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The Staatliche Bauhaus, founded after the cata-strophe of war, in the chaos of the revolution and
in the era of the owering of an emotion-laden,
explosive art, becomes the rallying point of all
those who, with belief in the future and with sky-
storming enthusiasm, wish to build the ‘cathedral
of socialism’.1
In 1915, as an alien citizen, Van de Velde was
forced to resign from his post as director of the
Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, a
post he had held since the School was created in1904. He proposed either Gropius, Endell or Obrist
as suitable successors. In 1916, the School of Arts
and Crafts was closed down and converted into a
military reserve hospital, but by this time Gropius
was closely involved with discussions concerning the
future of Weimar’s Academy of Art. His role as an
architect in these discussions was symptomatic of a
challenge throughout Germany to the status of ne
art and the art academies as the upholders of state
prestige. Gillian Naylor has described the way inwhich, from the 1880s onwards, ‘new concepts of
the nature, role and independence of the artist [and]
the problems of a rapidly industrializing nation
forced patrons, local and state authorities to re-
examine their priorities for design education’,2 lead-
ing initially to the establishment of several new
schools of art and craft, or schools of ‘applied
design’. By the First World War, concern had spread
to the poor state of ne art itself; it was not just in
Weimar that the idea of merging a traditional edu-
cation in ne arts with more practical craft-basedlearning was being suggested. The staleness of ‘art’
as taught in the academies was widely recognized,
even amongst academicians themselves, and in
Weimar it was they who suggested that Gropius
should be appointed as the director of a new ‘com-
posite institution’.3
The renewed attempt to bring together art and
craft was intended to benet both the ne arts
and craft production. Wilhelm von Bode, Director
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The Bauhaus as culturalparadigm
In the rst Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919, Gropius refers to the ‘new structure of the future’
which the school will conceive and create, a structure which will ‘rise towards heaven
. . . like the crystal symbol of a new faith’. While there is no shortage of literature on
the Bauhaus, the nature of the programme of redemption to which the school aspired
is seldom explored. By studying the origins of the school and focusing on the way in
which its aims were put into practice for the International Exhibition of 1923, particu-
larly through the experimental house and the Bauhaus stage, this essay attempts to look
more closely at the ‘cultural paradigm’ proposed by the Bauhaus.
© 1996 E & FN Spon 1360–2365
Diana Periton Architectural Association School of Architecture,
34–36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES, UK and
Birmingham School of Architecture, U.C.E., Perry
Barr, Birmingham B42 2SU, UK
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General of the Berlin Museums, was representa-
tive of those who felt that all art students should
be required to study basic arts and crafts, before
the skilled and chosen few could then move on tone arts, which would consequently be much
improved. He was concerned with the reform of
education in general, but wrote that: ‘in hardly any
other area does the reform appear . . . a more
urgent duty than in art education, since it . . . not
only causes the state . . . unnecessary expenses and
produces insufcient achievements, but above all
withdraws thousands of hands from useful employ-
ment . . . by restricting the instruction to the upper
level by rigorous selection, there would not be ten
thousand “painters” and “sculptors” populatingthe German cities in the future . . .’.4 In 1916,
Gropius was asked by the Saxon State Ministry to
explain the kind of inuence he felt the crafts could
be expected to receive from the artistic side, if the
Academy of Art in Weimar was to be brought
together with the former school of Arts and Crafts.
An extract from his reply says much about the
educational reforms he hoped to see:
‘. . . A thing that is technically excellent in all
respects must be impregnated with an intellectualidea – with form – in order to secure preference
among the large quantity of products of the same
kind. . . . As a result of greater knowledge one now
attempts to guarantee the artistic quality of
machine products from the outset and to seek the
advice of the artist at the moment the form
which is to be mass-produced is invented. Thus a
working community is formed between the artist,
the businessman and the technician which, organ-
ised according to the spirit of the age, may in the
long run be capable of compensating for all
the elements of the earlier individual work . . . For
the artist possesses the ability to breathe soulinto the lifeless product of the machine, and his
creative powers continue to live within it as a living
ferment . . .
The teaching of “organic design” takes the
place of the old, discredited method, which was
to stick unrelated frills on the existing forms of
trade and industrial products . . . Accurately cast
form, bare of ornamentation, having clear
contrasts and consistency of form and colour,
become commensurate with the energy and
economy of modern life – the esthetic equipmentof the modern artist.’5
The terminology of these remarks is revealing both
in terms of the intentions of the future Bauhaus
and the background to its aspirations.
In stating that an object, a product, should be
‘impregnated with an intellectual idea – with form’,
Gropius seems to rely upon the Platonic afliation
of form and idea. However, here the idea or form
is no longer an essence of the object; it exists sepa-
rately from the object, so that the object can be‘impregnated‘ by it. Form then becomes both an
abstract concept, existing as an aspiration before
it exists as a tangible thing, and a copulative
metaphor for artistic making. In this Gropius
echoes the art historian and theorist Alois Riegl,
who gave paramount importance to a concept
of ‘Kunstwollen’, of ‘absolute artistic volition’, a
‘latent inner demand which exists per se, entirely
independent of the object and of the mode of
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creation, and behaves as will to form’.6 With Riegl,
Gropius has converted the paradigm of Plato or of
Aristotle, the carefully differentiated process of the
particular embodiment of the universal, into a de-nite but abstract model rooted in human know-
ledge and will.
It is hard to imagine the traditional understand-
ing of form or intellectual idea having a market
value, but for Gropius’ comments to the State
Ministry, it is essential that it should. It is deemed
necessary ‘in order to secure preference’ among the
vast range of similar products available. Gropius
does not say that it will be the best, but that its
‘rightness’ lies in its appeal to prevailing taste. This
appeal to preference or to taste is clearly not a sub-mission to popular values, since the attempt is to
guarantee the ‘artistic quality’ of the product. The
type of preference to which Gropius refers seems
to be a post-Kantian understanding of taste as
something which is beyond empirical universality,
which can make a judgement of artistic quality not
in terms of knowledge, but in terms of a shared and
pure subjective consciousness. Gadamer calls this
the ‘transcendental quality of taste’.7
Gropius, though, does refer to a ‘greater know-
ledge’ which will lead to this pure subjectiveconsciousness and the guarantee of artistic quality.
The greater knowledge can be passed on in the
teaching of ‘organic design’, which it is the role
of the reformed education to supply. The modern
artist, trained in the understanding of form and
colour, will be able to follow the ‘laws’ of nature
and ‘breathe soul into the lifeless product of the
machine’. As a Zarathustra-like ‘Übermensch’,8 the
artist will be endowed with a superior strength
which enables him to appropriate through skill the
creative powers of nature, of ‘physis’.
The ‘working community’ which is to be formed
between artist, businessman and technician seemsto be put forward as some kind of cultural totality
which will then represent the larger community.
Gropius is more explicit about its role and its origins
towards the end of his eight-page reply:
‘In this environment we could revive the happy
working community that was one of the charac-
teristic features of the Medieval Bauhütten, in
which numerous allied Werkkunstler – architects,
sculptors and craftsmen of all grades – joined
forces and, inspired by the same corporate spirit,were able to make their individual and modest
contribution to the communal tasks which they
were required to perform, out of reverence for the
unity of a corporate idea which lled their minds
and whose signicance they had understood. With
the revival of this trusted working method, which
will be adapted to meet the requirements of our
new world, the artistic statements which we make
about life today will become more and more
unied, and will eventually be condensed into a
new style!’9
Interest in the ‘Bauhütten’, the medieval guilds of
freemasons, was not new. During the nineteenth
century, communities of craftsmen, or ‘Bauhütte’,
had been established to work on cathedrals in
various German cities, such as Köln and Hamburg.
With views similar to those of William Morris
in England, August Reichensperger, editor of
the Kölner Domblatt , saw the inuence of the
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‘Bauhütte’ as essential not just to the building of
the cathedrals, but to the regeneration of art in
general. In a speech recorded in 1850, he claimed
that:
‘It could well be that the whole future of art and
its general viability depend on whether it can forge
new links with craftsmanship and whether – as has
always been the case in great creative projects –
the various branches of art are able to reunite
within the ambiance of architecture, in which they
all had their origin . . .’10
For both Gropius and Reichensperger, the
‘Bauhütten’, or lodges, are expected to rescue artfrom its decline. Gropius, though, moves away
from the nineteenth century view of the
‘Bauhütten’ as places with moral values derived
from companionship and active participation in
craftsmanship to a much more symbolic and
mystical understanding of them.
This understanding is made more explicit in the
pamphlets and records of the ‘Arbeitsrat für Kunst’,
an organization of artists founded by Gropius,
Bruno Taut and Adolf Behne immediately after
Germany’s November Revolution in 1918, whichled to the replacement of the Kaiser with the
government of the Weimar Republic. Marcel
Franciscono has amply described the utopian ideals
of the ‘Arbeitsrat’, a worker’s soviet of artists, and
its claims to the creative leadership of the post-
revolutionary age. Of its founders, he writes:
‘Taut and Behne, more than anyone else, carried
over to architecture two dominant themes that
had strongly marked German artistic thinking
throughout the 19th century: . . . that the work of
art should be the medium for the expression of
a suprapersonal, transcendent content, and that itwas the historical mission of the artist to lead
mankind to the reattainment of social and spiritual
harmony – to the organic society in which all
human and spiritual oppositions would nd their
reconciliation.’11
As early as December 1918, the ‘Arbeitsrat’ had
addressed a pamphlet to the new government
demanding a piece of land where full-scale
building experiments could be carried out. These
experiments were to be preserved as a permanentexhibition structure which would bring together all
the arts, a ‘Welt als Schaustellung’.12 A few months
later, when the ‘Arbeitsrat’ was under Gropius’
leadership, the ‘collaboration of artists on the basis
of a comprehensive utopian building project’ was
announced as ‘an important task for the imme-
diate future’.13 For Taut, this building would
presumably have been the ‘Stadtkrone’ or city
crown discussed in his treatise on city planning of
1919,14 ‘postulated . . . as the universal paradigm
of all religious building, which together with thefaith it would inspire was an essential urban
element for the restructuring of society’.15 For
Gropius, this was to become the ‘Cathedral of the
Future’ to be built by the Bauhaus. In either case,
it was seen clearly as an operative symbol, a symbol
which, by virtue of being built, would bring about
the redemption of society. The redemption implicit
in Christian eschatology, which allows for a rela-
tionship between lived time and eternity, is
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replaced in these aspirations with an imperative,
apparently realizeable goal.
At the same time as the call for the immediate
collaboration on this utopian project, in April 1919,Gropius obtained the agreement of the Weimar
government to change the name of the Academy
of Art to the Bauhaus. The historicist example of
the Medieval lodge has been reinterpreted as a
house, less nostalgic than the ‘hütte’, but more of
a real place where the lives of the people impor-
tant to the new society could be carried out. The
rst Bauhaus programme was produced in the
same month, its title page a woodcut by Feininger
of a crystalline cathedral (Fig. 1). In the introduc-
tion to the programme, a manifesto of the aimsof the School, the more conservative views of the
reformers of art education are brought together
with the utopian ideals of ‘Arbeitsrat’:
‘The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete
building! To embellish the building was once the
noblest function of the ne arts; they were the
indispensable components of great architecture.
Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they
can be rescued only through the conscious, coop-
erative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, paintersand sculptors must recognize anew and learn to
grasp the composite character of a building both
as an entity and in its separate parts. Only then
will their work be imbued with the architectonic
spirit which it has lost as ‘salon art’ . . .
For art is not a ‘profession’. There is no essen-
tial difference between the artist and the craftsman.
The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments
of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of
his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work
to blossom into art. But prociency in a craft is
essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime
source of creative imagination. Let us then create a
new guild of craftsmen without the class distinc-
tions that raise an arrogant barrier between crafts-
man and artist! Together let us desire, conceive and
create the new structure of the future, which will
Figure 1. Illustra
the Manifesto and
Programme of the
Bauhaus, 1919. Ly
Feininger, woodcu(Resource collectio
the Getty Center f
History of Art and
Humanities. © DA
1992.)
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embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in
one unity and which will one day rise toward
heaven from the hands of a million workers like the
crystal symbol of a new faith.’16
The desire for the ‘complete building’ implies a
hope that architecture might once again become
the ‘mother’ of the arts, traditionally relying on an
understanding which associates architecture with
the articulation of the daily practice of human
life.17 For Gropius, this association is to be made
operative and explicit. Architecture, or ‘the new
structure of the future’, is to be created in order
to provide the necessary conditions for this life; its
completeness is essential to bring about the per-fection of the carrying out of human existence.
The emphasis on the ‘complete’ is reminiscent of
Hegel’s demand that unity or wholeness should be
understood as man’s ultimate spiritual experience.18
‘The true is whole’, he writes, ‘but the whole is
only the essence that perfects itself in the course
of its development’.19 The truth or perfection of
something whole emulates the perfection of the
cosmos, which, as Plato says, one cannot conceive
of as being incomplete.20 For Hegel or for Gropius,
it is the creative spirit of man which is expectedto achieve such completeness.
The Bauhaus programme itself, though, makes
no mention of architecture, which did not appear
on the curriculum until 1927. The ‘complete build-
ing’ was to be achieved initially through the idea of
the ‘Einheitskunstwerk’, the combined or unied
work of art which would be ‘imbued with archi-
tectonic spirit’. Again, the other founders of the
‘Arbeitsrat’ were more specic about the meaning
of this. Adolf Behne, referring to Wagner’s concep-
tion of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, hopes to extend
Wagner’s ideal to include not simply the construc-
tion of ‘an occasional building supplied with wallpaintings by a painter and portal sculptures by a
sculptor’21 but ‘an inner transformation of all art .
. . a mutual drawing together’ of the arts to create
‘an artistic cosmos from the artistic chaos of our
day’.22 This synthesis is to be brought about by a
common basis or spirit for the arts as the expres-
sion of an immutable essence, which Behne terms
‘cubist’ or ‘architectonic’.23 It is then the ‘crystal
symbol’ which can perform the alchemical trans-
formation of art, an almost immaterial structure
obeying once again the ‘organic’ laws of theunpolluted essence of the artistic cosmos.24
The rst year of the Bauhaus was a turbulent
one. There was considerable opposition to the
new school from the people of Weimar, ranging
from those who found the students bizarre
and unapproachable to those who accused it of
‘artistic dictatorship’.25 One by one, the professors
from the earlier Academy of Art found that their
teaching methods and those of the Bauhaus
could not co-exist, until the government even-
tually re-opened the former school as a separateinstitution. Gropius himself was worried that the
work produced by Bauhaus students, while en-
thusiastic, showed little direction. In October 1920,
a series of compulsory theory courses were in-
troduced, dominated by Johannes Itten’s new
‘Vorkurs’, which each student was expected to
attend for six months before choosing the work-
shop in which he or she would become an ‘appren-
tice’.
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Itten described the ‘Vorkurs’ in a printed state-
ment which accompanied the exhibition of Spring
1922. Its aims were:
‘to free the student’s creative powers, in part by
disencumbering him of that prior learning which
would inhibit or prejudice his own solution to an
artistic problem, and to develop the student’s
artistic abilities by a three-fold training of the mind,
senses and emotions.’26
In Itten’s teaching, the idea that the student’s
‘creative powers’ might be freed, and that prior
learning was an encumbrance, had its roots in
the reform of child education of Montessori andFröbel. Their intentions, summarized by Francis-
cono, were to ‘by-pass the intellect in order to
reach . . . [the] natural, inlearned creative center’.27
The relationship of such reforms to art had been
discussed at a conference on art education in
Dresden as early as 1901, attended by a number
of the future members of the Deutsche Werkbund.
Speaking at the conference, a Hamburg teacher,
R. Ross, began by claiming that ‘the essential
conditions for the enjoyment of art are already
present in the soul of the small child’;28 througha free activity of self-learning, ‘the psycholog-
ical processes of what is usually called “empathy”
– the lending of one’s personality’,29 could be
observed.
Itten’s process of freeing the student’s natural
abilities was similarly seen to depend on rediscov-
ering his psychological empathy30 with whatever it
was he was being asked to communicate or repre-
sent. This might be a human gure, a material,
texture or shape, an emotion-laden subject such
as war or a storm, or a relationship of contrasts.31
Both the artwork and its creator then become
simply ‘intermediar[ies] in an act of transference. . . between the original subject or concept, and
the viewer’.32 In Itten’s own words, ‘to experience
a work of art is to re-create it. Because, intellec-
tually speaking, there is no great difference
between a person who experiences a work of art
and a person who outwardly represents an expe-
rienced form in a work’.33
Through empathy, the artist or the person expe-
riencing the work of art is expected to make direct
contact with the essence or idea of the form as
the ultimate and genuine reality; the way in whichit is embodied is only relevant as a vehicle to repre-
sent this reality.34
For Itten, art is the ‘spiritually emotional vibra-
tory power’.35 ‘Everything reveals itself through
movement. Everything reveals itself in forms. Thus
all form is movement and all movements the
essence of form’.36
He describes form as the result of three ‘grades’
of human movement, the physical, the emotional
and the intellectual or spiritual, each of which
we empathetically make when we experiencesomething, re-create it as art and re-experience
it through the work of art. Form, ‘gestalt’, is not
primarily concerned with the outward manifest-
ation of that thing, but its forming, creative
power.37
Itten left the Bauhaus in the Spring of 1922
after a series of disagreements with Gropius
which centred on Itten’s refusal to compromise
his emphasis on expressive rather than practical
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achievements.38 The ‘Vorkurs’ was taken over by
Moholy-Nagy. Itten’s inuence during the early
years of the School, though, was tremendous, and
by no means limited to the ‘Vorkurs’; the work-shops each had a ‘Master of Form’ as well as a
‘Master Craftsman’, and until Schlemmer and Klee
joined the Bauhaus in 1921, Itten acted as form
master to all but three of them. To some extent,
Gropius’ arguments with Itten were the result of
pressures from outside the School. Itten’s enthu-
siasm for Mazdaznan, a Western version of an
oriental cult which, beyond stressing the mystical
afnities between subject and object, spirit and
matter, encouraged its adherents to shave their
heads and eat strangely prepared vegetarian food,spread to a number of his students; this only
encouraged the inhabitants of Weimar to see them
as alien and odd. The work produced on the
‘Vorkurs’, where the stress was laid on the forming
rather than the external appearance of what was
nally formed, was often crudely made from rough
materials, leading people to question its validity.
The objects from the workshops controlled by Itten
were similarly simply made, decorated with primi-
tive patterns. In a circular to the Bauhaus Masters,
Gropius defended them by claiming that:
‘The Bauhaus has made a start in breaking with
the usual academic training of artists to be “little
Raphaels” and pattern designers, and has sought
to bring back to the people those creative talents
who have ed the artistic working life, to their
own and the people’s detriment . . . To do this, it
was necessary to rebuild from the very roots in
order to have a chance to be able to give back to
the present generation the correct feeling for the
interrelation of practical work and problems of
form. Genuine crafts also have had to be reborn
in order to make intelligible to our youth, throughhandwork, the nature of creative work.’39
In the same circular, though, Gropius insisted that
the Bauhaus should not become a ‘haven for
eccentrics’,40 and that it was essential that it should
begin to strengthen its links with industry and the
outside world.
In Gropius’ view, the School had to avoid
animosity by opening itself up to this outside
world. The International Exhibition of 1923 was
organized with this in mind, despite the concernof a number of the masters who felt that it simply
was not ready to open itself up to public scrutiny.
The exhibition lasted throughout the summer,
showing work from the ‘Vorkurs’ and the work-
shops at the same time as an international exhi-
bition of architecture. It began with ‘Bauhaus
Week’, a week of festivities, stage performances
and lectures prepared by the school.
The stage workshops had been part of the
Bauhaus since its inception. From 1921, they were
run by Lothar Schreyer, whose view of theatre wasalmost exclusively expressionistic; it was because
he could not accept that the performances for the
1923 exhibition should be xed and rehearsed that
Oskar Schlemmer was asked to take over. The
change from Schreyer to Schlemmer was similar to
that from Itten to Moholy-Nagy, from an empa-
thetic understanding which attempted to make
direct contact with a universal creative or forming
power to an understanding of that power which
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was specic to the medium being formed. For
Moholy-Nagy and the ‘Vorkurs’, this meant placing
the emphasis on the disposition of objects in space,
looking at them in terms of weight displacementand balance. In Schlemmer’s theatre, the aim was
to study the relationship of man, ‘the human
organism’,41 standing within the ‘cubical, abstract
space of the stage’.42 Theatre itself is ‘representa-
tion, abstracted from the natural and directing its
effect at the human being’,47 where abstraction
functions ‘on the one hand to disconnect compo-
nents from an existing and positing whole, either
to lead them individually ad absurdum or to elevate
them to their greatest potential. On the other
hand, abstraction can result in generalization andsummation, in the construction of a bold outline
of a new totality’.44
The importance of the Bauhaus stage, then, was
its ability to create this ‘bold outline of a new total-
ity’, a new reality, and to do this by responding to
the creative forces of space and of the human
gure. ‘The laws of cubical space,’ Schlemmer
writes, ‘are the visible, linear network of planimet-
ric and stereometric relationships . . . The laws of
organic man . . . reside in the invisible functions of
his inner self: heartbeat, circulation, respiration, theactivities of the brain and nervous system . . .’45
Schlemmer’s ‘man’ is explicitly understood as a
‘cosmic being’, with formal, biological and philo-
sophical properties.46 Man as dancer, ‘Tänzer-
mensch’, ‘obeys the law of the body as well as the
law of space; he follows his sense of himself as well
as his sense of embracing space’.47 By wearing cos-
tumes which ‘re-group the various and diffuse parts
of the body into a simple, unied form’48, its
response to the surrounding space, to its own laws
or to the laws of its motion in space can be empha-
sized. Its ‘philosophical properties’, its need to cre-
ate meaning, can be discovered and demonstratedusing ‘metaphysical forms of expression . . . The star
shape of the spread hand, the ¥ sign of the folded
arms, the cross shape of the backbone’.49
Two performances were rehearsed for ‘Bauhaus
Week’ in 1923, the ‘Triadic Ballet’ and the ‘Figural
Cabinet’. The ‘Triadic Ballet’ (Fig. 2) consisted of
three parts developing from the humorous to the
serious, a gay burlesque, a ceremonious, solemn
piece and a mystical fantasy, labelled as the yellow
series, the rose series and the black series. The
introduction to the ‘Figural Cabinet’ described itas: ‘half shooting gallery, half metaphysicum
abstractum. Medley, i.e. variety of sense and non-
sense, methodized by Color, Form, Nature and Art;
Man and Machine, Acoustics and Mechanics.
Organization is everything; the most heteroge-
neous is the hardest to organize’.50
Gropius’ draft for the leaet advertising the
work of the Bauhaus stage saw it as deriving
from:
‘an ardent desire of the human soul [where] theater= show for the gods. It serves, then, to manifest a
transcendental idea. The power of its effect on the
soul of the spectator and auditor is therefore depen-
dent on the success of the transformation of the
idea into (visually and acoustically) perceivable space
. . . To be capable of creating moving, living, artistic
space requires a person whose knowledge and abil-
ities respond to all the natural laws of statics,
mechanics, optics and acoustics and who, having
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command of all these elds of knowledge, ndssovereign means of giving body and life to the
idea which he bears within himself . . . .’51
If the soul is seen as something exclusively human,
unlike the Platonic soul which goes beyond human-
ness by partaking of the world-soul, its ‘ardent
desire’ demonstrates a ‘transcendental idea’ which
has also become a human concept. It is the idea
which the actor or dancer ‘bears within himself’.
With enough knowledge of the non-human prop-erties of statics, mechanics, optics and acoustics,
the ‘Tänzermensch’ can discover the universal laws
of these things and learn to appropriate them.52
Only in this way can the ‘transcendental idea’ be
made concrete and accessible in space created by
the performer.
Schlemmer describes the theatre as one of the
elds in which the programme of the Bauhaus is
made particularly clear:
ure 2. Plan for the
Triadic Ballet. Oskar
lemmer, pencil, ink,
tercolour and gouache,
24–6. © Ramanlemmer Photoarchiv.
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‘It is natural that the aims of the Bauhaus – to
seek the union of the artistic-ideal with the crafts-
manlike-practical by thoroughly investigating the
creative elements, and to understand in all its rami-cations the essence of der Bau, creative construc-
tion – have valid application in the eld of the
theater. For, like the concept of Bau itself, the stage
is an orchestral complex which comes about only
through the cooperation of many different forces.
It is the union of the most heterogeneous assort-
ment of creative elements. Not the least of its func-
tions is to serve the metaphysical needs of man by
constructing a world of illusion and by creating the
transcendental on the basis of the rational.’53
For Schlemmer, as for Gropius, the transcendental
is something which, rather than going beyond the
human, can actually be created through human
endeavour.
One of the clearest and most literal examples of
‘der Bau’ was the experimental house, the ‘Haus
am Horn’, which was built especially for the exhi-
bition (Fig. 3). Georg Muche, an adherent of Itten,
who by 1923 was form master of the weaving
workshop, was chosen by the students to design
the house. Not unlike Tony Garnier’s houses for‘Cité Industrielle’, it was a ‘Roman house’ built
around a central ‘atrium’ or living room. The rooms
surrounding the atrium were each allotted specic
functions, designed to accommodate specic indi-
viduals (Fig. 4). The living room itself, intended to
bring the whole family together, rose above the rest
of the building to allow for clerestory windows. At
the time, it was hailed as a new ‘type of design . .
. which organically unites several small rooms
around a large one, thus bringing about a complete
change in form as well as in manner of living’.54
Its construction, carried out by Bauhaus students,
was supervised by Adolf Meyer, Gropius’ partner
from his architectural ofce. Building was made
particularly difcult by the rampant ination
suffered by Germany in the early 1920s, somethingwhich Schlemmer saw as instrumental in changing
the direction of the School:
‘. . . Originally the Bauhaus was founded with
visions of erecting the cathedral or the church of
socialism, and the workshops were established in
the manner of the cathedral building lodges . . .
The idea of the cathedral has for the time being
receded into the background and with it certain
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Figure 3. Postca
advertising the 19
Bauhaus Exhibition
Gerhard Marcks, w
From Hans M. Win(ed.) ‘The Bauhaus
(MIT, 1978).
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denite ideas of an artistic nature. Today we must
think at best in terms of a house . . . a house ofthe simplest kind. Perhaps, in the face of the
economic plight, it is our task to become pioneers
of simplicity, that is, to nd a simple form for all
of life’s necessities which at the same time is
respectable and genuine . . . .’55
The economic climate was encouraging an attitude
which looked for the simplest and cheapest way
of making the necessities of life available to
everyone, but the ideals which lay behind the
necessities had not changed. One of the postcards
designed to advertize the exhibition was a woodcut
designed by Gerhard Marcks, presenting the exper-imental house as a model, held between cupped
hands, alluding to the models of cities presented
to God’s representatives in Medieval paintings (Fig.
3). The cathedral of socialism, of the future, has
here been replaced with a much more introverted
‘temple’ to the individual, culminating in the totally
internal living room, where a complete and perfect
existence can be built up through the use and
arrangement of complete and perfect artefacts.
It is through the works of the Bauhaus stage
and the experimental house that the status of theBauhaus as a cultural paradigm seems particularly
clear. The theatre was the place where an illu-
sionistic ideal could be most thoroughly presented.
In Gropius’ own proposal for the ‘Total Theatre’, a
project for the Berlin theatre director Erwin Piscator
in 1927, the stage, tted with the most up-to-date
equipment for manipulating space through the
projection of light and sound, was to be placed in
the middle of the audience. Gropius’ attempt was
to achieve a ‘unity of the scene of action and the
spectator’,56 the ‘mobilization of all three-dimen-sional means to shake off the audience’s . . .
apathy, to overwhelm them, stun them, and force
them to participate in experiencing the play’.57 The
totality of the theatre is an ideal, a reality or truth
which is ‘not found but created’,58 it is not a ‘tran-
scendental idea’ which exists a priori , but some-
thing which can and has to be actively constructed.
The theatre then becomes ‘the metaphor of man
creating his own reality’.59
ure 4. Lady’s bedroom
m the Haus am Horn,
23. (Courtesy of
haus-Archiv, Berlin.)
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The house, too, is a version of an actively
produced totality of culture. From the legitimate
concern of attempting to provide millions of people
with their basic needs, the emphasis imposed bythe Bauhaus is on the perfection that can be
brought to those millions. By presenting the house
and its products as an image of the ‘truth’ of living,
of attainable perfection, and also as something
which can be mass produced by industrial means,
the message seems to be that redemption through
these artefacts is available to all. By a thorough
knowledge of the ‘biological, physical and spiri-
tual’60 properties of man and his surroundings, a
knowledge of the ergonomic, the scientic and the
aesthetic, such redemption can be assured.This redemption rests on the assumption that
the necessities of life, or culture, can be both iden-
tied and brought to perfection, that it is possible
to produce culture as a paradigm. Anything which
cannot be so identied is left to the intuition or
genius of the artist, to be made perfect by an inde-
nable ‘leap of faith’. Such an attempt was not
exclusive to the Bauhaus; its aims, though, whether
through the analogies with the Medieval commu-
nities of the ‘Bauhütten’ or the rareed research
‘laboratories’ for the perfect product once theschool had moved to Dessau, are made particu-
larly explicit. Schlemmer, quoting Goethe, is clear
that it is such a paradigm which the Bauhaus
should both aspire to be and to create beyond its
own boundaries:
‘If the hopes materialize that men, with all their
strength, with heart and mind, with understanding
and love, will join together and become conscious
of each other, then what no man can yet imagine
will occur – Allah will no longer need to create,
we will create his world.’61
Through such an enterprise, the search for a ‘tran-
scendental idea’ which can be guaranteed by a
culture made available to all is reduced to visual
consistency and practicality, made simply general
rather than universal.
Notes and references
1. Oskar Schlemmer, Manifesto from the Publicity
Pamphlet ‘The First Bauhaus Exhibition in
Weimar, July to September 1923’. The Councilof Masters at the Bauhaus attempted to
destroy the part of the pamphlet containing
this manifesto, feeling that the allusion to the
‘cathedral of socialism’ would lead to political
misinterpretation. However, a few complete
copies of the pamphlet did reach the public,
and caused the expected vehement attacks
against the alleged political leanings of the
Bauhaus. Translated by Wolfgang Jabs and
Basil Gilbert in Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus
(MIT, 1980).2. Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed
(London, 1985), p. 15.
3. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: a
critical history (London, 1985), p. 123.
4. Wilhelm von Bode, from the Berlin newspaper
Die Woche (April 1, 1916), in Hans M. Wingler,
op.cit.
5. Walter Gropius, paper sent to Grand Ducal
Saxon State Ministry in Weimar in January
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1916, in response to its request to ‘supplement
his statement concerning architectural educa-
tion in the art academy by an explanation of
the kind of inuence the crafts would receivefrom the artistic side and from the giving of
instruction in handicrafts’, ibid.
6. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy ,
translated by Michael M. Bullock (London,
1953), p. 9. Worringer’s book was rst
published in German in 1908. It is com-
menting on Riegl’s Stilfragen, which appeared
in 1893, and his Spätrömische Kunstindustrie
of 1901. Marcel Franciscono, The Creation of
the Bauhaus in Weimar (Chicago, 1971), cites
notes from a speech from 1918–19 in whichGropius clearly mentions Riegl. Franciscono
comes close to describing the Bauhaus as a
paradigm, referring to it as ‘the very instru-
ment of social and cultural regeneration’, but
his extremely thorough and useful account
of its early years does not, in the end, explain
how it might actually be expected to work as
such an instrument, and does not attempt a
critical exploration of this goal.
7. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
(London, 1979), pp. 39–41: ‘When Kant . . .calls taste the true sensus communis, he is no
longer considering the great moral and political
tradition of the concept of sensus communis
. . . Rather, he sees this idea as comprising two
elements: rst, the universality of taste inas-
much as it is the result of the free play of all
our cognitive powers and is not limited to a
specic area like an external sense, secondly
the communal quality of taste, inasmuch as,
according to Kant, it abstracts from all such
subjective, private conditions as attractiveness
and emotion. Thus the universality of this
‘sense’ is negatively determined in both itsaspects by that from which something is
abstracted, and not positively by what grounds
communicability and creates community’.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
(London, 1961).
9. Walter Gropius, paper sent to Grand Ducal
Saxon State Ministry in Weimar in January
1916, in Hans M. Wingler, op.cit. This trans-
lation is taken from Georg Germann Gothic
Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources,
Inuences and Ideas (London, 1972).10. August Reichensperger, speech recorded in the
Kölner Domblatt (1.12.1850), translated by
Georg Germann, op.cit.
11. Franciscono, op.cit., p. 113. He goes on
to mention Novalis’ concept of the mission
of poetry to achieve a golden age in which
world and spirit will at last be united, of poetry’s
original function to ‘reveal within the world that
which is beyond it . . .’, and Friedrich Schlegel’s
statement that ‘it is time that all artists joined
together as sworn artists in eternal alliance’ tocreate a ‘community of the holy’.
12. Werner Hofmann, Das irdische Paradies: Kunst
im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Munich, 1960),
quoted in Gabriele Häusler, ‘In the Artwork
we become one . . .’ (unpublished M. Phil.
Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1989).
13. Published, among other places, in Der Cicerone
(Berlin, April 1919), quoted in Franciscono,
op.cit., p. 145.
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14. Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone (Jena, 1919), with
contributions from Paul Scheerbart, Erich Baron
and Adolf Behne.
15. Kenneth Frampton, op.cit.16. Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto of April
1919, translated in Hans M. Wingler, op.cit.
17. The word ‘architecture’ proposes itself as the
chief or ruling principle of ‘techne’, in Latin,
‘ars’. Alberti, in his preface to The Ten Books
of Architecture, translated by James Leoni
(London, 1755), writes: ‘But if you take a view
of the whole Circle of Arts, you shall hardly
nd one but what, despising all others, regards
and seeks only its own particular Ends: Or if
you do meet with any of such a Nature thatyou can in no wise do without it, and which
yet brings along with it Prot at the same Time,
conjoined with Pleasure and Honour, you will,
I believe, be convinced that Architecture is not
to be excluded from that Number. For it is
certain, if you examine the matter carefully, it
is inexpressibly delightful, and of the greatest
Convenience to Mankind in all respects, both
publick and private; and in Dignity not inferior
to the most Excellent’.
18. As put forward in his lectures on aesthetics,see G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics – Lectures on
Fine Art , translated by T.M. Knox (Oxford,
1975).
19. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of the
Spirit , translated in Gabriele Häusler, op.cit.
20. ‘For god’s purpose was to use as his model
the highest and most completely perfect of
intelligible things, and so he created a single
visible living being . . .’. Plato, “Timaeus”, 31,
in Timaeus and Critias, translated by Desmond
Lee (London, 1965).
21. Adolf Behne, Die Wiederkehr der Künst
(Leipzig, 1919), translated in Franciscono,op.cit., p. 115.
22. ibid.
23. ibid.
24. ‘Where do the artistic forces become manifest?
Surely in the crystal, . . . the diamond, reect-
ing the virtues of a world which does not
yet exist’, Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra,
op.cit. Zarathustra himself is addressed as
‘the stone of wisdom’. Gabriele Häusler, op.cit.,
describes the opening ceremony of the Darm-
stadt exhibition of 1901, devised by GeorgFuchs and Gropius’ former employer Peter
Behrens, which involved the presentation of a
huge diamond.
25. Dr Emil Herfurth, spokesman of the ‘Citizen’s
Committee’, built up mainly from members of
the National People’s Party, in a pamphle
printed in February 1920, from Hans M.
Wingler, op.cit.
26. Franciscono, op.cit., p. 180.
27. ibid., p. 181.
28. R. Ross, quoted in ibid., p. 182.29. ibid.
30. The idea of ‘empathy’ was by this time
common currency in aesthetic theory. In
Abstraction and Empathy , op.cit., p. 4,
Worringer writes: ‘Modern aesthetics, which
has taken the decisive step from aesthetic
objectivism to aesthetic subjectivism, i.e. which
no longer takes the aesthetic as the starting
point of its investigations, but proceeds from
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the behaviour of the contemplating subject,
culminates in a doctrine that may be charac-
terized by the broad general name of theory
of empathy’.31. Some of the courses started with warming up
exercises, breathing and relaxation, ‘the rapid
drawing of simple rhythmical strokes, spirals
and circles, . . . as a means of “training the
machine for emotional functioning” ’. Francis-
cono, op.cit., p. 178, is quoting Klee’s amuse-
ment.
32. Franciscono, op.cit., p. 191.
33. Johannes Itten, Analysen der Meister , originally
published in Utopia: Documents of Reality
(Weimar, 1921), translated in Hans M. Wingler,op.cit.
34. The insignicance of the viewer except as
‘experiencing subject’ is emphasized by
Theodor Lipps, quoted in Worringer, op.cit.: ‘In
empathy, . . . I am not the real I, but am
inwardly liberated from the latter, i.e. I am
liberated from everything which I am apart
from contemplation of the form. I am only this
ideal, this contemplating I’.
35. Itten, op.cit., quoted in Franciscono, op.cit. p.
191.36. ibid.
37. In Oskar Schlemmer, The Theatre of the
Bauhaus, translated by Arthur S. Wensinger
(Wesleyan University Press, 1961), T. Lux
Feininger, who was a student at the Bauhaus,
is quoted as saying: ‘. . . the term “Gestaltung”
is old, meaningful and so nearly untranslate-
able that it has found its way into English
usage. Beyond the signicance of shaping,
forming, thinking through, it has the avor of
underlining the totality of such fashioning,
whether of an artifact or of an idea. It forbids
the nebulous and the diffuse. In its fullestphilosophical meaning it expresses the pla-
tonic “eidolon”, the “Urbild”, the pre-existing
form’.
38. Again, it is probably Franciscono, op.cit., who
explains the gradual disintegration of the rela-
tionship between Gropius and Itten most
clearly.
39. Walter Gropius, ‘The Validity of the Bauhaus
Idea’, a circular distributed to the Bauhaus
Masters in February 1922, translated in Hans
M. Wingler, op.cit.40. ibid.
41. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man as Art Figure’, in
Arthur S. Wensinger, op.cit.
42. ibid.
43. ibid.
44. ibid.
45. ibid.
46. Oskar Schlemmer, Man, from the notes for his
course on man given in Dessau, 1928–9, trans-
lated by James Seligman (London, 1971).
47. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man as Art Figure’, op.cit.48. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Theatre’, a lecture/demon-
stration delivered in Dessau in 1927, translated
by Arthur S. Wensinger, op.cit.
49. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Man as Art Figure’, op.cit.
50. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘The Figural Cabinet’, trans-
lated by Arthur S. Wensinger, op.cit.
51. Walter Gropius, draft leaet on the work of
the Bauhaus Stage, 1923, translated in Hans
M. Wingler, op.cit.
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52. Gadamer, op.cit., pp. 14–15, describes this in
terms of Hegel’s understanding of ‘Bildung’:
‘Theoretical Bildung goes beyond what man
knows and experiences immediately. It consistsin learning to allow what is different from
oneself and to nd universal viewpoints from
which one can grasp the thing . . . To seek
one’s own in the alien, to become at home in
it, is the basic movement of the spirit, whose
being is only to return to itself from what is
other . . .’.
53. Oskar Schlemmer, ‘Theatre’, op.cit.
54. Dr Erwin Redslob, art adviser to the Weimar
Republic, writing about the ‘Haus am Horn’
in The Bauhaus: Masters and Students by
Themselves, translated by F. Whitford (London,
1992).
55. Oskar Schlemmer, from a report on the work-
shops for wood and stone, November 1922,translated in Hans M. Wingler, op.cit.
56. Walter Gropius, quoted from ‘Convegno di
lettere’, in the journal of Reale Accademia
d’Italia (Rome, 1935), translated in Hans M.
Wingler, op.cit.
57. ibid.
58. Nietzsche, op.cit.
59. Gabriele Häusler, op.cit.
60. Schlemmer’s categories of ‘cosmic man’, in
Man, op.cit.
61. Goethe, quoted by Oskar Schlemmer, ibid.
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