What I really hadn't been prepared for was how big this book would be. Big and heavy. If I ever dropped it on my foot I'd be wearing a cast.
Friday, April 12, 2024
Doorstopper
When you get books from the library on an interlibrary loan you don't always know what you're going to get. I recently borrowed a book on the Bauhaus. It's mostly made up of original documents, and can be a little dry, but has an extensive and good-looking collection of photographs. And Wassily Kandinsky, a painting instructor at the school, wrote very well on art and teaching too.
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2 comments:
I can sympathize with you having to lug the book home but I'm sure you've had an entertaining time looking at it. Bauhaus was a fascinating movement that lasted as a formal organization until the Nazis managed to rid Germany of their influence. Naturally, the Bauhaus movement turned into a diaspora whose members began influencing governments and industry around the world. Walter Gropius, the principal founder, made his way to Massachusetts and became a longtime professor at Harvard.
Tom Wolfe wrote the book From Bauhaus to Our House which was essentially a criticism of modern architecture that nobody especially liked. There's still an awful lot of that around and very few buildings that actually live up to the visions of the originators. Buildings produced by CAD programs don't bring anyone joy or wonder.
I don't think that's what Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Kandinsky had in mind. I've long admired Kandinsky's artwork, I hadn't known he was an instructor at Bauhaus.
Maybe you should borrow a wagon when you return the book.
The Bauhaus birthed a lot of interesting ideas and housed a huge amount of creative talent. Given the time and the place where it operated this meant trouble in itself. The Nazis were, among other things, anti-intellectual and paranoid about ideas that they hadn't thought of first. What few realize about the Bauhaus is that the bulk of it moved to America and became the art school of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way and is unlikely to get a goth rock band named after it but at least everyone can do their work unmolested. One hopes.
That's the thing about modernist architecture. When done with care it has its own kind of austere beauty. Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and others were visionaries trying to redefine what living and working spaces could be. At some point, though, the style got taken over by architects and builders who were either cranking out dull functional buildings no one was meant to look at or shooting for size and scale above all else.
Probably should have used a wagon. I would have loved to have seen their faces.
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