Doing justice to the significance of the Bauhaus
Objective, functional, modern – the Bauhaus shaped the idea of design in the 20th century like hardly any other educational institution. The Bauhaus is synonymous with industrial, unornamented design and modern architecture. Last but not least, the concept of the “preliminary course” adapted this teaching worldwide. To this day, it has a historical afterlife in numerous design and art colleges. There it served as a model, as a self-contained idea of progressive-democratic design. While this homogeneous interpretation promoted the “Bauhaus myth” in the Federal Republic of Germany well over 50 years after the school was founded, the critical re-reading of the influential design school increasingly came to the fore with US postmodernism.
The slim volume “Das Bauhaus – Werkstatt der Moderne” by architectural historian Winfried Nerdinger now also takes a look at the fragile, non-linear dimensions of the Bauhaus in the context of the socio-political upheavals of its time. Nerdinger was Professor of Architectural History at the Technical University of Munich from 1986 until his retirement in 2012. He made a decisive contribution to research into modernist architecture. On the occasion of the centenary of the Bauhaus, the author traces the ambivalences: Between the mythicization of the historical institution in the 1950s and the postmodern criticism of the inhospitality of rigorous functionalism, Nerdinger argues that “only an objective, fact-based historical analysis” can do justice to the significance of the Bauhaus. This analysis must include not only the artistic and pedagogical, but also the political, economic and social concepts and interests.
Through history in seven chapters
Seven chapters guide the reader chronologically from the turn of the century and the pioneers of the Bauhaus to the post-war reception. In addition to the influential thinker and architect Gottfried Semper, these include the co-founders of the Arts and Crafts movement William Morris and John Ruskin.
This volume is a compact introduction. It not only reads like a kind of crash course for “Bauhaus newcomers”, but also pointedly demonstrates the paradoxes of the design school to the knowledgeable reader. Nerdinger is able to explain the complex and not always contradictory structure of the Bauhaus by means of numerous references. The author confidently guides the reader through a ‘workshop of modernism’, which proves to be more unwieldy, more complex and more multifaceted than the widespread image of it would have us believe.
