Word: bauhaus
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...bacon-and-cheese sandwich he enjoyed a week ago. He will, in the meantime, deposit a variety of dead and near dead things at the back door and stalk away for a nap. He may shred the antique silk draperies or decide that the shower stall is a Bauhaus litter pan. Whether the cat is friend or foe, many would agree with the prominent 18th century naturalist, the Count de Buffon. The cat, he wrote, "appears to have feelings only for himself, loves only conditionally and only enters into relations [with people] in order to abuse them...
...lucky (and smart) because in Bauhaus he has found a subject that badly needs debunking. Just because Wolfe didn't like modern painting doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it; paintings have no function but to provoke and entertain, and that is the province of personal taste. But architecture is different. It affects us everyday, and when it fails us, our lives are the poorer for it. And, sayeth the prophet Wolfe with characteristic grace and enthusiasm, architecture has failed us on a grand scale...
...problem, all agree, is the Box, and Wolfe seeks out the origins of the architecture we love to hate. In the world of modern architecture, all roads lead to the Bauhaus, that post-World War I citadel of artistic in Germany. There, under the leadership of the "Silver Prince," Walter Gropius, scores of young socialists (in name only) planned the rebuilding of Europe after the Great War. Because these folks were socialists, self-described friends of the workers, they would design for the working class with the materials of the industrial age. The Bauhaus crowd rejected anything tainted...
...Americans of the Lost Generation soon came over to study at the Bauhaus, then the Bauhaus folks came over here to flee Hitler. By the 1930s, the group had a label, "International Style," and an icon, Le Corbusier, and they had taken over the art world. Their manifestos and polemics killed trees from Paris to Pasedena, and the message was clear: we are going to create workers' housing from workers' materials, and the clients be damned if they don't want it. The clients-be-damned pose had an interesting side benefit. The gods in the International Style pantheon tended...
...matter. Taken in its entirety, From Bauhaus to Our House builds a compelling case against the whole profession. But don't just take his word for it. Pick up the latest copy of Architectural Record, a slick (six dollars a pop) monthly journal. On page 98, there appears an evaluation of two important architects. The story begins...