6 ms·

Tech posers of the Bauhaus

83 points by amicoleo 6y ago

wirrbel 6y ago
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.
- emteycz 6y ago
  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.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    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).
    - Gravityloss 6y ago
      Yes. You need to understand both the material and the industrial production methods. The criticism was that Bauhaus only taught the former.
- hef19898 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- amicoleo 6y ago
  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.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    > 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.
    - ibn_khaldun 6y ago
      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?
- kemiller2002 6y ago
  I think you're right. This is the impression I got after reading about Bauhaus in the ABC's of Triangle, Circle, Square.
- Animats 6y ago
  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] [1] https://www.decorativeceilingtiles.net/tin-ceiling-tiles/ https://www.decorativeceilingtiles.net/tin-ceiling-tiles/
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
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 https://injarch.com/archives/9326 )
- frostburg 6y ago
  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.
  - ahartmetz 6y ago
    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.
  - analog31 6y ago
    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.
- numpad0 6y ago
  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.
xtiansimon 6y ago
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.
- xtiansimon 6y ago
  If the idea of a metal fabrication course taught by Molholy-Nagy is exciting to you, then check out Connor Holland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBo7UbI6FMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBo7UbI6FMk
ibn_khaldun 6y ago
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.
de6u99er 6y ago
"Form follows function" is my takeaway from Bauhaus.
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  Well, they made it look nice, too! 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.
  - ibn_khaldun 6y ago
    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). Intense stuff, mate.
twelvechairs 6y ago
There's a good point in here poorly made. 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)
ddkto 6y ago
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.
minitoar 6y ago
Is there a Bauhaus software shop? Seems like such an idyllic approach to life.
swayvil 6y ago
There's a coldness in technology. Employing a complex machine is a merely intellectual process, all else mediated by the machine. Like having sex by remote control. Otoh, a physical craft is a conversation in multiple dimensions. Thought being just one small component. Given that coldness and limitation, you can understand why some artists would eschew technology.
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  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.
xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago
>It’s also because of that school and their influence on art education that we can enjoy things designed by people with an artistic sensibility. Rather than only having things designed by engineers. So that's who to blame for my Macbook running so hot! I intensely dislike the fact that all modern machines look the same. All cars look the same. All computers look the same. All gadgets look the same. We'd be better off if we fired every designer and gave creative control to a team of engineers and six-year-olds. They wouldn't know what they're doing, but at least they wouldn't chase trends and churn out dozens of identical designs.
analog31 6y ago
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.
- pgcudahy 6y ago
  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.
pacaro 6y ago
Maybe I'm being picky, but I think that the author means poseur when they are saying poser
brudgers 6y ago
Look around you. The Bauhaus is everywhere. Fuller nowhere. Because the Bauhaus made stuff and Fuller had theories, and while fuller was stuck on domes the children of the Bauhaus were making hyperboloids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hyperboloid_structures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hyperboloid_structures 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. The Bauhaus wasn't tech posers. It was artistic posers.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Bauhaus wasn't tech posers. It was artistic posers. I get this is meant to be pithy, but the Bauhaus was pioneering in several aspects of the arts as well.
  - brudgers 6y ago
    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.

83 points by amicoleo 6y ago

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.

emteycz 6y ago
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.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  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).
  - Gravityloss 6y ago
    Yes. You need to understand both the material and the industrial production methods. The criticism was that Bauhaus only taught the former.
hef19898 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
amicoleo 6y ago
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.
- eternalban 6y ago
  > 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.
  - ibn_khaldun 6y ago
    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?
kemiller2002 6y ago
I think you're right. This is the impression I got after reading about Bauhaus in the ABC's of Triangle, Circle, Square.
Animats 6y ago
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] [1] https://www.decorativeceilingtiles.net/tin-ceiling-tiles/ https://www.decorativeceilingtiles.net/tin-ceiling-tiles/

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

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 https://injarch.com/archives/9326 )

frostburg 6y ago
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.
- ahartmetz 6y ago
  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.
- analog31 6y ago
  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.
numpad0 6y ago
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.

xtiansimon 6y ago

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.

xtiansimon 6y ago
If the idea of a metal fabrication course taught by Molholy-Nagy is exciting to you, then check out Connor Holland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBo7UbI6FMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBo7UbI6FMk

ibn_khaldun 6y ago

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.

de6u99er 6y ago

"Form follows function" is my takeaway from Bauhaus.

ahartmetz 6y ago
Well, they made it look nice, too! 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.
- ibn_khaldun 6y ago
  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). Intense stuff, mate.

twelvechairs 6y ago

There's a good point in here poorly made. 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)

ddkto 6y ago

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.

minitoar 6y ago

Is there a Bauhaus software shop? Seems like such an idyllic approach to life.

swayvil 6y ago

There's a coldness in technology. Employing a complex machine is a merely intellectual process, all else mediated by the machine. Like having sex by remote control. Otoh, a physical craft is a conversation in multiple dimensions. Thought being just one small component. Given that coldness and limitation, you can understand why some artists would eschew technology.

ahartmetz 6y ago
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.

xirbeosbwo1234 6y ago

>It’s also because of that school and their influence on art education that we can enjoy things designed by people with an artistic sensibility. Rather than only having things designed by engineers. So that's who to blame for my Macbook running so hot! I intensely dislike the fact that all modern machines look the same. All cars look the same. All computers look the same. All gadgets look the same. We'd be better off if we fired every designer and gave creative control to a team of engineers and six-year-olds. They wouldn't know what they're doing, but at least they wouldn't chase trends and churn out dozens of identical designs.

analog31 6y ago

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.

pgcudahy 6y ago
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.

pacaro 6y ago

Maybe I'm being picky, but I think that the author means poseur when they are saying poser

brudgers 6y ago

Look around you. The Bauhaus is everywhere. Fuller nowhere. Because the Bauhaus made stuff and Fuller had theories, and while fuller was stuck on domes the children of the Bauhaus were making hyperboloids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hyperboloid_structures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hyperboloid_structures 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. The Bauhaus wasn't tech posers. It was artistic posers.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Bauhaus wasn't tech posers. It was artistic posers. I get this is meant to be pithy, but the Bauhaus was pioneering in several aspects of the arts as well.
- brudgers 6y ago
  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.