Design Talks

Observations on design

New books celebrate the Bauhaus centenary and its legacy

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Nargess

I attended an art and design foundation course much like the famous Vorkurs run by Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, a year-long requirement for all new Bauhaus students before they could progress to study in a specific workshop. In a similar way to how the Bauhauslers ran the famous art school a century ago, mine was a place that taught experimentation and encouraged abstraction, tasking us to find our own unique solutions. And it happened to be the finest year of my formal education. The specialist art school that proceeded, failed entirely to capture my imagination, lacking the free spirit, the magical weirdness of that original school. So, I left my paints, clay, tools and camera, and took up writing.

‘To have the gift of imagination is more important than all technology,’ wrote Gropius, reflecting the spiritual origin of the school he founded. And as the Bauhaus celebrates 100, a series of publications aim to explore the enduring legacy of this modest art school founded in 1919 in the quiet town of Weimar. Some are assessing the impact of the Bauhaus post 1933, as Bauhauslers emigrated to England and America and beyond. Others have re-published some of the original Bauhaus journals and documents. Together they tell a compelling story of the most famous school of design – a place of collective dialogues, progressive ideology, imagination and creative madness.

The Bauhaus was formed in response to the crisis and devastation following the first world war. It represented a collective voice desperate to forge a new world order. It was and remains so much more than an art school – it represents a significant cultural movement. The Bauhauslers championed the power of imagination and freedom of expression. They believed strongly in bringing the art of craft to industry, embracing architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity. They explored utopian ideas, celebrated the avant-garde and encouraged free love and creative madness – sometimes to the extreme. And long after they were forced to shut down, pressured by the Nazis who saw the progressive ways a threat after assuming power in 1933, as émigrés in London and Paris and New York, their dissident voices continued to be heard.

The first of the series of books takes us back in time for insight into the teachings, ideas and philosophies of the Bauhaus when it was alive with discussion in Weimar, Dessau and then Berlin. Lars Müller has collaborated with Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung for ‘Bauhaus Journals 1926-1931’ with edited voices of the key figures of the modern movement in art and design. Josef Albers, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gerrit Rietveld – all feature in this stimulating publication.

They address developments in and around the Bauhaus, the methods and focal points of their own teaching, and current projects of students and masters. The exact replica of all individual issues is accompanied by a commentary booklet including an overview of the content, an English translation of all texts, and a scholarly essay to place the journal in its historical context.

Accompanying this are four beautifully-republished journals from the ‘Bauhausbücher’ series, all in their original design. ‘International Architecture’ was the first to start the series with the school founder Gropius offering an illustrative lesson on the theories of the modern architecture movement of the mid-1920s. In ‘Pedagogical Sketchbook’ artist Klee expresses key aspects of the Bauhaus’ guiding philosophies, writing of his desire to reunite artistic design and craft in a tone that moves between the seeming objectivity of the diagram, the rhetoric of science and mathematics, and an abstract intuition.

Third in the series by Lars Müller is ‘New Design’ by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. He begins with a philosophical foray describing art as a figurative expression of human existence, questioning the prevailing hierarchy between painting and architecture, observing the future of his movement, neoplasticism – abstract painting which used only horizontal and vertical lines and primary colours. Lastly, ‘Painting, Photography, Film’ by Moholy-Nagy argues for photography and filmmaking to be recognised as a means of artistic design on the same level as painting. With some fascinating illustrations, the Hungarian makes the case for a functional transformation within the visual arts and for the further development of photographic design options.

All this was before 1933. With the closure of the Bauhaus school, most of its prominent members left Germany in search for new homes, and new schools to teach. They took with them their ideologies, which in turn evolved and changed with their new destinations. Two books explore this post-Bauhaus journey.

‘Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain’ by Batsford narrates the brilliant story of the giants of the international modern movement – Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Breuer – and their brief émigré life in Hampstead, London before they moved to America. The story centres around the Isokon, the building by architect Wells Coats, where they lived and where they collectively pioneered concepts of minimal and shared living. Isokon’s apartments, restaurant and bar became a creative hub for writers and artists and designers in the 1930s and 40s. Authors Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund paint a colourful portrait of the notorious dinners here, as the Bauhauslers party and discuss advancing the world alongside local creatives – Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Peter and Alison Smithson, even Agatha Christie was a guest here.

Thames & Hudson’s ‘Bauhaus Goes West’ also explores the cultural exchange between these émigrés and their new adopted homelands. The general idea is that England wasn’t receptive to the avant-garde in 1933 – possibly a concept backed by the fact that there are few early projects of significance made here. Much like what we learn in the Isokon, author Alan Powers also challenges this notion, suggesting there was a provocative dialogue between the Bauhauslers and local young leaders of opinion here, namely Nicholas Pevsner and Herbert Read. The book follows their journey onto America, where the Bauhaus titans really flourish. Gropius prospers at the Harvard architecture school, Breuer gets to design great monumental buildings, Moholy-Nagy sets up a new Bauhaus school in Chicago, as husband and wife team Anni and Josef Albers shine at the brilliant liberal Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

We will never know if the Bauhaus would have such an ongoing impact on generations of creatives had the school not been forced to close in 1933. Yet what’s clear is that the discussions initiated in this small school of art and design in Weimar in 1919 evolved and enriched through a broader, international dialogue with artists and designers and philosophers and writers from London to Paris, New York, Tel Aviv and beyond. What is also clear is that the creative community could benefit from revisiting these journals, reading some of the ideas being weaved at a time that also was in the midst of crisis. As we navigate a new world, assessing how we can design for a more efficient and fairer world, we should tap into the spirit of this progressive movement – this school of thought.

Nargess Banks

All images are strictly © Lars Müller. From the ‘Bauhaus Journals 1926 – 1931’, edited and published Lars Müller and Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung; and the re-published journals from the ‘Bauhausbücher’ series (1926-1931)

Radical design: Creatives at the frontline for change

Posted on April 26, 2017 by Nargess

Bertolt Brecht wrote: ‘Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.’

I grew up surrounded by politics. Raised in Iran at the height of its turbulent years, it was impossible not to be. Later, as an adolescent cocooned in the sanctuary of Europe, I rejected it all for I saw my life in the creative world where politics, seemingly, had little relevance.

Now, as Europe peddles into the deep dark waters of dirty politics, as ultra-right populist movements raise their ugly fists, and as we set sail on another turbulent journey that is too close in spirit to one taken by the same Europeans in the 1930s, my world finds itself once again deeply immersed in politics.

For the younger naïve me didn’t quite want to acknowledge that creativity cannot flourish without freedom of expression. And tragically it is this freedom of expression that is under attack by a movement that has no respect for knowledge, fears intellectual thought, has no tolerance for true democratic debate, acts like bullies in the playground with no compassion for others, nor for the environment and therefore ultimately has no appreciation of beauty.

Artist Charlie Morrissey’s ‘Actions from the Encyclopaedia of Experience’ is a speculative taxonomy of actions as part of Siobhan Davies Dance at the Barbican

We are all feeling the pressure – families are feuding, friends are separating. At two recent gallery openings here in London – Tate Modern Switch House and Design Museum – the speeches were centred firmly around politics. This would certainly not have been the case a few years ago. The creative world feels under attack, marginalised by a system that sees the arts at its best ‘soft’ and at its worst the enemy.

Art has always had the potential to make strong visual political statements. Now, progressive design can be an even more powerful rebellion. We have urgent concerns – with the environment, movement of people, displaced populations, mass urbanisation – and it is the job of the creative community to rise-up and challenge politicians by being revolutionary, finding real solutions for real issues not just re-creating objects of desire. Whether traditionalists and nationalists like it or not, the world has evolved, and is about to even more.

Some of the most exciting design movements, including Bauhaus, appeared at a similar time in history when the world order was changing. Now too designers have the chance to be at the forefront of a dialogue for progress. Politics has re-entered my world and I am thoroughly enjoying its return.

Nargess Banks

The World of Charles and Ray Eames

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Nargess

For designers context is destiny, writes Sam Jacobs half way through The World of Charles and Ray Eames. The time and place in which the designer happens to emerge is decisive in shaping their world, he argues. And in this context Charles and Ray Eames are intimately connected with mid-century California. It would be impossible to consider one without the other.

Post war, California embodied the New World – the west coast became synonymous with a new kind of modernism. This particular interpretation of the movement had at its centre a sunnier thinking, an optimism lacking in Europe at the aftermath of two major world wars. It also benefited hugely from its geographical distance from Old World modernism, and perhaps the climate and vast beautiful coastline helped shape a very different mind-set.

Californian modernism rejected some of the more rigid dogmas whilst maintaining the core values of the movement, and arguably directing it towards modern life so that ideologies like social improvement married new sensibilities of popular culture.

Here film, music, magazines, mass-produced products joined art, architecture and design as tools for shaping our lives. Californian modernism embraced free thinking; it had a direct connection with lifestyle. It took design out of the strict codes set by the European avant-garde and set it free.

And Charles and Ray truly embodied Californian modernism. You cannot help but smile at image after image of this handsome and healthy couple working alongside other equally sunny faced artists and designers in their Eames Office. Here they collectively experimented with new material, finding new solutions for sustainable products, creating movies, stills and architectural models for living. Their energy is intoxicating, almost bouncing off the pages of this book.

European and east coast intellectuals looked over in awe, too. Jacobs writes: ‘The Eamses were ‘natives of a world that could only be glimpsed through the keyhole of media.’

The World of Charles and Ray Eames is a highly informative and visually engaging book published to accompany the exhibition held at the Barbican in London, and on until 14 February. Together they succeed in celebrating the inspiring and prolific world of this husband and wife team.

Chapters are divided into ‘life in work’, ‘at home with the Eamses’, ‘art of living’, ‘celebration of human need’ and so on to reveal their broad reach. Over 300 pages are dedicated to photographs, sketches, letters, original text and film stills, and it includes insightful text by Eames Demetrios, the couple’s grandson, art and design academics.

We also love the fact the book design also reflects the Eames workings whereby cropping, framing, design and presentation of image became central to their work, here captured through the very present grid, essential also in handling the large body of work presented.

Charles and Ray worked with product design, filmmaking, advertising; they explored folk art and an assortment of non-design objects to see how they can help shape our lives. Their multi-media architecture led them toward film and photography as tools for modelling ideas.

In Powers of Ten, a film made for IBM, for instance, they explore the relationship between design and the universe, as the film shows how nature, people, objects, books, and life can fit into a wider context.

Their design world was a collaborative one. Their ‘laboratory’ as the studio was referred to – active for four decades during the post-war period – involved such a wide selection of designers, architects, artists and engineers.

Charles and Ray took the principles of early modernism, the expressive visions of early Bauhaus, transported it to sunny California and moved it forward to be relevant for the new age. And what is most fascinating is just how relevant their work remains today. We are continuing this discourse.

Commissioned by the Indian government, they submitted their India Report in 1958 in response to the challenge the country was facing in the light of western design and philosophy. The recommendation was for a new educational model that would bridge tradition and modernity.

It begins with a ‘sample lesson’ and a quote that we feel captures the essence of the Eames philosophy. It is borrowed from the Bhagavad Gita, the 700-verse Sanskrit scripture of the Hindu epic Mahabharata:

‘You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only; you have no rights to the fruits of work. Desires for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working.’ This simple quote beautifully underlines Charles and Ray’s curiosity with process, which remained at the very heart of their lifelong work.

Nargess Banks

The World of Charles and Ray Eames is edited by Catherine Ince and Lotte Johnson and published by Thames & Hudson for the Barbican.

Read The World of Charles and Ray Eames exhibition review here.

Cape Cod Modern

Posted on August 31, 2014 by Nargess

The story began with Walter Gropius. Finding it near impossible to further the cause for Modernism in politically volatile Europe, in 1936 the founder of Bauhaus accepted a professorship at Harvard’s new and progressive Graduate School of Design, and together with his wife Ise fled to America.

The following year they rented a holiday house not so far on Planting Island, near the base of Cape Cod. Here they began entertaining friends and fellow émigré Bauhaus members Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy and Xanti Schawinsky.

Gropius called the Outer Cape, ‘marvellous piece of earth’ where the reunited group cooked, ate, swam and talked of the future. As they settled in America, many returned renting and buying plots of land and within a few years, the area was a hotbed of European intellectuals.

They soon began designing and building holiday homes in the woods and on the dunes. These were almost laboratories for processing their ideas. By 1977, there were some one hundred notable houses here that fused European Modernism, Bauhaus concepts with the building traditions of this region of mainly fishing towns.

This was a hybrid culture, partly American partly European that gave rise to a new vernacular so that this remote area became highly significant in the evolution of Modernism in America.

Cape Cod Modern – Mid-Century Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape tells this story in depth. Beautifully captured by the photographs of Raimund Koch and illustrations of Thomas Dalmas, what adds further texture are the archival pictures of the lives of some of the most prolific names in the history of Modern architecture. We take a peak at their normal world as they prepare lunch, play chess on the porch, talk and laugh and enjoy one another’s company in these incredible homes.

As the authors write, it was ‘a lifestyle based on communion with nature, solitary creativity, and shared festivity.’ Their lives were as much about furthering the cause of Modern architecture as of radical thought and experimenting with new ways of living.

The former Bauhaus members brought to America their take on Modernism at the same time absorbing their new homeland’s hunger for change. This was an America so very different to now; a country that encouraged intellectual growth, championed creative thinking. Cape Cod Modern is a fascinating read.

Cape Cod Modern: Mid-Century Architecture and Community on the Outer Cape is written by Peter McMahon and Christine Cipriani and published by Metropolis Books.

Nargess Shahmanesh Banks

Design Talks is published by Spinach Design

Exhibitions: Bauhaus Art as Life

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Nargess

It is near impossible to be a designer in this day and age and not have been in one way or another influenced by the Bauhaus. The modern world’s most famous art school operated relatively briefly – between 1919 and 1933 – yet it changed the way we see, think and create. Bauhaus united art and technology, its utopian vision sought to change society in the aftermath of the First World War.

Founded by architect Walter Gropius, the school changed location in Germany from its first home in Weimar to Dessau and finally Berlin before its members were dispersed before the Second World War. Even after its avant-garde teachers and pupils had emigrated to Europe, the US and beyond, the Bauhaus style remained the most influential movement in design and architecture.

It seems completely fitting that the Barbican – itself a brilliant example of 60s utopian thinking – should host one of the most comprehensive, and exciting, exhibition in the UK in over 40 years.

Bauhaus: Art as Life explores the diverse artistic production which made up its turbulent fourteen-year history and delves into the subjects at the heart of the school: art, culture, life, politics and society, and the changing technology of the age. The exhibition features a rich array of painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre and installation.

There are examples on display from teachers at the school including Josef and Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Hannes Meyer, László Moholy-Nagy, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Gunta Stölzl.

It features a host of workshops, talks, films and performances as well as the Bauhaus Summer School, an intensive two-week school held at the Barbican and led by leading practitioners from all artistic backgrounds. In short, this is an exhibition not to be missed by anyone interested in design.

Bauhaus: Art as Life is at the Barbican in London, UK from 3 May to 12 August 2012.
The exhibition in co-operation with Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / Museum für Gestaltung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and Klassik Stiftung Weimar.