Word: bauhausization
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Instead of representation, instead of abstract beauty, Weimar visual cultural does...what? It is political, but it is more than simple propaganda--Heartfield and Georg Grosz each have their Hitler caricatures, but the meat of Weimar thought is elsewhere. Technology is everywhere: in the medium of photography, in Bauhaus design, in the mannequins of Josef Albers and Oskar Schlemmer, in the pipes and puppets in the portraiture section. The noisy whirligig of modern technology is both embraced in dada photo-montages of basketball-headed humanoids and controlled through the neat, organized designs of Herbert Bayer's movie house and exhibition...
...mannequins, the frightened dada, the busy montage, the cold Bauhaus design: All this could be funneled into some superficial critique of the continuities between Weimar culture and fascism. But such an approach would ignore peculiar versatility Weimar artists showed in reacting to and using these new modern themes...
...Angeles was a perfect proving ground for this slicker, more humanized and glamorous version of modernism than the Bauhaus produced. It had the climate and the light. It had the talent, the money and the daring to support a new design movement. And of course there was all that postwar production capacity. Eames' molded plywood chairs, in fact, used a technology he developed for making lightweight splints for the Navy...
...sculpted fuel tank (a feature that would become a near obsession with bike designers 75 years later). By the '20s and '30s, bike design was part of larger design fields. The 1923 BMW R32, with its clear, lean triangular geometry, is one of the most perfect expressions of Bauhaus sensibility ever devised. There were Art Deco machines too, with swooping exaggerated fenders, such as the early (1922) Megola Sport or the mighty, lumbering 1948 Indian Chief. The BMW and the Indian are, in fact, the poles of motorcycle design: one stripped down, the other elaborately faired...
...matter what style is chosen in this instance--boring Bauhaus, bogus Georgian, post-modern melange or glass box--a building of this proposed size can only be enormous. The resulting increase in traffic and parking would be only another intractable problem added to the whole...