100 Years of Bauhaus

It is said that hindsight is 20/20.

We look back at the past as a guide for the present. Except that what we discover is that we have merely repeated the mistakes of the past, or completely misunderstood the idealism and creativity of earlier generations because of how they have been reinterpreted in the present. When we consider the Bauhaus, it seems the resurgence of interest in the most influential design school of the past century is primarily focused on the physical artifacts and the aesthetics of the philosophy of form and function.

Perhaps the story of the Bauhaus could be another episode of the Nice Try! podcast, a study in human aspirations for utopia. As Ezra Klein quipped, “Everything begins as free love and ends up as capitalism. That’s the lesson of utopias.”

Consider 100 years of the influence of the Bauhaus on modern life.

A community of artists and architects conceived the modern system of architecture as a scientific synthesis of the industrial mass-production manufacturing process with the art of manipulating the most appropriate building materials. Concrete, steel and glass were the modernist trinity. These materials represented a break from the past focus on the aesthetics of the façade, instead placing the greatest priorities on engineering strength and production efficiency to create neo-plastic forms that exposed the inner life of the architectural structure, the human activities that the spaces afforded.

The Bauhaus was conceived by artists and architects as a means of building a socialist utopia out of the ruins of the Great War. In reaction to the failure of the political structures of the time to achieve peace and economic prosperity, people gathered to design a modern system to replace the hierarchical and aristocratic political systems that had led them to annihilate each other.