11 ms·

From Art Nouveau to Bauhaus: How Home Interiors Looked in Popular Art Movements

164 points by prismatic 3y ago

keiferski 3y ago
If you have a difficult time (as I did) differentiating between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, you might enjoy this article I wrote on it. There are at least four key ways to tell the difference: time of creation, curved lines vs. geometrical shapes, organic vs. machinic themes, and Japanonisme influence. https://onthearts.com/p/art-nouveau-vs-art-deco https://onthearts.com/p/art-nouveau-vs-art-deco I actually prefer Art Nouveau personally and wish there were more buildings that adopted the style. It seems like a good pairing for solarpunk architecture. Otherwise, it’s interesting to me how Bauhaus seems to have aged much worse, probably because it’s more similar to modernism, both of which are origins for the “minimal” aesthetic style that is still prevalent. Looking at an old Art Deco or Art Nouveau building feels like peering into a lost world, while Bauhaus isn’t dramatically different from most of what gets built today.
- cheeseface 3y ago
  A lot of people are old enough to have lived when Bauhaus was ”the modern look.” Hence, it now looks just plain ”old” whereas Art Deco and Noveau look ”classic.”
- ljvmiranda 3y ago
  They say "art deco is for dwarves while art nouveau is for elves." Forgot where it came from.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Hah, that is a good way to remember it. Wood elves would be even better.
- euroderf 3y ago
  Art Deco at the office. Art Nouveau at home.
- elhudy 3y ago
  I don’t mean to sound pretentious but i have a hard time understanding how anyone can have a difficult time differentiating between art nouveau and art deco. The only similarity between the two lies in word “art”.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    In that post I explore a few ideas as to why I think this happens. I think it’s more that Art Nouveau gets labeled as Deco. In general though, both are art movements from roughly the same time period with roughly the same basic principles. For someone unfamiliar with art history, it can be confusing in a way that doesn’t happen with say, Medieval vs. Neoclassical architecture.
    - bradknowles 3y ago
      Not the same time period. Art Nouveau started in the 1890s and was exhausted by the time of the start of the First World War (1914). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau Art Déco first appeared in 1910, and became much more popular in the 1920s, after the end of WWI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco
      - keiferski 3y ago
        Read my comment again. I said “roughly” the same time period. And yes, they overlapped for about a decade and from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with art history and living a century later, that is very close.
        bradknowles 3y ago
        WW-I was a huge event in the history of this world, and it is a pretty clear divider between those two styles of art and architecture. I wouldn't call pre-WWI and post-WWI "roughly the same time period". Not by a long stretch. The length of time between them is not relevant in this case. What is relevant is the events that occurred between them. Like the pre-atomic age and the post-atomic age. The events themselves in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively short-lived. But their impact on this world greatly exceeded the time immediately before those two events and the time immediately after those events.
- pyrale 3y ago
  > Otherwise, it’s interesting to me how Bauhaus seems to have aged much worse Could it be that the most acclaimed expressions of art nouveau were the product of a gilded age, while the bauhaus legacy was mostly enacted during the postwar period where speed of rebuilding was more important that quality of buildings?
  - keiferski 3y ago
    There was actually a lot more money put into art deco (which happened post WW1) than art nouveau, but yeah bauhaus and modernism certainly flourished in a resource-scarce post-war environment.
  - sheepybloke 3y ago
    The other big influence is that a lot of the members of the Bauhaus went to the US to teach, and so they influenced many of the midcentury designers that designed and built the post-war world.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  To me Art Deco seems to range from Kinda Like Art Nouveau all the way to "I can't Believe it's not Bauhaus". Deco and Bauhaus both seem to sometimes share an excitement towards mass production and materials themselves. Art Deco shows off luxury and wealth, which is not very far from truth to materials. With art Nouveau I notice designs more than materials, unless they're simple natural things like wood, not really giving any sense of technical achievement or extravagance in the actual materials. Bauhaus seems to deliberately design things that would not work without the specific high end materials used, and look out of place if they are scratched, everything is pointing to the raw substance, the craftsmanship, the function, and the level of maintenance, and the design is just a frame. Art Deco doesn't do the minimalism thing the same way, I greatly prefer Art Nouveau, but it seems like both the aesthetic and philosophy of Bauhaus is everywhere. Maybe there's something missing in my personality since I don't quite feel the appeal of simplicity and valuable materials as strongly as some, while the more philosophical types all seem to love it. I think part of the mass appeal of Bauhaus might be because it got popular when tech was worse. You couldn't make a cheap CrapBoard thing and veneer it, unless you wanted it to peel in a week. That still happens, but it's possible to reliability do form, function, and material more separately. Maybe people were tired of crappy goods that broke in a year, and Bauhaus was a way of advertising that you weren't doing that. Now of course, durability seems random, and sometimes people take superficial Bauhaus elements and use them without the deep quality that it was supposed to be about, and it looks bad from the start and then breaks. And we've got cheap synthetic materials that can be incredibly strong if you know how to design with them, although unfortunately they do not survive the trash compactor, when people toss them even though they're perfectly good, because people tend to see things without valuable substance as disposable.
taffronaut 3y ago
Oskar Schlemmer was most famous for designs for the "triadic ballet" staged by the Bauhaus. It's nice to see his wider work represented in the the Bauhaus-style interiors of Rabe House here.
- detourdog 3y ago
  This aspect of Bauhaus life was cros pollinating with the Paris intellectual scene.
asimpletune 3y ago
One of the Art Deco homes had really distinct Minoan themes. I wonder if that was a coincidence or if they were inspired.
- detourdog 3y ago
  Remember that all sort of "leaders" supported expeditions to far away places. Suddenly an average in Parisian could see with their own eyes objects from far away lands. As trade increased there would also be wooden boxes/crates with exotic markings.
- seydor 3y ago
  It's most likely the other way around: Arthur Evans, who excavated the site of Knossos is known to have done many fantastical restorations to make them more impressive, and they were inspired by his contemporary styles (art nouveau/deco) (i think you re referring to this https://www.kinfolk.com/home-tour-the-new-palace/ https://www.kinfolk.com/home-tour-the-new-palace/)
simlan 3y ago
That was very educational. I always get lost in the terms. Exception is Bauhaus which is usually easy to distinguish.
nologic01 3y ago
Maybe its just me but the art and style movements of the first part of the 20th century (up until the sixties) are somehow more profoundly beautiful (in different ways), wholesome and memorable. I don't even know what the "modern styles" are supposed to be. Maybe the time of coherent stylistic movements with a well articulated aesthetic is gone?
- Loughla 3y ago
  For architecture, modern style seems to be focused on maintaining resale value and/or blending in, depending on whether we're talking about residential or commercial spaces. Post-modern commercialism as a style?
  - smeej 3y ago
    I wonder if this has to do with the fact that people don't live their whole lives in one place as often anymore. If I think I'm going to live out the rest of my life in my house, I'll want to change it to suit my taste, maybe even multiple times if new artistic styles crop up and I like them better. If I'm expecting I might need to sell the house in the next five years, I'm going to prioritize having the widest possible potential buyer pool.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    What puzzles me (being a casual observer) is that post-modern commercialism does not seem to affect all design domains equally. I would say that e.g. current automobile design seems to have still fairly identifiable style propositions (whether I like them being a different matter).
    - detourdog 3y ago
      The forces of safety/market standards that an automobile must conform to is combining with capabilities of the materials available. This makes the easiest/safest answers pretty standard. Automobiles combine many disciplines which makes for long development time lines. This further reduces options. Multi-dwelling housing above 5 units will also show this same phenomenon. Coffee makers could be very dynamic market due to fewer dependencies.
mattclarkdotnet 3y ago
If you have any interest in art nouveau, check out the Horta House in Brussels: https://www.hortamuseum.be/en/Welcome https://www.hortamuseum.be/en/Welcome It is truly spectacular, and you will never be confused about nouveau vs deco again
vintermann 3y ago
I'm on the board of an old organization maintaining/running an Art Noveau house from 1906. The interiors haven't been preserved, unfortunately, but in the main hall we've tried to preserve and restore it as much as possible while still keeping it usable for its original function.
ggm 3y ago
The Bauhaus should have included workers housing interiors. Comparable to the Dutch (het scip worker housing), German art informed workers housing and the Bauhaus designed to that market as well as luxe.
- nathancahill 3y ago
  Got any examples? Found this on Wikipedia (photos of museum housing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Het_Schip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Het_Schip
  - UweSchmidt 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haus_am_Horn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haus_am_Horn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_kitchen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_kitchen
- jochem9 3y ago
  Het Schip is Amsterdamse School, which uses a lot of elements of art deco (e.g. rounded brick stone walls), but also tries to keep things simple, yet quality, which feels more Bauhaus. I recently bought a house from 1918 in Amsterdamse School style and am trying to reflect this in the interior as well (exterior is already beautifully done). I really like that they called the housing worker's palaces. You can definitely see that in the attention to detail.
virtualritz 3y ago
> [...] needlessly ornamental furniture [...] That ignorance of beauty being a perfectly valid prime objective over function, for everyday objects (or architecture) is why most things and buildings today look straight out of a dystopian sci-fi flic. And because we love to live in such bland spaces, "decorated" with such furniture, inside such buildings, is probably also why people spend tons of money every year to escape them. And to e.g. visit picturesque European cities and villages with tiny winding roads and "needlessly" decorated building facades in their holidays.
- kranke155 3y ago
  Glad someone else caught that. Saying beauty in decoration is “needless” is like saying we should only have non fiction books. Fiction - invention - creativity - fantasy - has its place both in furniture and publishing. We live in a Bauhaus world.
  - UweSchmidt 3y ago
    Architects and product designers saw Bauhaus and thought they could skip the decorations and call it a day, leading to ugly cities and crappy products, but that ain't Bauhaus! Minimal, aesthetic and functional things remain few and far between; the old iPod was Bauhaus, but most other things? Not so much.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      There are many beautiful buildings and objects. I hold the ugliness of the world on the people's behavior rather then the objects of the world.
      - jschveibinz 3y ago
        This is the most profound comment in the section, ie. to each his own to find beauty, and along the way try to treat others with respect.
  - detourdog 3y ago
sparrowInHand 3y ago
And now thanks to advances in industrialization, everyone can enjoy art deco housing, lovelessly crafted by CnC from templates, defeating both, the bauhaus and the art deco at the same time and ending the argument.
- detourdog 3y ago
  That is exactly the point where my design aesthetic starts. The belief that large manufacturers will be creating products that can easily be modified for the actual customer.
superhumanuser 3y ago
What about the other art movements post 1933?
- detourdog 3y ago
  Art movements are really just a cataloging technique. The movements can be named by dealers trying to develop a market, artists trying to articulate camaraderie, art historians retroactively categorizing what they think happened. They are all employed to promote and communicate. I'm more interested human artifact creation. I find it's more interesting to ignore movements and focus on the artifacts. All the terms are just ways to be articulate. Here is a cheat sheet on Greek and Roman columns. The image is from the general wikipedia page on Columns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column#/media/File:Schema_Saeulenordnungen.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column#/media/File:Schema_Saeu... Thinking about it in those terms it makes it seem really silly to think there are that many types of paintings or art post 1933. The only reason to know the names of movements is to try to articulate a thought with extreme clarity. This makes Art History a cut throat business. The industry is built entirely on bike shedding.
jemmyw 3y ago
I've never seen anyone's home look like these and I'm glad of that because they don't look like styles with much comfort involved.
stephc_int13 3y ago
Bauhaus and the Athens Charter movement (Le Corbusier) are, to some extent, legitimate and interesting periods. The problem is that for various historical reasons, mostly related to the second world war and the fast post-war growth the architectural side grew vastly out of proportions. As a side note, many of the most influential architects of this era were had no formal training in the craft, the tabula rasa approach was quite convenient. An highly problematic side effect is that the following generation was not properly trained, and they relied on pseudo-philosophical bullshit to obfuscate their lack of architectural skills. Imitating old architectural styles is rarely a good design, but we lost so much that we'll have to start somewhere. By the way, this is not the first time it happens in History.
- trgn 3y ago
  > Imitating old architectural styles is rarely a good design Why? Many college campuses in the US are pastiches of medieval european towns. This admiration for older styles in the late 1800s and early 1900s gave this country (and I'd say, even the world) the most wonderful architectural environments, truly beautiful and harmonious environments. The spiteful iconoclasm of post-WW2 instead gave us the most awful dreck.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I don't disagree with you at all. The 1900 campus building were most likely a new technique called re-enforced brick masonry. They were produced to match the earlier buildings. The Bauhaus school of thought held the same re-enforced brick masonry techniques could be used to produce the same square footage using less material labor. Post War Europe was in a race to provide resources before everything fell apart again.
    - trgn 3y ago
      thanks for added context, got hung up on the "rarely" I guess. Just wished people imitated _more_.
      - 3y ago
demondemidi 3y ago
I stayed at an art deco hotel in Cambodia years ago. For my brain, it was the most satisfying combination of color, form, detail, and space. I’ll never have the money, but I think living in that type of design would do wonders for my mental health.
barrysteve 3y ago
Life is so strange. Robin Boyd criticized Australian architecture for being an ugly confused mix of ideas and focusing on parts rather than the whole, featurism. There was an idea that every home owner should choose their own design and style. Robin disapproved, saying essentially, the results are ugly. He did that in the 1960s. Since the addition of pintrest, the computing revolution and more, it's somehow gotten worse. Most commercial properties going up have abandoned the laid back 1950s stying for 'generic house' that had visual depth, two-car garage, a garden, textured wall materials and a verandah (porch) of some kind. The new properties look like someone took the "Default Cube" you get in Blender and copy pasted it a few times. Flat concrete walls that look like a ww2 pill box. Ctrl C, Ctrl V, it would appear, has absolutely murdered beautiful houses. I know there's other reasons... but the death of beautiful houses in a country where home ownership (well, land ownership) has been the primary dream since settlement.. it hits a little too close to home.
Modified3019 3y ago
Interesting, so the name for the shitty and gross design elements found in so many of the “child management” buildings I grew up in (like schools), is “Bauhaus”. It can go to hell.
angarg12 3y ago
My home town has a treasure trove of Art Nouveau buildings in it's historic city center. It's a very desirable area to live in, so most of those units have been renovated over time. Sadly those renovations almost never respect the original and follow whatever trend of the moment. One thing i'd like to do is to acquire some of the remaining rare gems that remain (mostly) untouched and restore them to their original glory. I ever wonder if there is room for a business model here, like home flipping but with a side of restoration and preservation.
- weast 3y ago
  Where is this? In Europe?
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Sadly those renovations almost never respect the original and follow whatever trend of the moment. Not to be trite, but following that line of thinking back then would have prevented the Art Nouveau buildings from existing in the first place - assuming they replaced gothic buildings (or whatever was trendy) when they got built

164 points by prismatic 3y ago

If you have a difficult time (as I did) differentiating between Art Deco and Art Nouveau, you might enjoy this article I wrote on it. There are at least four key ways to tell the difference: time of creation, curved lines vs. geometrical shapes, organic vs. machinic themes, and Japanonisme influence. https://onthearts.com/p/art-nouveau-vs-art-deco https://onthearts.com/p/art-nouveau-vs-art-deco I actually prefer Art Nouveau personally and wish there were more buildings that adopted the style. It seems like a good pairing for solarpunk architecture. Otherwise, it’s interesting to me how Bauhaus seems to have aged much worse, probably because it’s more similar to modernism, both of which are origins for the “minimal” aesthetic style that is still prevalent. Looking at an old Art Deco or Art Nouveau building feels like peering into a lost world, while Bauhaus isn’t dramatically different from most of what gets built today.

cheeseface 3y ago
A lot of people are old enough to have lived when Bauhaus was ”the modern look.” Hence, it now looks just plain ”old” whereas Art Deco and Noveau look ”classic.”
ljvmiranda 3y ago
They say "art deco is for dwarves while art nouveau is for elves." Forgot where it came from.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Hah, that is a good way to remember it. Wood elves would be even better.
euroderf 3y ago
Art Deco at the office. Art Nouveau at home.
elhudy 3y ago
I don’t mean to sound pretentious but i have a hard time understanding how anyone can have a difficult time differentiating between art nouveau and art deco. The only similarity between the two lies in word “art”.
- keiferski 3y ago
  In that post I explore a few ideas as to why I think this happens. I think it’s more that Art Nouveau gets labeled as Deco. In general though, both are art movements from roughly the same time period with roughly the same basic principles. For someone unfamiliar with art history, it can be confusing in a way that doesn’t happen with say, Medieval vs. Neoclassical architecture.
  - bradknowles 3y ago
    Not the same time period. Art Nouveau started in the 1890s and was exhausted by the time of the start of the First World War (1914). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Nouveau Art Déco first appeared in 1910, and became much more popular in the 1920s, after the end of WWI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco
    - keiferski 3y ago
      Read my comment again. I said “roughly” the same time period. And yes, they overlapped for about a decade and from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with art history and living a century later, that is very close.
      - bradknowles 3y ago
        WW-I was a huge event in the history of this world, and it is a pretty clear divider between those two styles of art and architecture. I wouldn't call pre-WWI and post-WWI "roughly the same time period". Not by a long stretch. The length of time between them is not relevant in this case. What is relevant is the events that occurred between them. Like the pre-atomic age and the post-atomic age. The events themselves in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively short-lived. But their impact on this world greatly exceeded the time immediately before those two events and the time immediately after those events.
pyrale 3y ago
> Otherwise, it’s interesting to me how Bauhaus seems to have aged much worse Could it be that the most acclaimed expressions of art nouveau were the product of a gilded age, while the bauhaus legacy was mostly enacted during the postwar period where speed of rebuilding was more important that quality of buildings?
- keiferski 3y ago
  There was actually a lot more money put into art deco (which happened post WW1) than art nouveau, but yeah bauhaus and modernism certainly flourished in a resource-scarce post-war environment.
- sheepybloke 3y ago
  The other big influence is that a lot of the members of the Bauhaus went to the US to teach, and so they influenced many of the midcentury designers that designed and built the post-war world.
eternityforest 3y ago
To me Art Deco seems to range from Kinda Like Art Nouveau all the way to "I can't Believe it's not Bauhaus". Deco and Bauhaus both seem to sometimes share an excitement towards mass production and materials themselves. Art Deco shows off luxury and wealth, which is not very far from truth to materials. With art Nouveau I notice designs more than materials, unless they're simple natural things like wood, not really giving any sense of technical achievement or extravagance in the actual materials. Bauhaus seems to deliberately design things that would not work without the specific high end materials used, and look out of place if they are scratched, everything is pointing to the raw substance, the craftsmanship, the function, and the level of maintenance, and the design is just a frame. Art Deco doesn't do the minimalism thing the same way, I greatly prefer Art Nouveau, but it seems like both the aesthetic and philosophy of Bauhaus is everywhere. Maybe there's something missing in my personality since I don't quite feel the appeal of simplicity and valuable materials as strongly as some, while the more philosophical types all seem to love it. I think part of the mass appeal of Bauhaus might be because it got popular when tech was worse. You couldn't make a cheap CrapBoard thing and veneer it, unless you wanted it to peel in a week. That still happens, but it's possible to reliability do form, function, and material more separately. Maybe people were tired of crappy goods that broke in a year, and Bauhaus was a way of advertising that you weren't doing that. Now of course, durability seems random, and sometimes people take superficial Bauhaus elements and use them without the deep quality that it was supposed to be about, and it looks bad from the start and then breaks. And we've got cheap synthetic materials that can be incredibly strong if you know how to design with them, although unfortunately they do not survive the trash compactor, when people toss them even though they're perfectly good, because people tend to see things without valuable substance as disposable.

taffronaut 3y ago

Oskar Schlemmer was most famous for designs for the "triadic ballet" staged by the Bauhaus. It's nice to see his wider work represented in the the Bauhaus-style interiors of Rabe House here.

detourdog 3y ago
This aspect of Bauhaus life was cros pollinating with the Paris intellectual scene.

asimpletune 3y ago

One of the Art Deco homes had really distinct Minoan themes. I wonder if that was a coincidence or if they were inspired.

detourdog 3y ago
Remember that all sort of "leaders" supported expeditions to far away places. Suddenly an average in Parisian could see with their own eyes objects from far away lands. As trade increased there would also be wooden boxes/crates with exotic markings.
seydor 3y ago
It's most likely the other way around: Arthur Evans, who excavated the site of Knossos is known to have done many fantastical restorations to make them more impressive, and they were inspired by his contemporary styles (art nouveau/deco) (i think you re referring to this https://www.kinfolk.com/home-tour-the-new-palace/ https://www.kinfolk.com/home-tour-the-new-palace/)

simlan 3y ago

That was very educational. I always get lost in the terms. Exception is Bauhaus which is usually easy to distinguish.

nologic01 3y ago

Maybe its just me but the art and style movements of the first part of the 20th century (up until the sixties) are somehow more profoundly beautiful (in different ways), wholesome and memorable. I don't even know what the "modern styles" are supposed to be. Maybe the time of coherent stylistic movements with a well articulated aesthetic is gone?

Loughla 3y ago
For architecture, modern style seems to be focused on maintaining resale value and/or blending in, depending on whether we're talking about residential or commercial spaces. Post-modern commercialism as a style?
- smeej 3y ago
  I wonder if this has to do with the fact that people don't live their whole lives in one place as often anymore. If I think I'm going to live out the rest of my life in my house, I'll want to change it to suit my taste, maybe even multiple times if new artistic styles crop up and I like them better. If I'm expecting I might need to sell the house in the next five years, I'm going to prioritize having the widest possible potential buyer pool.
- nologic01 3y ago
  What puzzles me (being a casual observer) is that post-modern commercialism does not seem to affect all design domains equally. I would say that e.g. current automobile design seems to have still fairly identifiable style propositions (whether I like them being a different matter).
  - detourdog 3y ago
    The forces of safety/market standards that an automobile must conform to is combining with capabilities of the materials available. This makes the easiest/safest answers pretty standard. Automobiles combine many disciplines which makes for long development time lines. This further reduces options. Multi-dwelling housing above 5 units will also show this same phenomenon. Coffee makers could be very dynamic market due to fewer dependencies.

mattclarkdotnet 3y ago

If you have any interest in art nouveau, check out the Horta House in Brussels: https://www.hortamuseum.be/en/Welcome https://www.hortamuseum.be/en/Welcome It is truly spectacular, and you will never be confused about nouveau vs deco again

vintermann 3y ago

I'm on the board of an old organization maintaining/running an Art Noveau house from 1906. The interiors haven't been preserved, unfortunately, but in the main hall we've tried to preserve and restore it as much as possible while still keeping it usable for its original function.

ggm 3y ago

The Bauhaus should have included workers housing interiors. Comparable to the Dutch (het scip worker housing), German art informed workers housing and the Bauhaus designed to that market as well as luxe.

nathancahill 3y ago
Got any examples? Found this on Wikipedia (photos of museum housing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Het_Schip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Het_Schip
- UweSchmidt 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haus_am_Horn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haus_am_Horn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_kitchen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_kitchen
jochem9 3y ago
Het Schip is Amsterdamse School, which uses a lot of elements of art deco (e.g. rounded brick stone walls), but also tries to keep things simple, yet quality, which feels more Bauhaus. I recently bought a house from 1918 in Amsterdamse School style and am trying to reflect this in the interior as well (exterior is already beautifully done). I really like that they called the housing worker's palaces. You can definitely see that in the attention to detail.

virtualritz 3y ago

> [...] needlessly ornamental furniture [...] That ignorance of beauty being a perfectly valid prime objective over function, for everyday objects (or architecture) is why most things and buildings today look straight out of a dystopian sci-fi flic. And because we love to live in such bland spaces, "decorated" with such furniture, inside such buildings, is probably also why people spend tons of money every year to escape them. And to e.g. visit picturesque European cities and villages with tiny winding roads and "needlessly" decorated building facades in their holidays.

kranke155 3y ago
Glad someone else caught that. Saying beauty in decoration is “needless” is like saying we should only have non fiction books. Fiction - invention - creativity - fantasy - has its place both in furniture and publishing. We live in a Bauhaus world.
- UweSchmidt 3y ago
  Architects and product designers saw Bauhaus and thought they could skip the decorations and call it a day, leading to ugly cities and crappy products, but that ain't Bauhaus! Minimal, aesthetic and functional things remain few and far between; the old iPod was Bauhaus, but most other things? Not so much.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    There are many beautiful buildings and objects. I hold the ugliness of the world on the people's behavior rather then the objects of the world.
    - jschveibinz 3y ago
      This is the most profound comment in the section, ie. to each his own to find beauty, and along the way try to treat others with respect.
- detourdog 3y ago

sparrowInHand 3y ago

And now thanks to advances in industrialization, everyone can enjoy art deco housing, lovelessly crafted by CnC from templates, defeating both, the bauhaus and the art deco at the same time and ending the argument.

detourdog 3y ago
That is exactly the point where my design aesthetic starts. The belief that large manufacturers will be creating products that can easily be modified for the actual customer.

superhumanuser 3y ago

What about the other art movements post 1933?

detourdog 3y ago
Art movements are really just a cataloging technique. The movements can be named by dealers trying to develop a market, artists trying to articulate camaraderie, art historians retroactively categorizing what they think happened. They are all employed to promote and communicate. I'm more interested human artifact creation. I find it's more interesting to ignore movements and focus on the artifacts. All the terms are just ways to be articulate. Here is a cheat sheet on Greek and Roman columns. The image is from the general wikipedia page on Columns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column#/media/File:Schema_Saeulenordnungen.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column#/media/File:Schema_Saeu... Thinking about it in those terms it makes it seem really silly to think there are that many types of paintings or art post 1933. The only reason to know the names of movements is to try to articulate a thought with extreme clarity. This makes Art History a cut throat business. The industry is built entirely on bike shedding.

jemmyw 3y ago

I've never seen anyone's home look like these and I'm glad of that because they don't look like styles with much comfort involved.

stephc_int13 3y ago

Bauhaus and the Athens Charter movement (Le Corbusier) are, to some extent, legitimate and interesting periods. The problem is that for various historical reasons, mostly related to the second world war and the fast post-war growth the architectural side grew vastly out of proportions. As a side note, many of the most influential architects of this era were had no formal training in the craft, the tabula rasa approach was quite convenient. An highly problematic side effect is that the following generation was not properly trained, and they relied on pseudo-philosophical bullshit to obfuscate their lack of architectural skills. Imitating old architectural styles is rarely a good design, but we lost so much that we'll have to start somewhere. By the way, this is not the first time it happens in History.

trgn 3y ago
> Imitating old architectural styles is rarely a good design Why? Many college campuses in the US are pastiches of medieval european towns. This admiration for older styles in the late 1800s and early 1900s gave this country (and I'd say, even the world) the most wonderful architectural environments, truly beautiful and harmonious environments. The spiteful iconoclasm of post-WW2 instead gave us the most awful dreck.
- detourdog 3y ago
  I don't disagree with you at all. The 1900 campus building were most likely a new technique called re-enforced brick masonry. They were produced to match the earlier buildings. The Bauhaus school of thought held the same re-enforced brick masonry techniques could be used to produce the same square footage using less material labor. Post War Europe was in a race to provide resources before everything fell apart again.
  - trgn 3y ago
    thanks for added context, got hung up on the "rarely" I guess. Just wished people imitated _more_.
    - 3y ago

demondemidi 3y ago

I stayed at an art deco hotel in Cambodia years ago. For my brain, it was the most satisfying combination of color, form, detail, and space. I’ll never have the money, but I think living in that type of design would do wonders for my mental health.

barrysteve 3y ago

Life is so strange. Robin Boyd criticized Australian architecture for being an ugly confused mix of ideas and focusing on parts rather than the whole, featurism. There was an idea that every home owner should choose their own design and style. Robin disapproved, saying essentially, the results are ugly. He did that in the 1960s. Since the addition of pintrest, the computing revolution and more, it's somehow gotten worse. Most commercial properties going up have abandoned the laid back 1950s stying for 'generic house' that had visual depth, two-car garage, a garden, textured wall materials and a verandah (porch) of some kind. The new properties look like someone took the "Default Cube" you get in Blender and copy pasted it a few times. Flat concrete walls that look like a ww2 pill box. Ctrl C, Ctrl V, it would appear, has absolutely murdered beautiful houses. I know there's other reasons... but the death of beautiful houses in a country where home ownership (well, land ownership) has been the primary dream since settlement.. it hits a little too close to home.

Modified3019 3y ago

Interesting, so the name for the shitty and gross design elements found in so many of the “child management” buildings I grew up in (like schools), is “Bauhaus”. It can go to hell.

angarg12 3y ago

My home town has a treasure trove of Art Nouveau buildings in it's historic city center. It's a very desirable area to live in, so most of those units have been renovated over time. Sadly those renovations almost never respect the original and follow whatever trend of the moment. One thing i'd like to do is to acquire some of the remaining rare gems that remain (mostly) untouched and restore them to their original glory. I ever wonder if there is room for a business model here, like home flipping but with a side of restoration and preservation.

weast 3y ago
Where is this? In Europe?
sangnoir 3y ago
> Sadly those renovations almost never respect the original and follow whatever trend of the moment. Not to be trite, but following that line of thinking back then would have prevented the Art Nouveau buildings from existing in the first place - assuming they replaced gothic buildings (or whatever was trendy) when they got built