A Saturday Evening Bauhaus Crash Course: What I Learned
First of all, I’ll preface this post by saying that I’m not an academic, but simply a student with a basic understanding of the Bauhaus and a curiosity that landed me in the Nottingham Contemporary on a Saturday evening. If you want the real deal, be sure to check out Ines Weizman’s upcoming book “Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus Across 100 Years”, after which this talk was named.
Housekeeping: check ✓ Now on to the good stuff.
Weizman - director of the Bauhaus Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and Planning, and professor of architectural theory at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (phew!) - adopts an interesting approach to Bauhaus history. In essence, her work traces the geographical migration of “Bauhaus Modernism” post 1933, when the rise of Germany’s national socialist government forced the school to disband. As the words “dust” and “data” suggest, this fragmentation of a bold, avant-garde ideology created narrative black holes, and many important perspectives went unheard. It became clear to Weizman that mapping the trajectories of Bauhaus objects, documents and practitioners was the key to understanding their wider implications.
As someone with an increasing interest in the built environment, it was fascinating to learn more about the school’s aesthetic choices. For example, the Henry van de Velde building in Weimar was a hospital for the war wounded until Walter Gropius founded the school on the top floor in 1919. Rather than starting from scratch, Bauhaus architects worked with the space, offsetting curved staircases with distinctly modernist geometry. Meanwhile, the only purely Bauhaus structure to emerge in Weimar, the Haus am Horn (House and Home), was a celebration of hygiene, boasting metal furniture and surfaces that could be dusted to perfection and seemed never to age. When the school eventually moved to Dessau, the masters’ villas embodied a simplicity that felt at once functional and luxurious.
House am Horn interior
But the Bauhaus’ desire to make a scientific approach to art and architecture accessible was at odds with the national socialist rhetoric of the 1930s.
Through extensive research into the materiality of Bauhaus objects, Weizman has tracked the subsequent migration of German-Jewish practitioners across countries. It was interesting to learn that, through microscopic analysis of building materials, Bauhaus architecture could be traced through the Middle East, with Palestine importing cement from Germany in the 1930s, and many tiles, pipes and doorhandles being of German manufacture. Woven carpets have even been created to document the colour history of a building in Tel Aviv, a city known for its white modernist buildings. With the ripples of the Bauhaus emanating ever further, it became crucial for these material traces to be gathered, preserved, and organised coherently. “Dust & Data” - the digital collection of the physical.
Bauhaus architecture in Tel Aviv © galit seligmann / Alamy Stock Photo
Overall, I came away from the talk with a clearer understanding of the chronology and geography of the Bauhaus, but also a greater appreciation for the use of scientific processes within design research. Weizman adopts the analytical eye of a private investigator, following a trail of breadcrumbs from country to country in search of a deeper creative understanding. For my own upcoming projects, adopting the role of investigator will be key, and after today’s talk I feel empowered to look beyond the obvious and find what lies beneath.
