Utopia and disappointment

Written histories of buildings always end with their topping-out ceremony. Only very rarely do we learn about what happened in them afterwards: how existing buildings are used, converted, misused and occasionally reused in a creative way. Much needs to be done in this respect: not only empirical, but also conceptual work. To do so, we need a different model both of history and the future, one that contrasts with the future that the Bauhaus conceived for itself, in which the future is not only grasped as linear, as a point of departure and a new beginning, but also as a path of failure, a path towards consequences one never intended and yet nevertheless created: as a place to rediscover old things that have apparently been dismissed and overcome, but also to discover a completely different future that is different from our grasp of it in the past.

All this begins with the disappointment over the outcome of ideas and projects of the Bauhaus. But to understand this disappointment, we must first shed light on its utopias and aspects of hope, even though this has often been done before: for they only become clear against the background of later disappointments, and inversely, the disappointments only come to the fore against the background of their utopias, which have been downtrodden in many ways, but still survive, indeed more robustly than one might expect in view of the thousandfold tale of Bauhaus woes. That in itself is a miracle.

How did it all begin? It started with a new desire for simple, clear forms: in 1919, after the ornamentation of Wilhelminan period, after Historicism’s meaningless mixture of older building styles, after the loss of wide open spaces in the increasingly constricted city centres, Gropius and his colleagues (who were not the first – others such as Peter Behrens had preceded them) proposed a shift towards clear, new forms, new materials full of light and simple workmanship, a liberation: space to breathe and soothing for the eyes. In all of its thousand forms (since there is no definitive Bauhaus style), it appeared to be a victory of beauty in restoring people’s demoralised lives.

Like the classicism of Palladio, albeit even further reduced to simple forms, the new, functional, turn-of-the-century architecture – for instance by Henry van de Velde – established a connection between an incredibly distant past and the future: including the archaic art of ancient Greece and the remote cultures of East Asia and Oceania. The destruction of global war, the Second even more so than the First, also had its effect, clearing away the old and presenting a hardly lamented opportunity for creatio ex nihilo. An incredible demand for construction needed fulfilment and the scarce resources demanded simple, standardised solutions. Nevertheless, an atmosphere of resurgence and liberation pervaded. Not only was there a sense of a dawning new age, but also of an emerging task for humanity as a whole.

Since the mid-19^th century, the generation had experienced a sudden expansion in the perceived history of the world: from a few millennia to hundreds of millions of years, almost billions. For instance, even until 1880, the Brockhaus lexicon stated that the Earth was 6,000 years old, based on teachings dating back to the Middle Ages. Only in the 1860s did the spectral analysis of distant stars reveal that the cosmos had already existed for many millions of years and would continue to do so for an immeasurable period of time. In such a generation, the geometrical forms of early humanity suddenly seemed much closer, giving a simple straight line, circle or rectangle endless space for the future opportunities of an ever renewing humanity.

When people considered the future at the turn of the 20^th century, they thought far further forward than today. Instead of thinking decades and centuries ahead, they imagined millennia and even millions of years: “The Time Machine”, written by H. G. Wells in 1895, tells the story of a time traveller who effortlessly jumps 30 million years into the future. Which science-fiction film of recent decades has ventured beyond the next three or four centuries? In 1905, the Anthroposophic priest Friedrich Rittelmeyer held a sermon in which he speculated on the nations that would inherit the Europeans in the future: the Americans, Russians, each of them dominating for centuries, possibly millennia; or perhaps African or other nations, continuing ever further until the Earth begins to cool and slide back towards the sun, from where it once came, “before the dance can begin again on a different star.” Thinking in millennia was certainly common in the early 20^th century and in this respect, the “thousand-year Reich” of the Nazis was not unique.

Returning to the Bauhaus: nothing is more difficult than retrospectively grasping the reality horizon of a future imagined in the past. The simple forms, smooth surfaces and new materials: glass, concrete and a little later plastic – were at the time filled with a utopian promise and a yearning for a better world. Global war and its destruction had cleared the way for a new society, tearing apart the wrong nature of outdated forms and conventions, touching on a new horizon, into which life could flow. The hopes of the artistic avant-garde were not only aimed at destroying old art, which was considered false and no longer relevant, but also at a new form of art, which it did not yet know, did not even consider as a theoretical possibility, and would in turn invite new destruction and crimes against humanity. Before moving to this new form of art, we must consider the threshold that was crossed at that point, when the artistic process of setting off into the future was still in progress.

The Belgian Art Nouveau artist Henry van de Velde was probably one of the first to introduce a new programmatic element after the turn of the century. In 1907, he wrote, “In early manhood, my generation knew the burden of being led by people of meagre intelligence, who played with the organic elements of architecture like children with building blocks, stacking columns and arches, gables and cornices without any significance, without any need, without any consequences (…). It was a dread of such an artistic direction and the fear of such a future, which we also opposed, and which drove us to burst open windows and doors, crying for reason to liberate us.”

Others went further, such as the Belgian Johannes Lauweriks in 1908, with his conviction that “the conclusion of the present day already indicates the presence of guiding principles for the future”. Similarly in 1911, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky stated in his programmatic text “On the spiritual in art” that all art reaches beyond its present time and towards the future ahead: “[…] art, which bears no potentiality for the future and which, therefore, is only the child of its time, cannot grow to be a mother of the future. It is, therefore a barren art.”

Everything else was denigrated as old, outdated and even reactionary. But not only that: even where it accorded to more elevated tastes and the desire of affluent individuals to have exceptional things, for instance in the case of Piet Mondrian’s “neo-plasticist” design of a boudoir for Ida Bienert in Dresden, Bauhaus art dictated to new residents what they should find beautiful, indeed what they would have always found beautiful had they only listened to their inner feelings – in the conviction stated by Mondrian’s “abstract-realist artist” in 1920:

“It is as essential to decorate an aesthetic person’s apartment or room according to his inner qualities as it is to eat and drink, since for such a person, the aesthetic element is the equivalent of the material element.” To a small degree, it was already possible to see what disappointment such an artistic stance would lead to: for instance the conversions carried out in 1925 by the new owners of the estate in Dessau-Törten, which was designed by Gropius: the windows directly beneath the ceiling, which Gropius had positioned there so that furniture could be arranged under them, were replaced by ordinary windows at eye-level, through which people could perceive the outside world, as they had done since time immemorial.

Another example is the conversion of the communal park grounds in Taut’s Berlin “Horseshoe Estate” into individual allotments, which undermined the idea of a Socialist collective. To this day, one could say: understandable, but ugly. At least it was far removed from what Socialist artists deemed right for the post-war working class.

Neues Bauen architects could be quite tyrannical when it came to their urban planning designs: for instance in joining together hundreds of identical housing units, making it easy to lose one’s way in the monotonous system; or, as Le Corbusier declared in his Athens Charter, in precisely defining how many cubic metres of living space a person needs to live in; not to mention their willingness to flatten centuries-old cities such as Paris, Moscow and Berlin to erect high-rise housing blocks there. We need only think of Corbusier’s 1925 “plan voisin”, which he still propagated on French television in 1958.

Resistance, even public resistance, quickly stirred, not only among nostalgic right-wingers, who merely regarded it as proof of their claim that Communists and Socialists were raping human nature. The political events that initially led to the Bauhaus moving from Weimar to Dessau and then finally closing in 1933 are evidence of the sceptical and even antagonistic attitude adopted by large parts of the general public.

Another symptom is the many jokes and caricatures with which Bauhaus architecture was publicly ridiculed: for instance the caricature by Thomas Theodor Heine in his 1932 “Simplicissimus”, which includes the anecdote: “The new Bauhaus style has removed everything that distinguishes apartments from prisons. In the interest of an orderly penal system, it is therefore necessary to add ornamentation to prisons.” In the 1960s, Berliners derided the poor sound-proofing in the new Hansa district apartments with a sarcastic joke: When an annoyed woman mentions that their neighbour is talking to his friend in Hamburg again, her husband answers: “Well why doesn’t he use the telephone?”

However, Bauhaus architecture began conquering the world in the United States of America. Despite the fact that it had been decried as Communist around 1930, emigrants arriving from Germany, including many Jews, created new institutions there to teach Bauhaus ideas: including the “Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where Josef and Anni Albers emigrated in the winter of 1933, and the New Bauhaus Chicago, which was led by Moholy-Nagy from 1937 onwards, the same year that Walter Gropius joined Harvard University.

Some artistic styles stand for an era: Classicism for the Age of Enlightenment, Historicism for the late 19^th century. The Bauhaus can be regarded as such a signature of the “western” 20^th century. This does not mean that the majority of buildings were constructed in a Bauhaus style (whatever that may be). But the surviving buildings characterise the dominant image of the age. Perhaps on a higher, historiographical level, it is even possible to claim that in times when the model of progress is ever less capable of classifying historical ages into a fixed order, such visual signatures become increasingly important in making such historical periods recognisable.

But they also include the dark sides of Bauhaus history, which we only learn if we study the buildings’ uses. Two examples are worth mentioning here: Bruno Taut’s “Horseshoe Estate”, which was erected in Berlin-Britz in the spirit of Neues Bauen between 1925 and 1930, was affected by disagreements among its owners and a lack of funds. It was only completed thanks to strong support from Berlin’s city council. However, as a result of the tight budget, the social facilities – a library, communal kitchens etc. – were dropped, eliminating the idea of a social community.

Thus the housing community already fell apart during the estate’s construction and the houses and apartments later became private property. What remained of the estate’s promise for the future was ultimately only its original aesthetic signature, which is recognised today as World Cultural Heritage and a gem of “Berlin Modernity”. It upheld the dream of a utopian form of society that never became a reality.

Even more evident is the fate of major estates such as the Märkische Viertel in Berlin-Britz, which was designed in the style of Neues Bauen and built after World War II to accommodate the growing metropolitan population. With its expansive housing blocks of differing forms and sizes, which were recessed from the street, their public green spaces and communal facilities (schools, kindergartens, old people’s homes, cafés, cinemas and sports grounds, among others) were aimed at counteracting the monotony and ennui of previous estates.

However, they too failed to fulfil the needs of their residents due to monotonous details in the building methods, the decaying concrete deserts, the high rents, the social composition and the long distances residents needed to walk and travel to their workplaces. Thus the estates quickly declined into “social flashpoints” where nobody wanted to live if they could afford to be elsewhere. The future does not depend on buildings, but buildings provide spaces for highly contrasting futures.

However, although the Bauhaus has played no significant part in such cultural renewal in recent decades, the history of its use can provide insight into the path of architecture towards Modernity. It must include the destruction that allowed architectural history to become part of social history: following its expropriation in 1933, the Dessau Bauhaus was painted in the colours of National Socialism. In 1940, the Junkers factory occupied almost the entire building. A building team run by Speer also moved in there. In 1945, an incendiary bomb hit the building, destroying parts of the interior and almost all of the façade. Surrounded by semi-ruins, even after its first restoration, the building resembled an unwanted remnant for decades.

A recent publication describes the disastrous impression it made on visitors at the time, describing how one could mistake it for a school or an office building. “Perhaps no building was ever so famous that now seems so ordinary.” It is easy to forget that aspect when visiting it in today’s condition, prepared like a glossy brochure. However, its former condition is also part of the Bauhaus identity, not only its history, but also its present day.