Bauhaus Quotes

The sad truth was that the United States had not been reduced to a smoking rubble by the first World War.

One day [Kahn] walked into a classroom and began a lecture with the words: "Light ... is." There followed a pause that seemed seven days long, just long enough to re-create the world.

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of Magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out.

The days are passing so quickly. This is the only time of year when I want to slow time down. I spend the entire year trying to get here as fast as I can, then once I'm here I want to slam on the brakes. I'm beginning to have those moments when the feel of autumn is so strong it drowns out everything else. Lately it's been making me think about the perfect soundtrack for a Halloween party. The top of any Halloween music list as to be the theme song from the movie Halloween; right on its heels is "Pet Sematary" by the Ramones. For some reason I've always equated the old Van Morrison song "Moondance" with Halloween, too. I love that song. "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus is an October classic, as well as anything by Type O Negative. And Midnight Syndicate. If you've never heard anything by Midnight Syndicate, look them up right this moment. If you distilled the raw essence of every spooky story you ever heard, you would have Midnight Syndicate. I have a friend who swears by them, believing them to be a vital element of any Halloween party. To finish off the list you must have "The Lyre of Orpheus" by Nick Cave and "I Feel Alright" by Steve Earle.

When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's "form follows function," what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.

[The Bauhauslers] were joined in their will to replace outmoded values for everyone, rather than to retreat to alternate lives for themselves alone. They were not revolutionaries who wanted to topple the existing framework, but pioneers who sought to transform it. The Bauhauslers respected what was best in the existing German culture; they did not unilaterally disparage all its traditions. They wanted to forge connections, to see their ways accepted and integrated. (362)

What made him exceptional were a ferocious will to succeed and a burning sense of epistemic curiosity. Jobs was interested in everything: the Bauhaus movement, the

Bauhaus

Design came into being in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar. Part of the prospectus of this school reads: 'The function of art has in the past been given a formal importance which has severed it from our daily life; but art is always present when a people lives sincerely and health. 'Thus our job is to invest a new system of education that may lead to a complete knowledge of human needs and a universal awareness of them.' [...] What Gropius wrote is still valid. Tis first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one's material life in and and ideal world to take moral revenge in.

I couldn't find any humble pie this early in the morning, but the cream-filled [donuts] are chock full of humility.

Observation precedes vision.

The firm changed its name from frogdesign to frog design in 2000 and moved to San Francisco. Esslinger picked the original name not merely because frogs have the ability to metamorphose, but as a salute to its roots in the (f)ederal (r)epublic (o)f (g)ermany. He said that “the lowercase letters offered a nod to the Bauhaus notion of a non-hierarchical language, reinforcing the company’s ethos of democratic partnership.

The year 1968 was also ground zero for popular music in Germany. Karl Bartos, in 1968 a 16-year-old gifted classical musician, puts it like this: ‘We don’t have the blues in our genes and we weren’t born in the Mississippi Delta. There were no black people in Germany. So instead we thought we’d had this development in the twenties which was very, very strong and was audio-visual. We had the Bauhaus school before the war; and then after the war we had tremendous people like Karlheinz Stockhausen and the development of the classical and the electronic classical. This was very strong and it all happened very close to Düsseldorf, in Cologne, and all the great composers at that time came there. During the late forties up until the seventies they all came to Germany; people like John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer, and they all had this fantastic approach to modern music, and we felt it would make more sense to see Kraftwerk as part of that tradition more than anything else.

Artists who shared (Paul) Klee's fundamental beliefs, such as (Piet) Mondrian, were searching for universal truths, often derived from nature and having "all-mighty power." For some, a traditional notion of God was part of this; for others, it was of no consequence. What mattered was not the precise character of the object of worship, but the shared belief in its superiority to the cult of self. (104)

Toward the end of our sessions, Daniel and Peter spotted an undertaker polishing an old hearse while visiting the nearby village of Monmouth. It was love at first sight, and we ended up buying the poor old jalopy. After celebrating the purchase of this new Bauhausmobile, Peter decided to take the studio owner's daughter and her girlfriend for a spin down the unlit winding country roads of the Wye Valley. Drunk to the gills, he ended up driving the crate into a ditch. Despite this incident, and much to the chagrin of our manager, Harry Isles, this clapped-out crate became the band's official touring vehicle. It was constantly breaking down, and over time, many motorists would be entertained and possibly quite disturbed by the sight of four black-clad, corpse-like figures pushing their funereal conveyance down the highways and byways of Great Britain.

You see, the penis, it's so graceless, wouldn't you agree? When it's cold and shrivelled up, it looks like W.H. Auden in his old age; when it's hot, it flops and dangles about in a ridiculous way; when it's excited, it looks so pained and earnest you'd think it was going to burst into tears. And the scrotum! To think that something so vital to the survival of the species, fully responsible for 50 per cent of the ingredients--though none of the work--should hang freely from the body in a tiny, defenceless bag of skin. One whack, one bite, one paw-scratch--and it's just the right level, too, for your average animal, a dog, a lion, a sabre-tooth tiger--and that's it, end of story. Don't you think it should get better protection? Behind some bone, for example, like us? What could be better than our nicely tapered entrance? It's discreet and stylish, everything is cleverly and compactly encased in the body, with nothing hanging out within easy reach of a closing subway door, there's a neat triangle of hair above it, like a road sign, should you lose your way--it's perfect. The penis is just such a lousy design. It's pre-Scandinavian. Pre-Bauhaus, even.

Being unable to deal with the complexity of the world has seen us retreat into what Curtis calls a “static world”. Instead of looking to change the world for the better, we look either to change small things (our bodies, our own rights as an individual), or we fall back into the past. “This obsession with risk that politicians, terror experts and finance people have, it’s about going back into the past, looking for patterns – which computers now allow you to do – and adjusting everything to make sure things are stable. “When I was working with Massive Attack, I used an old Bauhaus song called Bela Lugosi’s Dead and [on the big screens] I constantly repeated the phrase, ‘If you like this, then you’ll love that.’ I think in a way that’s the motto of our time. We’ll give you tomorrow something very similar to what you had yesterday. And then the world will be stable. And that’s true in politics, finance and culture. “Look at the way culture plays it,” he continues. “I mean, look at me. Look at Edgar Wright: he makes movies constantly referencing things. We constantly play yesterday back to you in a slightly altered form, to try and make you feel stable and happy. And the world stays stuck and everyone gets ratty, which is why they all snark at each other on the internet.

I suppose that’s what we all want, deep down — some kind of purpose rather than going to the office day in and day out to mindlessly sell our life’s hours.

I've heard rumors that if we get too weak to give blood, they feed us to the zeds." Hannah just stared at her in horror a moment before asking, "The zeds?" "Yeah. You know, like how the Brits say the letter z? For zombie?" "Oh." "What do you call them?" Hannah thought about it a second before saying, "The scary dead things that ate my parents. But yours is catchier.

All of her days were full of strangeness here at the end of the world, but this day was standing out as one of the stranger ones.

Like the time I threw out Pete Murphy of Bauhaus for saying those six immortal words to Slim when he'd forgotten his backstage pass: 'Don't you know who I am?' 'Ha, ha, yeah, I do,' I said, 'You're out, arsehole'.

The city’s ultimate solution to the problem of racial migration was “intensive centralization’ Which is to say the erection of high-rise Bauhaus-style Wohnmaschinen on a massive scale beginning with the erection of the Robert Taylor Homes just south of IIT in the years from 1960 to 1962 and marching south with the same kind of building for the next two miles. Eventually some 27,000 Chicago blacks were re-settled on the quarter-mile-wide strip between the railroad tracks to the east and the Dan Ryan Expressway to the west. There the blacks from Mississippi and their descendants for the next two or three generations settled into welfare dependency as wards of the state that had brought them north as cheap labor but didn’t know what to do with them when the jobs that were supposed to employ them left town. The inherent weaknesses in the black family might have fared no better had they been left to develop in bungalows surrounded by trees and grass, but after a while it became clear that the Bauhaus formula for dealing with living arrangements according to materialist principles exacerbated the problems the sharecroppers brought north with them.

Durch Licht wird Leben gespendet, in der Natur wie in der Kunst.

Jeder kann Herr über die Maschine sein oder ihr Sklave.

I have begun to fact-check my e-mail jokes, and my e-mails generally, even though I do not use capital letters or proper punctuation. “we write everything lowercase in order to save time,” said Herbert Bayer—herbert bayer—of the Bauhaus school. When I discovered this quote I felt so reassured. I’d always worried that I’d naturally defaulted to lowercase letters because I lacked courage or conviction or a healthy sense of self-worth.

Our hangout sessions went on for a few months until we finally just evaporated into a puff of sexless smoke in her living room, like the dry ice at a Bauhaus concert. No, that’s too sexy. Like the dry ice at a Peter Cetera concert.

He studied at the Bauhaus, you know.” “So that makes him trustworthy? Because he’s an architect?” “A modernist architect.” “You’ve got an odd sense of trust, my love. He’s still a German, and you can never trust a German. Always remember that.” “Yes, my dear, I’ll keep that in mind.

I pick up a long, charcoal-gray silk overcoat at a West Hollywood rent-boy boutique. Anything heavier than silk will look ridiculous in L.A., and wearing a black overcoat is nature's way of telling you to lay off the Bauhaus.

El ascensor que me esperaba para llevarme al Cielo podía ser la mejor toma de Hollywood de una caja para momias Bauhaus: un sarcófago angosto, vertical, con una tapa acrílica transparente

Been practicing ever since I managed to tackle you. I figured there must be something to your idea about strong feelings." "Yeah. They can be hard to manufacture on demand, though." "So far I've managed okay." "Thinking about my dad usually gets it done for me. What about you? What do you think about?" He looked at me for a long moment before he said, "You." I didn't expect that answer. "Me? Really? Do I frustrate you that much?" "Kissing you," he clarified. "I think about kissing you." Oh. "Oh. Really?" I stood up and bumped into the table. It moved. Joe looked at it and smiled. "You thinking about kissing me?" "Well I am now." He got up and came toward me. "Good.

When Mahler went to a composing retreat, she began having an affair with Walter Gropius, the architect who founded the Bauhaus School. I do not really like the Bauhaus School. But if you started dating the founder of an architectural movement, I’d support you and think your choice was great, and I’d pretend to like his architectural movement when we were all hanging out because I’m a good friend. So Alma was an adulteress and creatively unfulfilled—but she was just killing it with her choice of men.

Denmark is very much a design society, and this plays quite a big part in happiness,’ says Anne-Louise. She explains how the stylish Danish aesthetic was influenced by the German Bauhaus school and how good design has been a tradition here since the 1920s.

In 1934, when Josef Albers designed, at the request of the architect Philip Johnson, the cover for the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art’s Machine Art exhibition, brandishing a dramatic photo of an industrial ball bearing, Josef rejected the initial proofs from the printer, demanding that his name as designer be removed if its flaw was not corrected. Johnson wrote back contritely. He assured Josef that the margin between the edge of the paper and the powerful image of that glistening, perfectly functioning machine part would be reduced to a precise three millimeters in accord with Josef’s original design. Johnson understood the gravity of the mistake and the importance of measurements.

Anni and Josef Albers’s house was the whitest place imaginable.

In essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; it is for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of shows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink….The mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself….And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. —Herman Melville, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in Moby-Dick; or the Whale (1851)

Le photographe Hessling, ancien étudiant du Bauhaus, faisait la guerre, en 1943, dans les armées de son pays. La nuit de Noël, au village de Novimgorod, tous les habitants reçurent l'ordre de sortir dans la neige et de chanter leurs cantiques à la lueur des flambeaux tandis que les SS crucifiaient une jeune femme sur la porte de l'église. Son agonie dura la nuit entière. Au lever du jour, la beauté surnaturelle de son visage était inondée de sourire et de larmes. Hessling s'approcha, s'agenouilla et, comme elle semblait dire oui, il la photographia. Peu après, il était exécuté à Kiev comme anti-nazi, traître à l'Allemagne. Il avait eu le temps de remettre son négatif à Wolfgang Borchert. Hessling savait qu'aucune photographie dans le monde ne pouvait être comparée à celle-ci. Il fit promettre à Borchert de la développer au retour de la guerre, de la regarder, puis de la jeter dans l'Elbe, afin que jamais, dans aucun musée, on ne pût s'arrêter et contempler cette crucifixion. Même avec des larmes. C'est peut-être en pensant à cela que Maurice Blanchot, beaucoup plus tard, note dans L'écriture du désastre : "Il y a une limite où l'exercice d'un art, quel qu'il soit, devient une insulte au malheur. Autoportrait en lecteur (page 60)

The Bauhaus was an attitude, not a style or a time period.

Once you had a solid base and sufficient knowledge, and respect for the essential facts and real needs of life, nothing rivaled careful observation and contemplation fired by a passion for the invention of new means for experiencing life.

Get up, eat jelly. Sandwich bars and barbed wire. And squash every week into a day

By addressing the building as an empty signifier (just as the Bauhaus lamp reveals the electrical wiring inside, so the Pompidou exposes its content and function according to a relationship that Baudrillard deems totally arbitrary), the Pompidou Centre is downgraded from architectural icon to hyper- functionalist failure.

The spread of concrete also spawned whole new types of architecture. One of its earliest apostles was the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright,56 who understood that concrete made possible entirely new forms. Take the inverted ziggurat of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that Wright designed in New York. Wright created its fanciful geometry with “gun-placed concrete,” aka gunite, a form of the compound made with more sand and less gravel than ordinary concrete, which allows it to be sprayed from a nozzle57 directly onto a vertical surface. Try doing that with brick. Wright’s work paved, so to speak, the way for Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus School, Le Corbusier’s International school, and Richard Neutra’s modernist creations. From Modernism grew Brutalism, the stark, angular, proudly concrete-heavy style that became popular after World War II. Today that term is often applied more broadly to the generic mode that has come to define so much of the visual landscape of our cities—the bluntly utilitarian look of near-identical factories and warehouses, the quadrangular shapes of institutional buildings and cheap apartment blocks, the coldly functional sweep of highway overpasses.

Bauhaus. And there were many other occasions when he praised the Bauhaus by name for having simplified and humanized the material objects of everyday living.

Marcel Breuer’s armchair, with its horsehair fabric stretched taut on an armature of tubular chrome, is one of the Bauhaus designs that has remained a classic.

They revered good form, in behavior and objects alike, in accord with the ideas of Plato, the Bauhaus’s intellectual god.

And all of them were obsessed with the appearances of the objects that served their quotidian needs.

For Josef, the goal of art was to reveal new ways of seeing, “to open eyes.

Nothing is crowded, although infinite functions are available.

If a glass tabletop was half a centimeter thick, its support and legs precisely doubled or tripled that measure. The iPhone also depended on the exact relation of proportions, so that a sense of rightness enters the user.

To reduce apparent details was to increase emotional and physical ease.

He was also perpetually developing configurations of straight lines that deceive the viewer in their apparent readability as plastic forms, with walls and openings, only to become something entirely different as we look at them. Physical impossibility in the guise of the plausible was his elixir.

Gropius characterized what was essential: “An object…must fulfill its function usefully, be durable, economical, and ‘beautiful.

The Bauhaus fights against the cheap substitute, inferior workmanship, and the dilettantism of the handicrafts, for a new standard of quality work.

Now, what made something work well was in and of itself the core of its aesthetic quality.

Albers celebrated the way that color and line have no truth of their own; what matters is their perception, which depends on what is adjacent to them.

The iPhone can have a way of presumptuously insisting that it is better than you are. If you want to have it fixed or get an accessory for it, you are required to go into one of the horrid stores with metallic bad-breath air, and then inevitably wait for two hours after being told it would only be ten minutes. The salespeople act as if they have everything you need, but enjoy concealing it from you while you have to figure out what it is. What

Bauhaus design at its best demonstrates that the ordinary and the everyday, when addressed with discernment and tastefulness, have a candor and clarity that calm the insides.

What counted was focus, paring down: the form of the Parthenon as opposed to all the ornament and complexities of wedding-cake architecture.

Self-expression was to be avoided. The essence of the Bauhaus design teaching that helped form Jony Ive was that what mattered in drawing technique and color exploration were the properties of the components and methods, not a personal narrative.

Josef Albers devoted his life to extolling the merits of “minimal means for maximum effect.

1930s Functionalism/Modernism Exterior •Facade: Cube shapes and light-color plaster facades, or thin, standing wood panels. •Roof: Flat roof, sometimes clad in copper or sheet metal. •Windows: Long horizontal window bands often with narrow—or no—architraves; large panes of glass without mullions or transoms. Emphasis on the horizontal rather than on the vertical. Windows run around corners to allow more light and to demonstrate the new possibilities of construction and materials. •Outside door: Wooden door with circular glass window. •Typical period details: Houses positioned on plots to allow maximum access to daylight. Curving balconies, often running around the corner; corrugated-iron balcony frontage. Balcony flooring and fixings left visible. The lines of the building are emphasized. Interior •Floors: Parquet flooring in various patterns, tongue-and-groove floorboards, or linoleum. •Interior doors: Sliding doors and flush doors of lamella construction (vaulted, with a crisscross pattern). Masonite had a breakthrough. •Door handles: Black Bakelite, wood, or chrome. •Fireplaces: Slightly curved, brick/stone built. Light-color cement. •Wallpaper/walls: Smooth internal walls and light wallpapers, or mural wallpaper that from a distance resembled a rough, plastered wall. Internal wall and woodwork were light in color but rarely completely white—often muted pastel shades. •Furniture: Functionalism, Bauhaus, and International style influences. Tubular metal furniture, linear forms. Bakelite, chrome, stainless steel, colored glass. •Bathroom: Bathrooms were simple and had most of today’s features. External pipework. Usually smooth white tiles on the walls or painted plywood. Black-and-white chessboard floor. Lavatories with low cisterns were introduced. •Kitchen: Flush cupboard doors with a slightly rounded profile. The doors were partial insets so that only about a third of the thickness was visible on the outside—this gave them a light look and feel. Metal-sprung door latches, simple knobs, metal cup handles on drawers. Wall cabinets went to ceiling height but had a bottom section with smaller or sliding doors. Storage racks with glass containers for dry goods such as salt and flour became popular. Air vents were provided to deal with cooking smells.

Garret played me Trent Reznor’s music video “Broken,” a series of cut-and-paste video clips of animal pornography and people shooting themselves. I didn’t understand it, though Garret tried to explain it to me—something about American culture being overwhelmed by commodification and the resulting depression we feel at being controlled by the hidden politics of a truly fascist state. Or something like that. I wanted to know how Garret found out what a particular song meant, or about Danzig and “She Sells Sanctuary” by the Cult, or when Skinny Puppy was putting out their next album, or who Bauhaus was.

Herbert Bayer was a photographer, an architect, a painter, and he was also the inventor of photo montage, as well as one of the originators—and probably the first modern—land artist. And so it was the idea that an artist could do all of these things using the same basic design concepts, and that it didn’t really matter if he was creating a beautiful land sculpture or if he was using photography or painting. He was really making art using the same methods, the same Bauhaus-type methods.

Without the Nazis fewer people would have heard of the Bauhaus today and it would almost certainly seem a little less important. It is a pleasant irony.

Some utopias become purer, harder, and harsher as they diminish, like an evaporating lake growing more saline every year in its shores of crystalline salt: think of the theorist-revolutionary Guy Debord, ostracizing and expelling people from the Situationist International movement until you could fit the future of artsy council communism around the back table of a Parisian bar. Some utopias dilute into the surrounding society that gives them context - the well-lit, spare, clean, glass-and-steel spaces of the Bauhaus are now the default settings for expensive apartments and bank lobbies, their mystic-visionary content reduced to homeopathic doses. Some die all at once with their founder or settle into a second act as businesses: silverware from the Oneida Perfectionists, hammocks from the Skinnerian behaviorist community Twin Oaks, or wind chimes from Arcosanti, which was once the be the germ of anthill arcologies honeycombing the planet. Of all these ways to end, a handful of utopian projects -perhaps the most successful - evaporate in practice but produce a persistent icon of the future for a group or a subculture, a shared arrangement of visions, a magnetic field by which other people unknowingly set their compasses. Extropy was one of these.

Know your materials! See the most minute nuances! Savor them! God is in the details.

That he produced the quintessential Bauhaus object is evidence that the ideals of the school were as they purported to be—capable of transcending all that was European, going beyond what was unique to a single culture, and spreading across the map of the entire world.

Plato advocated discipline and perfectionism, the effort to produce quality in small quantity rather than a vast range of what is second-rate.

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly

The panoply of consumers has iPhones or the lower-priced clones not because of what they represent but because of what they do.

iPhones are not the Elgin Marbles, or Stonehenge, or anything else where part of the miracle is that it lasts.

Like a clap of thunder, at a high decibel level yet with a suddenly squeaky voice, as high as it was loud, with his flying white hair in the light of the slide projector and therefore magnified a hundredfold as filaments gone haywire over the exquisitely painted van Eyck, Professor Schapiro shouted out, “He’s pissing! He’s pissing!

From Plato: “The measure of a man is what he does with power.

For those who see austerity and affordability and lack of chic as vital elements of the forms of beauty that last, the betrayal of those values is here.

To be true to the Bauhaus is not to follow a “style.” It is to maintain impeccable standards, consider every nuance, and make successful functioning the priority.

Then there is Plato on human happiness: “The greatest wealth is to live content with little.

At the Bauhaus, Josef Albers wrote a friend for whose apartment he was designing furniture, “An empty room is always the best.