The Bauhauscontinues to be profoundly relevant to contemporary design practice, for thesimple reason that its essential “single object” — its real product — was a curriculumthat remains foundational in design education. There is no doubt that thiscurriculum originally incorporated principles of art and industry that are no longerrelevant. It is also true that, like all early Modernism, the Bauhaus sufferedfrom a curious (and in retrospect unexplainable) “philosophical leap from theidea of the machine to that of simple, geometrical form” (Penny Sparke, 1986,p. 46). However, it is still presented to every young designer in a sort ofprofessional initiation rite; complete with the essentially Bauhausian conflictbetween Dionysian emotional thistle-drawing, and Apollonian intellectual manipulationof geometry.
The questionmight be: why is this curriculum still taught? The apparent answer is simple:it seems to work. But in proper designerly methodology, we ought then to proceed tothe next “why” — why does it work? This is where the lurking hours of observationare needed, to ascertain what it is we are really teaching by this method, becauseit is certainly not geometric form: the real learning outcomes are clearly somethingentirely different, it only we knew what they are.
The mostdated part of the Bauhaus curriculum, and that of Modernism in general, is not apreoccupation with form, but rather its underlying assumption of “ontologicaldiscontinuity” (Everdell 1977,351). This is the beliefthat the parts of a problem are discrete and autonomous, and can be understoodin isolation from one another — and that understanding atoms will explain molecules, andtherefore in turn biochemistry, life, and the existence of giraffes. But emergentrelationships between parts introduce factors not evident in the parts alone,as Koffka observed with his gestalt truism that “the whole is other than the sumof the parts.” It is here that Modernism fails, not in the tidy shapes.
As for asimplistic dismissal of the value of history, let us recall that both cultural connotation and physical fact build on history. Newer evolutionary theory emphasizes “nicheconstruction” as part of the biological heritage of living creatures, which is notlimited to their genes alone (Laland et al, 2016). “Path dependence” dogs both artand engineering, so that contemporary cities are built with sewers because dilution wasonce considered to be the solution for noxious substances, and, therefore, sewerstoday mingle wastes of widely differing characteristics, inhibiting thedevelopment of more subtle specific solutions (Praeger, 2007).
Ironically, proclaiming that history does not matterpreserves the very worst of historical Bauhaus thinking: its grandiose ahistoricalconceit. An alternativeopinion may be found in the words of the late architectural historian VincentScully, who once said in an interview: “everything in the past is alwayswaiting, waiting to detonate.”
Heidi O
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