Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to our house- fight against Bourgeois style

The new age of art compound, the story of European influences in modern and post-modern movements in art and architecture.

“Every Building must have its own soul”,Louis Kahn

The story begins in Germany after WWI, when “young American architects, along with artists and odd –lot intellectuals, are roaming through Europe”, they are called “The lost generation”. Their motto (Malcolm Cowley’s) was, “They do things better in Europe”.

Ambitious artists had to join a movement, a school or any type of “ism- a compound”.
The most influential of them all was Walter Gropius, THE SILVER PRINCE, founder of a new movement and School, Bauhaus. He wanted an art and technology to be in a “New Unity”. The Bauhaus School opened in German capital in 1919, it was a “commune, a spiritual movement,” with a “radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical centre comparable to Garden of Epicurus.”

“Ideas have consequences; the Bauhaus style proceeded from certain firm assumptions. First, the new architecture was being created for the workers. (...) Second, the new architecture was to reject all things bourgeois.” Dostoyevsky

The theory of the century was to build a non-bourgeois buildings, concrete, steel, wood, glass and stucco, “honest materials (...). Inside and out, they were white or beige with the occasional contrasting detail in black and grey. "

Le Corbuisier’s Villa Savoye










In the meantime, in art, Cubist technique of painting showed two theories, on one of the pictures with a cartoon face profile, with both eyes on the same side of the nose. “(1) the theory of flatness, derived from Braque’s notion that painting was nothing more than a certain arrangements of colours and forms on a flat surface; and (2) theory of simultaneity, derived from discoveries (...) indicating that a person sees an object from two angles simultaneously. “

In music, Arnold Schoenberg, experimented with mathematically coded music that proved, in a new age of “art compound”, the spirit of avant-garde.

As USA emerged from the WWI on top of the world, she was the only one not to be demolished unlike most of the European countries. She didn’t even have a bourgeois, and only little interest in socialism. The Empire State Building, sky scrapers with top ornaments were popular icons of US modern architecture. She had ”The International Style” with its main function, to please the client. It was “the first great universal style since Medieval and Classical revivals, and first truly modern style since the Renaissance.”

In 1929 the Museum of Modern Art opened and European Modernism in painting and sculpture was established in America. Gropius was made a head of school of Architecture at Harvard, and Breuer joined him there.

1940-50s Buckminster Fuller spread his innovative and inspirational ideas lecturing at Yale. He introduced a new style, “The Architects Collaborative”.

In 1950 Yale got his own Bauhaus-en, Joseph Albers, who became a head of fine arts instruction. With the moment it was noticed that every student was following the same pattern in designing buildings, box of glass and steel and concrete, with tiny beige bricks, the style became to be known as The Yale Box.

Further years brought “buildings like factories” in modern style by Mies, and all the style was bound to be repetitive since it aimed to be non-bourgeoisie. Banshaft, another architect, said about glassy boxes that, “he will keep doing them until he does one he likes.” Philip Johnson worked along with his assistant Mies, creating buildings in minimalistic style.

In 1954 after Edward Durell Stone being under the influence of his “very explosive” wife, he created an ornamental design of the American Embassy in New Delhi. His second International style achievement was house in Mount Kisco, the Kowalski house.

Earlier mentioned, Philip Johnson took over Stone’s job of building an addition on West Fifty Street. Stone was instead asked to design Gallery of Modern Art.
1960s were filled with “Morris Lapidus”, architecture of Joy.



1980s brought a new solution to architectural disasters, it was decided that unwanted buildings would be blown up.

In XX century photography, John Szarkowski was popular of his virtues like blurring, grotesque foreshorterings, untrue colours, images chopped off the edge of the film frame etc. , “they managed to make photography utterly baffling to those unwilling to come inside the compound and learn the theories and codes.”

God, Freedom, Immortality, man’s fate were seen “helplessly naive and bourgeois. The proper concern of philosophy was the nature of meaning.”

The struggle to be original outside of the compound was excluding architects like Stone, Saarine and kept the ongoing pattern until a new character, Robert Venturi demonstrated a new way in 1966. He said, “less is a bore” , he wanted to bring architecture from level of university elite to “ordinary people”. He spoke of “a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience”, he brought modernism to scholastic age. Venturi, in his diplomatic genius, was testing the subtlety of other architects, creating Post-Modernism architecture and continued the fight with monothematic glassy boxes.

The University of Winchester Journalism course,
Year II, Semester 2
History and Context of Journalism part IV

Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to our house