The Bauhaus Notes Essays - Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

The Bauhaus Notes Architecturearchitecture When Walter Gropius resigned as the head of the Bauhaus in 1930, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) became its director, moving it to Berlin before political pressures forced it to close in 1933. In his architecture and furniture he made a clear and elegant statement of the International Style, so much so that his work had enormous influence on modern architecture. Taking his motto less is more and calling his architecture skin and bones, his aesthetic was already fully formed in the model for a glass skyscraper office building he concieved in 1921. Working with glass provided him with new freedom and many new possiblities. In the glass model, three irreguarly shaped towers flow outward from a central court. The perimeter walls are wholly transparent, the regular horizontal patterning of the cantilevered floor panes and their thin vertical supporting elements. The weblike delicacy of the lines of the glass model, its radiance, and the illusion of movement created by reflection and by light changes seen through it prefigure many of the glass skyscrapers of major cities throughout the world. ]previous[ ]next[ Architecture architecture Georg Muche's Haus am Horn, the model house for the Bauhaus exibition in 1923, was the first house he had ever designed. It is an extraordinary little Modernist Villa, classical in its own way. As the floor plan shows, it was designed for a single family with young children and no servants. The living room stands at the centre of the house, surrounded by all the other, much smaller rooms and lit by clerestory windows above. The surrounding rooms are linked in a logical way for middle-class households (the man's and the woman's rooms both lead into the bathroom, the womans room connects with the nursery and so on). Muche became as fascinated by the idea of low cost, quick assembly prefabricated buildings as Gropius and Meyer. In 1925 they designed a house that could be assembled simply from steel panels. ]previous[ ]next[ Architecturearchitecture When Walter Gropius resigned as the head of the Bauhaus in 1930, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969) became its director, moving it to Berlin before political pressures forced it to close in 1933. In his architecture and furniture he made a clear and elegant statement of the International Style, so much so that his work had enormous influence on modern architecture. Taking his motto less is more and calling his architecture skin and bones, his aesthetic was already fully formed in the model for a glass skyscraper office building he concieved in 1921. Working with glass provided him with new freedom and many new possiblities. In the glass model, three irreguarly shaped towers flow outward from a central court. The perimeter walls are wholly transparent, the regular horizontal patterning of the cantilevered floor panes and their thin vertical supporting elements. The weblike delicacy of the lines of the glass model, its radiance, and the illusion of movement created by reflection and by light changes seen through it prefigure many of the glass skyscrapers of major cities throughout the world. ]previous[ ]next[ Architecturearchitecture ]g a l l e r y[ It was clear from Gropius's Manifesto that the ultimate aim of the Bauhaus was architecture; the very name Bauhaus suggests it most strongly. Each of the school's three directors, Gropius, Meyer and Van Der Rohe, were above all an architect and, rightly or wrongly, the Bauhaus has become strongly identified with the architectural approach that has variously been called Modernism, The Modern Movement or the International Style. The debate surrounding Modernism or the new architecture was carried on in terms heavy with moral conotations: truth, purity and honesty. Democracy even entered into it with the attempt to suppress the predominance of one face of the building in favor of buildings that would only be appreciated by walking around or through them. The structure of the building had to be expressed clearly by its outward appearance. In formal terms, the horizontal was emphasised rather than the imposing verticals of 19th Century public buildings; flat planes were interlocked at right angles and surfaces were rendered white to symbolize purity and clarity. One of the most controversial elements in the german context was the use of the flat roof; the pitched