In Our Time - Bauhaus

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Bauhaus which began in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, as a school for arts and crafts combined, and went on to be famous around the world. Under its first director, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau and extended its range to architecture and became associated with a series of white, angular, flat-roofed buildings reproduced from Shanghai to Chicago, aimed for modern living. The school closed after only 14 years while at a third location, Berlin, under pressure from the Nazis, yet its students and teachers continued to spread its ethos in exile, making it even more influential.The image above is of the Bauhaus Building, Dessau, designed by Gropius and built in 1925-6WithRobin Schuldenfrei Tangen Reader in 20th Century Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of ArtAlan Powers History Leader at the London School of ArchitectureAnd Michael White Professor of the History of Art at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs. Hello, Bauhaus began in 1990 in Weimar, Germany, as a school for arts and crafts combined, and went on to be famous around the world.

Under its first director, Walter Gropius, Bauhaus extended this to architecture, designing a series of white angular flat-roofed buildings reproduced from Shanghai to Chicago aimed for modern living. And while the school itself closed after only 14 years under pressure from the Nazis, its students and teachers continue to spread its ethos in exile,

making it even more influential. With me to discuss Bauhaus are Robin Shulton Pride Tangan reader in 20th century in modernism at the Courthold Institute of Art. Alan Powers, history leader at the London School of Architecture and Michael White, Professor of the History of Art at the University of York. Michael White, how did the Bauhaus come to be founded? Well, as you've just mentioned, it's launched in the spring of 1990

as the amalgamation of two existing schools, an Academy of Fine Art and a School of Arts and Crafts in Bymar. And the combination of that date, 1990 and that place, gives it a sense of real portendousness. It's happening simultaneously with meetings of the National Assembly that will reformulating constitution for a new republic in Germany. And it feels like a very innovative moment, a moment where new things can happen.

But there's actually quite a long backstory to it. It doesn't come out of the blue. In fact, Walter Gropis has already been invited several years beforehand to potentially take over the School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar. There's also been talk about him launching an architecture seminar in the Academy of Fine Art there. and this move actually to bring these two institutions together is part of the long trajectory in thinking in Germany

to unify a quite fragmented arts education, partly created through structures of aristocratic patronage that have now vanished after the war and it's into that moment that Gropius steps with a plan and it's taken up actually extremely rapidly by a new kind of local government. What does Bajas mean? So one of the cleverest things that I think

Gropius did was to come up with a new name for this institution. It gives it a sense of not having a precedent. So he doesn't call it an academy. He doesn't call it a workshop, which has various things that these places might have been called. He comes up with this actually very unusual title, it becomes the known to the State Bauhaus in Weimar. And in the centre of that is this word Bauhaus, building house, house for building. It's a bit of a neologism. But it's reminiscent of an older term for the Baalhutter or a medieval mason. Lodge that resonates quite broadly with his agenda, which is to revive crafts and to create a community. And that sense of community is very, very powerful in the early years of the Bower,

such in its initial programme. There's a whole section dedicated to the types of activities that might be conducted commonly and includes parties, eating and drinking together, ceremonial occasions. There's a very nice comment and some correspondence about the first Christmas at the Bauhaus in 1919 where Gropius goes around serving food to the students. So the director takes on that role and someone describes it actually as, as it was having the feeling of a foot washing. They describe it as. Why was Gropius chosen to edit? So Gropius was extremely well positioned by that time to take on the role.

It sort of manoeuvred himself into a particular position. There are at least two, several, actually, biographies of Walter Gropis and people have often tried to deduce him as a figure. He's one of those people onto which lots of people could sort of project their own ideas or see themselves reflected in him to some extent. And he managed to walk a very interesting typerope between those who wanted the institution to be primarily about art or those who wanted it to be about industry and found an interesting sort of middle way.

He had been involved very heavily in an organisation called the Deutsche Workbund, which had been agitating for bringing closer connections between art and industry. But one of the key ideas is a well-made table, a well-made chair, was worth consideration as a well-made painting. These two things should be locked together. There shouldn't be a pyramid. There shouldn't be a descending order. The making of things, whatever sort of things, was of equal value. Yes.

So in the first programme, there's a heavy emphasis on craft, return to craft, return to manual skills. But there's something very, there's a contradiction already embedded in the programme, which is great. He says that you can teach craft. Craft is something, and everybody should be taught that kind of skill, but you can't teach art. He says, so already in that initial program, there's a sort of creeping valuation for art in there, still a sort of notion of genius or innate talent

that remains a sort of undercurrent all the way through. Thank you. Robin, Robin, Hilden from. Why was there an opportunity, why was there a need for this kind of school, which is what it was essentially, in Germany at that time, just after the First World War.

This was a really important period in German history. It was a very turbulent time. Germany had just lost World War I, but they hadn't known they were losing during that period. And so in creating this new school, there was a very hopeful moment of bringing together the arts and the crafts, a unifying moment. And in doing so, Gropius was able to, indeed,

transcend these divisions, a social division, women were admitted to the school. Students even walked there in their uniforms. They had no other clothes and then they would sort of hand tailor them to create sort of everyday clothing out of it. So it was a really difficult time in German history and this was a very hopeful humanifying moment where you could possibly bring this division between craft seen as lower down and high art together and create a new society as well as creating new objects for people. But it also is deeply embedded in the craft training. In setting up the course, Gropius employed both craftmasters and form masters. The form masters were the artists, Kandinsky, Clay, Johanna Zittin. And the craft masters taught the nuts and bolts of clay and metalworking, the kind of actual metal smithing that the students would need.

So the students were granted both real skills in the course, but also this kind of artistic training, this kind of higher bringing up of the work. But the first year was very important because whatever they'd done, they went on a comprehensive journey to learn about doing things and making things across the board. Is that right? That's right. They had to start over, essentially. So many of the students who had already had perhaps some degree in art training or some amount of coursework under their belt. But everybody started basically from ground zero once again in the preliminary course, the four course. And this allowed the Bauhaus to train students in their vision of breaking down preconceived ideas, experimenting with different materials.

They weren't even allowed to choose what department they'd like to go into, metalworking or woodworking or stained glass, until they completed this year-long preliminary course. And what results did that imposition have? The results were that it was a place of experimentation, a place of really putting forth a creative ideal of working collaboratively together. They had come out with a journeyman's diploma from that, so it was actually quite practical for some of the students. But the idea is that we are remaking people and we are remaking our visual world. And I think that that's an important part of understanding these very complicated, turbulent years in Weimar.

You mentioned one or two, but could you tell the listeners again, who are the early staff who stood out for you? Really important is Johannes Iten. He was behind the preliminary course, and this is something that did not change throughout the 14 years of the Bauhaus. He was very important. Bosley Kandinsky, Paul Clay, as artists also taught within this four course, this preliminary course. Of course, Gropius, the director of the school, was very involved. And as the school grew, more members joined Oscar Schlemer in theater.

We also have students who came up through the ranks, such as Marcel Broi. and become masters. How did they get there? Oh, anybody who just came, were admitted in that point. How is it paid for? Students scraped together fees, but it was quite affordable and word spread. And Grobius was very keen to put out the word. He is a PR machine, and this is important right from the beginning.

He had pamphlets, leaflets that explained the school, and people encountered them, and they came. And his catalogues were works of propaganda as well as works of record. Absolutely. I think this is really important. It showed visually and also through the graphic design. Just the kind of institution the Bauus would be, as well as the early manifestos that he and others wrote, really encouraging people to understand this new ethos, this new spirit. Thank you. Alan Powers, why was Weimar chosen as the place for this school? To explain why Weimar, you have to go back to Count Harry Kessler, who's a rather forgotten figure,

whose mother was Irish and father was German. He was sometimes suspected of being an illegitimate son of the Kaiser, but this is probably not true. Anyway, his mother was so beautiful that people stopped their carriages to look at her. And he occupied a very high-ranking status, both in Germany and in England and was very well-known in Paris. So in the years before the First World War, he's moving between these places.

And he thinks that Weimar could be a field for his activity, so he brings people in, he supports Friedrich Nietzsche's sister who's moved her brother in there for his last year or so. She had a bad effect on his writing, didn't she? She did. Well, it was after he died. She doctored them. She had to wait until he died.

Last a piece of work. But Kessler is up to all sorts of things. He finally sort of gets elbowed out because he puts on a show of Rodin nude drawings, which doesn't go well with the more conservative elements in the court. Really? But he is the one who brings Henry van der Velda from Belgium. And van der Velde creates the school, which, as Michael was saying,

is the forerunner of the Bauhaus, the building itself and the sort of amalgamation of different activities and the avant-garde tinge that they acquire. However, Weimar is more than that because it has an earlier history associated with Gerta, Schiller, Herder. You can't really compare it with anything in English. as though you amalgamated Stratford-on-Aven with the Lake Poets, and then you add on something rather like the landscape garden at Starhead,

because the school is right on the edge of this fabulous 18th century garden with garden temples. So it is really a unique place and very beautiful. Can we find, when you half answered the question I was going to ask, but can we find much British influence in the early stages? Yes. The Arts and Crafts movement, for instance. What had happened when the art schools in Britain in the 1890s had set a precedent for this combination of working directly with materials hands-on and in a more general way designing quite a wide field really, trying to bring the fine arts and the making processes together. Who are we talking about here?

Well, W.R. Letherby, the founder of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and very influential within London, and then indeed a great influence through many other British cities, it ought to spread very rapidly, this quite coherent group of people with the same ideas. And Kessler knew about that. He thought the methods were great, but the aesthetic was a bit backward. So this in many ways is a translation. Gropius knew about it. about these, he often referred to William Morris as an inspiration, although Morris was never involved in teaching.

And teaching was the basis of this whole Bauhaus. When does it cease to be an experiment and become an institution? Never. But it is important. It's a school. There are, you know, it's seen as being a number of other things as well, a factory or a lot of design business, but it really is fundamentally a school. Can we go now, Michael White, in those early years,

was there a distinctive style of the Bauhaus? So the question of a Bauhaus style is quite a vexed issue really in that Gropius and his fellow teachers would always have denied there was such a thing and that the look of any object would be the result of certain kind of technical questions, the overcoming of technical problems. But it's quite clear that as the years go on something like a Bauhaus style is becoming more apparent in people's minds.

and ultimately will be imitated by others. One way to sort of think about this is to take the example of chair design in one of the first issues of the Bauhaus magazine. It's presented as a sort of five-stage film strip, the development of a chair. And it begins with an object that has the name originally of the romantic chair and then later acquires the name of the African chair that looks rough hue in out of wood and has a very extraordinary sort of woven backrest to it, which is a collaboration between Marcel Breuer and Gwinterstoldz when they're

students. It then morphs into the slat chair by Breuer and then the famous tubular metal chairs chairs and ends actually with a figure who seems to be resting on a cushion of air, a sort of futuristic chair where we won't see the chair at all. And this is presenting the act of sitting as a technical problem to be responded to by a chair design. However, you can see through that transition certain stylistic features or things that become recognisably Bauhaus, so the elimination of unnecessary ornament, an attraction to transparency, an idea of reflectivity,

things that actually look really good here photographically, which is something that Robin has studied a lot. And these sort of stylistic aspects then, so there's a very funny comment that some critic makes many years later that everything in small-case letters, everything in uppercase letters, this is what the Bauhaus becomes identified with. And that notion becomes important as it tries to turn itself actually into something like a brand.

Robin, it fell out of favour with the authorities in Vimar and moved to Dessar. Why did it fall out and why did it go to Dessar? As the Conservative government in Vimar gained power, they were disinvited. They were first asked to show what they were able to do, and they had a really important exhibition in 1923 in which they built a full-scale small house. They exhibited all of their work in all of the studios, and yet it wasn't enough.

They were asked to leave, and their contracts were not renewed. Do we know more specifically why they were asked to leave? Was it because of the art or was it because of the funding? It was a tightening of cultural time and contact in the period. They were quite expensive to run for what they were. were able to produce. They did not like the behavior of these very, um, sort of gangly and, uh, strangely dressed artistic students romping around the conservative city of Weimar with its history

of Goethe, an important theater. And they were just generally not embraced by their local. Yes. So I think I mentioned earlier about, uh, uh, income for the Bauhaus. I often point my students to the, the end point of the first program. Um, and, um, and, um, I, you mentioned earlier about, uh, uh, uh, income for the Bauhaus. we can see already at that time foreign students were paying double fees so ripping off foreign students is actually a very old idea and actually a large number of

students come from outside Germany as well so it partly comes to be seen by reactionary conservative in the area as a foreign influence as something alien Alan Allen Powers it was at this stage I think that architecture took off for the Bauhaus can you tell us more

about that well the architecture is strange story because there's Gropius as an architect and the word Bauhaus is associated with architecture, but they don't actually teach it until almost the point where he leaves in 1928. The idea is that the architecture would come at the end of the course. It was sort of the pinnacle of the Bauhaus career and many students actually graduated before they performed the kind of architectural work that they needed to. But Gropius also kept his own at the Bauhaus and students would then have basically internships with him. He then decided in 1927, 1928 to solidify and add more formal instruction and that's when he hired Hannes Meyer.

You lived in a Bauhaus house. What was it like? I had the opportunity to live in one of the master's houses during the summer, a summer spell and it was quite extraordinary for someone who's known the buildings as a tourist, as a scholar, it was quite extraordinary to actually sleep there, to see in the morning the way in which these big open-planned spaces, the way the light functioned, the way the windows opened, the access to the outdoors and to nature, this idea of inside and outside that's very important for modern architecture. When you live in those spaces, having those access doors to the balcony from all rooms really created a different experience than what I had previously sort of imagined.

Also, the play of light of these stark white walls. As the sun would rise and set, you would have the shadows of the tall pines, really as if you were sort of in a clock itself or something sort of cinematic. So it was a really actually relevatory experience for me. Can I come back to you on to talk about Gropius' influence in this area? Well, I think it needs to be said that whatever was done with architecture by Gropius or his associates at the Bauhaus is at that stage in Germany and indeed many parts of Europe quite generic. They are all travelling in a very similar direction. And I think the name, again, was picked up to describe something that didn't even originate from the Bauhaus.

One place I think is very helpful to visit is a house in the nearby city of Jena that was built for an academic couple. And there Gropius designed the house and one of his students did colour schemes for the rooms inside. And it's really the colour schemes that make that one special because they sort of create an internal geometry with a lovely palette of quite soft colours. And it's been beautifully restored. So the colour was very important too, because you tend to think of it as a place of whiteness and a sort of encroaching serility really. Well, this comes about because in that period there were very few colour images

and a lot of the original colour schemes were lost. So that's an interesting example. The buildings of Dessau have been given back their colour and it makes a huge difference to the perception. Coming down to the financial side, were they making things and doing things that could be afforded by anything like ordinary people? Robin is really the expert on this.

they strangely ended up marketing products made in such a way that they looked as though they could be machine made, but actually a machine couldn't make them, so they had to be made by hand. Therefore they cost a lot. They were also very often intended for rather a sort of high-level bourgeois lifestyle of tea parties. And in fact, one of the famous ones was a tea pot. Yes. What was more effective at a later stage was their wallpapers, which hardly ever talked about. but those actually made money.

The weavings were also very successful. We've got to go to you now, Robin. He keeps looking across you. And weaving brings in the women, because the women went, though, on so-called equal terms, but more or less, not relegated, but directed towards the weaving area, which was very successful.

Yes, indeed. Ginter Stolzer was put as the master of the weaving workshop. Women were encouraged and quite often then shunted to the weaving workshop, but it was an area of extraordinary collaboration, experimentation, and they were able to produce meter wares and fabric by the meter that was successful. Someone like Annie Albers completed her diploma, and in doing so, she made a special fabric for Hannah Smyer's auditorium

for his very important trade union building. This was made out of cotton and selifane. And that's just an example of where, using innovative materials that were both light reflective and sound absorbing, she really created a useful product. Gropius had coined the phrase art and technology a new unity, and this is really important in thinking about the products they were going to design. They never meant to mass produce their own objects, but they foresaw that they would place their graduates in factories and factories would then mass produce well-designed,

well-built objects for the masses. Again, this was a proposition that did not take off in part because people didn't always want to buy these very sort of astaire, stripped-down objects that we gravitate towards today as icons of modernism, but in the period people wanted fancy decoration, at least the average person. You would have going, Mike? We shouldn't forget that some of the most successful Bauhaus products are not so fated today, but actually still on sale today, it's toys. Lots of little children's toys,

a rather wonderful chess set. So actually some quite minor small objects. And one of the most successful commercially, one of the most successful workshops in the early days was actually the pottery, where they could sell things at a cheaper rate. But the Bannis didn't have its own pottery that was actually 15 miles from Vimar in a town called Dornburg. And they didn't take it to Desau either. So when we're thinking about the Bauhaus style, the pottery actually was something they could sell, but it didn't quite fit the image. The two notable women potters who started their own factories, well, one did Greta Marx, who later came to England, had her own business manufacturing pottery for the market. So that was post-Bowhouse,

but obviously derived from it. Margaret Friedenler designed for one of the major manufacturers. Another important figure would be Mariana Brandt in the metal workshop and she was someone who ended up leading the workshop for a short period and then she ultimately did take up a position as Director of Design

within a factory and very much improved the quality of candom lights for instance which were mass produced in the period. So there are some instances where this idea of well-designed objects being mass produced from the factories did come to fruition but indeed by and large, the legacy of the Bauhaus

is much more about this idea of creating well-designed objects for the masses and an educational program and less so the actual success of the specific products themselves. If it had an ethos, could you tell us what it was? I think the ethos is trying to push the boundaries of what we understand, for instance, a chair to be.

A chair doesn't need to be made out of wood. It could actually be made out of tubular steel, which has a strong resilience, it's lightweight, it's flexible, it's not as ponderous, and a cantilever chair by Mies Vandero has a certain springiness to it. It's a very innovative product, and it also looks modern. It sets a certain tone for a forward-looking, very hopeful future in a very complicated 1920s period. Is the idea of it being modern coming into play as a factor in its favour?

Absolutely, not only modern materials, such as the use of tubular steel, a preponderance of glass, innovative weaving materials, putting metal threads through the fabrics themselves, but also modern lifestyle that you might live in a light-filled house without all of the 19th century decorations. Anthe Macassas. Exactly. Out with the antimacassas, perhaps you just need a strip of leather

to support your back at just the right moment in Marcel Breuer's wossily chair. It's quite comfortable with just a few very well-proportioned ergonomic pieces of material really researched. And that's part of it. It's the research, design research in the period. Not necessarily what came out of that, but research is a product of that education. One of the things that really did was to make teachers as much as products because a great number of them went on. And even if they didn't teach in a school like Margaret Freeland,

went to California, set up her own sort of rural craft workshop and took a lot of students in and had a routine and a regime. There's a weaving workshop, not very far away just outside Airfoot, where one of the weaving students lived and worked through the whole of the rest of her life, through the Nazis, through the DDR, with a teaching studio. And the pupils came in, and they were given this severe training about getting it right. I also think just on that note, the way in which after the bow house was closed, Gropius goes on to the graduate school of design at Harvard. Ludwig Mies Vandero goes on to IIT in Chicago.

Laslo Moly Nage starts the new Bauhaus in Chicago and then turns into the Institute of Design. So in fact, exactly, the teachers go out, not only students who go on to teach, but the main protagonist of the Bauhaus also go into the greater world. And that becomes important as, they go into exile as it were. Can I come to you, Michael White?

It had an extraordinary explosion. The way you've all talked so far clearly tells people this is a smallish group, not many funds, when it made things that were too expensive for most people to buy, and life was going on for massive people without the Bauhausen, didn't seem to influence

them very much. But, quite soon, it's all over the place. It's in America, it's in Calcutta, It's in museums. What happened to make it explode like that? Well, one very simple explanation is the fact that it's closed in Germany, that the Nazis effectively make it impossible for its function there, and then many, many of its staff and students leave Germany.

Can you just tell us a bit more about the conflict between the regime, the Nazi regime, and Bahas? Yes, so Robin's already mentioned that there's a lot of, trajectory for this again, that rightist agitation against the Bauhaus exists in Weimar, in its first incarnation there. And it follows the Baas. They moved to Desau. That seems to be a much better situation. But again, the National Socialists come actually achieve some power actually in the city authority there and then managed to close the power there. It then moves to Berlin. Why did they object to what Bauhaus is doing? Why did the Nazis object to it? There are a number of reasons, both aesthetic and political.

In the mid-1920s, such Gropius has a very interesting sort of public debate with a conservative cultural critic and architect called Paul Schultz and Nelmberg, where they start debating nationality, identity and architecture. And you start to see this kind of creeping into the discourse about modern architecture actually being an alien, foreign thing. Even though it was engendered in Germany. Exactly, exactly. And that legacy goes.

on for a very, very long time. And interestingly, the Bauhaus also falls out of love from the left as well. So if an incident with the second director, Hannes Smyre, who's a committed Marxist, there's development of a communist cell within the Bauhaus and a big scandal erupts around him about the potential diversion of funds into political activities, and he's ejected from the Bauhaus. And at that moment, actually, the far left falls out of love with the Bauhaus as well, which has a long legacy into East Germany. Do you want to come into this dispute? Well, Alan.

Moving onwards, I think it's often assumed quite understandably that the Nazis would have nothing to do with modern design, but actually it's not true. And while the best known examples are chosen to show their conservatism, classical pitched roof houses, etc., a lot of buildings go on being built through the whole Nazi period, admittedly more for industrial purposes, which are flat-roofed with big glass walls,

and domestic products don't change very much either. So it's one more paradox in the received idea of the Bauhaus. So why is that paradox? Why is the received idea against the facts? Well, the received idea is a huge part of what we have to know about the Bauhaus, and Gropius was very largely responsible for creating it. First, when he came to England and lectured, published the first book about the Bauhaus, in English and then even more so in the US where he arranged for a big exhibition at the Museum of

Modern Art in 1938 with a catalogue that very selectively focuses on the things that he wanted to be seen. And I think that's a really important point in which after the Bauhaus closes, there begins another life with the Bauhaus. In that image is important. Exhibitions, the publications, especially this catalog, and also the actual photographs, at the point in which the world is at war, and then the Cold War where access to the original Bauhaus buildings was no longer possible, these images from the 1920s become the image of the Bauhaus. In part, that is the photography of Lucia Moholy,

Laszlo Moholy Naj's first wife, and the way in which these are reproduced, the reproduction of the image of the Bauhaus continues to resonate on, And thus we have a kind of coherent vision of the Bauhaus, even when, as we've all discussed, it's much more complicated. Yes, so when Gropus publishes a major treatise on modern architecture, new architecture and the Bauhaus, he uses precisely those photographs that Robin has referred to,

even though at that moment the building did not look like that. Actually, they'd been taken over by the Nazis today, had actually removed the glass curtain wall. So he's actually using these historical images to talk about modern, architecture. Do you want to come in, Alan? Yes, the use of images, the editing, it's taken a long time and the job is not yet finished, even past the centenary of the foundation, to try and readjust, to bring in the periods of the second two directors, even, which are often more or less skated over, both of which were very interesting. Hannes Meyer became, he said we want practical things for

people, not luxury things, and he acted on it, and therefore, you know, a lot of the tubular steel and so on disappears, and wooden furniture becomes the thing. And I think the Hanes-Meyer period is great, actually. And Bisse van der Roa's relatively short time there as well has many points, and he really got into architectural teaching while he was there, which he then continued in Chicago. So there's a great irony that Hannes-Meyer, so it's ardent, Marxist actually creates the most commercially successful version of the Bauhaus. Maybe he just understood how capitalism works better than other people. But both he and Mies van der Roa have an understanding that Gropis actually lacks.

Gropis does not really understand how intellectual property rights work. So he's interested in objects and products, but he doesn't understand actually how he might license something. So what did you not understand about intellectual property rights? So Marcel Breuer, who starts making this tubular steel furniture, actually creates a spin-off company from the Bauer's. And Grobes is devastated. He thinks this object is actually going to finally make some cash.

He's livid, not just devastated. He's livid. It's a crisis. Yeah, Breuer, so it creates a company and then sells on the rights from that company into other companies. So actually, that furniture we think of us, owned by the Bours, actually he loses the rights over it. And that has legacies right to today of what you think you buy

when you go and buy a cantilever chair. Also important to this end period of the Bauhaus, just when Mies van der Roe was getting going with the architecture, finally doing what Gropius had set out to do. He was working very closely with his partner, Lili Raich, so really contending with the external architecture, also the interior design and the fabrics and the furniture, and working also with Ludwig Hilbersheimer,

creating visions for urban planning in the way in which you might reproduce and property, these buildings, multiples, so that you could really build in a mass-produced way, architecture, housing for the masses. All that really is just getting going in these last three years, 1930 to 1933. And then when it closes in July of 1933, again, that is moved forward to other lands, other places. But it really was kind of just getting going in that period.

Can I come to Michael for a second? Why did it close in? Why did Bar House close? consequences followed? The actual formal closure of the House is like everything to do to the House. There's a simple answer and a more complicated answer. So it's been

tracked in each of its locations. It's suffered from the development of the rise of right-wing politics that have targeted it and actually removed its funding and forced it to close. So the big one comes in 1933 with the accession

of the National Socialists to the chancellorship and the seizure of power at that moment. It's one the very first things they do culturally is a raid on the Bauhaus in April, 1933. They closed the building. By that time, it's in a telephone factory in Berlin on living on a shoestring. But they close the building, they check everyone's identity papers and so forth. But there is then a very complex negotiation that happens behind the scenes between Mies van der Roa and high-ranking Nazis. He's communicating with. Alfred Rosenberg, who then go, you know, later he's in the Nuremberg trials from having

looted works of art from all over Europe. And actually the Nazis, they offer a deal to the Bauer. So you can carry on. They specifically name two members of staff that they want fired. That's Kandinsky and Ludwig Hilbertsheimer that Robin has mentioned, that are seen to be somehow particularly dangerous or subversive, but will also want closer state control of the institution. those are terms that Miss van der Roa and his colleagues were not going to accept. And so actually, the Bauhaus closes itself. They decide to formally dissolve. And that's an interesting sort of attempt to retain some sort of autonomy in a very desperate situation. Did its closure help its reputation, Robin? It helped in an international sense in that it was finished in Germany and

then it moved elsewhere. It had been moving. It was very well. known internationally in terms of the publications, but the actual emigration of the key figures, many people first to London and then on to the U.S., and also Turkey, Calcutta, China, Japan, and other states as well. And that was really important because that allowed it to also mingle with the local modern influence and the local craft traditions of those places. And so it's not a monolith. It could change. grow and it could adapt in some ways to local conditions. And that's again, this pliability and this flexibility of this Bauhaus idea, this consideration of how you might train, how it might be an educational ethos, how it's a time of great experimentation with materials, forms, and ideas about living.

And that, I think, really helped the Bauhaus to be able to spread and find relevance beyond this core episode in history. There's a huge impact during the Cold War period when the Bauhaus myth gets revived again because it serves the Americans in league with the West Germans as the good bit, as it were, the bit that you can take from interwar Germany and give back again. So the foundation of the school in Ulm, for example,

which was seen as the successor to the Bauhaus, is funded by American money to begin with. And then the programme of exhibitions and so on. at that point the East Germans have renounced the Bauhaus, was there under the Stalinist cultural influence. Later on, they take it back again. And there is a funny story I was told that there was an exhibition in Stuttgart, the first big post-war Bauhaus exhibition.

And there were people in England who wanted to bring it to London, which they did succeed in doing, but only by going to the West German cultural commissar in London and getting a plot, she was in league with this, to say that there would be an exhibition coming from East Germany unless the West Germans put up the money to bring the show to London. Was there any sense towards the end one, that Bauhaus was challenged, if that's possible?

Yes. Who challenged them? Quite often by quite a lot of people, I think. Not necessarily a head-on challenge, but a questioning, a scepticism, about was it all it was cracked up to be? It happens in the 1930s, you know, quite politely, but I think people can see through this slightly incredible sort of facade that Gropius creates.

In America, it's challenged by people who are not massively culturally conservative, but just a bit more. And they're very funny things about beware of the Bauhaus and Homes and Garden magazine and so on. Well, they seem funny to us. Perhaps they weren't then. Also important in this post-war period is the beginning of the Bauhaus archive, and Hans Winger as a particular figure in West Germany who sets up the original first archive of these materials. He sends round letters to Bauhaus members who are alive

to send back their memories, donate their objects, donate their papers and documents. And that's also, in addition to what Grope is doing on a kind of all-out PR front that he's been doing since he left the Bauhaus, it's also very important this institution becomes founded. Even in the early days, Winger had an estate car and he would drive around and pick up Bauhaus furniture

when he found it on flea markets and from people's houses when they wanted to donate it. And so it becomes institutionalized in this post-war period sort of despite itself and despite its flexibility. Finally, where does it stand now, Michael? Rather, remarkably being revived in all kinds of different contexts. I'll just give you two. So one is the European Union.

has launched a new European Bauhaus. It's actually a whole project that's to do with encouraging sustainability in architectural design. Meanwhile, it's been used over in China as the foundation of their first design museum, has a core Bauhaus collection, which is part of a government project, really, to move from being a manufacturing country into a design economy,

to stop being the factory of the world and to start getting other people to make their stuff. Well, thank you. Thanks, Sir Robin Shulden, Alan Powers and Michael White and our studio engineer Michael Milam. Next week it's DeMothanese Philippics. His speeches against Philip of Muston,

enemy of Athens, delivered in a crisis and re-read in times of crisis for more than 2,000 years. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material

from Melvin and his guests. Right, two hands up. I'll start with you. Well, I'd like to come in on the discussion point where we ended where the Bauhaus is now. Yeah, let's do it. Because I think the word has become almost meaningless. It's a brand name, as Michael suggested earlier.

It was from the beginning. But I've described it as the zombie barhouse. It goes around looking as if it might be the real thing still living, but it isn't. And it's actually quite deceptive. At the same time, there's a really important task of establishing and communicating what it really was. And, you know, people will use that word. But I think, you know, we don't, we shouldn't be relying on that as an empty phrase in the way that we are. So what would you substitute? New words. Not easy to come across new words.

So I think in reference to that, there's a very amusing, quite telling confrontation between two very different characters who tried to seize the legacy of the Bauhaus in the So, Alan's mentioned, the design is Huxgoula for Gestaltung in Ulm, this direct school that kind of grows out of the Bauhaus that's led by Max Bill, who had been a student of the Bauhaus, and sees it very much as a design project about coming up with practical solutions to everyday needs. And he enters a very interesting correspondence with an avant-garde Danish artist called Asgoyon, and they have completely diametrically opposing ideas about the Bauhaus is. There's Bill who's about making

stools and bits of furniture and Yon who sees it just fundamentally as a creative stimulus and in their correspondence then Yon comes up to this idea of the imaginist bowhouse is what he describes it as contrasting it with what he says that Bill has which is the imaginary bow house

Do you want to develop out a bit? Interesting. Yeah so if you look at we were talking earlier about Johannes Itten or Mahal Inage, if you look actually at the their writings. What's fundamentally important to them is the development of people. Alan spoke about the legacy in teaching. The ultimate product of the Bauhaus is people, and their creative potential being unleashed. And that's what Yorn is really excited about. It's about engaging with materials, but in a creative fashion. It's not actually about

producing objects that are going to be made in factories. And you can find that, repeatedly in those early documents of the Bauhaus. Holly talks about the biological functions of the human being and enhancing sensory perception and all of these sorts of things are actually about people fundamentally. I would take a slightly different tact on that because I think there is a legacy to the products of the Bauhaus and the way they're designed.

So if you think of Dieter-Rams at Braun and the products that he designed, they come out of this idea of well-functioning, well-designed objects, a high production value. And if you can remove a button or two to make your mixer or your shaver or your slide projector function that much better, it'd be that much more intuitive to use, that might serve people well. And I think the post-war products, there was a proliferation of objects in the post-war period.

Many of them were cheaply designed with planned obsolescence, a new color of your Sears refrigerator, your bathroom has to be a different color. Whereas some products, such as those produced by Braun, really stand the test of time. That has important implications for Steve Jobs and Apple products. The iPhone has certain connections to the way in which those brawn calculators were designed. And so I think there has been a place in the postwar. Also with Conting Grouchich and important designers in our contemporary period, there is a legacy that you can trace from that idea of our.

and technology a new unity from 1923 that we can bring up to the everyday present. IKEA is also an example that's bandied around. It is well-designed objects for the masses. We can debate the ecological implications of essentially what's throwaway furniture now, but I think that legacy is connected to the Bauhaus and I think that the design training and the products that came out of the Bauhaus, successful or not, in their time have been successful in the long run. I think Mahaliniage would be absolutely on side with sustainability because that was the direction he was traveling away from the sort of the physics

towards the biology and a holistic view of way beyond simply objects or images towards something much bigger and a friend of his Sir Tchaimaev who took over from him in Chicago for a few years had exactly the same idea and he said we need a space program for Earth. All that money that's being spent on going to the moon we actually need it here and how right he was. What does Germany think of the Bauhaus at the moment? Well, there's a big claim on the Bauhaus being made by Germany.

There's a very concerted attempt to repatriate it. And we see that, Robin mentioned earlier, the Bauhaus archive that was brought back and then a building created for it in Berlin. We've seen that linked up with the museum in Weimar, which still retains some objects from the early Bauhaus, and now the Bauhaus Foundation in Desau, which looks after the building. Those three have come together post-reunification of Germany to work together, to re-establish a kind of home for the Bauhaus in Germany.

And very important to that point is each of these institutions has just opened a brand-new building or is completing a building now in the case of the Bauhaus archive. which then moved from Darmstadt to Berlin in the post-war period as Germany became more and more divided. And so not only is that a sort of claim about iconic modernism and a certain period of German history and German modernism, but now actually backed by physical buildings of architecture. The problem, I think, is that it's cast such a big shadow

over the whole of the rest of that period, but particularly in Germany, there is so little available to discover what else was going on, which I think from what I've discovered was just as interesting in a great many ways. And that is something that does need rebalancing. Yes, so it happens to me that I regularly visit a small town near Hanover called Zeller, which has a remarkable architecture dating from the 1920s, built by an architect called Otto Hezler, who was working in a Noyesbao, a new building, style throughout this period, this is now being rebranded or remarketed as Bauhaus architecture. It was happening completely independently in a very surprising location.

It's not in a major urban centre. And it's now become a strong marketing ploy to bring people to look at your modern architecture by calling it Bauhaus. I think this actually brings us full circle because, in fact, nationalism and the Bauhaus was always entwined in one way or another. what was going on in Germany and what was perceived as German or the future of Germany and future direction of Germany was always at play in each period in 1919 when it was set up in 1923 when art in technology and new unity was sort of the way forwards for the way of the Bauhaus the move to desau an industrial town with already had Juncker's airplane and then you know it's sort of exile and then re-embraced in

the West German and post-reunification Germany. Do you think that one of the basic ideas that it should bring together technology and art, that should bring together industry and artistic thing? Do you think that happened, Alan? They did it with better publicity, with flair. You know, I wouldn't denigrate any of it, but it doesn't stand out so far beyond other things

in Germany and elsewhere. It's part of a European-wide movement. We've forgotten also the theater, the innovations in theater design, and these kind of other things that were going on at the Bauhaus that really influenced. We've talked about graphic design a little bit. But really, it's many, many directions. New ground was broken.

It became important in other fields as a sort of jumping off point. And so we might also understand the Bauhaus as a point of departure, many points of many departures. And I think that also is probably its legacy. Again, I'm going to argue somewhat against that because, well, typography, for example, Jan Chichold was really the founder of new typography. And many people say that the way the Bauhaus did it was a bit inexpert. I didn't really know what they were doing.

So in that and the theatre I know less well, but I have a suspicion that it would have happened anyway. Yes, it's very nice to have it sort of encapsulated within this. this sphere of associated activities. But that's the one we hear most about, and we hear less about the others. But don't you think it's important that they were able to then broadcast and perhaps popularize if they weren't that er point,

that originary point, there may be an interesting way in which just being a sort of broadcaster, a megaphone, which is something you sort of see in their imagery, the gramophones and these kind of mouthpieces for a movement, they may have just been an amplifier. I don't think they were always the originator of these objects because as we've seen, they started, they were there already.

Nothing comes from nothing. And I think we've really gone around that topic. But rather, I think the way in which the Bauhaus has sort of broadened and reached more people even today, as we're sitting here talking about it, is not unimportant to their legacy. You were going to say something. I was going to say that we've spoken about the

afterlife of the Bauhaus and its legacy in a number of different ways in in relation to teaching, in relation to the revision of the teaching of art and those sorts of curricula, in relation to design of objects and also buildings. I think what is developing now in research is as kind of nuanceing of those narratives and see where the Bauhaus penetrated in different sorts of environments. And its trajectory into what McCart might call developing countries was quite different into those that were already heavily industrialised, where it might have penetrated further into pedagogy than actually into, let's say, building. There was an idea, as I read in the notes of one of you,

but here was the notion to create the complete person. Whoever wrote that? That would be me. Can you describe what happened to that idea? I think that hit the buffers a bit. That's one of the early Bauhaus is it has a kind of ecstatic, you know, utopian tenor to it in its writings that feels like a venture into a new world. But a lot of what we've described is how that has to negotiate very kind of practical things.

How do you make money? How do you sustain this school? How are you actually going to negotiate with this manufacturer? And all those questions keep on drawing the bowels back to mundane things. But within the writings, within the concept of, of, many of the people at the bowers is this this sense of we are addressing the whole person and that is the ambition it's not just my hand and wrist that is making this this object my whole body is involved if you look at iton's encouragement of gymnastic exercises and breathing exercises before the making of

artwork this is something that's actually engaging the physical person completely in the making of the work or thinking about mahony large later his sort of product design actually fitting or corresponding to the shape of the hand. So the modern trim phone, whatever arises out of sculpting or carving things that actually relate to the body very, very directly. And this idea of actually improving or enhancing our sensory capacities, we will see more, we will feel more. There's lots in the Bauhaus teaching program, which actually about touch and feel and sensation, and that that can be actually, actually, made better. We will actually be more sensitive. Do you agree with that on that? Well, yes,

we all need to do this and you know, it was happening happening in England, dance troops, you know, dancing on the hills and on the seashores and people doing all sorts of experimental community things. So yes, it's true, but it's not uniquely true, I think. But it is unique that the school would be focused on the whole person on really creatively training so that that would be the onward direction of travel. Although there was sort of Laban's Reform movements where they were focused on dance or particular aspects, it's interesting that the Bauhaus so much encompassed this as a foundational part of what they were doing, that it was baked into the school itself, that there was jazz evenings and concerts and a film series and visiting lectures and a very robust

subscription to international journals. And so they were really training up people for this kind of whole life, modern life, a life where they didn't know what the next step was really going to be or what history was going to hold for them. Thank you very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. I'm Ella Ashimahi. I'm an explorer, stand-up comic and paleoanthropologist. And I want to tell you about my new podcast, why do we do that? An Anthropologist's Guide to the modern world from BBC Radio 4. In each episode, I'll be trying to work out why we do the things we we do from uncovering the unconscious reason we shake hands. There is a lot of information lying inside our body odor. To asking why we do things that are bad for us. If we weren't programmed to be more

risk tolerant, the species wouldn't have survived. And delving into the surprising science of kissing. I would never be short of willing subjects to participate in my research. So if you want to find out, Why do we do that? Head to BBC Sounds to subscribe.