Reflections on Issue Eighteen
Resurrecting the Bauhaus
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Thank you to everyone who had a chance to read Issue Eighteen over the past week. For those who have yet to read it, the reflections from other readers below may be a good starting point, or you can read “Resurrecting the Bauhaus” first.
As there is a larger number than usual of new subscribers this week, in part because of the generosity of Britt Wray (who will be soon featured here) republishing Issue Fourteen in her publication, Gen Dread, I want to issue a warm and personal welcome to everyone. I also want to briefly explain the rhythm of The Understory. This is a Reflections post, which is shared between issues with the thoughtful comments from subscribers on the previous issue. New issues of The Understory come out every two weeks.
Writing about the Bauhaus is one of those topics that could have easily turned into something more resembling a book than an essay. It took a degree of measurable restraint, although some might I could have exercised more, to refrain from diving too deep into Bauhaus topics such as pedagogy and the institutional relationship to the political arena. As I get further into this project, I have come to realize that leaving holes for others to fill in can be incredibly fruitful. I am immensely grateful for the comments added this week as they start to fill in many of the unexplored gaps and ask very significant questions, which broadened my perspective and I suspect will broaden yours too. I consider the reflections part of the original issue, a kind of two-part sequence that builds complexity and interest based on the contributions of this community.
While writing can sometimes be a solitary pursuit, it is in moments like these where the project feels like a communal group hug that are the most rewarding. The diversity of perspectives and experiences is something that I knew was present within this community. But sometimes the comments are so vast and far-reaching that I am inclined to stand back in awe of these friends, new and old, and what they have to share. While I would typically add comments after each reflection, the comments shared by readers on this issue form such an incredible compendium that I decided to leave them unaltered, only adjusting the sequence in hopes they flow like the riag-allt (Gaelic) of the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland as beautifully described by Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain:
“The Cairngorm water is all clear. Flowing from granite, with no peat to darken it, it has never the golden amber, the ‘horse-back brown’ so often praised in Highland burns. When it has any colour at all, it is green, as in the Quoich near its linn. It is a green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines, without the vivid brilliance of glacier water. Sometimes the Quoich waterfalls have violet playing through the green, and the pouring water spouts and bubbles in a violet froth.”
I invite you to bask in the lucent radiance of the following reflections. They provide further value in thinking about the legacy of the Bauhaus, and what its reincarnation might signify in our collective path to a more sustainable future. Each of the comments are in the exact words as shared by each respective subscriber and thus have not been formatted with quotations except when quoting others.
As Shared by Jillian Lerner
Beware the resurrectionists! I appreciate that you began with that crucial historical question: which Bauhaus does the EU hope to revive? Historical revivals are always inventions from a particular and highly political perspective in the present. Whether for the Bauhaus, the Arts +Crafts Movement, the New Green Deal, or any of the other projects aiming to reform the relation of art and life, technology and nature, social and economic prosperity, the elephant in the room is capitalism.
What would be the role of industry and corporations in the new Bauhaus? The danger here is the propensity for a range of win/win propositions and solutions steering public/private initiatives [as at Davos] with corporate innovations leading the way, and governments and "Baukultur" programs dutifully following their lead. The public/the commons/the planet is a third term, not at the table but central to the rhetoric as the entity to be served or saved.
What models of work and employment are imagined here, for a future of work aligned with potentially conflicting goals of economic prosperity, social justice, and environmental rehabilitation and stewardship? Would it simply be a continuation of existing models of production, where some elite workers are highly-trained artists, craftsmen, designers, and engineers within a system that relies on a much larger population of global workers continuing as an exploited precariat underclass? The danger is that we just end up with a new range of expensive niched infinitely customized “sustainable and socially responsible” designer products for elite “enlightened” consumers pursuing what can only be a limited model of designer wellness and self-improvement. Our collective conditions of life and ailing habitat are not altered by this, the privileged retreat to their more “authentic” decoratively greened bunkers while the old extractionism, exploitation, dispossession, displacement, and homelessness continue elsewhere.
To tackle our most urgent crises of social inequality and environmental destruction we will need an epic reimagining of how humans secure the conditions of life and approach the planet as a limited interconnected interspecies habitat. To do that we will need to grasp that economic prosperity is simply a means to the ends of collective social prosperity, and the latter is not achievable with the capitalist model of “accumulation by dispossession” [David Harvey]. It is hard to imagine that tech companies, product designers, artists, or a design school allied with industry, have the tools to bring about the overarching systemic changes needed to tackle the “social question of modern life in harmony with nature.” But I suppose it’s a start.
See Jillian’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers
As Shared by Neel
I didn’t know about von der Leyen’s op-ed, and it’s heartening to see a concerted effort and attempt at coordination at the highest level levels to address the climate crisis, and a framing of it in part in broader cultural terms. The evocation of the Bauhaus as a model is interesting, in part because it would be the kiss of death here in the United States—the shouts of socialism and elitism from the right and even center would be pathetically deafening—whereas in Europe it seems to hark back to idealism, solidarity, and artistic innovation which can potentially be harnessed towards political and policy ends. I do think it could be potentially useful, with some reservations, many of which you express.
My concerns would in large part center around organization—I think it’s easy to pay homage to something as innovative and iconic as the Bauhaus, and more difficult to implement it at scale with the coordination and support that’s needed to truly make a difference, and to trickle down to the actionable and political. Interdisciplinarity is a buzzword that can be hard to truly implement, especially at a larger level, and I think sometimes thrives in looser and non-hierarchical structures that are perhaps somewhat antithetical to the sort of urgent streamlined actions that’s needed on our timetable. Organizations like the MIT Media Lab, which I admire a lot, and could also be considered a model for the sort of innovative organization that’s needed, seems to, in my opinion, have a lot of research and work that ultimately just spins out into the ether. Translating zeitgeist—and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense—to a structure that yields concrete results seems daunting, albeit certainly possible, and most definitely worth pursuing. I guess after ambitious statements like this the key and big question is what comes next. “God is in the details”—someone relevant said that, right?
See Neel’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his
As Shared by James Hughes (via email)
My first thought was “how would starting up a new Bauhaus be different than what we've already got?” There's a ton of forward-looking innovative education programs out there. Possibly, they lack some unifying brand? Or is it just that they need some superstar teachers, where they only have “very good” teachers right now? Or do they just need 20-50 years of soak time for their accomplishments to be properly appreciated?
Then the other side of this equation is private industry. I'm thinking of things like Google X (aka, the moonshot factory) and Sidewalk Labs in Toronto (RIP). These seem like the locus of big picture thinking on all the thorny problems of sustainability. Academia is doing some theory, but these private industries are doing the practice.
The Bauhaus was a perfect encapsulation of Modernism. They designed discrete objects, wholly self-contained. I think the problems we face now are very firmly rooted in the post-Modern world. Everything is interwoven and connected. You can probably think about a building in isolation, but the more interesting projects are reimagining whole neighborhoods. I think this is the scale we need to be looking at to modify human behaviors. But... capitalism. It's so hard to undertake this kind of scale without government support, and even then it's fragile and vulnerable to fiscal cycles.
The other angle this got me thinking about was Open Source. The reason all the Bauhaus stuff is absurdly expensive these days is because of copyright laws. That kind of innovation will always be corralled by profiteers. The only way to stop it is to set it free. I'd love to see programs like a new Bauhaus be supported with government and/or private grants, but with an explicit mandate that everything produced becomes part of the public domain. I don't really know what the 2nd order effects of doing something radical like this would be, but it's an interesting thought experiment.
As Shared by Brian Giesbrecht (via email)
Something that jumped out at me was how Gropius went from technological optimism to calling technology immoral in only four years (it's taken me closer to eighteen).
This new Bauhaus thing is interesting too, but I'm torn. Did you watch The Martian (based on the book by Andy Weir)? The main protagonist, at one point, faced with almost certain death having been marooned on Mars, declares: "I'm going to have to science the shit out of this." (Plot spoiler: against all odds he succeeds.)
At one point in my career, most likely before my career started and back in design school, I might have made a similar declaration when faced with our near-certain planetary death—"we're going to have to design the shit out of this!"
On some level is this what the new Bauhaus believes will save us? Design?
I think it was the president of Volvo who once said there is no such thing as a green car, cars are by definition destructive to our planet some only less so, and I think this is how I feel about green design too (I admit I'm letting the perfect fight the good here to some extent).
But what about Tesla!? What about LEED architecture? Alternative energy? Organic farming?
I think the thing Musk achieved was making ultra-fast, ultra-tech, luxury cars cool, that happen to be electric, because he was smart enough to realise people don't want to go with less, humans seem almost hard wired to only want more—a remnant of our evolution where so often we didn't have enough?
FYI there's an electric Hummer coming out now too, and it's a monster of a thing—enormous, heavy, way too powerful, able to rock crawl over a crumbled building without spilling your latte— more a vehicle for surviving comfortably in an apocalypse rather than preventing one.
So as you point out, where the original Bauhaus was supposed to create high-quality designs for the masses that ended up being low volume luxury items for the wealthy, will this new Bauhaus do the same?”
As Shared by Peter Tavernise
Provocative topic! Bauhaus feels so sterile, and industrial it's hard for me to think of something that could be further from what eco-restorative architecture and living communities might need to become: messy, inter-sectional, porous, biodegradable, nontoxic, all natural and organic (in the widest sense).
You say "... Davos Declaration 2018, which sought to work “towards a high-quality Baukultur for Europe” with a new, adaptive approach to the built environment that “is rooted in culture, actively builds social cohesion, ensures environmental sustainability, and contributes to the health and well-being of all.” <-- Right here is one consideration that we're already beginning to realize is key: it's not going to be enough to be merely sustainable, we must also be restorative, such as the work of Allan Savory Institute (more than 90 member locations around the world), documentarian John D. Liu, and the movies and subsequent eco-restoration villages inspired by them.
Regarding that question of Robin Wall Kimmerer poses in your quotation, "How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?” This is exactly what folks like Manda Scott (Accidental Gods) and Robert Cobbold (Conscious Evolution) are asking us to take on—can we spend time every day considering "what would it be like if we got everything *right?*" And what could that lead us to in terms of ways of being and beginning to embody that future in stepwise fashion, starting now?
RICA looks amazing, and it makes me recall hearing Architect Bill McDonough’s talk regarding baseline design principles we need to take into account. [Adam’s insertion from the talk]:
“I don’t think we are doing anything really if we just be less bad. I think we are just being bad, but less so. It’s amazing to me that in places that honour the concept of science, people think that less and bad are numbers and you take two negatives and you get a positive. Less is a relationship. Bad is a human value. Being less bad is not being good. It is being bad, just less.”
McDonough recounts this discovery in a Bedouin tent:
After graduating from Dartmouth, McDonough helped put himself through architecture school at Yale by working weekends and summers as chauffeur to the bandleader Benny Goodman. Before entering graduate school, he went to Jordan to work on King Hussein’s Jordan River valley redevelopment project. “That changed me for life,” he recalls “because I had the chance to live in a Bedouin tent. When I first got there, I looked at this tent made of goat hair and said, ‘They’re going to make me live in a black tent in this 120-degree heat with no shade, no air movement?’ But once I was in the tent, I discovered I was in deep shade, protected from ultraviolet light. The surface of the tent would heat up, and you’d get convective currents, so all of a sudden there was a breeze. The coarse weave was so open that the light came streaming in, so it was full of beautiful light to read by inside. When it rains, the hairs swell up, and it gets tight as a drum. And you make it from [a goat] that follows you around and eats everything you can’t.”
McDonough says he remembers thinking, How exquisite are these tents?
“At the same time, we were helping the local tribes make adobe houses, which work under entirely different principles of thermal mass and diurnal cycles. The heavy brick moderates the temperature in ways that are totally effective for this place as well. So, I learned about mass and membrane and transparency from the tent and the adobe, and I saw that when you finish with them they return to the earth. The mud adobe hut is the earth; the tent will become compostable material,” from Vanity Fair.
All of this to say, I'd love to be surprised by the New Bauhaus, but I'm also not sure that's the way we get there (declare new design principles via a school or movement). Listening to Bayo Akomolafe last week, he is among those who are asking us to just stop. Stop looking to the past or any existing institution, theoretical model, or aesthetic. He says "not backwards, not forwards, but awk-wards." Let us sit in the crossroads with the trickster, sitting in not knowing, and be willing to be surprised by the emergent. He says “Modernity is the paradigm of confinement and capture, let us dwell in ambiguity long enough to meet new gods who make new worlds possible.”
See Peter’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to his
As Shared by May Bartlett
This issue evoked some strong internal reactions for me, which means you’re poking in the right places. If you were to ask me before having read the article, I would have enthusiastically jumped at the idea of a new European Bauhaus dedicated to sustainability. After reading, I still think establishing an educational system with the intention of envisioning and creating a sustainable future holds a lot of potential, but I think some of the concerns you brought up need to be addressed for it to be successful. The theme that I see beneath the concerns you raised is the need to address the invisible as much (if not more) than the visible. What I mean by invisible in this context is the mental and emotional state from which we as individuals approach sustainability.
One concern you bring up is the intention of those in power. You point to the original Bauhaus when you say,
“While Gropius reconceived the Bauhaus multiple times during the years 1915—1919 before it officially opened, the institution was inherently unstable because the political, economic, and social conditions both outside and inside it were highly volatile as well.”
This example reminds us that an institution is a direct reflection of the individuals who make it up. In order to have a healthy institution, we need healthy people in it. I think that any community of individuals (especially those holding the authority of education) needs to have an element of inner work. If it were up to me, space for individual’s inner work would be integrated into the Bauhaus curriculum at the faculty, staff, and student levels as a way to help mitigate corruption and ego-driven agendas.
Another concern you rightly raise is the danger of approaching sustainability from a design approach. You raise the question,
“Why is a new “sustainability aesthetic” needed, and how does that aesthetic reinforce our connectivity with nature rather than seek to design it through continued manipulation and obfuscation?”
This surfaces the importance of our mindset when working toward sustainability. If we try to ‘design’ a sustainable future from the same anthropocentric perspective that got us in this mess in the first place, I don’t have a lot of faith that we’ll be successful. In order to be successful in this transformation, it will require us to humble ourselves so we can let the wisdom of other species guide us forward.
Similar to the need to shift our anthropocentric mindset, when envisioning a sustainable future, we need to shift our relationship to the material world. You say it beautifully when you solidify your point that “A new sustainable aesthetic, such as there is one, needs to help us to envision a fuller life with less stuff.” This is essential for actually living in harmony with the rest of the planet, as sustainable growth is an oxymoron. We absolutely need to abandon our growth mindset if we want to step into a sustainable future. In order to do so, it will require deep inner work to find fulfillment and happiness from within instead of seeking it through material possession.
Overall, I think President von der Leyen’s intention of creating a sustainability-focused Bauhaus is a step in the right direction. And as with most intentional change, it will require thoughtfulness, humility, and a willingness to do the inner work to pull it off.
See May’s comment in its entirety and add your reflections to hers
As Shared by Rudy Buttignol (via email)
Yes, Bauhaus has indeed informed my work in film and design, particularly during my university years and a period afterwards -- and personal tastes as well. My home is a reflection of Modernist influences from white walls to Saarinen table. I’ve also owned “the chairs.”
The idea that a “New Bauhaus,” created to help solve the big problems of the era, imposed from the top down by a giant, notoriously bureaucratic government body, is self-defeating if not delusional. It is a complete misunderstanding of the source of the inspiration and creativity that was resourced and galvanized by Gropius’s school, not created by it. It rose from the bottom up, reflecting the cultural dynamism of the new machine age. Some of the experimentation at the school was a result of its lack of resources, like paper and ink, forcing students to improvise and expand from their choices of traditional artists’ mediums.
The thought of the EU jump-starting an artistic movement—any movement let alone one to mitigate the destruction of the natural world—by creating a set of five new institutions is ridiculous. Imagine the decision making process from the perspective of elected and unelected government officials in selecting the five sites. The list of pre-conditions—lengthy, bureaucratic and politically-skewed—will assuredly find “creativity” at the very end. Lip service will be paid of course to the central role of artists in this new initiative, but more will be spent on land acquisition and development, bricks and mortar construction, heating, electricity, maintenance and administration, than will be ever spent on artists’ supplies and stipends. It’s always the way with official culture. Here in Canada, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent building galleries, performing arts centers and museums, but funding for artists’ work to populate those cultural establishments always comes last.
Over the course of my professional life, I have arrived at the conclusion that artists do not lead change or even presage it. Rather art and artists reflect the changes taking place in the culture, the zeitgeist. The best of them, or at least the most historically notable, do so in the very early stages of cultural shifts. There will be new schools of thought that emerge but it is anyone’s guess what change they will presage. I am willing to bet, however, that a “new Bauhaus” school of thought will not emerge from any of the new five sites the EU settles on.
Destruction of the global environment is an outcome of over-population and over-consumption. Mies van der Rohe pointed in the right direction when he said less is more. Perhaps we need to come to grips with accepting the idea of less with less.
Jillian, Neel, James, Brian, Peter, May, and Rudy were thoughtful in writing these comments. I know they would welcome your generative comments that continue to build the conversation, as would I.
I hope this week between issues provides the space for further discovery and reflection. Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead. See you next Saturday.
Adam
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We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The scale of the issue demands not only continuous focus but also the courage to take bold action. I've found that a persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause.
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Brilliant, group hug indeed. There is no conversation I'd rather be taking part in right now. And I think this is an important factor we should all recognize. Perhaps what is needed isn't necessarily some school or aesthetic institutional movement, but instead that the conversation be had in this same spirit of openness and mutality you have fostered, so that the solutions and approaches that are needed are concieved, co-created, trialled and revised as appropriate based on learning, by those who live in each bioregion and sub-habitat thereof. Local solutions can be shared out by regional hubs, and what's useful in more than one place can be scaled, and what isn't doesn't need to be.