Word: bauhaus
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...this comic opera of a structure--and thousands of its cursed cousins of modern architecture--made their regrettable appearances on the scene is the subject of Tom Wolfe's latest book. In From Bauhaus to Our House, Wolfe asks the devastatingly simple questions that modern architecture has never been able to answer. Most importantly, Wolfe asks why the "boxes" on which almost all modern work is based, continue to be built when no one likes them. Not the architects. Not the builders. And especially not the people who live or work in them. Yet the glass boxes, the brick piles...
Before 1920 there was an American architecture, epitomized by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. But in the '30s its heritage was cast away for a mess of ideological pottage, cooked up in the Bauhaus by various Germans and mittel Europeans under the sway of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. This wholly alien style-monastic, severe, technology obsessed and full of socialist implications, smelling of Utopia and garlic-was brought to America, a country that (as Wolfe argues in one of his more dizzying transports of sociological fancy) had no need for worker housing and was therefore...
...weakest, The Painted Word and this one, showed how accurate an eye Wolfe has for manners, fantasies, customs and hype, and how he can rise to a kind of ravenous comic brilliance when engaged with a subject he respects. There is no feeling of engagement in From Bauhaus to Our House, no sense that he particularly cares about architecture at all, unless it can be shown up as the carapace of intellectual folly. This gives his argument a coarse and hasty...
...From about 1900 on, European modernism in architecture was imbued with American imagery, preoccupied with issues that became central to the International Style. The Grid, the load-bearing frame and light skin of the new buildings, came to Europe from the Chicago School, whose leader was Louis Sullivan. The Bauhaus ideal of the open plan was transmitted to Germany by Frank Lloyd Wright. Adolf Loos' messianic rejection of ornament in the early 1900s, which became such a fetish with the International Stylists, came straight out of his infatuation with American machine culture. Le Corbusier derived a good deal...
Most discriminations in From Bauhaus to Our House are dissolved in a hunt for conspiracies. Edward Durell Stone's late buildings like the U.S. embassy in New Delhi or the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., are, by any conceivable standard, maladroit and glitzy, but Wolfe will have none of that; he thinks the dread Compound laid Stone's name low not because he was a poor designer but for the crime of deviationism. Alas, the politics of architecture were never so simple...