Bauhaus
Article
Bauhaus is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 04, 2024 and December 05, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “From Bauhaus To Our House , a hostile history of modern architecture”; “a new heraldic device for the Bauhaus compound”; “Bauhaus worker housing in Stuttgart, 1927”. It most often appears alongside Beaux-Arts, From Bauhaus To Our House, International Style.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: December 04, 2024
- Last seen: December 05, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Beaux-Arts (2 shared issues)
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- From Bauhaus To Our House (2 shared issues)
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- International Style (2 shared issues)
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- 3D printing (1 shared issues)
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- @dieworkwear (1 shared issues)
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- Abercrombie & Fitch (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AI Art Turing Test (1 shared issues)
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- Aldo Rossi (1 shared issues)
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- Alessandro Menini (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- Architectural League of New York (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is From Bauhaus To Our House, a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: what happened? If everyone hates this stuff, how did it win?
Inline links: From Bauhaus To Our House
Preeminent among these was Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919. Their big idea was “starting from zero” - since all previous art had been contaminated by capitalism, we needed a hard reset where people started by (eg) contemplating what color and shape really were, then gradually building a new socialist art from the ground up. This new art must eschew ornamentation, associated as it was with kings and nobles who had money to spare on gold trim or sculpted curlicues. Real socialist art would be brutally functional, the sort of thing a poor worker might build. If this sounds harsh, remember that this was right after World War I, the old order stood infinitely discredited, and starting from zero must have seemed pretty appealing.
Maybe too appealing: the Bauhaus wasted no time in becoming a caricature of itself. Someone got into their head that pointed roofs “represented the crowns of the old nobility”; henceforward, all their buildings had flat tops (even though this was unsuited for the snowy German climate). Facades were fake, just like the fakeness of bourgeois propaganda; therefore true socialist buildings would show their innards as much as possible, with jutting pipes and undecorated structural supports.
Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments on AI Art Turing Test and From Bauhaus To Our House).
Inline links: AI Art Turing Test, From Bauhaus To Our House