Word: bauhausization
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...jewel brilliantly combining such elegant materials as travertine, Tinian marble, gray glass, onyx and steel, was Mies' first major public building to demonstrate many of these concepts. It immediately established its designer as a master. The following year he replaced Walter Gropius as the director of the Dessau Bauhaus, only to close up the experimental workshop three years later in protest against Nazi restrictions. In 1938, an invitation to head the school of architecture at the Armour Institute (since renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology) led Mies to Chicago and the full flowering of his genius. "He always said...
...From the Bauhaus drawing boards, lean, well-proportioned buildings came forth to challenge the Gothic, Baroque and neoclassic structures of the day. One of the best examples of the austere new look was Gropius' design for the Bauhaus' second home in Dessau. Flat-topped and structurally spare, the building had horizontal bands of windows that made it seem to hover effortlessly above rather than rest heavily on the ground. Such buildings had no more of a distinct national style than a locomotive, a chair, a doorknob, or any other machine-made object...
...architecture Laszlo Moholy-Nagy sought to extend to every visible element in the human environment. The two men had been kindred spirits ever since Gropius visited Moholy's first exhibition in Berlin in 1922, and invited the young Hungarian expatriate to join his staff at the newly formed Bauhaus. Moholy's acceptance sealed a friendship, rooted in a rare meeting of minds, that was to last until his death...
...Bauhaus that Moholy's career took its essential form. If Gropius was the founding father, Moholy was the radical activist who translated idea into experiment. His assignment was the metal workshop, but by no means did he confine himself to metals. Murals, photography, films, ballet and stage designs, light and color, typography and layout all commanded his attention. He experimented with plastics in a day when they were considered a poor substitute for genuine materials, painted on aluminum, created complicated "light-space modulators" (see color opposite) that anticipated the light and kinetic sculptures of the 1960s...
Harmonious Environment. Like his colleagues at the Bauhaus, Moholy believed that in creating a more harmonious environment he could bring out nobler aspects in the human profile. The ugly realities of Nazism cut the experiment short, but in 1937 Moholy-Nagy tried to reactivate the Bauhaus in Chicago. The student's first year, proclaimed the catalogue, would be devoted to his "spiritual preparation." Chicago was not Dessau, and the school folded in a matter of months. Moholy regrouped, and the following year opened the School of Design, which, with financial support from industry, emerged over the next decade...