The future-facing idiom of the Bauhaus, the German design school founded, in 1919, by Walter Gropius, is now antique, but its distinct vision of modern life is not a thing of the past. A relatively small repertoire of photogenic artifacts sometimes stands in for the entire Bauhaus phenomenon. It is easy to call to mind the iconic Wassily chair, a tubular steel frame that looks like an oversized paper clip; or the Barcelona coffee table, a glass square whose lethal corners seem designed to dent an ankle or a toddler’s forehead. In the nineteen-nineties, when modern furniture came back into fashion, Bauhaus chairs were unearthed in attics and storerooms, their caned seats brittle, their metal frames pitted from neglect. The first vintage-modern shops began to spring up, often in places where cadres of elderly bohemians and academics were dying out. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, you could find half a dozen retailers selling secondhand Bauhaus and Bauhaus-inspired pieces. Early models, spotted by trash pickers and estate-sale trawlers, commanded impressive prices. Demand trickled down, and by the turn of the century a severely edited version of the Bauhaus—a shopper’s version, free of historical context—was once again in style.
The Bauhaus aesthetic always drew sophisticated detractors. In 1981, Tom Wolfe, whose own taste in interiors ran to damask and lacquer, published “From Bauhaus to Our House,” a polemical defense of “coziness & color” and an indictment of the “whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness” of austere modern design. What bothered Wolfe most was the style’s erasure of affect, pleasure, and chance, subtractions that made a house into something resembling “an insecticide refinery.” It had been this way since the early twenties at the Bauhaus—the school, in the city of Weimar, Germany, where the aesthetic originated. From the start, Wolfe writes, Gropius, “the Epicurus” of the place, had insisted on “a clean and pure future.” Wolfe identified with Alma Gropius, the architect’s first wife. When Alma, a voluptuous and refined woman, visited the Bauhaus from her native Vienna, she was especially repelled by its high-minded diet of “a mush of fresh vegetables.” Years later, she remarked that the Bauhaus was best defined not by clean lines and pure materials but by “garlic on the breath.”
Fiona MacCarthy’s “Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus” (Harvard) is a comprehensive biography of the figure whom the painter Paul Klee, a teacher at the Bauhaus, called “the silver prince.” The aroma of nineteenth-century nobility, all the Old World values and social distinctions that the Bauhaus aspired to dismantle, nevertheless clung to Gropius. He was born in 1883 in Berlin, into a distinguished family at the nexus of business and the arts. His great-grandfather had a silk-weaving company, and a great-great-uncle manufactured theatrical masks. Another uncle was an architect; his father, who aspired to the trade, lost his nerve. The family outfitted young Gropius abundantly with Kultur, but industry was everywhere in fin-de-siècle Berlin, whose population more than doubled between 1871 and 1900, to 1.9 million. Gropius fell asleep every night, as MacCarthy writes, to “the rhythm of the metropolitan railway and the distant sound of carpet beating.”
When Gropius enlisted in a Hussars regiment of the German Army, in 1904, at the age of twenty-one, he was still a citizen of the nineteenth century. A photograph from that time shows him proudly wearing his uniform, with its heavily tasselled pelisse, mostly unchanged since the Napoleonic Wars, and later favored by Jimi Hendrix. He left the aristocratic corps after a year—the minimum requirement—worn down by the expense of keeping himself and his horse looking spiffy. Restless and in search of inspiration, he travelled in Spain for a year, and met Antoni Gaudí in the midst of constructing his masterpiece, the Sagrada Família. Back in Berlin, Gropius apprenticed to the architect and designer Peter Behrens, who taught him the arcana of the trade, from the “secrets of the medieval mason guilds” to “the geometrics of Greek architecture.” According to MacCarthy, Behrens was “the founding father of industrial design and corporate identity”; he designed not just buildings but the rooms and objects nested inside them. Gropius, for his part, seemed to know in his gut how to create a visual brand by combining materials—Moorish-style ceramic tiles and desert cacti, poured concrete and frosted glass.
When he was twenty-seven, Gropius was treated briefly at a naturopathic retreat in the mountains, where patients undertook a daily regimen of fresh air, exercise, and vegetables. On walks in the woods, he fell in love with another patient. Alma Mahler, already sexually notorious, was thirty-one. Her marriage to Gustav Mahler was on the rocks. (Mahler was at work on his Tenth Symphony when he learned of Alma’s feelings for Gropius, and travelled to Holland to consult with Sigmund Freud about his libido.) After Gustav Mahler’s death, a year later, Gropius found himself in a romantic triangle with the intense and frightening painter Oskar Kokoschka. When Alma finally left him, Kokoschka had a life-size nude doll made in her likeness.
Gropius’s personal awakening was abetted by a global one. “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “human character changed.” Individual artists were suddenly granted the freedom to design the arc of their own lives. Collectively, this freedom inspired the consistent period aesthetic that we call modernism. In 1911, Gropius returned to his architectural practice and, with a partner, designed an astonishing building: the Fagus orthopedic shoe-last factory, in Lower Saxony, one of the greatest buildings of early modernism. Its shimmering glass curtain wall, a feature that later became essential to Bauhaus design, brought together everything Gropius loved. It made a factory feel as dignified as a cathedral, expressing the near-holiness of modern work. Like the radically inventive poems and paintings of the era, it synthesized new materials and methods in ways that somehow felt classical, as though art had leapfrogged over the nineteenth century, the sentimental world of Gropius’s childhood.
But this fresh start was a false start. In 1914, Gropius’s regiment was called up just days after the onset of the First World War and sent into combat in the Vosges Mountains. In a single hour of fighting, early in the war, eighty of the three hundred men in his unit were killed. Gropius was wounded, and was decorated for his valor, but for decades he suffered flashbacks of a grenade explosion. On furloughs, he struggled to manage his professional and personal affairs. In 1915, he and Alma were married, and she gave birth to a daughter the following year. In 1918, a son was born prematurely and died within months. The child’s father, Gropius discovered, was the poet Franz Werfel.
The wartime story of lost innocence has been told of many who shaped the arts in the nineteen-twenties. But, of all the formidable figures of modernism whose lives were upended by the Great War, it is hard to think of another who suffered such trauma and chose a medium so innately incapable of expressing it. You can paint the carnage of battle or put it into lines of poetry. What can architecture say about violence? Gropius, who late in the war had been buried alive for three days, somehow went on to invent one of the most buoyant and optimistic vocabularies in any artistic medium. In 1918, he was in Hell. A year later, he had created a utopia.
The Bauhaus was partly the product of an abruptly and painfully interrupted thought process. The Fagus factory had just been completed when war broke out. While he was away, Gropius could continue designing only in his head. His fame grew during the war, and he was briefly recalled from the front to serve as the director of the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts, in Weimar. Three years later, after the fighting was over, he returned. Weimar, a small city blessed with outsized glories—the center of the German Enlightenment and the home of Goethe and Schiller—was now a scraped canvas. Gropius fused the city’s arts-and-crafts school and its fine-arts academy under a new name, the Bauhaus, which he adapted from the Bauhütte, the medieval stone mason’s guild. The idea was to evoke a time before the “fine arts” had been designated as a superior pursuit.
The first Bauhaus artifact was a limited-edition brochure announcing the school’s existence. It was a striking mashup of past and future, designed according to the principles it elaborated. A woodcut of a futurist cathedral by Lyonel Feininger graced its cover. Inside was the Bauhaus manifesto. “The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building!” it began:
The Bauhaus was “the servant of the workshop” and would one day “be absorbed in it.” There would be “no teachers and pupils” but, rather, “masters, journeymen, and apprentices.” Eventually, nearly everything used in the Bauhaus was designed and built at the Bauhaus or at its affiliated workshops. We still conflate, under its name, the school and the aesthetic invented there. From the manifesto pamphlet forward, the Bauhaus self-consciously cultivated itself as a brand, with a vaguely occult-looking logo and a raft of promotional ephemera.
According to the manifesto, “any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex,” was considered for admission to the Bauhaus, which picked up a number of progressive trends disrupted by the war. It brought the outdoors in, at a moment when young Germans, turning away from the cities, were joining back-to-nature movements, growing their hair long, and camping in the countryside. When students started arriving at the Bauhaus, in 1919 and 1920, some of them found Russian uniforms left behind by prisoners of war and, according to MacCarthy, adapted them for their daily dress, dying them in deep reds, blues, and greens. There’s something uniquely German about the idea that the standardization of dress and conduct can provide an outlet for joyful self-expression. The women wore their hair down; the men often shaved their heads, and painted their bare scalps in patterns. On the weekends, the students held elaborate dances, and there were kite and lantern festivals. Daily life was remade as an aesthetic artifact in its own right.
The Weimar Bauhaus was a kind of kindergarten-cum-commune for adults, whose real families and childhoods had in many cases been thrown into chaos by the war. Gropius, in his mid-thirties when the school opened, was its impresario. He attracted figures like Klee, who invited students to his apartment to view his aquarium full of fish, and Wassily Kandinsky, who, a generation older, was more magus-like and remote. Gropius was remarkably comfortable yielding creative control: his method, he wrote, was to “leave everything in suspension, in flux,” to keep the school from “solidifying into a conventional academy.” At the beginning, the Bauhaus was structured around workshops in a variety of media, making do with whatever tools had not been looted from the old schools during the war. Bauhaus masters were to be “powerful, famous personalities,” as Gropius wrote, “even if we do not yet fully understand them.” There were, of course, risks in hiring people before they were understood. Johannes Itten, the Swiss painter who designed the mandatory “preliminary course,” followed the religion of Mazdaznanism, dressed in robes like an ancient mystic, and promoted vegetarianism and the use of laxatives. He soon ran afoul of Gropius, who seems to have detected the beginnings of a cult.
The rational domestic interiors we associate with the Bauhaus—white walls, a few perfect objects, chairs and tables distilled to their essence—make the very idea of personal conflict seem almost gauche. There is no way to reconcile Gropius’s emotional life in the early twenties with the idealized spaces he created. His marriage to Alma dissolved, and her visits to Weimar were fraught, though Gropius loved to spend time with their daughter. In MacCarthy’s book, the storms of his private life tend to be tallied on one side of the ledger, unconnected to the goings on in his professional world. Later in his life, bantering with Frank Lloyd Wright about the importance of collaboration, Gropius was asked by Wright, ever the solo operator, whether he would enlist a neighbor’s help in making a baby. Gropius, channelling both sides of his nature, answered that he might, if his neighbor was a woman.
Because his genius was untethered to his misery, and because he often handed his ideas off to others, Gropius is a tricky subject for a biographer. Following his lead, we focus on his colorful and eccentric supporting players. As MacCarthy suggests, he had none of the puffery we associate with great architects. He was more a technocrat than a shaman. In a sense, therefore, MacCarthy’s book is a biography of the Bauhaus itself. It’s a story that she presents with a distinctly human-seeming arc. Its childhood unfolded in Weimar, where Itten impressed the students with his mantra, “Play becomes party—party becomes work—work becomes play,” and Gropius read the Christmas story aloud every year. But by early adolescence, in the mid-twenties, the Bauhaus had outstayed its welcome. In 1924, a new provincial government threatened to cut off the school’s subsidies. Nazi factions in the region supposed that all those foreign-looking students were Jews or Jewish sympathizers. The following year, Gropius moved the school to Dessau, an engineering and manufacturing center, southwest of Berlin. There, for the first time, the Bauhaus built itself a campus. Gropius, now one of the most famous architects in the country, oversaw the design of the main buildings and the masters’ houses. The workshops, which he also designed, provided everything: textiles, fittings, door handles, murals, and tableware. The furniture was produced in the joinery of Marcel Breuer, one of the first and youngest students at the Bauhaus.
The evolution of a single design gives a sense of how the Bauhaus grew. For his Model B3 chair—also called the Wassily chair, in honor of Kandinsky, who expressed admiration for its prototype—Breuer took inspiration from the elegant handlebars of a milkman’s bicycle, made of seamless tubular steel, a new material. He created an industrial-age club chair that, reduced to its metal frame, seemed to levitate in space. You could see through it to other, equally beautiful Bauhaus objects in the background. Like all the furniture Breuer designed for the school, it was also a collaboration: the school’s textile workshop contributed the seats, woven from Eisengarn, a strong cotton thread. And, as with many great Bauhaus designs, it is an example of materialized reasoning. It solves the formal problem of creating a substantial piece of furniture that is both there and not there. It is interesting from every angle, and especially beautiful from the back.
The B3 was installed in rooms full of objects whose designs posed playful riddles about their function. In the Bauhaus chess set, for example, the bishop, since it moves diagonally, was an X; the knight was an L. Novices and children could look at the pieces and remember the rules. Similarly, you could look at the B3, which resembled no other chair ever designed, and see how every other chair functioned. If you valued lumbar support above clean design, you would likely opt for another chair; but, as a piece of sculpture that you could plop down on, the Wassily chair’s equipoise has never been surpassed.
The B3 was also cheap, adaptable, and possible to mass-produce outside the Bauhaus. Breuer owned the patent for his tubular furniture, which he later licensed to a furniture company. Soon, the B3 and other models were turning up in suave interiors around the world. But, as Bauhaus and Bauhaus-influenced design began to spread beyond the school’s walls, the institution itself became harder to sustain. At the beginning of the most combustible period in German history, the school drew on government support. Construction of the main buildings had far exceeded the budget. The Bauhaus was not a factory, and although the B3 was a success, many of Gropius’s attempts to bring designs to the market failed. The school was barely furnished before the masters started complaining about their pay. And, once money entered the picture, the rhetoric of communal collaboration began to ring hollow. Where residents had frolicked, design pilgrims and sightseers now descended, and took notes. Gropius received regular offers for commissions outside the Bauhaus and hired a movie crew to film inside his villa. Meanwhile, the German economy was failing. The Bauhaus, which, according to MacCarthy, was “regarded by many as a Jewish-Bolshevik enclave, artistically crazy and racially impure,” was harassed by local Nazis and pilloried in the right-leaning press.
In 1928, a little more than a year after the main Bauhaus buildings were completed, Gropius suddenly quit. The new director, Hannes Meyer, instituted Marxist principles as an official part of the school’s curriculum, drawing even more antagonism from the Nazis. Meyer was dismissed two years later, and the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took over. In 1932, Nazi Storm Troopers occupied the school, destroyed much of what they found, tore down the iconic Bauhaus sign, and set up an officer-training site. The school briefly moved to Berlin, but a year later that site, too, was raided. Students unable to produce papers were taken into custody, Mies was threatened at gunpoint, and the Bauhaus, its designs now famous throughout the world, was closed for good.
The Bauhaus became an international style the moment it ceased to be a school. Bauhaus masters and students fanned out all over the world—and Gropius was soon part of its global dispersal. He codified his ideas in a textbook, “The New Architecture and the Bauhaus,” and worked in Rome and London. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, began collecting Bauhaus artifacts and, in 1938, displayed them in a full-scale Moma exhibition. The Bauhaus, though its designs were scarce in American homes, had become a household name.
In 1936, Gropius was hired by Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. With his second wife, Ise, and their adopted daughter, Ati, Gropius soon settled in the Yankee stronghold at Lincoln, Massachusetts, ten miles outside Boston in the country. Gropius immediately fell for the oldest New England houses—their rational, functional plans and their simple clapboard exteriors. The family rented an old Colonial, and filled it with an exquisite collection of the best Bauhaus objects and furnishings, which Gropius had managed to salvage from the Nazis. The house was a mile or so from Walden Pond, where, as Gropius liked to point out, Thoreau had built his own thrifty show house.
“Walden” is in part a book about building a house, but the structure needed to function only well enough and long enough to give Thoreau a subject for his prose. When Gropius set out to design his home in Lincoln, he knew that it would be an enduring part of his legacy. The house he built is a study in Thoreauvian economy and simplicity, with big glass windows overlooking a prospect of stone walls and fields. The house was made of redwood boards, painted white to resemble its clapboard Colonial neighbors, but running vertically, to stand out. The roof is flat, on Bauhaus principles; New Englanders, who have their own principles, have always scoffed at flat roofs on residential dwellings, which accumulate snow and leak when it melts. This modest design indulgence has sometimes been used to suggest that the house is out of context. But the house, which is now owned by Historic New England—its only twentieth-century holding—didn’t defy history. It showed, instead, that history wasn’t finished.
When you tour the Gropius House, you encounter design elements that took years to catch on: cork floors, acoustic plaster, a dishwasher and garbage disposal. The furnishings and fixtures, mainly from the Dessau Bauhaus, are well worn and thoroughly loved, but still somehow feel ahead of their time. The house served as a way station for visiting celebrities (Mr. and Mrs. Igor Stravinsky paid a visit as newlyweds), a living display of Bauhaus principles, and a refuge for the small family—their “Eden,” according to Ati, who was thirteen when they moved in, in 1938. Some of its most extraordinary touches were designed with family life in mind. Ise and Walter’s double desk, still stocked with paper clips and stationery, faces out over the sloping front field. An iconic corkscrew steel staircase, the kind now used to create instant duplexes in apartment buildings, is tacked to the exterior, feeding directly into Ati’s bedroom; the main staircase was often clogged with strangers and dignitaries who had come to see her father and his home.
The house in Lincoln was Gropius’s base until his death, in 1969. Steadily, he left his mark on the region, which supplied him with fresh waves of students, friends, and clients. His influential partnership, The Architects Collaborative (TAC), was founded in 1945. Jobs at the University of Baghdad and, a little closer to home, at Harvard allowed him to design environments for living and working, as he had done at the Bauhaus. The Harvard Graduate Center was at best a mixed success: inside its rooms, with their cinder-block walls and drop ceilings, even a modernist might pine for the red brick and ersatz Georgian of Harvard’s traditional campus buildings.
More impressive were the developments in pretty towns nearby, full of modest flat-roofed houses, based on those built for Dessau masters and designed to encourage interacting with your neighbors at the community pool, the mailboxes, and the tennis court. The very success of these houses has made them hard to spot; developments that borrowed their features on the cheap were soon being carved out of woods and fields all across the region. It had been Gropius’s dream since before the First World War to design dignified, elegant, and inexpensive workers’ houses. Many of his partners, in fact, lived in Six Moon Hill, a TAC-designed complex in Lexington, Massachusetts, which took on, in the fifties, a reputation for corduroys, cocktails, and, especially, rocky marriages. In this respect, it resembled the original Bauhaus, the utopia in the middle of Germany. It was as Gropius and his followers taught the world: form follows function. ♦
An earlier version of this article misquoted Virginia Woolf.
