Resurrecting the Bauhaus
The Understory: Issue Eighteen
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When you hear the word “Bauhaus,” what image comes to mind? Perhaps a white building with clean lines and no ornamentation? Or coloured squares nesting in one another to create a multi-dimensionality? An elegant leather chair that conforms perfectly to the symmetries of the body? Or a black and white photo collage of people dancing across different planes? A colourful woven textile with alternating basic shapes?
The significance of our historical imagination of the Bauhaus and its legacy has dramatically increased recently. In September 2020, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the creation of a New European Bauhaus. The next month she shared an Op-Ed that outlined more of her thinking. After lauding the significance of the Bauhaus in influencing industrial society in the 20th century, she wrote:
“A hundred years later, we are facing new global challenges: climate change, pollution, digitalization and a demographic explosion predicted to increase the world's population to up to 10 billion people by mid-century. These developments are going hand in hand with a seemingly limitless economic growth at the expense of our wellbeing, our planet and our limited natural resources...All the signs point the same way: we must rethink and replan.”
With the goal of Europe becoming the first climate-neutral continent in 2050, President von der Leyen astutely recognizes the project is more than just reducing emissions, but rather a massive economic, environmental, and cultural project. The European Green Deal “should experiment and provide practical answers to the social question of what modern life in harmony with nature can look like for Europeans.”
In Issue Eighteen, I’d like to peel back some of the historical Bauhaus layers to rediscover the possibility spaces for a New European Bauhaus. How is it that an institution such as the Bauhaus can help us imagine and move towards the world that we want to live in? For just as the original conception of the Bauhaus centred on the radical act of reimaging the role of the artist and the craftsman in the rising age of the machine, the New European Bauhaus will require a similar level of radicalism in rethinking the very institutions, systems, forms, and lifestyles of our contemporary society to become sustainable.
Which Bauhaus?
When trying to understand the referent that is “The Bauhaus” there is such a daunting multiplicity of versions that it demands specificity. Which version of the Bauhaus someone refers to reflects not just their historical understanding but also their ideological values that they want to carry forward from the institution into the present day. As Berry Bergdoll writes in The New York Times, “Bauhaus” has become a catchall synonym for modernist architecture and design. “But the original Bauhaus was neither a movement nor a style but a school, and it was a provincial institution, not run by the state.”
Just as there is no one correct interpretation of the Bauhaus, there was no singular version of the original Bauhaus either. The Bauhaus had a multiplicity of forms: pedagogically ranging from one of spiritual and socialist utopianism to a school of rational industrial production; leadership styles from directors Walter Gropius (1919–1928), Hannes Meyer (1928—1930), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930–1933); and geographies across countries with three locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin Germany between 1918—1933 and the United States in Cambridge (Harvard), Chicago (IIT), and North Carolina (Black Mountain). But it was not only the shifting pedagogy, directors, and geography that reinterpreted the Bauhaus, but also its changing faculty and students, both of whom were instrumental in the realization of what the Bauhaus was at any moment in time. Lastly, because the Bauhaus was at least in part funded by regional governments, it was susceptible to the changing political parties and movements of which Germany experienced many of from the end of the first World War through the 1920s until the Third Reich took hold of the country and expelled the Bauhaus from Germany. The many shifting forms of the Bauhaus and its interpretations are what led Eva Díaz to suggest that “We are All Bauhauslers,” as the umbrella widened beyond the Bauhaus’s direct participants and descendants to its broader influence on Western culture through these interpretations and the objects surrounding our lived experience.
“There’s no debate about the significance of the Bauhaus. But in celebrating the Bauhaus the way we do—highlighting its allegedly far-flung influence in space and time—are we blurring our understanding of what the school achieved, of the challenges it faced, and the ramifications of both?”
What Bergdoll suggests is that by scanning over the actual achievements of the Bauhaus and its myriad challenges (and there were many) in favour of a more simplistic narrative of aesthetics and style, we translate what we want the Bauhaus to have been perhaps even more than what it actually was. And his point becomes all the more salient as the European Commission begins planning the resurrection of the Bauhaus a century after its creation.
I am quite certain that many of the challenges the Bauhaus faced, while perhaps specific in their context, are more universal and will recur again with 21st-century specificity. If we are no longer just celebrating the Bauhaus legacy in books and exhibitions, but partially staking our sustainable future on its successful recreation, we are wise to focus on desired clarity from the blurred understanding Bergdoll suggests.
The Emergence of the New European Bauhaus
On the one hand, it is entirely noteworthy and worth celebrating that the leader of the European Union would choose to elevate an institution like the Bauhaus to be part of her political platform for change in the EU. It is utterly inconceivable in the two countries where I hold citizenship that leadership would call for the reemergence of a century-old institution as a reference point for their future vision. Perhaps this is partially as a result of our cultures of historical amnesia in Canada and the United States whose forward gaze rarely involves retrospection, as that would till the soil of systemic oppression of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the U.S., and the oppression of Black people in America as well documented by Isabel Wilkerson and others.
However, it is a sign of our cultural currents and distribution of power to contrast how the first Bauhaus emerged with how a new European Bauhaus might come about today. While the German Thuringian state government was influential in the opening, iteration, and eventual dissolution of the first Bauhaus, the concept evolved from the already existing Werkbund into a new kind of postwar school. The visionaries of this transition and newly conceived Bauhaus were ordinary Germans whose determination brought about the institution.
The origin story of the first Bauhaus is in marked contrast to the New European Bauhaus. Rather than emerging from within a region and from ordinary citizens, the seeds of the New European Bauhaus movement arose during a meeting of European culture ministers in January 2018. The meeting did not take place in the capital and headquarters of the European Commission, Brussels, but instead at the de facto staging ground for corporate power and influence, Davos (see Issue One). Their meeting resulted in the appropriately (if disconcertingly named) 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.”
Widespread collaboration across Europe in envisioning and supporting the New European Bauhaus is to be celebrated. However, it raises important questions around who controls the Bauhaus agenda and what political and economic contexts it is configured to perpetuate. Is the New European Bauhaus preconfigured as part of The World Economic Forum agenda and its Founder and Executive Chairman, Klaus Schwab’s “Fourth Industrial Revolution?” It is not obvious (yet) if and whose political agenda(s) are behind the New European Bauhaus, nor who would be responsible for determining what it is.
Shifting Political Winds
When Walter Gropius first envisioned the Bauhaus as an evolution of the Werkbund, he shared the vision of his contemporary, Bruno Taut, who defined architecture in terms of its social responsibility. According to Elaine S. Hochman in Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism, Taut and Gropius both believed that the role of the architect was to transform society. For them, the Werkbund and the Bauhaus were both a physical and a moral enterprise.
The technological optimism that industrial production would better the lives of workers, artists, and industrialists imbued Gropius’s original Bauhaus proposal in 1915. However, by the end of the war and the ensuing revolution, it had taken a radical turn. Technology, which Gropius once saw as a gateway to prosperity, had destroyed Germany both morally and physically. In his 1919 speech in Leipzig, Gropius brazenly declared that technology was downright immoral.
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. It would be a stretch to say that the instability of any European country today is on par with post-war Germany; however, some of the fundamental schisms that haunted the early years of the Bauhaus parallel our own realities. Some would say that we live in a dystopian technological reality that creates a level of dissolution not unlike post-war Germany. With the return of stakeholder value conversations, we are increasingly valuing the moral enterprise, not just the physical one. Having narrowly escaped the Euro crisis at the beginning of the decade but now facing ramifications from the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, the once borderlessness ambitions of Europe brought on by both peacetime aspirations and free-flowing financial markets are being unwound. National interests and independent decision-making is on the rise in Europe, further exacerbated by COVID-19. Growing social inequality also threatens to further destabilize countries and the European Union, so the call for systemic reform that ensures workers have a viable economic future and emotional well-being is once again of utmost concern.
Perhaps we should not be surprised, given these commonalities, that the resurgence of some of the existential concerns that catalyzed the creation of the first Bauhaus is once again igniting a movement for a new one. In her 2018 Opening Statement to the European Parliament, President von der Leyen declared, “The world is calling for more Europe. The world needs more Europe.” As The Economist notes, “COVID-19 torpedoes the logic of ‘more Europe.’ At its heart was a belief that a body like the EU is the only means of survival in a globalised world.” Seen in this light, the call for a New European Bauhaus is a timely attempt to reinject pride into the European Union, not unlike the rationale Julius Posener cited for why the Kaiser first supported the Werkbund in hopes that newfound pride in work would turn the worker away from the lingering threat of socialism to wholeheartedly embrace capitalism.
Environments for Reimagining
President von der Leyen anticipates five European Bauhaus projects to be commissioned over the next two years in different countries across the European Union. Each of them “will commit to sustainability” and “combine culture and art,” while centring around different sustainability challenges such as materials, energy, demographics, mobility, and digital innovation. What form these new institutions take will be of vital importance to the realization of their mission. The buildings of the Bauhaus were not just containers for its ideology but also were designed to foster the kind of intrapersonal and collaborative work that would free students from the conventional bounds around them. While the kind of modernist buildings of the Bauhaus Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin would have seemed entirely radical at the time, a similar architecture today would seem entirely commonplace, as it has become intertwined with our cultures of consumption from shopping malls to hotels to condominiums.
What might a similarly radical built environment look like for the New European Bauhaus on par with the historical contrast of the original Bauhaus buildings? Side-stepping the obvious and what will likely be a very controversial question of how these five sites will be chosen from both a nationalistic and geographic frame—if these new institutions are to imagine new models of what modern life in harmony with nature can look like, the lifestyles and environments of the faculty and students must reflect that same harmony.
In Reflections on Issue Six, I shared Robin Wall Kimmerer’s passage from Braiding Sweetgrass on students in her ecology class at Syracuse:
“How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day—brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl—truncated their ability to see some good between humans and the earth. As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?”
We should not expect students brought up in a built environment and culture that has largely displaced our interconnectedness with nature to be able to create our new context that bridges the divide. Just as the original Bauhaus students needed their entire context to help them imagine a modernist connection between art and life, so too must the environment of the New European Bauhaus students connect art and life— yet this time within a context that reconnects and builds personal interrelationships with the natural world.
The Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Museum hosted its latest Design Triennial, Nature, in 2019. One of the most memorable parts of the exhibition was the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Architecture (RICA). Here was a campus that linked the spatial relationship between regenerative built and natural environments and supporting their national goal of training the next generation of agriculturists to adopt and promote sustainable independent food production in Rwanda. The context was one in which agriculture had become one of the least desirable career paths for college students. In the first year of the school, RICA received over 7,000 applications for just 84 slots.
As shared by MASS Design Group, who was hired to lead the master planning, architecture, landscape, and engineering design for the new campus,
“The curriculum and campus design at RICA are informed by Conservation Agriculture and One Health Principles, both of which emphasize the interlinking of ecological, animal, and human health. The campus and curriculum seek to reinforce these principles by taking an interdisciplinary, experiential approach to learning, with a campus that promotes biodiversity, ecological conservation, and community participation. RICA will soon be a world leader in experiential education, research, and conservation agriculture.”
While the academic domains differ from the intended purpose of the New European Bauhaus, here we can see how such a system explicitly designed to highlight the interconnectedness of human, animal, and ecological systems can create the fruitful conditions for conceiving of new conditions of modern life integrated, rather than apart, from nature.
School of Desire
While some of the 20th-century’s most iconic crafts in textiles, metalwork, and woodwork and artistic work in photography, sculpture, and painting emerged from the Bauhaus, the school’s legacy is more typically associated with industrial objects such as buildings, housewares, and furniture that represented Gropius’s idealized unity of art and technology. Gropius wanted the Bauhaus to "fit into the rhythm of the competitive world...and come to terms with ...the machine...locomotives, airplanes, factories, American silos and...mechanical gadgets for daily use” (Hochman). This legacy of industrial production and consumption is at the heart of our current existential dilemma about where we go from here as we face a creeping mega-crisis on the horizon of mass extinction of species, unprecedented climate change, unsustainable resource depletion, and myriad pollution dangers. As Belgian architect Julien De Smedt told Bloomberg Green, the “Bauhaus was a great convergence of ideas. But it’s the symbol of the industrial world, which is our doom today.”
As buildings are responsible for 40% of the total energy consumption in the EU and 36% of the bloc’s energy-related GHG emissions (“Renovation Wave”), there is a recognition that buildings are a vital part of the equation for Europe to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The EU determined that 75% of its buildings are energy inefficient with an estimated 85-95% of today’s buildings that will still be in use by 2050. So, as part of its coronavirus recovery plan, the EU had allocated 1.8 trillion-Euros to energy retrofits, some of which they hope will be inspired by innovations coming out of the New European Bauhaus.
What becomes increasingly clear in reading through the details about the vision for the New European Bauhaus is that it goes well beyond performance improvements to architecture and products to embrace the Gesamtkunstwerk aspirations of total design from the Bauhaus and the British Arts & Crafts movement that helped inspire it. President von der Leyen suggests that the New European Bauhaus will be a “driving force to bring the European Green Deal to life in an attractive, and innovative and human-centred way.” She further explains, “every movement has its own look and feel. And this systemic change needs its own aesthetics—blending design and sustainability.” This is a curious turn in an otherwise logical and well-conceived concept of the New European Bauhaus. For it begs the questions, 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?
In “Hey, that’s me” in The London Review of Books, art historian Hal Foster laments this part of the Bauhaus legacy—where subject and object were mingled such that the aesthetic and the utilitarian become conflated. In the transition from an object becoming utilitarian to aesthetic, Foster notes that it goes from functional to desired. And such is the world that we live in:
“For today you don’t have to be filthy rich to be projected not only as designer but as designed—whether the product in question is your home or your business, your sagging face (designer surgery) or your lagging personality (designer drugs), your historical memory (designer museums) or your genetic future (designer children). Might this ‘designed subject’ be the unintended offspring of the ‘constructed subject’?”
Foster alludes to the fact that while the Bauhaus intended to create high-quality, cheap manufactured goods for the masses, they ended up creating small-batch designer goods for the wealthy. What he challenges us to consider is whether in the pursuit of a new sustainability aesthetic to emerge from The New European Bauhaus, are we further perpetuating the same system of consumption that we now presumably recognize as unsustainable. “Design is all about desire,” says Foster. “But this desire often appears to be without a subject (this is why design seems to perfect a kind of narcissism).” Design has perfected perpetual personalization, refashioning every object to seem like we are its subject rather than the utility of the object itself.
Foster’s contentions should resonate with President von der Leyen, as she recognizes that:
“Our current levels of consumption of raw materials, energy, water, food and land use are not sustainable...We need to change how we treat nature, how we produce and consume, live and work, eat and heat, travel and transport."
A school whose very responsibility is to cast greater desirability over a broader set of sustainable goods will increase what we produce and consume, not lessen it. While it might deal a blow to the limitless growth prospects for the European Union, the sustainable aesthetic we need to be seeking is more with less. If the New European Bauhaus can help us to reimagine our own well-being separated from continuous external desire fulfillment and consumption, the European Union might truly become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. This reimaging will be breaking an industrial production and consumption cycle that began with modernism and left us with the acute levels of societal unhappiness and planetary pollution we face today. It won’t be easy, but it is necessary. And just as the first Bauhaus inspired so many around the world to envision a different future, I am hopeful that the New European Bauhaus will too.
Conclusion
In proclaiming a New European Bauhaus, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen became one of the most provocative global political leaders in inspiring new possibilities for a more sustainable future. With the recent exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union combined with more strongly delineated national borders and independence around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are in a historic moment that in many ways parallels the emergence of the first Bauhaus in post-war Germany. And yet the mega-crisis on the horizon requires collective action which depends on the very interdependence and cooperation of nations around the world. With the anticipation of most countries missing their emission reduction targets agreed to at COP 21 in Paris, bold and courageous actions are necessary to mitigate further harm.
If we are to create a modern life in harmony with nature, we need radical new visions of what that looks and feels like. The resurrection of the Bauhaus ideology through a coordinated series of institutions around Europe can help inspire that transition by showing what is possible, and by inspiring the transformation of our institutions just as the original Bauhaus did globally. The shifts in how we produce and consume, live and work, eat and heat, travel, and transport will not be enough. A new sustainable aesthetic, such as there is one, needs to help us to envision a fuller life with less stuff. Just as the embrace of industrial production captivated the first Bauhaus, designing a life where well-being is the first tier priority can similarly inspire the next Bauhaus.
Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead.
Adam
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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.
I didn’t know about 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?