Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus In the first d

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Deutscher Werkbund or "German Craft Association" was formed with the expressed aim of improving the aesthetic quality of manufactured goods and industrial architecture while producing both less expensively (Adams, p. 477). The creation of this Association was very much a response to two complementary pressures. On the one hand, Germany was undergoing a period of rapid industrial development in which the factory and the machine were replacing the cottage and the craftsman's hands as the locus and source of production. On the other hand, a sense that many of the machine-made products and machine-serving buildings and other structures were of less aesthetic quality (and greater cost) than was desirable was also emerging.

The response from a large and diverse community of artists, architects, and craftsmen was the Deutscher Werkbund, and, alter, the foundation of a new school of architecture and related disciplines that would be known as Das staatliche Bauhaus or, simply, the Bauhaus (Adams, p. 477). Of seminal significance in forming this organization was Walter Gropius (1883 - 1969), an architect who believed in the integration of art and industry (Adams, p. 477). This brief report will examine the Bauhaus and the work of Gropius, arguing that both represent a response to German industrialization and commercial standardization.

Gropius was born in Berlin on May 18, 1883. As a young architect, he joined the office of

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utions, which were monumental and had a clearly marked entrance within a distinctive fatade." In designing this structure, Gropius rejected the elaborate "lying facades" of past architecture, which he saw as unrelated to function. Adams (p. 477) also contends that formal affinities with Cubism are inescapable although Gropius was motivated primarily by a philosophy of simplicity and harmony intended to integrate art and architecture into society. Gropius (p. 20) discussed his ideology and the New Architecture, commenting that they differed "fundamentally in an organic sense from those of the old, they are not the personal whims of a handful of architects avid for innovation at all costs, but simply the inevitable logical product of the intellectual, social, and technical conditions of our age." He wanted to use the Bauhaus as a mechanism for liberating architects and others from a welter of ornamentation. Aesthetically, it was his intent to master space while capitalizing upon the new realities presented by machine production. He recognized that the superior technical resources available to architects and designers after World War I made possible an element of innovation that had not been available to previous generations

Category: Arts - W