I cannot provide references (and don't really feel obliged to research them now), but I think this is a misrepresentation of bauhaus.
Bauhaus as a school for design was inherently technical with Werkstätten (workshops) where craftsmen taught the basics in woodworking, and other crafts. In that, Bauhaus continued the Arts&Crafts movement (or the respective German edition of that movement) while applying a 'simplified' visual language.
Of course a Bauhaus alumnus or a Bauhaus teacher wouldn't reach the technical skills of a "Meister" in the crafts, but the connection certainly ran deep.
It is aso worth noting that craftsmen based manufacturing, espcially in the early 20th century, has nothing to do with mass production. And what machine learning has to do with any of that, I have no idea.
Right. A key point here is that some complex things are easy to mass produce. If you can make it by stamping (available in the Bauhaus period) or casting (also available), adding decorative detail doesn't cost you anything. There's a class of parts you can make on a four-slide machine cheaply, and it includes most small threaded parts like the ones used in assembling lamps.
A good example from that period was stamped tin ceilings, which were a big thing in the US around 1880-1920 or so. These are purely decorative ceiling panels, available in many patterns. They replaced decorative hand-made plasterwork. Some of the patterns have Victorian details, some are rather plain. Manufacturing cost does not increase with pattern complexity.[1]
That's mentioned in the article, the problem they're talking about is that the classes were focused on handwork and what the teachers thought would be good for industrial production, but actually wasn't.
That's misunderstanding the goal of teaching handwork. Handwork teaches you about the materials behavior first and foremost, which is absolutely essential knowledge when you want to do something industrial, unless you will be using a material that you can't work by hand, such as synthetics.
But if you want to use wood industrially having basic woodworking knowledge will teach you a lot of very useful stuff about the properties of wood, what you can and can not make, regardless of the manufacturing methods, the strengths and weaknesses of the materials and so on.
Ditto for metals, and to some extent this goes for glass and ceramics as well (though in manufacturing methods those come closer to working with plastics, the same goes for casting metals).
Yes you're absolutely right that Bauhaus as a school was technical and a continuation of the Arts & Craft education. As you say though, their technical knowledge was around craftsmanship, and not in design for manufacturing (like we would refer to now).
The key example referred in the article is on a metal-working course taught by Moholy-Nagy. Students would handmade prototypes based on assumptions of what would be easier to mass-manufacture (like using basic shapes such as cylinders of spheres). But in fact products with those shapes were actually hard to make industrially.
> a metal-working course taught by Moholy-Nagy. Students would handmade prototypes based on assumptions of what would be easier to mass-manufacture (like using basic shapes such as cylinders of spheres). But in fact products with those shapes were actually hard to make industrially.
This was cause for a good laugh, though that likely wasn't your intention. But hear me out.
What doesn't seem to be mentioned is that Bauhuas was a leftist school. Moholy-Nagy is being your typical Marxist teaching a class on industrial products without having ever even stepping foot in a factory, much less knowing the state of industrial manufacturing.
Poser of tech? Well, in a way, Bauhaus was investigating the aesthetics of Modernity and industrial society. The disregard for actual manufacturing realities is entirely in line with disregarding human psychology when proscribing utopian authoritarian societies. It is a mindset and it should be added, symptomatic of their conceit.
Your tone detracts from the intrigue of this comment I for one, have no problem with it at all. I only bring it up to make an accessory complaint about how the bland enforcement of "civility" online can stifle people who express themselves in a certain way. You could've easily disregarded the first two lines of your comment and began with the "Poser of tech?" line, but without, it's just mundane input void of any association with a human being that actually feels something about the topic at hand instead of just having a thought about it.
Anyway, I loved your critique. With all of this being said, from at least a visual perspective, how do you feel about the work inspired by Bauhaus? What sort of design do you feel appreciates the human psychology of the issues/environment it intends to involve itself with?
Products of political design schools, by key practioners, are generally good, usually strong design. The ideological framing certain can help in guiding design, providing continuity (even if the "narrative fact" is imaginal).
I generally disregard the narrative attached to design - went to arch school so am entirely jaded about that aspect of design. So I love Sant'Elia but have a few issues with the Manifesto; love some Italian Fascist buildings (they're gorgeous) but am not a fan of Duce; same goes for Bauhaus: quite a few gems came out of Bauhaus, but as you noted I did not hide my disdain for that 'wing' of the orthodox binary political spectrum.
Two dyads that have been adopted fairly generally as central to design for modern humanity are: individual vs. collective, and, man and nature.
The architects that I admire started from the I|C paradigm and ended up in M|N.
The former has an unfortunate tendency to be subsumed by a political reading of the question: what is the order and nature of the relationship between the individual and the collective. This dyad has proved to be a disaster, for example, in psuedo (poser) Marxist/Socialist approaches to mass housing, and is in no small part responsible for the distasteful Post-Modernism that followed in reaction.
So design research in Man | Nature dyad. That is my personal direction and what I think (obviously :) is the appropriate venue of further efforts. (Why: The question of unit-collective is in fact embedded in that dyad. So is the quite topically urgent question of Man | Machine.)
(Thanks for the kind note and sorry for late reply - missed this.)
No book recommendations, really. That was crystalizing my own thoughts on the matter over the years. Possibly Alexander's latest opus "The Nature of Order" may be informative:
Could you elaborate on why you think teachers in the Bauhaus were Marxist?
I don't know about Moholy-Nagy specifically, but the founder Gropius tried many times to collaborate with industrialists to get Bauhaus objects to be produced (sometimes successfully) and his most famous architecture project was the Fagus factory. I really didn't see any Marxism in his ideas...
p.s. Actually we can answer that question based on the topic.
Bauhaus was inventing forms for industrial production. This means using machines with the inevitable reduction of human labor in the production process. As this logically would ultimately reduce workers to consumers and designers (as ultimate reduction of craftmanship), the ownership of the production means is an issue. Unless this owned by the state, Bauhaus then is guilty of pretending to socialism while helping industry tycoons retool their factories. I opt for their sincerity and thus the unspoken truth of Bauhau's social program has to be a state where non-labor capital is owned by the people/state. Otherwise, they would focus on design that required substantial human involvement.
Fuller mostly made arguments instead of changing the world.
The Dymaxion house is great if you have a helicopter and need to store triangles and don't mind the curves at the corner.
The geodesic dome house only sounds like a good idea if you ignore the idea of living in a building. At some point even stoned hippies return to lucidity.
His ideas were different in large part because they weren't very good and their best part was their conventionality...yurts and domes have been around for thousands of years.
Fuller was a clever engineer.
Clever engineering isn't usually an end in itself.
Posture is gesture. Gesture is both necessary and sufficient for art.
Part the reason the article is rubbish is denigrating art for engineering. Preference of Fuller’s posture and celebration of its minimal impact as evidence of its importance.
To critique the argument by pointing to Kandinsky can’t sell. The article is premised on dismissing Kandinsky outright.
Anyway post Warhol posing is known to be an essential component of artists. It’s just explicit now.
There is a similarity to the work of Charles and Ray Eames. Though motivated by the possibilities of mass-manufacture, but still produced many designs that could not be produced cost-effectively at scale.
Their aims for mass-manufactured, well-designed goods has been best realized by IKEA.
Were the Bauhaus and the Eames' failures because they did not realize the potential of their ideas? Obviously not! It is fascinating to study Bauhaus precisely because it is a hinge, a link between a world of craft-work and the world of mass-production. If you look at how they spent their time and organized their classes, it looks very old-school - but in that context, they were forward looking and set the aims for a new generation of design.
The good point is about artists and designers looking to technology to drive their inspiration but ultimately mostly just peddling a style. Which you can see in the tech world today.
Its poorly made because they try to make the Bauhaus look unique in this regard when it happened before (e.g. the Werkbund, the Arts and Craft movement, etc.) and after in many other places; and also it treats the Bauhaus's complex and nuanced history and operation only with sweeping statements (it even more or less conflates Gropius, 'the Bauhaus' and the International Style)
Meh. Design is messy. Moholy-Nage was a polyglot. To point out that Moholy-Nage, who is a profound 2-d visionary, was a crap industrial designer is like saying Michael Jordan was just OK at baseball. Historically the Bauhaus was an inflection point. Followed later by Ulm and other design programs who have exhaustively documented their pedagogy . If this tradition only ever produced Johnny Ive then I’m happy with that.
I appreciate and benefit from whenever a good design story is posted on HN and would like to implore anyone with access to them to share them more often or at least encourage readers to amplify the stories that are already being shared that I might be missing out on.
When the article talks about manufacturability, I wonder what was the actual state of German manufacturing in 1925, or worldwide for that matter. What we think of as modern manufacturing developed much later, and its epicenter has moved from country to country -- America, Japan, China, etc.
Still, the point remains that the artists did not always dream up practical designs. Buckminster Fuller wasn't exactly an engineer -- I don't think he had a degree. In my own neck of the woods, we have the movement surrounding Frank Lloyd Wright. I've been in a few of his buildings, and they are maintenance nightmares.
I would think of Henry Ford and the assembly line just prior to this period as the birth of modern manufacturing. Moving from artisans doing most or all of the work on an item to individuals repeating one process repeatedly as the product moves down an assembly line. So I think it was a very relevant question for the period of how designers could adapt to it. The article just claims they didn’t really have any experience with these new methods.
hard to make in mass production? I think Ikea doesn't agree with that (i think Ikea designs are often inspired by Bauhaus, at least that is what they say here: https://injarch.com/archives/9326 )
Hard to make in injection, press, lost-wax, lithography, or 3D print processes, perhaps.
Basic geometric shapes with matte surface and least mount of edges are ideal for lathe and mill works, while being basically torture tests for the rest.
Ikea products at times are similarly styled but actual Bauhaus furniture used very high quality materials.
In a room I have dreadful Ikea bookshelves (a temporary measure to store books while looking for a better solution) next to a pair of original Wagenfeld table lamps. The difference is craftmanship is stark.
Ikea's thing is good design and quality for the price. They have more expensive higher quality products as well. They don't have every quality in every category, though. And their products mostly don't have stupid flaws, they have been torture tested.
Try buying (aesthetically) well-designed furniture at !Ikea, it will start at 2-3x the price and you have to go higher to get really good build quality.
Indeed, the arts-and-crafts style furniture that my parents bought when they got married is still in use today, with minor repairs and some refinishing. The Ikea-style furniture that they also bought (veneered particle board) is gone.
There is a beauty in Bauhaus products that is the result of careful consideration (and probably experimentation) of how exactly the basic functional shapes are used - colors, proportions, placement etc. I'm a total layman though, just a fan of Bauhaus design.
I too am a layman in this area, but from what I've gathered is that the designers of Bauhaus and similar European design movements of the 1900s is they took design and all of its elements very seriously. "Good design" was an expression of a well thought out approach to the message at hand and was a reflection of a society that ought to be well-groomed themselves (i.e. intellectually, morally, all those sort of qualities).
I have visited the Bahaus in Dessau. The place feels human, calm and relaxing. Lesser imitations (and, sadly, some later works for hire by the same people) copied superficial aspects and produced something that feels cold and inhuman.
Bauhaus as a school for design was inherently technical with Werkstätten (workshops) where craftsmen taught the basics in woodworking, and other crafts. In that, Bauhaus continued the Arts&Crafts movement (or the respective German edition of that movement) while applying a 'simplified' visual language.
Of course a Bauhaus alumnus or a Bauhaus teacher wouldn't reach the technical skills of a "Meister" in the crafts, but the connection certainly ran deep.