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Despite the lofty egalitarian ideals often
attributed to its proponents, luxurious
materials were not anathema to the
Bauhaus, writes Kathleen James-Chakraborty
rchitects have a taste for spare, 'functional' spaces and objects
- a rejection, we would like to think, of conspicuous
consumption, and thus a mark of solidarity with those who
cannot afford it. It is in fact far more often a badge of considerable
distinction that enhances our effectiveness in working for clients
who can afford to pay for our services and who almost always
themselves have something to sell. Robin Schuldenfrei's smart and
suggestive book Luxury and Mode1·nism: A.1·chitectu1·e and the Object
in Germany 1900-19 33 runs against the grain of what we would like
to believe about our own aesthetic preferences, so often enshrined in
our social formation, including in the professional education of
architects. It is an uncomfortable truth that is also partly responsible
for the persistence of two myths about the Bauhaus that endure
a century after the school's founding.
One regards its political orientation: from the beginning, many of
the school's supporters agreed with its opponents that it ·was
communist, socialist or, at the least, inherently democratic. However,
the appearance in 1993 of a collection of essays in German edited by
Winfried Nerdinger on Bauhaus Modernism under National Socialism
demonstrated that many of those who taught and studied at the
school, including two directors, Waiter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe - who later built successful careers in the United States -
at least attempted to accommodate the regime.
A second, closely related myth is that the newness of the
architecture and design produced at the school and, after its closure,
by former faculty and students, was not simply a matter of form,
but also intended to ser ve the working class. This was cer tainly true
during the two years that the Bauhaus was led by Hannes Meyer. His
main achievement in this period was a school for a trade tmion and he
later led a brigade of architects in the Soviet Union. Many ·who studied
at the school before and after Meyer's time also shared t his goal.
However, in Luxury and Modernism, Schuldenfrei convincingly
demonstrates that this was not a position consistently shared by
OPPOSITE Walter Gropius,
Director's House, bathroom
basin, Dessau, 1926 (above),
published in Bauha'ltsbauten
Dessau, 1930, with Lucia
Moholy's photo retouched
to conceal the use of marble
Gropius or Mies - although Gropius was shr ewd enough
to obfuscate the fact. Both Gropius and Mies, as well
as their contemporary Erich Mendelsohn, were often
unsurprisingly at their best when they had access to
luxurious materials. Exquisitely detailed surfaces, as
much as spatial and technological experimentation, were