Bauhaus

Modernism and architecture

 “The Bauhaus movement was referring to
architecture as the gesamtskunstwerk. The total
work of art. It was the medium in which all other art
forms came to fruition. And I do believe it is very
relevant in the context of climate change…”

–Bjorke Ingels
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucpBYUw6b2M&t=1075s]
 Hausbau - Bauhaus
Following the end of World War I, the
provisional government of the short-lived
Free State of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in
Germany initiated an effort to reestablish
two schools, the Weimar School of
Applied Arts (Weimar
Kunstgewerbeschule) and the neighboring
Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für
bildende Kunst), as a single, unified
institution. Upon the recommendation of
Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, who
had previously directed the Weimar
School of Applied Arts, the Berlin
architect Walter Gropius was invited to
head the new school. Gropius’s request to
rechristen the institution under a new Lyonel Feininger (Illustration), Walter
name, Bauhaus State School (Staatliches Gropius (Author) Manifesto and programme
Bauhaus), was approved in March 1919. of the State Bauhaus, April 1919, with
illustration “Cathedral” illustration by Lyonel
Feininger, 1919
http://www.designhistory.org/Bauhaus_pages/BauhausLocations.html
• Bauhaus State School (Staatliches Bauhaus) offiicially opened on April 1, 1919

Fine Arts
Arts meant for aesthetic pleasure
out of creative expression
Painting, sculpture, architecture,
music, poetry Applied Arts
Arts that are applied as design or
decoration to objects of use
Industrial design, sculpture,
architecture, crafts, fashion,
calligraphy, graphic design,

spiritual possibilities of this new art pedagogy

• three stars – painting, sculpture and
architecture – with the rays from them
interlaced symbolically.
• All of the crafts and arts used to work
together on an equal basis even in the
stonemasons’ lodges of medieval cathedrals.
• At the Bauhaus, the cathedral now stood for
the total work of art that was to combine
architecture, craft and art into an ideal unity.
• The Bauhaus was thus aiming to reunite the
arts that had previously been separated in
the academies in order to arrive at
contemporary forms of art and architecture.
• As in the reform movements that had
preceded the Bauhaus, what mattered was
to find a response to industrialization and its
effects.
• The artistic avant-garde that gathered at the
Bauhaus wanted to become a force capable
of changing society and hoped to form a
modern type of human being and
environment.
• In a transdisciplinary community of work, the
‘building of the future’ – and thus also the
future itself – was to be conceived and
created.
 “The ultimate goal of all creative activity is the building! To
decorate the building was once the noblest function of the fine
arts, and the fine arts were considered indispensable components
of great architecture. Today they exist in complacent isolation,
from which they can only be delivered by the conscious
collaboration and cooperation of all craftsmen. Architects,
painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp
the composite character of building, both as a totality and in terms
of its parts so that their work may once more imbue itself with the
architectonic spirit, which it lost in salon art.”

–Walter Gropius
 “The old art schools were incapable of producing
this unity—and how could they, for art cannot be
taught. They must be merged once more with the
workshop. This world of mere drawing and painting
of pattern-designers and applied artists must at
long last become a world that builds…”
–W. Gropius
“Architects, sculptors, painters, we all must return
to the crafts! For there is no such thing as ‘art by
profession.’ There is no essential difference
between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is
an exalted craftsman… So let us then create a new
guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class
pretensions that attempted to raise an arrogant
barrier between craftsmen and artists! ”

–W. Gropius
• Relocated to Dessau in 1925 because of increasing
conservative stronghold in Weimar

• In 1933 school closed by Nazis

• Lyonel Feininger’s work along with other modernist work

declared ‘degenerate art’ by Nazis
• Architecture

• Industrial Design

• Graphic Design

• Fine art

• Photography

• New Media
 Paul Klee
Taught at Bauhaus
between 1921-1931

Hammamet with Its Mosque

A small town in Tunisia
 Abstract Trio

From an earlier drawing called ‘Theater of Masks’ - of the 9,146

works of Klee more than 500 refer to the theater, masks, or music
 Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door
Klee painted a series of ghost chambers
with eerie lines of perspective

Comedian’s Handbill
In tune with the motto "the medium is the message,"
Klee designed this handbill on a sheet of newspaper
 • Influenced by German Expressionism
• believed that the material world was
only one among many realities open to
human awareness
• Klee was a musician.
• He naturally saw analogies between
music and visual art, such as in the
transient nature of musical
performance and the time-based
processes of painting, or in the
expressive power of color as being akin
to that of musical sonority. In his
lectures at the Bauhaus, Klee even
c o m p a re d t h e v i s u a l r h y t h m i n
drawings to the structural, percussive
rhythms of a musical composition by
the master of counterpoint, Johann
Sebastian Bach.
• Klee challenged traditional boundaries
separating writing and visual art by
exploring a new expressive, and largely
abstract or poetic language of pictorial
The twittering machine symbols and signs.
 Wassily
Kandinsky
Taught at Bauhaus
between 1921-1933
 The blue rider [1903]
Initial influence of impressionism
Moscow, Red Square [1916]
 Composition 8
His investigations into the correspondence between colours and forms and their
psychological and spiritual effects
 Several Circles
“The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the
concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the
three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”
Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to
convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through
a universal visual language of abstract forms and colors that
transcended cultural and physical boundaries.

Kandinsky viewed non-objective, abstract art as the ideal visual mode

to express the "inner necessity" of the artist and to convey universal
human emotions and ideas. He viewed himself as a prophet whose
mission was to share this ideal with the world for the betterment of
society.

Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective

art - musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with
sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich
paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of
sensation.
 Marcel
Breuer
Student at Bauhaus
between 1921-1924
Briefly led furniture
design workshop

Club chair (model B3) or Wassily chair

Breuer created a light and visually transparent composition of
intersecting lines and planes that evokes abstract geometric
sculpture. The popularity of his metal furniture led Breuer to
establish his own firm, Standard Möbel, which in 1929 was
purchased by Thonet, the manufacturer of this chair.
 Cesca Chair
Breuer's design thus marries the traditional methods of craftsmanship - the woven
caning hand-sewn into the wood frame - with the industrially mass-produced tubular
steel. The chair takes its popular name from that of Breuer's daughter Francesca;
 Whitney Museum of American Art
Along with a small group of his contemporaries, Breuer helped reconsider the
lyrical potential of the durable, utilitarian material called concrete. His concrete
buildings, in particular, made him into a leading figure of the mid-century Brutalist
movement—which favored raw, exposed materials, often employed for massive,
institutional projects.
2 World Trade Centre, Bjorke Ingels
UNESCO Headquarters, Paris,
Main Building
 Monument to the March Dead (1920)

Walter
Gropius
Founder of Bauhaus
in 1919

Gropius believed that all design should be approached through a study of the
problems that needed to be addressed and he consequently followed the
modernist principle that functionality should dictate form. He applied these
beliefs to wider social issues, designing affordable housing in the interwar
period and seeking to improve physical conditions for factory workers through
his architecture.

Gropius is credited with the introduction of modernist architecture to the United

States through his design of the Gropius House and his teaching at Harvard
University.
Bauhaus Building at Dessau,1926
 László
Moholy-Nagy
From 1923 to 1928,
Moholy-Nagy taught at
the Bauhaus. He also co-
edited the periodical
Bauhaus with Gropius.
https://moholy-nagy.org/
photograms/

He was invited by Gropius to take over the running of the school's "basic
course" or vorkurs. Though Moholy-Nagy worked across a range of media, his
photograms became icons of Bauhaus experimentation. Created by placing
objects on photo-sensitive paper exposed to ambient light, these works, in the
artist's own words, made light "the medium of plastic expression".
Moholy-Nagy was amongst various European artists, including Christian Schad
and Man Ray, who experimented with the photogram - a term coined by Moholy-
Nagy - under various names during the 1910s-20s, but through the endeavors of
Moholy-Nagy, these works of Abstract Photography became indelibly linked with
the Bauhaus's revolutionary ethos.
In this playful collage-work from
1923-24, a motor-car races along a
curved road constructed from the
word "pneumatik," a reference to a
new type of air-pressurized tire. Due
to the use of vanishing-point
perspective, the letters grow larger
as if the car were racing towards the
viewer, the front P intersecting with a
white curve which surges upwards
through the pictorial plane, creating a
dynamic sense of movement. This
work is an example of what Moholy-
Nagy called his "Typophotos", which
combine typography and photo
collage. described the Typophoto as
"communication composed in type",
adding that while "[p]hotography is
the visual presentation of what can
be optically apprehended”,
"[t]ypophoto is the visually most
exact rendering of communication."
 Marianne
Brandt
Joined as student and later
one of the few women on the
Bauhaus faculty during the
1920s

Model No. MT 49

Marianne Brandt was responsible for creating many of the functional

objects that we now recognize as quintessential works of modernist
design. She enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1923, and began studying under
Moholy-Nagy in the metal workshop in 1924, becoming the first woman
admitted into his studio. Brandt made the prototype for her teapot the
same year, subsequently producing six other prototypes, though the
design was never marketed commercially.
In 1928, Brandt would succeed Moholy-Nagy as director of the metal
workshop. The curator of the Berlin Bauhaus Archive Klaus Weber has
called Brandt's Model No. MT 49 "Bauhaus in a Nutshell", a work which
exemplifies the school's industrial design aesthetic and emphasis upon
functionality. One of Brandt's prototypes for the teapot set a record price
for Bauhaus objects at Sotheby's in 2007 and was sold for $361,000.
https://www.dezeen.com/2007/12/21/the-361000-teapot-marianne-brandt-breaks-bauhaus-auction-record/
 Oskar In the 1920s he was teaching at Bauhaus
across a range of mediums
Schlemmer

Secular - saeculum [in Latin generation, age, in Christian Latin means ‘the
world’ as opposed to the church
Schlemmer was novel in bridging the
gap between pure abstraction and
representational art. Whilst his work
w a s p re d o m i n a n t l y a b s t r a c t , h e
retained elements of the physical
structure of the human body in his
paintings, sculptures and
performances.

His theater and dance work combined

his interest in the representation of the
human body with kinetic studies and an
investigation of the relationship
between performer and space and he
transformed his observations into
abstract geometrical and mechanical
choreography and costumes.

Schlemmer's work aligned with

Bauhaus thinking on merging art and
technology, man and machine. His
paintings often present genderless
automatons and his dancers moved in
unusual and machine-like ways. Tänzerin (Geste)

.
 Herbert
Bayer
Student of Bauhaus
from 1921 and later
taught at Dessau from
1925

Herbert Bayer's Universal Bayer typeface,

a classic of International Style typography,
employs a minimal geometric design of the
sans-serif type favoured by the Bauhaus.
At the same time, the simplicity of the
design reflects Bayer's interest in
enhanced legibility.

Bayer expressed the spirit of a new cultural movement that rejected

backwards-looking nationalism and embraced cosmopolitan modernity,
a movement spearheaded by the Bauhaus, and later snuffed out by the
Nazis.
 Man and Art Figure
Man and Art Figure, Schlemmer, O. (1924, 1961) ‘Man and Art Figure’, in W. Gropius and A.
Wensinger (eds) The Theater of the Bauhaus, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan: 17–32.

History of theatre

History of transfiguration of human form

History of man
Actor of physical -> spiritual events
naïveté -> reflection
Naturalness -> artifice
Form & colour
[materials of painter and sculptor]
Through the manipulation of
these materials the role of the artist, Arena: Constructive fusion of space
the synthesizer of these And building [architect]
elements, is determined.
 Emblem of our time:

to disconnect components from an existing

and persisting whole, either to lead them
individually ad absurdum or to elevate
them to their greatest potential
Abstraction
abstraction can result in generalization and
summation, in the construction in bold
outline of a new totality

Everything around us mechanised. So we

Mechanisation see what is not.

New potential of Can be used to create new hypotheses

technology and innovation Promise of boldest fantasies
Make-believe
Metamorphosis

Mummery

As moral institution

Passive spectator

Stage is representation abstracted from the

natural and directing its effect at the human being.

Animated actor
Word Mind
Deed Happening
Form Manifestation
Spirit
Act
Shape
 Immediacy
Actor
Independence

Word
Sound
Author
Composer s/he creates the representational material for transmission
and reproduction on the stage, whether it is meant for the
organic human voice or for artificial, abstract instruments

Mechanical reproduction
Non-rigid, intangible form occurs as
light, whose linear effect appears in the
geometry of the light beam and of
pyrotechnical display, and whose solid-
and space-creating effect comes
through illumination. To each of these
manifestations of light (which in
themselves are already colored – only
nothingness is without color) can be
added coloring (intensifying) color.

Color and form reveal their elementary

values within the constructive
manipulation of architectonic space.
Here they constitute both object and
receptacle, that which is to be filled and
fulfilled by Man, the living organism. In
painting and sculpture, form and color
are the means of establishing these
connections with organic nature
through the representation of its
phenomena. Man, its chief
phenomenon, is both an organism of
flesh and blood and at the same time
the exponent of number and ‘Measure
of All Things’.
 Stage gives form and
Arena for successive and transient action
colour in motion

Such kaleidoscopic play, at once infinitely variable and strictly

organized, would constitute – theoretically – the absolute visual
stage (Schaubühne). Man, the animated being, would be banned
from view in this mechanistic organism. He would stand as ‘the
perfect engineer’ at the central switchboard, from where he would
direct this feast for the eyes.

Obsession with Meaning

Laws of organic man

heartbeat, circulation, respiration, the activities of the brain and nervous system
Invisibly involved with all these laws is Man as Dancer
(Tänzermensch). He 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. As the one who gives birth to an
almost endless range of expression, whether in free abstract
movement or in symbolic pantomime, whether he is on the
bare stage or in a scenic environment constructed for him,
whether he speaks or sings, whether he is naked or
costumed, the Tänzermensch is the medium of transition into
the great world of the theater (das grosse theatralische
Geschehen).
 Role of costume

Negotiation with gravity

Acrobatics, Ubermarionette etc.

Utopia
‘Art is without purpose’ insofar as the imaginary
needs of the soul can be said to be without purpose.
Spectator
 WHAT AFTER BAUHAUS?
Post WW II
 • The Walter- Gropius designed 1926 Bauhaus building in
Dessau moved to East Germany making it difficult for
the West to access it between between 1933 and 1989

• Bauhaus Archive, designed by Gropius’s office in 1964

and founded by Hans Wingler in 1960 moved to Berlin
from Darmstadt in 1971

• In 1994 the Bauhaus

Dessau Foundation was
founded to, in its own
words, "preserve,
transmit and study the
legacy of the historic
Bauhaus, as well as to
contribute to solving the
problems involved in
designing today's
environment. Bauhaus Archive, 1979
 How did Bauhaus come to India?

In 1913, Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore had

set up Visva-Bharati University – a liberal arts
school in Santiniketan, Calcutta, with the prize
money from his Nobel Prize in Literature.

Its vision was to not only integrate the fine

and applied arts, as also the study of
philosophy and agriculture
Tagore’s vision for Visva-Bharati
found resonance with the ideologies
promoted by the Bauhaus School

Austrian art historian Stella Kramrisch, who

taught Indian and European Art at
Santiniketan from 1921 – 1923, invited the
Bauhaus to send some representative
paintings and graphics for a joint exhibition
with leading Indian artists from the Bengal
School.
Visva-Bharati University, Shantiniketan
‘Bauhaus in Calcutta’ exhibition opened at the 14th Annual Exhibition of
The Indian Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta in December 1922
 The exhibition featured over 250 works by Bauhaus teachers and students,
including Bauhaus masters such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily
Kandinsky, Johannes Itten along with Indian artists such as Gagendranath
Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandlal Bose, Jamini Roy, Sunayani Devi also
known as the Bengal School

Ghost of a Genius The House of the dead,

Paul Klee, 1922 Gaganendranath Tagore
For Johannes Itten, Indian culture and spirituality
could offer the West a model for infusing art with
spirit, counteracting materialist tendencies.

For Tagore, who conceived Santiniketan

as a place for mutual exchange of ideas,
it was an opportunity for India to share
its wealth of tradition with the world,
and where she would benefit from
learning about international trends.

Krishna Consorting Radha in a Guise of a Gopi,

Sunayani Devi
 The Asoka Legend
Abanindranath Tagore
 Landscape,
Kawabata Gyokushō Japanese
ca. 1887–92
 Meanwhile, the Indian Institute of Architects in
Bombay set up in 1920’s, was the only training
institute for aspiring architects in India, preceded by
the Sir JJ School in Bombay, under Claude Batley.

Others, who had the opportunity, went overseas to

study at Harvard or IIT Chicago in the US, where
the faculty included Bauhaus heroes such as Mies
van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer
who had emigrated from the closure of Bauhaus in
Nazi Germany in 1933.

From the 1940’s, a host of prominent buildings began being

built in strong monolithic shapes, exposed concrete, with open
plan structures that had a significant impact on the landscape
of modern Indian architecture.
 Habib Rahman studied at MIT, where he did both his undergraduate and
postgraduate levels, returning to Calcutta after his masters in 1944. Rahman’s
work impacted Calcutta where he worked initially, followed by New Delhi where
he worked at the Central Public Works Department CPWD. Habib Rahman
designed India's first high-rise, the New Secretariat, designed by him in Calcutta
 Rahman tries to integrate
religious architectural identities
to the Bauhaus in this case.
The resultant product was a
tower - a simplified profile of a
temple shikhara, capped with
an Islamic dome. A horizontal
cantilevered slab projecting
from either side of the tower
appeared to form a cross-like
silhouette.

Gandhi Ghat, Barrackpore, Habib Rahman

The influence of Bauhaus to modern architecture in India (often referred to
in the Indian context as 'The First Generation of Modernist Architecture')
can be best seen through the works of Achyut Kanvinde who trained under
Gropius at Harvard and Habib Rahman who studied at MIT.

The Mehsana Dairy, Gujarat, 1960s

 Bauhaus-influenced Indian architectural forms included
contemporary versions of the jalis as horizontal and vertical
fenestration, chajjas as larger overhanging roofs, and
monolithic geometric shapes including the ubiquitous domes.

Staircase, Habib Rahman

Detail of the Tomb of former president Zakir Hussain. Its clarity of structure, the
use of jalis, arches and curved walls, is a striking amalgamation of Rahman’s
Bauhaus influence with Indian traditional forms.
HSS Corridor,
IIT Bombay
 Mass production of Bauhaus
chairs by Godrej

The success of steel in locks,

safes and cupboards from early
Nineteenth century that
encouraged Godrej to use Steel
in other items of furniture -
enabling Pirojsha Godrej to seek
inspiration from the tubular
chairs first designed by Marcel
Breur and Mies van der Rohe
who pioneered the idiom of this
style of furniture.
CH-4 chair by Godrej
The early entry of Bauhaus paradigms through Walter Gropius’s students,
cross-pollinated with Indian culture and climate, along with modernist
strains from Frank Lloyd Wright, and from the 60's of Le Corbusier and
Louis Kahn, resulting in the expressions of – Brutalism [ The term
originates from the use, by the pioneer modern architect and painter Le
Corbusier, of 'beton brut' – raw concrete in French], Modernism, Utilitarian
Modernism, Tropical Modernism.

While some were indigenous interpretations and others directly imported,

all were created as a result of the architect’s response to his individual
surroundings and to his influences.
 Ulm School of Design

As post war Germany rebuilt itself, HfG was founded in Ulm, in

1953, with an intent to take forward the Bauhaus approach of
integrating arts, crafts and technology through a focus on multi-
disciplinary and humanistic education. The ‘Ulm Model’ was a
significant influence not only to some of the key design institutes in
India, but remains one to international design education, even today.

National Institute of Design (NID)

By the 1960’s, India’s first industrial design institution was being

established in Ahmedabad. NID was amongst the first to adopt the
teaching principles of the Bauhaus through the Ulm Model, as a
tool for national regeneration.

Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at IIT Bombay

Sudha Nadkarni also studied at HfG Ulm from 1962 to 1966 and
came back to India to work at NID 1966 to 1969, then went on to set
up the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Bombay in 1970.