At the review of the projects, Itten dismissed the
veteran's effort as a "romantic picture" in which the
pictorial elements "play at being a soldier," but he praised
the authentic energy and emotion of the younger man's scrawls.
"Here you see very clearly," he said, "this was done by a
man who really experienced the war in all its relentlessness and harsh
reality. It's all sharp points and harsh resistance."
The issue Itten had placed before the students was the problem of
the referent: whether a drawing (or a film, play, painting, or building)
should delineate the mere things of the world or should instead point to
the realm that produces experience while transcending experience's
quotidian limits. Spirit was what the early Bauhauslers tended to call
this realm. But we may invoke the more contemporary, materialist
terminology of the diagram to reconceptualize the issue. A diagram is
neither place nor thing. Rather, it is a relation that connects
different levels or planes of expression and content and leads to the
emergence of new forms. During the time of the Bauhaus, modernity itself
seemed to be etching its signature into its products, albeit in vague
and partial ways, as if struggling to find its proper designation. If
the designer could just recognize this and seize on the structure of
that signature, clarify, sharpen, and accelerate it, then perhaps design
could help usher in the future through the presentation of new forms.
"In every creative design appropriate to living, we reorganize an
organized form of existence," Meyer insisted. He described the
process of construction as "a conscious patterning or forming of
the socioeconomic, the techno-constructive, and the psychophysiological
elements in the social living process." An extraordinary statement,
this, positing the act of design as the mapping of the total situation
of subject and object; design as a graph of the transformative potential
out of which an authentic collective life of the future might be
developed; design as the diagram of the modern Mind itself.
The Bauhaus diagram was a kind of geometric and chromatic
infrastructure--primary and secondary hues, geometric figures in two and
three dimensions, diagonals, and serialized stacks and layers--which
should underlie objects, it was thought, no matter the medium or
material or whether their vocation was industrial, commercial, or
aesthetic. We are familiar with the way the Bauhaus diagram organizes
Breuer's furniture, with its separation of supporting cubic grid
and infill planes; Kandinsky's compositions of coordinated color
and shape, which he insisted were the cross-media analogues to Aleksandr
Scriabin's symphonic poems; Schlemmer's geometric theater
costumes and sets; Herbert Bayer's geometrically determined
"universal" type, the graphic equivalent of the Esperanto that
Meyer had long championed; and Gropius's Bauhaus building, the
aerial photographs of which heighten the effect of planar enclosures of
different transparencies around a pinwheeling armature. All these
examples were understood to share common underlying formal structures.
But designers like Moholy and Meyer also emphasized that the same
diagram organized all truly modern objects, even those not designed as
such. A passage from Meyer's 1926 essay "Die Neue Welt"
(The New World) begins with a list of the factographic, reportorial, and
advertising methods of visual-sign production that Moholy and others had
begun to develop and quickly moves to the psychovisual consequences of
those methods, picking out the geometric diagrams that organize those
effects:
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The steadily increasing perfection attained in printing,
photographic, and cinematographic processes enables the real world to
be reproduced with an ever greater degree of accuracy. The picture
the landscape presents to the eye today is more diversified than ever
before; hangars and power houses are the cathedrals of the spirit of
the age. This picture has the power to influence through the specific
shapes, colors, and lights of its modern elements: the wireless
aerials, the dams, the lattice girders; through the parabola of the
airship, the triangle of the traffic signs, the circle of the railway
signal, the rectangle of the billboard; through the linear element of
transmission lines: telephone wires, overhead tram wires, high-
tension cables; through radio towers, concrete posts, flashing
lights, and filling stations.
Modernity here provides its own language: noun shapes, color
adjectives, verbs of velocity and intensity, all scripted by the
Zeitgeist itself. Meyer reads the images of the industrial landscape
like hieroglyphs pointing forward in time, an emergent sign system that
strives for dissociation from the outmoded present. Like this sign
system, which communicates across space and time, class and gender, the
paradigmatic Bauhaus object, through abstraction, has claim to
cognitive, ideological, and practical, as well as visual and aesthetic,
status. The objects stand as facts of modern perception, as the physical
traces of our knowledge of things. And their richness may therefore be
recognized in terms of their ability to assimilate objective material
and technical values to subjective visual and psychological effects, to
convert the qualities of the one into the forms of the other and thereby
to reunite the two levels of subjective mental labor and the objective
realities of production. Abstract form, it was believed, attests to the
possibility of simultaneous collective reception, which affords a
practical apprenticeship for the collective society to come. The
concrete experience of the visual products of Bauhaus design, when
understood as affording epistemic access to the now vivid and tractable geometry of modernity, may be reconceived as a functional diagram for an
entire cognitive retooling.
In our day, however, abstraction has lost its diagrammatic
function, its status as the unifying geometry of the modern spirit.
After the return of pragmatism and positivism, abstraction came to be
seen not as essential but as one among many forms of ornament--either of
a philosophical type (too bothersome to think) or as anachronistic
visual dressing. And design, never mind art, risks shriveling into a
strictly instrumental enterprise, a set of opportunistic maneuvers in
specific, limited contexts, possessing neither transcendence nor
mystery. What is more, we have become suspicious of the totalizing
tendencies that see linkages between such unlike things as traffic
signs, paintings, buildings, and bodies. Our items are not linked across
groups and classes, but rather exist as purely nominalist confirmations
of individuality and private property: This is so me, so this is so
mine.
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Were an ontology of today's design possible, it would not be
of a unifying technology or of an underlying, totalizing formal
structure. It would have to be an ontology of the atmospheric--of the
only vaguely defined, the nebulously articulated, and indeed the barely
perceptible, which is nevertheless everywhere immediately present. The
new paradigm is, of course, integrally tied to digital design
technologies and computer programs that coordinate and synthesize
multiple parameters and different sorts of data into frictionless flows.
And contemporary design production explicitly refuses any disciplinary
partitioning, bursting boundaries and making connections beyond even
anything the Bauhaus could have imagined. So it is consistent that the
conventions of reception produced by the new design will be woven into
the same general media fabric as video games, social-networking
websites, and televisual leisure. Architecture and design are now part
of the smooth media mix; its visage and function can drift and expand in
culture in unprecedented ways, spreading laterally in a stretched-out
mixed-media experience.
Contemporary technologies of art and design have destabilized the
self that is defined by the sure and constant position it occupies in
the world. It is now possible for us to produce radically new freedoms
by folding objective and subjective forces into new modalities of
expression and being. But we might equally produce stagnation. I am
reminded of Paul Klee's assertion that the audience for a work of
art does not preexist the artwork but rather is called into being by the
artwork itself, which is to say, more generally, that the power of the
event of art is to actualize new subjectivities, new selves, and
altogether new conditions for perception and understanding. With this
dictum in mind, what we might yet gain from considering the Bauhaus as a
past event and a dynamic process whose nature is to actualize itself in
ever-changing ways is the possibility not of further smoothing and
blurring (the return of the same) but rather of keeping alive the
concept of the New, of producing difference--different objects,
different ways of thinking, different ways of living. Concrete
innovations can awake collective consciousness out of a static present
and inspire desire and hope for positive change. It is what used to be
called designing for Utopia. Perhaps we should call it that again.
K. MICHAEL HAYS IS ELIOT NOYES PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY AT
THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)
