THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND THE BAUHAUS
Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius: THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND THE BAUHAUS. London: Faber and Faber, July 1935. First edition. Octavo. Oatmeal cloth stamped in red. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 80 pp. 16 black and white plates. Spine cloth slightly darkened and cloth a bit dusty. The Moholy-Nagy is rubbed along the joints, lightly edgeworn and slightly chipped at both spine ends, and short, closed tears to both front and rear panels—a bit ragged, but essentially complete. Uncommon in the first-issue state and rare with the jacket. A nearly very good copy in a good dust jacket.
5.75 x 8.25 book with 80 glossy pages, including 16 full-pages black and white photographs. Translated from the German by P. Morton Shand and Introduced by Frank Pick. This is the book where Gropius attempted to spell out his theories of the new architecture he had incubated and formalized while Director of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau from 1919 to 1928.
- Introduction by Frank Pick
- The New Architecture & the Bauhaus
- Standardization
- Rationalization
- The Bauhaus:
- Preparartory Instruction
- Practical & Formal Instruction
- Structural Instruction
Jacket features an example of Moholy-Nagy's "Rhodoid" technique: photographing a composition through glass or other transparent material to catch the shadow cast on the background. Very cool indeed. This book looks and feels like a true artifact of the age, properly English and suitably Avant-Garde. László Moholy-Nagy developed his "Rhodoid" technique -- photographing compositions through glass or other transparent material -- to catch the background cast of his manipulated shadows. This design technique came out of Moholy's experiments with light as a new form of vision: "Formerly the painter impressed his vision on his age; today it is the photographer."
Moholy believed the camera -- by extending the eye's capability and through its manipulation of light -- could alter traditional perceptual habits.
"Moholy was one of the first to leave petrified traditions in photography and tread new paths by extending photographic possibilities both practically and theoretically. He arrived at lasting results in the photogram and in photo-montage at a time when these forms were almost unknown." -- Franz Roh
"Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning." -- Walter Gropius
Born and educated in Germany, Walter Gropius (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.
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.