Tons of stuff on Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus all over You Tube, as you might expect. Including this introduction. This art movement has had a tremendous impact on the lived experience of ordinary people - it was the liquidation of the academy and the art gallery and the fusion of design and aesthetic principles with mass production, mass public housing and machinery. You need to read the famous short essay by Tom Wolf (the world's best selling living journalist) From Bauhaus to Our House, which traces how modernism became the first 'mass' and democratic art movement, partly because it was embraced by American mass production where such ideas of mass consumption and egalitarianism are possible. Everything from the door handle in your flat to tower block have the hallmark of the Bauhaus (and its related Russian offshoot Constructivism) - not least magazine design and typography, and dress and hairstyles. Modern football kit for example was created by the Bauhaus using scientific principles of human movement - to replace the top hats and long trousers or whatever it was that Edwardian football players wore. Bauhaus had a non-metaphysical approach to aesthetics summed up in Gropius' famous slogan: Form Follows Function. That is a very important principle still in magazine and newspaper design. We are 'doing' Bauhaus as a way into High Modernism (which was a cleansing reaction to the subjectivism of Victorian romantic aesthetics (and particularly against neo-gothic architecture). Bauhaus is marked by extreme utility and lack of decoration - so in a sense a modern high tech hospital is Bauhaus architecture, as is our very own TV studio...
Walter Gropius:
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