German design reached high point before WWII
In the interwar years in Germany — from 1919 to the rise of the Nazis in the early '30s — the culture of that country thrived.
Though political and economic problems were widespread, Germany still had many of the best of the world's leading scientists, engineers, social theorists and theologians. Berlin was beginning to rival Paris as the capital of the arts world. Modern music was being composed, theatrical productions were excitingly experimental and the country was making a mark in film, as well. And in architecture, industrial design, graphics and other “practical” arts, there is almost no comparison elsewhere with the avant-garde experimentation that was going on in those days in Germany.
That leadership in modern design has influenced every element of design since. And much of that influence was due to just one school — the Bauhaus — founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919. This year marks 90 years since the famous Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, Germany, were opened, and though the school operated for only a half dozen years afterward, its mark on the world's visual arts is indelible today.
The Bauhaus started first in Weimar, but when the school encountered difficulties with a conservative municipal government there, it moved to Dessau, where Gropius designed a still-amazing campus of interconnected buildings. It fully embodied his desire to bring all the arts and crafts under one roof. You can still visit there today, about 80 miles southwest of Berlin.
Classes at the Bauhaus were taught by such celebrated artists as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger. Working in its studios, Marcel Breuer, later to become a famous architect in America, designed steel-tubed furniture that became standard the world over. Others developed radically different designs for everything from coffeepots to dinnerware that became almost iconic. Anni Albers changed the world's thinking about what textile designs might look like. Still others developed innovative graphic designs and typefaces. And many of the basics of what became known as “modern” architecture were elaborated on there, too.
To look at the 90-year-old Bauhaus buildings today is to see structures that could have been built here in Western Pennsylvania from the 1930s to the present. A look at the balconies on the student dormitory at the Bauhaus, for example, will remind you of some of the apartment buildings going up in East Liberty and Lawrenceville today.
The Gropius buildings helped establish the modern revolution of combining disciplined proportions with modern materials like steel and abundant glass in a sleek and totally un-ornamented style. He was among the first to use “curtain walls” — thin walls of metal and glass — hung along the outside of a building's structure. This later became standard here in the United States from the 1950s on.
The Bauhaus was eventually shut down by the Nazis. They thought modern art and architecture was “not German” and described most of what was revolutionary in German art as “degenerative art.”
Gropius himself is a fascinating study. He led an interesting personal life, becoming involved as a young man with the young wife of the composer Gustav Mahler, while she, Alma, was still married. As an officer in the German army in World War I, he experienced hand-to-hand combat with French soldiers at the front, survived an airplane crash on the battlefield, and was once trapped for four days in a collapsed bunker, the only man in the bunker still alive.
Perhaps because of his experiences in the war, he was politically astute. He was one of the first non-Jewish architects to see the dangers of the Nazis, and he left Germany in 1934. He went first to Britain and then came to the United States to head the department of architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He spent 15 years at Harvard training architects who became some of the most important in the United States from the 1950s on.
Gropius from the beginning believed — far more than most great architects — in collaboration with other architects and artists. Shortly after arriving in the United States, he joined with Marcel Breuer, who also had emigrated, to design two important projects here in Pittsburgh — the 1941 Aluminum City Terrace wartime housing project in New Kensington and the elegant 1939 Frank House in Shadyside, both in the “international style” for which he is famous.
Gropius also felt strongly that good architecture should serve public needs. One thing that is striking on visiting Aluminum City Terrace is how much the interiors of the row-houses there resemble in character the interiors of a group of single-family houses that Gropius designed in Dessau, near the school campus, to house the Bauhaus' senior faculty. The comparatively small, but sun-filled apartments in the New Kensington project, with just three-quarters high walls between the kitchens and the living spaces, have a fine sense of open space that matches the feeling you get from the interiors of the faculty houses at Dessau.
In their nationalistic zeal to make Germany “more German.” the Nazis, of course, drove away Gropius and many more of their country's best architects, scientists and artists. Gropius went to Harvard, just as Albert Einstein went to Princeton, and so on. The cultural revolution that had started in the 1920s died, and by 1950 the United States had become the cultural center of the world.
John Conti is a former news reporter who has written extensively over the years about architecture, planning and historic-preservation issues.
