ing educational institutions and the needs of industry. The new school was intended
to respond to this need. Its aim was to guarantee that industrial designers got an ed-
ucation that would enable them to fulfill their social responsibilities and produce de-
signs for the rational manufacture of high-quality products:
The school is a continuation of the Bauhaus.... Its underlying principle
is the combination of a broad but thorough technical training with a
sound general education on modern lines. By this means the enterprise
and constructive spirit of youth can be infused with a proper sense of
social responsibilities and taught that cooperative work on important
problems of modern design is a major contribution to the most urgent
task of the modern age: the humanizing of our increasingly mechanis-
tic civilization.^1Behind Bill’s educational system was a functionalist credo that stated that ra-
tionality and the use of modern materials were the basic elements of good design.
The attempt to respond to the requirements of industry and the improvement of the
quality of the products formed the Leitmotiv. The artistic input of the individual de-
signer was put at the service of the integration of design with industrial mass pro-
duction. Bill’s ideas reflect a pastoral and programmatic concept of modernity and are
in that respect comparable with those of Giedion. Like Giedion, Bill felt a great ad-
miration for Robert Maillart, the Swiss engineer, on whose work he edited a book.^2
Bill, however, represented a generation of architects and designers whose commit-
ment to arts took a very specific form. For this generation functionalism was an evi-
dent requirement. They accepted the need for an enrichment of life through “good
design”; their notion of design, however, was dominated by the needs of industry
and mass production. This idea was in the end radically different from the avant-
garde position that aimed to abolish the distinction between art and life by organiz-
ing life on the basis of art.
As in design, the prevailing trend in postwar modernist architecture no longer
had much in common with an avant-garde idea: functionalism was now smoothly in-
corporated into the logic of postwar reconstruction that had as its program the
speedy and efficient production of a large number of dwellings. The socially critical
position that modern architecture had stood for in the years between the wars was
thus replaced by an institutionalized and officially recognized approach.
This development did not pass unnoticed, however. Max Bill encountered
some opposition, for instance, when he founded the Hochschule für Gestaltung.
This came first from Asger Jorn, the Danish painter who together with Constant and
Dotremont was one of the figures behind the Cobra group of artists.^3 In 1953 Jorn
initiated the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. He accused Max Bill
of having reduced the revolutionary ideas of the Bauhaus into a soft academic dis-
course and of misusing them for a reactionary strategy. The Bauhaus’s, argued Jorn,
4
Architecture as Critique of Modernity