| HN Mirror

It's an interesting case of the limits of a design language, where it works great for furniture and scales horribly to buildings. Brutalism is a different language, there are valid criticisms of both Bauhaus and modernism in general that are not merely nostalgic or fascist, unless one thinks someone like Christopher Alexander is some kind of crypto-nazi, (and oddly by extension, Prince Charles but royals are probably not a good example).

The minimalist and arguably crude geometry of Bauhaus looks a lot like a revolt and a reaction against nature and divinity, which makes sense when Europe had recently come out of a romantic and nostalgic period of revivals and suffocating sentimentality. Personally, I think there are deeper and more meaningful criticisms of modernism(s) than what often reduces to mere anti-cosmopolitanism. To me, the intrinsic humanism in Bauhaus buildings begins with a definition of human that is in opposition to wildness, nature, and is explicitly secular, if not atheistic, which is understandable given what was going on at the time, but Bauhaus is one of those things where what you do in opposition isn't what you do as the incumbent. Bauhaus and modernisms are a reaction and a critique, instead of say, an expression of awe, humility, generosity, or other higher virtues. When I read about this stuff back in the 90s, my impression was modernism and Bauhaus were not so much cosmopolitan novelties, but assertions of humanity, both in opposition to nature but also to european clericalism, which has some pretty deep psycho-spiritual stuff wrapped up in it, so I can see why people who hear criticisms of Bauhaus start picking around the edges to see if they can unravel underlying anti-semitic urges. The need to assert humanity begins with a presumption of disadvantage, which in many cases was true and necessary, but also not. (An irony being that it was Italian fascism and its similar ultra modern futurist design that the german fascist/national-socialists adopted for their propaganda.)

The reason I like Bauhaus is because I think it encodes a valiance, resiliance, humility, humanism, generosity, accessability, and a peculiar universality of being not-of its environment, which is arguably a beautiful echo of the Jewish experience in Europe. Criticism of Bauhaus and modernisms are difficult to fully isolate and extricate from that experience, but that shouldn't be a criteria for talking about it, and it's also a proxy for discourse about where western history comes from. In the background, I'm working on something now about how the world owes our appreciation of J.S. Bach as a pillar of the western cannon to Felix Mendelssohn's revival of his work as the effect of his conversion from judaism to christianity, likely as a means to assimilate, but it was his sadness and self denial from being born an outsider that gave the world one of the most beautiful pillars of our civilization in the form of the works of Bach. Just as we can't talk about about Bauhaus without acknowledging the experience of Jews in Europe, our notions of a western "white" "civilized" "us," stand on pillars made explicitly by people who identified as another "us," and "not-us," which I think is proof we are not "us" without "them." By definition, they were us, and necessarily, we are them. Sure, nice furniture and ugly buildings, but that's not the point. Architecture is a rich discourse about meaning and experience, and anyway, it's just a pleasure to think about.