From Bauhaus to our house
A lamentation on the state of modernist, international style architecture. In this long-form architectural screed in essay form, Wolfe takes aim at celebrated figures in the modernist movement—most notably Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius—and examines the reasons for their rise and continuing acclaim.
Stats for nerds
11recommend
26mentions
19people
2011–2026years
54% recommend42% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think a good theory is:
Up until the late 1800s, beauty was expensive. Therefore, it was a costly (i.e., believable) signal of wealth, status, and taste. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, modern manufacturing got going and made beauty cheap. The ornate wrought iron door that took some workman hundreds of hours to produce was a good signal. Now, a cast simulacrum can be made at scale and ordinary people can have beautiful doors.
This led the tastemaker art and architecture elite to start playing a kind of inside baseball where what's "beautiful" isn't beautiful in some objective sense, or to ordinary people, it's just what's trendy within their clique at a given time.
(and, to head you off at the pass: you may like brutalism or Obama's library, but the data clearly show that regular people do not)
See Tom Wolfe's excellent From Bauhaus to Our House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
Also this ACX discussion (it's a few posts) is really good: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-everyone-on-taste https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/three-model-organisms-for-t...
We should really do something about this. Buildings affect everyone around them, and we should force people designing them to make buildings that regular people find beautiful.
These people are trying: https://www.humanise.org/
- Everyone who builds anything should read From Bauhaus to Our House.
- For anyone that wants to read a critical take of Bauhaus and modernist architecture in general, check out the very funny From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
His other book on art was pretty good too, and both were received very poorly by their respective industries, which is probably a sign that he was on to something.
- You might enjoy the Tom Wolfe book, From Bauhaus to Our House. In it he tries to explain the observations you make. Very lively, funny writing and you know he is on the right track because he was universally panned by modern architects.
- World Wars 1 & 2 happened, shattering the remaining sense of aesthetic unity we had
that was followed by modernism which purity spiraled into the ubiquitous glass box, which was then followed by a post-modernist surface-level, purely negative rejection of modernism
the post-modernists were unable to return to any pre-modern sense of aesthetics due to their ideological commitment to the ur modernist impulse of pride (called innovation)
recommended reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House
it is interesting to note that even individual aesthetic disasters like victorian homes, when combined in a neighborhood with common roof-lines, etc. form a charming aesthetic that has been singularly unachievable except in ersatz form since... deep questions of cultural unity lurk here...
- This sort of thing never stood out to me until I read Tom Wolfe's sardonic "From Bauhaus to Our House."¹ I recommend it.
¹ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41001.From_Bauhaus_to_Ou...
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