BAUHAUSBAUTEN DESSAU
Bauhausbücher 12
Walter Gropius
Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1930 [Bauhausbücher 12]. First edition. Text in German. Slim quarto. Plain card wrappers. Printed vellum dust jacket attached to spine and endsheets [as issued]. 221 pp. 203 black and white photographs, elevations, floor plans and illustrations. Letterpress text and illustrations with elaborate graphic design throughout by Moholy-Nagy and the majority of the photography credited to Lucia Moholy. Morton Goldsholl’s copy with his inkstamp to front and rear free endpapers. The fragile vellum dust wrapper is lacking the rear panel, but the front panel, spine and both flaps are present and attached. Vintage tape reinforcement to jacket lower edge and a sizeable chip to front panel [see scan]. Textblock unmarked very clean and tightly bound. A very good copy in a partial example of the fragile vellum dust jacket.
7.125 x 9-inch softcover book with 221 pages and 203 black and white photographs, elevations, floor plans and illustrations. This 1930 edition serves as the official record of the Gropius buildings in Dessau, including the Bauhaus building, the Masters’ Houses, the Törten Estates and other miscellaneous buildings designed by Gropius during his tenure in Dessau from 1925 to 1929.
Includes photography and/ or work by Lucia Moholy [fully credited], László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Erich Consemüller, Lux Feininger, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Walter Peterhans, Ise Gropius, and others.
Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy served as Editorial Directors for the 14 titles in the Bauhausbücher [Bauhaus Book] series published in Dessau from 1925 to 1929. The series served as an extension of the Bauhaus teaching tradition with volumes by Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Adolf Meyer, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy or as as anthologies of work produced by a select group of contemporaries such as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, J. J. P. Oud, Kasimir Malewitsch and Albert Gleizes.
Prior to the 20th century, when artists were called upon to illustrate texts or provide posters for advertising, their function was to provide visual images that bore no formal relationship to the message. In other words, the illustration was simply a diversion.
More than any other group, the expositional, programmatic set of Bauhaus Bücher engineers one of the most consistently remarkable episodes in the history of the art of the book. A series of 14 volumes (1925–1930) edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, the books rigorously demonstrate format as a systematic support of content and are discussed in Jan Tschichold’s classic and influential Die Neue Typograhie of 1928. In the Bauhaus Books the precepts and sense of content are palpably clear in the logic and decisions of design and format. Content is not so much conveyed by as in the carefully considered means and methods of presentation. Nowhere is the book more completely accomplished as a mental instrument; form and content virtually assume the operation of a mathematical proposition, arriving at a language in which everything formal belongs to syntax and not to vocabulary.
The Bauhaus Bücher series serve as testaments to the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. The layout of the pages designed by Moholy-Nagy—bold sans-serif captions floating in white space; compositions composed of arrows, dots and heavy ruled lines—is much more like a movie storyboard or a musical score.
Walter Gropius (Germany, 1883 - 1969) belongs to the select group of architects that massively influenced the international development of modern architecture. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such Fagus Boot-Last Factory and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, with their use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. After his emigration to the United States, he influenced the education of architects there and became, along with Mies van der Rohe, a leading proponent of the International Style.
American industrial, cultural and educational ambassadors were eager to embrace the refugees fleeing the coming storm in Europe. Joseph Hudnut invited Walter Gropius to join the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Association of Arts and Industries financed the New Bauahuas in Chicago under Moholy-Nagy, Josef and Anni Albers helped developed the experimental teachings at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, Mies van der Rohe assumed leadership of the Architecture program at the Armour Institute, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Alfred Barr and the Museum of Modern Art hosted art, architecture and design exhibitions devoted to the Bauhaus ideas.
The underlying idea Bauhaus formulated by Gropius, was to create a new unity of crafts, art and technology. The intention was to offer the right environment for the realization of the Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art]. To achieve this goal, students needed a school with an interdisciplinary and international orientation. The Bauhaus curriculum offered a unique combination of research, teaching and practice that was unequalled by rival academies and schools of applied art. This educational paradigm was widely embraced by institutions in the United States trying to emerge from the depths of the Great Depression.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design is widely regarded as the cradle of American modern architecture. Professor Joseph Hudnut created the GSD by uniting the three formerly separate programs of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning in 1935. He got rid of antique statuary, replaced mullioned windows with plate glass, and hired Walter Gropius to head the architecture program.
During his tenure at Harvard—from 1937 to 1952—Gropius oversaw the end of the academic French Beaux-Arts method of educating architects. Gropius’s philosophy placed an emphasis on industrial materials and technology, functionality, collaboration among different professions, and a complete rejection of historical precedent.
Assisted by Bauhaus colleague Marcel Breuer, Gropius educated a generation of architects who radically altered the landscape of postwar America, including Edward Larrabee Barnes, Garrett Eckbo, Lawrence Halprin, Dan Kiley, Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes, I.M. Pei, Paul Rudolph, Edward Durell Stone, and many others.
Lucia Moholy [Austria, 1894 –1989] took hundreds of photographs to document the buildings, masters’ houses and objects at the Dessau Bauhaus between 1924 and 1928. Some of the photographs reproduced here were taken before the school opened in 1925. Although Moholy was neither a student nor a teacher at the Bauhaus, she acted as its unofficial photographer, documenting it in photographs that were reproduced during its lifetime and beyond.
Her work adhered to the tenets of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) photography that documented the Dessau Bauhaus in a neutral fashion. In so doing, it reflects the search at the time of both Moholy and her husband, László Moholy-Nagy, for a New Vision or Neue Shen: a new way of seeing in the modern world. The sharply focused photograph with crisp architectural lines – its subject isolated from its surroundings and devoid of figures – seems to offer a degree of objectivity. Yet as historian Robin Schuldenfrei has noted, this photograph and others like it ‘are not neutral entities, but rather help to express the modernist goals of the buildings’ designer’, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius (Schuldenfrei 2013, p.185).
These photographs were first reproduced in publicity material for the Dessau Bauhaus, including brochures, posters and magazine articles. However, Moholy was rarely credited for her work, which was often wrongly attributed to Moholy-Nagy or Gropius. The catalogue for the 1938 exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1928, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, includes a number of such misattributions. A view towards the school’s workshops, for instance, which was attributed to Gropius, is now known to be the work of Moholy (reproduced in Museum of Modern Art 1938, p.103).
Moholy undertook initial training with a local photographer when Moholy-Nagy took up a position at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1923. She subsequently attended the Principal Course in Reproduction Technology at the Leipzig Art Academy. When the couple moved to the Dessau Bauhaus, Moholy took documentary photographs as well as experimental photograms. Moholy left Dessau in 1928 and after a period in Berlin fled Germany, leaving her belongings (including her photographic negatives) behind. Following her arrival in London in 1934, Moholy became a sought-after photographer, capturing prominent sitters such as the Countess of Oxford and Asquith and the writers Ruth Fry and Margaret Goldsmith. Her book on the history of photography, A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939, was published in 1939. Moholy’s Bauhaus-era negatives were in the possession of Gropius, who was reluctant to relinquish them, but in 1957 he returned 230 of the 560 negatives she made, with 330 remaining missing (Schuldenfrei 2013, p.195). [Tate]
Morton Goldsholl [United States, 1911 – 1995] was a lifelong resident of Chicago and an early student of the Institute of Design. He was a faculty member at The Abraham Lincoln School for Social Sciences, the educational institution run by the Communist Party USA. Goldsholl carved out his niche with corporate identity programs, packaging, and animated commercials, and produced the Good Design Logo for the Merchandise Mart and the Museum of Modern Art in 1950. Morton’s wife Millie graduated from the Institute of Design with a degree in Architecture. The couple formed Morton Goldsholl Associates in 1955, the first racially-integrated Design Offices in the United States.
The Bauhaus at Dessau [1926] included spaces for teaching, housing for students and faculty members, an auditorium and offices, which were fused together in a pinwheel configuration. From the aerial view, this layout hints at the form of airplane propellers, which were largely manufactured in the surrounding areas of Dessau.
The building is comprised of three wings all connected by bridges. The school and workshop spaces are associated through a large two-story bridge, which creates the roof of the administration located on the underside of the bridge. The housing units and school building are connected through a wing to create easy access to the assembly hall and dining rooms. The educational wing contains administration and classrooms, staff room, library, physics laboratory, model rooms, fully finished basement, raised ground-floor and two upper floors.
It's size "belied the enormous symbolic significance it was to gain as its national and international reputation grew as an experimental and commercial laboratory for design after 1927 as a hotbed of architecture and urban design."
To incorporate the students of the Bauhaus, the interior decoration of the entire building was done by the wall painting workshop, the lighting fixtures by the metal workshop, and the lettering by the print shop. With the Bauhaus building, Gropius thoughtfully laid out his notion of the building as a 'total work' of compositional architecture.
The huge curtain window facade of the workshop building became an integral part of the building's design. Hoping to create transparency, the wall emphasized the 'mechanical' and open spatial nature of the new architecture. These vast windows enabled sunlight to pour in throughout the day, although creating a negative effect on warmer summer days. In order to preserve the curtain wall as one expanse, the load bearing columns were recessed back from the main walls.